Weird Or What?

As many of you know (and from the many e-mails I have received over the past couple of days) I recently appeared on a new Discovery Channel series called "Weird or What?" that began airing this week.

I was one of the so-called "experts" they called on to help solve the mystery of the "Stephenville Lights" unidentified flying objects that have been sighted in Erath County (south-central Texas) with the most notable sighting happening in January of 2008.

I won't rehash the history of Stephenville here, but you can read all bout it at this LINK. This is the second time I have been contacted for video commentary due to an article by Phil Patton. I helped research the article and I'm quoted in it.



My involvement in "Weird or What" began when a producer who read the article called me last November. The series was described as a sort of Unsolved Mysteries - but where they actually solved the mysteries.

After talking to several producers (as the show was passed down from producers-to assistant producers-to field producers and finally directors) I decided to do the project under the caveat that it would not become another "UFOs are aliens -blah-blah-Area 51-blah-blah- Roswell-Alien Abductions - blah-blah "It was as big as a Wal-Mart" TV show that cable channels seem to crank out with amazing frequency.

Mine would be (as one producer eloquently put it) "The credible voice of reason and sanity among a growing cadre of UFO-crazies.

In other words-my job was to analyze the reports-talk to my sources-do a little digging and come up with an logical answer to what the good people of Erath County really witnessed.

Intrigued,I signed on to do the show even though (from experience) I know that skeptics and debunkers usually got scant camera time because no-one wants to be told what they saw wasn't the mother-ship from Zeta-Two Reticuli!"

Think about it. Would you want to watch a show about people who thought they saw a UFO but it turned out to be military aircraft? Booooooring!

Be that what it may, we shot the program on a cold wet-drizziling day in February in Dublin Texas while I was suffering with a massive dental infection.

Despite that, my interview took six hours to film. We spent two days in the area (Michael Wilhelm and myself) scanning the
local military airwaves and exploring the Brownwood MOA.




I took with me a new computer-controlled Uniden BCD996XT scanning radio and in no-time we had mapped all the military communications in the area.

BTW: the Uniden 996Xt is an excellent scanning radio-best I've ever owned and if you are thinking of getting into military monitoring this is the scanner to buy. I'll be posting a full review of the BCD996XT soon.


It was clear, after searching out all the known and discrete UHF military aero-band frequencies in the area that (despite the bad weather) the Brownwood MOA was a very active area indeed. I logged and recorded over 350 military communications.







It would have taken less time, but I was adamant about getting my point across that what the witnesses saw that night in 2008 was what amounted to a "Dog & Pony show" put on by the military to cover for a black (covert) aircraft that either was being tested in the area or inadvertently (because of a malfunction) was forced down to where the Erathlings could see it.




It was more than evident (from the military's first denial that anything was flying that night -to their sudden reversal (it was only F-16s in the Brownwood MOA) that something Skunky was going on.



I had observed this type of standard operating procedure before. It happened in Phoenix.
It happened in the Hudson Valley - and now over Stephenville.

It was a variation of any old magician's trick. When you don't want the audience to notice the ace you have hidden in your left hand, put a gold coin in the right.

As I researched the sighting and the standard procedure of disinformation began to appear, I couldn't help but be reminded of a line from The Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

Anyway- as I watched the show the other night I was pleasantly surprised. Despite my earlier misgivings, as promised, it hadn't descended in a UFO show and wasn't actually half bad.

Most of my better points did not make the final-cut-but I expected that. The show was fairly-balanced and except for a few moments where they substituted computer-animation and photos of the XB-46 for the "Beast of Kandahar - Sentinel. but on the whole- it was fairly accurate.



The show wasn't perfect - but it wasn't pablum either. Good job Cineflix Productions! I hope the series gets picked up.

With that in mind - I just turned down doing another Discovery Channel program (Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura) after a viewing their HAARP episode.

Despite the offer to fly out to Nevada (Area 51) I could see that their production company (A. Smith & Co.) really had no clue or real impetus to produce a show based on getting at the truth but it was more about a personality - Jesse Ventura as "The body and the brain" and also netting high ratings.


The truth ain't sexy - but UFOs are and UFO crazies are.

But enough about a bad show. Weird or What is much better.

If you didn't see the show, you can download a bit-torrent of the video here: LINK

You'll need a bit-torrent client such as Vuze to assemble it.


-Steve Douglass

DARPA-crafted Glider Falls Short In 1st Flight
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Published: 28 Apr 2010 07:42 PRINT | EMAIL
WASHINGTON - U.S. military scientists lost contact with a hypersonic glider nine minutes into its inaugural test flight, a defense research agency said April 27.

The unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) is designed to fly through the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere at speeds of up to Mach 20, providing the U.S. military with a possible platform for striking targets anywhere on the planet with conventional weapons.

The HTV-2 was launched April 20 aboard a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The test flight called for a 30-minute mission in which the vehicle would glide at high speed before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, north of a U.S. military test site at the Kwajalein Atoll.

The glider separated from the booster but soon after the signal vanished, a spokeswoman said.

"Preliminary review of data indicates the HTV-2 achieved controlled flight within the atmosphere at over Mach 20. Then contact with HTV-2 was lost," said Johanna Spangenberg Jones, a spokeswoman for DARPA.

"This was our first flight [all others were done in wind tunnels and simulations], so although of course we would like to have everything go perfectly, we still gathered data and can use findings for the next flight, scheduled currently for early 2011," she said in an e-mail message.

The test flight was supposed to cover a total of 4,100 nautical miles (7,600 kilometers) from lift-off and scientists had hoped to conduct some limited maneuvers, with the HTV-2 banking and eventually diving for its splash down.

U.S. aerospace giant Lockheed Martin builds the hypersonic glider, which the military calls "revolutionary."

The hypersonic program appears to fit in with U.S. plans to develop a way of hitting distant targets with conventional weapons within an hour, dubbed "prompt global strike."

According to a Pentagon fact sheet for the vehicle, "the U.S. military seeks the capability to respond, with little or no advanced warning, to threats to our national security anywhere around the globe."

A hypersonic plane could substitute for a ballistic missile armed with a conventional warhead, as other countries might suspect the missile represented a nuclear attack.

"Aside from its speed, another advantage is that it would not be mistaken by Russia or China for a nuclear launch," said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute who has done consultant work for Lockheed Martin.

The U.S. Air Force has also looked at hypersonic vehicles for intelligence-gathering if spy satellites in low orbit were attacked, he said.

Iranian Plane Buzzes US Carrier

Middle East
By PHILIP EWING
Published: 29 Apr 2010 10:23

An Iranian maritime patrol aircraft buzzed the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower at sea in the Middle East last week, passing within 1,000 yards of the ship, but American defense officials sought to downplay the encounter as relatively common.

The Iranian navy Fokker F27 turboprop reconnaissance plane had been flying near the Eisenhower Strike Group for about 20 minutes before it made its low pass on April 21, according to a defense official who was not authorized to talk publicly about the incident and asked not to be identified. The official did not know if the Eisenhower took any defensive actions, such as changing course or ordering its fighters to escort the intruder away. No one was hurt and the Iranian aircraft soon retired.

The Eisenhower and its escorts had been tracking the Fokker surveillance plane the entire time, the defense official said; it didn't try to pop up from low altitude or surprise them. There was no information about exactly where the encounter took place - for example, in the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman - but the official said it happened in "international waters."

"From our perspective, this is not something to get excited about - this is not out of the ordinary - this is within the bounds of what has happened in the past," the official said.

The date of the fly-by would seem to put it near the start of a series of Iranian naval exercises that took place last week in the Persian Gulf; dubbed Great Prophet 5, the Iranian navy and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps practiced small boat swarms and unveiled a new fast-attack missile craft.

Iranian ships and aircraft approach U.S. warships relatively often, apparently to test how they respond in close proximity. In 2008, Iranian speedboats darted among a formation of three American warships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, which blasted a warning with their horns and went to flank speed to escape.

The U.S. Navy has a long history of sometimes tense encounters at sea, including years' worth of jousting between carrier aircraft and Russian Tu-95 bombers, whose crews liked to get as close as possible to U.S. carriers during the Cold War. When two Russian bombers buzzed the carrier Nimitz in the Pacific in 2008, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead said at the time it didn't worry him - "they were stretching their wings, so to speak."

Boeing’s X-37B: Star Wars 2.0?

APRIL 26TH, 2010 BY JIM GARRETTSON

The X-37B during launch preparations
Last week, Air Force Space Command launched Boeing’s X-37B unmanned space vehicle (USV) from an Atlas V rocket in Cape Canaveral. That much was made public. What wasn’t made public was what the spacecraft would be used for or when it’s coming back to Earth (although it can stay in space for at least 9 months at a time).

However, since there are no secrets in space (amateurs all over the world track pretty much everything shot into space and NORAD can track objects in space 4 inches across), DoD has dropped a few clues for some possible uses for the USV, starting with the Air Force press release issued the day of its launch. Col. André Lovett, the 45th Space Wing vice commander and the launch’s commander said, ”this launch helps ensure that our warfighters will be provided the capabilities they need in the future.”

The phrasing he used – ensuring that our warfighters will be provided the capabilities they need – echoes a recommendation of the Joint Operating Environment Report released last month. Because America’s 21st-century rivals see themselves as military competitors in space, the U.S. has to anticipate attacks to neutralize mission-critical technologies like GPS and the upgraded WideBand SATCOM satellites that make up the backbone of our armed forces’ command and control networks. The JOE report advocates avoiding complete dependence on a networked environment, an easily-exploitable “Achilles’ heel” in military capabilities that could be defended with, for example, an unmanned defense craft that can stay in orbit for nine months at a time.

The Defense Department has been worried about a “Space Pearl Harbor” at least since 2001, and in 2007, China shocked the world by shooting down a weather satellite. That the U.S., Russia and China possess ground-based anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities isn’t in dispute, so adding a space-based anti-ASAT defense mechanism isn’t all that far-fetched. Also, since Boeing recently tested a solid-state laser designed to disrupt or disable a boosting ballistic missile, the technology currently exists to build such a platform.

The Air Force release says that new technologies on board the X-37B will “will make our access to space more responsive, perhaps cheaper, and push us in the vector toward being able to react to warfighter needs more quickly” if they prove successful, according to Gary Payton, Air Force deputy undersecretary for space programs. From that statement, it sounds like the Air Force is testing at least one Prompt Global Strike (PGS) capability.

Last week, the White House confirmed that it was considering adopting a hypersonic missile like the X-51 (also built by Boeing) that is capable of striking a target anywhere in the world in less than an hour. Prompt and precise strikes are a priority of Admiral Mike Mullen, who notes “Each time we kill a civilian inadvertently, we not only wreak devastation on the lives of their loved ones, we set our own strategy back months if not years. We make it hard for people to trust us.”

Even if the Air Force only plans to use the X-37B instead of the Space Shuttle to repair satellites in orbit, the program represents a major investment in America’s space capabilities, and programs like it might forestall our “slide to mediocrity.”

Stars on earth?

Livermore, California (CNN) -- Scientists at a government lab here are trying to use the world's largest laser -- it's the size of three football fields -- to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's formula for cooking up a sun on the ground may sound like it's stolen from the plot of an "Austin Powers" movie. But it's no Hollywood fantasy: The ambitious experiment will be tried for real, and for the first time, late this summer.

If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy
generated by the mini-star.

The lab's venture has doubters, to be sure. Nuclear fusion, the type of high-energy reaction the California researchers hope to produce, has been a scientific pipe dream for at least a half-century. It's been pitched as a miracle power source. But it hasn't yielded many results.

To make matters worse, the U.S. Government Accountability Office this month released an audit of the lab's work that cites delays and mismanagement as reasons it's unlikely the scientists will create a fusion reaction this year.

But researchers in Livermore, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco, say it's not a matter of if but when their laser-saves-the-Earth experiment will be proved successful.

"We have a very high confidence that we will be able to ignite the target within the next two years," thus proving that controlled fusion is possible, said Bruno Van Wonterghem, a manager of the project, which is called the National Ignition Facility.

That would put the lab a step closer to "our big dream," he said, which is "to solve the energy problems of the world."
How to build a star

Here is the boiled-down recipe for how the Livermore lab plans to cook up a star:
Step one: Build the largest laser in the world, preferably inside a drab-looking office building. (To do this, you'll have to suspend all previous notions about what a laser looks like. This one is basically a giant factory full of tubes. The laser beam, which is concentrated light, bounces back and forth over the distance of a mile, charging up as it goes.)

Step two: Split this humongous laser into 192 beams. Aim all of them -- firing-range style -- at a single point that's about the size of a BB.
Step three: On that tiny target, apply a smidge of deuterium and tritium, two reactive isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater. Surround those atoms with a gold capsule that's smaller than a thimble.

Step four: Fire the laser!
If all goes well, the resulting reaction will be hotter than the center of the sun (more than 100 million degrees Celsius) and will exert more pressure than 100 billion atmospheres. This will smash the hydrogen isotopes together with so much force and heat that their nuclei will fuse, sending off energy and neutrons.

Voila. An itty-bitty star is born.