Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause---Or at least little green men

[dustinzgirl]

(CNN) -- Earth Day may fall later this week, but as far as former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell and other UFO enthusiasts are concerned, the real story is happening elsewhere.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, shown after his Apollo mission in 1971, claims there "is no doubt we are being visited."

Mitchell, who was part of the 1971 Apollo 14 moon mission, asserted Monday that extraterrestrial life exists, and that the truth is being concealed by the U.S. and other governments.
He delivered his remarks during an appearance at the National Press Club following the conclusion of the fifth annual X-Conference, a meeting of UFO activists and researchers studying the possibility of alien life forms.
Mankind has long wondered if we're "alone in the universe. [But] only in our period do we really have evidence. No, we're not alone," Mitchell said.
"Our destiny, in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is [to] become a part of the planetary community. ... We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there."
Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." They had been warned of "dire consequences" if they did so.


But, he claimed, they "didn't want to go to the grave with their story. They wanted to tell somebody reliable. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story."
Roughly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at Pentagon to discuss what he had been told.
An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then denied access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process."
The same admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story.
"I urge those who are doubtful: Read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," he said.
"The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time."
A NASA spokesman denied any cover-up.
"NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere else -- period," Michael Cabbage said Monday.
Debates have continued about what happened at Roswell. The U.S. Air Force said in 1994 that wreckage recovered there in 1947 was most likely from a balloon-launched classified government project.
Stephen Bassett, head of the Paradigm Research Group (PRG), which hosted the X-Conference, said that the truth about extraterrestrial life is being suppressed because it is politically explosive.
"There is a third rail [in American politics], and that is the UFO question. It is many magnitudes more radioactive than Social Security ever dreamed to be," Bassett said.

Former astronaut: Man not alone in universe - CNN.com

Awesome.

 

[Nik]

Weep...

Was said at time that none of the Apollo crews were unchanged by their experience: Having one fall off edge of world is not too surprising...

(Remember David Icke, a UK athlete & commentator who got religion then began denouncing reptilian infiltrators ?? Quite... ;-)

Um, I remember a thread elsewhere that commented on how anti-social Neil 'OneSmallStep' Armstrong became. I corrected this, mentioning that the "TestPilot's TestPilot" merely loathed ijits, was a different person air-side. In fact, his flying-helmeted grin fronted 'Flightline', a long-running TV documentary series on aviation...

 

[Urlik]

wasn't there something about a classified airborne listening device used to listen out for Soviet nuclear tests?
I wish I could remember the name of it, but it is widely accepted that this is what was recovered from Roswell, it definitely wasn't a weather balloon, but it wasn't extra-terrestrial either.
it was decided high up that it was preferable to let people think there had been a cover up of ETs rather than let the Soviets know about the project that was responsible for the Roswell incident

 

[Nik]

Nuke-test Fall-out collector and cameras ?? Like a low-flying satellite ??

IIRC, they rode the jet-stream, so could travel at remarkable speeds, changing direction abruptly as they rose through the air layers. They would sometimes appear to turn right-angles as the expanding balloon went one way and the still unexpanded 'tail' briefly went another...

Um, IIRC, it was these US 'spy balloons' that set the legal precedent for later Russian satellite overflights. Everyone expected US to complain to UN & International Court about violated space-borders. But the US just let that aspect go by...

 

[Urlik]

just remembered what it was called
Project Mogul
it makes sense that the authorities would let people think the wreckage came from a UFO rather than give the Soviets any knowledge of a top secret project

 

[ManTimeForgot]

There is no reason to suspect that a trained Air Force personnel member is going to mistake a weather balloon for anything other than a weather balloon. Cover ups don't need elaborate schemes and multi-level information black-outs in order to be effective especially when something simple like (our latest weather research balloon crashed) would work just fine.


Plus that completely ignores the witness accounts of bodies. The Air Force later claimed that early parachute testing accounted for this, but the earliest recorded parachute testing using dummies didn't occur until the 1950s.


I'm not sure if Roswell really did have ET involvement, but it sure as hell isn't whatever has been told to the public. You do not get the level of cover-up that you did for something as "mundane" as what Roswell is purported to be. Information compartmentalization, scene sterilization, media cover-up/black-out, record sterilization, and clearance levels beyond top-secret all being utilized in the Roswell incident goes well beyond anything parachute testing or Mogul should have generated.

MTF

 

[The Procrastinator]

I have no idea whether Roswell is true or not, I'm not really into conspiracy theories. But...I did see a UFO one night. Not a flying saucer, a genuine unidentified flying object. All that could be seen of it (it was late at night) was a flashing light (regular pulses), like a very bright star, but with an incredibly erratic flight path (no way it could have been a satellite or aeroplane). It seemed very high up, and in the end it seemed to rise away from the earth...do those weather balloons have lights on them? Because I really have no idea what I saw...

 

[Urlik]

There is no reason to suspect that a trained Air Force personnel member is going to mistake a weather balloon for anything other than a weather balloon. Cover ups don't need elaborate schemes and multi-level information black-outs in order to be effective especially when something simple like (our latest weather research balloon crashed) would work just fine.


Plus that completely ignores the witness accounts of bodies. The Air Force later claimed that early parachute testing accounted for this, but the earliest recorded parachute testing using dummies didn't occur until the 1950s.


I'm not sure if Roswell really did have ET involvement, but it sure as hell isn't whatever has been told to the public. You do not get the level of cover-up that you did for something as "mundane" as what Roswell is purported to be. Information compartmentalization, scene sterilization, media cover-up/black-out, record sterilization, and clearance levels beyond top-secret all being utilized in the Roswell incident goes well beyond anything parachute testing or Mogul should have generated.

MTF

why wouldn't Mogul have been cause for a cover-up?
it was a classified project that the US didn't want the USSR to know about.
the wreckage wouldn't have looked like a weather balloon and would have been unfamiliar to those who saw it that had no knowledge of the project.
to them it was a crashed UFO (as in it was unidentified and had been flying, until it crashed) .
only some of the witnesses claim to have seen bodies.
none of the contemporary accounts mention bodies but do mention rubber, sticks, tin foil and scotch tape decorated with flowers (all of which are consistant with project Mogul.

the contemporary accounts refute alien involvement in the Roswell incident, but just because there is no connection there doesn't mean that there are no UFOs or ETs.

I believe that there is probably life elsewhere in the Universe (there are so many stars out there and life on this planet is so diverse and capable of existing in the most extreme conditions that it would be foolish to think that only this planet is populated)
I've also seen a UFO that didn't behave like any aircraft I have seen or heard of (I use the term in its general sense of unidentified flying object as it was a flying object that I could not identify rather than alien craft, although I don't rule out the possibility of it being the latter), but I also believe that what was found at Roswell was just the wreckage from a crashed Mogul listening device and the cover up was to keep that Top Secret project secret.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Mogul can and did have cover-up but it sure as hell could NOT have generated the amount of cover-up Roswell has. There is no way that it takes until well after the Cold War to "reveal" its involvement at Roswell. Wouldn't Project Blue Book's members want to quash the Alien Conspiracy stuff in the 70's?

The type of material and volume of material would have been a dead give away to an Air Force Colonel that some kind of balloon was involved. And most of the initial witnesses saw chunks of unidentified solid metal material; that is something that doesn't belong on a weather balloon and would have confused the heck out of an Air Force man who thought he should have been looking at a weather balloon.

Some of the witnesses... including the Nurse and then there is the coffin maker asked to make 4 small sized coffins the day after. Somebody or something (probably somebody) was killed that day. But who and why? Mogul sure as hell wasn't something you would have to kill and dismember someone to keep secret! Maybe what Mogul was really testing was something akin the Japanese experiment during WWII (could high altitude balloons be used to deliver weapons across the ocean with little chance of detection); and a premature detonation killed people (that would be able to generate the kind of cover-up Roswell did; and might require 4 small sized coffins).


Contemporary sanitized versions sure. The initial witnesses were confronted with unidentifiable symbols on solid metal fragments. Physics symbols and pieces of call signs (like what gets left on or the instructions to a bomb) might explain this, but Mogul as we understand it cannot. Mogul cannot possibly explain over 50 years of deep cover up; there are Roswell documents which are still blacked out and top secret to this day. A high-altitude radiation detector experiment doesn't even come close to top secret in this day and age. Nasa has been putting stuff into space (publicly) for quite some time now that are far more effective than what Mogul could do.

Everyone who looks at the evidence of Roswell need not come to a conclusion about what happened (I'm not sure we will ever know for sure), but there can be no denying that whatever happened there it was beyond top secret.

MTF

 

[Urlik]

just because an agency exists to study/research something doesn't actually mean it exists. take SETI for example. there we have a group of scientists looking for alien intelligence and in all the time they have been looking, they have found nothing to support this (mainly due to the length of time it takes for radio waves to travel across the distances involved. for us to get any results from SETI, the signal would either have to be millenia old or from a system within 40 light years).

the existence of project blue book doesn't mean they have any conclusive proof, just that an agency exists to look into reports of UFO activity (which could include US test flights and spy planes from foreign powers)

also, why keep on saying that it wasn't a weather ballon. project Mogul wasn't a weather balloon and didn't look like a weather balloon, so anyone familiar with them would have said that what they saw was definitely not a weather balloon.

the July 8th edition of the Roswell Daily Record gives no details about the disk that was recovered and the July 9th edition carries 2 stories about it.
the first is the cover-up story saying it is just a weather balloon (they couldn't/wouldn't reveal that it was a top secret project) and the second story is from Brazel giving a description of what he found (rubber, wood, tinfoil and tape).

dismissing the most likely explanation (the cover-up was to hide a top secret project) in favour of the romantic notion that aliens crashed there (and, according to many of the conspiracy theorists, also formed an alliance of some kind with the US government) only serves to hinder real projects like SETI.

it's like the crop circle phenomena of a few years ago which have been admitted to by hoaxers, but until that time were used by some UFOlogists as "proof" of alien activity and after used by some skeptics to debunk all UFO sightings (as if the 2 phenmena were mutually exclusive, which they aren't)

as I said before, I do believe that there is life somewhere out there in another system and I also accept that there is a possibility that we may have been visited by an alien intelligence in the past** as Genesis could be interpreted as the terraforming of a planet and the population of it through genetic manipulation and cloning (God made Man in his own image and then by taking a tissue sample from Adam created Eve, which is theoretically possible with today's knowledge of genetics)



**as suggested by Von Daniken, although many of the examples he used were later debunked and this has led to all his ideas and theories being ridiculed today. even though the general hypothesis that the ancient texts that speak of "heavenly visitors in firey chariots" could be contemporary records of historical events, and a suggestion that a scientific study (by experts in different fields co-operating with each other) be conducted to to find out more about our ancient ancestors, which, in itself, isn't such a bad idea)

 

[AE35Unit]

Oh dear,I think Mr Mitchell had too much gamma ray exposure while up there!
He just happens to have been brought up in Roswell,woooo! (Rolls eyes icon here)

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Urlik you aren't seeing the logic here.


Bluebook's existence is not meant as evidence of alien landing; I'm fairly sure aliens didn't land at Roswell (or crash as it were). I think the chances of this are minimal, as in maybe a billion to one.


Mogul was an alteration of current weather balloon technology extant for higher altitude observation. Any Air Force investigator with 10+ years of experience (you don't make O-4 or higher without years of experience) is going to be able to recognize balloon components.

And I should believe Brazel's second incarnation more than the one he told Wilcox all those years ago? This smacks of damage control.



The chain of logic goes like this: I have an incident. If it was something that should have been top secret, then it would be covered up... But after we began putting radiation detector satellites up into space why should high-altitude balloon radiation testing remain classified? They wouldn't, and when you consider the amount of buzz around Roswell why not dispel the myth as soon as possible? Why would something "just" top secret require multiple closed congressional hearings and top military meetings in order to disclose? Once something is no longer an issue much of what goes on becomes declassified, and something with as much popular regard as Roswell should have made it to the top of the military's list for declassification.

But it wasn't. What I had was an event that was not just covered up; it was practically sterilized. Conspiracy theories of the wildest sort remained unchecked and unopposed. What I got was an event where all the internal documents have serious redactions and all state and federal personnel have signed non-disclosure agreements that last until their death. For something that should be readily declassified this hardly is normal behavior.



Something happened at Roswell and it sure as heck was not Mogul, at least not by itself. Now if a second project (more secret than Mogul) or an accident of some kind was involved, then I can see how this level of response would be appropriate. But the military does not make a habit of embarassing its officers unless something very serious happened.




On a humorous note: I've heard it said that "grays" like strawberry ice cream, and if you look at Wall Street in the time after Roswell the index for strawberry ice cream goes up...

MTF

 

[Urlik]

some of the military personel named in the original cover-up theory have been linked with dissinformation.
if these men have any intelligence, it wouldn't be hard to see the possibilities in allowing the conspiracy buffs to continue thinking it was an alien crash.

imagine that you want to keep something secret and those that you want to keep it from announce that they believe you are covering up something completely ridiculous, and impossible to find real evidence of because it didn't happen.

if they clung to the theory more and more as time went on, with many making a nice living out of giving lectures and furthering the conspiracy belief, wouldn't you let them believe it for as long as possible so that any thing else that needed to be hidden could use the same cover.

as for the wreckage "not looking like a weather balloon", to an airforce officer it wouldn't have looked like a weather balloon in the same way that to a petrol head, a dodge viper RT10 doesn't look like a dodge viper GTS R. it al depends on what you mean by "doesn't look like" and how precise you are being, whether the phrase was used in response to a question and just how the question was phrased