Tag: ufo

More UFO hearings coming, Rep. Tim Burchett says

After a Pentagon report denying any evidence of alien technology or extraterrestrial life, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said there need to be more hearings on the subject.

The Pentagon report was issued in the wake of a whistleblower complaint from former intelligence officer David Grusch, who claimed the Pentagon was operating a secret UFO-retrieval program and even suggested the government had alien remains.

A hearing with Grusch and other former military personnel who had experiences encountering UAPs garnered bipartisan support from lawmakers but didn’t lead to any admission from the Department of Defense about alleged programs.

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Portland Community College Offers New Class on UFOs

Portland Community College is offering a niche new area of study this spring: UFOs.

“From Film to Real Life? UFOs, UAPs, Government and the Media” is an online class listed for non-credit in a category of study called “cultural exploration.” (Other offerings include low-cost Hawaii travel, foreign films and a “waterfalls and wine” tour of the Columbia River Gorge.)

The class is the brainchild of longtime local television news producer Brian Anslinger, the executive producer of KRCW’s lifestyle show Everyday Northwest. Previously, Anslinger worked as assistant news director and executive producer at KATU-TV.

Part of his mission with the class is to help students decode the confusing landscape of UAP sightings and research. (UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the updated name for UFOs, unidentified flying objects. Anslinger accepts both.)

“Having been looking at this subject for a long time and different aspects of it, I thought, gosh, if you see what’s happening on Capitol Hill or read headlines, I don’t know how you make sense of what’s actually going on,” Anslinger says.

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A new religion has Americans looking to the stars

Belief in aliens is no longer fringe. Fifty-one percent of Americans think that unidentified flying objects are likely controlled by extraterrestrials — an increase of more than 20 percentage points since 1996. And one in three believe we’re likely to make formal contact with aliens in the next 50 years.

But as someone who studies the psychology of religion, what’s most striking to me isn’t the widespread belief that aliens are out there — in the vastness of the universe, it’s unlikely that we’re alone — but rather the growing popularity of blending this belief with spirituality. From group sky-watching sessions in the desert Southwest to backyard meetups in suburbia, people are using practices like meditations, mantras, and offerings to try to commune with god-like entities they believe possess vast knowledge and technological power. And since UFOs are the supposed vehicles that aliens use to visit earth, looking for them, or sometimes even trying to entice them to appear, is a primary focus.

Is that enough to qualify this growing movement as a religion? For some scholars, the answer is yes. Diana Walsh Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, says many faiths are characterized by stories of divine beings coming down from the sky. Whether it’s angels, spirits, or gods, we humans have always looked to the heavens for entities greater than ourselves and yearned to join them in their higher realms. Aliens easily fit that narrative. And in truth, religions based around enlightened extraterrestrials aren’t new. Raëlism, for example, is a minor religion that emerged in the 1970s in which adherents seek communion with the Elohim — an alien race they believe created Jesus, Buddha, and other great teachers as alien-human hybrids.

But now UFO spirituality is no longer only comprised of small cults; it’s a burgeoning movement — one the psychologist Clay Routledge argues can fill the spiritual needs of a growing segment of secular Americans. The question is: Why?

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The truth is out there — especially here

I thought my brother had been dipping a bit too heavily into the cooking sherry at work that night in the summer of 1986 when he says he saw something in the sky.

Rob Levine, then a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, was driving home after closing the St. Andrews Cafe for the night. He saw what he first thought was a low-flying airplane or helicopter. Its size seemed to vary and colored lights were moving around it, he remembers.

He pulled over and watched for a while.

“I looked up and down the river valley, staring at this,” he said. “It seemed to get bigger and smaller, closer and farther, in the blink of an eye. The lights were moving in a V or triangle shape, and colors would change into shapes that looked like unknown letters, like it was trying to communicate something. And there was no sound whatsoever. There was light coming from it, but it appeared to go from the ground up instead of from the object down. I was, like, this isn’t a helicopter.”

I no longer think he was having a tipsy vision. In the 1980s and ‘90s, the Hudson Valley was a hotspot for unidentified flying objects. More than 5,000 people — including police officers, professionals and other highly reputable sources — report seeing essentially the same thing my brother saw between 1982 and 1986, making these sightings one of the biggest clusters of UFO reports in history. On March 24, 1983, there were more than 300 reports alone, all describing a V-shaped craft adorned with colored lights that hovered slowly and silently in the sky. The sighting became known as “the Westchester Boomerang.”

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Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“Translated into over thirteen languages and now a major motion picture, John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecy is an unsettling true story of the paranormal that has long been regarded as a classic in the literature of the unexplained.

West Virginia, 1966. For thirteen months the town of Point Pleasant is gripped by a real-life nightmare culminating in a tragedy that makes headlines around the world. Strange occurrences and sightings, including a bizarre winged apparition that becomes known as the Mothman, trouble this ordinary American community. Mysterious lights are seen moving across the sky. Domestic animals are found slaughtered and mutilated. And journalist John Keel, arriving to investigate the freakish events, soon finds himself an integral part of an eerie and unfathomable mystery.”

March 24, 1974: Night of the UFOs-The Close Encounters That Shook Sweden.

It’s easy to believe that the most spectacular — and maybe convincing — UFO incidents belong to the United States and other more prominent countries in the field of high strangeness, and where UFO culture has been in the media’s eye since its origins. UFO culture first came to the public’s attention on a massive scale with Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting over Mount Rainier, Washington State in 1947, and the controversial Roswell incident the same year. Later, the Rendlesham Forest Incident in 1980 and the 1994 Ariel School UFO landing in Ruwa, Zimbabwe caused headlines all over the world. But let me take you up to the northern part of our beautiful planet, to Sweden — the land once known of it’s of sin, ABBA and smörgåsbord — for a truly extraordinary incident. It wasn’t the first such incident in Sweden: during the 30s so-called Ghost Pilots were seen hundreds of times over the country, and in the 40’s the famous Ghost Rockets flew over the northern part of Sweden, some of them crashing (or landing) in small, far off lakes. There’s something up there. for sure: something the citizens of a small Swedish town will forever have etched in their memories.

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Veteran paratrooper reveals British special forces recovered a downed ‘non-human’ craft in northern England in late 1980s – supporting recent US whistleblowers’ claims of a secret UFO crash retrieval program

British special forces recovered a downed ‘non-human’ craft in northern England in the late 1980s, a former UK paratrooper and military intelligence officer claims.

Franc Milburn, a veteran of the British Army’s elite Parachute Regiment, tells DailyMail.com he has spoken with a member of the MI6-run unit that conducted the alleged operation.

Milburn said he also spoke to UK Royal Air Force crew who chased and fired on a pair of ‘disc-shaped’ UFOs that traveled at hypersonic speeds outstripping their fighter jets.

Milburn refused to reveal the identity of his former elite comrade, citing security and his desire to remain anonymous. DailyMail.com will refer to him using the alias ‘John.’

But in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Milburn divulged eye-popping details of the story told to him by his ex-Special Forces friend after both had left the Army – saying that he wanted to support recent US whistleblowers’ claims of a secret UFO crash retrieval program.

Milburn said that in the 1980s John worked for a reported secret unit now known as the ‘E Squadron’, which specialized in covert, clandestine, and paramilitary operations.

E Squadron, previously called ‘The Increment’, recruited the most experienced and reliable operators from the UK’s Special Forces units: the Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS) and Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR).

The US equivalent to E Squadron is the CIA’s Special Operations Group and Joint Special Operations Command, staffed from ‘Tier-1’ units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6.

Milburn said John served in the 1982 Falklands War and on numerous high-risk missions around the world, but one of the most disturbing was in his home country in the late 1980s.

‘He told me they were deployed in a troop-sized unit, maybe 20-30 Special Forces operators,’ Milburn said. 

‘They’d been told by the RAF [Royal Air Force] that a craft which wasn’t Russian, British, or American had been downed.

‘He said they were tasked to secure and retrieve the craft in the north of England. They were flown in by helicopter. They established a cordon, a perimeter, and they approached the craft.

‘He didn’t describe the craft, he just said it was obvious it was non-human, and it was obvious that there were occupants who had fled the scene on foot – or whatever you call it.

‘He said then it became a task of tracking down these beings to try to bring them into custody.

‘Part of the unit was left protecting the craft. They would have left maybe six to eight blokes to cordon the craft, and the others would have been on foot, quad bikes, or 4x4s trying to track down these entities that escaped from it, with helicopters supporting.

‘He said after that it was totally passed over. He said, “scientists and technicians came in and it was completely out of our hands. We were flown away by helicopter, and we knew nothing more after that.”‘

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Inside the £160-a-ticket UFO conference where thousands of alien hunters flocked to French city to ‘train humanity for the arrival of extraterrestrials’ – as councillor slams ‘eccentrics’ peddling ‘conspiracy theories’

Thousands of UFO fanatics flocked to a small city in central France in the hopes of finally meeting extra-terrestrial life. 

The event, organised by fringe group Alliances Célestes, reportedly drew around 2,200 people who each paid between €150 to €190 (£128 to £162) to attend the three day conference held in Zenith Limoges Metropole building in Limoges, a small city with a population of around 130,000. 

Organisers said they wanted to prepare people for the arrival of aliens or ‘new-style encounters.’

The event’s website reads: ‘The mission of this citizen delegation is to accompany humanity in this process, in order to properly inform and reduce the fear and stress that this type of encounter can generate.’

Though media was banned from the event, video of the conference was leaked to BFMTV, and showed thousands of people attentively listening to someone speaking on a set on the stage. 

The stage was decorated with white furniture, including several seats and what appeared to be a high table on the right. 

The background of the set was made up of ‘futuristic’ windows that portrayed stars rushing past the ‘alien room’ they were in. 

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The Tuatha De Danann: Were they Irish gods or aliens?

It’s little wonder the Tuath Dé or the Tribe of the Gods were mistaken as the stuff of nonsense, but we as mere mortals today can make our own conclusions. 

When I came to live in Ireland, it did not take long for me to fall in love with its misty landscape and scattered ancient ruins. They drew me in; I felt at once connected and intrigued. Leaving behind the realms of accepted Irish history I plunged into the shadowy domain of Irish mythology, and that was where I first encountered the Tuatha de Danann.

Stories of the Danann were passed down through the ages into legend via the ancient oral tradition of the poets. Later, Christian monks began assembling and recording them in an effort to produce a history for Ireland. Inevitably, these texts were influenced by their beliefs and doctrines, their translation skills (or lack of), and the desire to please their patrons. What we are left with is impossible to distill into fact and fiction.

These myths are so fantastic, so bizarre, that no scholar or historian worth his salt would ever entertain them as anything other than pure fantasy.

But I am not a scholar, and I don’t have to worry about academic reputation, and I say there is no smoke without fire.

Who were the Tuatha de Danann?

Tuatha de Danann (pronounced Thoo-a day Du-non) is translated as ‘tribe of Danu.’ Scholars are agreed that Danu was the name of their goddess, most probably Anu/Anann. However, that is unproven, and I believe could equally have referred to their leader or king, or even the place from which they originated.

They were a race of God-like people gifted with supernatural powers, who invaded and ruled Ireland over four thousand years ago. According to an ancient document known as the Annals of the Four Masters (Annála na gCeithre Maístrí compiled by Franciscan monks between 1632-1636 from earlier texts), the Danann ruled from 1897 BC until 1700 BC, a short period indeed in which to have accumulated such fame. They were said to have originated from four mythical Northern cities Murias, Gorias, Falias and Finias, possibly located in Lochlann (Norway).

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Pentagon’s flawed UFO report demands congressional action

On March 8, the Department of Defense published the most significant report on UFOs in at least two generations — a congressionally mandated historical review of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP.

Unfortunately, the report from the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) contains an array of striking omissions and one particularly egregious misrepresentation. The result is a misleading report which, like so much government UFO-related propaganda over seven decades, tells the reader just to move on, nothing to see here.

To start, it makes no mention of how the U.S. government’s official investigation of UFOs began. In a landmark 1947 memo, Lt. Gen. (and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Nathan Twining stated that UFOs are “real and not visionary or fictitious.” He also described their flight characteristics as including “extreme rates of climb, maneuverability…and action which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar.”

Nor does AARO’s report mention the earliest surviving intelligence assessment of UFOs — a late 1948 analysis that found many UFO reports came from observers “who, because of their technical background and experience, do not appear to be influenced by unfounded sensationalism nor inclined to report explainable phenomena as new types of aerial devices.”

Citing reports from “trained and experienced U.S. Weather Bureau personnel” from early 1947, the omitted document noted multiple observations of “strange metallic disks” with “a flat bottom and a round top.” (Note that these incidents predated by several months the widely-publicized June 1947 incident that catalyzed the “flying saucer” era.)

Other incidents involved “silver disks or balls” and “balls of fire” that stalked World War II aircrews over the European and Pacific theaters. The Associated Press, Reuters, New York Times, Newsweek, Stars and Stripes and the now-defunct International News Service referred contemporaneously to mysterious “silver colored spheres” and “silver balls which float in the air.”

Although omitted by AARO, all of this historical background remains significant because, to this day, images and videos continue to emerge of objects fitting similar descriptions. In fact, AARO’s ex-director openly stated as much during a May 2023 NASA presentation on UAP, that U.S. military personnel are observing “metallic orbs” “all over the world…making very interesting apparent maneuvers.”

Moreover, AARO has not provided a plausible explanation for naval aviators’ more recent encounters — including one harrowing near-collision — with spherical objects exhibiting extraordinary flight characteristics.

Worst of all, AARO’s review misrepresents the most exhaustive, comprehensive historical analysis of UFO incidents, conducted on behalf of the Air Force by the Battelle Memorial Institute in the early 1950s. According to AARO, the resulting report found that “all cases that had enough data were resolved and explainable.”

But this is not what Battelle’s analysis found at all, and AARO’s misrepresentation of its conclusions speaks volumes.

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