Subject: UFOs And Missile Bases.  Part 2.                              July 
19, 2011.

  This talks about water monsters.

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A previously classified F-I document dated November 12, 1957,
that is now in the public domain, thanks to Freedom of
Information Act legislation, makes that fact very clear:

"Within the past two weeks reports have increased tremendously
and some of the more serious have been described as follows: An
object had landed in Nebraska with six people aboard, the
persons had talked to a Nebraska farmer and then sped off into
space; a fiery object was seen flashing across the southern
skies from Albany, Georgia, to Miami, Florida; a Coast Guard
cutter had sighted a huge object flying over the Gulf of Mexico;
and persons in the Southwestern states while driving their cars
have allegedly seen UFOs that caused the engines in their
automobiles to stop."

The FB-'s special agents continued to diligently collate the
strange and unearthly facts pertaining to what seemed to many of
its personnel to be a near cosmic i-vasion, and studiously
briefed -BI Director J. Edgar Ho-ver on the nature of the
expanding situation, as well as on the then current response of
the U.S. m-litary to the vexing problem presented by the growing
UFO presence:

"The Air F-rce is following these sightings closely and all
reports are submitted to the Air Technical and In-elligence
Center, at Wright-P-tterson Air Fo-ce Base in Ohio where they
are evaluated and analyzed. In the event any of the future
reports appear to be authentic, the Air For-e will immediately
notify the Bureau, keeping in mind our particular interest in
matters concerning espionage and s-botage."

It is thought provoking indeed to note that this undeniably
dramatic upswing in UFO sightings, and even close encounters
with alien entities, occurred in the immediate aftermath of the
former Soviet Union's launch of its Sputnik 1 satellite. Is it
possible, perhaps, that the strange denizens of another world,
or indeed worlds, were sec-etly keeping a close watch on
humankind's first attempts to break free of its previous
terrestrial moorings? And, if so, was it those initial, hesitant
steps outside of our own atmosphere that prompted such a flurry
of concerned activity on the part of extraterrestrial visitors
from far-away planets?
It may be important, and relevant, to note that by 1957, and
over the course of little more than a decade, the Human R-ce had
successfully developed a-omic energy, had flattened two Japanese
cities with at-mic bombs, was working on advanced missile and
rocket technology, and had now finally left the moorings of the
planet. In other words, it might very well be at this particular
time in on our history, more than absolutely any other, when
alien visitors from afar might begin to take a serious interest
in us, and express deep concerns about us and our actions, too.

Perhaps also, one might be inclined to speculate, advanced
aliens civilizations of the type that were possibly secr-tly
watching us in the late 1950s, have undertaken such intense
scrutiny and surveillance on countless occasions throughout the
Universe. And particularly so when youthful, burgeoning
civilizations take that giant and world changing leap from being
tied to their own planet, and when propeller driven aircraft
dropping bo-bs on the enemy, are rapidly replaced by
intercontinental missiles that have the ability to obliterate
whole cities, countries and cultures.

Food for thought? Maybe

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/07/saucers-and-sputnik/#more-6032

- GET KRAKEN DEPARTMENT -

Why Scientists Should Study Sea Monsters

From the Loch Ness Monster to the Kraken, sea monsters still
capture the imagination centuries after medieval cartographers
doodled them in the blank spots of their maps. But to Charles
P-xton, a researcher at the University of St. Andrews in
Scotland, sea monster sightings are more than fish tales.

Paxton is no wild-eyed cryptozoologist who spends his weekends
imagining Bigfoot behind every tree. He's a fisheries ecologist
and statistician who believes that, with the right methods,
anecdotes about mysterious monsters can become scientific data
to tell us about human perception and the odd reports that
science can't fully explain.

On July 12, Pa-ton and other bonafide, peer-reviewed
researchers like him will discuss ways to bring cryptozoology
into the scientific fold at the Zoological Society of L-ndon
Communicating Science event "Cryptozoo logy: Science or
Pseudoscience?"

Ahead of the event, Pax-on spoke with LiveScience about sea
monster sightings, the likelihood of unknown beasts roaming the
sea, and why, before you report a sea serpent, you should always
make sure you're not looking at a s-xually aroused whale.

LiveScience: What drives you to study sea monster sightings?

Paxt-n: Several reasons. Actually, probably the first is I'm a
big kid and I thought it was an interesting set of questions. A
more proper scientific reason is that I'm interested in why
people believe the things they believe, especially if their
beliefs are non-mainstream. And the third reason I got
interested is it's important to understand how science tries to
relate to anomalous data, data that doesn't quite fit into our
existing paradigms.

LiveScience: You've lumped old sea monster sightings together
to study them statistically. What did you find?

Paxto-: I was interested in looking at reported distances in
sea monster accounts, in seeing whether those reported
distances, were they the same as we would expect if the reports
were genuinely of random animals popping up around boats. But if
you look at the distribution of reported distances of sea
monster accounts, they're much closer than you would expect by
chance alone.

This implies to me that there's a huge bias in the reporting of
sea monster accounts.

LiveScience: What does that bias tell us about the validity of
those reports?

Paxton: It means we can probably be more doubtful about one
potential explanation for sea monster reports. I expected that
when I did the analysis, the reports would be far away. I
thought people were reporting monsters because they'd seen
familiar things at a distances. But the reported distances are
much closer than you'd expect. It's not because these things are
a vast distance away, or at least, if witnesses are
misinterpreting things, it happens over short distances.

LiveScience: Are any of these historical reports actually
plausible?

There's a report by two zoologists actually in the early part
of the century published in the Journal of Zoology where they
actually reported seeing a serpent-like animal in the South
Atlantic. They describe an animal which doesn't quite fit into
our current view. That's an intriguing one. [Read: The Creatures
of Cryptozoology]

LiveScience: Okay, let's talk about an implausible report. Tell
me about the case of the possible whale p-nis.

Paxton: That's a quite famous sea monster sighting from the
18th century, where people saw a sea monster en route to the
Danish colony in Greenland. What they saw was an animal which
they described as having a serpent-like tail. We suggested that
there could be an alternative explanation and what they were
interpreting as a tail could actually have been the pe-is of the
animal.

If you do a search for "whale pen-s" on the Net, they've got
pictures and they do look quite serpentine.

LiveScience: Does it seem like misidentified body parts might
explain many sea monster sightings?

Paxton: I think that goes on, yes, but as yet I've got no
quantitative evidence of that happening. I'm actually collecting
data on that.

I think people make mistakes and it does mean that I'm a little
more sk-ptical of laypeople who report strange things. When you
see something in the water, there are lots and lots of large
animals it could potentially be, and there's no one in the world
who is an expert on all of these animals. Zoologists, when they
see an animal, perhaps they'll be looking at the features which
will tell them about its affinities, whereas laypeople won't
necessarily do that.

LiveScience: Do you think there are likely large, undiscovered
marine creatures out there?

Paxton: Yes, but to make something absolutely clear, my
position on this is quite an unusual one. I would actually say
without any doubt at all that there are unknown animals out
there. The reason I say without any doubt at all, if you look at
the rate at which we're discovering new species, that hasn't
completely flattened out.

The question isn't, "Are there large marine animals?" The
question is, "Are they seen by laypeople prior to their
discovery?" The answer to that is "Probably not."

LiveScience: Why not?

Paxton: Logically, the animals we've not discovered yet are the
ones that are difficult to detect, which means it would be very
rare for people to encounter them anyway. We know there are
biases in the reporting process, and we know that to have the
potential to recognize an unknown animal, you need to have
superb expertise. In terms of marine mammals, for example, I can
only think of about 10 people in the world who if they saw a
marine mammal would be in a position to say, "That's a marine
mammal that we've never described."

We can't explain away all the strange reports, but just because
I can't explain a report doesn't mean it's an unknown animal.
It's got to be a hypothesis of last resort. I think that's a
mistake lots of people make, that just because they can't
explain it, it must be something unknown. That's quite a jump.

LiveScience: Do you have a favorite sea monster?

Paxton: I quite like the sea monk [a creature with a monk's
head and fish body], actually. The idea that there's a monk
living in the sea, that's quite bizarre.

Part 2.

John Winston.  johnfw@mlode.com