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Your Paracast Newsletter — February 18, 2018


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
February 18, 2018
www.theparacast.com


The Paracast Presents UFOs From an Historical Perspective with Jerome Clark

The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.

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This Week's Episode: Gene and guest co-host Curtis Collins present long-time UFO researcher and author Jerome Clark, who will discuss an article he wrote for Fortean Times entitled, "Mr. Wilson and the aeronauts of 1897," and whether some of those sightings were genuine events, an elaborate fiction or something else: what Jerry calls an "experience anomaly." He'll also cover the history of the field, and whether anything has been accomplished towards understanding the phenomenon . And why has he once again been drawn into the field after a period of relative inactivity? His books include the multivolume magnum opus, "The UFO Encyclopedia." He's also a songwriter whose music has been recorded or performed by musicians such as Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Tom T. Hall.

Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet

Curt Collins' Blog: Blue Blurry Lines

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on February 18: Gene and guest co-host Curtis Collins continue their discussions with long-time UFO researcher and historian Jerome Clark. In this episode, Jerry explains how a random meeting with a book publisher led to a deal to write the third edition of “The UFO Encyclopedia,” expected in the fall of 2018, and the hopes for a more affordable version. The discussion also focuses on the history of the field and some of the early personalities. There are insights into UFO hoaxes, such as the MJ-12 documents, and how Project Blue Book usually treated the cases it pretended to investigate. You’ll also hear Jerry explain how he expects some classic cases to survive in the new edition of the book.

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel

Is Yet Another Flurry of UFO Interest Flaming Out?
By Gene Steinberg

Regardless of whether the news media covers such stories, UFOs are almost always around. Such researchers as Canada’s Chis Rutkowski, and the ones who work with MUFON and other organizations continue, to collect sightings. Some are mere lights in the sky while others provide far more compelling details that are downright strange.

Over the years, there have been UFO flaps, short-term increases in sighting activity. Having lived through a number of them, I used to feel that the time had come, if the government knew what was going on, to make them face the music and tell us. Well, at least until the flap ended.

Some researchers sought patterns in such activity. Maybe it had something to do with the distance of Mars from the Earth, believing the red planet was a possible source of the phenomenon. There was also a seven-year cycle repeated for a while before that pattern stopped.

Or maybe there was no pattern at all, and such events were mostly random, or followed a schedule that only visitors from other planets would understand.

Indeed, it sometimes seemed that the mere act of discovering a possible pattern of UFO waves was sufficient for things to change. Sometimes it was about UFO fans showing up at the location of fairly regular sightings only to see that particular pattern die down, or come to an end.

One possibility was that we were dealing with the so-called “publicity flap,” where one or more sightings capture the public’s imagination, receive extra news coverage, and encourage others to report their sightings. Since people were actually looking to the skies for something to happen, more strange things were reported. It wasn’t the result of some sort of intricate plan or schedule after all.

Obviously the expansion of UFO coverage increased hopes for serious attention from the government and scientists, but when the media turned its attention elsewhere, only the diehards stuck around. Indeed, one of my friends, who had a penchant for inventing hoaxes, remarked that he did it not for some nefarious purpose, but to keep up the interest in the saucers.

In the early 1970s, I was involved in publishing a magazine mostly focused on UFOs at a time when interest was at a low ebb. It had nothing whatever to do with me, but I saw the frequency of sightings increase once more. I was employed as the news director for a radio station located some 45 miles west of Philadelphia at the time. One day, between the usual coverage of entries in the local police blotters and town meetings came a bunch of UFO sightings.

Although they never talked about flying saucers with me, station management was happy to allow me to cover those events. Perhaps they felt it would somehow boost ratings, and they were always happy with that.

So the flying saucers were back, until they weren’t. The ebb and flow of sightings was the only thing on which you could depend. Even when hopes rose over the so-far unfulfilled prospects for disclosure, I could always accurately predict that it once again would come to nothing.

On December 16, 2017, it seemed the UFOs were back, but not because of a new saucer wave. America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, ran a special feature on the subject entitled, “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program.

One of the authors of the article was Leslie Kean, a journalist, author of a best-selling UFO book, and a sometimes guest on The Paracast. The article revealed how the Defense Department had spent $22 million on something called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It may not have been obvious by the title, but this was a genuine UFO research project, operated in concert with hotel and space magnate Robert Bigelow.

The story partly focused on the military intelligence official who headed the project, one Luis Elizondo, who had since become associated with a private startup known as the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. Heading up the team is rock and roller Tom Delonge, listed as President and CEO. The company’s leadership also included a small number of scientists and former government officials that included Elizondo and Dr. Hal Puthoff.

While there’s reason to doubt Delonge’s credentials to head of such a group, was it possible his interest was mostly mercenary? According to the trades, he had amassed a fortune of some $60 million from his career as a performer, primarily for Blink182.

In passing, I barely heard of the group before Delonge came to my attention as a UFO enthusiast and someone who regarded himself as very well informed on the subject.

The story about the Pentagon UFO study got a fair amount of coverage early on, mostly serious. Leslie Kean served as a spokesperson for the group, and I did catch a couple of her interviews on cable TV news channels.

One thing was certain: By and large, that coverage was serious. The TV talking heads asked reasonable questions and received reasonable answers. Rather than make outlandish claims and promises, the presentation was largely straightforward. I even began to feel that there would continue to be snicker-free coverage. Did that mean that mainstream science might actually take it seriously?

But without new and compelling UFO events to cover, the subject faded from the headlines. Some weeks after the initial flurry of coverage, Leslie appeared on a Fox News program hosted by conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson. He handled the subject seriously, and I almost felt he had a personal interest in UFOs. But the main case discussed was the 2006 sighting of a UFO at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Was there nothing new to report, beyond the few sightings quoted from the Pentagon study?

The long and short is that, barring any sudden resurgence in news coverage due to a recent UFO event or some other development, the story has pretty much faded from the media. The To the Stars fundraising campaign has also stalled.

I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything more. This is what always happens in the UFO field. Why should this time be any different?

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Here, Here , an excellent summation of the ufo perplex. From time to time i have given some thought to the (possible) psychological aspect of sightings. Maybe we have these sightings because we want to believe that someone has taken an interest in our presence and this collected thought propagates into more "visitations". You, me , Chris or even Mike (or someone among the billions of candidates on this big blue marble) may be unconsciousally creating the next close encounter of the third kind when all that was on our minds was having to get up earlier to beat traffic for the Monday morning slog.

Did i mention I really like Gene's submission this week ?
 
... Maybe we have these sightings because we want to believe that someone has taken an interest in our presence and this collected thought propagates into more "visitations" ...
What are you saying exactly? Hallucinations to satisfy some wish fulfillment? That seems like a bit of a stretch unless you're on some sort of hallucinogen. If that's the case then I suppose one could have a UFO experience just like some people meet their animal spirit ( or whatever the case may be ). There is even some suggestion to that effect in primitive cultural practise and artwork. I also ran across a project to document such experiences while Chris and I were debating the use of hallucinogens. Just don't ask men to remember where to find it. It's probably on one of the threads in this maze someplace.
 
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Maybe we have these sightings because we want to believe that someone has taken an interest in our presence and this collected thought propagates into more "visitations". You, me , Chris or even Mike (or someone among the billions of candidates on this big blue marble) may be unconsciously creating the next close encounter of the third kind when all that was on our minds was having to get up earlier to beat traffic for the Monday morning slog.

Whose Mike?

Moving along, the belief systems of the unconscious, that state of awareness of being, exists within us and resonates with the collective as the outpouring of the collective expression. The power of the collective is the power of the creation of physical reality along the lines of what it is we truly need.

Hail fellow, Well met!
 
What are you saying exactly? Hallucinations to satisfy some wish fulfillment? That seems like a bit of a stretch unless you're on some sort of hallucinogen. If that's the case then I suppose one could have a UFO experience just like some people meet their animal spirit ( or whatever the case may be ). There is even some suggestion to that effect in primitive cultural practise and artwork. I also ran across a project to document such experiences while Chris and I were debating the use of hallucinogens. Just don't ask men to remember where to find it. It's probably on one of the threads in this maze someplace.

Nope, I am saying ( mindlessly hoping?) that such contacts would happen through collective sheer will. I like to refer to such episodes as Star Trek's "SHORE LEAVE" or a better example FORBIDDEN PLANET'S monster of the id to suggest that guys like you or me have a lot more to say about what happens here and may be completely clueless to the possibility of some kind of contact and that we are the origin of it.[/QUOTE]
 
Nope, I am saying ( mindlessly hoping?) that such contacts would happen through collective sheer will. I like to refer to such episodes as Star Trek's "SHORE LEAVE" or a better example FORBIDDEN PLANET'S monster of the id to suggest that guys like you or me have a lot more to say about what happens here and may be completely clueless to the possibility of some kind of contact and that we are the origin of it.
[/QUOTE]
Interesting. That would imply some sort of intense study on a culture wide basis or brain scanning or telepathic connection right?
 
Nope, I am saying ( mindlessly hoping?) that such contacts would happen through collective sheer will. I like to refer to such episodes as Star Trek's "SHORE LEAVE" or a better example FORBIDDEN PLANET'S monster of the id to suggest that guys like you or me have a lot more to say about what happens here and may be completely clueless to the possibility of some kind of contact and that we are the origin of it.

In essence what you are saying is you have come to realize that life happens through you not to you. Velly good, dilly dilly!
 
New questions arise:
That's a perfectly viable theory, but as I've pointed out elsewhere, without context or additional information, the Gimbal video is like a Rorschach test: you can see whatever you want to see in that thing. All we know is that an indiscernible hot object was tracked and caught on FLIR video. That's it. It could be a jet, or it could be something else that's as hot as jet exhaust. What I find interesting about it is the oddly sudden rotations - in his example of the artificial illusion of rotation induced by the rotating mirrors inside the FLIR camera as it tracks a heat source, the rotations are smooth and continuous. But in this video there are two oddly sudden rotations that abruptly stop both times. That might be a peculiarity of that Raytheon ATFLIR gun camera system, or it might be an actual odd mechanical rotation. Hopefully in due time we'll get more info about the context, and ideally even see any interesting radar traces of the Gimbal event, so we can determine whether that object could be a jet or not.

But I find it strange that so many people are focusing on the Gimbal video, which is essentially meaningless without more data, when the USS Nimitz "Tic-Tac ufo" case is so incredibly compelling. Two of our top fighter pilots described their encounter with an object that dropped down from above the upper range of the radar (80,000ft), plummeted straight down and stopped above a large odd subsurface object roiling the ocean water, and then ultimately darted away from the fighter jets so fast that they were left in the dust. It only takes one case like this to provide reasonable proof of alien technology operating in our airspace. So why are so many people in the ufology community piling on to discredit the Gimbal video when the Nimitz video and its supporting testimony and technical details provide such powerful evidence of the phenomenon that we're all so interested in? It's just strange to me. When did we become our own worst enemy?
 
the Nimitz video and its supporting testimony and technical details provide such powerful evidence

First of all, to reiterate, I am fairly confident something anomalous was going on in this Nimitz case, and that the F-18 drivers and backseaters saw some anomalous object. However, I don't quite know what to make of what seems to me to be an amateur-level analysis of FLIR video data.

In the vid linked here you will clearly see an SU-27 tracked by FLIR. In two or three seconds into this vid you will see the jet shoot off to the left, and it is not because it went to warp speed, but because of an artefact of some reorientation of the FLIR tracking sensor system.

Yet, on the TTS Nimitz FLIR vid, we are told on the vid: "The object suddenly and instantaneously accelerates to the left, out of view of the sensor at what appears to be an unprecedented velocity." Here.

To me, the TTS crew is of such professional rank that questions arise about their motives when such obvious questions are not dealt with, whether the Gimbal vid or the Nimitz vid.
 
First of all, to reiterate, I am fairly confident something anomalous was going on in this Nimitz case, and that the F-18 drivers and backseaters saw some anomalous object. However, I don't quite know what to make of what seems to me to be an amateur-level analysis of FLIR video data.

In the vid linked here you will clearly see an SU-27 tracked by FLIR. In two or three seconds into this vid you will see the jet shoot off to the left, and it is not because it went to warp speed, but because of an artefact of some reorientation of the FLIR tracking sensor system.

Yet, on the TTS Nimitz FLIR vid, we are told on the vid: "The object suddenly and instantaneously accelerates to the left, out of view of the sensor at what appears to be an unprecedented velocity." Here.

To me, the TTS crew is of such professional rank that questions arise about their motives when such obvious questions are not dealt with, whether the Gimbal vid or the Nimitz vid.
Yeah I get what you're saying - that does appear to be a misinterpretation of the footage. It's like they got their own story mixed up: the footage isn't even from the incident that Cmdrs. Fravor and Slaight described - I understand that the FLIR footage was taken during a subsequent long-range interception attempt by different pilots later that day, if I've heard correctly. So it's like they got the pilots' testimony about the Tic-Tac ufo taking off with a stunning acceleration, mixed up with that footage which doesn't actually show any exotic maneuvering - even Bruce Maccabee got the analysis completely wrong as you can see in this video, that shows how the "acceleration" is just an illusion produced by switching to a 2X closer zoom:

So the Nimitz video, like the Gimbal video, isn't really interesting evidence on its own - just an indication that something happened, and we haven't seen any of the footage from Cmdr. Fravor's encounter, which is really frustrating.

But I'm withholding judgment about their motives because Luis Elizondo simply hasn't been asked any of these kinds of questions in any of the interviews he's given - and he's given a bunch, but most of them have been super brief and mostly superficial (though his recent 1-hour podcast interview got into some new areas - like the jaw-dropping confirmation of the exotic metamaterial exhibiting extremely sophisticated manufacturing, and even nonterrestrial isotopic signatures, as Tom DeLonge had first mentioned on the Joe Rogan show).

This is why he needs to appear in some long-form interviews, like here at The Paracast - other programs simply don't get into the nitty gritty like Gene and Chris and the technical-minded members here at the forums do. Now, if his answers to these kinds of questions prove unsatisfactory, then that's something else entirely. I'd like to know who wrote that text narration on the video, who got to proofread it, and what Mr. Elizondo has to say about it. But for the time-being I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, because the revelation of the AATIP itself, and this particular case, are both big stories that we simply didn't have before, and that buys them some time to address these kinds of errors and soforth, in my book anyway.
 
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