The History Channel’s scripted Project Blue Book arrives later this year
By now, San Diego Comic-Con is far more than a series of reveals for high-profile film and television projects and a giant, geek flea market. Over the years, it’s increasingly become home to immersive pop-up activations that bring to life a tiny sliver of a world for fans.
This year, the History Channel brought with it a declassified bunker experience to promote its upcoming scripted UFO series Project Blue Book.
Some backstory: At the height of the Cold War, the United States Air Force began a project to document and investigate sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in an effort to determine if said unexplained sightings posed any sort of threat to national security. Over the course of the study, between 1952 and 1969, it collected more than 12,000 reports. That project is the basis for History’s new show, which dramatizes some of the sightings reported to the Air Force. This year’s activation transported us back to the Cold War — or at least, into the bunker where it all went down — to allow us to report our own unexplained sightings to the government.
UFOs and alien abductions are both long-running staples in science fiction and fantasy circles, running the gamut from Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the SCI FI channel’s 2002 miniseries Taken. In recent years, we’ve seen a number of channels that traditionally focus on documentary programming take the jump into scripted dramas that draw heavily from history or nature: the Paramount Network is currently airing Yellowstone, the National Geographic Channel created Mars and Genius (and ordered a series based on Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone), the Discovery Channel aired Manhunt: Unabomber and Klondike, while the History Channel has produced Knightfall, Six, and Vikings. Its latest drama, Project Blue Book falls under the same umbrella: a series rooted somewhat in history. It’ll star Aidan Gillen from Game of Thrones and Captain America: First Avenger’s Neal McDonough.
UFO- Sighting forms
In San Diego, our first stop was to file our report to the project’s intake personnel. We were issued clearance badges and sat down in an army tent modeled after those of the 1950s. From there, we were asked to describe our encounter, filling out a standardized form — one that a rep noted was nearly identical to the forms used by Project Blue Book operatives for civilian and military UFO sightings — that was then handed off to a sketch artist. I recounted an experience of being lost in the woods, surrounded by bright lights in the air, before blacking out and waking up surrounded by fire.
From there, we were ushered into a clean room where we were briefed on some of the reports from the project’s vast files: sightings from across the country, just a handful of stories of lights in the skies. Once informed of the various sightings from across the country, we were ushered into a busy facility. White-shirted government agents poured over papers, while a bank of computers lined the opposite wall. We were invited to type out a message, which we were told would be beamed out to space, to try and contact the aliens that we described in our encounters. The activation takes down your phone number, and after the event, I received a text confirming that my message — ALIENS, Y U DO? — had already traveled 10,974,000 miles from Earth.
Exiting the facility, we were approached by a shifty “man in black” type who conspiratorially pulled us aside to stress that we were “not being told the whole truth” by the officials inside, that hundreds of the reports contained in Project Blue Book remain classified to this day, because many just “couldn’t be explained” by the operation. After he let us go, we were handed the illustration that had been drawn up by the earlier room full of agents sketching out the sightings that con-goers had reported to them.
The entire experience wasn’t as extensive as some of the other activations that we’ve seen — like last year’s Westworld and Blade Runner 2049 activations, for example — but they do highlight how companies or studios can bring their projects to life in a neat way. History’s Project Blue Book stood out because it’s not just something that you walk through (though the initial “scanning” process and subsequent viewing room, where real accounts were projected on the walls and accompanied by sound recordings and effects, had a very Disneyland Haunted Mansion vibe): you inject yourself into the story by recounting an experience you really had, or make one up, which is then turned into a neat memento that you can take home after the convention. Source
Lafayette Indiana had its first Recorded'Close Encounter' in 1890s
This encounter was recorded by a Lafayette Indiana repoter back in 1890. It is certainly something to think about. "The strangest experience of my life," said a well known young man in conversation with a Journal representative last evening, "came to me so unexpectedly Saturday evening that it startled me almost out of my wits for a moment.
"I had been out wheeling [bicycling] and was on my way home. I was on the road between Stockwell and Crane, the new name the post office had assigned to Culver station and was treading at a pretty lively pace to get home in time to make a few purchases before the stores closed. "Night had fallen and it must have been between 8 and 9 o'clock. The road was deserted and the only break in the monotony of my lonely ride was the occasional glimpse of a light shining from the window of a farmhouse. "My eyes were bent on the road in front of me and my thoughts were busy with matters common to the thoughts of most young men. I was conscious of the fact that it was dark, that I was alone and that I was moving. Beyond these conditions my mind had but little to do with the materiality of my surroundings. "All at once there was a change in my mental status. I was brought back to a realization of earthly things by an unearthly occurrence. A loud, hissing noise very similar to the escape of steam from a locomotive sounded so near me that I was startled into alertness. I looked for a railroad and the headlight of an engine, expecting to see the latter at my elbow, but saw neither. "Before I could get the engine idea out of my mind my hat was almost lifted from my head by the wind of an object passing over my head. I released my hold on the handlebars of my wheel and threw my hands to catch my hat. Just then my wheel struck a rock or something and I was dismounted in a trice, falling on my back on the road. "As my eyes turned upward they met a sight that made me wish I had fallen into a deep hole with a cover on it. Only a few yards away to my right in a small meadow, I saw the strangest object that any mortal has ever seen. "It looked to me like a perfecto-shaped cigar about 20 feet long and perhaps 8 feet in diameter at the biggest point. Beneath it was a box-shaped arrangement apparently 6 by 3 feet in dimension.
Artist Illustration
"This box or car was suspended from the cigar-shaped arrangement by a network of tubular wires. The cigar-shaped affair was pointing toward me and from the end there flashed a large light whose brilliance seemed to be much more powerful than an electric light. It was a scintillating blaze and different colors came and went with startling rapidity. It was a beautiful thing, but it hurt my eyes and besides, my nerves were so badly upset that I was hardly in a condition to appreciate the beautiful. "Two men were standing on the ground by the side of the strange object and seemed to be busy with several of the wires leading from the lower part of the queer object to the upper part. They spoke occasionally and I heard one remark, 'I wonder where we are?' He spoke with a foreign accent and I thought at the time that he was some French scientist. "His companion replied in excellent English and I supposed he was an American. "I was still lying on the ground on my back and the strangers had not noticed me. I was beginning to recover from my fright and my curiosity was taking its place. Convinced that I was within a few yards of the mysterious airship that has been exciting so much interest and comment, I decided to go to the men and make some inquiries. "I rose hastily to my feet, but at the first step the men saw me, lights flashed from both ends of the cigar-shaped arrangement and in another instant, the object was rising obliquely into the air. It rose like a thing of life and was many hundred feet high before the time elapsed that it takes me to tell it. "I watched it a moment and then rubbed my eyes to assure myself I was awake. Then I picked up my wheel, took a small pull at an amber-colored fluid I had purchased at Lebanon and then I pedaled for home as fast as I could." Source
The disappearance of the UK’s “most spectacular” UFO photo
Hanging on the wall near the British government’s UFO Desk was what one of the men who occupied that desk called “the most spectacular UFO photo ever sent to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).” The photo has since disappeared, but the story of how the picture was obtained, and what it showed, has not.
Nick Pope ran the MoD’s UFO project from 1991 to 1994. When he was first assigned to the position, he was not excited about it. He felt the issue was ridiculous and he was not looking forward to having to deal with a bunch of UFO nuts. However, over the years, Pope found there were credible cases of incredible things, and began to see there was something truly mysterious about the phenomenon. One of the cases that lead him to this conclusion had to do with a photo that was made into a poster that he found hung in the office near his desk when he began working the UFO desk.
“I first came across this story in 1991, when I joined the UFO project,” writes Pope on his website. “A poster-sized enlargement of the best photo was prominently displayed on the office wall.”
“The X-Files first aired in the UK in 1994 and I acquired the same nickname (Spooky) as Fox Mulder, for obvious reasons,” Nick continues. “Mulder famously had his ‘I want to believe’ UFO poster on his office wall and though uncaptioned, I suppose this was my equivalent.”
The photo showed a picture of a large diamond shaped craft with a jet in the background. When he asked about the photo, Pope was told that they had officially determined the image was real. They estimated the craft to have been 25 meters (over 80 feet) in diameter.
However, if asked, they were instructed to answer, “no definite conclusion had been reached regarding the large diamond-shaped object.”
Pope learned that the object had been photographed on August 4, 1990. Two people had been walking near the town of Calvine in Scotland when they spotted the large diamond-shaped object. They described the object as looking metallic. It sat in one position, hovering silently for several minutes before taking off vertically at, as Pope writes, “a massive speed.”
Nick Pope, former MOD UFO investigator
During the sighting, the witnesses also saw a military aircraft that they thought might be a harrier jet, but they were unsure whether the jet was escorting the craft, chasing it, or whether the jet pilot was even aware of the diamond-shaped UFO.
The witnesses had taken several photographs and sent them to the Scottish Daily Recordnewspaper. The paper contacted the MoD, and the MoD was somehow able to convince the paper to hand over the photographs along with the negatives.
” The photos were then sent to the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) who then sent them on to imagery analysts at JARIC (Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre). Yet at the time, MoD hadn’t even publicly acknowledged that there was any intelligence interest in UFOs at all,” Pope explains.
“We implied and sometimes stated that we didn’t ‘investigate’ UFOs, but merely ‘examined sightings to see if anything reported was of any defence interest’ – as if the two were somehow different!”
Pope say the MoD was actually very interested in these cases, but often less interested in where the craft came from than what they could learn from it. They had hoped to identify some sort of technology they would be able to appropriate.
Either way, the Calvine UFO photos impressed the UFO desk investigators enough that they hung the poster in the office.
“At one particularly surreal briefing on the UFO phenomenon my DIS opposite number indicated the photo and pointed his finger to the right: ‘It’s not the Americans’, he said, before pointing to the left and saying ‘and it’s not the Russians.’ There was a pause, before he concluded ‘and that only leaves …’ – his voice trailed off and he didn’t complete the sentence, but his finger was pointing directly upwards,” recalls Pope.
The office where the UFO desk was located also housed other non-UFO related projects.
Pope says the reaction of some colleagues who came to visit unaware of the UFO program had amusing reactions to the poster.
Pope writes, “You’d have this surreal moment when they’d stop mid-sentence, stare at it, point and say ‘what the hell’s that?’ – this wasn’t the archetypal distant, blurred UFO photo. This was up close and personal, reach out and you can touch it stuff. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s not one of ours’ was our stock answer to the inevitable question.”
Eventually, around 1994, Pope says his superior determined the craft was a secret American aircraft or drone. Pope says they had already asked the U.S. if the craft or something similar of theirs was being tested over the UK, and were told they were not. Pope believes his boss had decided to support a potential cover-up by the Americans and the MoD and removed the poster. It was never to be seen again.
Although Pope has discussed these photographs in the media and has posted an article on his website, no one has come forward to claim they took the photos. Nor has anyone at the Scottish Daily Record come forth to discuss any involvement. The case remains a mystery.
How Traveling Back In Time Could Really, Physically Be Possible
The idea of traveling back in time has long fascinated humans, such as in Back To The Future's Delorean DMC-12. After decades of research, we may have hit upon a solution that is physically possible.
It's one of the greatest tropes in movies, literature, and television shows: the idea that we could travel back in time to alter the past. From the time turner in Harry Potter to Back To The Futureto Groundhog Day, traveling back in time provides us with the possibility of righting wrongs in our own past. To most people, it's an idea that's relegated to the realm of fiction, as every law of physics indicates that motion forward through time is an absolute necessity. Philosophically, there's also a famous paradox that seems to indicate the absurdity of such a possibility: if traveling backward through time were possible, you'd be able to go back and kill your grandfather before your parents were ever conceived, rendering your own existence impossible. For a long time, there seemed to be no way to go back. But thanks to some very interesting properties of space and time in Einstein's General Relativity, traveling back in time may be possible after all.
An illustration of the early Universe as consisting of quantum foam, where quantum fluctuations are large, varied, and important on the smallest of scales. Positive and negative energy fluctuations can create minuscule, quantum wormholes.
The place to start is with the physical idea of a wormhole. In our known Universe, we have tiny, minuscule quantum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime on the smallest of scales. These include energy fluctuations in both the positive and negative directions, often very close by one another. A very strong, dense, positive energy fluctuation would create curved space in one particular fashion, while a strong, dense, negative energy fluctuation would curve space in exactly the opposite fashion. If you connected these two curvature regions together, you could — for a brief instant — arrive at the notion of a quantum wormhole. If the wormhole lasted for long enough, you could even potentially transport a particle through it, allowing it to instantly disappear from one location in spacetime and reappear in another.
Exact mathematical plot of a Lorentzian wormhole. If one end of a wormhole is built out of positive mass/energy, while the other is built of negative mass/energy, the wormhole can become traversible
If we want to scale that up, however, to allow something like a human being through, that's going to take some work. While every known particle in our Universe has positive energy and either positive or zero mass, it's eminently possible to have negative mass/energy particles in the framework of General Relativity. Sure, we haven't discovered any yet, but according to all the rules of theoretical physics, there's nothing forbidding it.
If this negative mass/energy matter exists, then creating both a supermassive black hole and the negative mass/energy counterpart to it, while then connecting them, should allow for a traversible wormhole. No matter how far apart you took these two connected objects from one another, if they had enough mass/energy — of both the positive and negative kind — this instantaneous connection would remain. All of that is great for instantaneous travel through space. But what about time? Here's where the laws of special relativity come in.
A "light clock" will appear to run different for observers moving at different relative speeds, but this is due to the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein's law of special relativity governs how these time and distance transformations take place, but it means that the stationary and the moving parties age at different rates.
If you travel close to the speed of light, you experience a phenomenon known as time dilation. Your motion through space and your motion through time are related by the speed of light: the greater your motion through space, the less your motion through time. Imagine you had a destination that was 40 light years away, and you were able to travel at incredibly high speeds: over 99.9% the speed of light. If you got into a spaceship and traveled very close to the speed of light towards that star, then stopped, turned around, and returned back to Earth, you'd find something odd.
Due to time dilation and length contraction, you might reach your destination in only a year and then come back in just another year. But back on Earth, 82 years would have passed. Everyone you know would have aged tremendously. This is the standard way time travel physically works: it takes you into the future, with the amount of travel forward in time-dependent only on your motion through space.
Is time travel possible? With a large enough wormhole, such as one created by a supermassive black hole connected to its negative mass/energy counterpart, it just might be.
But if you construct a wormhole like we just described, the story changes. Imaging one end of the wormhole remains close to motionless, such as remaining close to Earth, while the other one goes off on a relativistic journey close to the speed of light. You then enter the rapidly-moving end of the wormhole after it's been in motion for perhaps a year. What happens?
Well, a year isn't the same for everyone, particularly if they're moving through time and space differently! If we talk about the same speeds as we did earlier, the "in motion" end of the wormhole would have aged 40 years, but the "at rest" end would only have aged by 1 year. Step into the relativistic end of the wormhole, and you arrive back on Earth only one year after the wormhole was created, while you yourself may have had 40 years of time to pass.
Moving close to the speed of light will cause time to pass appreciably differently for the traveler versus the person who remains in a constant frame of reference.
If, 40 years ago, someone had created such a pair of entangled wormholes and sent them off on this journey, it would be possible to step into one of them today, in 2017, and wind up back in time at the mouth of the other one... back in 1978. The only issue is that you yourself couldn't also have been at that location back in 1978; you needed to be with the other end of the wormhole or traveling through space to try and catch up with it.
Warp travel, as envisioned for NASA. If you created a wormhole between two points in space, with one mouth moving relativistically relative to the other, observers at either traversible end would have aged by vastly different amounts.
Satisfyingly, we discover that this form of time travel also forbids the grandfather paradox! Even if the wormhole were created before your parents were conceived, there's no way for you to exist at the other end of the wormhole early enough to go back and find your grandfather prior to that critical moment. The best you can do is to put your newborn father and mother on a ship to catch the other end of the wormhole, have them live, age, conceive you, and then send yourself back through the wormhole. You'll be able to meet your grandfather when he's still very young — perhaps even younger than you are now — but it will still, by necessity, occur at a moment in time after your parents were born.
A great many unusual things become possible in the Universe if negative mass/energy is real, abundant, and controllable, but traveling backward in time might be the wildest one we've ever imagined. Owing to the oddities of both special and general relativity, time travel to the past might not be forbidden after all!
Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and primary writer of Starts With A Bang! His books, Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy, are available wherever books are sold.
Ex-NASA physics professor claims 'many governments' have covered up alien encounters and says humanity must 'face the possibility' UFO sightings really ARE alien craft
A physics professor from University at Albany, State University of New York and former NASA researcher believes there is 'plenty of evidence to support UFOs'
He believes skepticism around UFOs prevents serious scientific research
Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory.
To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect.
On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials.
During the meeting, a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, 'You have absolutely no idea what is out there!'
The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in.
Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast.
At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds.
But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable.
In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs.
A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles.
At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly, there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone.
I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there's plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought-provoking questions.
In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, 'Where is everybody?'
He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets.
Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.
Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy.
Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations?
This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'
The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered up and classified information about such encounters.
A black and white colored video from a 2004 encounter shows fighter jets closing in on an unidentified object (circled red) before it quickly accelerates out of sight
But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified.
UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions.
A declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil. Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008
None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft.
And no aliens have visited Earth.
Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense.
UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can't possibly be true.
But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, 'Why don't astronomers see UFOs?' The fact is that they do.
In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society.
He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock's respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so.
More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
Pictured: An example of a 'UFO' triangle formation that the UK government investigated as part of its report into alien sightings
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope's field of view.
Further sightings are documented in the book 'Wonders in the Sky,' in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs.
Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008.
The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s.
They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs.
Over the course of three online-based studies, researchers at the University of Kent showed strong links between the belief in conspiracy theories and certain psychological traits.
Narcissism and self-esteem levels have a large impact on a persons belief in conspiracy theories.
The results showed that people who rated highly on the narcissism scale and who had low self-esteem were more likely to be conspiracy believers.
However, while low self-esteem, narcissism and belief in conspiracies are strongly linked, it is not clear that one - or a combination - causes the other.
But it hints at an interesting new angle to the world of conspiracy and those who reinforce belief.
There are widely believed to be three main reasons as to why people believe in conspiracy theories.
The desire for understanding and certainty - Seeking explanations for events is a natural human desire.
The desire for control and security - Conspiracy theories can give their believers a sense of control and security.
The desire to maintain a positive self-image - People who feel socially marginalised are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and it gives them a sense of worth in the UFO community.
These three things tie in with the previously stated qualities and combine to create an avid conspiracy theorist.
ran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call 'CIA drones' which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere.
Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs.
Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support.
Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel.
In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets.
Pictured: A 1948 Top Secret US Air Force UFO extraterrestrial document. In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs
While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: 'Disclosure has happened. … I've got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who've come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?'
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology.
While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful.
This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief.
If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent.
Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Tourist Takes Incredible UFO Photo Over Active Volcano
A tourist captured images of a supposed UFO while visiting Costa Rica’s Irazu Volcano National Park in Cartago in 2016
The tourist reported the sighting and sent images to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), an organization that maintains a database of UFO sightings around the world.
According to the witness, he and his girlfriend were taking pictures of the volcano and the landscape shortly after 11 a.m. on February 24th when he unknowingly captured the images.
“The clouds looked like a white sea, but I noticed close to one of the mountains some clouds with different forms, so I started to take pictures there,” the witness states in the report.
Later, while heading home, the man began reviewing his snapshots. “While I was checking the pictures, I noticed one black circle above the mountains I noticed before. It looked like a circular saucer with two little antennas – one on the top of it and like one on its tail. On the moment while taking the pictures, I did not see it. I took the pictures in a burst. On one picture you can see the object completely clear. On the next one, it vanished – almost in seconds. All the pictures have less than one-minute difference,” the tourist reported.
