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Your Paracast Newsletter — November 8, 2020


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
The Paracast Newsletter
November 8, 2020
www.theparacast.com

Explore Incredible Mysteries of the Red Planet with Nick Redfern on The Paracast!


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 Randall welcome prolific paranormal author Nick Redfern, who has written dozens of paranormal titles, to discuss his new book about the amazing phenomena observed on the Red Planet and other incredible mysteries, "The Martians." This book is an in-depth study of the theory that Mars was once a world that teemed with life. Perhaps, even, life not too dissimilar to ours. Incredibly, the Martians may still be there. Alive. It explores the CIA's top-secret search for the Martians, multiple photos of strange anomalies, and the latest revelations about the environment and water on Mars. And most tantalizing of all: Did an ailing Martian race come to Earth in past eons and were they confused with gods? The questions concerning life on Mars—then and now—are many.

J. Randall Murphy's Ufology Society International: Ufology Society International (USI) - Explore the UFO Phenomenon

Nick Redfern's Blog: Nick Redfern's World of Whatever...

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on November 8: For Part II of an interview that began on the November 8, 2020 episode, author Nick Redfern expands the discussion of his book, “The Martians” to cover the so-called “unified field theory” of the paranormal, in which such phenomena as UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot and other strange events are in some way interconnected. The discussion also covers the U.S. government’s ongoing interests in the paranormal, and the possibilities of reverse engineering alleged alien technology, such as the unverified claims made in the 1997 book, “The Day After Roswell,” written by Army Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes. Is there any advanced technology at all that may have been funneled to private industry to somehow take apart and exploit?

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

The Sad Failure of Our Space Program

By Gene Steinberg

In my youth, I used to watch those live sci-fi shows on TV, juvenile space operas about Earth crews traveling through space on their rocket ships. So in “Space Patrol,” our hero, Commander Buzz Corey, flew in the Terra V. In “Captain Video,” the titular hero traversed the cosmos in his craft, the Galaxy.

It was all so much fun, and then the shows were gone.

So the death of the DuMont network in 1956 meant that, among other shows, the plug was pulled on “Captain Video.”

If you’ve watched any of these shows on YouTube, you couldn’t fail to notice the primitive special effects, based on models that, even on our tiny TV set, never got beyond the toylike stage.

In the next decade, the space program became real because President John F. Kennedy wanted to beat the Russians and thus promised that we’d land men on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

Yes men. While those sci-fi shows in the 1950s did feature some female characters, in the real world it was years before women became astronauts.

I did watch the moon landing on July 16, 1969. That “one small step for mankind” was repeated a few times, and then the space program backtracked.

While such movies as “2001: A Space Odyssey” showed humans visiting worlds beyond the moon, the politicians failed to see the imperative of continuing active space exploration at such a level.

It’s not that we abandoned space exploration altogether of course. There were satellites, and the space shuttle program, which extended from 1981 through 2011, kept astronauts busy flying into Earth orbit and returning. But NASA was a shell of itself as far as moving beyond those trips to return to the moon.

In short, space exploration has, in the scheme of things, languished over the decades, although there have been promises that we’ll get back in the game before long, maybe to the moon in the decade of the 2020s or 2030s. Or maybe earlier.

Mars? Well, if you believe the sometimes overwrought promises from Elon Musk, his SpaceX company (short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp.) is planning to send one of his advanced rocket ships, Starship, to the Moon and then to Mars.

According to SpaceX, Starship may land on the moon by 2022 with astronauts arriving two years later. But SpaceX may also take advantage of a Mars launch opportunity by 2024.

Of course, SpaceX isn’t the only company working on such plans, but that Musk’s company has managed to mostly meet its sometimes elaborate promises does lend a high level of credibility to this project.

But you have to wonder why it took so many years for any agency, public or private, to be able to achieve something that one might have hoped for years ago. After all, if we could safely fly to the moon with control mechanisms that barely qualified as computers in the 1960s, surely the dreams of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or even the “Space 1999” TV show would have been mostly realized.

So consider the transport technology. While SpaceX and other companies are doing quite well in the scheme of things with their rocket ships, it’s still based on technology that was first perfected in the 1940s.

We are still using what are essentially glorified fire crackers. But they are still very far from perfect, and they crash far more often then you’d expect after all these decades with all those amazing advancements in computers and other systems.

What about nuclear-powered spacecraft? Wouldn’t they be more efficient than chemical-powered rockets?

Of course, there are the negatives of nuclear power, dealing with matters of waste and the dangers to a flight crew if something goes wrong during a long voyage to another planet. And what if it were to explode? The practical consequences have certainly worked against the future of nuclear energy.

Now in the Star Trek universe, warp drive will be invented in 2063 by an eccentric scientist, Zefram Cochrane. In the 1996 movie “Star Trek: First Contact,” the crew of the Enterprise (from Star Trek: The Next Generation) flies back through time to save Earth from a Borg attack and help Cochrane realize his historic mission.

If you saw the movie — and its one of the best reviewed Trek films — you’ll recall that the human race was not in terribly good shape at the time. Earth has been decimated as the result of World War III, a nuclear war, and the survivors of the human race were struggling to rebuild their civilization.

Now with today’s pandemic, it’s not hard to feel depressed about humanity’s future. The situation almost seems to mirror the desperate conditions in sci-fi stories of the 20th century that depicted Earth’s condition in the early 21st century. One can almost feel we are living in a nightmare without any quick solutions.

Certainly hopes that an advanced race of extraterrestrials plans to come to Earth and rescue us from our follies of war, famine and disease, have never come to pass. Those who claim to be in contact with “higher” beings that preach peace, brotherhood and respect for our environment cannot prove their claims. The beings with which they claim to be in contact are, at the very least, feckless. All of their empty pronouncements have failed to attract more than a few scattered followers, and certainly no Earth government would take any of it seriously.

Or at least that’s how it seems.

But what about those unsupported reports of a secret space program, where a Black Project of some sort has perfected advanced space travel and has colonized the back side of the Moon and perhaps Mars?

If any of that is true, why waste all this energy building primitive spaceships, eying multiyear voyages to Mars, when there are better ways to travel through space? Imagine how such advanced spacecraft could be exploited as a way to basically put the U.S. — or whatever country is running this alleged program — in a position to abolish war and advance the entire world under their terms?

Where’s the logic in keeping it all a secret?

Or are there other possibilities, such as whether an extraterrestrial race has somehow prevented humans from actively pursing space travel after the initial period of success?

No, we can’t prove that either.

I just find it more logical to consider that the people in charge have failed to make the case for devoting more resources to space travel. Or perhaps they just don’t care enough to build a case for the need to explore the universe. They are too shortsighted to see its potential.

And that’s the most troubling prospect of all.

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