kisma Johnson's blog: "Not just kucinich has seen UFO's"

What would an alien llfeform be like? And what can we expect them to do about US, should they ever really arrive on planet Earth? As to the reality of alien forms, we should refer to Arthur C Clarke, who advised that if you want to theorise on what they would look like, visit a zoo. In doing so, the sheer diversity of life-types you will see will tell you it is impossible to speculate on alien-forms unless we actually see them. But what about their motive, and the eventual fate of ourselves? HOLLYWOOD FUN Hollywood gives us oodles of scenarios, usually based around the basic idea of malevolence. Words such as ‘invasion’ abound, as if they will be superior beings wiping us out without a second thought. Whether this is based on reasoned argument, or whether it is a fact that friendly, cuddly aliens wouldn’t make a spectacular movie - ET excepted - I’ll leave to you. However, that they would have superior technology goes without saying. After all, they’d have got here, wouldn’t they? But to understand alien psychology, perhaps we would be best advised to look at ourselves, our past, and our probable future. EVOLUTION AND SPACE TRAVEL During the nervy days of the Cold War, mankind learnt the power of technology. We had to - we could have destroyed ourselves if we hadn’t. And this is perhaps the most important point to realise about any alien forms who had broken out of planetary confinement to explore deep space. Technology is so powerful that if people don’t learn to live with each other, we’ll destroy ourselves. And as evolution seems to be a constant of life, then we can argue that, to get to the stage of star travel, then the lesson would have to be learnt or any alien form would have wiped itself out before going to the stars. FRIEND OR FOE OR … Bearing this point in mind, we can argue that any alien form that reaches us will be benevolent, realising the importance of getting on with others. So the most likely scenario for alien contact should not involve our total destruction by a race of Klingon-like warriors. However, this does not necessarily mean we will be safe. For there could be a sting in the tail - lf they have one, that is. It is all to do with sentience. We, as a species, have self-awareness. It is this which makes us human, and our awareness leads to a distinct category of behaviour patterns concerning other animals. Classifying ourselves as the most sentient beings on planet Earth, we naturally put ourselves at the top of the evolutionary tree. Some other animals, we decide, are not that far behind us. Close runners-up are dolphins, dogs, monkeys and cats. Due to the degree of sentience we have allowed them, we keep them as cuddly pets or planet-mates and have a distinct dislike for anyone who hurts them. On the other hand, cows, pigs and sheep are thought to be, in a word - thick. Hence, rather than treating them as near equals we farm them, kill them, chop them up and roast them. We don’t do it for nasty reasons, but for survival requirements - we need to eat (vegetarians excepted). However, we can argue that any alien form that visits us would have a superior intelligence to us. Which prompts the question, would they class US as sentient? Let us hope so. For if not, no matter how benevolent they may think they are, we could be dog meat.

Japan's chief government spokesman has announced that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) exist. Earlier, in response to a question from an opposition lawmaker, the Japanese government issued a statement saying it could not confirm any cases of UFOs. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura later told reporters he believed they were "definitely" real. It is the sort of question politicians dread but, under Japanese rules, are unable to ignore. A member of the opposition asked the government what its policy was to deal with UFOs. He said work should begin urgently to try to confirm whether or not they exist because of what he called "incessant" reports of sightings. The Japanese civil service swung into action. In a statement it said that should a flying saucer be spotted in the country's airspace, a fighter would be scrambled to attempt visual confirmation. But it emphasised that the government was not aware of cases where a UFO from space had been discovered. Most alerts turned out to be birds or other objects. 'Not confirmed' The document revealed that Japan has not yet planned what to do should aliens arrive here. Many UFO sightings can be easily explained The government's chief spokesman Nobutaka Machimura drew laughter from reporters when he admitted that this was a "stereotypical" response from the bureaucrats. Perhaps with his tongue a little in his cheek he insisted that he believed UFOs did "definitely" exist. Questioned about the existence of alien spaceships, Japan's Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda thought about it and then answered carefully. He said he had "not yet confirmed" whether they existed. The conspiracy theorists will note that the answer was not a "no".

Defining unidentified flying objects in Turkey The sighting of a UFO in early November excited the Turkish public, with pictures appearing in both tabloids and more serious papers. The flying object was spotted in the Karaköprü area of Şanlıurfa province at around 4 a.m. on Nov. 4. Filmed on amateur video, the strange hexagonal ball of light hovered in the sky emitting red, green and white lights and moved quickly and erratically. After 15 minutes it disappeared without a trace. As of yet no official explanation has been offered as to what it might have been, although some Internet comments point to a genuine sighting of a “Green Fireball” phenomenon. Non-believers claim the object is just a star filmed under magnification and the more cynical say these were American spy planes monitoring Turkey’s border with Syria. This is not the first instance of a UFO sighting in Turkey. They occur regularly, with recent ones in Konya in March 2007, which lasted on and off for a week, and İstanbul on Jan. 4 when people in the Yenibosna area saw a spinning circle with glowing white lights in the sky. Haktan Akdoğan, the head of the Turkish Sirius UFO Space Science Research Center, claimed in August that the number of sightings in Turkey, as in many other countries, has been increasing in recent months. The largest concentration of sightings in Turkey, and perhaps the best documented, occurred between 2001 and 2002. This spate of sightings seems to have been triggered by the extraordinary events of June 7, 2001. Ten village guards from Dondurmaz in Adıyaman province were on the night watch. All of them claimed to have seen a bright light in the shape of a large circular “tray” the size of a house glowing in the sky. They watched as it flew off in the direction of Ulubaş Mountain and then flickered out of existence. When the men reported to their commander, their statements were taken seriously and Adıyaman Governor Halil Işık had them separated and individually questioned. Not only did their accounts tally up, but when asked to draw pictures of what they had seen all the sketches were uncannily similar. Mr. Işık felt the event was serious enough to send a report with the details to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and also informed Akdoğan at the Sirius organization. By June 13 in the same year Sabah newspaper was leading with the headline “Everyone searching for UFOs” in a story that detailed how in Uşak locals had stoned an alien, in Gaziantep the police had made a video recording of a UFO and that people all over the country were phoning in reports of strange occurrences to their local gendarmerie. The reports continued in a slightly hysterical atmosphere well into 2002 and included an event in Gebze on May 31, 2002, where a UFO was said to have visibly circled, projecting lights, for over an hour. This was followed by the Akşam daily printing a story on June 1, 2002, about Saffet Şap, an electronic technician from Beykoz who managed to capture on video a flying object which looked like a black bug with seven or eight legs. On Nov. 9, 2002, Hürriyet daily ran an account of four commercial pilots from different planes who had all seen UFOs in the same patch of sky on the same day at the same time. Akdoğan seems to be a recurring figure in Turkish UFO lore, commenting freely on each event and insisting on the importance of Turkey to alien life. His motives however may not just be scientific; he is also the owner of the İstanbul UFO museum, which opened in 2002 (riding on the back of these multiple UFO events), and any extra interest in aliens will also encourage punters through the door of his premises. Indeed. The museum is a fairly successful franchise. Of the six UFO museums in the world, three are in Turkey (İstanbul, Denizli and Göreme in Cappadocia) and his Web site www.siriusufo.org advertises for further partners to open other UFO museums. It is his clearly stated intention to open UFO museums all over Turkey to “further the knowledge of the Turkish people and to attract tourists.” His organization provides all the necessary materials and installations so each museum is a de facto copy of the last. Whether they are lucrative or not is not mentioned, but when the Göreme museum opened in 2006, Hürriyet reported that they had 5,000 visitors in just one month. Apparently it was especially popular with the Japanese. Whether extraterrestrials exist or not is much debated but recent advances in science make the chances seem more likely. Animals known as “extremophiles” thrive in Earth environments previously thought not to have been able to sustain life -- from microbes found living without oxygen in volcanic fissures two miles down to “tardigrades” that can survive temperatures from nearly absolute zero to 30 degrees Fahrenheit and even live in a vacuum like that found in space. These minute living things have upended the understanding of what is needed for the survival of life. Previously scientists had worked under the assumption that both oxygen and liquid water were key factors in sustaining life but now it seems that these are only important to some types of life. The “rare Earth” theory is falling out of favor to be replaced with the idea that life is adaptable and that the question which needs to be asked is what kind of environment other than our own might sustain living things. The chances of intelligent life with the technology to communicate are slimmer; it is possible that such worlds have come and gone. If life of this sort exists now, they, like us, would have the technology to recognize that Earth is an “interesting” planet and worth investigating. So why aren’t they here? Some would say they are and that the report of flying objects above Karaköprü was a clear indication of just that. Where humans fear to tread: Göreme UFO Museum Intrigued by the purple sign with ET raising his finger toward home we thought the UFO museum would be well worth a visit. Arriving at 11 a.m. we were disappointed to find the museum closed and the area in front of the building scattered with rusty old signs. Perhaps, Penny said, they’d been abducted by aliens? It appeared that someone was watching us though because as we turned to leave a lady appeared out of nowhere and began to open up. The entire museum has been chiseled into the distinctive soft rock of the area. After passing through a door plastered with enlarged images of strange lights hovering over Göreme (photographed in 2005 by a French man), we entered a cream-colored, smooth-walled fallopian tube-like hall. As we wandered down the corridors, the walls on either side of us lighted up and elucidated upon the topics of UFO sightings amongst prehistoric and ancient cultures and in religious texts. Although the presentation was flat and static, the facts and photographs were riveting and made a convincing case that humans have been visited from outer space for thousands of years. The suspension of our disbelief and openness to the idea of aliens was I’m sure influenced by the strange womblike subterranean location and the spooky music echoing through the tunnels and chambers. The amount of information, testimonials and pictures was quite impressive although little wall space was set aside for dissenting views. Also lacking were the exhibits, models and interactive elements that one comes to expect from modern museums. Obviously displaying real dead aliens is not easy; likewise the options for displaying spaceships, balls of fire, meteors, etc. However the models that were on display were crude, almost of an elementary school project level and boards had letters and parts falling off them. The only installation that gave us pause was the largest one of four white aliens with large catlike black eyes, preparing to operate on a human woman. Trapped and helpless she lay prone under a white sheet, lights pumping down a tube from the nearest ET and over her belly and legs. Maybe it was the lighting or maybe because it was a woman the feeling of malevolence and terror was hard to shake. Luckily the abducted woman was near the exit and I was able to leave her and her captors swiftly behind and emerge reborn as a believer into the bright Cappadocian sunlight.

Unidentified Flying Objects have been in the news lately.It came up during a recent Democratic presidential debate. Apparently, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, had previously stated publicly that he had personally seen a UFO. When he was asked about it, he admitted to making the statement and having seen a UFO. Three cheers for the congressman for his courage and honesty. No cheers for the press who made a major joke out of his statement.That was followed this past week by a national conference in Washington D.C. of a group of very credible people relating their experiences having seen UFOs during their careers. The participants were from seven countries and the United States. One was a former Governor of Arizona. Another witness was a former four-star general from Belgium. A lot of airline pilots came forward to share what they had seen. Transcripts of astronauts talking about seeing UFOs in space were read.When I was a police agent working in Lakewood, there was a report of a sighting above the power lines on South Table Top Mountain near Golden. The witnesses said that the saucer like craft hovered above the power lines for about five minutes and then lifted straight up into the sky. In Summit County in the early 1980s, we had a report of an aircraft hovering above the Dillon Reservoir. It was black and had red, blue, yellow and green lights. It did not make any sound.When it left it shot straight up into the sky out of sight.A couple of days later we had the same report of something above the landfill near Keystone. Some campers were disturbed while sleeping and they woke up to see this “ship” above the landfill.The classic local event actually made the front page of the National Enquirer. I will not use the real names because one of the witnesses still works and lives in Summit County.I was living on Straight Creek Drive in Dillon Valley. The Sheriff at the time lived on Straight Creek Drive also, but at the other end. We always left our radios on at home just to monitor what was happening in the county.

We could have alien origins, say scientists who sent fossilized microscopic life-forms into space and back inside an artificial meteorite. The researchers attached the baseball-size rock to the outside of the European Space Agency's Foton M3 spacecraft to test whether biological material could survive the round-trip journey. Sculpted from stone from the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, the rock contained fossilized microbes and the molecular signatures of microbes. The unmanned spacecraft was launched by rocket from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying 43 experiments. The craft landed in Kazakhstan on September 26 after orbiting the planet for 12 days. "In the bit of rock we got back, some biological compounds have survived," said project leader John Parnell from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Preliminary findings suggest that it's possible simple organisms could arrive via meteorites, he said. The research also suggests that living microbes would likely have survived in a slightly bigger rock, he added. "This study of organic material is completely new," he said. Previous artificial meteorite experiments have examined only the degree to which rocks melt upon entering the atmosphere.

A group of former pilots who have recounted seeing strange phenomena in the sky has demanded the US government reopen an investigation into UFOs. Several pilots offered dramatic accounts of witnessing UFOs - including a transparent flying disc and a triangular craft with mysterious markings - as they insisted their questions needed to be taken seriously more than 30 years after the US file was closed. "We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor of Arizona and air force pilot who says he saw a UFO in 1997. "Instead our country needs to reopen its official investigation that it shut down in 1969," Symington said. "We believe that for reasons of both national security and flight safety, every country should make an effort to identify any object in its airspace," said a statement from the 19 former pilots and government officials from around the world. The subject of UFOs came up in a recent debate among US presidential candidates, with Democrat Dennis Kucinich saying he once saw a UFO - making him the object of ridicule and jokes by late night television comedians. Sceptics say UFO sightings are merely aircraft, satellites or meteors re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. But the retired pilots spoke to a sympathetic audience of UFO "believers" who heard them recall their encounters with seemingly other-worldly objects appearing out of the sky. "Nothing in my training prepared me for what we were witnessing," said James Penniston, a retired US Air Force pilot, as he described seeing and touching a UFO when he was stationed at a British air base in Woodbridge. He said he saw an inexplicable triangular craft in a clearing in the woods with "blue and yellow lights swirling around the exterior". The UFO was "warm to the touch and felt like metal," Penniston said. One side of the craft had pictorial symbols and "the largest symbol was a triangle, which was centred in the middle of the others," he said.

For four decades, residents of the tiny Pennsylvania town of Kecksburg have told their story of strange blue lights in the sky one winter's evening and a fireball crashing into woods.On 9 December, 1965, they say, they saw armed soldiers cordoning off the area and a large metallic acorn-shaped object bearing strange hieroglyphics driven off at speed on the back of a lorry. They talk of menacing plain-clothes officials visiting homes and warning local people not to tell anyone of what they saw. Article continues Until now the US government has denied that anything sinister took place. It has maintained that a thorough search of the woods by the air force, the only federal agency to have acknowledged it was there, found nothing. But now Nasa has been ordered to examine its X-Files to solve the mystery.Steve McConnell, Nasa's public liaison officer, has admitted two boxes of papers from the time of the Kecksburg incident are missing. The episode has parallels to the 1947 Roswell incident, when a UFO was said to have landed in New Mexico.'For so many years, a lot of good people in Pennsylvania were told by their government that what they had to say was a lie or that they were hallucinating,' said Leslie Kean, a journalist who launched a lawsuit four years ago to force Nasa to open its archives.Washington judge Emmett Sullivan refused to accept Nasa's claim that the papers had been lost. He gave it until the end of the year to examine its records. 'Something came down that night,' said Kean.'Nasa has been stonewalling and now it's required to do the search it didn't do in the first place. It's a victory for those patriotic people who didn't like being told that they were making things up.'Stan Gordon, a UFO investigator living close to the site, interviewed several witnesses. He said: 'It's interesting that [witnesses say] it was made of one solid piece of metal with no panels or rivets, and that it was moving relatively slowly and made almost a controlled landing.'I have no doubt the government knows a lot more about this than it has revealed to the public.

By Josh Gerstien Under fire for its sluggish processing of files from President Clinton's White House, the National Archives released files and photographs yesterday responding to 14 Freedom of Information Act requests from members of the public. The records appear unlikely to contain any political bombshells, though there could be fodder for the tabloids. Many of the requests sought information about the Clinton White House's records on unidentified flying objects or UFOs. The files detail the predilection of one of Mr. Clinton's chiefs of staff, John Podesta, for the extraterrestrial-laden television series, "the X-Files." A listing of the newly-released files is available on the Web at http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/textual-foia.html#0313. In a recent court filing, the Clinton Library's acting director, Emily Robison, said it had 287 pending requests for information from the Clinton Library's archives. The responsive records could total 10.5 million pages, she said. So far, the library has released records in response to just 18 Freedom of Information Act requests, according to the library's Web site. At a debate for Democratic presidential candidates last week, one of the moderators, Timothy Russert of NBC News, questioned Senator Clinton about her husband's decision to ask the library to consider for withholding certain records about Mrs. Clinton, as well as other files. Mr. Clinton later called the questions "breathtakingly misleading." He noted that the letter he sent the archives dated from 2002, long before Mrs. Clinton's presidential bid. He also said the thrust of the request was to speed up release of some records. One of the former president's aides, Bruce Lindsey, said in a statement last week that Mr. Clinton had not blocked any record from being released. The bulk of the delays in responding to the public requests, which often focus on substantive issues like Mrs. Clinton's Health Care Task Force, seems to stem from thin staffing at the library, which is run by the National Archives. Only six staffers conduct the page-by-page review required to weed out classified and private information, as well as information a former president is entitled to withhold for 12 years after leaving office. Asked by e-mail about the newly disclosed files and any possible impact on Mrs. Clinton's presidential bid, Mr. Podesta repeated an "X-files" catch phrase: "The truth is out there." He declined further comment. More substantive records about the Clinton White House appear to be on the verge of release. "We have had a breakthrough," a National Archives spokesperson, Susan Cooper told The New York Sun yesterday. "There should be a significant addition of materials coming up in the next few weeks."

In 2004, as a massive tsunami roiled through the Indian Ocean killing hundreds of thousands of people, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster potentially even more lethal. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was hurtling toward a possible collision with the most populated swath of Earth—Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. Furiously crunching numbers on their computers, the researchers put the odds of impact in the year 2029 at exactly those of hitting the number in a game of roulette: 1 in 37. “We usually deal with one chance in a million,” recalls Steven Chesley at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This was absolutely extraordinary—I didn’t expect to see anything like it in my career.” By the end of the day on December 27, 2004, to the relief of the observers, archival data turned up trajectory information that rendered the odds of a collision nil. Nonetheless, in 2029 the asteroid, dubbed Apophis—derived from the Egyptian god Apep, the destroyer who dwells in eternal darkness—will zoom closer to Earth than the world’s communications satellites do. And April 13, 2036, it will return—this time with a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting somewhere on a line stretching from the Pacific Ocean near California to Central America. Because Apophis was discovered during one of the world’s greatest natural disasters, the worries about the impact went largely unnoticed. But that tense day, December 26, 2004, stunned the small group of astronomers who dutifully detect and plot trajectories of hundreds of thousands of the millions of chunks of rock whizzing around the solar system. Though too small to end civilization—unlike the asteroid that may have doomed the dinosaurs—Apophis could pack a punch comparable to a large nuclear weapon. Traveling at 28,000 miles per hour, it would heat up as it passed through Earth’s atmosphere, turning the dark rock into a fiery sun as it arced across the sky. Then it would either explode just aboveground—as one most likely did in 1908, leveling a vast forest in the Tunguska region of Siberia—or gouge a crater 20 times its size. “If it hit London, there would be no London,” says Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who had closely followed the discussion of the potential 2029 impact. Slamming into the ocean, Apophis could create a tsunami dwarfing the one that killed more than 200,000 people around Indonesia.

Although nbc's Tim Russert attempted to embarrass Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in the October 30 presidential debate in Philadelphia, Kucinich may have the last laugh. Although NBC's Tim Russert attempted to embarrass Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in the October 30 presidential debate in Philadelphia, Kucinich may have the last laugh. It is clear that Russert and NBC are acting as political shills for the Democratic Leadership Council and their corporate masters at General Electric, a major defense contractor profiting from Bush's wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and against "global terrorism," in denying former Senator Mike Gravel a spot at the Philadelphia debate and trying to embarrass Kucinich by asking him about UFOs as a result of the Ohio Congressman's suggestion that President Bush is mentally ill. WMR has uncovered a letter from Democratic President Clinton to the organizer of a 1995 conference on UFOs and contact with alien civilizations that was bankrolled by the late Laurence Rockefeller. The organizer, Dr. Scott Jones, served on the National Security Council of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and later on the staff of Rhode Island Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell. Even the late Carl Sagan, while skeptical of first encounters, was interested in the 1995 Washington DC UFO conference. Clinton's chief of staff and aide John Podesta was quoted by the Las Vegas Journal as saying, "I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark on the question of government investigations of UFOs. " The Washington Post quoted Clinton's Press Secretary Mike McCurry as saying of Podesta, "John can get totally maniacal and phobic on certain subjects. He's been known to pick up the phone and call the Air Force and ask them what's going on in Area 51." Bill and Hillary Clinton are also reportedly intrigued with the subject of UFOs as was Presidents Carter and Reagan.