After days of fighting rumors about alien visitations, the managers of the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico say they’re reopening the facility — and have shed more light on the reason for its 10-day security-related closure.
Tag: UFOs
Categories
Sleuth solves Puget Sound UFO mystery
Was it an airplane? A missile? An honest-to-goodness unidentified flying object? For a couple of days, a mystery swirled around a long bright streak that was caught by a webcam pointing up from Western Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula.
Now the mystery has been solved. But it wasn’t easy.
It took a couple of days for Tyler Rogoway, a writer who specializes in the hush-hush corners of aviation, to figure out what was in the 20-second time-lapse webcam view, which was captured on Sunday by a camera pointed toward Whidbey Island.
The bloom of exhaust that blossomed in Southern California’s skies during Dec. 22’s liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket sparked jokes and jitters — with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joining in.
Was it an alien visitation? A North Korean rocket attack? A stunt involving Santa’s sleigh?
Folks who were following the launch of 10 Iridium NEXT satellites from Vandenberg Air Force Base at sunset knew full well what it was: a rocket booster’s contrail, catching the last rays of sunlight high above the California coast.
But for a while there, it was a mystery to unaware residents in Los Angeles, San Diego and locales in between. Such displays, including the infamous “Norway Spiral” of 2009, often spark UFO reports.
The U.S. Department of Defense funded a program to investigate unidentified flying objects until 2012, and the program may well be continuing with alternate funding, The New York Times reported today.
The Times says its report is based on a range of interviews with people familiar with the program — including the military intelligence official who ran it until a couple of months ago, Luis Elizondo; and the now-retired U.S. senator who helped get $22 million in funding for the program, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.
“This was so-called ‘black money,’” Reid told the Times.
The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program is also discussed today in a report published by Politico.
The FBI denies having a secret collection of X-Files like the ones that Mulder and Scully are investigating in “The X-Files” TV series – but you’d expect the alien conspiracy to say that, wouldn’t you?
Whether or not the truth is out there, both the FBI and the CIA have capitalized on the X-Files buzz to rehash some of their, um, more unusual cases. The FBI’s online vault features nine cases having to do with unexplained phenomena, including flying saucer reports, cattle mutilations, ESP and the purported Majestic-12 conspiracy.
The CIA took its turn just in time for this season’s “X-Files” reboot, which continues tonight with what’s said to be the best episode to date. The spooks offered up five flying-saucer surveys from 1952 that would warm the heart of Fox Mulder, the true believer on the fictional FBI’s X-Files team. Five more files, dating from 1949 to 1952, take a skeptical view that’s in keeping with the usual attitude of Mulder’s partner, Dana Scully.
The CIA also threw in its top 10 tips for investigating unidentified flying objects.
UFOs are back in style, thanks in part to the return of “The X-Files” to television this weekend, almost 13 years after the last episode had its original airing. And while Mulder and Scully are delving into new anomalies in prime time, the folks who deal with UFO reports in real life are gearing up for renewed attention as well.
“X-Files, Y-Files, No-Files, I get calls from people who say they have evidence of alien visitation,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “Either they’ve seen something, they’ve photographed something or they’re in touch with something.”
The calls generally come in at a regular rate, but Shostak does recall that there was a noticeable uptick while the original “X-Files” show was on TV.
Don Lincoln, a physicist at Fermilab who’s the author of “Alien Universe,” notes that attitudes toward UFOs tend to reflect depictions in popular culture, ranging from flying saucers and little green men to mysterious “Men in Black” and alien conspiracies. The original “X-Files” told tales of gray extraterrestrials and government coverups, and he’s curious to see whether the new series will follow the same path.
“It could well be that what the new X-Files will ultimately accomplish is to introduce a new generation to the mysteries of Area 51 and the unsettling idea of the Men in Black,” Lincoln wrote in an email. “I have said enough. They’re watching…”
One expert who won’t be watching is Peter Davenport, who’s the director of the National UFO Reporting Center, or NUFORC. He doesn’t even own a television.
“I try to avoid addressing works of fiction, because I am a scientist,” he told GeekWire from his home base in Harrington, Wash. “I collect data that is appropriate and accurate. … I find [fictional UFO tales] to be unsatisfying, seeing that I deal with the real thing, all day, every day.”
If the truth about UFOs is out there, Hillary Clinton says she’ll be on it as president.
When the Democratic presidential front-runner vowed to “get to the bottom” of the alien-visitation issue, she just might have locked up the “X-Files” vote – while giving her critics one more thing to taunt her with.
Clinton’s comment came at the end of a recent chat with the editorial board of the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire, which holds its first-in-the-nation presidential primary on Feb. 9. Reporter Daymond Steer reminded her about a conversation they had about UFOs in 2007, and that perked up the candidate.
“Yes, I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Clinton reportedly replied.
An unannounced Trident missile launch lit up the skies over Los Angeles on Saturday night, setting off a hail of UFO reports, tense tweets and YouTube videos.
After the flare-up, the U.S. Navy confirmed that the USS Kentucky, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine that’s homeported at the Bangor submarine base on the Kitsap Peninsula, conducted a “scheduled, on-going system evaluation test” in the Navy’s Pacific Test Range off the coast of Southern California. The missile was not armed, the Navy said in its statement.
It’s typical for the Navy to refrain from announcing Trident test launches in advance, but it’s definitely not typical for the launch to be witnessed by millions of people in one of the nation’s most populous regions.