UFO Secrets - US Air Force Secret Documents revealed - BBC article - pics

Project Blue Book: US Air Force UFO documents revealed

By Debbie SiegelbaumBBC News, Chicago

Evidence of Martian attacks is not a part of the Air Force UFO documents

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Amateur historian John Greenewald has spent nearly two decades requesting declassified information from the US government regarding UFOs.

Recently, he posted more than 100,000 pages of documents on the US Air Force's internal UFO investigations to the internet. Here are the top five things to know from the open files of Project Blue Book.

1. Project Blue Book had a sizeable mission

The origins of the ambitious project can be traced to June 1947, UFO researcher Alejandro Rojas tells the BBC.

The editor of Open Minds magazine says a well-respected businessman and pilot, Kenneth Arnold, was flying over Washington state when he witnessed several unidentified flying objects.

Arnold later described the crafts as "skipping like saucers", which the media adopted and took to calling flying saucers.

This high-profile incident - along with several others, including a rumoured UFO landing in Roswell, New Mexico, the same year - led the Air Force to launch an investigative body.

The Air Force says this wreckage, recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, came from a radar target

Named Project Blue Book and headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the programme was reportedly comprising only a handful of staff.

Nonetheless the group investigated 12,618 UFO sightings in a two-decade period.

2. Project Blue Book was created in a time of public unease

Formed in the years immediately following World War Two, Project Blue Book was intended to stop the spread of public unease about a growing number of reported UFO sightings, including over such landmarks as the White House and US Capitol.

"There was a lot of hysteria with the public, and that to the military and government at the time was a big threat in itself," Greenewald says. "It didn't matter if UFOs were alien or not, they were causing a panic, so [the government] had to settle everybody's nerves."

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“Start Quote

There are secrets after conspiracies after scandals that continue to come out”

John GreenewaldAmateur UFO historian

Though frequently met with derision today, UFO sightings are said to have been discussed at the top levels of government in the 1940s and 1950s.

"It was taken very seriously back then," Rojas says, with Central Intelligence Agency chiefs publicly claiming it was a real phenomenon and even then-Congressman Gerald Ford warning it needed to be investigated.

In 1966 a separate Air Force committee was set up to further delve into some of the cases within Project Blue Book. That group later released a report finding no evidence of UFO activity.

Project Blue Book was officially shuttered in 1969.

3. Many of the Project Blue Book cases appear open-and-shut

Though many credible sources, from Navy admirals to military and civilian pilots, reported seeing UFOs, most of the cases investigated by Project Blue Book were deemed caused by weather balloons, swamp gases, meteorological events or even temperature inversions.

In Seattle, Washington, in April 1956, a witness described seeing a "round, white object, one-half the size of the moon … [and] going round and round", according to documents.

Investigators later concluded it was a meteor and closed the case.

Amateur UFO investigators believe the truth is still out there

In January 1961 in Newark, New Jersey, a witness reported viewing a dark grey object "about the size of a jet with no wings".

That object was later deemed a jet aircraft flying in the area.

4. Some Project Blue Book cases aren't so easily explained

According to Greenewald and Rojas, more than 700 Project Blue Book entries could not ultimately be explained by investigators. Many such cases cited insufficient data or evidence.

But even some of the closed cases raise more questions than answers for UFO researchers.

In one such example, a police officer in 1964 in Socorro, New Mexico, halted vehicular pursuit of a suspect after he saw a strange aircraft overhead.

The officer followed the craft - which he described as bearing a strange red insignia - and saw it land and two child-sized beings exit.

It later took off, leaving scorch marks and trace evidence on the ground.

"[Project] Blue Book labelled it unexplained; even after all these decades they still can't explain it," Greenewald says.

5. There is still information to be uncovered about UFO activity

Though Greenewald has amassed a stockpile of government documents, he says there are still many he - and the public - has not yet accessed.

One request to the National Security Agency yielded hundreds of pages, but they were so redacted only a few words were readable on each page, he says.

Other US government entities - including the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency - also conducted UFO investigations that have not been publicly released, Greenewald notes.

"I think Project Bluebook … is simply the tip of the iceberg," he says, adding he will continue to request more information from the US government.

"There are secrets after conspiracies after scandals that continue to come out," Greenewald concludes. "There's always something to go after."

The Day UFOs stopped me - dedicated to my good friend Steve Audain who sadly recently passed away - article, pics - newspaper and TV footage available

My true UFO story
It happened in 1991
The starship looked exactly like this, also seen in Belgium....read on

In 1991 I was privy to a most extraordinary event, recorded on both national television and newspapers in New Zealand. 

I was out walking on the beach with a Ufologist, Steve Audain, who had been giving lectures in New Zealand. He asked me if I would like to see a real UFO.

He claimed to have been visited by aliens, who came down to his beach house in Bethells Beach and cast a blue light over the dwelling for three days forcing his brain to accept vast quantities of alien information. This led to many UFO sightings, such as the one in 1991, many of them documented.

The aliens told Steve that the human being was wired as a transmitter and receiver for universal information and that given the right knowledge, could actually connect and communicate with alien craft and creatures. This was through two crystals in the brain (Located in the third eye area) and a powerful energy generator at the base of the spine and in the spine, which directed with care, would send out the appropriate signals using the planets Venus and Jupiter as transmitting stations.

If you are still reading, then I admire your bravery and resilience as to most ordinary folk the above paragraph may read like nonsense if you haven’t experienced it. But on this one particular night, a Saturday in November, 1991, on Sumner Beach in Christchurch, New Zealand, experience it, we did.

We practiced the energy exercises together for about 5 minutes. Then above our heads appeared a satellite, heading from south to north across the sky. At least it looked like a satellite. Then, when it reached a point exactly above our heads it stopped.

Yes, it stopped.

Satellites do not stop midway through their trajectory.

Then it began its descent towards us.

We could see it clearly.

It was transparent, about twice the size of a jumbo jet, with a massive engine at the rear, a pilot at the front, and three flashing lights at the nose and wing tips. It lowered right down over my house (which was on the beachfront)

It was very similar but not identical to, the Belgian Black Triangle, seen by citizens of Brussels in 1990.

I was stunned.

Not just because I saw it but also because I was very aware we had “called” it.

The craft flashed at us three times.

It then sped off at enormous speed to the north, disappearing over the hills to Lyttleton.

The incident was reported by some people walking on the same beach who saw it, as well as people fishing and a group of four boys, sleeping on the roof of their house, who appeared on national television, all who described the same craft (including a ‘whooshing’ noise it made when it took off) with almost identical accuracy. The newspaper reports are still available today.

The following week, on Wednesday, the US Air Force flew in two jets and a group of scientists. Notices went up all over Sumner town, $500 for information leading to identification of the craft. I never submitted any such information until now.

The day UFOs stopped play and 10,000 football fans gasped - BBC - article, pics

The day UFOs stopped play

By Richard PadulaBBC World Service Sport

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Sixty years ago a football match ground to a halt when unidentified flying objects were spotted above a stadium in Florence. Did aliens come to earth? If not, what were they?

It was 27 October 1954, a typically crisp autumn day in Tuscany. The mighty Fiorentina club was playing against its local rival Pistoiese.

Ten-thousand fans were watching in the concrete bowl of the Stadio Artemi Franchi. But just after half-time the stadium fell eerily silent - then a roar went up from the crowd. The spectators were no longer watching the match, but were looking up at the sky, fingers pointing. The players stopped playing, the ball rolled to a stand-still.

One of the footballers on the pitch was Ardico Magnini - he was something of a legend at the club and had played for Italy at the 1954 World Cup.

"I remember everything from A to Z," he says. "It was something that looked like an egg that was moving slowly, slowly, slowly. Everyone was looking up and also there was some glitter coming down from the sky, silver glitter.

"We were astonished we had never seen anything like it before. We were absolutely shocked."

Play was suspended because spectators saw something in the sky, according to the referee's match report.

Among the crowd was Gigi Boni, a lifelong Fiorentina fan. "I remember clearly seeing this incredible sight," he says. His description of multiple objects differs slightly from Magnini's.

"They were moving very fast and then they just stopped. It all lasted a couple of minutes. I would like to describe them as being like Cuban cigars. They just reminded me of Cuban cigars, in the way they looked."

La Nazione's headline reads: Glass fibres fall on Tuscan cities after globes and flying saucers pass by. Lower headline: The sighting over Florence (with a photograph, now lost, of the UFO).

Boni has spent many years reliving that day in his mind. "I think they were extra-terrestrial. That's what I believe, and there's no other explanation I can give myself."

Another of the players, Romolo Tuci, still sprightly in his 70s, agrees. "In those years everybody was talking about aliens, everybody was talking UFOs and we had the experience, we saw them, we saw them directly, for real."

The incident at the stadium cannot simply be interpreted as mass hysteria - there were numerous UFO sightings in many towns across Tuscany that day and over the days that followed. According to some eyewitness accounts a ray of white light was seen in the sky coming from Prato, north of Florence.

Another man who relishes the chance to speak about that day is Roberto Pinotti, the president of Italy's National UFO Centre. He has written many books about UFOs and his home in the centre of Florence is stuffed full of alien memorabilia, posters of old Italian B-movies, framed newspaper articles and black-and-white photographs of blurry flying saucers.

"The players and the public were stunned seeing these objects above the stadium," Pinotti says.

"At the time the newspapers spoke of aliens from Mars. Of course now we know that is not so - but we may conclude that it was an intelligent phenomenon, a technological phenomenon and a phenomenon that cannot be linked with anything we know on Earth."

He's also intrigued by the material that fell from the sky - what Magnini describes as silver glitter.

"A wave of flying saucers over Italy," reported the Domenica del Corriere three years later. With thanks to the Fondazione Corriere della Sera for the use of material from their historic archives.

A sketch of UFOs over the stadium by Silvio Neri

"It is a fact that at the same time the UFOs were seen over Florence there was a strange, sticky substance falling from above. In English we call this 'angel hair'," says Pinotti.

"The only problem is after a short period of time it disintegrates." As a 10-year-old-boy he witnessed this phenomenon himself. "I remember, in broad daylight, seeing the roofs of the houses in Florence covered in this white substance for one hour and, like snow, it just evaporated.

"No-one knows what this strange substance has to do with UFOs."

Variously described by witnesses as similar to cotton wool or cobwebs, the substance was hard to collect because it disintegrated on contact - but some people were determined to find out what it was.

One of them was a journalist at the Florentine newspaper La Nazione, the late Giorgio Batini. In 2003 he told an Italian television programme, Voyager, how on that day he received hundreds of phone calls about the sightings. From the offices of La Nazione in the centre of town his own view of the sky was blocked by the Cathedral, so he went up to the top of the newspaper's building to see what everyone was talking about. The 81-year-old recalled seeing "shiny balls" moving fast towards the dome of the Cathedral.

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The players and fans from that legendary game spoke to World Football on BBC World Service.

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Batini ventured out to investigate. He came across a wood outside the city that was covered in the white fluff. He gathered several samples by rolling them up on a matchstick, and took them to the Institute of Chemical Analysis at the University of Florence. When he got there he found that others had done the same.

The lab, led by respected scientist Prof Giovanni Canneri, subjected the material to spectrographic analysis and concluded that it contained the elements boron, silicon, calcium and magnesium, and that it was not radioactive. Unfortunately this did not provide any conclusive answers - and the material was destroyed in the process.

A sample of the mysterious "angel hair" was photographed for the newspapers

Could it have come from a UFO? "It's an absolutely silly idea. Science totally rejects this idea," says US Air Force pilot-turned-astronomer James McGaha. From the Grasslands Observatory in South Eastern Arizona he has spent more than 40,000 hours staring at the night sky. Not to mention the additional hours he's spent in the cockpit of US fighter jets.

"You know the whole UFO phenomenon is nothing but myth, magic and superstition, wrapped up in this idea that somehow aliens are coming here either to save us or destroy us," he says.

In McGaha's view, the whole spectacle, "angel hair" and all, was nothing more than migrating spiders.

"When I looked at this case originally I thought perhaps it was a fireball, a very bright meteor breaking up in the atmosphere. They can be cigar-shaped with pieces breaking off. But it became fairly apparent that this was actually caused by young spiders spinning webs, very, very thin webs.

"The spiders use these webs as sails and they link together and you get a big glob of this stuff in the sky and the spiders ride on this to move between locations. They just fly on the wind and these things have been recorded at 14,000 feet above the ground. So, when the sunlight glistens off this, you get all kinds of visual effects.

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"As some of this stuff breaks off and falls to the ground, this all seems magical of course," says McGaha. "But I'm fairly confident that's what happened that day."

This theory is backed up by the fact that September and October are the months when spiders in the northern hemisphere migrate - and spectacular spider migrations still make headlines today. But it hasn't convinced everyone.

"Of course I know about the migrating spiders hypothesis - it's pure nonsense. It's an old story and also a stupid story," says Pinotti.

He disputes the spider theory because of the chemical analysis of the "angel hair" samples. Spider silk is a protein - an organic compound containing nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen and oxygen - not the elements reportedly found in the samples Batini and others brought to the university.

Players Ardico Magnini, Ronaldo Lomi and Romolo Tuci with their fan Gigi Boni (second left), at the ground

Sixty years on, the chances of determining the cause of the incident are slim. "I wouldn't trust any reports of an old and strange event like this unless I'd seen the data," says science writer Philip Ball. He agrees that the elements said to have been observed in the "angel hair" don't seem to tally with the spider theory.

"Magnesium and calcium are fairly common elements in living bodies, boron and silicon much less so - but if these were the main elements that the white fluff contained, it doesn't sound to me as though they'd come from spiders," he says.

So it all remains a mystery. No matter what the scientists say, those who were there are convinced that what they saw was unlike anything on earth.

Romolo Tuci just feels lucky to have been there. His eyes dance excitedly as he remembers that curious day. "I was spell-bound and I was also so, so happy."

Video of spiders ballooning courtesy of Rob Ferber, Little Grove Farm

Additional research by Vibeke Venema

Listen again to the Mystery of the Fiorentina UFOs as featured on World Football on BBC World Service.

Area 51 revealed by CIA - UFOs and Aliens?

Area 51 'declassified' in U-2 spy plane history

Area 51, so-named for its designation on a 1950s-era map, surrounds a dry lake bed, Groom Lake

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The CIA has officially acknowledged the secret US test site known as Area 51, in a newly unclassified internal history of the U-2 spy plane programme.

The document obtained by a US university describes the 1955 acquisition of the Nevada site for testing of the secret spy plane.

It also explains the site's lingering association with UFOs and aliens.

The remote patch of desert surrounding Groom Lake was chosen because it was adjacent to a nuclear testing facility.

"The U-2 was absolutely top secret," Chris Pocock, a British defence journalist and author of histories of the programme, told the BBC.

"They had to hide everything about it."

The U-2 plane, developed to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is still flown by the US Air Force.

Reports of UFOs

The document, a secret 1992 internal CIA history of the U-2 programme, was originally declassified in 1998 with heavy redactions.

Many of the blacked-out details were revealed this month after a public records request by the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington DC.

The site was selected for the U-2 programme in 1955 after an aerial survey by CIA and Air Force staff.

According to the history, President Dwight Eisenhower personally signed off on the acquisition.

Officials from the CIA, Air Force and Lockheed, the contractor building the U-2, began moving into the facility in July 1955.

While a lengthy account of the development of the U-2 spy plane programme, the history also attempts to shed light on the public's fascination with the Area 51 site and its lingering associations with extra-terrestrials and UFOs.

It notes that testing of the U-2 plane in the 1950s - at altitudes much higher than commercial aeroplanes then flew - provoked "a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)".

"At this time, no one believed manned flight was possible above 60,000 feet, so no one expected to see an object so high in the sky," note authors Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach.

'Inclination towards secrecy'

The original request for the redacted portions of the history was made in 2005. It was released to the National Security Archive several weeks ago.

Jeff Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, said the long period of secrecy was notable because of the extent people across the world were already aware of Area 51's existence.

Mr Richelson speculates the CIA must have recently made a conscious, deliberate decision to reveal Area 51's existence and origins.

"There is a general inclination towards secrecy," he said, and the many US agencies and non-US governments involved in the U-2 programme would have had a say in the declassification process.

"As far as I can tell, this is the first time something must have gone to a high-enough level to discuss" whether or not to formally acknowledge Area 51's existence, he said

Telepathy

Telepathy, auras, communication with animals and healing

From very early childhood experiences, many opportunities described by shamans, mystics and saints opened up to me.

I was able to link telepathically with other human beings. One of my friends and I shared dreams precisely. We could describe in detail the dream the other one had the previous night. We knew what each other was thinking. We could choose cards and know which card the other one was holding. We knew when one of us was about to call. The connection was so close it was almost unnerving.

I was able to see auras. One of my staff at the time had a skiing accident several years ago when she broke her elbow. I could see a green bulb of healing around her right elbow and asked her if she had broken it and whether it still ached. She was amazed I could see that and describe the level of her current pain.

I was walking on the beach with a group of friends. They asked me about my abilities and wanted me to prove I could “summon” UFOs. I asked if a simple proof like communicating with animals would suffice, like dolphins. They agreed. I sat down on the beach and began to meditate. A few moments later I felt the consciousness of the ocean, like the brain of a dolphin, inside my body. Several minutes later, three wild dolphins swam along the beach, then turned and swam into where I was sitting. My friends were amazed. I asked them if they wanted to swim with the dolphins who were communicating in high pitched squeaks to us. I ran into the ocean alone and swam with the dolphins as they ducked and dived and jumped in and around me for five minutes. They spoke to me just like I am speaking with you. I was able to understand them and they me. It was truly joyful.