The Haunted Fence of Tankerton

The Haunted Fence of Tankerton

This is a sighting brought to my attention by Whitstable resident, SB. A haunted fence sounded intriguing so I headed out to Tankerton straight away. On investigation, I found myself in sudden freak weather conditions - was this an attempt by entities to warn me off?
Rain hammered hard on the pavement and was blown by the sea-wind into waves of spray. As the rain passed a rainbow arched through the sky, and my eyes saw the evil in the wooden fence in front of me.

I'm guessing, but could it be that these are the faces of spirits trapped inside the wood of a Witches Hanging Tree*, which is now buzz-sawed into B&Q fence panels? They seem to be animal faces, perhaps Witches familiars? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

ufohunters@rocketmail.com 

Huge Bird Sighting - New Kent Co., Virginia

Huge Bird Sighting - New Kent Co., Virginia

I received the following witness account today (Monday):

On Weds the 22nd of May, this year (last week), I was driving west on New Kent Highway, just before rt 106, in Virginia, around 8:30AM, driving under the speed limit of 45 (yes, I'm one of THOSE people) and I came around a bend and slowed down more because about 30 yards ahead of the car a HUGE bird was in the center of the road, straddling the dotted line with it's back to me.

New Kent is basically a swamp with islands of high ground. Because of the terrain, housing properties are kind of jammed together on "high ground" with lots and lots of alternating hill/steep ravine wooded land of the swampy kind between. We have all kinds of big birds in our area: Bald Eagles, ospreys, herons, turkey vultures, all kinds of hawks, wild turkeys, several kinds of geese, etc. so SEEING a bird in the road~no real surprise.

What made me stop the car 12 ft away from it was the fact the dang thing's head was taller than my hood! I could feel myself starting to grin that grin we do when we just CAN NOT BELIEVE what we are seeing and suspect a joke~ when it opened it's wings. I won't tell you what I said, then (you just use yer imagination).

I was on a 2 lane country road with gravel shoulders. This thing's wingtips were TOUCHING gravel on both sides!!! With two slow motion swoops (my window was down, radio off, and I actually HEARD it's wings pushing the air~it DID make a slow "ssshhwooop" sound), it was up and blotting out EVERYTHING ELSE in my windshield, banked left on a wingtip (LITERALLY completely vertical with a full view with the whole back of it's body) and glided into the woods between the trees. I remember craning my head over the steering wheel and up to see all of it as it banked.

I have NO IDEA how long I sat there in the middle of the road with my mouth open, totally blank, mentally, feeling like I had been slapped silly. The only word that surfaced was "Thunderbird!" Now, like most American kids, I had HEARD of Thunderbirds, but honestly, I had never given a single thought as to what they would look like. But that was the word that surfaced. I supposed, if you had asked me before that day, I would have drawn a Micmac totem pole style thing. THIS was not THAT.

When I finally cruised past where it had cut through the woods, you can BELIEVE I was looking for it. No sign. I immediately called my Man, feeling silly and NOT mentioning what I thought it was, and asked what bird in VA had a 15 ft wingspan (I wasn't brave enough to tell him it was more like 20 ft). He said none. The CA condor, but none here. To his credit, he didn't try to tell me I hadn't seen what I was describing, merely suggested that it may have seemed bigger than it really was due to proximity.

But here's the thing....my Beloved Grandfather was a Mountain man, a lifelong hunter and naturalist. He would take us camping my whole childhood, teaching us about wildlife from up close. He taught me how to estimate an animal's size from surrounding markers. And you can't GET more specific than a road-span. So...what the HECK did I see????

It was dark colored, looked a dark charcoal color while on the road, but it's feathers were a rusty red-brown when it launched into the sunlight. It's tail was a long triangle (with a very slight point on the end/center), like a hawks, it's wings..............................it's wings. Let me just say, it's wings were just unbelievable. I had a hard time looking at both at the same time, I had to look from one to the other. They weren't shaped like a hawk's, more like a sea gulls, if you can picture it. It's body was torpedo shaped, no neck to speak of and a flat head. Due to the angle, I didn't see it's face or beak and when I could see it bank, I was honestly trying to take in the wings and couldn't tell you anything about the shape of the head in flight. Though, I think if it HAD a long neck and extended it in flight, I would've noticed. The impression I got of the legs were "short and stubby" I didn't see the feet.

It's been sitting there, in the back of my mind, bugging the Hell out of me. What was it?? I've been trying to talk myself out of having seen it. I didn't try to look it up, because that would make it "real"...does that make sense? Tonight, I finally decided to try a search on line. "Largest bird in VA", "Wing spans of VA birds"~kind of searches. Nothing to match. The Man, always direct and honest, finally said "Search Thunderbird". Feeling sheepish, I did. Every description of "modern" Thunderbird sightings sounds like what I saw. Go ahead. Laugh. I don't blame you. You weren't there. A week ago, I would have done the same.

Stacy

The weather of late December of 1973 had turned Seattle into a bleak, quasi-frozen mess.  Well over six inches of snowfall had accumulated in the previous week and at this point what started out as a charming winter landscape of fresh, fluffy snow had been churned into a mushy, dirty inconvenience by both positively sure.

I'm not exactly sure what year this abduction took place although I think it was in 1995 during the late fall or early winter.  This was at a period in my life when I was beginning to have full, conscious recall of my encounters with alien beings.  About midnight or a little later I took my new puppy dog out to the back yard to pee and poop.  It was raining and not fun to stand around waiting for Pushka to find the perfect spot, as dogs are inclined to do.  The next thing I remember was ending up in a room full of people -- I'd guess about three to four dozen -- some wearing pajamas, others in night gowns, underwear and some unclothed.  At least I had pulled on some pants to go outside.  For some reason my first impression was that maybe this was a bus station, but there was a lot of moaning and crying coming from the people milling around in a disoriented state.  Many were asking what was going on but nobody, including me, seemed to know.

The lighting in this room was from a limited number of spot lights.  I also recall that there was an area over to one side where people who were too traumatized to even stand upright were placed in a holding pen.  [Actually, now that I think of it, maybe they became violent and were drugged into an unconscious state?]  This area had a lower ceiling and I could see by the ambient light that the roof and walls looked like they were roughly carved out of dark rock.  There were roped off corridors set up in one area of this room to guide the traffic of people in a certain direction, not too different from herding cattle to the slaughter house.  This reticulated flow was toward a doorway that led into another part of the building and one by one the people in this group were taken to this room.  Eventually it was my turn and I stood in front of a human man and a woman who wore white lab coats over black clothing.  Holding a clip board with some kind of attached list, the woman asked me some questions to verify my identity.  She spoke in English and had a stern tone of voice. 

I recall demanding to know what was going on and refused to answer any questions until some of my questions were answered.  This didn't go down too well, and a rather nasty back-and-forth ensued until a tall guy came over and jammed the needle of a hypodermic syringe into my arm.  The next thing I recall was lying flat on my back on an exam table, with my skeletal muscles paralyzed.  I was still somewhat conscious but sedated.  A small screen had been placed just above my waist, effectively making it impossible for me to see what was taking place at the 'business' end of things.  There were bright spot lights illuminating an otherwise dark room and judging by what I saw when I first walked into this room there were several other tables set up with people lying on them.  It was a very strange and frightening situation.

At some point the sedation wore off enough (I inherited a robust liver) that I could begin to vocalize, even though I still didn't have enough muscle control to move my arms or legs.  I let out a trial shriek then let go with one of my customary profanity-laced ululations demanding to know what the f*** was going on.  Apparently this demand surprised the 'doctor' who was doing something to my nether parts and I saw a human head stick out from behind the small partition for a brief moment.  This was quickly replaced by a cardboard cutout of an alien head for me to stare at.   By this time in my life I had been able to recall the appearance of enough Gray aliens and other types to know that this crudely made fake alien was a ruse intended to make me think I had been abducted by aliens, rather than by humans messing around with innocent people.

The next morning I woke up thinking I had a very strange dream about being in a bus or train station with a lot of confused people walking around.  My right arm hurt and I was surprised to see a dark purple colored bruise on my right arm just behind the wrist.  This bruise was the shape and size of a thumb print and my vague recollection was that someone had grabbed my arm in a vice-like grip in order to get me under control and pull me along.

As an aside, I think that somehow in the abduction process my puppy dog, Pushka, was along for the ride, so to speak.  My recall is that I was tired of standing out in the pouring down rain and picked up the dog to take her back inside.  What is interesting, in my estimation, is that since that event she looked up to the sky when airplanes or helicopters flew overhead.  She barked ferociously even at commercial aircraft flying at high altitude.  One of my neighbors noticed this and thought it was unusual for a dog to look up to the sky and bark at aircraft.  For a second or two I thought about saying that my dog and I had been abducted by 'aliens' but decided to change the subject to more prosaic topics.

Streetlamp Interference: A Modern-day Paranormal Mystery

 

Let’s say there’s a row of street lamps you pass every day while going to and from work. They are, being typical, modern street lamps, of the low-pressure sodium-vapor variety, emitting a red glow at start up and, once they’re operating fully, a steady monochrome yellow. The lamps automatically switch on at sundown, via the activation of a light-sensitive cell, or photocell. The cell is triggered again when sunlight returns at dawn, switching the lamps off. Generally, rather than each lamp having its own photocell, a single photocell is used to control a whole group of street lamps.
You’re returning home from work on what has so far been a completely typical evening, the street lamps illuminating your way as you stroll down the footpath. No one else is around. Oddly, the street lamp nearest you suddenly blinks out, turning on again as soon as you’ve passed it. A level-headed person, you attribute the event to coincidence and think no more of it. Three evenings later, however, while passing the same row of lamps, the phenomenon occurs again. On this occasion, three successive lamps are affected, each one blinking out as you approach, only to suddenly blink on again the moment you step away.

What on earth just happened? Did you influence the lamps with the power of your mind? Or is there a mundane explanation for these events?
Known as street lamp Interference (SLI), experiences of this nature are common, with people in many different parts of the world claiming “that they involuntarily, and usually spontaneously, cause street lamps to go out. Generally the effect is intermittent, infrequent and without an immediately discernable sequence of cause and effect.”¹
These are the words of the British paranormal scholar Hilary Evans, who, prior to his death in 2011, was the foremost authority on SLI. (“SLIder” is the term he coined to refer to someone who reports a SLI experience.) In addition to being a pictorial archivist and author of numerous books on the Fortean, he helped found, in 1981, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP). After receiving numerous reports from people claiming that street lamps respond to their presence in an inexplicable fashion, Evans decided to take on the mystery, collecting hundreds of accounts of SLI through his Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange (SLIDE). The culmination of this research – what turned out to be his final book – is the brief yet highly impressive SLIDERS: The Enigma of Street Light Interference (2010). “SLI… can reasonably be regarded as a phenomenon in its own right,” he argued.² 

Frankly, when I first heard of SLI I considered it largely insignificant and boring, regardless of whether or not the phenomenon had a paranormal basis. I hastily concluded that most, if not all, SLI experiences could be accounted for as a result of people perceiving connections that have no basis in reality. For, as everybody knows, street lamps can and do malfunction from time to time, and people are bound to walk past them at the moment these malfunctions occur. After taking a deeper look at the phenomenon, however, I came to the unavoidable conclusion that we’re dealing with a genuine mystery – and, what’s more, an important and fascinating one. I agree with Evans when he says: “If true… claims [of SLI] carry profound and exciting implications for science and for our knowledge of human potential.”³
It’s time we examined some of those claims. Richard M, a professional magician in his thirties who lives in London, England, recalls the moment he became aware of his SLI ability. A teenager at the time, he was taking his dog for a walk when he noticed “that lights were going out when we walked under them and then flickering back on when we had passed.” He continues:
“It didn’t frighten me but I became conscious of it. I remember walking under them trying to make them go out but I couldn’t. The moment I stopped willing it to happen, it would start again – like someone catching me out. I sort of anticipated it for a while and didn’t really tell anyone about it. A few years ago, I noticed it happening again – the first time for a long time. Again, I was with my dog and this time we turned out a number of lights in a car park across the road. I told a close friend when I got home and he came out to watch from the other side of the road. As we walked around the park, they all went out as we passed under them, and then came back on when we had moved away… I seem to recall that both periods coincided with stress, some of it quite intense.”⁴


If SLI involves psychokinesis – or some other form of psi – it figures that the ability would be more inclined to manifest while one is in an abnormal mood or state of consciousness. For, as shown by experiments in parapsychology, our everyday state of consciousness is virtually useless when it comes to psychic functioning. How interesting, then, that the two SLI experiences described by Richard occurred while he was stressed. That a stressed or aroused state of mind encourages SLI ability is suggested by the testimony of a man from Yorkshire, England, referred to as Dan C.
It was early one morning in 1991, when he was nineteen, that Dan’s history of SLI began. He was heading home from his girlfriend’s house, where the two of them had engaged in a steamy “smooching session,” when a street lamp went out as he approached it. At first he attributed the incident to a “dodgy bulb.” However, the lamp did the same thing the following night. When the incident happened a third time, he “started to think something was up.” Further strange incidents with the street lamp followed. Explains Dan: “Over the months, as I returned home from my girlfriend’s house, the light would always do the opposite as to its original state, i.e. if it was off it would turn on and vice versa. After I’d passed the light-post, it would usually revert to its original state…”⁵
As was found to be the case for Richard, Dan discovered that the phenomenon behaved according to its own set of rules, largely resisting his attempts to control it. On one occasion, for example, keen to demonstrate his SLI ability to doubting friends, he made them watch while he approached the street lamp, only to make himself look a fool by failing to duplicate the effect. A number of SLI experiences later, involving not just the one street lamp but several different lamps, Dan became aware of a pattern: the phenomenon generally coincided with his being in a particular state of mind. He describes this as “quite tired, on edge, nervous of my surroundings… and I reckon my adrenaline levels must have been up.” He concludes: “This sort of explains why I couldn’t ‘perform’ in front of my friends, having been in a relaxed situation. I have since shut my friends up as I have shown my ability on more than one occasion.”⁶
There is clearly a connection between sex and SLI. This connection deepens when examined in light of William G. Roll’s recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK) interpretation of poltergeist disturbances. According to the RSPK model, these amazing demonstrations of mind-over-matter – of objects flying around houses and electrical equipment going haywire – occur as a result of sexual and emotional tension on the part of the “focus,” who more often than not is a troubled teenager undergoing puberty. Are the mechanisms at work in poltergeist disturbances the same as those involved in SLI?
That the state of arousal produced by sexual activity plays a role in SLI is nowhere more evident than in the case of Bob Lovely, from Montana, USA. Bob says his SLI ability became especially apparent when, at one point in his life, he was dating a woman who lived across the other side of town from him, to whom he paid frequent evening visits. It was while making these nightly trips that Bob occasionally saw rows of street lamps switch off as he passed them in his car, so that “each lamp I passed would go out as I was passing it.” Most interesting of all, however, is that the phenomenon always occurred on those evenings when he and his girlfriend had had intercourse. “On other evenings some lamps would go out but not like on the ones when our passions had been aroused.”⁷
Whereas some SLIders say they affect only street lamps, other say their ability extends to a whole range of electrical devices, from battery-operated wrist watches to railroad crossings to aircraft navigation equipment. Diana B, an office worker from Texas, USA, belongs to the latter category. Not only do street lamps dim and go out when she approaches them at night, sometimes they also turn on when she approaches them during the day. Regular light bulbs and fluorescent lights also behave oddly in her presence, such as when she goes to a restaurant or enters the home of a friend. There have been occasions, too, when automatic garage doors have suddenly gone haywire on her, opening and closing quickly “in a crazy way.”
According to Diana, her ability to affect electrical devices becomes heightened whenever she’s in a state of excitement or high energy. During these times, she can hold a compass in her hands and the needle will start to spin wildly, coming to a rest the moment she puts the compass down. Handheld tape recorders pose a special problem for Diana, either refusing to record when she wants them to or breaking down altogether. “I went through about 10 of them over a period of a couple of months,” she says. “Once it was so bad it even wiped out what was on the tape.”⁸

Interestingly, countless instances of malfunctioning electrical equipment, involving recording devices especially, have been observed in relation to psychics like Uri Geller and Matthew Manning, as well as in connection with poltergeist disturbances, UFO sightings and even crop circles. Who isn’t familiar with the scenario whereby an enthusiastic investigator attempts to record some form of paranormal activity on film or cassette, only to find that his equipment has suddenly and inexplicably broken down, or, more frustrating still, that the tape came out blank? Much to the gratification of skeptics – who fail to comprehend that paranormal events are, by their very nature, as slippers as subatomic particles, resisting all attempts to be pinned down – such occurrences are a matter of course.

In terms of what’s known about the human body by contemporary, orthodox science, Diana’s strange talent shouldn’t exist, and therefore she must be either lying or deluded. But if such is the case, why have so many others come forward with similar claims, most of them perfectly normal human beings? Many of those who contacted Evans to inform him of their SLI experiences had never heard of the phenomenon until coming across his research, previously considering their ability unique or doubting their own sanity. To quote one SLIder: “I couldn’t believe this was a phenomenon that others shared with me. I just thought I was nuts…”⁹
There are indications that SLI has a physical, measurable component, and that even the run-of-the-mill physicist or biologist would be able to make some headway into penetrating the mystery. For instance, some SLIders, including Diana, have a tendency to accumulate (or perhaps generate within the body itself) a high static charge. She explains: “I… can get very charged with static electricity, so much so that sparks actually fly around me and if anyone else is close by the sparks will connect with them.” Similar comments from other SLIders include, “I build up static electricity like crazy,” and “I seem to get more static shocks than other people.”¹⁰
Of course, not all SLIders have issues with static electricity, and while it’s true that someone with a high static charge has the potential to interfere with electrical equipment, they cannot do so from a distance; only by means of contact. That a statically charged person would be able to influence a street lamp mounted high above them is therefore extremely unlikely. And let us not forget that some incidents of SLI occur while the individual is seated in their car, a car being a crude form of Faraday cage, blocking static and non-static electric fields. One needn’t be a scientist to realize that the phenomenon is hard to account for in terms of electromagnetism alone, and must therefore involve some other form of energy – perhaps what the Taoists call “chi,” or what Wilhelm Reich dubbed “orgone.”
Speculation aside, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that at least some incidents of SLI can be attributed to entirely mundane causes, a combination of mechanical and psychological factors. Skeptics of SLI are keen to point out that when the bulbs in sodium-vapor street lamps reach the end of their life they undergo a phenomenon known as “cycling,” switching on and off every few minutes until a technician comes along and replaces the bulb. It can also happen that the bulb becomes slightly dislodged from its socket, so that even a minor vibration – such as that caused by a passing car or a person – is enough to make the lamp blink out for a moment.
Richard Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, England, was asked to give his opinion on SLI for the Daily Mail newspaper. A dedicated member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), he cited “observer bias” as the culprit, stating that “street lamps are going on and off all the time… People only have to walk under a couple of lamps going off to think that they might be the cause.”¹¹
Had Wiseman looked at the evidence properly, he’d realize that observer bias is not the whole story. When we eliminate this and other obvious explanations for SLI, we’re left with an exciting possibility: that the phenomenon is due to psychokinesis. Evans discusses this notion in his book, suggesting that some kind of “force” is at work when a SLIder influences a street lamp. He explains that street lamps are designed in such a way as to be protected from operating at too high a voltage, whereby a cut off switch is triggered the moment the voltage reaches a certain level. The lamp will remain off until reactivated the following evening. A similar scenario occurs when the voltage drops below a certain level. Evans puts forward an intriguing theory: that the “force” at work in SLI operates by affecting the voltage of the current, most likely by causing a surge in voltage that triggers the lamp’s internal cut off switch.
“To perform this feat,” he speculates, “SLI would have to be an electro-dynamic force, somehow generated within or through the human biological system, and somehow externalised into the neighbouring environment, where it will act on any appliance which happens to be vulnerable.”

Witness: Flying Ray-Shaped Cryptid - Atascocita, Texas

Witness: Flying Ray-Shaped Cryptid - Atascocita, Texas

I recently received the following information:

My husband & I were grilling out in our backyard one Sunday afternoon approx. 5pm a month ago, when a pacific blue (in color) stingray looking bird flew over our home. Must of been 1 1/2 - 2' in length and width.

We were actually sitting and conversating when it caught our attention. It looked down at us and continued flying. We live in Atascocita, TX. We were in shock as we've never seen anything like it before. We both looked at each other and a couple seconds later asked "what the heck was that?"

It disappeared into trees and have not seen it since.

NOTE: this location is near a large body of water (Lake Houston)...similar to the incident in Laredo (Lake Casa Blanca). Is it possible that these cryptids / beings are somehow able to live in water and fly over land? An amphibious bird? I appreciate any sighting reports or encounters related to this phenomena...Lon

-----

This is the 2nd sighting of a flying ray-shaped cryptid in Texas in 2013...previously seen in Laredo, TX:

I was driving home to my house at 1:20PM when I came across this stingray grayish-white looking thing flying over my car - coming from the lake we have here in Laredo, Texas going into the golf course next to it. It was roughly 3 feet wide - maybe bigger and it had a glide to it - no wings, just looked like a stingray - literally. It passed about 30 ft. in front of me and I watched it for about 10 seconds. It looked as if it was swimming, but flying. What could this creature be? I'm kinda freaked out by this. I jumped on the internet as soon as I got home and thank gosh, I'm not the only one. AR

I contacted the witness for further information which I added to the initial report. This is the first flying ray-shaped cryptid report I have received from Texas. It seems the sighting was between the Casa Blanca Country Club and Lake Casa Blanca located in east Laredo, TX. The witness was driving north / northest on Rt. 20. I have been researching this phenomena for several years and mentioned in my book  as well. Below are links to the other sightings previously reported to me:

Winged Manta Ray Shaped Cryptid - Near Ashton, WV - 12/3/2004

Additional Ray-Shaped Cryptid Sightings in WV Ohio River Valley Revealed

Flying Translucent Ray-Shaped Cryptid - Hampton Bays, New York

New 'Flying White Sting Ray' Sighting - Hebron, Kentucky - 1/25/2012

New Flying Manta Ray Sighting - Lynchburg, VA

Reader Submission: New 'Flying Manta-Ray' Sighting - Jordan, Minnesota

NOTE: There were 2 reports of a large leather-winged 'V' shaped bird in Spring, Texas...but the reports differed from the others. I'd appreciate any followup the readers could provide:

Argentina: Remotely- Guided UFOS Threaten Highways in Buenos Aires

Argentina: Remotely- Guided UFOS Threaten Highways in Buenos Aires

Source: I CANNOT TELL - RON P MILIONE - IT'S A SECRET
Date: 05.14.13

Argentina: Remotely-Guided UFOS Threaten Highways in Buenos Aires

To the south of La Plata, these devices pursue cars or appear out of thin air in the midst of the river, shoulders or cattle troughs to startle drivers and fishermen alike.

A wide area bordered by the Bay of Sanborombón and Route 2 to the south of La Plata have turned into a pole of attraction for the same UFO phenomenon that researchers have associated with the “activity of remotely guided luminous probes” – a miracle of nanotechnology – and which have allegedly caused accidents on roads and highways in the area in question.

In fact, reports and records kept by the Fundación Argentina de Ovnilogía (FAO) disclose a rich case history provided by direct witnesses to the encounters produced by these luminous devices which are apparently “research devices pursuing cars, or appear out of thin air in the midst of the river, shoulders or cattle troughs to startle drivers and fishermen alike.”

Luis Burgos, director of FAO, considers that the sphere of influence of these probes is potentially rich in sightings, landing traces and even humanoid encounters. It is for this reason he dubs this broad geographic extension as a vast UFO nest, and particularly, in this case, for probes.

Burgos told Más Allá del Misterio: “Out of 1500 cases attributable to UFOs, recorded in the entire country, a third – that is to say, 500 – occurred in this great expanse.”

“This unquestionably shows us that we are faced with the great Argentinean saucer nest,” maintains the researcher. The proliferation of these probes, ranging in size from that of a tennis ball to a spare tire, has acquired disquieting aspects: they have caused several accidents on highways, superhighways and roads crisscrossing this surface.

According to the ufologist, a member of RADIO (Red Argentina de Investigaciones Ovni): “Many reports have taken place in recent years. We consider these probes to be remotely-guided objects engaged in exploratory activity and which, for reasons unknown, pursue vehicles driving along the roads.” In certain cases they engage in mysterious maneuvers that place drivers in jeopardy.
The FAO, stressed Burgos, has in its possession one of the most striking recent cases, involving a driver ferrying passengers from Mar de Ajó in his microbus, who suddenly found himself escorted by a small, fluorescent green sphere.

“The case involving Horacio Riquelme, the driver in question, is among the most attractive due to the situation occurring on Route 11 in the vicinity of Pipinas, an hour before midnight,” notes Burgos.

On this occasion, the luminous sphere appeared first on the sides of the microbus, flying alongside it for a few minutes. It then gained speed, passing the vehicle to stop in mid-air in the center of the highway, about a thousand meters ahead. At this point, as one can imagine, Riquelme and his passengers became aware that they faced a phenomenon that was hard to explain.

After being suspended for a brief period of time, the probe flew in a direction opposite to that of the microbus, and when it appeared about ready to crash into the vehicle, flew over it and vanished at a startling speed that was hard to estimate.

“The remarks made by the driver and the passengers involved the possibility of having faced something they associated with a laser beam, or even one of the classic green-colored road signs that suddenly acquired incredible mobility,” the FAO director pointed out.

High-Risk Area

While the microbus event had no further outcome than the shock felt by the witnesses to the event, and which startles them to this day, Burgos notes the existence of other cases involving motorists who wound up on the shoulder, or with their car at an angle on the road, after becoming the focus of these probes, which are now very dangerous in the light of these circumstances.
The first of such accidents took place in 1983, when a businessman from La Plata, now deceased, was chased some 80 km along Route 11 by what the driver defined as a “a yellow soccer ball” that emerged from the roadside as if by magic.

“The problem with this story is that after 80 hours of stressful driving on account of this strange presence, the businessman returning from Villa Gesell lost control of the car, which wound up on the curb,” stated Burgos.

Regarding the question of what is behind these probes, Burgos replied: “Everything suggests a remotely guided UFO with limited flight endurance, which would explain its appearance and disappearance in a matter of minutes. But who or what controls them is still part of a deep mystery.”

From La Mala Luz to You Foo Fighters

Among the analyses conducted by FAO on manifestations of the UFO probe phenomenon is that many of these events were retold by rural residents within the concept of what is known as “la luz mala” (the evil light).

Luis Burgos put forth an event that occurred last January, far from the “great Argentinean UFO nest” area, in Añatuya, Santiago del Estero, where two young people traveling on a motorcycle on a lonely road claim being shocked by a powerful and strange light that caused them to fall out of their two-wheeled vehicle.
In historical terms, Burgos also made reference to “foo fighters”, which followed the air missions of Allied and Nazi pilots during World War II.

The Monte Grande Enigma is Among Them

Luis Burgos is convinced that the 26 September 2011 explosion in the locality of Monte Grande, which killed one woman, destroyed three homes and was attributed by authorities to the explosion of “a domestic pizza hoven”, was in fact nothing more than an accident or self-caused destruction of one of these probes. “To us, what really occurred is not the official version, or the likelihood of a missile or meteorite. We believe that it was a probe that malfunctioned, struck a lamp post, and self-destructed.”

(Translation © 2013, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Guillermo Giménez, Planeta UFO)

Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted by Extraterrestrials?

A prestigious Harvard psychiatrist, John Edward Mack, thought so. His sudden death leaves behind many mysteries.

Courtesy of Anne Ramsey Cuvelier (house), courtesy of JPL-Caltech/UCLA/NASA (cosmos), courtesy of the family of John E. Mack (Mack).

Anne Ramsey Cuvelier’s Victorian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, where, once a year, alien experiencers gather and exchange stories. Inset, John Edward Mack at Harvard University, where he earned his medical degree in 1955.

If you’re abducted by alien beings, are you physically absent?
This happens to be an important issue for the media-shy people gathered one afternoon last July on the porch of Anne Ramsey Cuvelier’s blue Victorian inn on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, once called “the most elegantly finished house ever built in Newport.” Co-designed in 1869 by a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, it has been in Cuvelier’s family since 1895, when her great-grandfather bought it as a summer getaway from his winter home blocks away, just as the Gilded Age cottages of the Vanderbilts and Astors began springing up across the island, redefining palatial extravagance. Still imposing with its butternut woodwork, ebony trimmings, and four-story paneled atrium frescoed in the Pompeian style, the harborside mansion turned B&B seemed a fittingly baroque setting for the group of reluctant guests Cuvelier describes as “not a club anyone wants to belong to.”
She had gathered them to compare experiences as, well, “experiencers,” a term they prefer to “abductees,” and to socialize free of stigma among peers. Cuvelier, an elegant and garrulous woman in her 70s, isn’t one of them. But she remembers as a teen in the 1940s hearing her father, Rear Admiral Donald James Ramsey, a World War II hero, muttering about strange flying craft that hovered and streaked off at unimaginable speed, and she’s been an avid ufologist ever since. “I want to get information out so these people don’t have to suffer,” she says. “Nobody believes you. You go through these frightening experiences, and then you go through the ridicule.”
So, for a week each summer for almost two decades, she’s been turning away paying guests at her family’s Sanford-Covell Villa Marina, on the cobblestoned waterfront in Newport, to host these intimate gatherings of seemingly ordinary folk with extraordinary stories, along with the occasional sympathetic medical professional and scientist and other brave or foolhardy souls not afraid to be labeled nuts for indulging a fascination with the mystery. I had been invited as a journalist with a special interest who has been talking to some of them for several years.

© Bettmann/CORBIS.

© Splash News/Corbis.

Top, Betty and Barney Hill pose with John G. Fuller’s book The Interrupted Journey, which chronicles the 1961 abduction that the two say they experienced. Above, a plaque in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, commemorating the Hills’ experience as “the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.”

Perched on a wicker settee was Linda Cortile, a mythic figure in the canons of abduction literature, whom I’d come to know by her real name, Linda Napolitano. A stylish young grandmother in a green T-shirt, black shorts, and a charcoal baseball cap, she had agreed to meet me months before at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport to point at her 12th-floor window overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, where, she says, one night in 1989 three small beings levitated her “like an angel” into a hovering craft in view of horrified witnesses, including, it was said, a mysterious world figure who might have been abducted with her. “If I was hallucinating,” she told me, “then the witnesses saw my hallucination. That sounds crazier than the whole abduction phenomenon.”
The short-haired Florida woman in white capris and a fuchsia flowered blouse was, like Cuvelier, not herself an abductee but the niece of two and the co-author of a book on the first widely publicized and most famous abduction case of all. Kathleen Marden, the director of abduction research for the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, one of the oldest and largest U.F.O.-investigating groups, was 13 in 1961, when her aunt and uncle Betty and Barney Hill returned from a trip through the White Mountains of New Hampshire with the stupefying tale of having been chased by a giant flying disc that hovered over the treetops. They said they had stopped for a look with binoculars, spotted humanoid figures in the craft and, overcome with terror, sped away with their car suddenly enveloped in buzzing vibrations. They reached home inexplicably hours late and afterward recovered memories of having been taken into the ship and subjected to frightening medical probes. Their car showed some peculiar markings, and Betty’s dress had been ripped, the zipper torn. She remembered that the aliens had fumbled with her zipper before disrobing her for a pregnancy test with a needle in her navel. I was surprised to hear from Marden (but confirmed it) that the garment is preserved at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.
Also present was Barbara Lamb, a tanned and gold-coiffed psychotherapist and family counselor from Claremont, California, who studies crop circles, the enigmatic patterns left in fields, often in England, and practices regression therapy, treating personality disorders by taking people back to previous lives. She told me what she remembered happened to her about seven years earlier: “I was walking through my home and there was standing this reptilian being. It was three in the afternoon. I was alert and awake. I was startled somebody was there.” Ordinarily, Lamb said, she is repulsed by snakes and lizards, “but he was radiating such a nice feeling. I went right over and had my hand out. He was taller than I, this close to me”—she held her hands a foot apart—“with yellow reptile eyes. Then he was suddenly gone.” She said she had recalled more of the encounter when a colleague put her through hypnotic regression. “He said telepathically, ‘Ha, Barbara, good, good. Now you know that we are actually real. We do exist and have contacts with certain people.’”
Chatting with this group were two astrophysicists from a leading institution and the director of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital Southeast. I was intrigued by these eminent outsiders, who may have been risking their careers.
But I was interested most of all in the dead man who remained an icon to many on the porch. John Edward Mack, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, spent years trying to fathom their stories and reached an astonishing conclusion: they were telling the truth. That is, they were not insane or deluded; in some unknown space/time dimension, something real had actually happened to them—not that Mack could explain just what or how. But weeks after attending the 2004 Newport gathering, days before his 75th birthday, he looked the wrong way down a London street and stepped in front of a drunk driver.
Aside from those of his circle and university colleagues, Mack is scarcely known today. But 20 years ago, when he burst onto the scene as the Harvard professor who believed in alien abduction, he was probably the most famous, or infamous, academic in America, “the most important scientist ever to dare to admit the truth about the abduction phenomenon,” in the words of Whitley Strieber, whose best-selling memoir, Communion, introduced millions of Americans to alien encounters.
Tall, impulsive, and magnetic to women and men, Mack was everywhere, or so it seemed—on Oprah and Nova; on the best-seller lists; in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time; at his Laurance S. Rockefeller–supported Program for Extraordinary Experience Research; in scholarly journals, documentaries, poems, theater pieces, and Roz Chast cartoons. And then suddenly he was under investigation at Harvard, the target of a grueling inquisition. “I didn’t think people would believe me,” Mack had confided to his longtime assistant, Leslie Hansen, who was in Newport last July. “But I didn’t think they’d get so mad.” In the end he achieved a measure of vindication, but his freakish demise denied him a final reckoning in an unpublished manuscript he saw as his cri de coeur against scientific materialism and “ontological fascism.”
He left behind another unpublished manuscript, with another mystery he was seeking to unravel, a secret as dark as death itself. And now his interrupted journey may be heading to the big screen. After a four-year negotiation, the film and television rights to Mack’s story were granted by the Mack family to MakeMagic Productions, which has partnered with Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, and a major feature film is currently in development. But two decades after Mack took alien abduction from the pages of the National Enquirer to the hallowed halls of Harvard, the question remains: why would a pillar of the psychiatric establishment at America’s oldest university court professional suicide to champion the most ridiculed and tormented outcasts of society?
On Cuvelier’s porch, a Vermont shopkeeper who wanted to be known as “Nona”—the way Mack identified her in Passport to the Cosmos, his 1999 follow-up to Abduction—remembered filling 300 pages with “abduction recollections,” which Mack struggled to accept as real. Had she actually traveled on shafts of crystalline light? “John, I know when I’m physically gone,” she remembered replying. “I know when I’m going through a wall.” Mack had had one nagging disappointment, Nona recalled. He had never undergone an abduction, or even spied a U.F.O. Why can’t I see one?, he wondered. Nona would twit him. “Probably because you’re not patient enough, John.”
‘I was raised as the strictest of materialists,” Mack told the writer C. D. B. Bryan. “I believed we were kind of alone in this meaningless universe, on this sometimes verdant rock with these animals and plants around, and we were here to make the best of it, and when we’re dead, we’re dead.” A great-grandfather of his had pioneered the use of anesthetics in eye surgery, and a great-uncle had been one of the first Jewish professors at Harvard Medical School. His father, Edward, was a noted literary biographer and scholar at the City College of New York who had remarried a widow with a young daughter after his wife died of peritonitis eight months after John was born. John’s socially prominent stepmother, Ruth Prince, was an eminent feminist economist and New Dealer whose first husband, a great-grandson of the founder of Gimbels department store, had jumped or fallen from the 16th floor of the Yale Club as the Great Depression deepened.

Courtesy of the family of John E. Mack.

John Edward Mack with his then wife, Sally, and their first child, Daniel, in Japan, 1960.

Mack graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School and, while only a resident, founded one of the nation’s first outpatient hospitals. He took his social-worker bride, Sally, to an Air Force posting in Japan and, once home, introduced psychiatric services to incarcerated youths and impoverished nursery schoolers. He started the first psychiatric department at Cambridge hospital, winning a prize for a study of childhood nightmares, a field he would explore further in his first book, Nightmares and Human Conflict. His second book, a groundbreaking psychological study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1977. He traveled in the Middle East, lecturing on the Arab-Israeli conflict and going on “bomb runs,” traveling from city to city warning what would happen if a one-mega-ton bomb exploded overhead, and getting arrested with his family at nuclear-test sites. He cornered Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb then pressing President Reagan for a Star Wars nuclear-weapons shield in space. Teller denounced peacenik physicians and told Mack: “If you are not in the pay of the Kremlin, you’re even more of a fool.” After the cold war ended, Mack studied consciousness expansion with Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born psychoanalyst who had experimented with L.S.D. Grof and his wife, Christina, had developed a breathing discipline called Holotropic Breathwork to induce an expanded state of consciousness. In one breathwork session with Russians at California’s Esalen Institute, Mack recounted that he became, “a Russian-father in the 16th century whose four-year-old son was being decapitated by Mongol hordes.’’ He owed a lot to the Grofs, Mack later said. “They put a hole in my psyche, and the U.F.O.’s flew in.”

Courtesy of the family of John E. Mack.

Mack, at left, performs an autopsy as a student at Harvard Medical School, 1951.

They flew in with a man named Budd Hopkins.
It was January 10, 1990, Mack recalled, “one of those dates you remember that mark a time when everything in your life changes.” A woman he had met at the Grofs’ introduced him to Hopkins, a nationally known New York Abstract Expressionist and intimate of Willem DeKooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell, whose works hung with his in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Whitney. According to Hopkins, he had spotted a U.F.O. on Cape Cod in 1964, and he went on to investigate the case of a badly shaken neighbor who had reported seeing a spaceship with nine or ten small beings land in a park near Fort Lee, New Jersey. Hopkins wrote a story about it for The Village Voice that was picked up by Cosmopolitan. He was soon being thronged by abductees, whom he examined under hypnosis, and he would win renown as the father of the alien-abduction movement, starting with his book Missing Time, in 1981, and its 1987 sequel, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods.
Hopkins was then beginning his investigation of the so-called Brooklyn Bridge U.F.O. abduction of the woman he called Linda Cortile, which would become his third book, Witnessed, in 1996. It would involve two security guards for an international figure Hopkins never named but believed to be U.N. secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, who, Hopkins would conclude, appeared to have been abducted with her. (I had a local reporter in Lima ask the 92-year-old retired Peruvian diplomat directly about the matter in April 2012. He responded enigmatically, saying, “I’m not interested in those types of curiosities.” Asked if he recalled being questioned by Hopkins, Pérez de Cuéllar, who was in the process of updating his 1997 memoirs, said, “I don’t remember, but it is possible. I can’t assure it nor deny it. My memory at this age fails me.”)
Hopkins gave Mack a box of letters from people reacting to aliens. “I think most of these people are perfectly sane, with real experiences,” Hopkins recalled telling Mack when I visited him in his art-filled Chelsea town house shortly before his death of cancer at 80, in August 2011. But, he added, Mack could decide for himself. He was the doctor.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”
As he later said, “These individuals reported being taken against their wills sometimes through the walls of their houses, and subjected to elaborate intrusive procedures which appeared to have a reproductive purpose. In a few cases they were actually observed by independent witnesses to be physically absent during the time of the abduction. These people suffered from no obvious psychiatric disorder, except the effects of traumatic experience, and were reporting with powerful emotion what to them were utterly real experiences. Furthermore these experiences were sometimes associated with UFO sightings by friends, family members, or others in the community, including media reporters and journalists, and frequently left physical traces on the individuals’ bodies, such as cuts and small ulcers that would tend to heal rapidly and followed no apparent psychodynamically identifiable pattern as do, for example, religious stigmata. In short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.”
With the new millennium, Mack began showing up at Newport, Leslie Hansen remembered. She had been hired to help Mack transcribe recordings of his sessions, and she came to believe in the process that she had buried her own troubling childhood memories of aliens at her bedside. Mack’s household was in turmoil. Sally was unhappy with Mack’s treatment sessions in the house, especially the screams. Mack was also deeply in love with his research associate, Dominique Callimanopulos, the glamorous daughter of the Greek shipping tycoon who owned Hellenic Lines. “John had a lot going on, but he was kind of like a child,” Hansen recalled. “He kind of regarded every person as a fresh slate.” And, she added, “he was very attractive.” Hansen had heard about Cuvelier’s gatherings, and she invited him to attend. Mack was dubious. “What’s this going to cost me?,” he asked. Hansen laughed. “John,” she said, “you’re a guest.”
Two years after meeting Hopkins, Mack was working with dozens of experiencers, and one day he told incredulous fellow psychiatrists at Cambridge Hospital about alien abduction. In 1992 he and David E. Pritchard, a pioneering physicist in atom optics at M.I.T., got that institution to open its doors to a revolutionary alien-abduction conference. Mack presented his findings, as did Hopkins and David M. Jacobs, an associate professor of history at Temple University who was teaching the nation’s only fully accredited college course on U.F.O.’s, and who had just published a provocative book detailing alien encounters, called Secret Life. C. D. B. Bryan, the author of the best-seller Friendly Fire, was among a few select writers invited, for another book, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, which Knopf would publish in 1995.
“If what these abductees are saying is happening to them isn’t happening,” Mack demanded, “what is?”
Conferees argued over the validity of a poll done by the Roper Organization for the hotel and aerospace mogul and U.F.O. advocate Robert T. Bigelow that sought for the first time to quantify alien abduction in America. Because few were likely to admit to being an abductee, the pollsters asked the 5,947 respondents if they had ever experienced five key abduction-type symptoms: waking up paralyzed with the sense of a strange presence or person in the room, missing time, feeling a sensation of flying, seeing balls of light in the room, and finding puzzling scars. (A trick question asked if “Trondant” held any secret meaning for them. Anyone who answered yes to the nonsense word was eliminated as unreliable.) Two percent of the respondents, or 119 people, acknowledged at least four of the five experiences, which Roper said translated to 3.7 million adult Americans. At a minimum, Hopkins reported, the results suggested that 560,000 adult Americans might be abductees.

© Stuart Conway.

Mack, a year before his death, with Budd Hopkins, the American artist and abduction researcher, at the International U.F.O. Congress Awards in 2003.

The beings didn’t have to come from outer space, Mack theorized, maybe just a parallel universe. But by the time he wrote Abduction, he said his cases had “amply corroborated” the work of Hopkins and Jacobs, “namely that the abduction phenomenon is in some central way involved in a breeding program that results in the creation of alien/human hybrid offspring.” He concluded furthermore that the aliens were carrying warnings about dangers to the planet; almost all of his abductees emerged with “a commitment to changing their relationship to the earth.”
Some respected colleagues, asked to comment on his manuscript, were dismayed. Anyone could espouse alien abduction, but Mack was a renowned Harvard professor. “Can I believe any of this?,” wrote the editor of a psychiatry journal who turned down publication even though all of the peer reviewers urged it. An eminent Harvard ethicist and philosopher responded: “Clearly you cannot easily go ahead with publication so long as you do not have more incontrovertible evidence.” Even Hopkins called Mack “gullible.”
Indeed, Mack soon stepped into a minefield, adding to his circle of abductees a 37-year-old Boston writer who intrigued him with a bizarre tale of being taken into a spaceship with Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Then, saying she was a double agent out to expose Mack’s U.F.O. cult, the woman, Donna Bassett, supplied tapes of her sessions to Time, which ambushed Mack with the hoax, calling him “The Man from Outer Space.” Mack countered that Bassett had a troubled history at his office, but the betrayal stung. The Boston Globe followed up with a gleeful headline: ALIENS LAND AT HARVARD!
Undaunted, Mack appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with five of his lucid, articulate, and normal-acting abductees. “He believes them when they say they have been on the aliens’ spaceships,” declared Oprah. “And Dr. Mack believes them, he says, when they say that they have had children with aliens.” Mack put it differently. “Every other culture in history except this one, in the history of the human race, has believed there were other entities, other intelligences in the universe,” he said. “Why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they’re crazy, humiliate them, if they’re experiencing some other intelligence?”
Harvard had had enough. In June 1994 it convened a confidential inquest under a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, Professor Emeritus Arnold Relman. “If these stories are believed as literal factual accounts,” Relman wrote Mack, “they would contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.” Some went further, accusing Mack of ushering in a new dark age of superstition and magic.
Mack recruited a potent legal team: Daniel P. Sheehan, of the Christic Institute, who had helped to uncover the Iran-Contra drugs-for-arms deals of the Reagan administration and had represented Karen Silkwood’s family in their successful lawsuit against the Kerr-McGee nuclear power plant, and Roderick “Eric” MacLeish, former general counsel of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who was to achieve fame for exposing sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Boston.
Experiencers who had appeared on Oprah with Mack testified for him. Peter Faust, an acupuncturist in his 30s, told of having been recognized on a spaceship by another abductee and of possibly having been an alien himself in a previous lifetime.
And then, as if scripted for dramatic timing, BBC journalist Tim Leach in Zimbabwe called Mack’s office about a flurry of U.F.O. sightings. Mack and his research partner Callimanopulos flew off to investigate a report that on September 14, 1994, a large, saucer-shaped spacecraft and several smaller craft had landed or hovered near a schoolyard in Ruwa, 40 miles northeast of Harare.
The children told Mack and Callimanopulos on tape that the beings had large heads, two holes for nostrils, a slit for a mouth or no mouth at all, and long black hair, and were dressed in dark, single-piece suits. “I think it’s about something that’s going to happen,” said one little girl. “What I thought was maybe the world’s going to end. They were telling us the world’s going to end.”

Poll: Continued belief in JFK conspiracy!!!!!!!

The Kennedys' motorcade drives through downtown Dallas Nov. 22, 1963, moments before the shooting of President John F. Kennedy. / Bettmann/Corbis

A clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind President John F. Kennedy's assassination, but the percentage who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-1960s, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.
Cheryl Casati, 62, who retired from the Air Force after 20 years, watched it all unfold on television back in November 1963. She said she's "extremely sure" there was a conspiracy. The killing of Oswald, the accused shooter, just days after the assassination is part of the reason why.

"There's too many holes in explanations," the Phoenix-area woman said. "That just could not have happened easily in that time and place. And (Jack) Ruby shooting (Oswald) could not have happened as easily as it did."

Pat Sicinski sees it differently. She and her husband recently visited the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Looking out the sixth-floor window from which Oswald allegedly fired on Kennedy's motorcade helped reaffirm the retired school employee's faith in the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman.

"Some skepticism is always justified," the 68-year-old Houston-area woman said. "I just think when people take it to extremes, they lose me."

According to the AP-GfK survey, conducted in mid-April, 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, and 16 percent are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.
The Oswald-acted-alone results, meanwhile, are the highest since the period three years after the assassination, when 36 percent said one man was responsible for Kennedy's death.
Robert Mawyer of Blairsville, Ga., is one of them. The 44-year-old IT salesman recently finished reading Bill O'Reilly's "Killing Kennedy." Assuming all of that information is correct, he has no problem accepting that Oswald went solo.

"The Warren Commission says that's what happened, so I tend to believe that, I guess," he said. But, he added, "I don't suppose anybody can be completely positive."

Jon Genova is positive that no one person could have pulled off this crime.

"There are just a number of factors that don't seem to zero out in my mind," the 46-year-old Denver mechanical engineer said. "How some evidence seemed to be suppressed, and the results are sealed for how many years? And the fact that ... it just seemed like the whole political winds change at the point when Kennedy was assassinated. It just seemed as if he was probably an impediment."
Those who were adults in 1963 were almost as likely as younger Americans to say that Kennedy's killing was a conspiracy involving multiple people — 55 percent, compared to 61 percent.
As for who might have been behind a conspiracy, Genova's money is on the Central Intelligence Agency. Casati, who wouldn't divulge her rank or military occupation, was a little more circumspect.
"I will tell you that Jack Kennedy was too much of his own person," she said. "And he made decisions that were not popular with some agencies, as far as I'm concerned."

The Associated Press-GfK Poll was conducted April 11-15, 2013 by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cellphone interviews with 1,004 adults nationwide. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

UFOs Disabling Nuclear Missiles: Former Senator Says Veterans' Testimony is the "Smoking Gun" Confirming a U.S. Government Cover-up!

ABSOLUTELY IT IS - Ron Milione

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following was released today by Robert Hastings:

In an interview with ABC News/Yahoo! News last Friday, former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) said statements by U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch officers--regarding mysterious aerial objects interfering with the functionality of American ICBMs--make clear that top government officials are lying to the public when they claim to have no knowledge of national security-related UFO incidents.
Gravel first gained national recognition in 1971, by placing the still-classified Pentagon Papers--which documented U.S. government malfeasance during the Vietnam War--into the public record.
Gravel said the revelations by former/retired Captains Robert Salas, Bruce Fenstermacher, and David Schindele, as well as retired Security Policeman Sgt. David Scott, are "the smoking gun of the whole issue" of government secrecy on UFOs.

The interview may be viewed at http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players-abc-news/former-sen-mike-grave l-says-white-house-suppressing-112957111.html?vp=1

On September 27, 2010, Captain Salas co-hosted the "UFOs and Nukes" press conference with noted researcher Robert Hastings, during which seven USAF veterans revealed ongoing UFO activity at U.S. nuclear weapons sites during the Cold War era. That media event was extensively and favorably covered by hundreds of news organizations worldwide, including CNN, which streamed the proceedings live.
The full-length video of the press conference appears at http://www.ufohastings.com/.
The latest testimony--about UFOs knocking ICBMs offline--was heard by Senator Gravel and five other former members of congress at the "Citizen Hearing on Disclosure" organized by Stephen Bassett at the National Press Club last week.

Hastings decided not to participate in that event, saying, "It's unfortunate that Bassett chose to mingle the highly credible testimony of the missile launch officers, and the missile security guard, with questionable claims made by some of the other witnesses at the hearing. That is counter-productive if one is attempting to educate the public about the UFO reality and undercuts the legitimacy of the Disclosure process that he supposedly wants to bring about."

Hastings has interviewed over 140 U.S. military veterans regarding their involvement in nukes-related UFO incidents over the years. His summary of their tape recorded accounts may be found in UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites, which is available at his website, www.ufohastings.com, for $23.95. (Scalpers resell it at Amazon for $85 and up.)

"An advanced, outside third party has been tampering with American and Russian nukes," Hastings says.

CONTACT: Robert Hastings, ufohastings@aol.com

Visitors From Outer Space, Real or Not, Are Focus of Discussion in Washington!!!!!!!!!!!!

WASHINGTON — While President Obama was promoting an immigration overhaul in Mexico, six former members of Congress gathered two blocks from the White House to consider what they see as the enforced government secrecy surrounding another kind of visitor: the kind who come from a lot farther away.

 

 

Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

Mike Gravel, a former senator from Alaska, above in 2007, appeared this week on a panel to discuss extraterrestrial life.

Every day this week, the former legislators presided over panels made up of academics and — former, of course — government and military officials, who were there to discuss their research or their own eyewitness accounts of unidentified flying objects and the extraterrestrials who presumably would have occupied them.

“Something is monitoring the planet, and they are monitoring it very cautiously, because we are a very warlike planet,” said Mike Gravel, a former Democratic senator from Alaska who ran in both the Democratic and Libertarian presidential primaries in 2008.

Mr. Gravel and his fellow panelists were assembled by the Paradigm Research Group, which says it is committed to ending the government’s “truth embargo” on the existence of extraterrestrial life. The lawmakers were there in hopes that their presence and political credibility would be enough to persuade Congress to take the issue seriously.

“I’ve been exploring how we might get this issue out of the shadows of the lunatic fringe,” said Roscoe G. Bartlett, a former Republican representative from Maryland. Before his defeat last year, Mr. Bartlett was known for sounding the alarm on the threat posed to the nation’s energy infrastructure by electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, the shock wave from a nuclear weapon detonated beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

Called the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, the event might have been mistaken as advocacy for government transparency, and some of the panelists had impressive résumés.

“I’ve come to understand and appreciate the importance of open, transparent government and the power of truth,” said Paul T. Hellyer, who served as Canadian minister of defense during the 1960s.

“We are not alone in the cosmos,” he added.

One reason the ex-members of Congress agreed to sit on the dais and ask questions may have been curiosity.

“Our country has trivialized it, has made it a joke, has made it green people with horns sticking out,” said Carolyn Kilpatrick, a Democratic representative from Michigan who lost her seat in 2010. “Now I find that it’s much more than that. And it’s not a joke. And there is scientific data that there may be something there.”

Another reason might have been the $20,000 the organizers said they paid each panelist. But they are still maintaining a healthy skepticism.

“Just because the government might have had a document about how to handle extraterrestrials doesn’t mean there were any,” said Merrill Cook, a Republican from Utah who was twice elected to the House.

The panels this week have been low-hanging fruit for the news media while President Obama is out of town and Congress is out of session, and not all of the people who study U.F.O.’s think the meetings will help them improve their stature in Washington.

“There really is something to this issue, and there is a serious side to it, but that’s not what’s being presented as this event,” said Leslie Kean, a journalist and author of “U.F.O.’s: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record,” a collection of firsthand accounts by people who believe they saw them.

The conclusion that U.F.O.’s are proof of extraterrestrial life is misguided, she said, and the people who broadcast that belief hindered support for real scientific research.

Despite the ridicule that usually accompanies the discussion of U.F.O.’s, they have been quietly talked about in corridors of power here. Some panelists at the event this week counted among true believers John D. Podesta, a chief of staff in President Bill Clinton’s White House, because of his role in Executive Order 12958, which requires the declassification of most government documents over 25 years old.

But the possible existence of extraterrestrial life is not exactly why he believes in government transparency, Mr. Podesta said.

“At the end of the day, there are going to be people who say that even if you did that, there must be other files that exist that you’re not disclosing,” he said in an interview.

But objects in the sky have piqued his interest. In June 2011, the Center for American Progress hosted government officials, from the Pentagon, NASA and the Department of Transportation, as well as Congressional staff and former officials from intelligence organizations, for a briefing by Ms. Kean and experts from academia and foreign militaries.

The private briefing was organized to discuss a proposal that the government establish a small office of two staff members who would selectively investigate mysterious skyward sightings and seek to understand them by applying scientific method. The proposal did not refer to U.F.O.’s, but rather, U.A.P.’s, unidentified aerial phenomena, as if those who drew up the proposal were keenly aware of how their objective could be perceived.

“They were interesting, credible people who had observed aerial phenomena that were unexplained and worthy of additional follow-up,” Mr. Podesta said. “Going back and looking at and declassifying whatever government documents exist is a smart thing to d

The Mystery of John Titor: 

Hoax or Time Traveler?

A person named “John Titor” started posting on the Internet one day, claiming to be from the future and predicting the end of the world. Then he suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again.

This is our planet’s bleak future: a second Civil War splinters America into five factions, leaving the new capital based in Omaha. World War III breaks out in 2015, starting with Russia and the U.S. trading nukes and ending with three billion dead. Then, to top it all off, a computer bug delivers where Y2K sputtered, destroying our world as we know it. That is, unless an audacious time traveler successfully traverses the space-time continuum to change the course of future history.
In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.
A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months, Titor responded to every question other posters had, describing future events in poetically-phrased ways, always submitted with a general disclaimer that alternate realities do exist, so his reality may not be our own. In between dire urgings to learn first aid and stop eating beef—Mad Cow was a serious threat in his reality—Titor provided a number of technical specs regarding how time travel worked, with overly complex algorithms and grainy, hard-to-make-out photos of his actual machine. (Which, yes, of course, was an automobile: a 1987 Chevy Suburban.) He even showed off his cool futuristic military insignia.
On March 24, 2001, Titor offered his final piece of advice (“Bring a gas can with you when the car dies on the side of the road”), signed off forever, and returned home. He was never heard from again.

Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned to suspect everything.

IN 2003, TITOR FAN Oliver Williams—some may want to put “fan” in quotation marks, simply because of the numerous unsubstantiated theories that Williams himself is/was Titor—launched JohnTitor.com, which tracks Titor’s predictions and offers a compendium of all of his 151 posts. In 2004, members of George Mason University threw together a multimedia rock opera based on Titor. A summary of the tale at io9.com garnered over 103,000 hits in 2011. And, according to IMDB, a feature-length film about Titor is in the pipeline. What seemingly should have been dismissed as a four-month hoax, the work of some nerd killing time at his boring temp job, somehow turned into a phenomenon.
Since the beginning of the mysterious posts, Art Bell’s popular late-night radio program “Coast to Coast AM,” a nationally-syndicated show that covers pretty much everything that’d fit comfortably into an episode of The X-Files, has been the go-to place for all things Titor. George Noory, who replaced Bell in 2003, has continued carrying the torch, devoting entire episodes to the ongoing mystery, fielding inane questions from callers and somehow answering with a straight face. (Examples: “Is there any way that Titor could be a godsend, sent as an angel, to warn us?” and “Do you think there’s any possibility he was a space alien? I’ll hang up and listen.”) In 2006, a lawyer named Lawrence Haber, who claimed to represent Kay Titor, a woman alleging to be John’s mother, contacted Noory. An interview followed between Noory and Kay—with Haber acting as a phone go-between—and it ended up answering, well, pretty much nothing at all.
After that episode, the show intermittently tracked Titor’s proposed timeline, looking at current events like tea leaves, possible harbingers of a nuclear armageddon. But as the false predictions piled up—while many of Titor’s descriptions are vague enough to be considered “not yet disproved,” he did also claim there would be no Olympic Games after 2004—the search for Titor shifted from “Is this real?” to “Who deceived us?”
IN 2003, THE JOHN Titor Foundation, a for-profit Limited Liability Corporation, self-published John Titor: A Time Traveler’s Tale, which is essentially a bound copy of the message board posts. (Used copies of this are currently going for $130 a pop on Amazon.) The Italian investigative TV show Voyager took up the case in 2008, hiring a private eye to locate the folks behind the LLC, and a search led back to the aforementioned Lawrence Haber, who was listed as the company’s CEO. An investigation by amateur sleuth John Hughston, who also goes by the name “Razimus,” uncovered a mysterious P.O. Box in Celebration, Florida, belonging to the LLC. A group of friends with some downtime between gigs at their production company checked out the P.O. Box themselves but found nothing worthwhile. At some point, JohnTitorFoundation.com was created, offering some kind of nonsensical secret code to digital passersby. And just a week ago, Hughston released another video—this one 40 minutes long—in which he names Haber’s brother, Morey, as his prime suspect by using a side-by-side analysis of phrase-usage, which, to be kind, is not exactly a slam dunk.
(Weirder side note: In 2004, a computer engineer named Marlin Pohlman filed a patent for a time travel machine that “back-engineered” concepts in the Titor posts. This started another round of speculation that Pohlman, himself, was the original Titor poster. Last March, he was arrested for drugging and sexually assaulting four women.)
The search for Titor, then, has become more convoluted than Oliver Stone taking on the 9/11 conspiracy. A new piece of information comes out, a tech-savvy kid with some time to kill sees it, decides to give the puzzle a shot, and on and on it goes, the cycle never reaching an end. The trail burns hot, the trail goes cold, but the trail never disappears. There have been countless blog posts and armchair investigations—a Google search for “John Titor solution” bounces back with 325,000 results—but nothing’s come close to finding a worthwhile solution. An itch in the back of the throat remains, unscratched.
But why?

The Titor legend persists because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory.

LAST MONTH, BRIAN DUNNING, a writer and producer specializing on the subject of skepticism, devoted an entire episode of his aptly-named podcast Skeptoid to the John Titor phenomenon, less focused on who it might have been and more about that question: why does something without any merit still have legs as an urban legend?
“Now that the number of unsubstantiated claims on the Internet is somewhat larger than the factorial of the square of all the large numbers ever conceived separated by arrow notation,” said Dunning on his podcast, “it would be a lot harder to achieve John Titor’s celebrity.”
Today, everything posted online gets a healthy dose of skepticism. Let’s call it the Post-Snopes Era. We’ve been conditioned—from everyone having access to Photoshop, to Punk’d and Jackass, to found footage films, to big budget viral marketing campaigns, to emails from faux Nigerian princes offering a portion of their riches if we simply send them our bank account number—to suspect everything. Every video of a cat performing a spectacular feat is met with at least one commenter decrying “FAKE!” The Titor story, from a time when we were all so innocent, a time that was less than 15 years ago, came right before things started to change.
And the Titor legend persists, in part, because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory. Our skepticism needs a party responsible, a grand designer that allows it to make sense. When we find out—think the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, or whoever Jacob was supposed to be in that final season of Lost—the mystery ends. No one has claimed Titor, so the story continues.
There are some obvious connections for conspiracy theorists—the fracturing of governments, underground bunkers—but, for everyone else, there’s this: time travel stories are freaking cool. “This is a superpower that everyone would love to have,” said Dunning. “We all want John Titor to actually be from the future.” Who among us didn’t spend idle moments of our youth wondering about flying cars and hoverboards, or what life was like back in the Old West. In fact, when I asked Hughston, the sleuth blogger, why he was initially drawn to Titor, he said that he’d been “a big fan of time travel since about 1985,” the year Back to the Future was released.
But there’s also a much easier explanation. “The John Titor story is popular,” Dunning said, “simply because that happens to be one of the stories that became popular.” If Titor wasn’t leading conspiracy-minded white dudes in their post-graduate years of boredom and confusion down a rabbit hole of mystery, something else would. It’s Urban Legend Darwinism. Among all of the hoaxes, Internet rumors, ghost stories, and Satanic voices you can hear if you play the vinyl backwards, some have to become popular. Might as well be Titor.
There is one other (distant, remote, nearly scientifically impossible) possibility, though.
“ONE OF THE KEYS to cracking the Titor question,” starts an email by someone who goes by the name Temporal Recon, “is to just allow for the possibility that time travel very well could be true.”
The great thing about time travel: the story cannot be refuted. If events don’t happen as the traveler says, that’s because the traveler changed the timeline. “Many never even get off the ground in their research due to this very limiting view,” T.R. said. “They simply don’t believe that the human race will ever conquer time. ‘Ever’ is a very long time, Rick.”
There’s a particular point-of-view that seems to evolve within every amateur Titor investigator I encountered. As the puzzle fails to be solved, when no serious candidates present themselves, the goal of locating the hoaxster morphs ever so slightly, allowing in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, time travel could be real. “Look, of course John Titor didn’t travel through time,” they’ll say, only to dramatically shift with the addendum, “but let’s say he did.”
If you squint hard enough—and forget about the last four Olympics—things will always begin to resemble what you want to see, especially when reality’s only a minor quibble.
I mean, couldn’t the political differences that continue to separate America into red states and blue states be precursors to the Second Civil War? U.S.–Russian relations have been kind of strange lately, haven’t they? The history of 2015, when Russia and the U.S. nuke each other into oblivion, is still yet to be written!
Then T.R. writes a sentence that haunts me, one that will no doubt tip me over the edge on a course to try to solve the mystery, to locate the poster, or maybe a precocious kid now armed with a learner’s permit who once met his future self. Graphs and charts will mass, blanketing my small studio apartment, where I’ll only need a bare mattress in the corner, a pizza on the way, and a computer with browser tabs parked on obscure pages of note, set to auto-refresh. Friendships and relationships and family will drift into the ether; there are only so many hours in the day. Hands will blister, fingers will ink-stain, eyes will learn to scan for men in black suits, or white coats, or some combination thereof.
He writes: “And there are others.”
And down I’ll go, into the abyss.