When UFOs Land By Jim Wilson

The rich really are different. When Laurance S. Rockefeller-yes, those
Rockefellers-wanted to know more about UFOs, he didn't have to satisfy his
curiosity at alien-hunters' Web sites or in the Weird Science section of Barnes
& Noble. He asked Peter A. Sturrock, the former director of the Center for Space
Science and Astrophysics at Stanford University, to convene a private meeting of
a dozen top scientists at the Pocantico Conference Center, on the grounds of the
old Rockefeller family estate 20 miles north of Manhattan.  Sturrock's guest
list and agenda was noteworthy for its omissions. Bob Lazar, who claimed to have
reverse-engineered UFOs at Area 51, wasn't invited. Neither was alien-buster
Philip J. Klass of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of
the Paranormal. Roswell, the "face" on Mars and other familiar sightings got
little attention. Instead, researchers from Princeton University, Stanford,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Center for Space Research in
France focused on cases with more meat on their bones-sightings in which
physical evidence was left behind. "While their findings were not conclusive, I
hope [they] will raise the level of the debate," Rockefeller said afterward.

"Ask most scientists what they think of the UFO enigma and you will almost
certainly get a scoff and a brushoff like, 'There's not one shred of evidence,'"
says Bernard Haisch, an astronomer with more than 100 scientific publications to
his credit. "That answer is simply not true. The problem is that this evidence
does not follow our expected scientific logic, and so scientists dismiss what
is, in fact, a huge number of accounts. Many sighting reports, as absurd as they
sometimes appear, are probably real. Most professional scientists never bother
to look at the evidence.  Instead, the dogmatic dismissals by professional
debunkers, which are often patently ridiculous, are simply taken at face value."

As you will see for yourself, some of the cases discussed at Pocantico are
difficult for even die-hard skeptics to ignore.

Police Cruiser Blackout Luis Delgado was a 28-year-old patrolman for the Haines
City, Fla., police department when he became part of one of the most compelling
UFO sightings. It happened about 3:50 am, on March 19, 1992. Delgado noticed a
rapidly descending green light in his rearview mirror as he drove down a street
alongside a citrus grove. The light seemed to keep pace with his cruiser, until
he slowed down. Then the silent, dome-shaped object flew overhead, filling his
police cruiser with a brilliant green glow. He pulled to a stop, and the power
in his vehicle went dead. For the next several minutes he stood outside his car
watching the 15-ft.-wide craft hover silently in front of him. It seemed to
float about 10 ft. off the ground, cooling the surrounding air to the point at
which it formed a foggy mist. Then, just as quickly as it appeared, it sped
away. Delgado returned to his car, and found the electrical system was again
operating.

"The scientific panel was very impressed by cases in which electrical equipment
was disrupted," says Michael D. Swords, of Western Michigan University in
Kalamazoo, Mich. A conference participant at Pocantico, Swords told Popular
Mechanics that this type of encounter is far more common than most people
realize. UFO investigator Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies in
Chicago told the conference at Pocantico that over the past 50 years more than
500 similar reports had been filed. What distinguishes the Delgado sighting is
the inherent credibility of the observer.  As a police officer, Delgado had
nothing to gain-and possibly a great deal to lose-by coming forward with his
account.

Trans-En-Provence For UFO investigators, the most disappointing aspect of the
Delgado sighting isn�t the absence of evidence, but the way evidence has been
allowed to simply disappear through neglect. Samples of the nearby road and
vegetation were never collected. No radiation measurements of the area were
made.

UFO researchers in France take the scientific investigations of unexplained
aerial phenomena more seriously than those in the United States. The Center for
Space Research, France�s counterpart to NASA, even has a team that swings into
action when these types of events occur. The team is called GEPAN, after the
French acronym for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Study Group.
The Trans-En-Provence landing site was carefully documented by the French
government. 

Investigator Jean-Jacques Velasco told the Pocantico conference the details of
what is perhaps the most completely and carefully documented sighting of all
time, the Trans-En-Provence incident. Renato Nicolai didn�t think he had seen a
UFO, but instead a secret military aircraft that had strayed from its test site.
A contractor who had been retired for about two years when the episode occurred
on Jan. 8, 1981, Nicolai was working on his terrace in the late afternoon when
he heard a faint whistling. In the distance he saw a lead-colored object, about
5 ft.  high, a bit wider in diameter, and shaped like a pair of inverted bowls,
fall from the sky. It came to a floating stop about 6 ft. above the ground. For
the next half-minute he observed the object, and then watched it rise into the
sky, creating a small trail of dust. "When my wife came home in the evening, I
told her what I had seen," he said in his official report.  "My wife thought I
was joking." The following morning, he showed her where it had hovered and the
two of them spotted circular traces it had left in the ground.  Neighbors
suggested they tell the police. Through the police, word reached GEPAN, which
routinely checks to see whether such sightings are of a military activity or an
aircraft. When both were ruled out, GEPAN interviewed Nicolai and collected soil
from the area where the object had reportedly hovered. The mystery only
deepened. 

There was black material mixed with the soil, but chemical analysis ruled out
combustion residue, oil or concrete. Later analyses showed the soil had been
contaminated with traces of metal, and the surrounding vegetation showed subtle
damage.  Something happened in Trans-En-Provence, but to this day no one is
certain of what that was.

Metal Rain There was absolutely no question about what happened in Council
Bluffs, Iowa, on the night of Dec. 17, 1977. A UFO ejected about 40 pounds of
molten metal onto the ground. While most of America was settling down for the
evening sitcoms, Mike and Criss Moore, who were each 24 at the time, were
driving to Mike�s mother�s home in Council Bluffs. About a half mile ahead, just
above the treetops, they saw a glowing

In 1957, a UFO reportedly exploded after hitting the water near the town of
Ubatuba, Brazil. Metallic debris collected by a physician, turned out to be
composed of an extremely high grade of magnesium.

Recently declassified documents explain what it might have been. During the
1950s and 1960s, the U.S. Air Force experimented with electrostatic drives. In A
sample of the Ubatuba debris (below) examined under a microscope (above)
revealed a higher level of purity than occurs in nature. PHOTOS COURTESY OF
WALTER WALKER AND J. ALLEN HYNEK CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES theory, lift and
propulsion can be created by imparting airframes with an electric charge that
matches, and therefore repels, the surrounding air. Such an aircraft would
require enormous amounts of electric power, and the Air Force seemed to know how
to create it. Other declassified documents reveal the Air Force had built
compact nuclear reactors small enough to fly on an aircraft. It had also
experimented with a device known as a magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD) to
extract large amounts of electricity from a fast-moving stream of molten metal.
Engineers familiar with such systems say that if MHD units were to become
unstable, some of the metal circulating in the unit would have to be ejected.

UFO investigators sent a portion of the Ubatuba material to the Air Force for
analysis. It was "accidentally" destroyed before tests could be completed.


CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES red ball falling toward Big Lake Park. "It hit the ground
in the vicinity of Gilberts Pond in Big Lake Park, across the Missouri River
from Eppley Airfield. The exact street address is 1900 N.  Eighth St.," says
Jacques F. Vallee-a computer scientist who has compiled a database of thousands
of sightings-in detailing the episode. When onlookers arrived at the impact
point on a small levee, they found a 4-in.-thick mass of molten, red-orange
metal covering the frozen ground, about 16 ft. from the road.  The metal mass
was still glowing 15 minutes later when Mike Moore�s father, assistant fire
chief Jack Moore, arrived.
After the metal had cooled, Robert Allen, a local astronomer, collected samples.
Part of the roughly 40-pound slab went to the U.S. Air Force�s Foreign
Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. A portion also
went to the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University. The Air Force never made
its analysis public, but in a letter assured local authorities that "re-entering
spacecraft debris does not impact the earth�s surface in a molten state." In his
report, Ames Laboratory director Robert S. Hansen ruled out a meteor.
Officially, the episode remains an unsolved mystery, but Vallee sees it as
something more telling. The Council Bluffs episode was not unique. At the
Pocantico conference, Vallee said that in at least nine other sightings, aerial
objects in distress were accompanied by the ejection of molten metal. "Reports
of unusual metallic residue following the observation of an
unexplained aerial phenomenon are detailed enough for a comparative study to be
undertaken."

True Skeptics Needed Bernard Haisch, a former Lockheed scientist who had served
on the Rockerfeller panel in 1997, believes it is time for the scientific
community to become more skeptical in the truest sense of the word. "We need to
be skeptical of both the believers and the scoffers," he told PM during a visit
to the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Palo Alto, Calif.,
where he is currently director. To this end, Haisch recently created
www.ufoskeptic.org. The Web site encourages mainstream scientists to reconsider
the UFO phenomenon in light of recent advances in physics, such as superstring
and M-brane theories, which postulate the existence of multidimensional space.
"I have been an active professional astronomer since earning my doctorate in
1975," he says. "I've learned quite a bit about the UFO phenomenon over the
years, certainly more than I had bargained for. UFO sightings are not limited to
farmers in backward rural areas. There are astronomers, and pilots and NASA
engineers, who have witnessed events for which there is no plausible
conventional explanation."

note: photos available at
http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/sci/0105STMIAP.html