Thursday, November 1, 2007

Presidential Debates Push UFO Facts Closer To Disclosure


Toward the end of the televised Democratic presidential candidates’ debate on MSNBC Tuesday, Oct. 30, NBC’s Tim Russert asked Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich about published reports that he had once seen a triangle-shaped unidentified flying object.

Kucinich stated briefly that, yes, he did see something that was unidentified (at least to him), was apparently flying and appeared to be an object.

Illinois Senator Barack Obama was also asked about extraterrestrial life and he spun it in a reasonable way by saying he was concerned with life on Earth and living beings in the United States.

During the analysis segment after the debate, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews followed up on the issue with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson.

Matthews pointed out that Richardson’s home state is associated with UFO lore due to the stories about “the Roswell incident.”

Richardson responded that, in his view, the federal government should be more straightforward and release classified information about these topics.

But he stopped short of saying he believed there was anything to the issue of actual contact with Earth and humans by visitors from other planets, dimensions or some other unusual point of origin.

Richardson said he does deal with the issue as a way to promote tourism in New Mexico and stated that he has not seen a UFO.

He, like Obama, did not want to get drawn into a discussion about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth or UFOs. This is understandable for a politician seeking high office.

WRIGHT-PATTERSON, ROSWELL, O’HARE

It is interesting that these three candidates are from states with significant involvement in the UFO issue.

Kucinich, from the Cleveland area in northeastern Ohio, is just a few hours drive from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, in southwestern Ohio.

Wright-Patterson, according to lore (some of it very well-researched), is where wreckage and possibly extraterrestrial bodies were taken in the summer of 1947 after the Roswell crash of an unusual craft.

Wright-Patterson was, and still is, involved in testing and analyzing foreign aircraft materials and technology.

The base reportedly was involved in the UFO issue for many decades. Project BLUEBOOK, a UFO investigation effort (or some say cover story operation) was based at Wright-Patt.

This brings us to New Mexico’s Richardson, who says he doesn’t mind promoting Roswell as a tourist destination, and feels the federal authorities (or whoever is in charge of the UFO situation) should be more forthcoming with the American people.

For those few people not familiar with the accounts of the so-called “Roswell incident,” as the story goes, a crash of an object at a remote sheep ranch in July 1947 resulted in the rancher bringing strange debris into the local county sheriff’s office.

The nearby Roswell Army Air Force (RAAF) base was contacted. The base intelligence officer and counter-intelligence personnel investigated and reportedly came the conclusion that a “flying saucer” had crashed there.

The base public affairs officer issued a press release stating this which made worldwide headlines, before a more down-to-Earth explanation (or cover story) about a weather balloon was issued.

Richardson has seemed somewhat strong in the past about advocating the release of information about Roswell and the general topic of UFOs. After the debate, though, he seemed to back off a bit when questioned directly by Matthews.

And Obama made his comments almost exactly one year after a highly unusual incident at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. On Nov. 7, 2006, a gray, metallic, disc-shaped craft was witnessed hovering over O'Hare by many airport and airline employees. The incident made news around the world.

Witnesses reported that the object had no visible lights and it was estimated to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter. The object was reportedly in a stationary position and was silent. It hovered just below the cloud deck which was estimated to be 1,900 feet that day.

A SENSITIVE SUBJECT

No matter how you cut it, UFOs and the visitation to Earth of extraterrestrial or other unusual beings are controversial topics. Yet, many people find these subjects thought-provoking and interesting.

Did the U.S. Government become acutely aware of this kind of situation in the summer of 1947 in Roswell? Were extraterrestrial bodies or even a live survivor recovered?

Did we establish communications with other nations about this scenario? Was a special group of scientists and military officers established by President Harry Truman to deal with this development?

Those are some of the claims of researchers who have tried to get insight into the stories, rumors and documentation about UFOs.

How big is your imagination? Some researchers claim that the U.S. established communication and diplomatic relations with these “visitors” and that they provided our government with advanced technology and knowledge.

There is a story that President Dwight Eisenhower met with a different type of extraterrestrials at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1954.

Yet another story alleges that the U.S. Government trained a small team of military personnel as part of an exchange program in the 1960s with the Roswell type of visitors. This program reportedly sent the U.S. team to another planet, via the visitors’ space craft, for over ten years.

According to tales about this program, Steven Spielberg’s movie CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND referenced the operation as part of the film’s plot.

President Ronald Reagan reportedly made a comment about Spielberg’s movie being closer to the truth than most people could imagine. And Reagan made a well-known speech about how humanity would become unified in the face of an extraterrestrial threat.

President Jimmy Carter and other witnesses aboard an aircraft spotted a UFO of some kind in October 1969. Carter filled out a UFO witness report form.

Former Arizona governor Fife Symington stated, as reported in a March 18, 2007 article, that he saw the huge “Phoenix Lights” craft that silently cruised at low altitude over the Phoenix metropolitan area in the early evening of March 13, 1997.

He was quoted as saying he witnessed a large triangular "craft of unknown origin" with lights. "It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape," Symington said.

Symington, a former Air Force officer, stated, "It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too."


These kinds of accounts are very difficult to believe. But, when researchers and average people put various bits of information together, an interesting scenario does emerge. But, are these things true, partially true, totally false? This is not completely clear.

READY OR NOT

And now in the early part of the 21st Century we have candidates for president discussing the topic, or avoiding discussing it, on national TV. This could be “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” as Ohio native and astronaut Neil Armstrong stated when he set foot on the moon July 21, 1969.

Because whether we believe accounts and reports of unusual objects sighted in the skies or not, contact between humans and other kinds of intelligence cannot realistically be ruled out.

Nowadays, physicists and other scientists tell us there could be other dimensions that are unseen. And that there could be ways of bending or using time and space in ways that make long-distance space and inter-dimensional travel possible.

For average people who take time to read some of the alleged evidence of these very unusual activities, the information can sometimes be compelling in persuading us that something is going on. Something that is very interesting, maybe scary or dangerous, maybe something that can completely change your view of things.

It seems worthwhile that we keep open minds about these kinds of topics. Because as we become more prepared to discuss and consider subjects like this, we are better able to deal with unusual circumstances of many types. And this can be helpful for us.

Who knows – our next president might be the one who announces that, yes, my fellow Americans, we are in contact with unusual visitors. There have been successes and problems in the relationships with them over the decades. There have been courageous efforts, advances and mistakes along the way. There was secrecy and now there is disclosure.

My fellow Americans, we will now need to look at our human existence on this small planet in new ways.


Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Mothman Is Back!

According to an expert in Portland, Maine, the Mothman is still flapping its frightening wings.

Loren Coleman is a cryptozoologist and author who says the Mothman — a mythical monster who causes disastrous events like terrible traffic accidents — is behind some current carnage, including the Minnesota bridge collapse this past summer and another bridge disaster in China two weeks later.

Coleman says there are some precise paranormal parallels, including the fact that the Minnesota bridge stretched across I-35, and was built in 1967, and the original Mothman mishap occurred in 1967, on highway 35 in West Virginia.

He says, “There’s a definite link with the Mothman across time and space. The Mothman can still have an amazing evil effect.”

Coleman is chronicling the ongoing morbid Mothman madness in his upcoming book, “Mothman: Evil Incarnate,” due out next year…


Haunted Connecticut Inn Gets It's Share Of Believers

Marci Chevian-Hooper, famous among blues cognoscenti in Connecticut for her long career and current status as Ms. Marci in the band Ms. Marci and the Lovesick Hounds, isn’t quite sure what to make of the gig they played at the Lighthouse Inn here in June 2005.

There she was in midsong, she said, when to her left she noticed the oddest thing — the fleeting image of a woman in a long white gown, who seemed to be floating, like an ectoplasmic vision, just outside a large window. She looked to her right to see if it was a reflection of someone in the room, but, no, it wasn’t that either. And it couldn’t have been someone outside, she learned later, because the window is 20 feet above the ground.

It wasn’t until after the show, when she shared her story with someone from the hotel, that she was told who it was.

The bride. The one who fell down the grand winding staircase on her wedding day, broke her neck and died at her groom’s feet. The one who has haunted the place ever since, popping up in fleeting orbs and weird flashes of light, including the intriguing picture of what seems to be a figure in a white gown taken just last Sunday on the Haunted Connecticut Tour, led by the paranormal investigator Donna Kent.

“Part of me is still a little skeptical, but I know what I saw,” said Ms. Chevian-Hooper, who added that she hadn’t even heard of the legend before she performed that night. “I try to explain it away, but it still comes down to the bride floating outside that dang window.”

In these dark, confused times, we don’t believe in much, but on some level, it seems almost everyone wants to believe in something; hence the evolution of Halloween as everyone’s favorite holiday. And it’s why a healthy crowd of the curious, the fun-loving and the four trained paranormal investigators from the Smoking Gun Research Agency spent their Halloween at this lovely atmospheric inn, built in 1902 as a private home overlooking the Long Island Sound.

Connecticut is full of famous and beloved haunted spaces: the “White Lady” of the Union Cemetery in Easton, the grave site of the Revolutionary War hero Israel Putnam in Brooklyn, the house haunted by the murdered tobacco farmer in Simsbury.

And these days, like every place else, the state seems to be full of paranormal investigators. Lorraine Warren, head of the New England Society for Psychic Research, has been at it since 1952. But the rest are newer in the business. Jon Nowinski, a 2005 government and politics graduate of the University of Maryland, came up from Westport with his Smoking Gun team. Ms. Kent is founder of the Cosmic Society of Paranormal Investigation. John Zaffis runs the Paranormal Research Society of New England. There’s the Connecticut Paranormal Research Society, the Northwest Connecticut Paranormal Society and various others.

Ms. Kent, author of the recently published “Ghost Stories and Legends of Eastern Connecticut,” has been at it for 12 years, since she was prompted to pull off the road and take photographs in a cemetery that revealed the spectral image of a Mr. Peete, who visits her still. Each year, she does about 25 serious investigations of people who say they were visited by ghosts, some benign, some not.

“It’s a new century,” she said. “At the beginning of centuries people have often been more open. And it’s mostly a good thing that there’s less of a stigma to believing in ghosts. But it also means you have to be careful. You can do a lot of harm by bringing in someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

Still, who can resist the alluring tales of an old haunted hotel, this one including accounts not just of the bride, but of the ghosts of two children who died in the hurricane of 1938 and can be heard running around the halls? Even the deceased golfer Payne Stewart has been spotted there. It seems half the employees have spooky tales to tell, and an investigation by the Smoking Gun team last November reported evidence of unexplained voices and anomalous temperature and electromagnetic field readings.

It’s all pretty compelling but for one small thing. Sally Ryan, 77, New London’s municipal historian, who grew up two blocks from the inn, said, alas, there was no tragic bride. No children died in the 1938 hurricane. If there are ghosts — or mice or rattling pipes — at the Lighthouse Inn, it ain’t them.

“It’s getting to the point that on Halloween, everyone needs a ghost,” she said. “But there’s no truth to any of it. The closest thing to it I know is that my cousins had their wedding receptions at the Lighthouse Inn, but they all made it down the stairs without tripping and all came out alive.”


When ET Comes Knocking the UFO Welcome Center Will Be Ready

It has attracted nearly 3,000 tourists to a small town just off Interstate 26. And its owner says it may attract some from outer space.

In the slightly more than one square mile that is Bowman, South Carolina, there is one blinking light, one restaurant and at least 16 churches. Nearly 1,200 people call Bowman home.

“There is not much here. Sunday afternoon you can ride around in your car, that's about the most excitement around here. All except for the spaceship,” said Jody Pendarvis.

In the shadow of the town's only gas station sits what you could call Pendarvis' cosmic condo. Decades of work and love have turned wood and aluminum into a 42-foot wide planted saucer. He calls it the UFO Welcome Center.

“I guess some people have a destiny and my destiny must have been to build this.”

In 1994, Pendarvis started piecing together wood from his grandfather's house to build his own. But anything square was too square for him.

Pendarvis is known as the alien ambassador.

“Seriously, I am here to welcome the aliens from out of space.”

Inside, you find 4 stories filled with Christmas lights, space-related videos, a mess Pendarvis claims the aliens left behind and some of his 13 cats.

Pendarvis cannot explain why he pours so much time and already more than $20,000 into his hobby.

“Some people think I ought to turn it into a ghost house for Halloween,” he said.

But the UFO man is not out to make a profit or to gain acceptance.

But, he is looking for the community’s support.

“Since this is the only attraction in Bowman, I think I’ll run for mayor and maybe I’ll get it.”

This unofficial mascot of Bowman wants to make it official.

“They want a friendly town and right now friendly is the main word I want to go for,” he explained.

It is a campaign platform based the way he lives his life: welcoming strangers into the town he keeps an extra-eye on from up above.

Pendarvis is running for mayor against Zelda Pelzer, who has held the post for 7 years. She says she is basing her campaign on improving the quality of life and the economy of Bowman. The election is November 6th.

The welcome center is located at 4004 Homestead Road in Bowman.


Spooklights Documented Nationwide

Forget about spooky ghosts when you celebrate Halloween tonight. So fickle, unreliable and, well, unreal, how about spooklights, instead?

Spooklight sighters have documented the floating lightballs for decades throughout the United States, including near Cloverdale and Lexington in Lauderdale County.

"Half the time, you're looking at the sky, see nothing and you turn around and there it is," said Wyatt Cox, spooklight aficionado who documented more than 180 sightings in his 2007 book Spooklights, "The Amazing Cloverdale, Alabama Spooklight Mystery" (Ghost Research Society Press).

Cox said the best place to see spooklights in the Shoals is at the intersection of Cloverdale Road and Lauderdale 272, just south of Cloverdale. The best time, he said, is between 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.

"It may not be every night, but it probably will be," Cox said.

Cloverdale spooklights typically are 8-foot-wide balls of yellowish-orange light, that silently pulsate and travel about 20 to 30 mph. Their longevity and altitude are unpredictable, according to Cox.

He said that unlike ghosts, some observers explain spooklights with science as "a natural phenomenon produced by electrical currents in most fault lines."

Andy Goodliffe, geophysicist at the University of Alabama, said other strange light phenomena exist such as St. Elmo's Fire from static charges across sea surfaces. Others are "gas hydrates," which occur when a gas escapes from the Earth's surface and ignites.

Goodliffe remained skeptical about spooklights, however. "As far as it being associated with plate boundaries and electrical charges, that's pushing the scientific frontier," said the researcher who hadn't previously heard of spooklights.

Another experience local residents had with spooklights was in the spring of 1973 when a rash of reported UFO sightings in Lexington stirred up residents.

"Have you heard about the Unidentified Flying Objects in the Shoals Area? If you haven't, you're way behind," wrote Lucille Prince for the TimesDaily in Feb. 6, 1973, article.

By the early 1980s, the paper reported "Local UFO Investigation Team Gets Saucer Theory Shot Down." The team included Cox and his friend, Greg Keeton.

Cox, a Wilson High School graduate, works for the electrical utility at the Hartwell power plant near the Georgia-South Carolina state line.

Cox, who also has written about UFO and Bigfoot sightings in Alabama, said he used long time exposures to photograph the lightballs because, "you can get more information out of a time exposure."

Pulsations and even a tinier sidekick balls of light can be seen with long camera exposures, Cox said.


British Schoolboy Speaks 10 Languages

A boy genius of 10 has stunned teachers by learning to speak 10 languages.

Arpan Sharma taught himself French, Spanish, German, Italian, Swahili, Mandarin, Polish, Thai and the difficult Lugandan language of Uganda. He also learned Hindi from his mum and dad.

The gifted primary school pupil from Oldbury, West Mids, studied using CD-roms.

He learned Italian fluently at seven, German at eight, and Spanish when he was nine.

But he admitted: "Learning Swahili was probably one of the biggest challenges I've faced and Mandarin Chinese was hard too."

Deputy Headmaster Richard Lynn, of Blue Coat School, Edgbaston, Birmingham, said: "Arpan is a language genius, a natural when it comes to listening to an exact pronunciation and repeating it perfectly."

Arpan wants to be a surgeon and work in hospitals abroad and speak each country's tongue.


Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Neighbors Describe Their Resident Ghosts

It's not unusual to find houses around northern Colorado that seem to be the home of a few haunted things: the Windsor farmhouse where the family can't keep a Christmas tree because a ghost keeps throwing it outside; the rocking chair ghost in Eaton, where family members have seen the old ghostly woman rocking late into the night.

Northern Colorado has its share of apparitions, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, wisps and mysterious vapors. But now there are reports from the residents of three houses, side-by-side in a Greeley neighborhood, that each house has its own set of ghosts.

The families live in east-central Greeley, and have asked that their addresses not be released. But they wanted to talk about their ghostly experiences.

Gerry Park

From the day she walked into her home 16 years ago, Park "felt something." Her husband felt "the presence" also.

"It was a feeling at first that we weren't alone in the house," Park said. "Then, from time-to-time, we've seen them."

She said a "ghost family" -- a man and woman and two children -- have been seen in her house several times over the years. They stay mainly in the basement, but "things" have happened upstairs, Park said. "One evening, we were sitting in the living room watching TV," Park explained, "and there was a Big Wheel tricycle in the dining room. Suddenly, the trike just started rolling, and came out of the dining room into the living room."

Park's adult daughter had problems in the past with the "father" of the family, and he's terrified her, seeming to chase her from the basement. She told her mother that the man was evil.

Liz Hoffman

"They live in the attic of our house, and we're so used to them, they really don't frighten us. You just learn to live with the ghosts."

But last summer, while Hoffman and friends were sitting outside on a summer evening, they saw something floating out of the attic vents of the house. They were like streaks of light, Hoffman said, and her neighbor, Gerry Park shot a photo. "We've also found that many times, if you take a picture of our house," Hoffman said, "you'll get orbs of light on the photo."

Hoffman lives in the center of the three allegedly haunted houses in north-central Greeley. None of the people living in the houses wanted the addresses released because they are concerned about people coming to their homes to search for their ghostly residents.

Marjorie Park

The third resident on the block said she has seen the shadows and heard the noises her children talk about, but she doesn't let them bother her. "My kids say there are ghosts in my house, but I've lived here 40 years and haven't seen a real one yet," Marjorie Park said.

Gerry Park is her daughter-in-law.

Marjorie said there might be ghosts living in her house but she won't let them frighten her. "I just don't pay any attention to the shadows and noises."

The three houses were placed on the basements and foundations about 40 to 60 years ago, according to Greeley records. The area was farm for many years, but then when it was sold, the three houses were brought in from other areas.

The entire area, southwest of Jerry's Market, is filled with homes and complete neighborhoods now. And three houses who may have extra, ghostly residents.


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