What Say You, NASA? (UFO)

[frogmarch]

I consider myself a skeptic when it comes to the possibility that ETs may be visiting Earth, but while I realize that woo abounds in UFO circles, I don’t consider the idea in its purest form ridiculous and laughable. But then, I’m a skeptic, not a debunker out to automatically pooh-pooh all ideas I consider unorthodox.

A handful of pertinent quotes:

"I was testing a P-51 fighter in Minneapolis (1951) when I spotted this object. I was at about 10,000 feet on a nice, bright, sunny afternoon. I thought the object was a kite, then I realized that no kite is gonna fly that high. As I got closer it looked like a weather balloon, gray and about three feet in diameter. But as soon as I got behind the darn thing it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a saucer, a disk. About the same time, I realized that it was suddenly going away from me -- and there I was, running at about 300 miles per hour. I tracked it for a little way, and then all of a sudden the damn thing just took off. It pulled about a 45 degree climbing turn and accelerated and just flat disappeared."
--Mercury Astronaut Capt. Donald “Deke” Slayton

http://www.netscientia.com/ufo_quotes.html

More on the incident from Slayton’s autobiography:

I realized I wasn't closing on that son of a bitch. A P-51 at that time would cruise at 280 miles an hour. But this thing just kept going and climbing at the same time at about a forty-five-degree climb. I kept trying to follow it, but he just left me behind and flat disappeared. The guys on the ground tracked it with a theodolite, and they'd computed the speed at four thousand miles an hour.

Then they told me: Just for your information, the day you saw this object a local company was flying high-altitude research balloons. They had a light airplane tracking it, and a station wagon on the ground. Both observers were watching this balloon and had seen this object come up beside the balloon. The object appeared to hover, then took off like hell.

The guys on the ground tracked it with a theodolite, and they'd computed the speed at four thousand miles an hour. I guess they were trying to tell me I wasn't exactly crazy: somebody else had seen something unusual, too. But I never heard another thing about it.

My position is, I don't know what it was: it was unidentified. Maybe what I saw was the company's weather balloon-maybe the object going four thousand miles an hour to these guys on the ground was me. Maybe there was something about the environment and the setup that confused me. I don't know. Or it could have been something unknown. (I don't automatically presume that it came from Alpha Centauri, just because I can't identify it.). It's still an open question to me.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread497514/pg1

~~

"UFO sightings are now so common, the military doesn't have time to worry about them - so they screen them out. The major defense systems have UFO filters built into them, and when a UFO appears, they simply ignore it."
--Lee Katchen former atmospheric physicist with NASA

"I've been asked about UFO's and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization."
--Commander Eugene Cernan, Commanded the Apollo 17 Mission. (LA TIMES, 1973)

"In my official status, I cannot comment on ET contact. However, personally, I can assure you, we are not alone.
--Charles J. Camarda (Ph.D.) NASA Astronaut

http://www.netscientia.com/ufo_quotes.html

“It followed us during half of our orbit. We observed it on the light side, and when we entered the shadow side, it disappeared completely. It was an engineered structure, made from some type of metal, approximately 40 meters long with inner hulls. The object was narrow here and wider here, and inside there were openings. Some places had projections like small wings. The object stayed very close to us. We photographed it, and our photos showed it to be 23 to 28 meters away.” Cosmonaut Victor Afanasyev commenting on a UFO sighting that occurred while en route to the Solyut 6 space station in April of 1979.

http://www.ufocasebook.com/ufoquotes1.html

Bonus quotes:

"Radio has no future.”

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax."

--William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, English scientist, 1899. (Kelvin units were named in his honor.)

http://zapatopi.net/kelvin/quotes/

~~

My apologies to 911 theorists for barging in, but you can always use the Hide Thread feature for UFO threads if you want to.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[frogmarch]

2. I'd heard

bits and pieces of what Carol Rosin stated in her testimony, but that is all. Thanks for the link. Fascinating read.

According to Rosin, Werner von Braun insisted that UFO were not a threat. I didn't read anything in Rosin's testimony about his saying they (ET-controlled spacecraft) didn't exist. Rosin claims he believed that our government was planning to use the false threat of an impending ET invasion as one of the excuses for "weaponizing" space. Werner von Braun is said to have believed that if ET were indeed visiting Earth, they posed no danger to us, because if they were a threat to us, they'd have harmed us by now.

If I read her testimony correctly, Carol Rosin said that any time someone associated with the U.S. government (I suppose this would include NASA representatives) reports a UFO sighting, it's a lie - a report the person was instructed to make by higher-ups in the government. I'm skeptical of that. I give a little more credence to the idea that the U.S. government would fake an ET threat to further its agenda, but I'm skeptical of that too - Bush/Cheney's bogus WMD threat notwithstanding.

It's too bad Werner von Braun didn't share his "hidden reasons" evidence with Carol Rosin, or with anyone else either, apparently.

If our government is cooking up a bogus threat of a UFO attack, I think that would be all the more reason for independent investigations of the most plausible UFO sightings to find out what the lights or objects were. If they turn out to have been solar- or weather-related phenomena or some other natural occurrences - or false reports - this would help put the kibosh on any bogus UFO threat the government might be planning.

[snagglepuss]

3. As per the mod, I am reposting the article from a different site. My post got deleted because

I linked to rense.com which it seems is not allowed. That said you raise some important points, such as Von Braun not saying ETs didn't exist, simply that the govt would make false claims. On one hand I am bowled over reading astronauts say aliens have visited Earth but if that is so why has NASA never officially said anything? I don't understand the discrepaency between the astronauts statements and NASA's silence.


snip


Dr Carol Rosin was the first woman corporate manager of Fairchild Industries and was spokesperson for Wernher Von Braun in the last years of his life. She founded the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space in Washington DC and has testified before Congress on many occasions about space based weapons. Von Braun revealed to Dr Rosin a plan to justify weapons in spaced based on hoaxing an extraterrestrial threat. She was also present at meetings in the '70s when the scenario for the Gulf War of the '90s was planned.


CR: Dr Carol Rosin
SG: Dr Steven Greer

CR: My name is Carol Rosin. I am an educator who became the first woman corporate manager of an Aerospace Company, Fairchild Industries.

I am a Space and Missile Defense Consultant and have consulted to a number of companies, organizations, and government departments, even the intelligence community. . I am an author and have testified before Congress and the President's Commission on Space.

snip

When I was a Corporate Manager of Fairchild Industries from 1974 through 1977, I met the late Dr Wernher Von Braun. We first met in early 1974. At that time, Von Braun was dying of cancer but he assured me that he would live a few more years to tell me about the game that was being played- that game being the effort to weaponize space, to control the Earth from space and space itself.

snip


And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. "And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens and all of it is a lie."


http://www.lermanet.com/communion/carol-rosen.htm

[frogmarch]

4. Thanks for

posting a new link.

I see I misread parts of the article the first time.

snip from your link:

So, when I hear that there is a possible threat of extraterrestrials-and I look at the history of thousands of years of possible ET visitations, and hear the disclosures of honest military-intelligence- industry people who have had experiences with UFO's, with crashes and landings, with live and dead bodies of extraterrestrial beings-I know it is a lie. And if I am ever told that these are enemies against whom we have to build space-based weapons systems, based on my own personal experience of having worked in the military industrial complex on weapons systems and military strategy, I am going to know it is a lie.

It is a lie.

Not only will I not believe it, but I am going to go out as loudly as I can and tell everyone to take a look. They have not taken us away yet. We are still here after thousands of years of visits. If in fact they are still visiting us now and we have not been harmed then we have to look at this as something that is not a hostile occurrence.

It would be my hope and my intention to do everything I could to work with people who are working to communicate with and cooperate with these extraterrestrial beings. They are clearly not hostile. We are here. That is enough proof for me.

~~

Interesting.

By the way, I don’t know of any NASA astronauts who claim to have positively identified any unidentified flying objects they’ve encountered as ET space crafts. It seem clear, though, that at least some astronauts are open to the possibility that ET crafts could be zipping around out there.

[snagglepuss]

5. There are quotes from astronauts who identified ufos as ET or said contact has been made.

"All Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin - flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence."
--Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA Communications Systems.


I've been asked about UFO's and I've said publicly I thought they were somebody else, some other civilization."
--Commander Eugene Cernan, Commanded the Apollo 17 Mission. (LA TIMES, 1973)

"We have contact with alien cultures."
--Astronaut Dr. Brian O'leary

[frogmarch]

6. But wait...

http://www.debunker.com/texts/apollo11.html

snip:

But the stories crossed the Atlantic into a French UFO book, and then came back home reinforced and newly authenticated in Maurice Chatelain's Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space (Doubleday, 1978). According to the author, who claimed to be an ex-NASA space scientist (actually, he had worked for a space contractor in Los Angeles for several years): "The astronauts. . . saw things during their missions that could not be discussed with anybody outside NASA. It is very difficult to obtain any specific information from NASA, which still exercises a very strict control over any disclosures of these events...It seems that all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed...by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin...Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence...."

Chatelain specifically mentions Apollo-11, which "made the first moon landing on the Sea of Tranquillity and, only moments before Armstrong stepped down the ladder to set foot on the moon, two UFOs hovered overhead. Edwin Aldrin took several pictures of them...."

Even more sensational was the claim for the Apollo-13 flight: "There was some talk that the Apollo 13 mission carried a nuclear device aboard that could be set off to make measurements of the infrastructure of the moon and whose detonations would show on the charts of several recording seismographs placed in different locations. The unexplained explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module of Apollo 13 on its flight to the moon, according to rumors, was caused deliberately by a UFO that was following the capsule to prevent the (nuclear) detonation...."

Of course, the cause of the explosion was found by NASA later, and there was no nuclear device--rumors of UFO attacks are absurd. But that's no reason for some UFO people not to pass on and embellish such stories, as we'll see.

~~

Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish truth from fabrication in the world of UFO enthusiasts. Lots of dishonest reporting going on there. After one shovels out the bullshit at most websites about UFO, there’s not much left. I’ve learned to be skeptical of astronaut quotes I find there, too. How many of the astronaut quotes pertaining to UFO were taken out of context, or weren’t really said at all?

There are You Tube videos of some astronauts stating they believe in ET, but in none of the videos I’ve seen have any astronauts claimed to have made contact with ET or positively identified a UFO as an alien craft.

[salvorhardin]

7. Maurice Chatelain never worked for NASA

He was employed by a subcontractor, North American Aviation if I recall correctly, as a low-level engineer and was dismissed in 1966. Not only did Chatelain never work for NASA, he wasn't even tangentially involved with the space program three years before Apollo 11 launched.