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From: United Kingdom UFO Network <ufo@holodeck.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 1997 23:17:23 +0000
Fwd Date: Sat, 01 Feb 1997 11:24:37 -0500
Subject: {69} part 2 - United Kingdom UFO Network
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U K / / // ___/ / / ' January 31st, 1997
/ / // / / / / N E T W O R K Part 2 Issue 69
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This issue comes in 3 parts. If any part is missing please mail:
ufo@holodeck.demon.co.uk giving the issue number and part/s
that are missing. Please put the details as below in the subject
section e.g. Repost {69} parts 1/2
[W6]******
Source: CNN
Date: 14th November 1996
Business blooms for desert UFO capital of world
RACHEL, Nevada (Reuter) -- Out in the desert wastelands, a small
group of people believe they are close to a secret so devastating
that it would, if revealed, mean the end of government and the
collapse of religions around the globe.
Until a few years ago, Rachel was just a small, windblown community
of people living in trailers and shacks close to a top-secret U.S.
Air Force base in the mountains of central Nevada. Now it is the
self-proclaimed UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) capital of the
world and draws hundreds of visitors from many countries every year,
hoping to glimpse strange lights and objects in the night sky.
Claims that the nearby U.S. base, known as Area 51, houses alien
spacecraft recovered by the military have struck a chord with people
who believe we are not alone in the universe and that there is a
murky government conspiracy to hide the truth.
As the millennium approaches, popular television series such as "The
X-Files" and films like this year's blockbuster "Independence Day"
about an alien invasion reflect growing interest in the theme. For
Rachel, with a population of just 100 people, it means business is
booming -- just as it has done for years in the gambling mecca of
Las Vegas more than 100 miles to the south.
Outside "The Little A-le-Inn," Rachel's only motel on its single
street, signs welcome UFOs and their crews. Inside, the menu offers
"Alienburgers" and the walls are covered with photos from around the
world of supposed spacecraft sightings.
A group of men sit at the bar drinking beer, earnestly discussing
evil alien plans to deprive our planet of its atmosphere.
Chuck Clark, an astronomer who has written a guide to the area,
unfolds a map of the secret Air Force base, which is also known as
"Dreamland" and tells tales of aircraft moving at impossible speeds
between the mountains at each end of the valley. "If the authorities
were completely open about it, the government would fall, the
economy would collapse, religions would go crazy," he said. "Think
about the implications."
The stories started in earnest in 1989, when a former U.S.
government physicist said he had been researching the properties of
an alien spaceship at the base. Some believe it was a craft that was said to
have crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
The Pentagon refuses all comment on the remote, closely guarded
facility. Military specialists say it has been used to test new and
secret aircraft such as the Stealth bomber and that these account
for most or all supposed UFO sightings.
This does nothing to shake the faith of the believers, who spend
their time comparing notes on the Internet and say the U.S. military
has simply learned to incorporate captured alien technology into its
most advanced planes.
Pat Travis, 53, runs "The Little A-le-Inn" with her husband and says
the motel's seven rooms are full for most of the year. They also do
well from selling T-shirts, baseball caps, coffee mugs and other
tourist paraphernalia.
"We get people from all over but it's not just business. There are
strange things going on round here and some baffling questions," she
said. "The government started off lying about it and now they have
to keep on lying."
UFO sightings have been reported at a local ranch up the road
towards the base. A man from California, who says he is an alien
ambassador in human form, visits Rachel several times a year. Others
come with claims of alien abduction.
There are grainy photographs several years old of the hangars and
buildings that make up Area 51, but guards now prevent tourists from
making their way along rough tracks to the mountain ridge from where
the base can be observed.
Harold Singer, 34, helps run the Area 51 research center in Rachel
-- a trailer filled with maps, satellite photographs and information.
"It's growing more popular because of the end of the millennium," he
said. "Every thousand years or so people say the world is going to
end, they look for answers elsewhere."
His friend Marcus Pizzuti is an earnest artist who makes model
aliens for the tourists. Dressed in army fatigues and wearing a
pistol, Pizzuti lives in a tiny shack with his collection of pet
desert lizards, boxes of the cigars he loves to smoke and a picture
of his mother on a shelf.
Asked to explain why his model aliens resemble humans, even though
they have larger, bald heads, he has a ready answer. "I think that
we humans were made in their image, that they made us," he said.
"These beings travel through the cosmos, creating new races."
So far, the only craft to have landed in Rachel is an F-16 fighter
that crashed near a trailer during NATO wargames a few years ago.
The only hint of danger comes from cattle that occasionally wander
onto the road, into the path of cars.
The people here have yet to find that elusive visitor from another
planet, but at least now they can make a living.
The state government of Nevada wants to cash in on the UFO tourist
boom as well; it has designated the road that runs past Rachel as
"The Extra-Terrestrial Highway" and put up signs showing flying
saucers.
Experts on UFOs meet here for regular conferences and the stars of
"Independence Day" visited this year as part of the huge publicity
drive for the film, leaving a commemorative plaque behind.
"Man, you should have seen this place before the UFO thing," Singer
said. "There wasn't nothing here. Nothing at all."
[W7]******
Source: CNN
Date: 23rd November 1996
UFO footage stirs sensation in S. Korea
SEOUL (AP) -- A local television network showed footage of a shining
object floating motionless in the sky early Friday morning.
The YTN pictures showed the object suspended in midair for about 10
minutes before it suddenly moved and disappeared.
UFO experts in South Korea said the object could have been a
spaceship judging from its movements -- motionless in the sky for
several minutes, and moving in several different directions before
disappearing altogether.
According to South Korean Air Force officials, there were no
scheduled flights at that hour.
South Korea has been hit by UFO fever in recent weeks due to alleged
sightings by local photographers, which have gained widespread and
prominent coverage in newspapers throughout the country.
[W8]******
Source: Sunday Telegraph newspaper
Date: Sunday 5th January 1997
Message in the bones: we might not be alone
Bigfoot & Co
Robert Matthews
UFOs, frogs falling out of the sky, the Beast of Exmoor - perfectly
sensible people have reported seeing all these things at some time or
another, but all have been rejected as utterly ridiculous by
scientists.
They all have something else in common: despite the protests of the
scientific community, there is nothing intrinsically impossible about
any of these phenomena. One might not like the idea of the Earth
being visited by aliens, say, but that's a long way from proving that
such visits are impossible.
Happily, every so often new discoveries leave the know-it-alls
scraping egg off their faces, such as the identification of "rocks
from the sky" - meteorites - as genuine chunks of interplanetary
matter, and the discovery of the "extinct" coelacanth swimming happily
in the Indian Ocean.
For years, explorers and forest workers have claimed to have seen
large, human like beasts stalking the Earth's wilder places, from
Oregon to the Himalayas. Yet despite first-hand accounts and even
photographs by people of the eminence and integrity of Sir John Hunt
and Eric Shipton, the vast majority of scientists have no truck with
the idea that we share this planet with another human like species.
Now those who have rejected sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot and other
"mythical" hominids may soon have to apologise, following new
discoveries made at a remote site in Java.
According to tests on fossils found in Java, not one but three
different human species co-existed on Earth around 35,000 years ago.
The theory of human evolution is notoriously controversial, but few
palaeo-anthropologists doubt that modern humans - homo sapiens - are
descended from homo erectus, a species which emerged in Africa around
1-6 million years ago.
Until now, no one has much worried about what happened to homo
erectus - the general view is it just slowly evolved into homo sapiens
as the millennia rolled by, finally disappearing around 300,000 years
ago.
But now radioactive dating tests carried obt by Carl Swisher of the
Berkeley Geochronology Centre and his team are making that Darwinian
disappearing act look a little too easy.
The researchers have been working on samples taken from a site at the
Solo River in Java, where the skulls of 12 prehistoric hominids were
found in the early 1930s.
Variously catalogued over the years as the remains of animals and
humans, most palaeo-anthropologists now agree that they are remnants of
homo erectus.
To confirm this diagnosis, a number of research teams have tried to
date the remains - a task made difficult by the reluctance of the
Javanese authorities to allow test samples to be taken from the
skulls.
This has forced researchers to date samples taken from around where
the skulls were found.
In 1985, a Japanese team dated the surrounding volcanic rock at
around 250,000 years. While such a date is entirely consistent with
the homo erectus picture, it could also be utterly irrelevant, as the
origin of volcanic rock has little to do with the existence of humans.
Swisher-and his colleagues decided to get closer to dating the skulls
themselves by tracking down animal teeth that were found alongside
them. Using two independent methods, the team came up with an
astonishing result: the teeth were no more than 53,000 years old, and
could be a little as 27,000 years old.
In other words, homo erectus survived for 250,000 years longer than
anyone thought - and not only failed to "fade away", but actually
co-existed with modern humans.
The situation is more remarkable still, as there was a third species
of hominid around 40,000 years ago: the Neanderthals.
These hairy humanoids mysteriously vanished around 35,000 years ago -
and not surprisingly, some have pinned the Yeti legend on the
existence of die-hard Neanderthals in the Himalayas and elsewhere.
If Swisher and his team's dating results - reported last month in the
journal Science - stand up, homo erectus managed to cling on almost 10
times longer in some parts of the world.
All those supposedly "ludicrous" sightings of hairy men by
mountaineers and the like suggest that for man and his close cousins,
1997 could just be business as usual on planet Earth.
[W9]******
Source: The Mail on Sunday newspaper
Date: Sunday 26th January 1997
Ray gun that will zap the scrap in space
>From Willima Lowther in Washington
Astronauts building an international space station high above the
Earth are to be protected by a massive ray gun.
It is not that they fear an attack by aliens. Instead the ground
based weapon will be used to zap space junk - thousands of pieces of
debris - ranging from screwdrivers dropped by astronauts to small
meteoroids.
The junk orbits Earth at 18,000 mph and could cause irreparable
damage to the space station. Any such debris seen heading towards it
will be targeted by the gun, and vaporised or pushed into another
orbit.
The 25 million pound Sterling station is expected to have an
aluminium shield strong enough to fend off flying rubbish up to a
centimetre long.
Ground-based radar will monitor all approaching debris over 10cm
long - the smallest size that can be tracked - and the station will
be moved to another orbit.
Shuttles
The ray gun will deal with pieces between 1 and 10cm in length.
Dr George Gleghorn, chairman of Nasa's National Research Council
Committee, said: "A hit would could be catastrophic. A 10cm piece of
debris would probably pass right through the shields and tear a hole
in the station wall."
Assembly of the space station - a joint effort between Nasa and the
Canadian, Russian, Japanese and European space agencies - will start
in November and take five years. Sections will be shuttled out by
rocket and fitted together in orbit.
Six scientists will live aboard the base, conducting experiments
with an eye to one day colonising Mars. It will have two 'lifeboat'
shuttles to carry them back to Earth in emergencies.
[W10]******
Source: The Associated Press
Date: January 6, 1997
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- It wasn't even close to an encounter.
Thousands of Israelis crowded Tel Aviv beaches early Monday,
watching for extraterrestrials whose arrival was predicted by
self-proclaimed Israeli psychic Helinor Harar.
As the theme music from the TV show ``The X-Files'' resounded from
loudspeakers, she shouted: ``Israel will be the center for UFO
landings.''
Crews set up cameras across the country in hopes of filming the
visitors, who Harar predicted would arrive Sunday night. But the
only object she spotted was a plane about to land at Ben-Gurion
airport.
Harar, who predicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's upset
election victory, later told Israel TV she had a new date for a
landing -- Feb. 14, Valentine's Day.
And she ventured another prediction: "Until they fly over Hebron,
there will be no agreement.''
Israel and the Palestinians are negotiating a troop pullout from the
West Bank city.
[W11]******
Source: Albuquerque Journal,
Date: December 3, 1996
RUMORS OF ALIENS TRAIL COMET
Charges that a spacecraft is headed for Earth behind the Comet
Hale-Bopp have taken on a life of their own
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
An alien spacecraft is headed toward Earth, tailing Comet Hale-Bopp.
NASA and the U.S.government know about it and are suppressing the
telescope images that would prove it. Those charges, lurking on the
Internet and talk radio since the comet was discovered in 1995, have
exploded in recent weeks. The talk has been fueled by nationally
syndicated late-night talk show host Art Bell and discussion groups
on the Internet, where anyone who wants can weigh in. Despite
debunking by scientists, the conspiracy theories have gained a
momentum of their own, with the scientists who offer explanations
immediately lumped in with the conspirators.
The debate has grown so intense that, two weeks ago, one Internet
critic called Alan Hale, the New Mexico astronomer who discovered
the comet, "an Earth traitor" after Hale helped debunk one of the
latest "mystery spaceship" sightings. "This whole thing is nutty,"
said Hale, who said he is alternately amused and aghast at the uproar
surrounding the comet that bears his name. The most popular tale is
that the spacecraft is either out to destroy us or save us.
The government knows about it, according to the conspiracy
theorists, and is keeping it from the public. Their evidence is a
hodgepodge of speculation, information allegedly gathered
telepathically from the aliens and astronomical data that, scientists
say, have been misinterpreted out of ignorance. Neither Bell nor any
of the other chief conspiracy theorists responded to Journal requests
for comment.
Hale-Bopp would seem an unlikely subject for an international
cover-up, scientists say, simply because anyone who wants can take a
look. Now 270 million miles from Earth and growing brighter, the
potential comet of the century is hanging out there for anyone with
a cheap telescope or even a pair of binoculars to see.
Hale, who lives in the mountains outside Cloudcroft in southern New
Mexico, has been observing the comet every night it's visible, and
hasn't seen anything amiss. "Don't take my word for it," he says.
"Go out and look at it." Since Hale and amateur star-gazer Thomas
Bopp discovered the comet in July 1995, the conspiracy theorists have
latched onto the comet with a vengeance.
The evidence for the alien presence is hung from bits of truth. As
astronomers gather more data on the comet's orbit, they have revised
their calculations of its orbit. That has led to calls from
conspiracy theorists that Hale-Bopp has "changed course," something
no comet could do.
Conspiracy theorists have also made much of a perceived paucity of
publicly available images from the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble comet pictures taken
in September and October, published recently in the magazine Science
News, do not seem to have reduced the vehemence of those arguments.
For the record, NASA scientist Jay Bergstralh, who is heading up a
portion of the space agency's comet research efforts, said he has
heard of no such conspiracy.
The discovery of "mysterious objects" in telescope pictures of the
comet has been trumpeted by the conspiracy buffs, only to have
astronomers identify them as stars in the backgrounds of the
pictures.
"What's upsetting is that they won't take the time to learn," said
Harvard-based astronomer Daniel Green.
If there was a mysterious object flying alongside the comet, said
Green, amateur and professional astronomers around the world
watching the comet would have seen and reported it.
"That's the way science works. That's the way astronomy works. You
can't hide anything," said Green, who works for the International
Astronomical Union, an international clearing house for such
information.
The "mysterious object" pictures have nevertheless raised the
conspiracy talk to a crescendo in recent weeks, led by late-night
talk radio host Bell, whose syndicated show runs in Albuquerque on
KOB AM (770) from midnight to 4 a.m. Last Thursday night, a guest on
Bell's program claimed to have "remotely viewed" the alien
spacecraft, using a sort of telepathic eyesight.
Hale said the Internet has been both a curse and a blessing. Anyone
with a computer and a telephone connection can "publish" information
on the Internet, a worldwide computer network. That has allowed the
Hale-Bopp conspiracy theories to spread quickly, but it has also
given scientists an equal forum.
But with Hale-Bopp getting brighter and likely to be major public
spectacle next spring, Hale expects the wild talk to continue. "It's
just going to get worse," he said.
[W12]******
Source: New Scientist
Date: October 1996
WHERE ARE ALL THE EXTRATERRESTRIALS?
Ian Crawford wonders how common technological civilisations are in
our Galaxy
THE possible evidence for ancient life on Mars has rekindled the
age-old debate about life in the Universe. Certainly, if life
evolved independently on Mars, why not also on just about every
suitable planet in the Galaxy? But it doesn't necessarily follow that
"advanced" life, and therefore technological civilisations, are also
common. Far from it.
The first reason is the "absence of evidence". There are two parts
to this: the failure of the SETI programmes - the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence - to detect extraterrestrial radio
signals, and the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial visits to
Earth. The SETI argument is admittedly weak because only a small
number of stars have so far been covered, and these at a limited
range of radio frequencies. The second argument is stronger, and was
dealt with in 1975 by Michael Hart in his seminal paper "An
explanation for the absence of extraterrestrials on Earth" (Quarterly
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol 16, p 16).
Hart pointed to the lack of evidence for alien visits to Earth.
Certainly, Earth has never been "taken over" by extraterrestrials,
as this would have put an end to our own evolution. There are only
three plausible explanations. First, interstellar spaceflight is
impossible. Secondly, cultural or political factors prevent alien
civilisations from achieving interstellar travel, or otherwise
persuade them to leave life on other planets alone. Thirdly, ET
civilisations are rare or absent.
It seems unlikely that interstellar spaceflight is impossible. Even
today, we can envisage propulsion strategies which might make it
possible to reach between 10 and 20 per cent of the speed of light,
permitting travel between nearby stars in a few decades (see The
Starflight Handbook by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff, John
Wiley, 1989). Any civilisation with this technology would be able to
colonise every planetary system in the Galaxy in about 10 million
years, which is only onethousandth of the age of the Galaxy. Thus,
any attempt to reconcile the "absence of evidence" with a Galaxy
teeming with technological civilisations must rely on the
"sociological" explanations identified by Hart. The most important of
these are: that ET civilisations destroy themselves before they can
develop interstellar spaceflight; that ET civilisations have no
interest in colonising the Galaxy; and that ET civilisations have
strong ethical codes which prevent them from interfering with
primitive life forms.
The problem with all these explanations is that they appear
plausible only if the number of civilisations is quite small. If the
Galaxy contains thousands of technological civilisations (as SETI
optimists often suppose), is it likely that they would all destroy
themselves, or be content with a sedentary existence, or be
super-ethical? The implausibility of such arguments appears
particularly great if we consider that the only civilisation we know
anything about, namely our own, has not destroyed itself and shows
every sign of being expansionist. Moreover, it is not especially
ethical in its treatment of other forms of life. Earth has been wide
open to interference from outside for billions of years, and yet
there is no evidence that this ever happened. This would seem
to imply that extraterrestrial technological civilisations are either
absent (as Hart argued), or at least sufficiently rare for some
combination of "sociological" explanations to plausibly account
for the absence of evidence.
The history of biological evolution on Earth supports this
conclusion. Life first appeared about 4 billion years ago, yet the
Earth itself is only 45 billion years old. The fact that life arose
so quickly suggests that this step is relatively easy for nature to
achieve. This is consistent with current biochemical thinking, which,
in the words of Nobel prize-winning biologist Christian de Duve, is
coming round to the view that "life is almost bound to arise ...
wherever physical conditions are similar to those that prevailed on
our planet some four billion years ago" (Vital Dust, Basic Books,
1995). If life did evolve independently on Mars, this conclusion
would be greatly strengthened.
However, while the rapid appearance of life on Earth augurs well for
the prospects of simple life in the Universe, subsequent
evolutionary history leads us to expect that more "advanced" forms of
life will be quite rare. This is because multicellular life did not
appear on Earth until about 07 billion years ago. For more than 3
billion years Earth was inhabited solely by single-celled
microorganisms. In contrast to the rapidity with which the first
bacteria appeared, this may imply that the evolution of more
complicated life forms is very difficult. If this was the case, the
transition to multicelled animals might occur on only a tiny fraction
of the millions of planets that may be inhabited by single-celled
organisms.
These two lines of argument lead to the same conclusion: while life
may be common in the Galaxy, "advanced" multicellular life, and
therefore technological civilisations, are probably extremely rare.
Ian Crawford is at the department of physics and astronomy at
University College London.
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