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Roswell UFO incident is a purported crash of an unidentified flying object (UFO) in Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1947.

Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947, announcing "capture" of "flying saucer"Contents [hide] 1 Overview: The story as reported in 1947 and the controversy 1.1 Incident 1.2 Press releases and news 1.3 Inconsistent accounts and cover stories 1.4 Later stories of strange debris 1.5 Stories of a "disc" craft and alien bodies 1.6 Decline of interest 2 Renewed interest 2.1 Lydia Sleppy and Jesse Marcel interviews 2.2 Brigadier General Arthur Exon testimony 2.3 Brigadier General Thomas J. Dubose report 2.4 Other witnesses 2.5 Skeptics' views 2.6 Similar incidents 3 Theories and Analysis 3.1 Conventional Theories 3.1.1 The Mogul Balloon theory 3.1.1.1 1994/95 Air Force Roswell report 3.1.1.2 1997 Air Force "case closed" report 3.1.2 The nuclear accident theory 3.1.3 The horrible secret experiments theory 3.2 The "Alien Autopsy" film 3.3 UFO Crash theories 4 Recent developments 5 Cultural influence and trivia 6 Roswell International UFO Museum 7 Secret FBI teletype 8 Excerpts from newspaper account of Brazel's find 9 Notes 10 Sources (generally "pro-UFO" explanations) 11 Further reading (debunkery) 12 1947 newspaper articles and press bulletins

Overview: The story as reported in 1947 and the controversy

The Sacramento Bee article detailing the RAAF statements.[edit] Incident On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing disc- or saucer-shaped objects flying at high speed near Mt. Rainier in Washington state. In the days thereafter, hundreds of reports of the new "flying saucers" (or "flying disks") appeared in newspapers across the United States.

During the first week of July 1947, rancher William "Mack" Brazel discovered a large amount of unusual debris scattered widely over his ranch about 75 miles northwest of Roswell. Neighbors told him about the new "flying disk" phenomenon and suggested he go to Roswell to report his find. Brazel informed the local sheriff in Roswell, George M. Wilcox, that he may have found a "flying disk" and Wilcox then contacted the local USAAF airbase in Roswell. The base commander, Colonel William Blanchard, sent his head Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, with the head of the Roswell Army Counterintelligence Corps, Sheridan Cavitt, to investigate. Marcel and Cavitt went with Brazel to his ranch, retrieved some of the debris and returned with it to the Roswell base on the evening of July 7. Some debris was later flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, home of the USAAF's aeronautical research labs.

Press releases and news The next afternoon, July 8, Col. Blanchard issued an official USAAF press release from Roswell reporting that a "flying disk" had been found "sometime last week" by a local rancher and that it had been recovered by the Intelligence Office at the base for transfer to "higher headquarters". United Press also reported that residents near the ranch saw "a strange blue light several days ago about 3 a.m." The press release caused a media feeding frenzy and phone lines into New Mexico and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. became jammed as reporters clamored for more details.

Within an hour of the release, the head of the Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, began changing the story. The object retrieved was now a weather balloon with "hexagonal" radar target attachment. He would later describe it on the radio as "remnants of a tin foil-covered box kite and a rubber balloon" and denied there were any identification markings or instruments found with it.

Gen. Roger Ramey (kneeling) and chief of staff Col. Thomas Dubose posed with weather balloon and radar reflector, July 8, 1947, Fort Worth, Texas. A controversial message about what happened is in Ramey's hand (boxed) and enlarged below.United Press also reported that Ramey said, "he couldn't let anybody look at the thing or photograph it because Washington had clamped a 'security lid' on all but the sketchiest details." However, he thought "...it was nothing to get excited about. It looks to me like the remnant of a weather balloon and a radar reflector." He said he would bring in a weather officer to confirm this. Soon after, a weather officer was summoned to make the identification official. Ramey had pictures taken of the weather balloon and radar target displayed in his office, which he said was the recovered Roswell debris.

Gen. Ramey also had Major Marcel make a statement for the press. Instead of the object being found "sometime last week" in the original press release, Marcel was quoted by Associated Press as saying the object was found "3 weeks previously" (or mid-June). Further, when Brazel first found the debris he "bundled the tinfoil and broken wooden beams of the kite and the torn synthetic rubber remains of the balloon together and rolled it under some brush." When Brazel first learned of the "flying disks" on Saturday night, July 5, he "hurried home, dug up the remnants of the kite balloon on Sunday, and Monday headed for Roswell to report his find to the Sheriff's office."(AP story)

While the new date of discovery agreed with Brazel's account a few hours later of first finding the debris on June 14, it conflicted sharply with his story of when and how he collected it: "At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. ...on July 4 he ...went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris." full quote

Inconsistent accounts and cover stories Marcel and Ramey's then chief of staff, Brigadier General Thomas Dubose (ret.), would later claim that the weather balloon was a cover story to get the press off their backs. Gen. Dubose, in fact, stated he personally received the order from Washington to start the coverup. Both said they were acting under Ramey's orders when they made statements to the press about the object being a weather device. Supporting this to some extent was another quote attributed to Marcel from 1947 by AP saying that the balloon debris was "scattered over a square mile," inconsistent with the small amount of balloon material that was publicly displayed. Another quote inconsistent with what was shown oddly came from Ramey himself, who was quoted by the Washington Post, United Press, Associated Press, and others saying that the "box kite" covered with foil would have been "about 25 feet in diameter" if reconstructed.

Gen. Ramey also had one of his intelligence officers, Major Kirton, make statements on his behalf, starting about two hours after the initial press release. Kirton changed Ramey's 25-foot "box kite" to the balloon being "20 feet" in size when speaking to the Dallas FBI office and Reuters news agency. Kirton also told both the FBI and Dallas Morning News that the object was a weather balloon and attached radar reflector. However, he told the Morning News that the identification was definite and the flight to Wright Field was cancelled. (Morning News story) Contradicting the public statement, the FBI was instead told that the object was still being transported to Wright Field. Wright Field also stated that they disagreed with the weather balloon assessment. (FBI telegram) ABC News also contacted Wright Field and was told by officials there that they expected "the so-called flying saucer to be delivered there, but that it hasn't arrived as yet." (ABC News radio broadcast)

After Ramey brought in a weather officer for definitive identification, the weather balloon story became official three hours after the first press release of a "flying disk" from Roswell base. Soon after this, Brazel showed up in Roswell at the local newspaper for an interview. Two reporters at the scene later related he was accompanied by military officers. The base provost marshal, Col. Edwin Easley, likewise later confirmed that they were holding Brazel at the base. (A number of other witnesses also testified to seeing Brazel in military hands or hearing him complain bitterly afterwards about his treatment by the military.) Initially Brazel seemed to be describing a balloon crash of some kind. According to the story published the next day, Brazel said he found five pounds of “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks. ... Considerable Scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in its construction... The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt... The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

But at the end of his interview, Brazel seemingly recanted his earlier balloon description stating that, "...he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these.’I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon, but if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.'" Also contradicting the initial balloon story, Brazel said at the start of his interview that he "whispered" to Sheriff Wilcox that "he might have found a flying disk." (Roswell Daily Record, July 9, 1947) (However, some skeptics argue that there was no contradiction since Brazel allegedly found a different type of balloon device from the weather balloons he had previously found.)

Sheriff Wilcox was also quoted in other stories. According to United Press Wilcox claimed that Brazel came in saying that he thought he had found a "weather meter." This contradicted Brazel's denial that he had found any type of weather balloon and he instead told Wilcox that maybe he had found a "flying disk." Wilcox did say that Brazel also said the object "more or less seemed like tinfoil" and was about 3 feet across. However, when Associated Press asked Wilcox for more details about the object's description, they reported he declined to elaborate saying "I'm working with those fellows at the base." Various Wilcox family members would later claim that he was threatened by the military.

A number of UFO researchers charge that the change in the military's story from flying saucer to weather balloon was disinformation and that the U.S. government was withholding or suppressing information. Whether Ramey showed the actual debris and whether Brazel and Marcel's newspaper statements accurately describe what was actually discovered remain highly contentious to this day in debates between advocates and skeptics. Also hotly debated is whether there really was a coverup and whether some witnesses like Brazel and Wilcox were coerced.

Later stories of strange debris Beyond dispute is that a number of military and civilian witnesses, including Marcel, Dubose, and Brazel's son, gave very different accounts of the events and debris many years later, reviving interest in the case. Instead of flimsy weather balloon material, the debris allegedly possessed highly anomalous physical properties. Some material resembled dull aluminum or lead foil yet, when crumpled, straightened back up leaving no creases or wrinkles, similar to a shape memory alloy. Other debris bore some resemblance to balsa wood in lightness and color. But like the foil material, witnesses claimed that it could not be burned, cut, or otherwise damaged. All debris was said to be extremely light in weight. Some, including metallic-looking "I-beams," was said to be covered with strange writing or "hieroglyphics." witness debris descriptions

Enlargement of Gen. Ramey's held message in above photo.[edit] Stories of a "disc" craft and alien bodies Even more controversial than the debris descriptions were stories to emerge later of an intact "disc" and even alien bodies being recovered, primarily second-hand accounts from friends and family members of those involved, such as the Wilcox family. Not surprisingly, no mention of bodies was made in newspaper accounts from 1947. If anything, Gen. Ramey made a big point that the object was "too lightly constructed to have carried anyone" and "scoffed at the possibility that the object could have been piloted." However, it is pointed out that another of Ramey's 1947 statements of the foil-covered "box kite" (or radar target) being about 25 feet across if reconstructed would be consistent with later testimony from two eyewitnesses of seeing a damaged craft about 25 feet in size.

There is also a current contention that the telegram held by Gen. Ramey while being photographed with the weather balloon does speak specifically of "the 'disc'" and "the victims of the wreck" (enlargement of message above right). [9] However, some skeptics claim the text is not clear enough to be read with any certainty. The USAF similarly claimed in their 1994 summary report that they had submitted the message to a photo-analysis lab of "a national level organization" and then claimed that nothing could be read. However, the Air Force has never identified the organization nor provided the actual report of the lab to document their claim, despite prolonged efforts to obtain this information using FOIA. [10]

Decline of interest The Roswell Incident briefly received national and even international attention in 1947, but after it was reported that the crash was of a weather balloon and not a "flying disk", the event faded from public view for over 30 years as most people simply took the government's word at face value. It did, however, occasionally receive passing mention, such as in a special article on UFOs published in Look magazine in 1967. [11]

Renewed interest The Roswell incident received little mainstream attention until 1978, when researchers Stanton T. Friedman and William L. Moore compared notes from a series of interviews each had conducted independently.

Lydia Sleppy and Jesse Marcel interviews Friedman and Moore interviewed Lydia Sleppy, a teletype operator who worked at an Albuquerque, New Mexico, radio station in 1947, and United States Air Force Lt. Colonel Jesse A. Marcel (ret.), chief intelligence officer at Roswell base in 1947. Sleppy claimed that the FBI had stopped their teletype story of "the crashed flying disk with bodies" from being transmitted after a Roswell radio reporter had phoned in the story. Marcel reported gathering highly unusual materials near Brazel's ranch, which he said were "not of this Earth." He was then ordered to fly the recovered debris to Wright Field, first stopping in Fort Worth, Texas, to see Brigadier General Roger Ramey[12], head of the 8th Air Force there. Marcel also stated that the weather balloon explanation subsequently put out by Gen. Ramey was a cover story.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon testimony Impressive testimony about the Roswell Incident came from retired Air Force Brigadier General Arthur Exon [13], as related by ufologists Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt. In 1947, Exon was stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. In recorded interviews, Exon said that shortly after the reports of the saucer crash, strange material was shipped to Wright Patterson. Though it was very thin and lightweight, Exon said, the metal could not be bent, dented or scorched. He also said he heard reports of bodies being recovered. Further, there was a national level effort to cover the whole thing up and the White House was involved. Exon added, "Roswell was the recovery of a craft from space." [Randle & Schmitt (1991), 108-112, 231-234; Randle & Schmitt (1994), 73-78, 119-120; Randle (1995), 142-149; compendium of Exon's testimony]

By 1961, Exon had been promoted to general, and was Wright-Patterson’s base commanding officer from 1964 to 1966. Another statement of Exon's was that other UFO crash recoveries staged out of Wright-Patterson occurred during his tenure as base chief, though he wasn't privy to details. (see 1965 Kecksburg UFO incident) However, critics charge that Exon's knowledge was mostly secondhand, as Exon himself stressed in interviews and in a letter to Randle and Schmitt. In order to have access to U.S. government classified information, one must have both the proper level of security clearance as well as a need to know the information. In consequence, Exon was denied access to areas of the base where UFO-related studies were ongoing, and was never officially briefed regarding their findings. Thus it is claimed his reported statements decades later may have reflected rumor or opinion not based on personal knowledge. Against this, he also stressed that he spoke to firsthand witnesses to both the debris and bodies, people he personally knew.

Brigadier General Thomas J. Dubose report Another report about the events at Roswell came from retired Air Force officer Brigadier General Thomas J. Dubose.[14] In 1947 he was a colonel and Gen. Ramey's chief of staff. In recorded interviews, Dubose said the whole Roswell matter was conducted in the strictest secrecy and even involved the White House. One such secretive event involved a shipment of debris by "colonel courier" from Roswell to Washington D.C., first stopping at Fort Worth. Dubose handled the high-level phone communications and said he personally received the order from Gen. Clemence McMullen in Washington to cover up what happened at Roswell. He said McMullen told him the matter was so highly classified that it went "beyond top secret". He also confirmed Marcel's account that the weather balloon explanation put out by Gen. Ramey was the cover story to get the press off their backs. Dubose affidavit and audio

Other witnesses Adherents to the UFO theory point to other witnesses in the Roswell case. Family and friends of Capt. Oliver Henderson, a senior pilot at Roswell, stated that he told them of flying the remains of a flying saucer to Wright Field and seeing small alien bodies. Lewis Rickett, a member of the Army Counter Intelligence Corp at Roswell base, confirmed that the metallic debris was highly anomalous and that the military engaged in a large and highly secretive recovery operation at the Brazel ranch. Bill Brazel, Jr., Mack Brazel's son, independently corroborated Major Marcel's descriptions of anomalous debris, the large, linear debris field, and his father's finding of the debris after hearing a tremendous explosion. Both Rickett and Brazel, Jr., described what appeared to be a linear impact groove, as did Gen. Exon, who overflew the site later. Brazel, Jr., also said the military detained his father at the base; this seems to have been corroborated by the base provost marshal, Major Edwin Easley. When pressed for details of his involvement, Easley said he had sworn an oath not to talk about what had happened. Family members also claim that on his deathbed Easley spoke of the "creatures" at Roswell, though Easley never mentioned this in interviews with researchers.

Project Apollo astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, though not a direct witness, has also stated on numerous occasions that Roswell was a real alien event based on his high-level contacts within the government. "Make no mistake, Roswell happened. I've seen secret files which show the government knew about it—but decided not to tell the public." [15] Mitchell has also spoken about bodies: "A few insiders know the truth . . . and are studying the bodies that have been discovered." St. Petersburg Times article, Feb. 18, 2004

Another high-level, indirect witness was Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a retired Brigadier General in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, a 1964 Presidential nominee, and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Goldwater many times told the story of trying to get into the area at Wright-Patterson where alien artifacts were rumored to be kept. When he brought the subject up with his good friend General Curtis LeMay, USAF Chief of Staff, Goldwater claimed LeMay swore at him, told him never to bring up the subject again, and finished by saying that even he did not have clearance to get in. Retired Brigadier General Stephen Lovekin (North Carolina State Guard) similarly claimed to have received a Pentagon briefing on a 1947 New Mexico crash when he was a young tech specialist stationed at the White House in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1959 to 1961. Those briefed were allegedly shown some of the anomalous debris and were also told that alien bodies were recovered.[1]

Skeptics' views Against this, skeptics state that some witnesses, whose testimony at first might have seemed compelling, have since been largely or entirely discredited. A notable recent example was Frank Kaufmann, who claimed to have been a member of an exclusive team in charge of the craft and body recovery. After his death it was found that he had hoaxed documents about the crash and about his background in intelligence.[16]

Another important witness whose credentials were recently challenged was Stephen Lovekin. Roswell researcher Kevin Randle originally claimed that he could find no evidence to support Lovekin's rank of brigadier general and also questioned whether he would have been old enough to have served in the White House when he said he did. However, Randle's research has since been shown to be incomplete and some of his statements inaccurate. Documents released by Lovekin and posted at The Disclosure Project website would seem to verify Lovekin's claimed credentials, most importantly having served in the White House Army Signal Agency when he said he did. Documents Randle has since printed a retraction. (Randle's blog) However, it would also be misleading to claim Lovekin as a high-level military witness, since his current brigadier general rank is only in the State Guard. Lovekin retired from active duty in the U.S. Army as only a sergeant.

A further common criticism is that the bulk of testimony on Roswell, particularly on the subject of bodies, is secondhand or even further removed from the actual events. Witnesses like Exon, Goldwater, and Lovekin would largely fall into this category.

Some other witnesses, though probably sincere, are contended to suffer from various types of memory distortions such as senility, false memory, or retrospective falsification.[2] Counterarguments are that "faulty memories" are speculative and also not equally applied to witnesses supporting the skeptical point of view.

Similar incidents The 1946 European "ghost rockets" involved numerous objects being sighted and tracked by radar, crashes reported, military investigations and searches, and debris fragments reported recovered. The official conclusion was that the ghost rockets were real. The December 1980 Rendlesham Forest Incident involving many USAF personnel is sometimes called the "British Roswell" because of its importance, though no crash was involved. The December 1965 Kecksburg UFO incident was another alleged military crash recovery of a UFO and is sometimes called the "Pennsylvania Roswell." The Shag Harbor incident was the crash of an unknown object in Shag Habor, Nova Scotia, Canada, in October 1967, and involved attempts by the Canadian military to recover the object. The crash object was referred to by several Canadian government agencies, such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as a "UFO". The Height 611 UFO Incident was a 1986 Russian crash with analysis of physical debris. The 1996 Varginha incident was another alleged recovery of one or more aliens by the Brazilian military.

Theories and Analysis

Conventional Theories

The Mogul Balloon theory

1994/95 Air Force Roswell report Under pressure from a Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation initiated by New Mexico Congressmen Steven Schiff, the Air Force in 1994/95 presented evidence that the crash was actually that of a lost Project Mogul balloon launched from nearby Alamogordo, New Mexico, whose top secret purpose was long-distance detection of expected future Russian A-bomb tests. The early Mogul balloon arrays consisted of about two dozen rubber weather balloons and sometimes had several attached radar targets, balsa wood kites covered with a foil/paper material, used for tracking. They claimed this fully accounted for the 1947 debris descriptions, particularly rancher Brazel's, and matched the photos taken in General Ramey's office. Furthermore, the balloon arrays could be up to 600 feet in length, and this was said to account for the large size of the debris field reported by Brazel and Marcel. The Air Force declared the "Roswell case" officially closed.[3]

A few weeks before the GAO released its own report in June 1995, columnist Jack Anderson of the Washington Post wrote that GAO investigators didn't believe the Air Force. They were "quietly skeptical about whether the U.S. Air Force told the truth" and were "not satisfied with the Air Force explanation," though they didn't believe the Air Force was covering up a UFO incident. However, one GAO source told Anderson, "...we do believe that something did happen at Roswell... Something big. We don't know if it was a plane that crashed with a nuclear device on it ... or if it was some other experimental situation. But everything we've seen so far points to an attempt on the part of the Air Force to lead anybody that looks at this down another track." [17]

The Air Force based their Mogul theory primarily on interviews with a few surviving Project Mogul personnel and comparing descriptions of the Mogul balloons with statements from witnesses in 1947 and today. In particular, rancher Brazel's mention of "tape with flower patterns" was said to be a perfect match for tape allegedly used in the construction of the radar targets sometimes attached to the balloons.

Critics counter that the report was written by Air Force counterintelligence agents and charge they used classic propaganda techniques of ridicule, selective quotations, and omission of contradictory evidence, such as anomalous debris descriptions or testimony about a coverup, such as from General Dubose. In fact, Dubose, an important primary witness and one of their own generals, was never mentioned. They also note that the Mogul personnel were not directly involved and have no idea what may or may not have been recovered in the field.

The one primary witness the Air Force did interview was Sheridan Cavitt, the Army Counterintelligence Corp agent who accompanied Major Marcel and rancher Brazel back to the ranch and participated in recovery of the material. The Air Force claimed that Cavitt's balloon testimony also supported their theory. However critics contend that Cavitt's testimony was not credible and actually contradicted the Air Force's Mogul balloon hypothesis. Cavitt claimed to find a balloon crash no bigger than his living room and denied any markings on the debris, including the so-called "flower patterns," claiming stories of such "hieroglyphics" came solely from crashed saucer promoters. Critics charge that Cavitt was merely repeating the original 1947 weather balloon cover story. Cavitt also denied going out with Marcel or ever meeting rancher Brazel. Critics note this begs the question how Cavitt found his tiny balloon crash without Brazel's help. It also directly contradicts Marcel's testimony and 1947 newspaper stories, including a statement by Brazel that Cavitt was with them. Finally they point out that Cavitt also contradicted himself by telling researchers for years that he wasn't involved in any way and/or not at Roswell at the time.

The Air Force also noted in their 1994/95 report that they deliberately weren't addressing the issue of alien bodies. One justification given was that the crash wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon which had "no 'alien' passengers therein." Another reason they said was that some of the claims had been shown to be hoaxes or made by anonymous witnesses. Critics of the report note that the first reason is an example of circular reasoning, since the Air Force was using its own unproven explanation as justification for its other conclusion of no bodies being involved. Some witnesses were also clearly not hoaxers or anonymous, a notable example being Gen. Exon, whom the Air Force never interviewed.

1997 Air Force "case closed" report

The USAF argued these 6-foot test dummies from the 1950s closely resembled reports of small alien bodies from the Roswell crash in 1947.However, after initially ridiculing the notion of bodies, the Air Force changed positions and did a follow-up investigation examining possible sources for the reports of bodies. In 1997 they issued another "case closed" report stating that stories of alien bodies were actually distortions of various aviation experiments from the 1950s and 1960s. They claimed to show that the testimony of the people saying they had seen bodies near Roswell was in good agreement with actual events involving crash test dummies dropped from high altitude balloons, aircraft accidents, and a manned balloon accident. The time discrepancy between the 1947 incident and the later period of crash test dummy drops and the accident they said could be accounted for by distortions of memory.

Critics of the 1997 "crash dummies" report note that it is inconsistent with the Air Force's earlier position that there was nothing to the stories of bodies because all witnesses were unreliable. Indeed, some of the witness testimony they relied most heavily on were from the same people strongly suspected of hoaxing. It is also argued that there is no resemblance between the six-foot test-dummies made to human proportions and the descriptions of small, non-human, decomposing bodies. Also the experiments were conducted in areas of New Mexico that were remote from Brazel's ranch and where witnesses said bodies were found. Finally, it is argued, the severe memory distortion theory is at best highly questionable and cannot account for the serious differences in times, locations, and body descriptions.

The question has been raised why the Air Force chose to deal with the issue of bodies after initially ridiculing and avoiding it. Speculation from some UFO researchers is that this may have been the result of pressure from the Clinton White House. President Bill Clinton is known to have had an interest in Roswell, instructing friend and associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell to find out what happened (reported in Hubbell's memoirs). In November 1995, only a few days before the Air Force issued the final version of its first Roswell report, Clinton responded in a prepared speech to a child's letter about Roswell during a trip to Northern Ireland. Clinton said that as far as he knew "an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico," but then added, "If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know." (See also 2005 Clinton Roswell comments in Recent Developments below, where he again states his doubts about Roswell but again raises the possibility of information being withheld from him.)

The question remains that if it was not a flying saucer, why the initial reports of a recovered "flying disk" and government secrecy? Here is a theory proposed by skeptic Karl T. Pflock in his book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe:

Some officers at Roswell, particularly Major Marcel, allegedly bungled the identification of the Mogul balloon equipment and then compounded the blunder by putting out a press release that they had instead recovered a "flying disk." Once the crash was publicly revealed and since Project Mogul was top secret, a coverup was imposed to protect the project's secrecy. Proponents of this theory further claim the balloons used in Project Mogul were extremely strange looking and would have appeared otherworldly to observers, and the project itself was so heavily classified it was nearly unknown outside of the higher branches of the U.S. government.

Those who dispute this interpretation note that only the purpose of Project Mogul was classified, but the main components were not, being standard meteorological equipment such as rubber weather balloons and radar-target kites made of balsa wood and foil/paper also used for wrapping candy bars. None of this would have appeared otherworldly to anyone. It is also pointed out that such flimsy materials do not match the many descriptions of anomalous, extra-strong and heat-resistant debris reported by witnesses such as Marcel, Rickett, Brazel, Jr., and Exon.

A clear example of the non-classified, public side of the equipment and project was a scientific article written by three of the Mogul people in December 1947, published in the Journal of Meteorology in May 1948, and titled "Controlled-Altitude Free Balloons." It showed multiple diagrams of the altitude-control equipment used on the Mogul balloon flights, a photo of one of the new polyethylene balloons that replaced the original rubber weather balloons, detailed how the balloons were tracked, and had multiple graphs of some of the flights. The only thing left out was the top-secret purpose of some of the flights, namely listening for distant Soviet A-bomb tests. (Attachment 14 in 1995 Air Force Roswell report)

It is further argued that Mogul records indicate that the military was unconcerned about civilians stumbling across other Mogul balloon crashes, since the components were unclassified and the balloon's top-secret purpose could not be discerned from the debris. One such noted incident from June 8 involved another New Mexico rancher, who immediately notified Alamogordo Air Force Base, which then sent out three men to retrieve the remains of the balloon. This is completely unlike the very large and secretive military response to what rancher Brazel found at his place in early July. However, some skeptics counter that the situtation was different because Brazel first claimed he found a "flying disk" and not a balloon. While this might explain an initial difference in response by the military, it is not clear why they would continue to behave in a heavy-handed manner once they had an opportunity to examine the debris. There was nothing secret or mysterious about any of the Mogul balloon debris.

Another point raised is that historically the military made no attempt to conceal the existence of the Mogul balloons. (Indeed, as some of the former Mogul people testified, it was impossible to do so.) For example, the day after the Roswell base press release, a mock Mogul balloon launch was staged for the press at Alamogordo[4] and used to try to explain both the Roswell events and the recent nationwide flood of flying saucer reports (see Kenneth Arnold). Again, it is contended, this is inconsistent with the notion that a crashed Mogul balloon would be bathed in high secrecy, even if the purpose of the project was top secret.

Regarding Pflock's claim that Major Marcel was both incompetent and a publicity seeker, Marcel defenders note that his subsequent career and performance reviews by his superiors do not seem to bear this out. For example, Roswell base commander (and Marcel's commanding officer) Col. Blanchard raised Marcel's overall fitness report rating from "excellent" to the highest rating of "superior." A year later, Gen. Ramey called Marcel's performance "outstanding" and rated him command officer material.[5] Marcel was also transferred to Washington and became the chief briefing and intelligence officer of a top secret project to learn of Soviet A-bomb tests. (Ironically, part of this program's intelligence involved Project Mogul.) It is pointed out that none of this fits the profile of an incompetent.

The nuclear accident theory There is also some speculation that the Roswell incident was the result of a broken arrow: an accident involving a nuclear weapon. Even the GAO considered this possibility, according to columnist Jack Anderson. Some have proposed that the military created the cover story of a "flying disk" crash, rather than admit that a nuclear weapon had accidentally fallen out of their hands.

However, the facts do not support this theory. There are no known nuclear accidents from this period, despite dozens of such incidents being declassified and now in the public record. (See List of nuclear accidents) Indeed, the U.S. had no assembled nuclear weapon in its arsenal at the time. Some also argue that it makes no sense that the military would be completely unaware of losing a nuclear weapon until a sheep rancher notified them about it.

The horrible secret experiments theory A variation of the nuclear accident theory came out in June 2005 when UFO researcher Nick Redfern published a book called Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, [18]. Redfern's thesis is that the Roswell crash has nothing to do with aliens or Mogul balloons, but was instead the crash of an experimental spy craft hybrid involving advanced Japanese Fugo balloon technology lifting a German-based Horten flying wing glider (see also Military flying saucers) and with a captured Japanese flight crew inside the glider. The alleged experiment went awry when the glider prematurely decoupled and crashed at one site, while the lifting balloons drifted off and allegedly created the debris field at the Mack Brazel ranch site. Almost the identical theory was first presented in an article in Popular Mechanics magazine in July 1997, the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash.[6]

The "horrible truth" that was subsequently covered up to this day was allegedly the illegal detention and use of Japanese prisoners of war in this and other experiments, including biological weapons research, high altitude decompression tests, and radiation exposure. Genetically deformed surviving victims of criminal medical experimentation by the notorious Japanese Unit 731 were also allegedly used. Further, captured Japanese war criminal scientists were allegedly brought over and participated in these experiments, similar to the program of using captured German scientists brought to the U.S. with Operation Paperclip. Allegedly, the primary purpose of these criminal experiments was to obtain needed physiological data for the development of a Nuclear aircraft, plus other delivery systems for nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry. Redfern also contends that the U.S. government is quite content with the public believing in aliens because it is less shocking and damaging than what really happened. Allegedly other purported New Mexico flying saucer crashes were just cover stories for some of the experiments. Redfern wrote that when he contacted the U.S. Air Force, they had no comment on his theory and said they were sticking to their official Mogul balloon and crash dummy reports for explaining the Roswell incident.

Redfern bases his theory primarily on five sources, all of whom approached him, and several of whom Redfern says he knows to have been in contact with one another, raising the possibility of collusion. The main source was an unnamed colonel who provided details of the actual crash and other manned high-altitude experiments using human guinea pigs that supposedly took place from May through August 1947. Another source, an unnamed official in the British Home Office, initially approached Redfern in 1996, and also claimed that he and others were told in 1989 of the alien Roswell crash and shown the alien autopsy film (see next section) by the CIA and British Ministry of Defense in an attempt to dissuade them from pursuing their own UFO studies. But instead, they allegedly suspected the Roswell story given them was bogus and the autopsy film a fake, part of a cover story to hide criminal U.S. experiments on Japanese POWs. Even Redfern admits he initially found this source's approach, story, and willingness to publicly disclose such information suspicious.

There are also no documents to support that any such program ever existed. One of Redfern's sources claimed that all documents and photos plus bodies were destroyed to eliminate all traces of this criminal activity. Some critics of Redfern's thesis note it is almost entirely based on dubious testimony of a few people who approached Redfern, nearly all of whom admit to previous psyops/counterintelligence backgrounds, with conveniently no way to ever check their stories against official records since allegedly all such records have been destroyed.

Critics also note other problems, such as the gross mismatch between the materials described by most witnesses from the Brazel debris field--numerous, mostly small metallic pieces with anomalous properties scattered along a long linear path--and what would be expected from a balloon crash. Redfern's sources also claim that part of the flying wing craft and one of the Japanese crew were carried away with the balloons and were also found near the main debris field. Redfern states high priority was attached to recovering these and searches were initiated. Left unexplained is the seeming absence of any tracking or how searchers could have missed spotting the large, fully-exposed debris field from the air, despite over two days having elapsed from the time of the alleged disaster. Redfern attributes this to "bad luck."

Another serious objection raised was the historical fact that there were no survivors of the medical experiments of Japanese Unit 731. They were all killed to eliminate evidence when the Russians invaded China and quickly overran the Japanese positions. Hence there were no genetically deformed bodies for the U.S. to "snatch," seriously undercutting one of Redfern's key "horrible truth" arguments supposedly underlying the Roswell crash and subsequent coverup.

Nonetheless, Redfern's theory is undoubtedly provocative and has quickly gained much support inside the UFO research community along with much criticism.

The "Alien Autopsy" film

The muscular, six-fingered being from the Ray Santilli "alien autopsy" filmMain article: Alien autopsy Another twist in the Roswell story also occurred in 1995 when Ray Santilli, a British film producer, produced a film supposedly showing the autopsy of an alien from a 1947 New Mexico crash. In the U.S., portions of the film were shown on the FOX-TV network in 1996 along with some analysis by special effects experts and a pathologist.

Santilli claimed he accidentally ran into the former Army cameraman in the course of looking for archival film footage for another documentary. The crash described by Santilli's cameraman, however, does not conform to the classic Roswell crash of early July 1947 near Corona, New Mexico. Instead the cameraman was allegedly brought to the scene of the crash southwest of Socorro, New Mexico on May 30, 1947, and the autopsy depicted in the film was supposed to have been shot in Fort Worth, Texas in early July.

Skeptics argued this film showed the alleged surgeons utterly disregarding conventional surgical and scientific procedure. Various special effects people have argued the body could have been easily manufactured using standard special effects techniques. For these reasons—and many others—the film was widely considered spurious both within and outside the UFO community. However, opinions of fraud were not universal among expert medical and special effects people, and nothing definitive was found in the film itself proving it a hoax. There was some testimony from others that they had seen this autopsy footage, or related footage, elsewhere before Santilli appeared on the scene. Some held out the possibility it might be a genuine autopsy of some kind.

On 4 April 2006, to coincide with the release of the film Alien Autopsy, British Sky Broadcasting broadcast a documentary, "Eamonn Investigates: Alien Autopsy" presented by Eamonn Holmes. In this programme, Santilli finally revealed the full details of the creation of the footage.

Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield now claim in 1992 that they originally saw 22 cans of film, averaging 4 minutes in length, shot in 1947 by a US Army cameraman in Roswell covering an alien autopsy. However, by the time he returned to purchase the footage two years later, the footage had degraded from humidity and heat with only a few frames staying intact. They now claim that they "restored the footage" by filming a fake autopsy on a fake alien "based upon what they saw".

A set was constructed in the living room of an empty flat in London. John Humphreys, an artist and sculptor, was employed to construct two alien bodies. In addition, Humphreys played the part of the key scientist undertaking the autopsy to allow him to control the body effects being filmed. After filming, they disposed of the bodies.

The "debris" footage of items from the crash site was also recreated by Humphreys, including the alien symbols and the six-finger control panels which Santilli admits to being "artistic license on his part". As an additional decoy, Santilli and Shoefield picked up an unidentified man on the streets in Los Angeles and filmed him in a hotel reading a statement "verifying" his identity as the original cameraman and source of the footage.

Santilli still claims that 5% of the film footage is genuine and intercut with the "recreation" though none of the contributors are able to identify which parts. However, the almost universal feeling among UFO researchers is that the entire episode is an unqualified hoax by Santilli and there never was any original film footage of an alien autopsy.

UFO Crash theories Some UFO proponents theorize events are best explained by a mid-air collision between two alien spacecraft. The first completely fragmented and its remains were found at Mack Brazel's ranch. The second, according to witnesses and people who uphold this theory, landed a short distance away. Allegedly four extraterrestrial entities were found—one alive, one dying, and two dead and were witnessed by many people, including a university professor and his class, who were going on a field trip [citation needed]. Then the army came, warned the others away, and took care of the crash. Supposedly the surviving alien was christened Extraterrestrial Biological Entity 1 (EBE-1), and survived at a safe house in New Mexico until 1952, when it died of unknown causes. Most of this theory, however, is based on very dubious sources, including "documents" of highly questionable authenticity that arrived in some researchers' mailboxes.

Another theory is the craft was struck by lightning and partly exploded, creating the large debris field of small pieces found at Brazel's ranch. The rest of the crippled craft with crew came down at some other nearby location. Mack Brazel did tell his son Bill and Roswell intelligence officer Marcel that he first found the debris following a tremendous explosion he heard in the midst of a violent thunder and lightning storm. There are also other witnesses to this explosion, including some neighboring ranchers and a highly respected Roswell couple, Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot, who reported to the local newspaper on July 8 seeing a glowing flying saucer pass overhead on the night of July 2. Marcel would later reveal in his last interview that Paul Wilmot had recently told him about his parents also seeing the craft explode in the distance after passing in the direction of Brazel's ranch to the northwest. Marcel added that Brazel came to Roswell a few days later to report the crashed flying saucer.

Regardless if this latter theory of the crash has merit, weather records do provide information on thunderstorm activity and can perhaps help pinpoint when Brazel found the debris field on his ranch. There were no thunderstorms in the region the first three weeks of June 1947, the period when the Project Mogul balloon allegedly responsible for the wreckage was launched (June 4) and when Brazel would later claim in a newspaper interview to have found the debris (June 14). However, there were thunderstorms in late June and early July, specifically July 2 and July 4. The latter dates are at least consistent with the initial Roswell base press release of July 8 that said the rancher had found the "flying disk" "sometime last week." Local ranchers have also told researchers Brazel would not leave such debris sitting in his fields for three weeks since it would have been hazardous to his livestock's health. This again suggests an early July discovery of the wreckage, alien or not.

If Roswell was indeed a crash of an extraterrestrial craft, as some continue to insist, some ufologists would argue that several things follow:

The United States government knows that extraterrestrials have visited our planet since at least 1947 but still will not admit that fact. The U.S. government is currently in possession of alien technology. The reasons for initial government secrecy would be largely self-evident: high government officials would probably fear public panic from a potential alien threat (as happened in 1938) and there would likely be an attempt to conceal an advanced technology from the Soviets while secretly trying to reverse engineer it.

Recent developments In 2005, researcher Nick Redfern published his theory, detailed above, of horrible military experiments involving human guinea pigs that led to the Roswell incident, and claimed this lay at the heart of the high secrecy and subsequent coverup.

Another important recent development concerns attempts to read the text on a paper held by Gen. Ramey in a photo taken with Col. Dubose and the displayed balloon debris photo above. A Roswell investigator named David Rudiak, as well as some other examiners of the message, claim to have identified several important phrases, including "the victims of the wreck," another referring to the crash object as "the 'disk'" (Rudiak thinks it reads "aviators in the 'disk'"). This is cited as strong evidence that the Roswell incident was actually the crash of an alien spacecraft and that bodies were indeed recovered. However, some also note that these interpretations would also be compatible with Redfern's non-alien theory of events. Rudiak also claims to have disproved the calculations done by some supporters of the Mogul balloon hypothesis that winds would have taken the purported lost balloon exactly to the Brazel ranch crash site. (See [19]). Redfern's anonymous colonel source states in Redfern's book this isn't surprising since Mogul had nothing to do with it, but served instead as a convenient cover story to the real balloon crash that had to be covered up.

In 2002, the Sci-Fi Channel sponsored a dig at the Brazel site in the hopes of uncovering any missed debris that the military failed to collect. Although these results have so far turned out to be negative, the University of New Mexico archeological team did verify recent soil disruption at the exact location that some witnesses said they saw a long, linear impact groove.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who headed the United States Department of Energy under President Clinton, apparently found the results provocative. In 2004, he wrote in a foreword to The Roswell Dig Diaries, that "the mystery surrounding this crash has never been adequately explained—not by independent investigators, and not by the U.S. government."

In October 2002 before airing its Roswell documentary, the Sci-Fi Channel also hosted a Washington UFO news conference. John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff, appeared as a member of the public relations firm hired by Sci-Fi to help get the government to open up documents on the subject. Podesta stated, "It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the true nature of the phenomena."[7]

In an interview in September 2005, former President Bill Clinton downplayed his and his administration's interest in the Roswell incident. He said they did indeed look into it, but believes it had a rational explanation and didn't think it happened. Many in his administration thought it was a "fraud". However, he added the caveat that he could have been deceived by underlings or career bureaucrats. If that were the case, he said he wouldn't be the first American president that had been lied to or had critical information concealed from him. He also said he would be very surprised if we didn't discover other forms of life in the universe in the near future.[8]

In February 2005, the ABC TV network aired a UFO special hosted by news anchor Peter Jennings. Jennings lambasted the Roswell case as a "myth" "without a shred of evidence." ABC endorsed the Air Force's explanation that the incident resulted solely from the crash of a Project Mogul balloon. Critics of the ABC segment counter that the brief treatment was one-sided and failed to consider many key pieces of evidence, such as the testimony of important witnesses like Generals Exon and Dubose or astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

In 2005, UFO and paranormal researcher Ethan A. Blight claimed to have identified several modern UFO photographs containing spacecraft of the same design as the Roswell craft.[9]

In December 2005, a NASA spokesman changed the official position on the 1965 Kecksburg UFO incident, another alleged military UFO crash retrieval. Originally explained as a meteor fireball with nothing found, the NASA spokesman now admitted that NASA had indeed examined metal fragments that allegedly came from a "Russian satellite." Furthermore, all documentation had allegedly been "lost" in the 1990s. The new story also contradicted the previous results of a NASA expert who had conclusively ruled out a Russian or any other satellite as being involved. AP story Although not specifically about Roswell, these revelations could possibly provide insight into how the government has covered up similar incidents.

In March 2006, the Discovery Channel aired a program on Roswell produced by Dateline NBC. It presented a historical review of the case and opinions of research experts. One group argued the preponderance of evidence pointed to an alien spacecraft crash; the other argued it pointed to a Project Mogul balloon.

For many ufologists, the Roswell case is considered one of the most important UFO events and the one that started the alleged UFO cover-up, while for the skeptics it is just the most widely popularized case, not specifically notable. The official position of the United States government, as of 2005, remains that nothing of a paranormal or extraterrestrial nature had happened. The final report of the USAF regarding the Roswell case is available, as well as the answer to that report by ufologists, who insist that the report is bogus.

Cultural influence and trivia Today, UFO tourism provides a major income for people around Roswell. The 1947 incident has been featured in many books, comics, movies and television series.

Six Days In Roswell is a semi-documentary about the city's annual festival commemorating the 50th anniversary of the incident. Featuring comedian Rich Kronfeld, the film captures the annual event's unusual atmosphere: part scientific conference, part science fiction convention and part county fair.

The novel Majestic by Whitley Strieber (1989) was a part-fact, part-fiction account of the Roswell crash which Strieber claimed was based on an inside government source.

In 1994 the TV film Roswell was made starring Kyle MacLachlan and Martin Sheen. It featured MacLachlan as Jesse Marcel and focused on his quest to find the truth behind the Roswell story.

Roswell was produced by Paul Davids, who reports having had a classic flying saucer sighting in Los Angeles. Davids' father was one of President Bill Clinton's professors at Georgetown University in his student days. Davids said he gave Clinton a copy of the book UFO Crash at Roswell, which was the basis of the film. The book was in Clinton's personal library at the White House when it was inventoried while Clinton was being investigated by a special prosecutor.

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Little Green Men" (1995), the craft had come from the 24th century, and the aliens were the Ferengi characters Quark, Rom, and Nog. Similarly, in Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well", the characters came from the 31st century, and the captured alien was Dr. Zoidberg, and the crash debris was the dismantled body of Bender.

In 1995, the rock group the Foo Fighters came out on the Roswell record label. Dave Grohl has always had an interest in UFOs named his record label after the city. The Foo Fighters' name comes from the term used to describe a UFO during World War II. To promote 2005's In Your Honor, the band played a show at Roswell.

Hangar 18 (1980) [[20] was an early movie loosely based on the Roswell story. A UFO crashed in Arizona and was hidden away at Hangar 18 in Texas. ("Hangar 18" is really supposedly at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio and allegedly where the Roswell craft and debris were also taken initially.)

In the 1996 movie Independence Day, the Roswell craft was a scout from the aliens' mother ship. The damaged craft and recovered bodies were moved to the secret base at Area 51 in Nevada for study. The craft, now flown by humans, played a key role in defeating the alien invasion.

In the 1996 movie The Rock, the FBI Director (Womack) comments that the alien crash at Roswell was one of the nation's deepest secrets along with such things as the Kennedy assassination.

In the 1996-97 TV series Dark Skies, the Roswell crash was caused by the military shooting down a flying saucer after the aliens announced their hostile intent. President Truman created the secret team Majestic 12 to counter the alien threat. The series was based on much other contemporary UFO lore and conspiracy theories, including Kennedy being assassinated for wanting to reveal the truth about Roswell and UFOs. Robert F. Kennedy was depicted as being a member of Majestic 12, as was astronomer Carl Sagan.

In the TV series 7 Days (1998-2001), technology from the Roswell crash led to a secret time-travel device.

In the 2002 TV series Taken on the Sci-Fi Channel, an Emmy-winning series on alien abductions produced by Steven Spielberg, the Roswell crash plays a central role in the story. Ironically actor Eric Close, who played the lead role in Dark Skies, now depicted an alien survivor of the Roswell crash who adopted human form and had a hybrid child with an Earth woman.

Also in 2002, the Sci-Fi Channel funded a scientific investigation at Roswell that revealed some anomalies, and collected many samples of local soil at the Brazel ranch debris field site. The program on the investigation, titled The Roswell Crash: Startling New Evidence, aired the same night as Taken. It also featured analysis of the message about the crash photographed in the hand of General Roger Ramey back in 1947.

Probably the most elaborate example of a Roswell-inspired TV series was titled simply Roswell. It followed the story of four alien survivors of the Roswell crash who adopt human form and live as teenagers in Roswell, one falling in love with a young human. The series ran for two seasons on the WB and a third on UPN between 1999 and 2002.

One of the executive producers and directors of Roswell was actor Jonathan Frakes, who played first officer of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Frakes had also hosted an earlier Sci-Fi special on Roswell from 1997 and another on the alien autopsy from 1996 on FOX-TV.

The X-Files made much of the Roswell incident. In some episodes, characters from the Department of Defense tried to sell the idea that it was a staged distraction, while, in others, it is said that the crash was an alien scout ship brought down by its proximity to a deposit of magnetite (and led to the alien rediscovery of the virus in a deposit of oil). In other episodes, the idea was advanced that aliens were just cover stories for genetically engineered human monsters made by the U.S. government, similar to the current theory advanced by Nick Redfern that an alien Roswell crash is just a cover story for horrible experiments on human beings in New Mexico. In at least one episode, as in other series, the Kennedy assassination was linked to the alien coverup conspiracy. The episode "The Unnatural" took place primarily in Roswell itself, telling the story of an alien bounty hunter chasing a renegade survivor of the Roswell crash, who adopted human form, joined a Roswell minor league baseball team, and became their star hitter. In another episode, the writers had some fun with the alien autopsy film and FOX TV, which did a special showing the autopsy and was the X-Files home network. Agent Fox Mulder dryly commented that the alien autopsy film shown on FOX was an "obvious fake."

In the 2005 episode of Doctor Who, Dalek, a collector of alien artifacts owns the mileometer of the ship that crashed at Roswell. He invented broadband from technology aboard the ship.

In many forms of fiction including computer and video games, the Roswell incident is often mentioned as being the source of many reverse-engineered advanced technologies. In Deus Ex, one of Area 51's engineers posits that the facility's two large-scale antimatter reactors and four small-scale cold fusion plants were derived from technology recovered from the crash. His theory is supported by the presence of odd clones which resemble greys, an image which states the cold fusion plants as having the designation "Artifact ROS172-E" (Note the ROS prefix), and the same image describing the mechanism as under study. However, other sources within the game point towards these possibly being the results of secretive research, with the alien explanation being a simple red herring.

In the DC Comics universe, the official explanation is that it was a "crashed Dominator scoutship", but this is widely discounted as being a cover story. The humorous comic book "Roswell", from Bongo Comics, had as its hero the little green man, also called Roswell, who was found in the craft.

In the Delta Green supplement for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, the crash at Roswell is depicted as a ruse by the supernatural Mi-Go monster race to influence the U.S. The monsters pretended to be aliens to trick the government into making concessions (i.e., kidnappings, murders) in exchange for supposed technological advances.

Roswell also features in the series of books The Time Machine. In book three, chapter fifteen was called "The Truth About Roswell". In it, Max goes back to 1947 and find out what happened at the time. He discovers that it was in fact a real alien spaceship that crashed, and the autopsy was also not faked. He makes it known to the public, before traveling back to his own time and finding that he has changed the world ever so slightly. One such change is that the moon landing occurred in 1964, as opposed to 1969, and that humans landed on Mars in 2007.

"The Roswell Incident" is a popular topic in the fields of techno and other electronic music. For example, The Orb's ambient house album U.F.Orb includes tracks entitled "Majestic" and "Blue Room". "Area 51" is the name of a track by British techno outfit Eat Static.

Roswell International UFO Museum The International UFO Museum & Research Center in Roswell [10] was started in 1991 by former Roswell base public information officer Walter Haut (who in 1947 issued the flying disc press release to the local Roswell media). Up until his death in 2005, Haut had been very outspoken about Roswell being a real saucer crash and not a balloon of some kind. He also vouched for the high integrity and competency of some of the key people involved, such as Maj. Marcel and base commander Col. Blanchard, who ordered him to issue the press release. (Blanchard was a close personal friend.) The museum has a research library and various exhibits such as some alleged debris, allegations of the civilians being threatened by the US Army into compliance, depictions of the aliens, the UFO or UFOs, etc. The "UFO Museum" is hard to miss, with its front showing a flying saucer crashing into the building.[11]

Secret FBI teletype On July 8, 1947 a secret teletype message was sent from the FBI office in Dallas, Texas to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and to the FBI office in Cincinnati, Ohio (the closest FBI office to Wright Field).

Decades later the message was released through the Freedom of Information Act. It is the only government document on the Roswell case that has ever been found or publicly released. Major "Curtan" in the messages is a misspelling of the name of Major Edwin Kirton, one of Gen. Ramey's intelligence officers. Kirton also spoke with Reuters news agency and the Dallas Morning News and gave them somewhat different stories. For a discussion and copy of telegram see [21]. The official copy of the telegram can be found at [22]

The text of the message is:

FBI DALLAS 7-8-47 6-17 PM PMX DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI URGENT FLYING DISC, INFORMATION CONCERNING. MAJOR CURTAN, HEADQUARTERS EIGHTH AIR FORCE, TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT AN OBJECT PURPORTING TO BE A FLYING DISC WAS RECOVERED NEAR ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO, THIS DATE. THE DISC IS HEXAGONAL IN SHAPE AND WAS SUSPENDED FROM A BALLON [sic] BY CABLE, WHICH BALLON [sic] WAS APPROXIMATELY TWENTY FEET IN DIAMETER. MAJOR CURTAN FURTHER ADVISED THAT THE OBJECT FOUND RESEMBLES A HIGH ALTITUDE WEATHER BALLOON WITH A RADAR REFLECTOR, BUT THAT TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THEIR OFFICE AND WRIGHT FIELD HAD NOT XXXXXXXXXXX BORNE OUT THIS BELIEF. DISC AND BALLOON BEING TRANSPORTED TO WRIGHT FIELD BY SPECIAL PLANE FOR EXAMINATIO[N.] INFORMATION PROVIDED THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN CASE XXXX AND FACT THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF LOCATION OF DISC TODAY. MAJOR CURTAN ADVISED WOULD REQUEST WRIGHT FIELD TO ADVISE CINCINNATI OFFICE RESULTS OF EXAMINATION. NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED. WYLY END

Excerpts from newspaper account of Brazel's find Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year old son, Vernon, were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J. B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks. At the time Brazel was in a hurry to get his round made and he did not pay much attention to it. But he did remark about what he had seen and on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter, Betty, age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.

The next day he first heard about the flying discs and wondered if what he had found might have been the remnants of one of these.

Monday he came to town to sell some wool and while here he went to see sheriff George Wilcox and "whispered kinda confidential like" that he might have found a flying disk.

Wilcox got in touch with the Roswell Air Field and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel and a man in plain clothes accompanied him home, where they picked up the rest of the pieces of the "disk" and went to his home to try to reconstruct it.

[The material] ...might have been as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that is how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long, he felt, measuring the distance by the size of the room in which he sat. The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter. When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. There was no sign of any metal in the area which night have been used for an engine and no sign of any propellers of any kind. Although at least one paper fin had been glued onto some of the tinfoil. There were no words to be found anywhere on the instrument although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment may have been used.

Brazel said that he had previously found two weather balloons on the ranch, but that what he found this time did not in any way resemble either of these. "I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon," he said. "But if I find anything else besides a bomb they are going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it." full text, AP story of interview, & Brazel photo taken by AP at press conference

Sources (generally "pro-UFO" explanations) Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, The Roswell Incident, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1980 Jerome Clark, Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, Visible Ink Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8103-9436-7 Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmidtt, UFO Crash at Roswell, Avon Books, 1991 Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmidtt, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Avon Books, 1994 Kevin D. Randle, Roswell UFO Crash Update, Global Communications, 1995 Kevin D. Randle, The Roswell Encycylopedia, Quill/HarperCollins, 2000 Stanton T. Friedman and Don Berliner, Crash at Corona, Marlowe & Co., 1992 Stanton T. Friedman, Top Secret/Majic, Marlowe & Co., 1996 Michael Hesemann and Philip Mantle, Beyond Roswell: the alien autopsy film, area 51, and the U.S. government coverup of UFO's, Marlowe & Company, 1997 Tim Shawcross, The Roswell File, Motorbooks International, 1997, ISBN 0-7603-471-8 (more neutral in tone) Thomas R. Morris & Theresa J. Morris, with Sally Hester "Roswell Connection", 2006

Further reading (debunkery) Col. Richard Waver and Lt. James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Fact Vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, 1995, U. S. Government Printing Office, ISBN 0-16-048023-X or ISBN 0788146610. (Weaver and McAndrew are both officers in the Air Force counterintelligence branch, Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Weaver is known to have taught courses on propaganda and disinformation.) Capt. James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, Barnes & Noble, 1997, ISBN 0-7607-0814-2 (Also published by the U. S. Government Printing Office, June 1997) Karl T. Pflock, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe, Prometheus Books, 2003, ISBN 1-57392-894-1 (Probably most comprehensive and best-researched of the debunkery books with many affidavits, interview with Jesse Marcel, FBI telegram, United Press Roswell teletypes. Note: Pflock has a CIA background and was once involved in a cattle mutilation hoax.) Kal K. Korff, The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don't Want You to Know, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-127-0. Dell (Random House) paperback : ISBN 0-440-23613-4 Philip J. Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-164-5 Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell (editors), The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, Prometheus Books, 1997, ISBN 1-57392-131-9 (Has nine chapters on the Roswell incident.) Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994, ISBN 1-56098-343-4 (Has some discussion of the Roswell incident.) Benson Saler, Charles A. Ziegler, Charles B. Moore, UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern Myth, 1997, Smithsonian Institution Press, ISBN 1560987510 (Academically-oriented, sociological debunkery of Roswell case; chapter by former Mogul engineer Charles Moore on Mogul balloon trajectory calculation to Mack Brazel ranch is contended to be a hoax.[23]) Many people believe in the Roswell UFO Crash and support all the Roswell residents,believers and seekers of truth including Glenn Dennis and Sally Hester. So much so that one woman founded a faith on this belief that UFO's, aliens, EBEs, Alien Civilzations Exist (ACE).

Ascension Center (ACE) Founded by Theresa Thurmond Morris - Faith Based Religion based on her and others belief in Alien Civilizations Exist.

1947 newspaper articles and press bulletins Comprehensive collection, summary, and analysis of several dozen local, regional, national, and international press articles Discussion and links to several dozen more 1947 press articles of military saucer debunkery campaign following Roswell ABC News radio broadcast, July 8, 1947, audio and transcript Mack Brazel's press interview, Associated Press and Roswell Daily Record versions includes photo of Brazel RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region, Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947. Text and comparison to AP and UP announcements of base press release Full text of AP and UP versions of base press release plus analysis

See also List of major UFO sightings

External links "The Roswell Incident" Documents, Timeline, Air Force reports, Witness List. http://www.thegoggleboy.com talks a lot about Roswell and the crash. 1994 USAF Executive Summary of their first Roswell report, The Roswell Report Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert Mogul balloon synopsis from Air Force report USAF Executive Summaries of 1994 and 1997 reports Link to GAO report Complete 1995 Air Force Roswell report, mostly old Project Mogul files, 1000+ pages (very long download) An answer to the Case Closed statement Criticism of the 1997 USAF "Case Closed" or "crash dummy" report, from Dr. Mark Rodeghier, director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. Criticism of the Air Force Roswell reports from Roswell researcher Stanton T. Friedman Sci Fi network website on Roswell incident; includes lengthy summary of case by researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt. Roswell researcher Dennis Balthaser's website; includes some witness interviews, FOIA information requests, Roswell summary, and more. Critical review of Redfern's "horrible experiments" theory from OVNI Global UFO Network; excellent research. History of Roswell for July 1947 Entry of the Rotten Library about Roswell (skeptical look at both sides) The Skeptic's Dictionary entry for Roswell (debunkery with many links to other debunking articles and books) Skeptical Inquirer article on Mogul explanation (debunkery) Debunkery of the Ramey message

Alternative, fringe viewpoints "Roswell Incident Update"; Different angle from someone claiming to be there Roswell and PAPERCLIP; From a Christian site against the UFO phenomenon. The "E.T. Myth" Vs. The "Nazi Legend": An Examination of Some MJ-12 Documents; Project Paperclip and Nazi flying saucer theories from alternative energy enthusiast Joseph P. Farrell's book Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & Cold War Allied Legend Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident"

Area 51

It has been suggested that List of parodies or puns on Area 51 be merged into this article or section.

Satellite view of Area 51 from 1968.Area 51 (formally known as Air Force Flight Test Center, Detachment 3 and also known as Dreamland, Watertown Strip, Paradise Ranch, The Farm, The Box, Groom Lake, and The Directorate for Development Plans Area) is a remote tract of land in southern Nevada, owned by the federal government of the United States, containing an airfield apparently used for the secret development and testing of new military aircraft. It is famed as the subject of many UFO conspiracy theories.

Contents

1 Geography 2 Operations at Groom Lake 2.1 Senior Year/U-2 program 2.2 Blackbird programs: A-12 (OXCART); YF12A; M/D-21 (TAGBOARD); and SR-71 (SENIOR CROWN) 2.3 Have Blue/Senior Trend/F-117 program 2.4 Later operations 3 Area 51 commuters 4 The Government's position on Area 51 4.1 Environmental lawsuit 4.2 1974 Skylab photography 5 UFO and other conspiracy theories concerning Area 51 6 Area 51 in popular culture 7 See also 8 External links 9 References 9.1 General references 9.2 Specific references

Geography

Map showing Area 51, NAFR, and the NTSArea 51 is a section of land of approximately 60 square miles (155 km²) in Lincoln County, Nevada, USA. It is part of the vast (4,687 square mile [12,139 km²]) Nellis Air Force Range (NAFR). The area consists largely of the wide Emigrant Valley, framed by the Groom and Papoose mountain ranges (to the North and South respectively) and the Jumbled Hills to the East. Between the two ranges lies Groom Dry Lake (37°16′05″N, 115°47′58″W), a dry alkali lake bed roughly three miles (5 km) in diameter. A large air base exists on the southwest corner of the lake (37°14′N 115°49′W) with two concrete runways, one of which extends onto the lake bed, and four unpaved runways on the lake bed itself.

High-resolution satellite images have shed some light on the facility's complex runway layouts. Area 51 has two operating runways, the main is 14L/32R, a concrete runway constructed in the 1990s, measuring 11,980 x 200 feet (3,651 x 61m.) with a 1000 x 100 feet (304 x 30m.) overrun at each end and the secondary, shorter runway is 12/30 which also doubles as a taxiway, measuring 5,420ft x 150 feet (1,652m x 45m). The older runway is exactly six miles (9,656 m) long. It is composed of 12,500 feet of concrete, 11,080 feet of asphalt, and 5560 feet and 2540 feet of now dismantled asphalt on the north and south ends respectively. At least three sets of old runway markings are found, suggesting that the full six-mile length was probably never used in its entirety. Currently only a 6,600 feet (2011m.) stretch of the concrete section is marked for use, forming runway 14R/32L. The dirt lakebed runways, comprising two twin airstrips, measure up to 11,270 feet (3435m.) in length, and 100 to 170 feet (30 to 52m.) in width.

USGS map of the Groom Lake area, notably not showing the secret facilityArea 51 shares a border with the Yucca Flats region of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), the location of many of the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear weapons tests. The Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility is approximately 40 miles (64km) southwest of Groom Lake.

The designation "Area 51" is somewhat contentious, appearing on older maps of the NTS but not newer ones, but the same naming scheme is used for other parts of the Nevada Test Site.

The area is connected to the internal NTS road network, with paved roads leading both to Mercury, to the northwest, and west to Yucca Flats. Leading northeast from the lake, Groom Lake Road (a wide, well-conditioned dirt road) runs through a pass in the Jumbled Hills. Groom Lake Road was formerly the track leading to mines in the Groom basin, but has been improved since their closure. Its winding course takes it past a security checkpoint, but the restricted area around the base extends further east than this (unauthorized visitors who travel west on Groom Lake Road are usually observed first by guards located on the hills surrounding the pass, still several miles from the checkpoint). After leaving the restricted area (marked by numerous warning signs stating that "photography is prohibited" and that "use of deadly force is authorized" under the terms of the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act) Groom Lake Road descends eastward to the floor of the Tikaboo Valley, passing the dirt-road entrances to several small ranches, before joining with Nevada State Route 375, the "Extraterrestrial Highway", south of Rachel.

Operations at Groom Lake

Simulated aerial view of Area 51, made using Landsat imageryGroom Lake is not a conventional airbase, and frontline units are not normally deployed there. It appears, rather, to be used during the development, test, and training phases for new aircraft. Once those aircraft have been accepted by the United States Air Force, operation of that aircraft is generally shifted to a normal air force base. Groom is reported, however, to be the permanent home for a small number of aircraft of Soviet design (obtained by various means). These are reportedly analyzed and used for training purposes.

Soviet spy satellites obtained photographs of the Groom Lake area during the height of the Cold War, but these support only modest conclusions about the base. They depict a nondescript base, airstrip, hangars, and so forth, but nothing that supports some of the wilder claims about underground facilities. Later, commercial satellite images show that the base has grown, but remains superficially unexceptional.

Senior Year/U-2 program Groom Lake was used for bombing and artillery practice during World War II, but was then abandoned until 1955, when it was selected by Lockheed's Skunkworks team as the ideal location to test the forthcoming U-2 spy plane. The lakebed made for an ideal strip to operate the troublesome test aircraft from, and the Emigrant Valley's mountain ranges and the NTS perimeter protected the secret plane from curious eyes.

Lockheed constructed a makeshift base at Groom, little more than a few shelters and workshops and a small constellation of trailer homes in which to billet its small team. The first U-2 flew at Groom in August 1955, and U-2s under the control of the CIA began overflights of Soviet territory by mid-1956.

During this period, the NTS continued to perform a series of atmospheric nuclear explosions. U-2 operations throughout 1957 were frequently disrupted by the Plumbbob series of atomic tests, which blew up over two dozen devices at the NTS. The Plumbbob-Hood explosion on July 5 scattered fallout across Groom and forced its (temporary) evacuation.

As the U-2's primary mission was to overfly the Soviet Union, it operated largely from airbases near the Soviet border, including Incirlik in Turkey and Peshawar in Pakistan.

Blackbird programs: A-12 (OXCART); YF12A; M/D-21 (TAGBOARD); and SR-71 (SENIOR CROWN) Even before U-2 development was complete, Lockheed began work on its successor, the CIA's OXCART project, a Mach-3 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, a later variant of which became the famed USAF SR-71 Blackbird. The Blackbird's flight characteristics and maintenance requirements forced a massive expansion of facilities and runways at Groom Lake. By the time the first A-12 Blackbird prototype flew at Groom in 1962, the main runway had been lengthened to 8500ft. (2600m), and the base boasted a complement of over 1000 personnel. It had fueling tanks, a control tower, and a baseball diamond. Security was also greatly enhanced, the small civilian mine in the Groom basin was closed, and the area surrounding the valley was made an exclusive military preserve (where interlopers were subject to "lethal force"). Groom saw the first flight of all major Blackbird variants: A-12, SR-71, its abortive YF-12A interceptor variant, and the D-21 Blackbird-based drone project.

Have Blue/Senior Trend/F-117 program The first Have Blue prototype stealth fighter (a smaller cousin of the F-117 Nighthawk which was commonly seen and reported as a "UFO"), first flew at Groom in late 1977. Testing of a series of ultra-secret prototypes continued there until mid-1981, when testing transitioned to the initial production of F-117 stealth fighters. In addition to flight testing, Groom performed radar profiling, F-117 weapons testing, and was the location for training of the first group of frontline USAF F-117 pilots. Subsequently, active-service F-117 operations (still highly classified) moved to the nearby Tonopah Test Range, and finally to Holloman Air Force Base.

Later operations

Area 51 border and warning sign. "Camo dudes" in their vehicle watch from the ridgeline.Since the F-117 became operational in 1983, operations at Groom Lake have continued unabated. The base and its associated runway system have been expanded, and the daily flights bringing civilian commuters from Las Vegas continue. Some commentators, after examining recent satellite photos of the base, estimate it to have a live-in complement of over 1000 people, with a similar number commuting from Las Vegas. In 1995, the federal government expanded the exclusionary area around the base to include nearby mountains that had hitherto afforded the only decent overlook of the base. Subsequently, limited views of the area are available only from the summits of several distant mountains, particularly Tikaboo Peak (37°20′40″N, 115°21′32″W), around 26 miles (42 km) to the east.

Aircraft that have supposedly been tested at Groom include the Northrop Tacit Blue stealth demonstrator, various classified UAVs, a small stealthy VTOL troop-transport aircraft, a stealthy cruise missile, the rumored Aurora hypersonic spy plane, a "Stealth Blimp", a secret USAF spaceplane codenamed Blackstar[1], and replacements for the SR-71 and F-117A.

Area 51 commuters

EG&G JANET 737s at McCarran.Defense contractor EG&G maintains a private terminal at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. A number of unmarked aircraft operate daily shuttle services from McCarran to sites operated by EG&G in the extensive federally controlled lands in southern Nevada. These aircraft reportedly use JANET radio call signs (e.g., "JANET 6"), said to be an acronym for "Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation" or (perhaps as a joke) "Just Another Non-Existent Terminal". EG&G advertises in the Las Vegas press for experienced airline pilots, saying applicants must be eligible for government security clearance and that successful applicants can expect to always overnight at Las Vegas. These aircraft, painted white with red trim (the livery of now defunct Western Airlines), include Boeing 737s and several smaller turboprops. Their tail numbers are registered to the U.S. Air Force. They are reported to shuttle to Groom, Tonopah Test Range, to other locations in the NAFR and NTS, and reportedly to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. Observers counting departures and cars in the private EG&G parking lot at McCarran estimate several thousand people commute on JANET each day. These shuttle flights were previously operated by Key Air. Key had flown 22,000 passenger trips on 300 flights from Nellis AFB to Tonopah Test Range per month from 1982 until early 1991 (ATA Airlines received this contract for another year and a half).

A bus runs a commuter service along Groom Lake Road, catering to a small number of employees living in several small desert communities beyond the NTS boundary (although it is not clear whether these workers are employed at Groom or at other facilities in the NTS). The bus drives down Groom Lake Road and stops at Crystal Springs, Ash Springs, and Alamo, and parks in front of the Alamo court house overnight. Interior pic of Janet Area 51 Shuttle

The Government's position on Area 51

A letter from the USAF replying to a query about Area 51The U.S. government does not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the Groom Lake facility, nor does it deny it. Unlike much of the Nellis range, the area surrounding the lake is permanently off-limits both to civilians and normal, military air traffic. The area is protected by radar stations, and uninvited guests are met by helicopters and armed guards. Should they accidentally stray into the exclusionary "box" surrounding Groom's airspace, even military pilots training in the NAFR are reportedly grilled extensively by military intelligence agents.

Perimeter security is provided by uniformed private security guards, called "camo dudes," working for EG&G's security subcontractor Wackenhut[2], who patrol in desert camouflage Jeep Cherokee and Hum-Vee vehicles, and more recently, champagne coloured Ford F-150 pickups and gray Chevy 2500 4X4 pickups. Although the guards are armed with M16s, no violent encounters with Area 51 observers have been reported; instead, the "camo dudes" generally follow visitors near the perimeter and radio for the Lincoln County sheriff. Modest fines of around $600 seem to be the norm, although some visitors and journalists report receiving follow-up visits from FBI agents. Some observers have been detained on public land for pointing camera equipment at the base. Surveillance is also conducted using buried motion sensors and by HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters.

A montage of available USGS satellite photography showing southern Nevada. The NTS and the surrounding lands are visible; the NAFR and neighbouring land has been removedThe base does not appear on public U.S. government maps; the USGS topological map for the area only shows the long-disused Groom Mine, and the civil aviation chart for Nevada shows a large restricted area, but defines it as part of the Nellis restricted airspace. Similarly the National Atlas page showing federal lands in Nevada does not distinguish between the Groom block and other parts of the Nellis range. Although officially declassified, the original film taken by U.S. Corona spy satellite in the 1960s has been altered prior to declassification; in answer to freedom of information queries, the government responds that these exposures (which map to Groom and the entire NAFR) appear to have been destroyed (Corona image). Terra satellite images (which were publicly available) were removed from webservers (including Microsoft's "Terraserver") in 2004 (Terraserver image), and from the monochrome 1 m resolution USGS datadump made publicly available. NASA Landsat 7 images are still available (these are used in the NASA World Wind). Non-U.S. images, including high-resolution photographs from Russian satellites and the commercial IKONOS system, are also easily available (and abound on the Internet). Area 51 also appears on Google Earth in some detail, but as with other images nothing to make the base stand out from other facilities can be seen.

Despite the official government ban on discussing the matter, the phrase "groom lake" does appear on several publicly-accessible U.S. Air Force websites most of which are unambiguously referring to the facility.

Extraterrestrial Highway signNevada's state government, recognizing the folklore surrounding the base might afford the otherwise neglected area some tourism potential, officially renamed the section of Nevada State Route 375 near Rachel "The Extraterrestrial Highway", and posted fancifully illustrated signs along its length.

Although federal property within the base is exempt from state and local taxes, facilities owned by private contractors are not. One researcher has reported that the base only declares a taxable value of $2 million to the Lincoln County tax assessor, who is unable to enter the area to perform an assessment.

Environmental lawsuit In 1994, five unnamed civilian contractors and the widows of contractors Walter Kasza and Robert Frost sued the USAF and the Environmental Protection Agency. Their suit, in which they were represented by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, alleged they had been present when large quantities of unknown chemicals had been burned in open pits and trenches at Groom. Biopsies taken from the complainants were analyzed by Rutgers University biochemists, who found high levels of dioxin, dibenzofuran, and trichloroethylene in their body fat. The complainants alleged they had sustained skin, liver, and respiratory injuries due to their work at Groom, and that this had contributed to the deaths of Frost and Kasza. The suit sought compensation for the injuries they had sustained, claiming the USAF had illegally handled toxic materials, and that the EPA had failed in its duty to enforce the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (which governs handling of dangerous materials). They also sought detailed information about the chemicals to which they alleged they had been exposed, hoping this would help the medical treatment of those still living.

The government petitioned trial judge, U.S. District Judge Philip Pro (sitting in the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas), to disallow disclosure of classified documents or examination of witnesses on secret matters, alleging this would expose classified information and threaten national security. When Judge Pro rejected the government's argument, President Bill Clinton issued a Presidential Determination, exempting what it called, "The Air Force's Operating Location Near Groom Lake, Nevada" from environmental disclosure laws. Consequently, Pro dismissed the suit due to lack of evidence. Turley appealed to the Ninth Circuit court of appeal, on the grounds that the government was abusing its power to classify material. Secretary of the Air Force Sheila E. Widnall filed a brief which stated that disclosures of the materials present in the air and water near Groom, "Can reveal military operational capabilities or the nature and scope of classified operations." The Ninth Circuit rejected Turley's appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear it, putting an end to the complainants' case.

The President continues to annually issue a determination continuing the Groom exception [3] [4] [5]. This, and similarly tacit wording used in other government communications, is the only formal recognition the U.S. Government has ever given that Groom Lake is more than simply another part of the Nellis complex.

1974 Skylab photography In January of 2006, aviation journalist Dwayne Day published an article in online aerospace magazine The Space Review titled "Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident." The article was based around a recently declassified memo written in 1974 to CIA director William Colby by an unknown CIA official. The memo reported that astronauts on board Skylab 4 had, as part of larger program, inadvertently photographed a location of which the memo said "There were specific instructions not to do this. <redacted> was the only location which had such an instruction." Although the name of the location was obscured, the context led Day to believe that the subject was Groom Lake. [6]

The memo details debate between federal agencies regarding whether the images should (or indeed could) be classified, with Department of Defense agencies arguing that it should, and NASA and the State Department arguing against classification. The memo itself questions whether it was legal for images obtained by an unclassified program to be retroactively classified.

Remarks on the memo[7], handwritten apparently by DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) Colby himself, read:

He did raise it - said State Dept. people felt strongly. But he inclined leave decision to me (DCI) - I confessed some question over need to protect since: USSR has it from own sats What really does it reveal? If exposed, don't we just say classified USAF work is done there? The declassified documents do not disclose the outcome of the discussions regarding the Skylab imagery, but they were not placed in the National Archive at Sioux Falls, South Dakota along with the rest of the Skylab 4 photographs.

UFO and other conspiracy theories concerning Area 51 Its secretive nature and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led Area 51 to become a centerpiece of modern UFO and conspiracy theory folklore. Some of the unconventional activities claimed to be underway at Area 51 include:

The storage, examination, and reverse engineering of crashed alien spacecraft (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), the study of their occupants (living and dead), and the manufacture of aircraft based on alien technology. Meetings or joint undertakings with extraterrestrials. The development of exotic energy weapons (for SDI applications or otherwise) or means of weather control. Activities related to a supposed shadowy world government. Many of the theories concern underground facilities at Groom or at nearby Papoose Lake, and include claims of a transcontinental underground railroad system, a disappearing airstrip (nicknamed the "Cheshire Airstrip", after Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat) which briefly appears when water is sprayed onto its camouflaged asphalt [8], and engineering based on alien technology. In 1989 Bob Lazar claimed that he had worked at a facility at Papoose Lake (which he called S-4) on such a U.S. Government flying saucer.

One major theory is that Area 51 is a place which simulates the environment of the moon. In 2000-2001, Fox Television broadcasted a show about Apollo moon landing hoax accusations, in which it was suggested that the whole moon landing in 1969 was a hoax and was filmed in parts of Area 51. Soviet satellite photography indicates that parts of Area 51 resemble the moon's surface, as shown in the moon landing video.

Others, however, claim that during the mid 1990s, the most secret work previously done at Groom was quietly moved to other facilities, including Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and that the continued secrecy around Groom is largely a successful attempt at misdirection[9].

Area 51 in popular culture

Cover of the 2005 Area 51 FPS video gameThe base is featured in episodes of the television series Sonic X, The Simpsons (area 51A), Futurama, Family Guy, American Dad, The X-Files, Taken, Seven Days (Never Never Land), Kim Possible, Tracker (although actually, the episode was titled 'Area 51' but the base involved was actually at Roswell, the so-called craft was discussed.), Megas XLR (as Area 50), Stargate SG-1, the movies Groom Lake, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Area 52) Independence Day, the computer and video games Area 51, Area 51, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D, Tomb Raider III, Rogue Trip (as one of the game stages), Perfect Dark, The Pandora Directive, Twisted Metal 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Area 69), Starfox 64 (Area 6, in space) Destroy All Humans! (Area 42), SimCity 4 (Area 5.1). Half-Life, which is set mostly in and around the fictional Black Mesa Research Facility, is generally considered to be modeled after Area 51. It is also featured in several novels by Dale Brown and Robert Doherty's (Bob Mayer) Area 51 series, which take place after Area 51 scientists make contact with extraterrestrials.

Division 47, an area of Strangetown in the PSP version of The Sims 2, is modeled after Area 51.

Area 51 has been used in several role-playing games as a plot element. In the game Conspiracy X, it is a safe facility and base of operations for the players' counter-extraterrestrial operations. On the flip side, in the Call of Cthulhu modern day conspiracy supplement Delta Green, the base is the site of a foolish conspiracy's laboratory facilities for studying and intercepting otherworldly beings. The alternate history roleplaying game, Deadlands also features an 1880s version of the location called "Fort 51".

Area 51 is the name given to a variety of unrelated products and companies, including a range of computers built by Alienware, the development area for the phpBB forum software, one of the areas of the Geocities web hosting service, an Aprilia motor scooter, and numerous science-fiction bookstores and bulletin boards.

In 1994, Version 2.0 of the ROM for the Apple Newton personal digital assistant included the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of Area 51 in the Time Zones application as an "Easter egg". This feature was removed (supposedly at the request of the CIA) by applying a software patch, but it remained possible to bypass the patch fairly easily. [1]

The world's largest model railway in Hamburg, Germany features a fictional Area 51 model in its America section (with aliens playing basketball with base personnel).

Area 51 has also been the inspiration for the sci-fi rock musical, Area 51 The Musical.

The tiny town of Rachel, Nevada (the nearest settlement to the base) enjoys minor celebrity status as being "the official home of Area 51". Located three hours from Las Vegas by car, Rachel receives a modest number of visitors year-round, and several small businesses offer food and lodging to visitors, together with aerospace and "alien" themed merchandising. The visitor numbers are swelled yearly with aviation enthusiasts hoping to catch a glimpse of the RED FLAG exercises. A small museum sells maps, photographs, badges, and other Area 51 material, and a local inn, aptly named "The Little A'le'Inn" proudly displays a time capsule received from the production crew of Independence Day.

In 2005, radio station 107.9 KVGS Laughlin/Las Vegas changed its format to alternative rock, going by the name of "Area 108." The promotion of the station is "alien" themed.

The minor league baseball team in Las Vegas, Nevada is called the Las Vegas 51s. Their logo includes the image of a "Grey" extraterrestrial.

See also List of parodies or puns on Area 51

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Category:Area 51Area 51 - History, Structures, and Employees WikiSatellite view of Area 51 at WikiMapia Dreamlandresort - detailed history of Area 51 Nellis AFB High resolution pictures of Area 51 (Updated) Topographic Map of the Emigrant Valley / Groom area Satellite photograph of "Area 51" Google Maps satellite image - Recently updated with high detail images (Feb 5, 2006). Aerial Photos from different decades, overlaid with Google Maps interface Photographs of McCarran EG&G terminal and JANET aircraft Maps and aerial photos Coordinates: 37.240203° -115.818558° Street map from Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps Topographic map from TopoZone Aerial image or topographic map from TerraServer-USA Satellite image from Google Maps or Windows Live Local

References

General references Area 51 resources at the Federation of American Scientists Rich, Ben; Janos, Leo. (1996) Skunk Works. Little, Brown & Company, ISBN 0316743003 Darlington, David. (1998) Dreamland Chronicles. Henry Holt & Company, ISBN 0805060405 Transcript from CBS 60 Minutes segment about the environmental lawsuit "Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident" article in The Space Review Patton, Phil (1998) Dreamland : Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51. Villard Books / Random House ISBN 0375753850 Tom Mahood's Area 51 timeline

Specific references ^ Two-Stage-to-Orbit 'Blackstar' System Shelved at Groom Lake? William B. Scott, Aviation Week March 5 2006 ^ Patton, p10 ^ 2000 Presidential Determination ^ 2002 Presidential Determination ^ 2003 Presidential Determination ^ Dwayne A. Day (January 9, 2006). Astronauts and Area 51: the Skylab Incident. The Space Review. ^ CIA memo to DCI Colby. hosted by The Space Review'. ^ "The Cheshire Airstrip", Tom Mahood, October 1996, retrieved April 2 2006 ^ "Dugway Proving Ground - the new Groom Lake?" Above Top Secret June 23 2004, retrieved April 2 2006 Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51" Categories: Articles to be merged | Lincoln County, Nevada | Conspiracy theories | UFOs | United States Air Force facilities

Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle (also known as Devil's Triangle) is a nearly half-million square-mile (1.2 million km2) area of ocean roughly defined by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Bermuda Triangle has become popular through representation by the mass media, in which it is a paranormal site in which the known laws of physics are violated and altered.

While there is a common belief that a number of ships and airplanes have disappeared under highly unusual circumstances in this region, the United States Coast Guard and others disagree with that assessment, citing statistics demonstrating that the number of incidents involving lost ships and aircraft is no larger than that of any other heavily traveled region of the world [1]. Many of the alleged mysteries have proven not so mysterious or unusual upon close examination, with inaccuracies and misinformation about the cases often circulating and recirculating over the decades.

The triangle is an arbitrary shape, crudely marking out a corridor of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching northward from the West Indies, along the North American seaboard, as far as the Carolinas. In the Age of Sail, ships returning to Europe from parts south would sail north to the Carolinas, then turn east for Europe, taking advantage of the prevailing wind direction across the North Atlantic. Even with the development of steam and internal-combustion engines, a great deal more shipping traffic was (and still is) found nearer the US coastline than towards the empty centre of the Atlantic. The Triangle also loosely conforms with the course of the Gulf Stream as it leaves the West Indies, and has always been an area of volatile weather. The combination of distinctly heavy maritime traffic and tempestuous weather meant that a certain, also distinctly large, number of vessels would founder in storms. Given the historical limitations of communications technology, most of those ships that sank without survivors would disappear without a trace. The advent of wireless communications, radar, and satellite navigation meant that the unexplained disappearances largely ceased at some point in the 20th Century. The occasional vessel still sinks, but rarely without a trace.

American journalist Vincent Gaddis in the 1960s renamed this region from "The Devil's Triangle" to "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle," but the shortened version "Bermuda Triangle" is far more common.

Other areas often purported to possess unusual characteristics are the Devil's Sea, located near Japan, and the Marysburgh Vortex or the Great Lakes Triangle, located in eastern Lake Ontario.

Contents

1 History 1.1 First citations 1.2 Popularized by Berlitz 1.3 Skeptical responses 1.4 Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved 1.5 Methane hydrates 2 Famous incidents 2.1 Flight 19 2.2 Star Tiger 2.3 Mary Celeste 3 Cinematic depictions 4 Cultural references 5 See also 6 External Links 7 Further reading

History

The cover of the 1977 Panther paperback edition of Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle[edit] First citations The first mention of disappearances in the area was made in 1951 by E.V.W. Jones as a sidebar on the Associated Press wire service regarding recent ship losses. Jones' article notes the "mysterious disappearances" of ships, airplanes and small boats in the region, and ascribes it the name "The Devil's Triangle". It was next mentioned in 1952 in a Fate Magazine article by George X. Sand, who outlined several "strange marine disappearances". The term "Bermuda Triangle" was popularized by Vincent Gaddis in an August 1964 Argosy feature.

Popularized by Berlitz The area achieved its current fame largely through the efforts of Charles Berlitz in his 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle (right) and its subsequent film adaptation. The book recounts a long series of mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft, in particular the December 1945 loss of five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo bombers in the infamous Flight 19 incident.

The book was a bestseller and included several theories about the cause of the disappearances, including accidents due to high traffic volumes; natural storms; "temporal holes"; the lost empire of Atlantis; transportation by extraterrestrial technology; and other natural or supernatural causes.

Skeptical responses The marine insurer Lloyd's of London has determined the "triangle" to be no more dangerous than any other area of ocean, and does not charge unusual rates for passage through the region. Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion.

Skeptics comment that the disappearance of a train between two stops would be more convincing evidence of paranormal activity, and the fact that such things do not occur suggests that paranormal explanations are not needed for the disappearance of ships and airplanes in the far less predictable open ocean.

Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved Kusche's research revealed a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies between Berlitz's accounts and statements from eyewitnesses, participants and others involved in the initial incidents. He noted cases where pertinent information went unreported, such as the disappearance of round-the-world yachtsman Donald Crowhurst which Berlitz had presented as a mystery, despite clear evidence that Crowhurst had fabricated the accounts of his voyage and had probably committed suicide. Another example was the ore-carrier Berlitz recounted as lost without trace three days out of an Atlantic port when it had been lost three days out of a port with the same name in the Pacific Ocean. Kusche also argued that a large percentage of the incidents attributed to the Bermuda Triangle's mysterious influence actually occurred well outside it.

Kusche came to several conclusions:

The number of ships and airplanes reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than any other part of the ocean. In an area frequented by tropical storms, the number of disappearances that did occur was neither disproportionate, unlikely, nor mysterious. The numbers themselves had been exaggerated by sloppy research. A boat listed as missing would be reported, but not necessarily its eventual, if belated, return to port. The circumstances of confirmed disappearances were frequently misreported in Berlitz's accounts. The numbers of ships disappearing in supposedly calm weather, for instance, did not tally with weather reports published at the time.

Methane hydrates Main article: Methane clathrate An explanation for some of the disappearances focuses on the presence of vast fields of methane hydrates on the continental shelves. A paper was published in 1981 by the United States Geological Survey about the appearance of hydrates in the Blake Ridge area, off the southeastern United States coast. Periodic methane eruptions may produce regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning. Laboratory experiments have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water.

Hypothetically, methane gas might also be involved in airplane crashes, as it is not as dense as normal air and thus would not generate the amount of lift required to keep the airplane flying. Low levels of methane have also been shown to cause an aircraft engine to stall when added to the intake of air.

Famous incidents

Flight 19 Main article: Flight 19 One of the best known Bermuda Triangle incidents concerns the loss of Flight 19, a squadron of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a training flight out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on December 5, 1945. According to Berlitz, the flight consisted of expert Marine Corps aviators who, after reporting a number of odd visual effects, simply disappeared, an account which isn't entirely true. Furthermore, Berlitz claims that because the TBM Avenger bombers were built to float for long periods, they should have been found the next day considering what were reported as calm seas and a clear sky. However, not only were they never found, a Navy search and rescue seaplane that went after them was also lost. Adding to the intrigue is that the Navy's report of the accident was ascribed to "causes or reasons unknown".

While the basic facts of Berlitz's version of the story are essentially accurate, some important details are missing. The image of a squadron of seasoned combat aviators disappearing on a sunny afternoon is inaccurate. Rather, it was a squadron of lost, inexperienced flight trainees forced to ditch their out-of-fuel airplanes into unknown stormy waters in the dark of night. As for the Navy's report, it is claimed that the original report blamed the accident on the commander's confusion (Lt. Taylor abandoned his airplanes twice in the Pacific after getting lost returning to his carrier), but the wording was changed in deference to the wishes of his family.

Another factor to consider is that the TBM Avenger Aircraft were never designed for crash-landing into water. Wartime experience in the Pacific showed that an Avenger aircraft would sink very quickly if landed on the water. Especially with novice pilots at the helm, an Avenger would be very difficult to land on calm water, let alone the perilous rough seas in the Bermuda Triangle.

Star Tiger Another well-known loss is that of a four-engine Tudor IV airliner named Star Tiger, in the predawn hours of January 31, 1948. Piloted by Captain B. W. McMillan, the airliner, which carried twenty-nine passengers and crew on board, had left hours earlier from Santa Maria, Azores, one of numerous scheduled fuel stopover points on its route from London, England to Havana, Cuba. While approaching Bermuda, McMillan made the expected contact with Kindley Field, the next stopover, requesting a radio bearing to calibrate his navigation systems and ensure he remained on course. With the response indicating that the plane was slightly off course, its position was corrected after Bermuda relayed a first-class bearing of 72 degrees from the island. At this point, with Star Tiger less than two hours flight away, McMillan gave confirmation of an ETA of 05:00 hours, an hour late due to strong headwinds; no further transmission from the aircraft was ever received.

Armed with precise reports of the plane's last known position, rescue operations were launched after the craft was determined overdue for arrival; but no trace of the aircraft was ever found.

In the report issued soon thereafter by the Civil Air Ministry, numerous hypotheses as to what might have occurred during the flight's final two hours are given, before each being subsequently rejected: "There would accordingly be no grounds for supposing that Star Tiger fell into the sea in consequence of having been deprived of her radio, having failed to find her destination, and having exhausted her fuel." "There is good reason to suppose that no distress message was transmitted from the aircraft, for there were many radio receiving stations listening on the aircraft's frequencies, and none reported such a message." "...The weather was stable, there were no atmospheric disturbances of a serious kind which might cause structural damage to the aircraft, and there were no electrical storms." It was ruled that the aircraft could not have gone off course, as the broadcast bearing from Bermuda, with winds prevailing, would have brought it within thirty miles of the island: "The aircraft could hardly have failed to find the island in a short time, in the conditions of visibility which prevailed." Engine difficulty was ruled out as a likely cause, since at such late stage in the flight, without the added weight of extra fuel aboard, the aircraft might have been flown safely on three, or even two, engines instead of the four it had. The probability of the aircraft entirely losing three engines in the course of under two hours was considered absurd.

Faced with the accumulation of evidence, or perhaps lack thereof, the board of investigation addressed the loss of the Star Tiger with remarked eloquence: "In closing this report it may truly be said that no more baffling problem has ever been presented for investigation. In the complete absence of any reliable evidence as to either the nature or the cause of the accident of Star Tiger the Court has not been able to do more than suggest possibilities, none of which reaches the level even of probability. Into all activities which involve the co-operation of man and machine two elements enter of a very diverse character [sic?]. There is an incalculable element of the human equation dependent upon imperfectly known factors; and there is the mechanical element subject to quite different laws. A breakdown may occur in either separately or in both in conjunction. Or some external cause may overwhelm both man and machine. What happened in this case will never be known and the fate of Star Tiger must remain an unsolved mystery."

Mary Celeste While it is true the Mary Celeste (earlier the Amazon) is a famous incident involving a missing ship, it is a common misunderstanding the Triangle was involved. The Mary Celeste never actually went near the Bermuda Triangle.

Cinematic depictions The episode "Bad Water" of seaQuest DSV deals with four crewmembers trapped on the surface of the water in a lifeboat within the Bermuda Triangle as a hurricane passes over them. An episode of Disney's DuckTales (episode #27: "Bermuda Triangle Tangle") left Scrooge a prisoner in the mysterious Sargasso Sea after a search for his missing ships. One episode of Quantum Leap featured Sam as a pilot flying through the triangle. Mysterious ghost ships and odd transmissions from planes that went missing 20 years ago are featured. One episode of Rocko's Modern Life featured the main characters going on a cruise which ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. Chaos ensues as the young become old, old become young, and a strange airplane-like alien appears. A season 6 The X-Files episode, aptly named "Triangle", featured a Bermuda Triangle storyline about a 1939 luxury liner that appeared in the present day. On December 5, 2005, the Sci Fi Channel began broadcasting its three-part series called The Triangle. This series features a theory on electromagnetic disruptions and space-time holes. This series was then shown in the UK on BBC1 over the 27-29th May 2006. In an episode of Nickelodeon's The Fairly Odd Parents, Timmy's most dangerous wishes are transported to an island in the Bermuda Triangle. Jorgan Von Strangle gives the reasoning that it is so dangerous, nobody would be crazy enough to go there. A 1978 film entitled The Bermuda Triangle. In a 1978 episode of Scooby-Doo titled "A Creepy Tangle in the Bermuda Triangle", the gang enters the Triangle on a ship helmed by an evil captain and becomes involved in many mysterious incidents. The 2001 film Lost Voyage is about a ship which was lost in Bermuda Triangle and returns after 30 years. In the 1977 television series The Fantastic Journey, the main characters traveled through different places and times trying to escape the Bermuda Triangle. In a 2006 episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius titled "The Evil Beneath", Jimmy and his friends travel to a region called the Bahama Quadrangle. In the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind an alien spaceship returns the crew members of Flight 19, along with many other missing humans, to Earth at Devil's Tower, Wyoming. The Avenger airplanes themselves are returned earlier, in the middle of the night to the Sonora Desert in pristine working condition, a large ship is also returned to the Gobi desert. In the 1991 film The Addams Family, Abigail Craven tries to pass off her son Gordon as the long-lost Uncle Fester, explaining his long absence with an onset of amnesia after a vacation in the Bermuda Triangle. In an episode of the 1987 animated series The Real Ghostbusters titled "Venkman's Ghost Repellers", the Ghostbusters become trapped in a region akin to the Bermuda Triangle off the coast of New York - the New Jersey Parallelogram. [edit] Cultural references Barry Manilow sang a UK no. 15 hit in 1981 titled "Bermuda Triangle". Fleetwood Mac had a song called "The Bermuda Triangle" on their 1974 album Heroes are Hard to Find. DC Comics' Paradise Island city-state, controlled by Amazons and the home of Wonder Woman, is located there. The Marvel Comics series Skull the Slayer was set in a world inhabited by people who had been swallowed by the Triangle, which was actually a trap created by aliens. Milton Bradley released a board game named Bermuda Triangle in 1975. Buckethead released an album named Bermuda Triangle in 2002. Starlord, a British comic book, ran a story called "Planet of the Damned", which portrays the triangle as a vortex in space and time leading to a hostile planet where survivors struggle against the alien environment. The story relies on a number of documented disaperances for its background. The story began 13 May 1978. Jaws author Peter Benchley wrote a novel called The Island in which a journalist investigates the Triangle and discovers the disappearances are the work of pirates — specifically the descendants of buccaneers who live isolated from civilization and raid shipping to survive. In 1980, the book was made into a film directed by Michael Ritchie and starring Michael Caine. The narrator of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Diary often refers to any item which has disappeared as having been "Bermuda triangulated". The British playwright Snoo Wilson won the John Whiting Award in 1978 for his dramatic fantasy The Glad Hand in which a South African millionaire hires actors to perform scenes from the history of the American West in an oil tanker while it sails through the Bermuda Triangle, in the hopes of summoning up the Anti-Christ for a shoot-out. Hardrock band Vengeance released an album named Back From Flight 19 in 1997. 70s and 80s New Wave rock group Blondie's album Plastic Letters features the song "Flight 45 (Bermuda Triangle Blues)" about the mysterious disappearance of an aircraft which was "leaving for some fun in the hot tropic sun, back next Monday."

See also List of Bermuda Triangle incidents Chuck Wakely Incident Vile Vortices

External Links

bermuda-triangle.org (Website of historian & Bermuda Triangle researcher Gian Quasar) U.S. Navy Historical Center Bermuda Triangle FAQ U.S. Navy Historical Center (Selective Bibliography) The Bermuda Triangle: Startling New Secrets, Sci Fi Channel documentary (November 2005) [edit] Further reading "Into the Bermuda Triangle: Pursuing the Truth Behind the World's Greatest Mystery" by Gian J. Quasar, International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press (2003) ISBN 007142640X; contains list of missing craft as researched in official records. (reprinted in paperback (2005) ISBN 0071452176). The Bermuda Triangle, Charles Berlitz (ISBN 0385041144): appears to be currently out of print; however, there are many other books available covering the same material, frequently the same stories. The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved (1975). Lawrence David Kusche (ISBN 0879759712) Limbo Of The Lost, John Wallace Spencer (ISBN 0-68-610658-X) The Final Flight, Tony Blackman (ISBN 978-1-4116-4663-6

Bible code

Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, which claims that these codes can predict the future. These claims are strongly doubted by skeptics and by many religious groups.

Contents

1 Overview 2 History 3 Criticism 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Overview The primary method by which purportedly meaningful messages have been extracted is the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS). To obtain an ELS from a text, choose a starting point (in principle, any letter) and a skip number, also freely and possibly negative. Then, beginning at the starting point, select letters from the text at equal spacing as given by the skip number. For example, the bold letters in this sentence form an ELS from the word SAFEST. (The skip is -4. Spaces and punctuation are ignored.)

Often more than one ELS related to some topic can be displayed simultaneously in an ELS letter array. This is produced by writing out the text in a regular grid, with exactly the same number of letters in each line, then cutting out a rectangle. In the example below, we show part of the King James Version of Genesis (26:5–10) with 33 letters per line. ELSs for BIBLE and CODE are shown. Normally only a smaller rectangle would be displayed, such as the rectangle drawn in the figure. In that case there would be letters missing between adjacent lines in the picture, but it is essential that the number of missing letters be the same for each pair of adjacent lines.

Arrange the letters from Genesis 26:5–10 in a 33 column grid and you get a word search with "Bible" and "code". A myriad of other arrangements can yield other words. Although the above examples are in English texts, Bible codes proponents usually use a Hebrew Bible text. For religious reasons, most Jewish proponents use only the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy).

History As far as is known, the 13th-century Spanish Rabbi Bachya ben Asher was the first to describe an ELS in the Bible. His 4-letter example related to the traditional zero-point of the Jewish calendar. Over the following centuries there are some hints that the ELS technique was known, but few definite examples have been found from before the middle of the 20th century. At this point many examples were found by the Slovakian Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl and published by his students after his death in 1957. Nevertheless, the practice remained known only to a few until the early 1980s, when some discoveries of an Israeli school teacher Avraham Oren came to the attention of the mathematician Eliyahu Rips at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Rips then took up the study together with his religious studies partner Doron Witztum and several others.

Rips and Witztum invented the ELS letter array and used a computer to find many examples. About 1985, they decided to carry out a formal test and the Great rabbis experiment was born. This experiment tested the hypothesis that ELSs for the names of famous rabbis could be found closer to ELSs of their dates of birth and death than chance alone could explain. The definition of "close" was complex but, roughly, two ELSs are close if they can be displayed together in a small rectangle. The experiment succeeded in finding sequences which fit these definitions, and they were interpreted as indicating the phenomenon was real.

The great rabbis experiment went through several iterations but was eventually published (1994) in the peer-reviewed journal Statistical Science. Although neither the Editor nor the referees were convinced by it, nor could they find much formally wrong with it, so the paper was published as a "challenging puzzle".

Witztum and Rips also performed other experiments, most of them successful, though none were published in journals. Another experiment, in which the names of the famous rabbis were matched against the places of their births and deaths (rather than the dates), was conducted by Harold Gans, an employee of the United States National Security Agency [1]. Again, the results were interpreted as being meaningful and thus suggestive of a more than chance result. These Bible codes became known to the public primarily due to the American journalist Michael Drosnin, whose book The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster, 1997) was a best-seller in many countries. Drosnin's most famous success was to predict the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, allegedly using a Bible code technique. Opponents claim that in the political atmosphere of the time, predicting with no additional details the fact that Rabin would be assassinated is not compelling, though dramatic. In 2002, Drosnin published a second book on the same subject, called The Bible Code II.

Use of Bible code techniques also spread into certain Christian circles, especially in the United States. The main early proponents were Yakov Rambsel, a Messianic Jew, and Grant Jeffrey. Another Bible code technique was developed in 1997 by Dean Coombs (also Christian). Various pictograms are claimed to be formed by words and sentences using ELS. By 2000, most books, and most web sites, devoted to the codes were produced by Christians.

Criticism The primary objection advanced against Bible codes of the Drosnin variety is that information theory does not prohibit noise from appearing to be sometimes meaningful. Thus, similar patterns can be found in books other than the Bible. Although the probability of an ELS in a random place being a meaningful word is small, there are so many possible starting points and skip patterns that many such words are completely expected to appear.

Responding to an explicit challenge from Drosnin, who claimed that only the Bible could yield ELS, Australian mathematician Brendan McKay found many ELS letter arrays in Moby Dick that contain ELSs related to modern events, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Choice of Moby Dick was probably due to it being used by Drosnin as an example of a book that could not contain secret code.)

Other people, such as US physicist Dave Thomas, found other examples in many texts. In addition, Drosnin had used the flexibility of Hebrew orthography to his advantage, freely mixing classic (no vowels, Y and W strictly consonant) and modern (Y and W used to indicate i and u vowels) modes, as well as variances in spelling of K and T, to wrench out the desired meaning. In his television series John Safran vs God, Australian television personality John Safran worked successfully with McKay to look for evidence of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York in the lyrics of Vanilla Ice's repertoire. Additionally, the known coded references in Bible texts, as for instance the famous Number of the Beast, do not use the Bible code technique. And, the influence and consequences of scribal errors (eg, misspellings, additions, deletions, misreadings, ...) are hard to account for in the context of a Bible coded message left secretly in the text.

Code proponents respond by claiming that the ELS letter arrays appearing in the Bible are better in some way than those appearing in other books. They also investigate alternative types of codes and cyphers to stay ahead of criticism. However, in the absence of an objective measure of quality, and an objective way to select test subjects, it is not possible to positively determine whether any particular observation is significant or not. For that reason, most of the serious effort of the skeptics has been focused on the "scientific" claims of Witztum, Rips and Gans.

In 1999, McKay, together with mathematicians Dror Bar-Natan and Gil Kalai, and psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, published a paper in Statistical Science which they claim provides an adequate refutation of the earlier paper of Witztum and Rips. Their main points were:

The data used by Witztum and Rips was a list of rabbi names in Hebrew. The Hebrew language is somewhat flexible as far as name spelling goes, and each rabbi has several different appellations (aliases and nicknames), so special care should be taken as to how to choose the particular names searched for. So their result could be explained by claiming the data was not collected properly. From the paper: "...the data was very far from [being] tightly defined by the rules of their experiment. Rather, there was enormous "wiggle room" available, especially in the choice of names for the famous rabbis". There is indirect evidence that the data was not, in fact, collected properly; that is, the choice of names and spellings was somehow biased towards those supporting the codes hypothesis.

Attempts at replicating the experiment failed to achieve the same result. From the paper: "A technical problem that gave us some difficulty is that WRR have been unable to provide us with their original computer programs. Neither the two programs distributed by WRR, nor our own independent implementations of the algorithm as described in WRR's papers, consistently produce the exact distances listed [by WRR]". There has been a continuing debate on these claims. (See the web pages cited below.)

The experiment of Gans has also received critical attention. Several attempts at replicating it, designed by mathematician Barry Simon, gave negative results. Finally, a committee at the Hebrew University, comprising both code proponents and skeptics, ran two replications using outside experts to compile the data. Both replications failed to find the phenomenon that Gans' original experiment claimed to find.

As of 2003, there are still a few university scientists who see evidence for such hidden messages. The most notable are Eliyahu Rips (see above) and Robert Haralick (an electrical engineer at the City University of New York). However, the overwhelming majority of scientists who have investigated these claims reject them.

ELSs are very sensitive to single-letter insertions. Jeffrey Tigay attacks the notion that there exists a single text in which to search for ELSs by pointing out the long history of scholarship on textual variations in the Hebrew Bible text. The significance of ELSs would seem to diminish in the face of hundreds or perhaps thousands of spelling drifts (often taking the form of letter insertions) in the text over time. There are similar variant readings and scribal distortions in the New Testament.

The statistic-skewing power of synonyms is also often overlooked. There are many synonymous words that can be used to describe any event. (For example, thesaurus.com gives 132 entries for "trick.") This is yet one more factor making it easier to find deceptively convincing-looking ELSs in the bible or any other text of similar length.

See also Number of the Beast Cryptography Sherry Shriner The Bible Code (book) Summary of Christian eschatological differences theomatics confirmation bias Relevant mathematial topics:

Ergodic theory, which forms the foundation for modern information theory Information theory, which involves various statistical properties of long sequences of text Ramsey theory, for an interesting and important notion of "unavoidable coincidences" Symbolic dynamics, a subfield of ergodic theory which deals with (possibly multidimensional) symbolic sequences [edit] References Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. USA: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684810794. Drosnin, Michael (1997). The Bible Code. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 029781995X. Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. USA: Viking Books. ISBN 0670032107. Drosnin, Michael (2002). The Bible Code II: The Countdown. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0297842498. Drosnin, Michael (Forthcoming 2006). The Bible Code III: The Quest. UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 0297847848. Satinover, Jeffrey (1997). Cracking the Bible Code. New York: W. Morrow. ISBN 0688154638. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg (1994). "Equidistant letter sequences in the Book of Genesis". Statistical Science 9: 429-438. Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai (1999). "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle". Statistical Science 14: 150-173. Stanton, Phil (1998). The Bible Code - Fact or Fake?. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books. ISBN 0891079254. Haralick, Robert M.; Rips, Eliyahu; and Glazerson, Matiyahu (2005). Torah Codes: A Glimpse into the Infinite. Mazal & Bracha Publishing. ISBN 0-974-04939-5.

External links Promoting bible codes:

Doron Witztum's codes page from Doron Witzum, a coauthor of the Statistical Sciences paper Discovery Seminar from Harold Gans of Aish HaTorah, a fundamentalist organization in Jerusalem which promotes the so-called "bible codes" Pictographic bible codes, from Picture Bible Code website Postdiction of Christmas Tsunami, from Bible Code Digest, an apparently distinct website (but offering very similar material) Prophecy Truths, a website registered in Fort Collins, CO which sells "bible code software" Debunking bible codes:

Mathematicians' Statement on the Bible Codes, an open letter signed by numerous mathematicians "Scientific Refutation of the Bible Codes" by Brendan McKay (Computer Science, Australian National University) and others Report on the committee experiment, from McKay's website Bible Code page from Dror Bar-Natan (Mathematics, University of Toronto) The Bible Code: A Book Review by Allyn Jackson, plus Comments on the Bible Code by Shlomo Sternberg, Notices of the AMS September 1997 (see the American Mathematical Society) On the Witztum-Rips-Rosenberg Sample of Nations, by Dror Bar-Natan, Brendan McKay, and Shlomo Sternberg (from Bar-Natan's website) The Bible "Codes": a Textual Perspective, by Jeffrey H. Tigay (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania) The Bible Codes and the Clinton Sex Scandals excerpted from Once Upon a Number - The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories, by John Allen Paulos (Mathematics, Temple University) THE BIBLE CODE from Ralph Greenberg (Mathematics, University of Washington) The Case Against the Codes, by Barry Simon (Mathematics, Cal Tech), from Woody's Office Portal Hidden Messages and The Bible Code from Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publisher of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine The Bible Code by Dave Thomas and Shocking New Codes Found in Drosnin Sequel!, both from New Mexicans for Science and Reason, more debunking by exhibiting silly "coded messages" Are there Really Codes in the Bible? from Mayim Educational Network in Jerusalem Ten Criticisms of the Bible Code and Cracking the Codes, both from Reasons to Believe, a creationist website Mass media coverage:

The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday 20 November 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and McKay. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code" Categories: Bible Code researchers | Prophecy | Jewish texts | Pseudoscience | Numerology | Christian eschatology

Loch Ness Monster From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Lochness monster) Jump to: navigation, search "Nessie" redirects here. For the cryptography research project, see NESSIE. For other uses, see Loch Ness Monster (disambiguation).

The famous "Surgeon's photo" (1934), today known to be a hoax.The Loch Ness Monster, sometimes called Nessie or Ness (Scottish Gaelic: Niseag) is a mysterious and unidentified animal or group of creatures said to inhabit Loch Ness, a large deep freshwater loch near the city of Inverness in northern Scotland. Nessie is usually categorized as a type of lake monster. Its disputed "scientific" name, as chosen by the late Sir Peter Scott, is Nessiteras rhombopteryx.

Along with Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman, Nessie is one of the best-known mysteries of cryptozoology. Most mainstream scientists and other experts find current evidence supporting Nessie unpersuasive, and regard the occasional sightings as hoaxes or misidentification of mundane creatures or natural phenomena. However, the issue remains controversial.

Contents

1 History of alleged sightings 2 Evidence 2.1 Evidence for 2.2 Evidence against 3 The Loch Ness Monster and popular culture 4 References 5 Other Nessie-related material 6 See also 7 Loch Ness Monster Researchers 8 External links

History of alleged sightings Rumours of a monster or animal living in the loch are claimed by believers to have been known for several centuries, though others have questioned the accuracy or relevance of such tales, which were generally unheard of before the early 1960s when a strong "wave of interest" in legitimizing Nessie's 1930s-based history began.

The earliest report is taken from the Life of St. Columba by Adamnan, recorded in the 6th century. It describes how in 565 Columba saved the life of a Pict, who was being supposedly attacked by the monster. Adamnan describes the event as follows:

"...(He) raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and, invoking the name of God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air, and commanded the ferocious monster, saying, "Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed." Then at the voice of the saint, the monster was terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes, though it had just got so near to Lugne, as he swam, that there was not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast. Then the brethren seeing that the monster had gone back, and that their comrade Lugne returned to them in the boat safe and sound, were struck with admiration, and gave glory to God in the blessed man. And even the barbarous heathens, who were present, were forced by the greatness of this miracle, which they themselves had seen, to magnify the God of the Christians".[1]

Critics have questioned the reliability of the Life, noting a different story in which Columba slays a wild boar by the power of his voice alone. They also point out that the event is said to have occurred on the River Ness, not in the Loch, and that Adamnan reports Columba encountering and conquering assorted "monsters", at various places in Scotland, throughout his "life". Additionally, they point out that the Loch Ness monster has no other reported instance of attacking anyone, and in fact is generally portrayed as shy.

Evidence

Evidence for

The rhomboid fin photograph, the "flipper" photographSome have argued a history of "monster" sightings in the loch provides circumstantial evidence supporting the creature's existence. Note that the validity and origins of these stories have been challenged, along with any "history" predating the early 1930s.

In the early 1970s, a group led by American patent lawyer Dr. Robert Rines obtained some underwater photographs. One was a vague image, perhaps of a rhomboid flipper (others have argued the object could be air bubbles or a fish fin). On the basis of this photograph, Sir Peter Scott, one of Britain's best-known naturalists, announced in 1975 that the scientific name of the monster would henceforth be Nessiteras rhombopteryx1 (Greek for "The Ness monster with diamond-shaped fin"). This would enable Nessie to be added to a British register of officially protected wildlife (but compare [1]). It has been noted by London newspapers that Nessiteras rhombopteryx is an anagram of "monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Monster-hunter Dr. Robert Rines replied that the letters could also be rearranged to spell "Yes, both pix are monsters--R."

The underwater photos were reportedly obtained by painstakingly scouring the loch's depths with sonar, over the course of days, for unusual underwater activity. An underwater camera with an affixed, high-powered light (necessary for penetrating Loch Ness' famed murk) was then deployed to record images from below the surface. Several of the resulting photographs, despite their obviously murky quality, did indeed seem to show an animal quite resembling a plesiosaur in various positions and lightings. A few close-ups of what is alleged to be the creature's diamond-shaped fin were also taken, in different positions, indicating movement. The Dinsdale 16 mm film of 1960, which has also been criticized as having an interpretation that has been greatly expanded from the original JARIC report, and numerous sonar contacts.

Evidence against Perhaps typical of the many unsatisfactory facts about Nessie is the alleged sighting of October 1871. In this incident, "D. Mackenzie" supposedly described seeing something that moved slowly before moving off at a faster speed. People who saw "the monster" were said to describe it as having a hump (sometimes more than one) that looked like an upturned boat. However, although this story has been repeated in several places [2][3][4][5], no original 1871 source has been cited, casting doubt on the report.

The famed "Surgeon's Photo" (pictured top) was confirmed a hoax, based on the deathbed confessions of Chris Spurling, son-in-law of Marmaduke Wetherell. Spurling claimed the photo, which inspired much popular interest in the monster, was actually a staged photograph of clay attached to a toy submarine. Also notable are the ripples on the photo, which fit the size and circular pattern of small ripples when photographed up close, not large waves. Wetherell, a big game hunter, had been tricked into searching for an imaginary monster around the loch based on evidence which turned out to be the result of children's prank. He was publicly ridiculed in the Daily Mail, the journal which employed him. To get revenge, Marmaduke Wetherell set this hoax up, with the help of Chris Spurling (his son-in-law as mentioned), who was a specialist in sculpture, Ian Marmaduke (his son), who bought the material for the fake Nessie, and Maurice Chambers (an insurance agent), who was to call and ask Robert Wilson (a surgeon) to show the pictures. Well before Spurling's claims, however, others had argued the photo was that of an otter or a diving bird. There are in fact two "Surgeon's Photos," which depict slightly different poses, leading some to argue the photos are evidence against a hoax. However, at the time of this confession his father had already died, and Spurling wanted to disprove the photo. The surgeon who was credited for taking the photo never claimed he hadn't taken it either. [2]

The "flipper photograph" above has been highly retouched from the actual original image. The Museum of Hoaxes [6] shows the original unenhanced photo.

In July 2003, the BBC reported an extensive investigation of Loch Ness by a BBC team, using 600 separate sonar beams, found no trace of any "sea monster" (i.e., any large animal, known or unknown) in the loch. The BBC team concluded that Nessie does not exist. [7] In 2004, a documentary team for Channel 4 (primarily consisting of special effects experts from movies) deliberately tried to make people believe there was something in the loch. They constructed an elaborate animatronic model. Despite setbacks, it was a success, and numerous sightings were reported on the day, in the places they performed the hoaxes.

In addition, sunlight does not penetrate very deep into the water because of peat washed into the loch from the surrounding hills. This limits the amount of algae in the loch, thereby reducing the number of plankton, small fish, and then large fish up the food chain. The loch simply does not have enough food to support animals as big as a plesiosaur, particularly a breeding population of plesiosaurs. Palaeontologist Neil Clark has also proposed that the 1933 sightings were actually elephants from the travelling circus of Bertram Mills. [8]

According to the Swedish naturalist and author Bengt Sjögren (1980), the present day belief in lake monsters in for example Loch Ness, is associated with the old legends of kelpies. Sjögren claims that the accounts of lake-monsters have changed during history. Older reports often talk about horse-like appearances, but more modern reports often have more reptile and dinosaur-like-appearances, and Bengt Sjögren concludes that the legends of kelpies evolved into the present day legends of lake-monsters where the monsters "changed the appearance" to a more "realistic" and "modern" version since the discovery of dinosaurs and giant aquatic reptiles from the horse-like water-kelpie to a dinosaur-like reptile, often a plesiosaur.

The Loch Ness Monster and popular culture The Loch Ness Monster is a famous creature in modern literature, television movies and games. See Loch Ness Monster and popular culture for more information.

Similarly, there exists a myth surrounding the Northeastern Lake Champlain which states that there is a mythical lake monster who inhabits the lake. It is considered a fun parable or myth, it isn't taken as seriously as the Loch Ness Monster. There is a Vermont baseball mascot named "Champ" who represents the Vermont Lake Monsters (Formerly the Vermont Expos). Several establishments, including a car wash, utilize "Champ" as a logo.

References Binns, Ronald, The Loch Ness Mystery Solved, Great Britain, Star Books, 1984, ISBN 0352314877 Sjögren, Bengt, Berömda vidunder, Settern, 1980, ISBN 9175860236

Other Nessie-related material Loch Ness monster and popular culture

See also Bear Lake Monster Champ Lake Tianchi Monster Mokele mbembe Muc-sheilch (Loch Maree Monster) Ogopogo Sea monster Sea serpent Sea snake Plesiosaur

Loch Ness Monster Researchers F.W. Holiday Jon-Erik Beckjord Robert Rines Dick Raynor Adrian Shine

External links Loch Ness Project Research edited by Adrian Shine Information from the Global Lake Monster Database List of Nessie sightings BBC 'proves' Nessie does not exist Loch Ness Discovery Centre, Edinburgh Film of Nessie in 1967 and 1983 Smithsonian Institution Skepdic Museum of Hoaxes Nessie & Loch Ness links The Loch Ness Monster And The Bermuda Triangle Investigation Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Ness_Monster" Categories: Lake cryptids | Scottish folklore

Pyramid From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Pyramids) Jump to: navigation, search

Geometric shape created by connecting a polygonal base to an apexFor other versions including architectural Pyramids, see Pyramid (disambiguation). Contents [hide] 1 Geometry 2 Architecture 2.1 Ancient monuments 2.2 Modern pyramids 3 Hierarchical structure 3.1 Human pyramid 4 Arts and Media 5 Confidence game 6 See also 7 External links 8 References

Geometry See Pyramid (geometry) An n-sided pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting an n-sided polygonal base and a point, called the vertex, by n triangular faces (n≥3). i like cheese

Architecture See also List of ancient pyramids by country Pyramids are among the largest man-made constructions as well as one of the great Wonders of the ancient world.

Ancient monuments

The ancient pyramids of EgyptPyramid-shaped structures were built by many ancient civilizations. The most famous are the Egyptian pyramids — huge pyramids built of brick or stone. Standard Archaeology claims that they were used as tombs for pharaohs, however their many surprising features have birthed many alternative theories, particularly since the great pyramids have never yielded a body. The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest in Egypt and one of the largest in the world. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and the only one of the seven to survive into modern times. The ancient Egyptians capped the peaks of their pyramids with gold and covered their faces with polished white limestone, though many of the stones used for the purpose have fallen or been removed for other structures over the millennia.

The putative inspirations for Egypt's pyramids are themselves a subject of ancient and ongoing debate. Some Egyptologists have seen King Zoser's Step Pyramid as a symbolic representation of ancient Egypt's stratified society. A more recent hypothesis by Patricia Blackwell Gary and Richard Talcott ("Stargazing in Ancient Egypt," Astronomy, June 2006, pp. 62-67) derives the shapes of the pyramid and of the obelisk from natural phenomena associated with the sun (the sun-god Re being the Egyptians' greatest deity). The pyramid and obelisk would have been inspired by previously overlooked astronomical phenomena connected with sunrise and sunset: the zodiacal light and Sun pillars, respectively.

To the south of Egypt the Nubians also built pyramids. They built far more than the Egyptians, but they are much smaller. The Nubian pyramids were constructed at a much steeper angle than Egyptian ones and were not tombs, but monuments to dead kings. Pyramids were built in Nubia up until the AD 300s.

The Mesopotamians also built step pyramids, or ziggurats. In ancient times these were brightly painted. Since they were constructed of mud-brick, little remains of them. The biblical Tower of Babel is believed to have been a Babylonian ziggurat.

A number of Mesoamerican cultures also built pyramid-shaped structures. Mesoamerican pyramids were usually stepped, with temples on top, more similar to the Mesopotamian ziggurat than the Egyptian pyramid. The largest pyramid by volume is the Great Pyramid of Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla. This pyramid is also considered the largest monument ever constructed anywhere in the world, but it is still being excavated. There is an unusual pyramid with a circular plan at the site of Cuilcuilco, now inside Mexico City and mostly covered with lava from an ancient eruption of Xictli.Pyramids in Mexico were often used as places of sacrifice.

There are pyramid-shaped ancient monuments found in parts of Georgia.

Pyramid of CestiusThere is a pyramid in ancient Rome. The 27-meter-high Pyramid of Cestius was built by the end of the first century BC and still exists today, close to the Porta San Paolo. Another one, named Meta Romuli, standing in the Ager Vaticanus (today's Borgo), was destroyed at the end of XV century.

There are quite a few flat-top pyramids in China. The First Emperor of Qin (221 B.C.~), with the terracotta warriors in vicinity, was buried under a large pyramid outside modern day Xi'an. In the following centuries a dozen more Chinese royalties of Han Dynasty were also buried under flat top pyramidal earth works.

Modern pyramids Pyramids have occasionally been used in Christian architecture of the feudal era, e.g. as the tower of Oviedo's Gothic Cathedral of San Salvador. In sme cases this leads to pseuculations on masonic or other symbolical intentions.

An example of a modern pyramid can be found in Paris, France, in front of the Louvre Museum. The Louvre Pyramid is a 20.6 meter (about 70 feet) glass structure which acts as an entrance to the museum. It was designed by the American architect I. M. Pei and completed in 1989.

The Transamerica Pyramid in Downtown San Francisco, California.

The 32-story Pyramid Arena in Memphis, Tennessee (built in 1991) was the home court for the University of Memphis men's basketball program, and the National Basketball Association's Memphis Grizzlies until 2004.

The Walter Pyramid, home of the basketball and volleyball teams of the California State University, Long Beach, campus in California, United States, is an 18-story-tall blue pyramid.

The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, United States, is a 30-story pyramid.

The Summum Pyramid, a 3 story pyramid in Salt Lake City, Utah, used for instruction in the Summum philosophy and conducting rites associated with Modern Mummification.

The Louvre Pyramid, a modern pyramid built as a feature and as an entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Pyramid Arena in Memphis, Tennessee. Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. The Walter Pyramid in Long Beach, California

The Summum Pyramid in Salt Lake City, Utah

Hierarchical structure The hierarchical structures of some organizations are sometimes described as pyramids. This often includes sports league systems Pyramid structure are commonly used in a reasonably large organization, they show different areas and how 'high up' they are in the organization.

Human pyramid This is a stunt, performed by circus artists — sometimes even doing other tricks such as juggling while up there — or less perfectly by amateurs (often for the fun of failing and falling), whereby participants form a pyramid of layers of persons, each standing (or supporting in another way, e.g. kneeling) on two others one level lower, one half a position to the right and the other to the left.

4 de 9 amb folre of Castell A human pyramid on the Hindu festival Krishna Janmaashtami.

A pyramid of Desserts. Pyramids made out of snowballs.The castellers of Catalonia (Spain) form human pyramids up to eight man heights high. During the Hindu festival Krishna Janmaashtami, young men form human pyramids to reach pots filled with curd and butter and suspended high above the ground as part of the Dahi-Handi ritual. Human pyramids are often formed to reach for the bun during the Chinese Bun Festival. It is also used in bonding, e.g. as part of a North American college fraternity hazing ritual, also in a variation called a spanking pyramid, also suitable as a collective punishment, in which the pledges, often divested, are paddled on the conveniently protruded posterior.

Arts and Media Game show Pyramid is the name of a game show that involves word association.

Novel Pyramids is a Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett.

Album Pyramid is a concept album by The Alan Parsons Project, released in 1978.

American Rock-n-Roll Band Pyramid formed 1997 in Winston-Salem, N.C. Released "The First American" in 2005.

The Pyramids played instrumental surf music out of Long Beach, CA in the early 60's

Magazine Pyramid is an online magazine publishing role-playing and other game articles, published by Steve Jackson Games.

Card Game Pyramids a single player card game.

Fictional Card Game Pyramid is a fictional card game based on poker that is played on the 1979 TV show Battlestar Galactica Battlestar Galactica (1979)

Fictional sport Pyramid is a team sport played professionally and recreationally in the television drama Battlestar Galactica (2003).

Song Pyramid Song is the title of a song by the British rock group Radiohead. It is the first song off of the album Amnesiac. It was also the first single from the album.

Confidence game A pyramid scheme is a phony business, similar to a chain letter, that involves the exchange of money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme, promising a multiple return as long as the pyramid keeps growing — which it inevitably stops doing rather soon, so only the first participants are likely to make a profit.

See also Bipyramid Trigonal pyramid (chemistry)

External links Paper models of pyramids

References Patricia Blackwell Gary and Richard Talcott, "Stargazing in Ancient Egypt," Astronomy, June 2006, pp. 62-67.

Spontaneous combustion

The self-ignition, or apparent self-ignition, and burning of any mass; often of highly flammable materials, such as a pile of oily rags; see combustion. Spontaneous human combustion is the alleged phenomenon of a human being suddenly bursting into flames. Pyrophoric materials can ignite spontaneously under certain conditions: Some types of coal are susceptible to spontaneous ignition. Some alloys, such as ferrocerium for lighter "flints" and the hardened depleted uranium used in anti-armor weapons, have a low ignition temperature when finely divided. Scraping such an alloy tends to create a large number of sparks, and pulverizing it can lead to a fierce metal fire. Other substances such as caesium, rubidium or silanes can ignite spontaneously when contacting air. See pyrophoricity. Sodium metal ignites spontaneously when placed in water.

In popular culture "Spontaneous Combustion" is an episode of the South Park television series. This is a disambiguation page: a list of articles associated with the same title. If an internal link referred you to this page, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Unidentified flying object

This is an alleged 1952 UFO over Passoria, New Jersey. It is derived from an FBI document with no information establishing its authenticity or falsity.A UFO or unidentified flying object is any real or apparent flying object which remains unidentified after investigation.

The UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek described a UFO as "the reported perception of an object or light seen in the sky or upon the land the appearance, trajectory, and general dynamic and luminescent behaviour of which do not suggest a logical, conventional explanation and which is not only mystifying to the original percipients but remains unidentified after close scrutiny of all available evidence by persons who are technically capable of making a common sense identification, if one is possible."

Some people believe UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, but some say there is no compelling evidence to support such a conclusion. Most scientists and academics adhere to a standard of research attributed to Carl Sagan that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". As a result, claims that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft are generally dismissed through lack of evidence.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Ancient accounts 1.2 First modern reports 1.3 Modern UFO era 2 UFOs in popular culture 3 Research 3.1 UFO categorization 3.1.1 Hynek system 3.1.2 Vallee System 3.2 Physical evidence 3.3 Explanations and Opinions 3.3.1 Popular ideas for explaining UFOs 3.3.2 Identified flying objects (IFOs) 3.3.3 Hoaxes 3.3.4 Psychology 3.4 Conspiracy theories 3.4.1 Allegations of evidence suppression 4 Ufology - people and organizations 4.1 Organizations: U.S. 5 Use in film and television 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 8.1 General 8.2 Debunkery 8.3 Psychology 8.4 Histories 8.5 Technology 9 External links

History Main article: List of major UFO sightings

Ancient accounts Unusual aerial phenomena have been reported throughout history. Some of these strange apparitions may have been astronomical phenomena such as comets or bright meteors, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia. Examples of these reports include:

During the reign of the Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BC, there is a description of multiple "circles of fire" brighter than the sun and about 5 meters in size that appeared over multiple days.[citation needed] They finally disappeared after ascending higher in the sky. The army of Alexander the Great in 329 BC, as they were crossing a river into India, saw "two silver shields" in the sky that dove repeatedly on their military columns causing panic. In 322 BC when Alexander was besieging Tyre in Phoenicia, another "flying shield" moving in triangular formation with smaller "shields" approached. Supposedly the larger object shot beams of light at the city shattering its walls and other defenses [citation needed]. Alexander's army quickly took advantage of the situation and seized the city. The objects then departed.

1566 woodcut by Hans Glaser of 1561 Nuremberg eventThe Roman author Julius Obsequens writes that in 99 BC, "in Tarquinia towards sunset, a round object, like a globe, a round or circular shield, took its path in the sky from west to east." In 1235 the army of Oritsume in Japan saw mysterious lights in the sky. [citation needed] Circa 1491-1492, famous explorer Christopher Columbus had an account, in his journal, of lights that had seemed to come out of the sea, and vanished into the air. On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects seemingly engaged in an aerial battle. Small spheres and discs were said to emerge from large cylinders.[citation needed] (image right) Usually treated as supernatural portents, angels, and other religious omens, some contemporary investigators believe these reports to be the ancient equivalent of modern UFOs.

First modern reports Before "flying saucers" and "UFO"s were coined as a term, there were a number of reports of strange, unidentified aerial phenomena from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. These include:

Photo of an alleged UFO taken in New Hampshire in 1870On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying "at wonderful speed." On November 17, 1882, astronomer E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory described in the Observatory Reports "a strange celestial visitor" that was "disc-shaped," "torpedo-shaped," or "spindle-shaped." It was said to be very different in characteristics from a meteor fireball. Years later, Maunder wrote it looked exactly like the new Zeppelin dirigibles. The strange object was also seen by several other European astronomers.[1]

In the late nineteenth century, sightings of large airships, often using searchlights, were sometimes conflated with extraterrestrial visitors. One of the most famous early reports was an 1897 crash of an airship of unknown origin in Aurora, Texas. Local news reported the recovery of the body of a "Martian pilot" in the crash. On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the U.S.S. Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and "soared" above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns. [2] The so-called Fátima incident or "The Miracle of the Sun," witnessed by tens of thousands in Fátima, Portugal on October 13, 1917, is believed by some researchers to actually be a UFO event.

Between 1932 and 1937, there were hundreds of reports of large "ghost planes" over the Scandinavian nations, often reported using powerful searchlights and accompanied by multi-colored lights at much higher altitudes. In both the European and Japanese aerial theatres during World War II, "Foo-fighters" (balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots. On February 25, 1942, an unidentified craft was detected over the California region. The craft stayed aloft despite taking at least 20 minutes worth of flak from ground batteries. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid. In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as "Russian hail," and later as "ghost rockets," because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. This was subsequently shown not to be the case, and the phenomenon remains unexplained. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be "real physical objects" by the Swedish military. A significant fraction of the remainder were thought to be misperceptions of natural phenomena, such as meteors.

Modern UFO era The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. He reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier towards nearby Mount Adams at "an incredible speed", which he calculated at at least 1200 miles an hour by timing their travel between Rainier and Adams. His sighting subsequently received significant media and public attention. Arnold would later say they "flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water" and also said they were "flat like a pie pan", "shaped like saucers," and "half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. ...they looked like a big flat disk." (One, however, he would describe later as being almost crescent-shaped.) Arnold's reported descriptions caught the media's and the public's fancy and gave rise to the terms flying saucer and flying disk.

Arnold's sighting was followed in the next few weeks by several thousand other reported sightings, mostly in the U.S., but in other countries as well. Perhaps the most significant of these was a United Airlines crew sighting of nine more disc-like objects over Idaho on the evening of July 4. This sighting was even more widely reported than Arnold's and lent considerable credence to Arnold's report. For the next few days most American newspapers were filled with front-page stories of the new "flying saucers" or "flying discs." Starting with official debunkery that began the night of July 8 with the Roswell UFO incident, reports rapidly tapered off, ending the first big U.S. UFO wave.

Starting July 9, Army Air Force intelligence, in cooperation with the FBI, secretly began a formal investigation into the best sightings, which included Arnold's and the United crew. The FBI was told that intelligence was using "all of its scientists" to determine whether or not "such a phenomenon could, in fact, occur." Furthermore, the research was "being conducted with the thought that the flying objects might be a celestial phenomenon," or that "they might be a foreign body mechanically devised and controlled." (Maccabee, 5) Three weeks later they concluded that, "This 'flying saucer' situation is not all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomenon. Something is really flying around." [3] A further review by the intelligence and technical divisions of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field reached the same conclusion, that "the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious," that there were objects in the shape of a disc, metallic in appearance, and as big as man-made aircraft. They were characterized by "extreme rates of climb [and] maneuverability," general lack of noise, absence of trail, occasional formation flying, and "evasive" behavior "when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar," suggesting either manual, automatic, or remote control. It was thus recommended in late September 1947 that an official Air Force investigation be set up to investigate the phenomenon. [4] This led to the creation of the Air Force's Project Sign at the end of 1947, which became Project Grudge at the end of 1948, and then Project Blue Book in 1952. Blue Book closed down in 1970, ending the official Air Force UFO investigations.

A claimed UFO from Brazil. The circular aura suggests it is a light in the foreground.Use of "UFO" instead of "flying saucer" was first suggested in 1952 by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, who felt that "flying saucer" did not reflect the diversity of the sightings. Ruppelt suggested that "UFO" should be pronounced as a word — "you-foe". However it is generally pronounced by forming each letter: "U.F.O." His term was quickly adopted by the Air Force, which also briefly used "UFOB" circa 1954. Ruppelt recounted his experiences with Project Blue Book in his memoir, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), also the first book [5] to use the term.

Air Force Regulation 200-2, issued in 1954, defined an Unidentified Flying Object (UFOB) as "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." The regulation also said UFOBs were to be investigated as a "possible threat to the security of the United States" and "to determine technical aspects involved." Furthermore, Air Force personnel were directed not to discuss unexplained cases with the press.[6]

UFOs in popular culture Beginning in the 1950s, UFO-related spiritual sects, sometimes referred to as contactee cults, began to appear. Most often the members of these sects rallied around a central individual, who claimed to either have made personal contact with space-beings, or claimed to be in telepathic contact with them. Prominent among such individuals was George Adamski, who claimed to have met a tall, blond-haired Venusian named "Orthon," who came to warn us about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Adamski was widely dismissed, but an Adamski Foundation still exists, publishing and selling Adamski's writings. At least two of these sects developed a substantial number of adherents, most notably The Aetherius Society, founded by British mystic George King in 1956, and the Unarius Foundation, established by "Ernest L." and Ruth Norman in 1954. A standard message-theme from space beings to these cults was a warning about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. More recent groups organized around an extraterrestrial theme include Ummo, Heaven's Gate, Raël, and the Ashtar Command. An interesting feature that many of the early as well as the later UFO sects share is a tendency to incorporate ideas from both Christianity and various eastern religions, "hybridizing" these with ideas pertaining to extraterrestrials and their benevolent concern with the people of earth.

The notion of contactee cults gained a new twist during the 1980s, primarily in the USA, with the publication of books by Whitley Strieber (beginning with Communion) and Jacques Vallee (Passport to Magonia). Strieber, a horror writer, felt that aliens were harassing him and were responsible for "missing time" during which he was subjected to strange experiments by 'grey aliens'. This newer, darker model can be seen in the subsequent wave of "alien abduction" literature, and in the background mythos of TV's X-Files.

However, even in the alien abduction literature, motives of the aliens run the gamut from hostile to benevolent. For example, researcher David Jacobs believes we are undergoing a form of stealth invasion through genetic assimilation. The theme of genetic manipulation (though not necessarily an invasion) is also strongly reflected in the writings of Budd Hopkins. The late Harvard psychiatrist John Mack (1929-2004) believed the aliens ethical bearing was to take a role as "tough-love" gurus trying to impart wisdom. James Harder says abductees predominantly report positive interactions with aliens, most of whom have benevolent intentions and express concern about human survival.

Another key development in 1970s UFO folklore came with the publication of Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods. The book argued that aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, which he purported to explain UFO-like images from various archeological sources as well as unsolved mysteries. Such ideas were not exactly new. For example, earlier in his career, astronomer Carl Sagan in Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) had similarly argued that aliens could have been visiting the Earth sporadically for millions of years. "Ancient astronauts" proposals inspired numerous imitators, sequels, and fictional adaptations, including one book (Barry Downing's The Bible and Flying Saucers) which interprets miraculous aerial phenomena in the Bible as records of alien contact. Many of these interpretations posit that aliens have been guiding human evolution, an idea taken up earlier by the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An interesting 1970s-era development was a renewal and broadening of ideas associating UFOs with supernatural or preternatural subjects such as occultism, cryptozoology, and parapsychology. Some 1950s contactee cultists had incorporated various religious and occult ideas into their beliefs about UFOs, but in the 1970s this was repeated on a considerably larger scale. Many participants in the New Age movement came to believe in alien contact, both through mediumistic channeling and through literal, physical contact. A prominent spokesperson for this trend was and is actress Shirley MacLaine, especially in her book and miniseries, Out On a Limb. The 1970s saw the publication of many New Age books in which ideas about UFOs and extraterrestrials figured prominently.

UFOs constitute a widespread international cultural phenomenon of the last half-century. Folklorist Thomas E. Bullard writes, "UFOs have invaded modern consciousness in overwhelming force, and endless streams books, magazine articles, tabloid covers, movies, TV shows, cartoons, advertisements, greeting cards, toys, T-shirts, even alien-head salt and pepper shakers, attest to the popularity of this phenomenon. Gallup polls rank UFOs near the top of lists for subjects of widespread recognition — a 1973 survey found that 95 percent of the public had heard of UFOs, whereas in 1977 only 92 percent had heard of Gerald Ford in a poll taken just nine months after he left the White House." (Bullard, 141) A 1996 Gallup poll reported that 71% of the United States' population believed that the government was covering up information regarding UFOs. A 2002 Roper poll for the Sci Fi channel found similar results, but with more people believing UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. Again about 70% felt the government was not sharing everything it knew about UFOs or extraterrestrial life. But 56% thought UFOs were real craft and 48% that aliens had visited the Earth. [7]

Research

Main article: Ufology Ufology is a neologism coined to describe the collective efforts of investigators who study UFO reports and associated evidence. While ufology does not represent an academic research program, UFOs have been subject to various investigations over the years, varying widely in scope and scientific rigor. Governments or independent academics in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the Soviet Union are known to have investigated UFO reports at various times. Among the best-known major studies was:

The Ghost rockets study (1946-1947) by the Swedish and Greek militaries Project Blue Book, probably the best known study, previously Project Sign and Project Grudge, conducted by the United States Air Force from 1947 until 1970. The Green Fireballs/Project Twinkle investigation (1948-1951), by the USAF The Robertson Panel (1953), organized by the CIA The Brookings Report (1960), commissioned by NASA The Condon Committee (1966-1968), commissioned by the USAF The Sturrock Panel (1998), a private scientific study The French GEPAN/SEPRA studies (1977-2004), by the French government, run by the French space agency CNES The French COMETA (1996-1999), a private study by high French military officers and aerospace experts, many associated with SEPRA No national government has ever publicly suggested that UFOs represent any form of alien intelligence. However, a few internal, classified government studies have suggested this or had individuals associated with them who have held such opinions. Examples are the 1948 Estimate of the Situation by Project Sign personnel and the heads of the French GEPAN/SEPRA studies, who have publicly supported the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis.

UFO categorization Some researchers recommend that observations be classified according to the features of the phenomenon or object that are reported or recorded. Typical categories include:

Saucer, toy-top, or disk-shaped "craft" without visible or audible propulsion. (day and night) Rapidly-moving lights or lights with apparent ability to rapidly change direction" Large triangular "craft" or triangular light pattern Cigar-shaped "craft" with lighted windows (Meteor fireballs are sometimes reported this way). Other: chevrons, equilateral triangles, spheres, domes, diamonds, shapeless black masses, eggs, and cylinders.

Hynek system J. Allen Hynek developed another commonly used system of description, dividing sightings into six categories. It first separates sightings on the basis of proximity, arbitrarily using 500 feet as the cutoff point. It then subdivides these into divisions based on viewing conditions or special features. The three distant sighting categories are:

Nocturnal Lights (NL): Anomalous lights seen in the night sky. Daylight Discs (DD): Any anomalous object, generally but not necessarily "discoidal", seen in the distant daytime sky. Radar/Visual cases (RV). Objects seen simultaneously by eye and on radar. The distant classification is useful in terms of evidentiary value, with RV cases usually considered to be the highest because of radar corroboration and NL cases the lowest because of the ease in which lights seen at night are often confused with prosaic phenomena such as meteors, bright stars, or aircraft. RV reports are also fewest in number, while NL are largest.

In addition were three "close encounter" (CE) subcategories, again thought to be higher in evidentiary value, because it includes measurable physical effects and the objects seen up close are less likely to be the result of misperception. As in RV cases, these tend to be relatively rare:

CE1: Strange objects seen nearby but without physical interaction with the environment. CE2: A CE1 case but creating physical evidence or causing electromagnetic interference (see below). CE3: CE1 or CE2 cases where "occupants" or entities are seen. (Hence the title of Steven Spielberg's movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Hynek's CE classification system has since been expanded to include such things as alleged alien abductions and cattle mutilation phenomena.

Vallee System Jacques Vallee has devised a UFO classification system which is preferred by many UFO investigators over Hynek' system as it is considerably more descriptive than Hynek's, especially in terms of the reported behavior of UFOs.

Type - I (a, b,c, d)- Observation of an unusual object, spherical discoidal, or of another geometry, on or situated close to the ground (tree height, or lower), which may be associated with traces - thermal, luminous, or mechanical effects.

a - On or near ground. b - Near or over body of water. c - Occupants appear to display interest in witnesses by gestures or luminous signals. d - Object appears to be "scouting" a terrestrial vehicle. Type - II (a, b,c) - Observation of an unusual object with vertical cylindrical formation in the sky, associated with a diffuse cloud. This phenomenon has been given various names such as "cloud-cigar" or "cloud-sphere."

a - Moving erratically through the sky b - Object is stationary and gives rise to secondary objects (sometimes referred to as "satellite objects") c - Object is surrounded by secondary objects Type - III (a, b,c, d,e)- Observation of an unusual object of spherical, discoidal or elliptical shape, stationary in the sky.

a - Hovering between two periods of motion with "falling-leaf" descent, up and down, or pendulum motion b - Interruption of continuous flight to hover and then continue motion c - Alters appearance while hovering - e.g., change of luminosity, generation of secondary object, etc. d - "Dogfights" or swarming among several objects e - Trajectory abruptly altered during continuous flight to fly slowly above a certain area, circle, or suddenly change course Type IV (a, b,c, d) - Observation of an unusual object in continuous flight.

a - Continuous flight b - Trajectory affected by nearby conventional aircraft c - Formation flight d - Wavy or zig-zag trajectory Type V (a, b,c)- Observation of an unusual object of indistinct appearance, i.e., appearing to be not fully material or solid in structure.

a - Extended apparent diameter, non-point source luminous objects ("fuzzy") b - Starlike objects (point source), motionless for extended periods c - Starlike objects rapidly crossing the sky, possibly with peculiar trajectories Source: 1. Jacques and Janine Vallee: Challenge To Science: The UFO Enigma, LC# 66-25843

Physical evidence The factual accuracy of this section is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. Besides visual sightings, cases sometimes have alleged associated physical evidence. Some of these cases have been shown to be deliberate hoaxes. Others have been shown to be explainable as natural or manmade phenomena. The remaining fraction have been labeled unidentified or unexplainable. Analyses of such cases have results that are usually ambiguous or inconclusive.

A list of various purported physical evidence cases from government and private studies includes:

Radar contact and tracking, sometimes from multiple sites. These cases often involve trained military personnel and control tower operators, simultaneous visual sightings, and aircraft intercepts. One such recent example were the mass sightings of large, silent, low-flying black triangles in 1989 and 1990 over Belgium, tracked by multiple NATO radar and jet interceptors, and investigated by Belgium's military (included photographic evidence). [8] Another famous case from 1986 was the JAL 1628 case over Alaska investigated by the FAA.[9] Photograpic evidence, including still photos, movie film, and video[citation needed]. Recorded visual spectrograms (extremely rare) — (see Spectrometer). In one example, Bruce Maccabee analyzed a diffraction grating generated spectrogram recorded during one of the Gulf Breeze 'Bubba' sightings. [10] Recorded gravimetric and magnetic disturbances (extremely rare)[citation needed] Landing physical trace evidence, including ground impressions, burned and/or desiccated soil, burned and broken foliage, magnetic anomalies, increased radiation levels, and metallic traces. [11]

Physiological effects on people and animals have been reported, including temporary paralysis, skin burns and rashes, corneal burns, and symptoms resembling radiation poisoning. [12] Animal/Cattle Mutilation cases, that some feel are also part of the UFO phenomenon. Such cases can and have been analyzed using forensic science techniques. [citation needed] Biological effects on plants such as increased or decreased growth, germination effects on seeds, and blown-out stem nodes (usually associated with physical trace cases or crop circles)[citation needed]

Claimed "Electromagnetic interference (EM) effects", including stalled cars, power black-outs, radio/TV interference, magnetic compass deflections, and aircraft navigation, communication, and engine disruption. [13] Remote nuclear radiation detection, some noted in FBI and CIA documents occurring over government nuclear installations at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1950, also reported by Project Blue Book director Ed Ruppelt in his book. [14] Hard physical evidence cases, such as 1957, Ubatuba, Brazil, magnesium fragments analyzed by the Brazilian government and in the Condon Report and by others. The 1964 Socorro/Lonnie Zamora incident also left metal traces, analyzed by NASA. Misc. electromagnetic phenomena, such as microwaves detected in the well-known 1957 RB-47 surveillance aircraft case, which was also a visual and radar case; [15] polarization rings claimed to be observed around a UFO by a scientist, explained by James Harder as intense magnetic fields from the UFO causing the Faraday effect. [16] These various reported physical evidence cases have been studied by various scientist and engineers, both privately and in official governmental studies (such as Project Blue Book, the Condon Committee, and the French GEPAN/SEPRA). A comprehensive scientific review of physical evidence cases was carried out by the 1998 Sturrock UFO panel.[17]

Explanations and Opinions

Statistics compiled by U.S. Air Force studies found that the strong preponderance of identified sightings were due to misidentifications, with hoaxes and psychological aberrations accounting for only a few percent of all cases.

Nevertheless, many cases remained unexplained. An Air Force study by Battelle Memorial Institute scientists in 1954 of 3200 USAF cases found 22% were unknowns, and with the best cases, 35% remained unsolved. Similarly about 30% of the UFO cases studied by the 1969 USAF Condon Committee were deemed unsolved when reviewed by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).[18] The official French government UFO scientific study (GEPAN/SEPRA) from 1976 to 2004 listed about 14% of 5800 cases as inexplicable. [19]

Despite the unexplained cases, many skeptics of the phenomenon in the mainstream scientific community, such as astronomer Carl Sagan, have continued to say that no UFO sighting requires extraordinary explanations. [20] Instead, it is asserted that all may still be ultimately explained by the usual prosaic explanations of misidentification of natural and man-made phenomena, hoaxes, and various psychological phenomena. Proponents, however, counter that these are all unprovable arguments by assertion and also contradicted by the scientific studies that have been conducted which have already rejected such prosaic explanations as inadequate.

Skeptics say that most evidence is ultimately derived from notoriously unreliable eyewitness accounts. Very little in the way of solid physical evidence has been reported, and because UFO sightings are transitory events, there is no opportunity for the repeat testing called for by scientific method. Ockham's razor is invoked by such skeptics since it is considered less incredible for the explanations to be the result of scientifically verified phenomena rather than resulting from novel mechanisms (e.g. the extraterrestrial hypothesis).

Popular ideas for explaining UFOs To account for hardcore unsolved cases, a number of explanations have been proposed by both proponents and skeptics. Among proponents, some of the more common explanations for UFOs are:

The Extraterrestrial Visitation Hypothesis (ETH) (most popular) The Interdimensional Hypothesis The Paranormal/Occult Hypothesis The hypothesis that they are time machines or vehicles built in a future time. Similarly, skeptics usually propose the following explanations:

The Psychological-Social Hypothesis The man-made craft hypothesis (see Military flying saucers) The unknown natural phenomena hypothesis, e.g. ball lightning, sprites The Earthlights/Tectonic Strain hypothesis Usually a combination of explanations is cited to explain all cases, and even proponents will sometimes invoke skeptical explanations, such as man-made craft, to possibly account for some unsolved cases.

Identified flying objects (IFOs) Main article: Identified flying object

It has been estimated from various studies that 50-90% of all reported UFO sightings are eventually identified, while typically 10-20% remain unidentified (the remainder being "garbage cases" with insufficient information). Studies also show only a tiny percentage of UFO reports to be deliberate hoaxes; most are honest misidentifications of natural and man-made phenomena.

Generally studies indicate that misidentifications fall into three basic categories: astronomical causes (planets, stars, meteors, etc.), aircraft, and balloons. These typically account for 80-90% of the IFOs, with all other causes (such as birds, clouds, mirages, searchlights, etc.) being rare and accounting for the remainder.

The actual percentages of IFOs vs. UFOs depends on who is doing the study and can vary widely depending on the used database, evaluation criteria, personal biases, and politics. Results can also fluctuate from year to year.

Hoaxes Among the many people who have reported UFO sightings, some have been exposed as hoaxers. Not all alleged hoax exposures are certain, however, and many claimants have stuck by their stories, leaving the determination of specific cases as hoaxes contentious. Some of the controversial subjects include these:

Contactees such as George Adamski, who said he went on flights in UFOs. (Some believers even contend he had real experiences and later fictionalized others, leaving the subject murky.) Billy Meier, some of whose photographs have been discredited. Ed Walters of the Gulf Breeze, Florida UFO reports. Documents surrounding Majestic 12, a purportedly supersecret high-level United States UFO information management group formed during the Truman administration. The Maury Island Incident The alleged Aztec UFO crash [21] The Ummo affair, a series of detailed letters and documents allegedly from extraterrestrials. An online list of reportedly discredited sightings [22]

Psychology The study of UFO claims over the years has led to valuable discoveries about atmospheric phenomena and psychology. In psychology, the study of UFO sightings has revealed information on misinterpretation, perceptual illusions, hallucination and fantasy-prone personality, which may explain why some people are willing to believe hoaxers such as George Adamski. Many have questioned the reliability of hypnosis in UFO abduction cases.

Carl G. Jung, the Swiss analytical psychologist, published a book about UFOs in 1957 (Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies). In it, he approached them, without addressing the question of their existence, as objects of the collective unconscious and modern archetypes.

Conspiracy theories Main article: UFO conspiracy theory UFOs are sometimes an element of elaborate conspiracy theories in which the government is said to be intentionally covering up the existence of aliens, or sometimes collaborating with them. There are many versions of this story; some are exclusive, while others overlap with various other conspiracy theories.

Probably most Ufologists believe the basic premise that various national governments are covering up UFO information. In the U.S., opinion polls again indicate that a strong majority of people believe the U.S. government is withholding such information. Various notables have also expressed such views. Some examples are astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell, Senator Barry Goldwater, Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (the first CIA director), Lord Hill-Norton (former British Chief of Defense Staff and NATO head), the 1999 high-level French COMETA report by various French generals and aerospace experts, and Yves Sillard (former director of the French space agency CNES, new director of French UFO research organization GEIPAN).

There is also speculation that UFO phenomena are tests of experimental aircraft or advanced weapons. In this case UFOs are viewed as failures to retain secrecy, or deliberate attempts at disinformation: to deride the phenomenon so that it can be pursued unhindered. This explanation may or may not feed back into the previous one, where current advanced military technology is considered to be adapted alien technology. (See also: skunk works and Area 51)

It has also been suggested by a few fringe authors that all or most human technology and culture is based on extraterrestrial contact. See also ancient astronauts.

Allegations of evidence suppression Some also contend that physical evidence of UFOs is sometimes swiftly and clumsily suppressed by governments, aiming to insulate a population they regard as unprepared for the social, theological, and security implications of such evidence. See the Brookings Report.

There have been allegations of suppression of UFO related evidence for many decades. (See also Men in Black) Some examples are:

On July 7, 1947, William Rhodes took photos of an unusual object over Phoenix, Arizona.[23] The photos appeared in a Phoenix newspaper and a few other papers. According to documents from Project Bluebook, an Army counter-intelligence (CIC) agent and an FBI agent interviewed Rhodes on August 29 and convinced him to surrender the negatives. The CIC agent deliberately concealed his true identity, leaving Rhodes to believe both men were from the FBI. Rhodes said he wanted the negatives back, but when he turned them into the FBI the next day, he was informed he wouldn't be getting them back. [24] The photos were extensively analyzed and would eventually show up in some classified Air Force UFO intelligence reports. [25] A June 27, 1950, movie of a "flying disk" over Louisville, Kentucky, taken by a Louisville Courier-Journal photographer, had the USAF Directors of counterintelligence (AFOSI) and intelligence discussing in memos how to best obtain the movie and interview the photographer without revealing Air Force interest. One memo said "it would be nice if OSI could arrange to secure a copy of the film in some covert manner," but if that wasn't feasible, one of the Air Force scientists might have to negotiate directly with the newspaper. [26] In another 1950 movie incident from Montana, Nicholas Mariana filmed some unusual aerial objects and eventually turned the film over to the U.S. Air Force, but insisted that the first part of the film, clearly showing the objects as spinning discs, had been removed when it was returned to him. [27]

During the military investigation of Green Fireballs in New Mexico, UFOs were photographed by a tracking camera over White Sands Proving Grounds on April 27, 1949. The final report in 1951 on the green fireball investigation said there was insufficient data to determine anything. But documents later uncovered by Bruce Maccabee indicate that triangulation was accomplished. The data reduction and photographs showed four objects about 30 feet in diameter flying in formation at high speed at an altitude of about 30 miles. Maccabee says this result was apparently suppressed from the final report. [28] The Robertson Panel: This is a CIA initiated plan intended to suppress any and all UFO and/or alien reports. Since shrinks are used, those reporting these matters are to be treated as being mentally ill, thus have no credibility and/or social standing at all. It was initiated in 1952 after Washington, D.C. was involved in a major UFO incident, to ostensibly prevent panic that could be taken advantage of by hostile powers, such as the USSR. This protocol is still being followed today. Project Blue Book director Edward J. Ruppelt reported that, in 1952, a U.S. Air Force pilot fired his jet's machine guns at a UFO, and that the official report which should have been sent to Blue Book was quashed. 1952 newspaper articles of USAF jets being ordered to shoot down saucers[29]

Astronaut Gordon Cooper reported suppression of a flying saucer movie filmed in high clarity by two Edwards AFB range photographers on May 3, 1957. Cooper said he viewed developed negatives of the object, clearly showing a dish-like object with a dome on top and something like holes or ports in the dome. The photographers and another witness, when later interviewed by James McDonald, confirmed the story. Cooper said military authorities then picked up the film and neither he nor the photographers ever heard what happened to it. The incident was also reported in a few newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times. The official explanation, however, was that the photographers had filmed a weather balloon distorted by hot desert air. [30]

On January 22, 1958, when NICAP director Donald Keyhoe appeared on CBS television, his statements on UFOs were precensored by the Air Force. During the show when Keyhoe tried to depart from the censored script to "reveal something that has never been disclosed before," CBS cut the sound, later stating Keyhoe was about to violate "predetermined security standards" and about to say something he wasn't "authorized to release." What Keyhole was about to reveal were four publicly unknown military studies concluding UFOs were interplanetary (including the 1948 Project Sign Estimate of the Situation and Blue Book's 1952 engineering analysis of UFO motion). [31] Astronomer Jacques Vallee reported that in 1961 he witnessed the destruction of the tracking tapes of unknown objects orbiting the Earth. (However, Vallee indicated that this didn't happen because of government pressure but because the senior astronomers involved didn't want to deal with the implications.)

In 1965, Rex Heflin took four widely-published Polaroid photos of a hat-shaped UFO near Santa Ana, California. Two years later (1967), two men posing as NORAD agents confiscated three prints. Just as mysteriously, the photos were suddenly returned to his mailbox in 1993. [32] A March 1, 1967 memo directed to all USAF divisions, from USAF Lt. General Hewitt Wheless, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff, stated that unverified information indicated that unknown individuals, impersonating USAF officers and other military personnel, had been harassing civilian UFO witnesses, warning them not to talk, and also confiscating film, referring specifically to the Heflin incident. AFOSI was to be notified if any personnel were to become aware of any other incidents. [33]. In the 1986 JAL radar/visual case over Alaska (see Physical evidence/radar), FAA manager John Callahan stated that he briefed the CIA, President Reagan's scientific staff, and others on the FAA's analysis of the radar and voice data tapes. At the end of the briefing, Callahan said the CIA advised that they were "confiscating all the data, this event never happened, we were never here, and you are all sworn to secrecy." In addition, they were advised to not notify the media as "it would scare the public." [34]

Ufology - people and organizations See also List of UFO researchers.

Organizations: U.S. There have been a number of civilian groups formed to study UFO’s and/or to promulgate their opinions on the subject. Some have achieved fair degrees of mainstream visibility while others remain obscure. The groups listed below have embraced a broad variety of approaches, and have seen a correspondingly wide variety of responses from mainstream critics or supporters.

Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) (1952-1988) National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) (1956-1980) Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) (1969-present) Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) (1973-present) A privately-funded unidentified flying object (UFO) research group. It was founded in 1973 by J. Allen Hynek, a professor of astronomy at Northwestern University in Chicago. Hynek was also a top scientific consultant for Project Blue Book. Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) (1976-present) National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) (1996-present) National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) (1994-present): Run by Peter Davenport; national clearing house for UFO reports with phone hotline; listings of reports online. homepage, and this link National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) (2000- ): Founded by NASA scientist Richard F. Haines. Clearing house for aviation UFO reports. Concerned about UFOs and air safety. Has collected and evaluated 3400 aviation cases from the last 40 years. homepage Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) (~1978- ): Small, Arizona based research and FOIA interest group. CAUS Homepage Paradigm Research Group (PRG) & Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee (X-PPAC) (1996- ): Small, Washington D.C. group pushing for government UFO disclosure. home page Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI)[16] (1990- ): Maryland group that runs The Disclosure Project, an effort to get government disclosure on UFOs. CSETI home page Dr. Greer's Disclosure Project Disclosureproject Homepage UFO Casebook UFO Case Book's Homepage UFO Search Engine (UFOSeek) (~1998-present): UFO and paranormal search engine and directory UFOSeek Homepage Malevolent Alien Abduction Research Malevolent Alien Abduction Research Homepage This organization believes that aliens are pushing an extremely deceptive agenda, such as claiming that they're friendly and promote peace. [edit] Use in film and television See List of major UFO movies/tv shows

See also Wikimedia Commons has media related to: UFO Alien abduction Ancient astronauts Anomalous phenomenon Australian Disclosure Project Australian Ufology Black triangles British Rail flying saucer Brookings Report Cattle mutilation Condon Committee Conspiracy theory Contactees Crop circle Extraterrestrial life Extraterrestrial hypothesis Flatwoods Monster Foo fighter Forteana Ghost rockets Green Fireballs Hollow earth Identified Flying Objects Interdimensional hypothesis Kecksburg UFO incident Kenneth Arnold List of magazines of anomalous phenomena Lonnie Zamora Military flying saucers Mutual UFO Network 1976 Tehran UFO Incident Project Blue Book Project Grudge Project Sign Prophet Yahweh Rael Robertson Panel Scientific skepticism Rendlesham UFO incident Roswell UFO incident Shag Harbor incident True-believer syndrome UFO conspiracy theory UFOs in Fiction Ufology Ummo UFO Casebook Unidentified submerged object Valentich Disappearance The X-Files

Notes ^ http://farshores.org/ufopast.htm (Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers, Serious Business, 18) ^ http://www.temporaldoorway.com/ufo/report/19040228.htm http://brumac.8k.com/RemarkableMeteors/Remarkable.html ^ http://www.ufoscience.org/history/swords.pdf Maccabee, 15; Dolan, 69; Good, 253; Fawcett & Greenwood, 213-14 ^ http://209.132.68.98/pdf/twiningopinionamc_23sept47.pdf Maccabee, 20; Good, 261, 476-8 ^ http://www.nicap.dabsol.co.uk/Rufo.htm ^ http://www.cufon.org/cufon/afr200-2.htm] ^ http://www.scifi.com/ufo/roper/ ^ http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc413.htm ^ http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/JALalaska.htm][http://www.freedomofinfo.org/science/Callahansummary.pdf ^ Bruce Maccabee, Bubba Comes to Gulf Breeze, [1] ^ See, e.g. Height 611 UFO Incident or the 1964 Lonnie Zamora's Socorro, New Mexico encounter, considered one of the most inexplicable of the USAF Project Blue Book cases. A well-known example from December 1980 was the USAF Rendlesham Forest Incident in England. Another less than 2 weeks later, in January 1981, occurred in Trans-en-Provence and was investigated by GEPAN, then France's official government UFO-investigation agency [2]. Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt described a classic 1952 CE2 incident ("Scoutmaster case") involving charred grass roots and tips under the area where the witness said the UFO had hovered. [3] Catalogs of several thousand such cases have been compiled, particularly by researcher Ted Phillips.[4] [5] ^ The 1967 Falcon Lake Incident and 1980 Cash-Landrum incident are two examples. One such case dates back to 1886, a Venezuelan incident reported in Scientific American magazine. [6] Mass sightings and UFO-generated injuries and deaths were reported in the Amazon River delta beginning in 1977 and documented by the Brazilian military and others.[7] [8] ^ [9] A list of over 30 such aircraft EM incidents was compiled by NASA scientist Richard F. Haines. [10]. A famous military case from 1976 over Tehran, recorded in CIA and DIA classified documents, resulted in communication losses in multiple aircraft and weapons system failure in an F-4 jet interceptor as it was about to fire a missile on one of the UFOs. Fawcett & Greenwood, 81-89; Good, 318-322, 497-502. [11] [12] ^ [13] ^ [14] ^ [15] ^ http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/sturrock/toc.html ^ http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc594.htm ^ http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1627.htm ^ Sagan, Carl (1996). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House. ISBN 039453512X. ^ http://www.nmsr.org/aztec.htm debunking article ^ http://www.larryhatch.net/DISCRED.html ^ http://www.roswellproof.com/Rhodes_Phoenix.html ^ http://projectbluebook.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB1-913 http://projectbluebook.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB1-920 ^ Randle, 34-45, full account ^ http://projectbluebook.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB90-218 http://projectbluebook.org/page.aspx?PageCode=NARA-PBB90-219 ^ Clark, 398 ^ http://www.nicap.org/ncp/ncp-brumac.htm ^ http://roswellproof.com/ShootDown_INS_72952.html ^ http://www.ufoevidence.org/Newsite/Files/MacDonaldSubmissionUFOSymposium.pdf McDonald, 1968 Congressional testimony, Case 41 ^ Good, 286-287; Dolan 293-295 ^ http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/pdf/14.4_druffel_wood_kelson.pdf ^ Document in Fawcett & Greenwood, 236 ^ http://www.freedomofinfo.org/science/Callahansummary.pdf

References

General Thomas E. Bullard, "UFOs: Lost in the Myths", pages 141-191 in "UFOs, the Military, and the Early Cold War Era", pages 82-121 in "UFOs and Abductions: Challenging the Borders of Knowledge" David M. Jacobs, editor; 2000, University Press of Kansas, ISBN 0700610324 Jerome Clark, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial, 1998, Visible Ink Press, ISBN 1-57859-029-9. Many classic cases and UFO history provided in great detail; highly documented. J. Deardorff, B. Haisch, B. Maccabee, Harold E. Puthoff (2005). "Inflation-Theory Implications for Extraterrestrial Visitation". Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 58: 43–50. (links to pdf file) Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, 2001 (revised edition), Abbeville Press, ISBN 0-7892-0708-7. Non-sensational but fair treament of contemporary UFO legend and lore in N. America, including the so-called "contactee cults." The author traveled the United States with his camera and tape recorder and directly interviewed many individuals. Richard H. Hall, editor, The UFO Evidence: Volume 1, 1964, NICAP, reissued 1997, Barnes & Noble Books, ISBN 0760706271. Well-organized, exhaustive summary and analysis of 746 unexplained NICAP cases out of 5000 total cases — a classic. Richard H. Hall, The UFO Evidence: A Thirty-Year Report, 2001, Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0-8108-3881-8. Another exhaustive case study, more recent UFO reports. Alan Hendry, The UFO Handbook: A Guide to Investigating, Evaluating, and Reporting UFO Sightings, 1979, Doubleday & Co., ISBN 0-385-14348-6. Skeptical but balanced analysis of 1300 CUFOS UFO cases. J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A scientific inquiry, 1972, Henry Regnery Co. J. Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report, 1997 (new edition), Barnes & Noble Books, ISBN 0-7607-0429-5. Analysis of 640 high-quality cases through 1969 by UFO legend Hynek. Carl Sagan & Thornton Page, editors, UFO's: A Scientific Debate, 1972, Cornell University Press, 1996, Barnes & Noble Books, ISBN 0-76070-192-2. Pro and con articles by scientists, mostly to the skeptical side. Peter A. Sturrock (1999). The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0446525650

Debunkery Philip Plait (2002). Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax". John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-40976-6. (Chapter 20: Misidentified Flying Objects: UFOs and Illusions of the Mind and Eye.) Michael A. Seeds. (1995). Horizons: Exploring the Universe, Wadsworth Publishing, ISBN 0-534-24889-6 and ISBN 0-534-24890-X. (Appendix A) [edit] Psychology Carl G. Jung, "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies" (translated by R.F.C. Hull); 1979, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691018227

Histories Richard M. Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State: An Unclassified History, Volume One: 1941-1973, 2000, Keyhole Publishing, ISBN 0-9666885-0-3 9. Dolan is a professional historian. Downes, Jonathan Rising of the Moon. 2nd ed. Bangor: Xiphos, 2005. Lawrence Fawcett & Barry J. Greenwood, The UFO Cover-Up (Originally Clear Intent), 1992, Fireside Books (Simon & Schuster), ISBN 0-671-76555-8. Many UFO documents. Timothy Good, Above Top Secret, 1988, William Morrow & Co., ISBN 0-688-09202-0. Many UFO documents. Kevin Randle, Project Blue Book Exposed, 1997, Marlowe & Company, ISBN 1-56924-746-3 Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects, 1956, Doubleday & Co. online. A UFO classic by insider Ruppelt, the first head of the USAF Project Blue Book

Technology Paul R. Hill, Unconventional Flying Objects: a scientific analysis, 1995, Hampton Roads Publishing Co., ISBN 1-57174-027-9. Analysis of UFO technology by pioneering NACA/NASA aerospace engineer. James M. McCampbell, Ufology: A Major Breakthrough in the Scientific Understanding of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1973, 1976, Celestial Arts, ISBN 0-89087-144-2 online. Another analysis by former NASA and nuclear engineer.

External links Actual Aliens: Extraterrestrial News and Current Events Classified Information Message Board UK UFO Petition & Ufology Community UFO.Whipnet.org UFO's, Aliens, and their ships The Black Vault Document Archive The Raellian movement's web page. Mutual UFO Network homepage CIA educational summary Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) The Cryptostation The Coalition for Freedom of Information (sponsored by the Sci-Fi Channel) UFO Research Queensland Incorporated Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) ufoskeptic.org -- a non-commercial website directed to scientists, hosted by an astronomer. Project Blue Book Archive Online version of USAF Project Blue National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena National Institute for Discovery Science Edward J. Ruppelt The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Project Bluebook) BBC article on Mexican Airforce videotape www.ufo.org UFO Research (NSW) Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. UFO Society of Western Sydney Campbelltown, New South Wales, Australia. UFO Casebook Homepage UFOSeek Search Engine UFO and Paranormal Search Engine and directory. Information Regarding UFOs (Aliens) About.com article on UFOs NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts UFO Help Files UFO articles Roswell Proof - Ramey Memo SciFi Channel: The Roswell Report JT Archer's UFO Story and Song Flying Saucers - Where Did They Go? UFO.com www.coasttocoastam.com www.rense.com www.unknowncountry.com - Whitley Strieber's website www.earthfiles.com - Linda Moulton Howe's website www.ufocasebook.com www.mysteries-megasite.com ‎‎ ‎‎

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Contents 1 a perfect circle 2 defy gravity 3 TOP 10 BIGGEST BRAIN DAMAGING HABITS 4 Priory of Sion 5 List of hoaxes 6 band profile 7 an ode to maybe 8 projectile feelings 9 broken cells of my heart 10 fall to pieces 11 unsaid thoughts 12 http://images.google.com.ph/imgres?imgurl=http://thebiggestsecretpict.online.fr/ufo/Area51-ALIEN.jpg&imgrefurl=http://thebiggestsecretpict.online.fr/ufo_et.htm&h=493&w=640&sz=30&hl=en&start=3&tbnid=O2 13 liriks

[edit] a perfect circle

A Perfect Circle

Origin California Country United States Years active 1999–2006 (hiatus [1]) Genres Alternative rock Labels EMI Virgin Records Members Josh Freese Billy Howerdel Jeordie White Maynard James Keenan James Iha

A Perfect Circle (often referred to as APC) was an alternative rock band, formed by guitarist Billy Howerdel. Howerdel had worked as a guitar tech for bands such as Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Fishbone, Guns N' Roses and Tool. He played demos of his music to Tool's singer, Maynard James Keenan. Maynard offered himself as vocalist should Howerdel form a band. Howerdel was initially hesitant about this as he originally wanted a female singer.

Contents 1 History 1.1 Mer De Noms-era (1999-2001) 1.2 Thirteenth Step / eMOTIVe-era (2002-2005) 1.3 Hiatus (2006-present) 2 Band members 2.1 Staple members 2.2 Others 2.3 Latest lineup 3 Discography 3.1 Studio albums 3.2 DVDs & Other 3.3 Compilations 4 Music videos 5 Trivia 6 See also 7 External links

History

Mer De Noms-era (1999-2001) Joined by The Vandals drummer Josh Freese, drummer Tim Alexander of Primus and Laundry, ex- Failure guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, and bassist/violinist Paz Lenchantin (later of Zwan), the band rehearsed the music that Howerdel had begun and finished their debut album Mer de Noms (French "Sea of Names"). At this time Tool was tied up in negotiations with their record label, allowing Keenan much time to complete the work.

Thirteenth Step / eMOTIVe-era (2002-2005) Between Lenchantin leaving the band for Billy Corgan's new band Zwan and Van Leeuwen becoming the new guitarist of Queens of the Stone Age, the band was in need of a new bassist and guitarist for their live performances. These positions were taken over by ex-Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White (formerly known as Twiggy Ramirez) and ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha.

The band released their second album, Thirteenth Step, in September 16, 2003. A third album, eMOTIVe was released on November 2, 2004, which contains anti-war cover songs of artists such as John Lennon and Joni Mitchell. eMOTIVe was recorded with various different past and present members of APC, but mostly by Keenan and Howerdel.

On November 16, 2004 the band released the DVD and CD set entitled aMOTION. The set contains the music videos to the singles, as well as some previously unreleased videos, along with b-sides and remixes.

Hiatus (2006-present) A Perfect Circle is currently on hiatus, partly due to Keenan's commitments with Tool. A Perfect Circle experienced a considerable amount of downtime during recording, release and tour for Tool's previous album Lateralus. This makes the band extremely dynamic in terms of its members. During the downtime, other members of the band seek other projects which can mean they are unavailable when APC is reformed, which was the case with both Troy van Leeuwen and Paz Lenchantin.

As of May 2006, Keenan is touring with Tool, Howerdel is planning a solo album, and White is touring with Nine Inch Nails. Iha is currently touring with Vanessa and the O's in Europe. On December 6, Freese took over as drummer for Nine Inch Nails, replacing Alex Carapetis.

Freese continues to work with The Vandals. They are currently working on a new studio album, which is due out in summer/fall 2006. Josh Freese tracked drum performances for Black Light Burns, which features ex Limp Bizkit guitarist/From First to Last bassist Wes Borland on vocals and guitar, Danny Lohner on bass, and Josh Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv on keyboards. Freese is unexpected to tour with that lineup. Freese also recently recorded drum tracks for the still unreleased solo debut of former Korn guitarist Brian Welch, also nicknamed "Head". He is also scheduled to participate in the reunion of DEVO.

Iha was asked to participate in the reunion of The Smashing Pumpkins, in order to have the line-up completed, but he has not confirmed that he will join.

Keenan recently said in an interview with French magazine Rock Hard that he thinks A Perfect Circle is over. Billy Howerdel confirmed this by saying there were no plans for a new album or tour. [2]

Band members

Staple members Billy Howerdel - guitar, vocals Maynard James Keenan - vocals Josh Freese - drums since 1999, and on all tracks on Mer de Noms except "The Hollow"

Others Danny Lohner - helps with engineering and fills in for different instruments as necessary. Has made some contribution to each album. Paz Lenchantin - bass, vocals, strings, piano on Mer de Noms and eMOTIVe Troy Van Leeuwen - guitar on Mer de Noms and Thirteenth Step James Iha - guitar on eMOTIVe and touring musician Jeordie White - bass on Thirteenth Step and eMOTIVe Tim Alexander - drums for a short time in 1999, and on "The Hollow" All members had some contribution or another to aMOTION, and all are listed in its liner notes in the above order.

Latest lineup Owing to Iha and White's commitments elsewhere, the "Passive" video featured the lineup of Keenan, Howerdel, Freese, Lohner, and Lenchantin. An aborted performance of that single scheduled for The Tonight Show was cancelled at the last minute, and would have included the same members.

Howerdel had mentioned in November 2004 that the next incarnation of the band will definitely contain Keenan and himself, and most likely Josh Freese, though as of 2006 it is unclear if there will ever be another A Perfect Circle ensemble.

Discography

Studio albums

Mer de Noms (2000) Thirteenth Step (2003) eMOTIVe (2004)

DVDs & Other

aMOTION

(2004) (DVD and Remix CD)

Compilations Underworld (Soundtrack, 2003) - "Judith (Renholder Mix)" Resident Evil: Apocalypse (Soundtrack, 2004) - "The Outsider (Renholder Apocalypse Mix)" This track is by a second Maynard Keenan side project involving Danny Lohner called 'Puscifer'

MTV2 Headbanger's Ball: Volume 2 (Compilation, 2004) Constantine (Promotional song, 2005) - "Passive". Passive was never included on the film's soundtrack, but was used to promote the movie by placing scenes within the song's music video.

Music videos "Judith" from Mer de Noms (directed by David Fincher) "3 Libras" from Mer de Noms "Thinking of You" from Mer de Noms "Weak and Powerless" from Thirteenth Step (directed by Brothers Strause) "The Outsider" from Thirteenth Step (directed by Steven Grasse of Bikini Bandits fame) "Blue" from Thirteenth Step "Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums" from eMOTIVe "Imagine" from eMOTIVe "Passive" from eMOTIVe (directed by Brothers Strause)

Trivia The song Passive that appeared on the 2004 album eMOTIVe is actually adapted from the defunct band Tapeworm (also known as The Tapeworm Project). Tapeworm was essentially a project involving Maynard James Keenan and Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) as well as Danny Lohner. The project never fully developed due to apparent contractual conflicts that could not be negotiated. During several shows on their tour in early 2001, A Perfect Circle played a cover of an unreleased Tapeworm song, then apparently titled Vacant (also referred to as Perfect Enemy). The song was never released by any artist until it appeared on eMOTIVe as the song Passive. A Perfect Circle has also had songs appear in several films and television shows including Underworld (2003), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) and Constantine (2005) as well as CSI: NY (season one). Maynard James Keenan has starred in two Bikini Bandits films. To separate himself from Tool, Maynard James Keenan wears long wigs on his otherwise bald scalp in all of A Perfect Circle's music videos, photo shoots, and live performances. Some believe that the A Perfect Circle's logo isn't in fact a perfect circle, however the two 'slivers' are created using four over-lapping perfect circles of varying sizes, as illustrated below. But others believe the slivers to be the edges of a ring turned on its side.

A Perfect Circle's logo construction

During Middle Ages, musical notation development was in the hands of the monks, who inevitably associated religious and musical phenomena. To them the three_part concept of the Holy Trinity represented religious perfection; therefore to them only triple meter was perfect meter. To express this meter they placed the geometrically perfect circle at the beginning of the plainchant. Many APC songs are in triple meter.[citation needed] The music video for The Hollow, the first track off of Mer de Noms, was cancelled during production and only a CD single exists of this track.

See also Supergroups

[edit] defy gravity

defiance

everytime i look into your eyes a part of me divides the sky i'm falling back to the ground where you want me to be

it's the gravity that makes me want to fall.. for you wish i could defy this feelings i have inside

if tomorrow i wake up and don't see the setting sun nothing even matter as long as we're alive

our love will defy the force of gravity and together we will rise up above the sky we'll try to escape this world of uncertainty.

        for elisha

we're living in a different worlds, and i'm parallel to the place you've never been before wish i could go where you spend the most but our path will never ever cross

and time, won't ease the pain inside for you to feel the same way that i felt for you now this thought seems so surreal

i want to escape from these reality and stay with you in this illusion fool enough to almost believe that you're lying here next to me

no more promise for tomorrow got to runaway from this sorrow i close my eyes and dream of you kiss you in your silence, my love.

42nd flr. PB Com Tower 4:40 PM 7/17/2006 http://www.chez.com/aperfectcircle/

There is apt to be a bit of tension between your heart and your general mood today, dear Aries. More than likely, your romantic nature will adopt a bit of a selfish, impatient attitude, while the prevailing tone of the day calls for peace and balance. Try to maintain an equal amount of give and take in all situations. There is enough love to go around. Don't feel like you need to be possessive of others in order to hold their attention.

Work Date Day Worked Hours Regular Hours Approved OT Hours Late / UT

7/19/2006 Wed 0 0 0 7/18/2006 Tue 8.04 8.04 0 0 No REGULAR 0 I Yes 7/17/2006 Mon 9.44 9.19 0.25 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7/16/2006 Sun 0 0 0 DAYOFF 7/15/2006 Sat 0 0 0 0 No SATOFF 0 I SATOFF 7/14/2006 Fri 9.34 9.19 0.15 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7/13/2006 Thu 9.38 9.19 0.19 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7/12/2006 Wed 8.29 8.29 0 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7/11/2006 Tue 9.69 9.19 0.5 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7/10/2006 Mon 10.23 9.19 1.04 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee/1 Yes No 7/9/2006 Sun 0 0 0 0 No DAYOFF 0 I DAYOFF No 7/8/2006 Sat 0 0 0 0 No SATOFF 0 I SATOFF No 7/7/2006 Fri 10.33 9.19 1.14 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee Yes No 7/6/2006 Thu 9.35 9.19 0.16 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee Yes No 7/5/2006 Wed 10.03 9.19 0.84 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee Yes No 0.01 7/4/2006 Tue 9.8 9.19 0.61 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee Yes No 0.61 7/3/2006 Mon 7.33 7.33 0 0 No REGULAR 0 I 7 - new employee Yes Yes 1.83 TOTAL 111.25 106.37 4.88 0 0 0.87 2.14 0

[edit] TOP 10 BIGGEST BRAIN DAMAGING HABITS

TOP 10 BIGGEST BRAIN DAMAGING HABITSTOP 10 BIGGEST BRAIN DAMAGING HABITS

1. No Breakfast People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level. This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration. 2. Overeating It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power. 3. Smoking It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease. 4. High Sugar consumption Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development. 5. Air Pollution The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency. 6. Sleep Deprivation Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain cells. 7. Head covered while sleeping Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects. 8. Working your brain during illness Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain. 9. Lacking in stimulating thoughts Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage. 10. Talking Rarely Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.

The main causes of liver damage are: 1. Sleeping too late and waking up too late are main cause. 2. Not urinating in the morning. 3. Too much eating. 4. Skipping breakfast. 5. Consuming too much medication. 6. Consuming too much preservatives, additives, food coloring, and artificial sweetener. 7. Consuming unhealthy cooking oil. As much as possible reduce cooking oil use when frying, which includes even the best cooking oils like olive oil. Do not consume fried foods when you are tired, except if the body is very fit. 8. Consuming raw (overly done) foods also add to the burden of liver. Veggies should be eaten raw or cooked 3-5 parts. Fried veggies should be finished in one sitting, do not store.

We should prevent this without necessarily spending more. We just have to adopt a good daily lifestyle and eating habits. Maintaining good eating habits and time condition are very important for our bodies to absorb and get rid of unnecessary chemicals according to "schedule." Because: Evening at 9 - 11pm: is the time for eliminating unnecessary or toxic chemicals (detoxification) from the antibody system (lymph nodes).This time duration should be spent by relaxing or listening to music. If during this time a housewife is still in an unrelaxed state such as washing the dishes or monitoring children doing their homework, this will have a negative impact on health. Evening at 11pm - 1am: is the detoxification process in the liver, and ideally should be done in a deep sleep state. Early morning 1 - 3am: detoxification process in the gall, also ideally done in a deep sleep state. Early morning 3 - 5am: detoxification in the lungs. Therefore there will sometimes be a severe cough for cough sufferers during this time. Since the detoxification process had reached the respiratory tract, there is no need to take cough medicine so as not to interfere with toxin removal process. Morning 5 - 7am: detoxification in the colon, you should empty your bowel. Morning 7 - 9am: absorption of nutrients in the small intestine, you should be having breakfast at this time. Breakfast should be earlier, before 6:30am, for those who are sick. Breakfast before 7:30am is very beneficial to those wanting to stay fit. Those who always skip breakfast, they should change their habits, and it is still better to eat breakfast late until 9 - 10am rather than no meal at all. Sleeping so late and waking up too late will disrupt the process of removing unnecessary chemicals. Aside from that, midnight to 4:00 am is the time when the bone marrow produces blood. Therefore, have a good sleep and don't sleep late.

[edit] Priory of Sion

Priory of Sion

Priory of Sion The Prieuré de Sion, usually rendered in English translation as Priory of Sion or Priory of Zion, has, since 1956, been an alleged cabal featured in many conspiracy theories and works of pseudohistory. It has been characterized as anything from the most influential secret society in Western history to a modern Rosicrucian-esque ludibrium, but, ultimately, has been proven to be a hoax created by Pierre Plantard. Most of the evidence presented in support of claims pertaining to its historical existence, let alone significance, has not been considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities.

History The Original Priory The Priory of Sion is an association that was founded in 1956, in the French town of Annemasse. As with all associations, French law required the association to be registered with the government. This took place at the Sous-Prefecture of Saint Julien-en-Genevois, in May 1956, and its registration was noted on 20 July 1956 in the Journal Officiel de la République Française. The founders and signatories are inscribed as Pierre Plantard (known as "Chyren"), André Bonhomme (known as "Stanis Bellas"), Jean Delaval, and Armand Defago. The purpose of the association according to its Statutes deposited at St. Julien was entered as, "Études et entraide des membres" ("education and mutual aid of the members"). In practice, the originator of the association and its key protagonist was most probably Plantard, its General Secretary, although its nominal head ("President") was André Bonhomme. The choice of the name, 'Sion' was based on a popular local feature, a hill south of Annemasse, known as 'Mont Sion'.[1] The accompanying title to the name was Chevalerie d'Institutions et Règles Catholiques d'Union Independante et Traditionaliste: this forms the acronym CIRCUIT and translates as "Knighthood of Catholic Rule and Institution and of Independent Traditionalist Union."

The Statutes and Registration Documents of the Priory of Sion were deposited on 7 May 1956, while the first issue of its journal Circuit is dated 27 May 1956 (in total, twelve numbers of the journal appeared). Considering the political instability of the French Fourth Republic, the objectives of the journal were regarded with suspicion by the local authorities. It was indicated as a "Bulletin d'Information et Défense des Droits et de la Liberté des Foyers HLM" ("News Bulletin for the Defence of the Rights and the Freedom of Council Housing"). Indeed, some of the articles took a political position in the local Council elections. Others attacked and criticized property developers of Annemasse. It also opposed the gentrification of the area. The offices of the Priory of Sion and the journal were at Plantard's council flat.

The articles of the Priory of Sion as indicated in its Statutes desired the creation of a monastic order, but the activities of the Priory of Sion bore no resemblance whatsoever to the objectives as outlined in its Statutes as noted by the Sub Prefecture of St Julien-en-Genevois. Article VII says that its members are expected, "to carry out good deeds, to help the Catholic Church, teach the truth, defend the weak and the oppressed". There is ample evidence that it had several members, as indicated by the numerous articles contained in its journal Circuit, written by a number of different people. Towards the end of 1956 the association had aims to forge links with the local Catholic Church of the area involving a school bus service run by both the Priory of Sion and the church of St Joseph in Annemasse.

The Hoax The association was dissolved sometime after October 1956 but intermittently revived for different reasons by Plantard between 1962 and 1993 in name and on paper only. A letter at the Sub-Prefecture of St. Julien-en-Genevois indicates that Plantard had a criminal conviction as a con man. From the 1960s, a series of hypotheses and unproven historical associations became attached to the name Priory of Sion. These bear no relation to the origins of the 1956 association. The Priory of Sion is considered "dormant" by the Sub-Prefecture because it has indicated no activities since 1956. According to French law, subsequent references to the Priory bear no legal relation to that of 1956 and no one other than the original signatories are entitled to use its name in an official capacity (though André Bonhomme played no part since 1956, he officially resigned in 1973 when he heard that Plantard was linking his name with the association; therefore no one is around to use the name officially).

Plantard originally hoped that the Priory of Sion would become an influential cryptopolitical pseudo-masonic lodge (similar to P2) dedicated to the restoration of chivalry and monarchy, which would promote Plantard's own claim to being a legitimate pretender to the throne of France. In the 1960s, Plantard began writing a manuscript and produced "parchments" (created by his friend, Philippe de Cherisey) that Father Bérenger Saunière had supposedly discovered whilst renovating his church in Rennes-le-Château. These forged documents alluded to the survival of the Merovingian line of Frankish kings. Plantard manipulated Saunière's activities at Rennes-le-Château in order to "prove" his claims relating to the Priory of Sion.

Between 1961 and 1984 Plantard contrived a mythical pedigree of the Priory of Sion claiming that it was the offshoot of the Abbey of Sion which had been founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The Abbey of Sion and all its assets were absorbed by the Jesuits in 1617. The mistake is often made that this Abbey of Sion was a "Priory of Sion", but there is a difference between an abbey and a priory. Calling his original 1956 group "Priory of Sion" undoubtedly gave Plantard the later idea to claim that his organisation had been historically founded in Jerusalem during the Crusades when meeting the author Gérard de Sède during the early 1960s - this fabrication by Pierre Plantard was part of his literary deal with de Sede when they began collaborating during the early 1960s in a series of published books.

Furthermore, it is reported that letters in existence dating from the 1960s written by Plantard, de Cherisey and de Sede to each other confirm that the three were engaging in an out-and-out confidence trick, describing schemes on how to combat criticisms of their various allegations and how they would make-up new allegations to try and keep the whole thing going. These letters (totalling over 100) are in the possession of French researcher Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has also retained the original envelopes. Jean-Luc Chaumeil during the 1970s was part of the Priory of Sion cabal, and wrote books and articles about Plantard and the Priory of Sion before splitting from it during the late 1970s and exposing Plantard's past in French books.

In order to give credibility to the fabricated lineage and pedigree, Plantard and de Cherisey needed to create 'independent evidence'. So during the 1960s, they deposited a series of forged documents, the so-called Dossiers Secrets or "Secret Dossiers", at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), in Paris. Therefore, people who set out to research the 'Priory of Sion' would come across these fake documents at the BnF. One of those researchers was Henry Lincoln.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail For more details on this topic, see The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. With such evidence in hand, Henry Lincoln persuaded the BBC's factual program Chronicle to make a series of documentaries. The BBC was very willing to go along with this. The program generated thousands of responses. With such interest, it became inevitable that a book was going to be written. In order to further 'investigate' the Rennes-le-Château mysteries, Lincoln joined forces with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. Their research led to the pseudohistorical Secret Files of Henri Lobineau at the BN, compiled by Plantard and de Cherisey under the pseudonym of "Philippe Toscan du Plantier"; the three authors also met up with Plantard and de Sede. Such 'evidence' became the source for their book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, in which they reported claims that:

with illustrious Grand Masters including Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci (see full list below), the Priory of Sion has a long history starting in AD 1099; the Knights Templar were created as its military and financial front; it is sworn to returning the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Frankish kingdom from 447 to 751 C.E., to the thrones of Europe and Jerusalem; the order protects these royal claimants because they think they are the literal descendants of Jesus and his alleged wife Mary Magdalene or, at the very least, of king David and high priest Aaron; and the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene. These authors further asserted that the ultimate goals of the Priory of Sion are:

the founding of a "Holy European Empire" that would become the next hyperpower and usher in a new world order of peace and prosperity; the establishment of a messianic mystery state religion by revealing the Holy Grail, which would prove Ebionite views and Desposyni claims; and the grooming and installing of a "Rex Deus" pretender on the throne of a Greater Israel. Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln even incorporated the infamous anti-semitic tract known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (spelling Zion with an S) into their story, concluding that it actually referred to the activities of the Priory. This they viewed as the most persuasive pieces of evidence for the existence and activities of the Priory of Sion:

The original version emanated from an irregular Masonic organization that used the name "Sion" but had nothing to do with an international Jewish conspiracy. The original version was not intended to be inflammatory or released publicly, but was a program for gaining control of Freemasonry. The person responsible for changing the text in about 1903 was Sergei Nilus in the course of his attempt to gain influence in the Court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The presence of esoteric cliques in the royal court led to considerable intrigue. Nilus' publication of the text resulted from his failure to succeed in wresting influence away from Papus and an otherwise unidentified "Monsieur Philippe". Since Nilus did not recognize a number of references in the text that reflected a background in a Christian cultural context, he did not change them. This fact established that the original version could not possibly have come from the first Zionist Congress in Basel (1897). Accepting these factoids as the truth, some fringe Christian eschatologists viewed the Priory of Sion as a fulfillment of prophesies found in the Book of Revelation and further proof of an anti-Christian conspiracy of epic proportions.

However, since modern historians do not accept The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail as a serious contribution to scholarship, all these claims are regarded as being part of a dubious conspiracy theory. French authors like Franck Marie (1978), Jean-Luc Chaumeil (1979, 1984, 1992) and Pierre Jarnac (1985, 1988) have never taken Pierre Plantard and the Priory of Sion as seriously as Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh. They eventually concluded that it was all a hoax, outlining in detail the reasons for their verdict, and giving detailed evidence that the Holy Blood authors had not reported comprehensively. They imply that this evidence had been ignored by Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh in order to bolster the mythic version of the Priory's history.

In 1989, Pierre Plantard tried but failed to salvage his reputation and agenda by claiming that the Priory of Sion had actually been founded in 1681 at Rennes-le-Château.

The Pelat Affair In September 1993, Plantard approached of his own volition an investigative judge, Thierry Jean-Pierre who, at the time, was investigating the activities of multi-millionaire Roger-Patrice Pelat. Plantard communicated to the judge that the man he was investigating had once been grandmaster of the Priory of Sion. Indeed, Pelat's name had been on Plantard's list of grandmasters since 1989. In fact, Pelat had died in 1989, while he was being indicted for insider trading - or 'délit d'initié' in French. Plantard was not only naive about French law but also of financial terms and he interpreted the word 'initié' esoterically, to mean 'initiate'. Following a long established pattern, Plantard 'recruited' the 'initiate' Pelat soon after his death and included him as the most recent Priory of Sion grandmaster.

But in 1993, Plantard failed once more to realise the severity of interfering with the law; he had made his most important mistake and it led to his eventual isolation. Pelat had been a friend of François Mitterrand, then President of France, and at the centre of a scandal involving French Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy. As an investigative judge, Thierry Jean-Pierre could not dismiss any information pertaining to his case that was brought to his attention, but since he never considered it worthwhile meeting Plantard, he ordered the search of Plantard's home by his officers.

This turned up what has been described as a fantasy-land of harmless, forged documents, including some proclaiming Plantard the true king of France. Under oath, Plantard had to admit that he had fabricated everything, including Pelat's involvement with the Priory of Sion.[2] Plantard was ordered to cease and desist all activities related to the promotion of the Priory of Sion and lived in obscurity until his death on 3 February 2000, in Paris.

The Da Vinci Code Recently, due to Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, there has been a new level of public interest in the Priory of Sion. In a short preface, Brown lists a series of "facts" underlying the fiction of the novel. He declares that "the Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci." If this is not a mere marketing trick, it would seem that Dan Brown takes the fantastic claims of the Secret Dossiers more or less at face value, as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail did before him. In the body of the novel itself (chapter 48), it is said that "the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed" that the famous people listed were indeed former Priory leaders—something "historians had suspected for a long time." It should be understood that this fictionalized treatment completely reverses the judgment of real-world researchers, who (with the exception of dedicated conspiracy theorists) have rather dismissed the Dossiers as obvious forgeries. Nor had any "historians" ever suspected that Newton, Botticelli etc. were members of any "Priory of Sion"; this claim first appeared in the Dossiers themselves.

In the novel, the Priory is portrayed as more of a Goddess mystery religion, something that is hardly true to the character of Plantard's original Priory (he had no particular interest in goddesses). On the other hand, the organizational structure of Brown's version of the Priory is as described in the Dossiers (it has a Nautonnier or Grand Master who has three Sénéchaux below him; as part of the plot, all four are murdered).

In 2005, UK TV channels aired a detailed rebuttal (narrated by well known amateur TV historian and archaeologist Tony Robinson) of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, "The Real Da Vinci Code", shown on Channel 4. The programme featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Prieuré de Sion. "Frankly", Arnaud de Sède stated in the programme, "it was piffle". The programme also cast severe doubt on the alleged expatriation of Mary Magdalene to France and any connection between the Merovingians and Jesus.

In early 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed suit against Brown's publishers, Random House. They alleged that significant portions of The Da Vinci Code were plagiarized from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, violating their copyright, but lost the case.[1] Nevertheless, most of what Dan Brown writes about the Priory is based directly or indirectly on Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which in turn is inspired by the Secret Dossiers that Plantard and his companions planted in the French National Archive.

Brown also worked into his plot Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh's theories regarding the ultimate "secret" of the Priory: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, their descendants intermarried with the Merovingians, and the sacred bloodline survives into modern times. In the universe of the novel, unlike our own, this scenario seems to be widely accepted among historians and academics (while the general public remains ignorant because of the influence of the Bible and the Church).

The Sion Revelation Further conspiracies are alleged in The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline (2006) by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince (authors of The Templar Revelation, the principal source for Dan Brown's claims about hidden messages in the work of Leonardo da Vinci). They accept the evidence that the Priory was created by Plantard, and that its pre-1956 history is fraudulent, but they insist that this was a part of a complex double-bluff designed to discredit the story of the "divine bloodline" and the secret organisations that support it. They argue that these plotters are attempting to create a United States of Europe.

Et in Arcadia ego...

For more details on this topic, see Et in Arcadia ego.

Poussin's Arcadian ShepherdsEt in Arcadia ego... is supposedly the official motto of both the Plantard family and the Priory of Sion, according to a claim that first appeared in 1964. Et in Arcadia ego is a Latin phrase, that most famously appears as a tomb inscription on the ca. 1640 classical painting, The Arcadian Shepherds, by French painter Nicolas Poussin. It literally means, "And in Arcadia, I". It has been suggested that the cryptic phrase could be an anagram for "I Tego Arcana Dei" which translated into English means "Go! I Conceal the Secrets of God". However, the addition of the ellipsis (which was not there in the Poussin painting), suggests a missing word. Sum has been proposed as the completion of the phrase, which could then read "And in Arcadia, I am." Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger in their book The Tomb of God have theorized that the extrapolated phrase Et in Arcadia ego sum could be an anagram for Arcam Dei Tango Iesu, which would mean "I touch the tomb of God – Jesus". Their argument assumes that

a) the Latin phrase is incomplete b) the extrapolation as to the missing words is correct c) the sentence, once completed, is intended to be an anagram d) Andrews and Schellenberger selected the proper anagram out of the thousands of possibilities.

Poussin's earlier version of the "Arcadian Shepherds", depicting a different tomb with the same inscriptionThey then concluded that the tomb contains the ossuary of the historical Jesus. Andrews and Schellenberger also claim that the tomb portrayed is one at Les Pontils, near Rennes le Chateau[3]. Regardless of the veracity of this first claim, it is not considered part of the official history of the painting by Poussin that contains the phrase, which is well-documented. Furthermore, the phrase was not created by Poussin, but was first used in a painting by Guercino, which Poussin had already imitated in an earlier work, portraying an entirely different tomb, before he created the more famous Louvre painting. The claim that Poussin could have depicted the Les Pontils tomb was severely discredited in the 1996 BBC2 Timewatch documentary "The History of a Mystery" – which also showed film footage of the two authors unable to correctly answer basic questions about the Priory of Sion. Other research published by Franck Marie in 1974 and Michel Vallet (Pierre Jarnac) in 1985 had already shown that the tomb was created in 1903 by the owner of the land, Jean Galibert, who buried his wife and grandmother there. The stone sephulcre was built in the 1930s, and was demolished in 1988 by its then-owner, with the full permission of the local government authority, because the land around it was being repeatedly trespassed upon and damaged by Priory "researchers" and treasure hunters.[4]

Cultural influences The Priory of Sion has had several influences on popular culture, not all of them entirely accurate or serious:

The Priory was the template for the Grail order in the Preacher comic book series and, more loosely, the Millennium Group in the Millennium television series. The Priory also makes an appearance in the third installment of the popular Gabriel Knight adventure game series by author Jane Jensen, Gabriel Knight III: "Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned". The band 'Priory of Brion' formed by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant in 1999 is an amalgamation of the name 'Priory of Sion' and 'Life of Brian' (after the Monty Python film). Alleged Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion The Priory of Sion was supposedly led by a Grand Master or Nautonnier. The following list of Grand Masters is derived from Les Dossiers Secrets d'Henri Lobineau compiled by Pierre Plantard under the pseudonym of "Philippe Toscan du Plantier" in 1967: Leonardo da Vinci, alleged to be the Priory of Sion's 12th Grand MasterJean de Gisors (1188-1220) Marie de Saint-Clair (1220-1266) Guillaume de Gisors (1266-1307) Edouard de Bar (1307-1336) Jeanne de Bar (1336-1351) Jean de Saint-Clair (1351-1366) Blanche d'Evreux (1366-1398) Nicolas Flamel (1398-1418) Rene d'Anjou (1418-1480) Yolanda of Bar (1480-1483) Sandro Filipepi (1483-1510) Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Connetable de Bourbon (Charles III of Bourbon-Montpensier, Eighth Duke of Bourbon ) (1519-1527) Ferdinand de Gonzague (1527-1575) Louis de Nevers (1575-1595) Robert Fludd (1595-1637) Johann Valentin Andrea (1637-1654) Robert Boyle (1654-1691) Isaac Newton (1691-1727) Charles Radclyffe (1727-1746) Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine (1746-1780) Archduke Maximilian Franz of Austria (1780-1801) Charles Nodier (1801-1844) Victor Hugo (1844-1885) Claude Debussy (1885-1918) Jean Cocteau (1918-1963) Francois Ducaud-Bourget (1963-1981) Pierre Plantard (1981-1984) When the "Secret Files" were exposed as a forgery by French researchers and authors, Plantard acknowledged that the above list was a fraud. In 1989, however, he tried to make a comeback and revive the Priory of Sion by publishing a second list of Priory Grand Masters. This second list, which included the names of Roger Patrice Pelat and Thomas Plantard, should not be confused with the first. Post-1989, Plantard sought to distance himself from the first list, which belonged to an older, discredited version of the Priory.

Victor Hugo, alleged to be the Priory of Sion's 24th Grand MasterThe second List of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion appeared in Vaincre No. 3, September 1989, page 22 (Managing Editor: Thomas Plantard de Saint-Clair)

Jean-Tim Negri d'Albes (1681) François d'Hautpoul (1703) André Hercule de Rosset (1726) Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine (1766) Archduke Maximilian Franz of Austria (1780) Charles Nodier (1801) Victor Hugo (1844) Claude Debussy (1885) Jean Cocteau (1918) François Balphangon (1963) John Drick (1969) Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair (1981) Philippe de Cherisey (1984) Patrice Pelat (1985) Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair (1989) Thomas Plantard de Saint-Clair (1989) Notes ^ http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1552009_page2.shtml Transcription of 60 minutes program ^ Priory-of-Sion,com - Discussion of the Pelat affair ^ Images of the Les Pontile tomb ^ History of the Galibert tomb References Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982). Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Corgi. ISBN 055212138X. Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1987). The Messianic Legacy. Dell. ISBN 0440203198 (1989 reissue). The sequel to Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger (1996). The Tomb of God: The Body of Jesus and the Solution to a 2,000-year-old Mystery. Little Brown. ISBN 0316879975. Smith, Paul. Priory-of-Sion.com External links Emick, Jennifer. Priory of Sion (R+C): Alternative Religions Resource Guides. About.com Ibbotson, Miriam. (2005) The Priory of Sion Hoax: an A-Z Johan (2006) Chaumeil - Plantard. Gazette of Rennes-le-Château Polidoro, Massimo. (2004) The Secrets of Rennes-le-Château: Notes on a Strange World Pourtal, Jean-Patrick. (2005) Priory of Sion Introvigne, Massimo. Beyond "The Da Vinci Code": What is the Priory of Sion? MalGo Media Services Ltd. The Priory of Sion Hoax McDonald, James. The Priory of Sion McDonald, James. Books on the Priory of Sion Mizrach, Steven. Priory of Sion: the Facts, the Theories, the Mystery Sandri, Gino. (2003) Rennes-Le-Chateau Gazette interview of Jean-Luc Chaumeil Willker, Wieland. (2005) Codex Bezae and the Da Vinci Code: A textcritical look at the Rennes-le-Chateau hoax

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

[edit] List of hoaxes

List of hoaxes

List of hoaxes

Contents

1 Proven hoaxes 2 Probable hoaxes 3 Possible hoaxes 4 Practical joke hoaxes 5 Known pranksters, scam artists and impostors 6 Hoaxes of exposure 7 Journalistic hoaxes 8 Fictitious people 9 References 10 External links

Proven hoaxes These are some claims that have been revealed to be deliberate public hoaxes:

George Adamski's claims to have gone into space in UFOs. His book was based on his earlier book of fiction. The Amityville Horror, ghostly events reported by the buyers of a house where another family had been murdered. Cannibal Holocaust The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a book about purported sexual enslavement of a nun Richard Bachman (a pseudonym for Stephen King that got out of control) Bananadine Bathtub hoax, an imaginary history of the bathtub published by H.L. Mencken Johann Beringer's lying stones The Blair Witch Project[1] Steve Brodie, who did not jump from the Brooklyn Bridge The Cardiff Giant, of which P. T. Barnum made up a replica when he could not obtain the "genuine" hoax Carlos, a fictional spirit medium created by James Randi and Jose Luis Alvarez. Thomas Chatterton's "medieval" poetry The Cottingley Fairies Most Crop circles Dihydrogen monoxide Disappearing blonde gene Drake's Plate of Brass accepted for 40 years as the actual plate Francis Drake posted upon visiting California in 1579 The Donation of Constantine George Dupre, who claimed to have worked for SOE The Education of Little Tree, widely acclaimed autobiography by Asa Earl Carter, later revealed to be fictional. Emulex hoax - a stock manipulation scheme Feejee Mermaid The Flying Bigfoot of Florida Spiritualist Arthut Ford's claim of psychic contact with Harry Houdini. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood 1939-1948, fictional autobiography by Binjamin Wilkomirski, Holocaust survivor manqué Furry trout The Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814 Greenlighting The Hand that Signed the Paper, purportedly based on the experiences of "Helen Demidenko," actually Helen Darville Joice Heth, African-American slave exhibited by P. T. Barnum as George Washington's nurse. Histoire de l'Inquisition en France, the 1829 book by Etienne Leon de Lamonthe-Langan The Hitler Diaries The Horn Papers The Hundredth Monkey Idaho's name Il Bambino, a sculpture created by Michelangelo but sold as a classic Greek statue. Clifford Irving's biography of Howard Hughes The Jackalope, supposedly a form of rabbit with antlers. Jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax The Killian memos (see Rathergate) Lobsang Rampa Majestic 12 (Peebles, 1997:258-60, 264-268) Milli Vanilli, a duo that did not sing its own songs The Moles' "We Are The Moles", a 1967 single promoted with not-so-subtle hints that it might be The Beatles recording under a pseudonym. It was actually recorded by Simon Dupree & The Big Sound - a 1960's UK pop group, members of whom later formed the progressive rock band Gentle Giant. Mon cher Mustapha letter Nacirema, a fictional tribe The Necronomicon, a fictitious occult book quoted by writer H. P. Lovecraft in many of his stories. Ompax spatuloides Castelnau, a fish "discovered" in 1872 in Australia, made of a mullet, an eel and the head of a platypus. The Works of Ossian, "translated" by James MacPherson "Our First Time," an early popularized Internet hoax. Palisade, Nevada The perpetual motion engines built by John Ernst Worrell Keely and Charles Redheffer Pickled dragon Piltdown Man, unmasked by unconvinced scientists Princess Caraboo, aka Mary Baker The Priory of Sion Project Alpha The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Q33 NY, an Internet hoax based on the 9/11 event A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century Ray Santilli's Roswell alien autopsy film Satan's Underground and other fabricated memoirs of Satanic ritual abuse by Laurel Rose Willson (simliar to Michelle Remembers, below) George Psalmanazar and his "Formosa" Psychic surgery Remote viewing The Report From Iron Mountain Rosie Ruiz, who cheated in the Boston Marathon Audrey Seiler, 20-year-old woman who faked her own abduction in Madison, Wisconsin in 2004 Sheng Long Ashlee Simpson, a pop singer who was caught faking her live performances The Skvader, a form of winged hare supposedly indigenous to Sweden. Snuff Space Cadets, a 2005 TV programme by Channel 4, in which contestants were fooled into thinking that they were training at a Russian space academy to become space tourists. The spaghetti tree harvest was an April Fools hoax broadcast by the BBC in 1957. spiritualism and spirit mediums. The "R. E. Straith" letter sent to George Adamski by James Moseley (Moseley & Pflock, 2002:124-27, 331-32). The "Surgeon's Photo" of the Loch Ness Monster James Vicary's Subliminal advertising (Boese, 2002:137-38) Tamara Rand's prediction of the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, which was actually made after the fact (Randi 1982:329). The Tasaday Thatchergate Tapes. A punk band fooled the governments of the U.S. and U.K. with this fake conversation. Robert Tilton's "prayer cloths" Mary Toft, rabbit mother Toothing The Turk, a chess-playing automaton that actually contained a person. Most UFO photography Benjamin Vanderford's video of his own beheading in Iraq Vortigern and Rowena, a work allegedly by William Shakespeare that was actually by William Henry Ireland, collector of books and forger of Shakespeareana Yellowcake forgery, the false documents suggesting Iraq's Saddam Hussein was to purchase uranium from Niger Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot a book containing World War I Aerial combat photos that were actually models superimposed on aerial backgrounds. [edit] Probable hoaxes Alleged photo of Lincoln's body The Ashtar Galactic Command broadcast on Southern Television The book Communion by Whitley Strieber, with claims of alien abduction. Kensington Runestone The Loudun demonic possessions of 1634 that led to the execution of Urban Grandier for witchcraft. Michelle Remembers, a memoir of Satanic child abuse NESARA conspiracy theory, a purported secret law under gag order by The Supreme Court, which would abolish the IRS and eliminate all credit card debt. The Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot (Boese, 2002:146-47) The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, book supposedly written by AI program Racter Trance Channeling, a New Age form of spiritualism. Zeno map; Shows lands known not to exist, e.g., Estotiland, Drogeo, Podalida, Neome, or known to exist in rather different locations, e.g., Estland (Estonia) and Frisland (Friesland). Pope Joan Paul Is Dead (Paul McCartney death hoax) Walam Olum - alleged migration legend of the Lenape people, likely perpetrated by Rafinesque [edit] Possible hoaxes The Book of Veles The Buddha Boy Mel's Hole Josef Papp's solo thirteen hour trans-Atlantic submarine voyage Philippine historical figure Kalantiaw The Piri Reis maps The Vinland map The Voynich Manuscript John Titor's time travelling claims World Jump Day Zinoviev Letter The Shroud of Turin [edit] Practical joke hoaxes The Balloon-Hoax The Dreadnought Hoax Forgotten Silver I, Libertine, originally nonexistent book Naked Came the Stranger Plainfield Teacher's College and its football team Sawing off of Manhattan Island Christopher Walken for US president. [2] [edit] Known pranksters, scam artists and impostors Frank Abagnale, professional impostor and check forger Alan Abel, US professional hoaxer Jim Bakker P. T. Barnum, US showman known for his sensational hoaxes Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian writer who often included references to nonexistent books and authors in his works Horace de Vere Cole, British aristocrat Jeanne Dixon, a self-proclaimed psychic. Benjamin Franklin, American patriot, scientist and publisher William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper tycoon known as "the father of yellow journalism". Danny Hellman, NY cartoonist sued for playing joke on Ted Rall faith healer Benny Hinn Elmyr de Hory, art forger Brian G. Hughes, US banker Reginald Jones, British professor Andy Kaufman, US comedian and inter-gender wrestling champion M. Lamar Keene J. Z. Knight, trance channeler who claims to contact an entity called Ramtha Victor Lustig, professional con artist Jim Moran, publicist, actor and TV panelist Frederick Emerson Peters, professional impostor and check forger Edgar Allan Poe Charles Ponzi, originator of the Ponzi Scheme Faith healer Peter Popoff George Psalmanazar, European writer James Randi, professional stage magician, hoaxer and hoax debunker James Reavis, professional forger and impostor Harry Reichenbach, Hollywood publicist Joey Skaggs, US media prankster Soapy Smith, Jefferson Randolph Smith, infamous 19th century confidence man Edward Askew Sothern, British actor Robert B. Stein, former UFO photographer and debunker of photographic hoaxes Jonathan Swift, British humorist and writer Robert Tilton Hugh Troy, US painter Dick Tuck, US political prankster who harassed Richard Nixon. Joseph Weil, professional scam artist and inventor of the con that inspired The Sting Stanley Clifford Weyman, professional impostor [edit] Hoaxes of exposure "Hoaxes of exposure" can be thought of as semi-comical, private sting operations. Their usual purpose is to expose people acting foolishly or credulously, to encourage them to fall for something that the hoaxer hopes to reveal as patent nonsense. See also culture jamming.

The Arm the Homeless Coalition The Atlanta Nights hoax The British television series Brass Eye encouraged celebrities to pledge their support to nonexistent causes, to highlight their willingness to do anything for publicity. The Centaur from Volosdisplayed at the John C. Hodges library at The University of Tennessee Dihydrogen Monoxide Disumbrationism Grunge speak, an alleged slang of the Seattle rock underground, concocted by a Sub Pop employee and profiled in the New York Times. Sina, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals Media pranks of Joey Skaggs The Sokal Affair The Spectra hoax The Taxil hoax Benjamin Vanderford created a video allegedly depicting his own beheading in Iraq and distributed it over the Internet. The avant-garde "music" of "Piotr Zak" [edit] Journalistic hoaxes Deliberate hoaxes, or journalistic fraud, that drew widespread attention include:

Jayson Blair, reporter for The New York Times Janet Cooke, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her fictitious Washington Post story about an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy Stephen Glass, reporter for The New Republic The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Great Wall of China hoax of 1899 Jack Kelley, longtime USA Today correspondent The New York Zoo hoax of 1874 Nik Cohn's New York Magazine article, "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", which was the source material for the movie Saturday Night Fever, and which Cohn admitted decades later had been fiction, not reportage. [edit] Fictitious people Abdul Alhazred, author of the equally fictitious Necronomicon created by H. P. Lovecraft William Ashbless, a 19th-century poet and adventurer Pierre Brassau, avant-garde artist (in reality, a chimpanzee named Peter) Ponsonby Britt executive producer of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show George P. Burdell, eternal student Eddie Burrup, fake Australian aboriginal painter Josiah Carberry, professor of psychoceramics at Brown University Jára da Cimrman, fictional Czech genius and polymath Allegra Coleman, nonexistent supermodel Hyuck E, fake staff member of Ed, Edd n Eddy Axel Eklund, mid 50's fictional chemistry student and inventor Sidd Finch, nonexistent baseball prodigy created by George Plimpton for an April Fool's Day prank. Michael Fitzpatrick, fictional Irishman Honorable J. Fortescue, fake US physician Lester Green, inventive farmer whose ingenuity was chronicled by C. Louis Mortison. Bruno Hat, nonexistent painter Anthony Godby Johnson, (probably) fictitious author of Rock and a Hard Place : One Boy's Triumphant Story Andreas Karavis, nonexistent Greek poet Kodee Kennings, nonexistent 8-year-old girl whose letters were published in the Daily Egyptian, a student newspaper for Southern Illinois University Wanda Koolmatrie, nonexistent Australian aboriginal author Chimezie Kudu, nonexistent 7-foot-11 basketball player (ESPN.com readers' responses) JT LeRoy, fictional American author and literary celebrity. Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, volumetric namesake. Pedro Lopez, the world's most prolific serial killer. Andrew MacDonald, a pseudonym for William Luther Pierce, white supremacist and author of The Turner Diaries Ern Malley, Australian poet Dr. Irving Joshua Matrix, numerologist, invented by Martin Gardner Jeremy McNeil, fictional film writer/ director credited with several independent film productions. S. Morgenstern, whom William Goldman claims originally wrote The Princess Bride. Kaycee Nicole, fictional leukemia sufferer and Internet personality Rupert Peasley, fictional music producer credited with producing several Weezer albums. Hans Pfaall, Dutch debtor and balloonist created by Edgar Allan Poe Simonya Popova, nonexistent tennis player Kozma Prutkov, nonexistent Russian writer R. E. Straith, who wrote a ficticious letter to George Adamski (Moseley and Pflock, 2002:124-127) Phil Raven, fictitious pro-wrestler created by Phil Parent Henry Root, fictitious correspondent, and Henry Raddick (possibly the same person) H. Rochester Sneath, nonexistent headmaster of the nonexistent Selhurst School Nat Tate, fake 1950's American artist Adventure novelist B. Traven Kilgore Trout, fictional author created by Kurt Vonnegut Johnny Tsal, a character created by Hugh Troy Udo of Aachen, fictional monk Francis Wagstaffe, fictitious postulant for priesthood Edna Welthorpe, nonexistent morality campaigner Araki Yasusada, fake Hiroshima survivor and author Yardis Alpolfo, an nonexistent soccer player, an anagram of April Fools Day [edit] References Boese, Alex, Museum of Hoaxes: A Collection of Pranks, Stunts, Deceptions, and Other Wonderful Stories Contrived for the Public from the Middle Ages to the New Millennium, 2002, Dutton/Penguin Books, ISBN 0-525-94678-0. Boese, Alex, Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and other B.S., Harvest Books 2006, ISBN 0-156-03083-7. Curtis Peebles (1994). Watch the Skies: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth, Smithsonian Institution, ISBN 1-56098-343-4. James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock, (2002). Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist, Prometheus Books, ISBN 1-57392-991-3 James Randi. (1982). Flip-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and other Delusions, Prometheus Books, ISBN 0-87975-198-3. [edit] External links Museum of hoaxes - A collection of hoaxes

[edit] band profile

band profile

<a href="http://www.purevolume.com/theabducteds" title="Listen to the abducteds at PureVolume.com"><img src="http://www.purevolume.com/images/link_exchange/pv_black_234_60.gif" alt="Listen to the abducteds at PureVolume.com" /></a>

[edit] an ode to maybe

Unexplained sight whenever you're around this unfulfilled adjacent of moment comes around impulsive scene shivers over and over again

I wonder if i could completely present myself to you i don't have any brilliant words to say anyway

and affirmation denies everything i need to say take back everything like nothing's left for me why can't you feel the way I’m feeling now?

Could you even pretend that you want me?

I've waited long enough for you no more wasted time alone, saving the message you sent to me, is it okay? I'll be waiting,

did it ever crossed your mind, that I’m falling for you, and I never had the time and I don't have the words to say

i'm falling out of place to another lonely road, the words i want to say seems to hide behind my head, the message that you sent, i kept it in my heart, i'm falling out of place to another lonely you.

the night is young and no stars, but your voice soothes my ears, you broke up with your boyfriend, is it okay? if I'll be waiting? I understand what you're trying to say no need to say it, I am leaving but don't walk away just stay right there I’ll fall.

and I’ll just look at you I’ll just look at you I don't know why i always feel like this it's hard to breathe when you're around

your big blue eyes are drowning me to sleep the space is tearing me I’ll stay, please stay

words are not important smiles are all I need from you the yearning, it's getting stronger I’m dumb. I hope you like me too

you're two tables away you could see me mesmerized I want to talk to you but I’m so scared

before I never cared, infatuation's never there but now it's killing me I really hate myself

I am waiting but I find myself looking I’m sick of myself I’m so lonely

I just found out sometimes I can't control these tears everything is falling down on me

I feel so cold and it's all my fault so this is how the guilt feels it can break you down to pieces

[edit] projectile feelings

projectile feelings

I try to withstand the influence of gravity regarding this feelings I have for you now there’s no use of holding back coz survival is not the topic here

i’m free free from falling down on you will you be there to catch me? Or will you be someone to hurt me?

The possibility of seeing you again Is still out of the question I’m counting down my days Waiting to be consider

  "uncertainty principle"      

i can't wait for another day to see you again wish i could break the uncertainty of the undefined distance between us

now i'm struggling to survive this feelings that i can't resist it's tearing me apart coz i'm missing you so bad

i'm counting down on you every minute and a second always feeling pathetic just to be with you a hopeless romantic over you

If a UFO Mothership Hovered over the Cut . . .

What would people think? What would people do? How would our positions and lifestyles dictate our reactions to this new situation? One day you are walking to class or work in the academic buildings at CMU, and a big UFO mothership is just hovering over the Cut like a spider in its web. ________________________________________

The Chemists would throw sulfuric acid on it and watch the results. "Kids, don't try this at home."

The Chemical Engineers would try to figure out how quickly gases mix inside the UFO.

The Historians would look into their books to try to figure out if history was repeating itself.

The Industrial Managers would try to buy out the UFO. If the Industrial Managers failed, ROTC would attempt a "hostile takeover."

The Physicists would examine particle-scattering effects around the hull of the UFO and attempt to find out what the thing was made of.

The Biologists would attempt to classify the characteristics of the pilots by asking the Physicists about the internal characteristics that they derived by bombarding the mothership with radiation. This information would be required to answer a question on the next Modern Biology test.

The Administrators would petition the UFO for money to support CMUs research efforts. They would also hire Photographers to get an aerial shot of the ship over campus.

The Photographers, like always, would be overpaid, but they would offer a complete line of glossy or matte UFO shots from several unlikely angles, in sizes ranging from too-small-to-reasonably-qualify-as-wallet to large-enough-to-endanger-the-earth's-trees.

The Theologians would accompany the Photographers, making sure that the angle of the photographs made the mothership appear to be a halo floating over the graduate lounge at the top of Hamerschlag Hall.

The Philosophers would try to figure out whether the same UFO mothership would make a sound if it crashed in a forest. The Mechanical Engineers would try to find out what kind of mileage the UFO mothership gets, and would design something more energy-efficient.

The Statisticians would calculate the odds of such an event occurring elsewhere, or again in the same place. They would have the gall to claim it was a "normal" distribution. The Psychologists would chalk the whole thing up to another one of their own twisted experiments and therefore would ignore it.

The Musicians would play excerpts from Close Encounters of the Third Kind from the CFA building, and would not be prepared for the response.

The Artists would paint their interpretations of the UFO mothership itself, or of what they thought it represented. This could involve drug-induced hallucinations in order to reveal the full symbolism behind the visitation.

The Graphic Design folks would comment on the UFO mothership, saying how it was not designed for the maximum contrast of light and dark and was therefore not as attractive as it could have been.

The Civil Engineers would design a bridge or ladder to climb up to the UFO. The structure would be flexible in wind but resiliant enough to support the weight of the UFO itself, although it would be completely useless after the mothership moved.

The Dramats would invite the mothership to their next performance by, while intoxicated, climbing the structure produced by the Civil Engineers and posting flyers on the windows of the space vessel. They would also negotiate the movie rights.

KGB would hold a Skeptics Picnic directly below the UFO just to be different.

The Eclectic Studies Group would claim foreknowledge, then would proceed up the Civil Engineers' structure to offer Tarot or palm readings for the crewmembers of the UFO. The Student Environment Action Coalition would protest the UFO for "polluting the ecosystem" by blocking sunlight to the Cut.

The Computer Scientists would try to guess the UFO's IP address.

The Mathematicians would examine the dimensions of the ship and try to relate it into their research. They would also have the computer scientists ask it for the next major revision of Maple.

The Electrical and Computer Engineers would get the IP address from the Computer Scientists and create a gateway so users could connect to it as http://www.ufo.cmu.edu. The Software Engineers would meet in little committees, each of which would hold sub-meetings to determine what to do next. None of the committees would communicate their findings to the others.

The Architects would examine the UFO, draw some sketches, and build their own original design. "And," they would say, "And--our version has flying buttresses!" ________________________________________ © 1996 by Todd C. Gleason

[edit] broken cells of my heart

broken cells of my heart

i don't know how i don't know why i always feel like this everytime your presence is near

i can't pretend i cannot hide the feelings that you gave to me each and everyday i look for you

words are not enough to describe how i feel for you wish i could make you smile and that's all i want you to be

[edit] fall to pieces

fall to pieces

i will promise myself not to (fall..!!!) i'm not deserving for someone like you for all the times i come for you and look for you you were never really ever there ..at all

i'm tired of waiting for you(again I fall back!) you remind me of things i've done before(the mistakes!) and history repeats and comeback(to me!!) 'til i breakdown and fall(to pieces!!!)

koro: i'll just try to forget you(eventhough it's hard to do) but i can't do anything(coz i'ts you i always wanted) i'm not gonna let you down(for you i will fall to ground) and i will never leave you(till the end of time)

[edit] unsaid thoughts

unsaid thoughts

i'm still waiting and it doesn't make any sense why i'm still writing songs about you? even if you don't want me to

i'm runnin' out of hopes words don't come out right i guess i have to let go of these feelings i felt for you

this may be the last song that i write for you coz you're everything i want but i'm everything you're not

i'll just let this moment pass by somehow, someday you'll be needing me too and tomorrow i'll be you

[edit] http://images.google.com.ph/imgres?imgurl=http://thebiggestsecretpict.online.fr/ufo/Area51-ALIEN.jpg&imgrefurl=http://thebiggestsecretpict.online.fr/ufo_et.htm&h=493&w=640&sz=30&hl=en&start=3&tbnid=O2

The Biggest Secret Forum UFOs, ETs & Cropcircles photoalbum

Here is a collection of our favorite pictures of ETs and UFOs. Some picts, including some of the genuine UFO picts, have been made and sent in by visitors to our site. Much thanks goes to them!

While all picts found on this page have been sorted as thoroughly as possible on how likely it is they are genuine or not, an error could still have been made by us. If you think a pict is not put in the right category and have a relevant reason for it, then we're always interested to hear about it.

Click on a picture to enlarge it. Some picts can't be enlarged.

UFOs, genuine. The following pictures are most likely 100% authentic.

UFO crash in Russia. Over the last 60 years, worldwide a few dozen crashed saucers have been found and secretly recovered. This is one that was found in the former USSR, in Sverdlovsky (formerly Yekatrinburg), in March 1969. UFO crash in Russia. Contrary to what one could be led to think, the craft seen on these picts has not crashed into the ground. Allegedly, when it crashed, the craft broke in half. What we see on the picts is half of the craft leaning against a tree, as it ended up after the other half disintegrated upon impact. 3 UFOs, Austria. A beautiful picture of 3 UFOs manoeuvering. Belgium flap 1989-1990. A sensational and famous picture of a triangular UFO, seen from below, taken in Belgium at Petit Rechain during the Belgium UFO flap in March, 1990. It's very possible that this is a man-made craft (see below).

Overexposed version. This overexposed version of the picture unveils the craft's body more effectively. Belgium flap 1989-1990. Belgium flap, different source than previous picts. These photos were taken by J.S. Henrardi in Wallonia, Belgium on June 15, 1990. Notice the odd shape of the nose of the object. Belgium flap 1989-1990. As previous. Triangular craft animation. This image comes from a video special effect re-creation of the triangular craft observed during the Belgium flap of 1989-1990, done for the program "Unsolved Mysteries".

Gulf Breeze. A unique and beautiful craft, extensively photographed by Ed Walters in the '60s. Gulf Breeze. Gulf Breeze. Gulf Breeze.

Gulf Breeze. Gulf Breeze. Gulf Breeze. Gulf Breeze.

Mexico, 1991. Photographed by a police officer called Diaz, who at first thought the UFO was a plane smuggling drugs... Mexico, 1991.

Mexico, Puebla, Atlixco 1991. The same (type of) UFO, photographed from a police plane.

Mexico, Ocotlan, Jaslico.

Mexico, Ocotlan, Jaslico.

Mexico, Ocotlan, Jaslico.

Canada, Hamilton, 1978. A UFO model that shows up in many UFO picts. This one was photographed by an anonymous person in Canada. Mexico, Pueblo, 1992. This could well be a close up of the type of craft shown in he previous pict. Kanarraville A very uncommon model UFO. Kent, Orpington, England, Feb 2004 Sent in by one of our visitors.

Japan, Chiba 1975. This UFO looks a lot like the one filmed by Adamski (probably a Nazi saucer). Adamski type UFO. Source unknown. At the "Happy Burger", 1989. Photographed in LA, CA. USA. A slightly different model than Adamski's. Red UFO (B/W). A red UFO like the one on this pict (in B/W) was seen at several collisions with airplanes.

Hungary 2001. A UFO filmed by a Hungarian air-force pilot while being off duty, which is why the pictures of it were made public. Hungary 2001. The shots of this UFO model that occurs on many picts are of very high quality. Hungary 2001. The source of these Hungarian video shots is www.rense.com . Hungary 2001, zoom.

Austria, Steire 1971. Very much the same UFO model as the one of the Hungarian footage, photographed in 1971 in Austria. Sqaudron of 3 UFOs. The model of these UFOs is very close to that of the Hungarian footage, but of a different color. UFO USSR. This UFO model looks a lot like the previous ones, but is actually slightly different, having a small dome. UFO USSR. Another shot.

Derbyshire, UK 2002. A very odd UFO videoed by an English housewife who ventured out in her garden with a camera just on the right moment. Space shuttle video UFO. This UFO filmed by the space shuttle looks a lot like the one filmed in Derbyshire. Danmark, Jutland. This strange UFO looks the most like a... jelly-fish. Bettman 1994.

USA, East, 2002. A peculiar UFO. Source: www.rense.com . USA, East, 2002. Several cut-outs from several shots. USA, East, 2002, zoom. USA, East, 2002, zoom.

USA, East, 2002, zoom.. Rendition of UFO. A computer-aided generated rendition of what the UFO might actually look like. Photo by F15 fighter, 1994. This UFO looks very much like the one of the previous picts. Woods UFO, 2001. A very uncommon UFO model.

Fleet of UFOs. UFO Fleet Taped Over Bedhampton. Australia, Melbourne 1966. UFO above fence. USA, CA. Bishop.

Battle of Los Angeles, CA. 1942. A UFO is kept in lights from the ground when flying over Los Angeles in 1942. China, Tientsien, Hopeh, 1942.

China, Tientsien, Hopeh, 1942, zoom.

France, Rouen 1954. Classic UFO pict from the 50s, taken by a French soldier.

Peru, Maldonato, 1952. A UFO leaving an odd smoke-like trail behind it. Peru, Silvani.

Pinto Mountains, CA. 1981.

Bob Lazar UFO. According to Bob Lazar, who worked at area 51, this is how some of the UFOs look that are reversed engineered there. More info about Lazar can be found here.

Las Vegas 2004. A "fireball" craft photographed by SK from Las Vegas. The craft looks very much like the one photographed by Diaz, in Mexico (see above). Las Vegas 2004. A diamond shaped craft, photographed above the city of Las Vegas, by SK. Las Vegas 2004. Two fireball crafts. What seems to be beams of light are actually lens flares. Photo by SK. Las Vegas 2004. Here a UFO that moved very quickly was photographed, resulting in this strange pict. Photo by SK.

Mexico, aug 6, 1997. This UFO was videoed above downtown Mexico City, in 1997. You can find the video here or here.

UFOs, uncertain authenticity. For the following pictures it's uncertain if they show genuine or fake UFOs. If you have any additional information, please let us know!

Mexico, Pueblo, Atlixco 1991. Although the photographer of this picture, police officer Carlos Diaz, made some pictures that are shown in the previous section, that appear to be very authentic, due to the abnormal "magma" phenomenon that can be observed, it is on the other hand very possible that this picture is in fact not authentic. The windows seem to have an improbable shape, and the object does not seem to be of the "magma" kind. Mexico, Tlaxacaca 1991. Another picture of this type, allegedly taken in a different place. It looks like Diaz initially photographed a genuine UFO, and decided to follow up with some fake material, for whatever reasons...

Manmade flying saucers and UFOs. The following pictures show manmade flying saucers and other crafts that are with 100% certainty real... Some of the UFOs listed above as authentic could well belong to one of the series mentioned below... With such crafts, it's easy to imagine that many "UFO" encounters and "ET" abductions could actually well be occurring in the context of secret programs of earthlings...

The Vril-8 Odin. The Vril society built their first working flying saucer already in 1934! They started working on flying saucers in 1922. The Vril-8 Odin was built by the NAZIs somewhere around 1945... The Vril-8 Odin. The source for this picture, as well as some of the others is http://ovnis.esoterica.pt/ The Vril-8 Odin. In the early 1940s it was already possible to make pictures in color, although the technique was not yet widely used. The Vril 6. This is the model that was built after The Vril 5. Here it's on a base, with a car parked behind it...

The Vril 6 on base. Another picture of the Vril 6 on an airbase, with a man holding on to it. The Vril-7 Geist. This is the Vril-7 Geist model... Vril-1 Jager. The 1st Vril model, built around 1941. RFZ with man. Some sources say RFZ stands for "Rund Flugzeuge", meaning "Round Airplane", while others say it stands for "Reichsflugzeuge", meaning "Airplane of the Reich".

Haunebu on base. Probably a model from the Haunebu series. The Nazis built their first Haunebu in 1939... Haunebu model. Another unknown model of the Haunebu series. Haunebu gun. Detail of the Haunebu's gun. The NAZIs tried several methods of mounting guns on their saucers, but the guns made the saucers very unstable. So they ended by giving up on that idea and later used what was called a "PHASER" weapon, which stands for "Phased Energy Rectifier", a weapon that put out a single shaft of concentrated phasic energy that could tore through armor. Haunebu gun drawing. A drawing of a Haunebu gun.

Haunebu I plan. A work drawing/plan of the first Haunebu model, built in 1939... It had a diameter of 25m. It flew thanks to what the Germans called a "Mag(netic) Field Impulser", as specified on the plan... Haunebu II plan. A work drawing/plan of the Haunebu II model, built in 1942/1943. It's diameter varied from 26m to 36m. Haunebu III plan. A work drawing/plan of the Haunebu II model, built in 1942/1943. It had a diameter of 71m. Andromeda plan. The Andromeda was a craft with a diameter of 139m that was meant to transport troops, up to 5 saucers, and equipment. It was probably not built, although they could have done it easily... Maybe some of the "flying cigars" that have been seen are later models...

Vril 1 plan. A work drawing/plan of the first Vril model. Miethe V-7 plan. This craft was based on a "Luft Turbine" that burned air mixed with nitrogen in a 50,000 degree chamber. Helium was injected into the chamber to cool it and add to the thrust through gas expansion. Foo Fighters. At the end of WW2, the allied air forces frequently encountered what they thought to be a German secret weapon, consisting of balls of fire, which they called "Foo Fighters". "Foo" actually comes from the French word for "fire", namely "feu". Foo Fighter. Actually, there were at least 4 different German weapons that were called "Foo Fighters": the disc WNF Feuerball, the larger lone ZW Kugelblitz, the spherical Kugelwaffen, and the anti-radar balloon Seifenblasen. The Kugelwaffen and Feuerballs were even seen in Japan.

UK Skyship. This flying saucer was designed by the British firm, Airship Industries... Date unknown (probably in the 1950s/1960s). The Horten HIX One of the crafts designed by Doenitz, whose designs were discovered and taken by the Americans. This craft was designed in early 1945 and it definitely seems to be the precursor of the American Stealth craft, whose technology therefore must be considered at least some 50 years old! The Gotha P.60A Another German craft by Doenitz. of early 1945, discovered by the Americans. Also with a triangular shape (actually, it's more of a flying wing). More German designs found by the Americans can be seen here.

The Manta A triangular craft that looks a lot like the UFO of Petit Rechain, Belgium, although it's not the same. The TR-3B Another human made triangular craft.

UFOs, fake. For the following pictures it's most likely 100% certain they show FAKE UFOs.

Special hoax cases.

There have been many hoaxes related to the UFO phenomenon and ETs, although probably surprisingly less than many people could be led to believe by systematic "debunkers" of the subject. But there are hoaxes, and then there are *mega-hoaxes*. Some hoaxers leave all the others far behind them biting the dust, because of the sheer scale of their deception. Here's a special section on them.

The Billy Meier case, and related hoaxes.

During the 1970s, a Swiss farmer by the name of Billy Meier produced some of the most startling pictures and films of flying objects ever. But over the years, various research has shown most of these can be proven to be fakes.

Nevertheless, this is still one of the most enduring yet probably also one of the most complex hoax cases ever, especially because it can not be entirely excluded some extraordinary events occured at the Meier farm in Switzerland, as it is alledged by various persons who say to have witnessed strange activity in the skies, and other. Since we don't hold the belief everyone is a hoaxer, we think these witnesses may be taken serious and taken on their word. You can read about some of them here.

On the other hand, it can't be entirely excluded at least some of these witnesses have made untrue statements due to being under influence of the sect like Meier cult-community. We also note that in many (other) cases, witnesses describe UFOs that are very different from the objects that can be seen in Meier's pictures and film footage.

Whatever the truth about these witnesses and possible UFO activity in the region where Meier lives, the deception of most of Meier's picts, films, and other material speaks for itself, while it must be noted that the pictures that are generally available online, or published in videos and books, are the "creme of the crop", where it is the least obvious that strings have been used, or that other manipulations have been applied.

According to researcher Kal Korff, Meier made his first fake UFO photograps already when he spent time in India, in the 1960s and early 1970s, long before coming out with the famous pictures of the mid 1970s. It's fair to say that by the time Meier made his pictures public, his fakery skills were of a pretty high level for his time, and that he must have worked hard and long at perfecting them. Also, we believe Meier must have had help to make some of his fake "evidence", in certain instances from professionals (as for instance for the sound sample alleged to be from a spacecraft, which required particular sound equipment and know-how).

Our view is that the only reason why there is still a so called Meier "controversy", is simply the fact that making fake pictures of UFOs and other such material, and claiming they are genuine, are by itself not punishable by law, while certain governments have too much to hide to bring the subject of UFOs in the open, in order to allow genuine public scrutiny of it...

However, when considering certain aspects of this case, the question should be asked if the Meier hoax is merely a set-up by conmen without any scrupules, or in fact a kind of psy-op/disinfo operation to discredit the subject of UFOs in general, and/or to divert attention from more genuine cases. We consider it a very real possibility... Study the links and the presentation on this website and make up your own mind!

For the following picts, those that have been made by B. Meier, the sources are (ultimately)

• billymeier.com Official Billy Meier website.
• theyfly.com Website of Michael Horn, B. Meier representative.

More relevant info on the Meier case can be found at the following links:

• Billy Meier Exposed by filmcrew
• MSN chat with researcher Kal Korff on the Billy Meier case
• A "modest" but most significant analysis of the "predictions" made by Billy Meier
• Interesting forum thread. About most of the pro & cons of the Meier hoax.
• The Meier case: more conclusive "smoking gun" proof of deception. Report from this site on one of the picts shown below

Billy Meier classic, but fake... This is one of the best known picts made by Billy Meier. Much of his picts and videos look remarkably real and are quite difficult to be proven fake. However, even this classic Meier pict is fake, as the following analyses shows. Billy Meier classic fake. The previous UFO, in higher resolution. Billy Meier's classic exposed. On this photo analysis by the researcher and UFO debunker Peter Brookesmith it can be clearly seen that the UFO is simply a model hanging on a string... Source (read more) Billy Meier classic fake exposed. A verification of the previous photo analysis of the Meier fakery, although for a slightly different version of that pict.

Billy Meier fake UFO on string. Although it makes a nice picture, when you see the film footage of it, this "ET craft" is clearly moving as hanging on a string (notwithstanding the waving tree tops). You can find a clip of it here. You get the best result when viewing the clip 2x its normal speed! Bear in mind that this is a relatively LARGE model, which is why it looks relatively real, in particular when taken against the tree which is not necessarily as big as it seems (think of Bonsai trees!). When you view the other clips on the link mentioned, note that the wobbling left to right, is also typical for an object hanging on a string, and not the result of some "unstable magnetic field"... Billy Meier fake UFO. The same fake craft as on the previous pict. Billy Meier fake UFO, reconstruction by K. K. Korff. This is a reconstruction of one of the picts of a model very similar to the one seen in the previous picts, done by Kal Korff. He uses a simple plate, photographing it aproximately at the same height (albeit a little lower) of exactly the same hill Meier photographed his pict. Korff's full investigation can be found in his book on the Meier case.

Billy Meier fake UFO and proof of deception.

Graphic reconstruction.

According to Meier's ex-wife, as reported by Kal Korff, he made this fake UFO (above) with the cover of a garbage can and kitchen utensils, then photographed it from nearby. This pict offers IRREFUTABLE proof of a deliberate deception, without any special equipment or software needed to reach that verdict. All we have to do is look and think about what we're seeing. We see a "craft" that is in focus ("sharp") while the house on the background is out of focus ("blurry"). This means the house is a lot further away from the camera than the "craft" is. We can estimate from the size of the windows that the house is at aprox. 12m to 18m (39.4 to 59 feet) from the camera. Since the house is so much out of focus, while the craft is in focus, the craft must be at most at 1m to 2m (3.3 tot 6.6 feet) away from the camera. The craft is therefore at most +/- 1m (3.2 feet) large! It MUST just be a model, albeit a relatively large one. In fact, further analysis shows the model is in reality +/- 60 centimeters large (+/- 2 feet, or 23.6 inches). (Note that the above link leads to a slightly enlarged version of the pict available, which causes everything to be slightly more blurred than the original, but it still shows clearly that the "craft" in the foreground is much more in focus than the house in the background, plus some other flagrant discrepancies. This means the house is a lot further away from the camera than the "craft" is. We can estimate from the size of the windows that the house is at aprox. 12m to 18m (39.4 to 59 feet) from the camera. Since the house is so much out of focus, while the craft is in focus, the craft must be at most at 1m to 2m (3.3 tot 6.6 feet) away from the camera. The craft is therefore at most +/- 1,5m (4.9 feet) large! It MUST just be a model, albeit a relatively large one. (Note that the above link leads to a slightly enlarged version of the pict available, which causes everything to be slightly more blurred than the original, but it still shows clearly that the "craft" in the foreground is much more in focus than the house in the background, plus some other flagrant discrepancies. You can find the original pict here).

Graphic reconstruction as according to J. Deardorff.

James Deardorff is one of the Meier-clan "researchers" who claims these picts of the "Weddingcake craft" are authentic, according to his "scientific analysis" as posted on his website. On that page, he states that: "It is quite revealing to notice in Fig. 1 [ed: the pict of the previous analysis] that not only is the wedding-cake craft in good focus, but the main residence beyond it is in fairly good focus, too." But clearly, the craft is much better in focus (sharper) than the house, so there must be a considerable distance between them, according to my estimates: 10m to 16m, which is a fact Deardorff clearly tries to obfuscate... After his initial misleading statement, Deardorff claims: "For a wedding-cake craft of 7m diameter, the camera equation indicates it was situated about 13.5m from the camera." When taking into consideration Deardorff's calculation, that means the camera would be at least at 13.5m + 7m + 10m (to 16m) from the house, i.e. at 30.5m to 36.5m. This is clearly not what can be seen in the pict, as taking a picture from such a distance would show much more of the house, there would be more of the horizon to be seen, and there would be more space visible above the house (the roof line would be relatively lower). Deardorff's analysis is very clearly bogus, and can only be understood as an attempt to deceive...

Note about the camera-lens used and focal depth: we can't be really completely sure what camera-lens Meier used, but according to Meier's own saying, and according to the specifications mentioned by Deardorff, with a 35mm film, a lens focal length of 55mm, and a selected f-stop of f/11, with the subject being at 2 meters, then the near and far limits of acceptable sharpness would be at respectively 1.64 m and 2.56 m, with a hyperfocal distance of 8.97m, which is perfectly compatible with the calculation that the "craft" is in reality +/- 1.5m in diameter, and at +/- 2m from the camera, and which fully explains why the "craft" is significantly sharper than the house in the background.

On the other hand, if the camera would be at 13.5m of the "craft", as Deardorff claims, then the hyperfocal distance would still be at 8.97m, and when focussing on the craft there would simply have been NO noticeable difference at all between the sharpness of the "craft" and that of the house, which is clearly not what can be observed... Also see Understanding Depth of Field in Photography, Hyperfocal Distance Guide, examples of hyperfocal distance settings 1, 2, 3, and this online depth of field calculator. To get a feeling of what one can do by playing around with lenses, depth of field and lens focal length, see these examples.

Billy Meier fake UFO and proof of deception.

Graphic reconstruction.

This pic (above) is another example of IRREFUTABLE proof of a deception, without any special equipment or software needed to analyze it. Since the "craft" is perfectly in focus ("sharp"), while the car is completely out of focus ("blurry"), to know if this is a hoax or not, all that we need is to answer the following question: is the "craft" in front of the car, or is it behind the car? If it is behind the car, it is definitely a big object. This is the impression Meier intended to create... But if the "craft" is in front of the car, it is definitely a relatively small object, much too small to carry a humanoid of normal size. The object can definitely not be above the car, and be aprox. twice the size of the car, since in that case both the object and the car would be perfectly in focus, which is not the case. With two objects, one being in focus ("sharp") and the other out of focus ("blurry"), while neither shape overlaps the other, it would, with all cirumstances being neutral, be impossible to tell which is in front of the other. However, here it is the light that allows the viewer to determine that the "craft" is really IN FRONT of the car. The reason for that is that the light source is slightly behind the camera, at its left, yet it is the object and NOT the car that is the brightest, and receiving the most light. Therefore, the object MUST be in front of the car (hanging slightly above eye-level), and be significantly smaller to be so much more in focus ("sharper") than the car, and brighter at the same time. There is simply no way to refute this fact... The car is aprox. 4,3m long. We can estimate from the size of the car that the camera is aproximately at +/- 10m distance. Therefore the craft must be at most at 1m to 2m (3.3 tot 6.6 feet) away from the camera. The craft is therefore at most +/- 1m (3.2 feet) large! This is in complete accord with the previous analysis, and a perfect corroboration of our final conclusion that it is in fact +/- 60 centimeters large (+/- 2 feet, or 23.6 inches).

Billy Meier fake UFO and proof of deception (enlarged). Original pict can be found here Previous pict with highlight. Previous pict with model cut out. Click here to read article with full analysis, including that of matching the model to a garbage can lid!

This pict (above) comes from the same series as the previous picts. If the previous analyses didn't convince everyone yet, then this pict should to the job. It's surely the ultimate "smoking gun", proving willful deception by Billy Meier, as it can clearly be seen that the object shown is hanging in front of the car!! Ooops...

It's a fact that due to the bad (i.e. low) resolution of the available original picture, and due the confusing lighting of object and car, one could easily oversee this fact. But after enlarging the pict several times, it becomes blatently obvious when looking at the area indicated by the red line, that the craft is with 100% certainty in front of the car, and is therefore much smaller than the car! Consequently it must be of similar dimensions as those calculated for the previous analysis! This pict was posted with the photo-"analysis" by James Deardorff mentioned earlier (page has been saved by us in its entirety in case it gets modified), which should be an indication of how "qualified" he really is to confirm the "authenticity" of these picts...

Billy Meier fake UFO. Same fake UFO as previous picts. Note the completely unrealistic feel of this pict. Billy Meier fake UFO. Same fake UFO as previous picts. Same trick with the trees as for the first pict. Billy Meier fake UFO. Same fake UFO as previous picts. Here it can be clearly seen the "craft" is actually a small model, since it hangs in front and onto some of the branches of the FRONT tree, even though the Meier clan (i.e. Deardorff et al) claims it hangs "between" the 2 trees that can be seen... (The above link leads to an enlarged version of the available pict, find the original pict here). Billy Meier fake UFO. Same fake UFO as previous picts. Same false perspective trick as for the extensive analyses above. Notice that while the car projects a shadow to its left, no shadow can be seen coming from the "craft", even though this is precisely what should happen if the "craft" was hanging above the car, and not far IN FRONT of it, close to the camera... We also see the same focus discrepancies as for the previous picts. (The above link leads to a slightly enlarged version of the available pict, find the original pict here).

Fake Pleadians, Asket & Nera Never being out of ideas, Meier even endeavoured to make fake picts of his mythical Pleadian visitors. When people noticed a reflection and a strange curve in the pictures, Meier tried to make believe that he took the photographs from a large videoscreen on board of a 'beamship'... Susan McIver, a.k.a. Suzan Lund, on the Dean Martin Show In fact, he simply took pictures off a very earthly TV screen. The "Pleadian" he called "Asket", was in reality proven to be a dancer on the Dean Martin show, called Susan McIver, a.k.a. Suzan Lund. Once this became known, Meier then claimed he was set up by the "Men in Black", and that they stole the original photos, replacing them by these. Sure, Billy... Model in Meier's barn. This is a picture of a model of a "Pleadian craft", which was allegedly found in a barn at Meier's farm, and photographed by the researcher Kal Korff. Meier has admitted that he owns such models, but claims they are only for his kids... Fake UFO for demonstration. Here's a rather good example of how easy it is to fake a UFO pict like those made by Meier. Note in this pict the extra difficulty of using clouds on the background, instead of a crystal clear blue sky, which appears in most of Meier's picts, and which make it easier to copy and paste objects. Read the full story and find more examples here. Other examples of Meier-type fake UFOs can be found in this interesting forum thread (scroll down).

Meier's and Adrian's "beamships" compared. In the 1990s another "Pleiadean contactee" appeared, by the name of Adrian. He claimed to have photographed ET crafts of the same type as Meier's. When comparing these picts, Adrian's pict would seem to confirm the authenticity of Meier's picts of the same type of craft. Pict by Adrian of several crafts on a row. But this pict by Adrian clearly pushes things too far, as it shows 3 Meier type crafts, and an Adamski type craft (on the left), perfectly on a row, just right to be photographed through a patio railing. Adrian's pict exposed. A particular photo analysis shows that in fact the 3 Meier type crafts are hanging on a string. The same could be the case for the Adamski craft, or it could be a montage. The pict is a hoax, and obviously the work of someone who tried to benefit from Meier's initial hoax. Source: ufowatchdog.com Adrian's pict exposed. One doesn't really need any special software to see some of the strings, as shown in this enlargement.

The Rael cult.

This case is shocking, but it shouldn't discourage those genuinely interested in UFOs and extraterrestrial life!

Contrary to other hoaxes mentioned on this page, in the case of Rael there are no images of "evidence" to show at all, because... there simply isn't any! Still, the man who calls himself "Rael" has succeeded in building a big and very, very, lucrative following around his persona. A real financial empire, all based on his allegations of having had contact with ETs whom, he says, call themselves the Elohim, and who chose him to be their prophet...

As there is no proof to disprove, due to the fact that there isn't any (which in a way is pretty smart), one could think that this case therefore can't be proven to be a hoax. However there are many indications it is indeed precisely that. Amongst other things, it is firmly supported by statements from Roland Chevaleyre, a close and good childhood friend of Claude Vorilhon (Rael's original name), to whom Vorilhon allegedly once admitted he made everything up (Vorilhon's old friend's statements were recorded and shown in a TV documentary, which was broadcasted on the French channel M6, in 2001). The fact that Vorilhon made everything up is also firmly supported by statements of another - unnamed - friend whose account was published in the French Newspaper "Progrès de Lyon".

Rael/Vorilhon has created an astute but cunning mix out of the beliefs of Judaism, Christianity (Rael claims to be the half brother of Jesus, a religious fabrication in its own right), and Islam, while at the same time opposing these beliefs. He also uses genuine information as unraveled by Zacharia Sitchin, and ideas from cults such as Ron Hubbard's "Scientology", or Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's (Osho) sect/movement. A careful analysis of all these sources, and the sources they are based on in turn, will demonstrate to anyone who cares to do it, that Rael's stories are pure fabrications (just like the religious beliefs they are based on!).

Like Billy Meier, Claude Vorilhon/Rael is a most cynical crook without any scruples whatsoever. And although - similarly to Meier, who also built a religion around his persona - he preaches a philosophy with many elements of "love and peace", which in appearance would seem not to do much harm, the mere fact that all is based on deception should be enough of a warning not to be manipulated and abused by the Rael sect.

After running into more and more problems in France, due to the expansion of his cult activities, Vorilhon/Rael immigrated to Canada, where he is now a resident and where he obtained a tax-exempt religious status for his Raelian movement...

More relevant info on Rael/Vorilhon and his followers can be found at the following links:

• The true story of "little Claudy" Vorilhon, now known as "His Holiness Rael"
• More articles (from the same site as the previous link)
• A.I.D.E.R. - French site of Ex-Raelians
• Excellent French site on the Rael hoax
• The official site of the Rael cult

Rael & "Elohim" craft. Here we see Rael/Claude Vorilhon standing in a "spacy" uniform, in front of a reproduction of what he alleges was an extraterrestrial craft. Notice the craft's "clumsy" shape, and how it doesn't look at all like any genuine UFO seen on the picts of the "genuine" category on this page. (Pict is slightly enlarged. Original pict here) Reconstruction of Rael's encounter. This is how things were supposed to have looked like, when Rael had his alleged encounter with the "Elohim" on a vulcano in the French Puy de Dôme. Luckily for him, Rael never pursued a carreer as a movie art-director... But unfortunately for him, there are people who do pay attention to details, and who found that Rael messed up specific topographical details of his encounter (French), which is yet another indication he made everything up... Mainstream press about Rael. The Rael cult preaches liberal sex and the fact that it has many pretty looking young (sometimes very young) female members has always been an attractive subject for the main stream press... Rael in court. This is a news article about a court case Rael started against an ex-member of his sect, who used to translate Rael's books. After she made statements in an internet forum about Rael being a fraud, he sued her for defamation. Rael lost the case... of course... Source: A.I.D.E.R. - French site of Ex-Raelians.

Original Rael logo. This is the first version of the original Rael cult logo, the way it was published in Vorhilhon's first book. It shows a swastika ("rotating" in the NAZI way), combined with a hexagram. He got the idea of using a hexagram with a symbol at its centre from the book "l'ère du VERSEAU", by Jean Sendy, which is a book about the Aquarius era, from which Vorhillon copied many ideas for his "teachings". Read more here (French). 2nd generation Rael logo. This is what the original Rael logo was turned into after a while. Funny how it didn't seem to be important to use the logo exactly as it was allegedly seen by Vorhillon on the Elohim craft and uniforms... Revised Rael logo. Since Rael wants to build an ET/Elohim embassy in Jerusalem, he figured that the Nazi swastika could be somewhat problematic, so he changed the right angles of the swastika into curves and added two arms to make everything fit nicely. It was a smart move, and good for merchandizing... but the Israeli government is still declining all requests for permission to construct the ET embassy.

Other cases.

Here is a selection of "minor league" hoaxters.

Fake UFO by Jonathan Reed. This fake triangular UFO was photographed by a certain Jonathan Reed, actually named Jonathan Rutter. The object on this pict is obviously fake, while research has shown Reed/Rutter's story is completely made up. Read an excellent report here. Fake UFO by Jonathan Reed. It can easily be seen this is a relatively small object, by comparing it to the size of the bush vegetation. It would be completely unable to carry an ET of the size shown on his fake picts of it (see fake ETs, below). Abduction hoax These were allegedly marks of a Brazialian man having been abducted, lifted up by a beam of light from a UFO. In reality the marks have been shown to have been made by burnig torches and/or hot metal bars... Abduction hoax 2. See previous comment. This hoax was done by Urandir Oliveira whose goal seems to be to run a lucrative sect (probably inspired by illustruous predecessors like Meier and Rael). More info can be found here

ETs, genuine. The following pictures are most likely 100% authentic.

Stranded alien. Alien photographed in Italy by Filiberto Caponi. Stranded alien 2. The alien seems to have been stranded after his craft was shot down 2 days before by the Italien airforce. Stranded alien 3. The odd looking skin is actually a space suit that has melted... More info can be found at ufocasebook.com/caponi.html Zie ook artikel. 1949, New Mexico. Source and story unknown, but probably authentic. It can not be excluded the small being that can be seen is not of extraterrestrial origin.

Solway Firth Spaceman '64. When Jim Templeton took this charming picture of his 5 year old daughter in the English countryside in May 1964, once it was developed in a Kodak laboratory a spaceman was found appearing on it. There was no tampering with the negatives... Solway Firth Spaceman '64 zoom. A zoom on the spaceman. Ilkley Moor Alien. This reptilian-ish alien was photographed by an anonymous policeman in '87. Ilkley Moor Alien. The full picture of which the previous picture is a zoom.

Chile ET, 2004. This ET was photographed in Chile. The silhouette is blurred allegedly due to a technical error of the camera with which this picture was made. Although the ET itself is rather blurred on the image, it does seem genuine. Chile ET, 2004. This is the original picture of the ET photographed in Chile. Notice the small silhouette crossing the path, just behind the horse on the left. From the proportions it can be concluded this is not a child or midget. Read the full report here. Alien being interviewed. This is a picture taken from a video of what seems to be an interview with what is most probably a genuine alien, at area 51. The footage is said to have been smuggled out of the base by a certain Victor. Read the full report here. You can download a version of the video of good internet quality here (Windows Media Player), and an edited less good quality version here (RealOne Player). View full screen for best results! Alien being interviewed. Another picture from the video, here showing a person on the background. Opinions diverge strongly whether or not this footage is genuine. However, there seem to be muscle contractions around as well as in the eyes and in other parts of the ET's face, while the body movements would be difficult to do with a puppet, much more so with a latex prop, indicating the footage is probably genuine. Other significant evidence the video is genuine is given by the reverse speech analysis of an interview with "Victor".

Gray alien, closeup. Source and story unknown, but probably authentic. Gray alien, closeup. Source and story unknown, but probably authentic. Chino Zayas ET. Killed in a cave, near Santiago of Puerto Rico by Chino Zayas who struck the ET on the head. Here the ET is shown out of the formaldehyde jar he's usually kept in. Chino Zayas ET. Zoom on the back of the ET's head showing traces of the fatal blow.

Tiny alien. A creature that was found in Chile, having distinctly humanoid features yet extremely small. Tiny alien 2. Tiny alien. Seen from the front. Dromiciops australis marsupialis. A number of "scientists" are claiming the creature of the previous picts is merely a rare marsupial. Compare the picts and be the judge of how likely this is...

"Power station" alien, closeup. Watchmen of a thermoelectrical power station in Altamira, Tamaulipas, in Mexico, managed to capture an alleged alien entity on videotape, employing the power plant's security cameras. "Power station" alien, closeup. This is how the story appeared in a Mexican newspaper. Source: ufocasebook.com

ETs, uncertain authenticity. For the following pictures it's uncertain if they show genuine or fake ETs. If you have any additional information, please let us know!

Alleged reptilian alien. This picture is said to show a reptilian alien. There's no direct reason to presume this pict is not authentic, but the picture is showing some photographic oddities and blurry enough to allow legitimate doubt. Alleged reptilian alien, zoom.

Alleged grey alien. Allegedly showing a grey ET. Muddy head alien. It's uncertain if this "muddy head" is actually that of an ET.

Alleged alien skull. This allegedly alien skull was found in Bulgaria in 2001. "Casper" ET. At present we have no specific information on this pict. There are some indications the ET shown could be genuine.

ETs, probably fake. For the following pictures it's highly probable - but not necessarily 100% sure - they show fake ET's. If you have any additional information, please let us know!

Greeting alien. Very likely fake, but cute though... Alabama alien '73. Chief of Police Greenshaw in Falkville Alabama photographed this alleged alien wearing a sort of tin foil space suit... It seems an improbable type of suit. More info can be found here. Dragon baby. This small baby dragon was found in Oxfordshire. Read the story here.

ETs, fake. For the following pictures it's 100% certain they show FAKE ETs and/or related phenomena.

Alleged alien at area 51. This "alien" has 100% positively been identified to actually be an inexpensive latex prop sculpted by the distinguished Hollywood makeup effects designer, Don Post. In certain retail shops it's possible to find a model of it that glows in the dark... Don Post alien. This is a pict of another set up with the alien designed by Don Post, made for an exhibition. Compare with previous pict. April's fool joke 1950. This picture appeared in the German newspaper "Wiesbadener Tagesblatt" in 1950. April's fool joke 1950. The hoax picture shown with one of the series of pictures it was made from by painting an alien head on the boy, a son of Hans Scheffler.

Fake alien prop in jar. This prop has been presented as the "Salinas alien", allegedly killed by 2 young boys who were molested by a group of ETs. In reality it's a prop that can even be bought online at www.frightcatalog.com Alien skeleton. Apparently being shown to selected MUFON visitors, this skeleton is said by one witness who touched it to be made of some sort of plastic. Vietnam ET skull hoax. This USA soldier in the Vietnam war found a skull alleged to be alien. Vietnam ET skull hoax original. This is what the photo really looks like when not manipulated... (= original version, not "de-manipulated").

TV movie alien. This image comes from the movie called "Roswell: the UFO cover up". Roswell Alien prop This is a cast from the prop that was used for the movie of the previous pict. It was sculpted by Steven Johnson. Alien on bed. Due to missing information, for a long time this picture was posted on this page, mistakenly being labeled as "very probably a genuine ET". In fact, it is just another version of the Roswell movie ET props, and a pretty good one too! It was never meant as a hoax, but can easily lead to misunderstandings... Paul Davids and Norman Cabrera ET prop. Here's actor and producer Paul Davids posing with the ET prop that was sculpted by Norman Cabrera. Read more on it here (French)

Roswell museum alien. This is a sculpture from the Roswell International Museum meant to be a depiction of how the aliens found there in the 1947 UFO crash near Roswell (New Mexico) might have looked like. Roswell museum alien. Same picture as previous, with another coloring. Roswell museum alien. Another pict of the Roswell museum exhibit. Roswell museum alien. Another pict of the Roswell museum exhibit.

Roswell museum alien. This is a picture of the renewed alien exhibit at the Roswell International Museum, using a new alien prop. Roswell museum alien, artistic. This picture of the Roswell museum alien was named one of the 100 best pictures by National Geographic. Japan exhibit alien. This wax model of an alien was presented at a space exhibit in Japan. Japan exhibit alien as Roswell alien. This is how the Japan wax model is presented as a genuine Roswell alien...

Fake Roswell Santilli alien. This is the alien from the infamous Santilli footage. Many indications prove the footage just like the alien are fake. Fake Roswell Santilli alien 2. Fake Roswell Santilli alien 3.

Fake alien by Jonathan Reed. This fake alien was photographed by a certain Jonathan Reed, actually named Jonathan Rutter. It looks somewhat convincing, but the next picts should abolish the idea of genuineness, as do the fake UFO picts (see above). Furthermore, research has shown his story is completely made up. Read an excellent report here. Fake Reed alien. On this pict it's easier to see the ET is actually a dummy with a fake headwound. Reed's story is that he hit the ET when it attacked his dog. By the way, Rutter has a reputation to be allergic to dogs or any animal, and to never have owned one... Fake Reed alien. Fake inspection of the fake ET.

Alleged alien called "Aleshenka". Around 2004, several web sites in Russia have spread the latest news about the nature of this creature that was found in Kashtim, Ural mountains, by an old woman: it's said that its DNA was checked and found to be that of a normal human female. The abnormality of the poor being raised further discussion as to whether she was the victim of radiation driven mutation or normal albeit unfortunate natural mutations. Hoax meeting ET and Bush. A hoax picture of Bush who seems to meet an ET. Bush showing the hoax ET picture to the press.

Fake Greada meeting. A photo montage. Notice how nobody seems to notice the ET and how the lighting on the latter is different than that on the others.

Head of a "Reptilian". What seems to be the head of an obviously humanoid Reptilian creature is actually just a piece of art by Charlie White... It fooled a whole bunch of people, including us (blush...). The art is presented at: Art in context. Woman and creature. Another Charlie White creation that could look as an ET. Source: Art in context. Alleged alien photographed in North Carolina, USA, 1967. A teenager named Ron Hill claimed to have taken this photo of an ET in his backyard. In reality, the "alien" was a doll wrapped in aluminum foil... Cryogenic tank alien - artwork. This pict shows an imaginary piece of artwork created by Larry Barnes, and was commissioned by Jeff Goodman, the editor of the magazine "Official UFO and Ancient Astronauts". The pict started a life on its own and appeared in various publications, with the claim that it shows one of the bodies recovered at a UFO crash.

Aliens with baby A beautiful rendition, photographed and sent in by one of our visitors ;)

Some recommended links for UFO videos, picts, and sources for some of the info posted:

Google video: UFOs A great collection of UFO videos, including some excellent long video documentaries. Enjoy!

UFOlogie.net www.ufocasebook.com www.iwasabducted.com www.ufoevidence.org www.hbccufo.org www.ufoartwork.com

Mars

Mars Pyramid. A pentagonal pyramid on Mars.

Cropcircels Soon to be updated.

Cell cropcircle.

Sun symbol found in cropcircle. Cropcircle with sun symbol.

Go back to photoalbum index.

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[edit] liriks

3 Libras

Threw you the obvious And you flew with it on your back A name in your recollection Down among a million, say: Difficult enough to feel a little bit Disappointed, passed over. When I've looked right through, To see you naked and oblivious and you don't see me

Well I threw you the obvious, Just to see if there's more behind the Eyes of a fallen angel, Eyes of a tragedy.

Here I am expecting just a little bit Too much from the wounded But I see, See through it all, See through, And see you.

So I threw you the obvious Do you see what occurs behind the Eyes of a fallen angel Eyes of a tragedy

Well, oh well..

Apparently nothing. Apparently nothing at all.

You don't You don't You don't see me You don't You don't You don't see me You don't You don't You don't see me You don't You don't You don't see me at all

"Sometimes"

Shadows they fall on the stage of your own life, Trailing behind footsteps. There's comfort in ghosts who are no longer with you, Hiding behind your death. I let you down you've lost your taste, I'm losing ground I fall from grace. Well just listen, Sometimes, YOU GOTTA' SET FREE WHAT YOU LOVE JUST TO BRING IT BACK! WOULD YOU EVER LOSE ME? WOULD YOU EVER LET GO FOR THAT? And if the love is real you gotta' let yourself go, Just to bring it back. Sometimes, Just to bring it back. Hiding inside my asylum I'm always, Hanging on by a thread. I can't ecpect you to respect me until I've, Learned to respect myself. I've let you down you've lost your taste, I'm losing ground I miss your face. Well just listen, Well just listen, SOMETIMES, SOMETIMES, YOU GOTTA' SET FREE WHAT YOU LOVE JUST TO BRING IT BACK! WOULD YOU EVER LOSE ME? WOULD YOU EVER LET GO FOR THAT? And if the love is real you gotta' let yourself go, Just to bring it back. Sometimes, Just to bring it back. I've let you down you've lost your taste, I'm losing ground I fall from grace. Well just listen, Sometimes, Sometimes, Sometimes, YOU GOTTA' SET FREE WHAT YOU LOVE JUST TO BRING IT BACK! WOULD YOU EVER LOSE ME? WOULD YOU EVER LET GO FOR THAT? And if the love is real you gotta' teach yourself, Just to bring it back. Sometimes, Just to bring it back. Oh the love you're bringing back. Oh the love you're bringing back. Sometimes, Sometimes, Just to bring it back. You gotta' let go.

"You're A God"

I've got to be honest I think you know We're covered in lies and that's OK There's somewhere beyond this I know But I hope I can find the words to say

Never again no No never again

[Chorus] 'Cause you're a god And I am not And I just thought That you would know You're a god And I am not And I just thought I'd let you go

But I've been unable To put you down I'm still learning things I ought to know by now It's under the table so I need something more to show somehow

Never again no No never again

[Chorus]

I've got to be honest I think you know We're covered in lies and that's OK There's somewhere beyond this I know But I hope I can find the words to say Never again no No never again

Wonderwall by Oasis Lyrics

Today is gonna be the day That they're gonna throw it back to you By now you should've somehow Realized what you gotta do I don't believe that anybody Feels the way I do about you now

Backbeat the word was on the street That the fire in your heart is out I'm sure you've heard it all before But you never really had a doubt I don't believe that anybody feels The way I do about you now

And all the roads we have to walk along are winding And all the lights that lead us there are blinding There are many things that I would Like to say to you I don't know how

Because maybe You're gonna be the one who saves me ? And after all You're my wonderwall

Today was gonna be the day? But they'll never throw it back to you By now you should've somehow Realized what you're not to do I don't believe that anybody Feels the way I do About you now

And all the roads that lead to you were winding And all the lights that light the way are blinding There are many things that I would like to say to you I don't know how

I said maybe You're gonna be the one who saves me ? And after all You're my wonderwall

I said maybe You're gonna be the one who saves me ? And after an You're my wonderwall

Said maybe You're gonna be the one that saves me You're gonna be the one that saves me You're gonna be the one that saves me

"Lonely Day" by phantom planet

I could tell from the minute I woke up It was going to be a lonely lonely lonely lonely day. Rise and shine rub the sleep out of my eyes And try to tell myself I can't go back to bed It's gonna be a lonely lonely lonely lonely day. Even though the sun is shining down on me and I should feel about as happy as can be I just got here and I already want to leave It's gonna be a lonely lonely lonely lonely day

Everybody knows that something's wrong But nobody knows what's going on We all sing the same old song When you want it all to go away It's shaping up to be a lonely day

I could tell from the minute I woke up it was going to be a lonely lonely lonely lonely day.

LONELIEST PERSON I KNOW LYRICS You wanna feel you're never walking You see your feet from off the ground And when you leave there's no one talking You slowly breathe and look around

I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a flag in the wind that won’t blow Just a tear rolling down the window

You cut your lip and now you're freaking Another friend becomes a foe You try to leave but they offer candy Another time you won’t say no

Well, I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a flag in the wind that won’t blow Just a tear rolling down the window

You see that I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a blade in the grass that won't grow Just a hand holding on to let go

Time is a train... Time is a train... Leading you nowhere... Leading you nowhere…

Time is a train… I feel the same… Leading you nowhere… Leading you nowhere…yeah

A second page you reach a chapter You're on the phone but no one's there Another thing you can't keep after Another time you're left alone

I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a flag in the wind that won’t blow Just a tear rolling down the window

You see that I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a blade in the grass that won't grow Just a hand holding on to let go

You see that I know you're the loneliest person I know Just a fly living in the back row Just a slap in the face that won’t show… yeah

And I can do nothing… about it And I can do nothing… about it

"Everybody's Changing"

You say you wander your own land But when I think about it I don't see how you can You're aching, you're breaking And I can see the pain in your eyes Says everybody's changing And I don't know why

So little time Try to understand that I'm Trying to make a move just to stay in the game I try to stay awake and remember my name But everybody's changing And I don't feel the same

You're gone from here And soon you will disappear Fading into beautiful light Cause everybody's changing And I don't feel right

So little time Try to understand that I'm Trying to make a move just to stay in the game I try to stay awake and remember my name But everybody's changing And I don't feel the same

So little time Try to understand that I'm Trying to make a move just to stay in the game I try to stay awake and remember my name But everybody's changing And I don't feel the same

"Yesterday's Feelings"

Close my eyes and move to the back of my mind Where worries are washed out to sea See the changes, people's faces blurred out Like the sun spots or raindrops

Now all those feelings, those yesterdays feelings will all be lost in time but today I've wasted away for today is on my mind

Left the only worries I had in my hands Away from the light in my eyes Holding tight and try not to hide how I feel 'Cause feelings mean nothing now

All those feelings, those yesterdays feelings will all be lost in time but today I've wasted away for today is on my mind (yeah today is on my mind)

Now I can't care to worry I'm feeling so lonely Breaking apart all this love in my heart

Close my eyes and move to the back of my mind Where feelings mean nothing now

All those feelings, those yesterdays feelings will all be lost in time (all be lost in time) But today I've wasted away for today is on my mind for today is on my mind yeah today is on my mind

Now I can't care to worry I'm feeling so lonely Breaking apart all this love in my heart

"Broken"

I wanted you to know I love the way you laugh I wanna hold you high and steal your pain away I keep your photograph, I know it serves me well I wanna hold you high and steal your pain

'Cause I'm broken when I'm open And I don't feel like I am strong enough 'Cause I'm broken when I'm lonesome And I don't feel right when you're gone away

The worst is over now and we can breathe again I wanna hold you high, you steal my pain away There's so much left to learn, and no one left to fight I wanna hold you high and steal your pain

[x2] 'Cause I'm broken when I'm open And I don't feel like I am strong enough 'Cause I'm broken when I'm lonesome And I don't feel right when you're gone away

"Runaway"

Say it's true, there's nothing like me and you I'm not alone, tell me you feel it too

And I would run away I would run away, yeah..., yeah I would run away I would run away with you

Cause I am falling in love with you No never I'm never gonna stop Falling in love with you

Close the door, lay down upon the floor And by candlelight, make love to me through the night (through the night, through the night...)

Cause I have run away I have run away, yeah..., yeah I have run away, run away I have run away with you

Cause I am falling in love (falling in love) with you No never I'm never gonna stop Falling in love with you... With you...

And I would runaway I would runaway, yeah..., yeah I would runaway (runaway) I would runaway with you

Cause I am falling in love (falling in love) with you No never I'm never gonna stop Falling in love with you...

Falling in love (falling in love) with you No never I'm never gonna stop falling in love with you

With you, my love, with you... na ni na ni na na... (With you, with you, with you, with you)

"Leaving On A Jet Plane"

I'm ... I'm ...

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go I'm standin' here outside your door I hate to wake you up to say goodbye

But the dawn is breakin', it's early morn The taxi's waitin', he's blowin' his horn Already I'm so lonesome I could die

So kiss me and smile for me Tell me that you'll wait for me Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane I don't know when I'll be back again Oh, babe, I hate to go

I'm ...

There's so many times I've let you down So many times I've played around I'll tell you now, they don't mean a thing

Every place I go, I think of you Every song I sing, I sing for you When I come back I'll wear your wedding ring

So kiss me and smile for me Tell me that you'll wait for me Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane I don't know when I'll be back again Oh, babe, I hate to go

Now the time has come to leave you One more time, oh, let me kiss you And close your eyes and I'll be on my way

Dream about the days to come When I won't have to leave alone About the times that I won't have to say ...

Oh, kiss me and smile for me Tell me that you'll wait for me Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leaving on a jet plane I don't know when I'll be back again Oh, babe, I hate to go

And I'm leaving on a jet plane I don't know when I'll be back again Oh, babe, I hate to go

But I'm leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) Leaving on a jet plane (Ah ah ah ah) (Leaving) On a jet plane

"Goodbye To You"

Of all the things I've believed in I just want to get it over with Tears form behind my eyes But I do not cry Counting the days that pass me by

I've been searching deep down in my soul Words that I'm hearing are starting to get old It feels like I'm starting all over again The last three years were just pretend And I said,

[Chorus:] Goodbye to you Goodbye to everything I thought I knew You were the one I loved The one thing that I tried to hold on to The one thing that I tried to hold on to

I still get lost in your eyes And it seems that I can't live a day without you Closing my eyes and you chase my thoughts away To a place where I am blinded by the light But it's not right

[Chorus]

And it hurts to want everything and nothing at the same time I want what's yours and I want what's mine I want you But I'm not giving in this time

[Chorus x2]

And when the stars fall I will lie awake You're my shooting star

"Where Are You" (feat. Justin Roman)

[Justin] (I know you are out there baby...somewhere) There is someone out there for me (I know there is somebody out there) I know she is waiting so patiently (yeah) can you tell me her name? (Somebody tell me her name) This life-long search is gonna drive me insane How does she laugh? How does she cry? What's the color of her eyes? Does she even realize I'm here? Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? Where is this beautiful girl? Who is she? Who is she? Who is gonna complete my world? Where is she? Where is she? Where is this beautiful girl? Who is she? Who is she? Who is gonna complete my world? dadadadadada dadadada dadadadadada (where are you?)

[Natalie] I'm staring out at the sky (I see you baby) Praying that he will walk in my life Where is the man of my dreams (right here) yea-yeah I'll wait forever, how silly it seems How does he laugh? How does he cry? What's the color of his eyes? Does he even realize I'm here? Where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Where is this beautiful guy? Who is he? Who is he? Who is gonna take me so high? Where is he? Where is he? Where is this beautiful guy? Who is he? Who is he? Who is gonna take me so high? dadadadadada dadadada dadadadadada (where are you?)

[Justin] There is someone out there for me (there is someone out there for me) I know she is waiting so patiently (so patient) Can you tell me her name (can you tell me his name) This life-long search is gonna drive me insane (that's right)

[Natalie] How does he laugh? How does he cry? What is the color of his eyes? Does he even realize I'm here?

[Justin] Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? Where is this beautiful girl? Who is she? Who is she? Who is gonna complete my world?

[Natalie] Where is he? Where is he? Where is he? Where is this beautiful guy? Who is he? Who is he? Who is gonna take me so high?

[Together] dadadadadada dadadada (yeah) dadadadadada (I know you out there) dadadadadada dadadada (yeah) dadadadadada

[Justin Talking] Where are you?? I'm going to look all over the world baby 'Cuz I know you are out there I know this might sound crazy, but I think I love you dadadadadada (that's right) dadadada dadadadadada dadadadadada dadadada (yeah) dadadadadada

Artist: Goo Goo Dolls Lyrics Song: Iris Lyrics

Verse 1

And I'd give up forever to touch you Cause I know that you feel me somehow You're the closest to heaven that I'll ever be And I don't want to go home right now

Verse 2

And all I can taste is this moment And all I can breathe is your life Cause sooner or later it's over I just don't want to miss you tonight Chorus

And I don't want the world to see me Cause I don't think that they'd understand When everything's made to be broken I just want you to know who I am Verse 3

And you can't fight the tears that ain't coming Or the moment of truth in your lies When everything seems like the movies Yeah you bleed just to know your alive

Chorus

And I don't want the world to see me Cause I don't think that they'd understand When everything's made to be broken I just want you to know who I am Chorus

I don't want the world to see me Cause I don't think that they'd understand When everything's made to be broken I just want you to know who I am

I just want you to know who I am I just want you to know who I am I just want you to know who I am I just want you to know who I am

"What Can I Do"

I haven't slept at all in days It's been so long since we've talked And I have been here many times I just don't know what I'm doing wrong

What can I do to make you love me What can I do to make you care What can I say to make you feel this What can I do to get you there

There's only so much I can take And I just got to let it go And who knows I might feel better, yeah If I don't try and I don't hope

What can I do to make you love me What can I do to make you care What can I say to make you feel this What can I do to get you there

No more waiting, no more, aching... No more fighting, no more, trying...

Maybe there's nothing more to say And in a funny way I'm calm Because the power is not mine I'm just going to let it fly

What can I do to make you love me (What can I do to make you love me) What can I do to make you care (What can I do to make you care) What can I say to make you feel this (What can I do to make you love me) What can I do to get you there (What can I do to make you care) What can I do to make you love me (What can I do to make you love me) What can I do to make you care (What can I do to make you care) What can I change to make you feel this (What can I do to make you love me) What can I do to get you there (What can I do to make you care)

And love me... love me...

"Every Little Thing"

Let me in to see you in the morning light to get me on and all along the tears they come see all come I want you to believe in life but I get the strangest feeling that you've gone away will you find out who you are too late to change? I wish I could be every little thing you wanted all the time I wish I could be every little thing you wanted all the time some times

lift me up just lift me up don't make a sound and let me hold you up before you hit the Ground see all come you say your all right but I get the strangest feeling that you've gone away- you've gone away and will you find out who you are too late to change?

I wish I could be every little thing you wanted all the time I wish I could be every little thing you wanted all the time some times

Don't give me up don't give me up tonight or soon nothing will be right at all salvation will you find out who you are too late to change?

I wish I could be every little thing you wanted

He spends his nights in California, {He spent his whole life being to young,} Watching the stars on the big screen, {To live the life that's in his dreams,} Then he lies awake and he wonders, {At night he lies awake and he wonders,} Why can’t that be me Cause in his life he is filled With all these good intentions He’s left a lot of things He’d rather not mention right now But just before he says goodnight, He looks up with a little smile at me, And he says,

If I could be like that, I would give anything Just to live one day, in those shoes If I could be like that, what would I do, What would I do

Now and dreams we run She spends her days up in the north park, Watching the people as they pass And all she wants is just A little piece of this dream, Is that too much to ask With a safe home, and a warm bed, On a quiet little street All she wants is just that something to Hold onto, that’s all she needs Yeah!

If I could be like that, I would give anything Just to live one day, in those shoes If I could be like that, what would I do, What would I do

I’m falling into this, dreams, We run away

If I could be like that, I would give anything Just to live one day, in those shoes If I could be like that, what would I do, What would I do

If I could be like that, I would give anything Just to live one day, in those shoes If I could be like that, what would I do, What would I do

If I could be like that, I would give anything Just to live one day, in those shoes

If I could be like that, what would I do, What would I do Falling in I feel I am falling in, to this again.

[ {} - another version ]

"Best I Ever Had (Grey Sky Morning)"

So you sailed away Into a grey sky morning Now I'm here to stay Love can be so boring

Nothing's quite the same now I just say your name now

[Chorus] But it's not so bad You're only the best I ever had You don't want me back You're just the best I ever had

So you stole my world Now I'm just a phony Remembering the girl Leaves me down and lonely

Send it in a letter Make yourself feel better

[Chorus] But it's not so bad You're only the best I ever had You don't need me back You're just the best I ever had

And it may take some time to Patch me up inside But I can't take it so I Run away and hide And I may find in time that You were always right You're always right

So you sailed away Into a grey sky morning Now I'm here to stay Love can be so boring

What was it you wanted Could it be I'm haunted

[Chorus] But it's not so bad You're only the best I ever had I don't want you back You're just the best I ever had The best I ever had The best I ever