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On Jan. 10, just one day after my article on UFO secrecy appeared in this newspaper and on this Web site (“Intelligent Extraterrestrial life: The Other Inconvenient truth?” Jan. 9), I was unceremoniously dropped as a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, a position I’d held for more than 20 years.

First some background. I’m a Ph.D. economist with a national reputation in the antitrust area. I’ve written books, journal articles, and many dozens of op-ed articles over the years on a variety of public-policy issues. My association with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D. C. goes back many decades. Yet they cut me away in a heartbeat because I dared call for more government disclosure on the UFO phenomenon.

I really didn’t believe that calling for more disclosure was all that controversial. After all, John Podesta, former chief of staff under Bill Clinton, has called for more government disclosure on the UFO subject. Former astronaut Ed Mitchell has repeatedly called for more disclosure, as has Gov. Bill Richardson, D-N.M. Former Canadian Minister of Defense Paul Hellyer has stated that our government knows that UFOs are interplanetary machines and that the secrecy should end. Given these bold assertions by “insiders,” I thought that I was in safe company; apparently I was wrong.

Actually the most classic call for disclosure came 48 years ago from former CIA Director Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkotter. As reported in The New York Times of Feb. 28, 1960, Hillenkotter (in a letter to Congress) argued that “it is time that the truth (about UFOs) be brought out in open Congressional Hearings.” He went on to say that “through official SECRECY and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense ...” and, further, that the Air Force “has silenced its personnel” in order “to hide the facts.”

If a former CIA director could say that, why couldn’t I?

The most recent attempt to “chill” serious media interest in UFO secrecy occurred in Stephenville, Texas. Stephenville currently is a hotbed of UFO activity, and much of the newspaper reporting has been done by the Empire Tribune’s Angelia Joiner. Ms. Joiner filed some of the first stories, talked to many witnesses of the phenomenon, and even appeared on a CNN Larry King special in January.

Yet despite a worldwide interest in the sightings, Ms. Joiner recently was fired by the Empire Tribune for, among other things, openly questioning the U.S. Air Force’s improbable explanation of the sightings.

So much for courage and truth.

None of this intimidation and media censorship is new. I first became interested in UFO secrecy when CBS aired an Armstrong Circle Theater episode on UFOs on Jan. 22, 1958. On that program, an Air Force spokesman recited the standard mantra that UFOs were all nonsense and that the government wasn’t hiding anything.

Also on the program was Donald E. Keyhoe, executive director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the leading critic of an Air Force cover-up. At one point during the live broadcast, Keyhoe broke away from his pre-approved remarks and said, “And now I’m going to reveal something that has never been disclosed before ...” but then his microphone suddenly went dead. The live TV audience saw his lips moving (me included) but his audio had been terminated by CBS and the U. S. Air Force under a prior agreement. Keyhoe intended to tell the American public that NICAP had proof that UFOs were real machines under intelligent control but he never got the chance. He’d been censored by those who claimed that they had nothing to hide.

In this presidential year of “hope,” let us all hope that someone, somewhere will finally be honest with the American people about unidentified flying objects. Censorship and intimidation have no place in a free and democratic society. We (they) continue this policy at our peril.

Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford and has written op-ed articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other newspapers. He lives in Vero Beach.

Source: TCPalm
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/feb/25/dom-armentano-ufos-and-censorship
-why-cato-institu/

Who isn't interested in their family tree? But for Phylis Canion, it's a search for the lineage of a beast living under the oak trees of her Cuero ranch.

"The interest in the chupacabra has been overwhelming," said the Cuero rancher.

At least, that's the name the strange creature has been given in the last year. Its DNA has been flown across the continent as Cuero residents search for a final answer about their mysterious, blood-sucking beast.

The much-anticipated results are back from experts at the University of California at Davis.

Last year, the KENS I-Team had scientists from Texas State University evaluate DNA from the animal Canion found. The animal was one of three peculiar, lavender-colored, dog-like animals Cuero residents found last July.

Results from Texas State University stated the animal is from the coyote family. But Canion wanted to know more, so she sent more DNA, tooth and tissue samples, off to California.

Results from the University of California at Davis show the animal is in fact a mutt: on the mother's side it is part coyote.

"On the paternal side, it had Mexican wolf in it," said Canion.

Scientists from the University of California at Davis say they can't tell when the Mexican wolf heritage made its way into the gene pool. It could be generations ago, but Canion believes the father's genes are important and can explain some of the odd characteristics of the creature.

"It was a hybrid, because it has this other breed in it," she said.

Canion is referring to the hairless, odd-colored skin originally thought to be caused by parasites or disease. Now, experts aren't so sure.

The Cuero rancher said she expects further testing to find out where all the hair has gone and why the animal, she says, seems to crave just blood from its victims.

"We still can't figure that one out," she said.

Meantime, an international media storm continues to descend on the small Texas town. Italy's popular Voyager TV show spent an hour on the story of Canion and her creature.

Japan is sending a television crew this month, too, as the legend continues to grow. E-mails and letters to Canion at her shop certainly haven't slacked, either.

"It may be quiet out here in rural Cuero, Texas, but the drama still continues. There are still sightings of the animal, and chickens? They keep disappearing, too. Some of it captured in footage by the Discovery Channel," she said.

They had cameras running, heat-seeking cameras, six cameras that ran for 31 days and took over a thousand shots, and in that it also picked this animal up. That's a lot of images to comb through and may give even more insight into the creature's habits.

Together with the new DNA results, the Cuero rancher is reassured the animal is not a fluke of nature. Canion firmly believes a family of the Cuero creatures are living — and hunting — her property.

T-shirt sales of the chupacabra are still going strong, with more than 16,000 sold already. There's even been legal action to keep some knock-offs from being sold on eBay where they were going for three times the price.

Source: KVUE
http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/020608kvuechupa-eh.970954f8.html

When last we saw the lost Ark of the Covenant in action, it had been dug up by Indiana Jones in Egypt and ark-napped by Nazis, whom the Ark proceeded to incinerate amidst a tempest of terrifying apparitions. But according to Tudor Parfitt, a real-life scholar-adventurer, Raiders of the Lost Ark had it wrong, and the Ark is actually nowhere near Egypt. In fact, Parfitt claims he has traced it (or a replacement container for the original Ark), to a dusty bottom shelf in a museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.

As Indiana Jones's creators understood, the Ark is one of the Bible's holiest objects, and also one of its most maddening McGuffins. A wooden box, roughly 4 ft. x 2 ft. x 2.5 ft., perhaps gold-plated and carried on poles inserted into rings, it appears in the Good Book variously as the container for the Ten Commandments (Exodus 25:16: "and thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee"); the very locus of God's earthly presence; and as a divine flamethrower that burns obstacles and also crisps some careless Israelites. It is too holy to be placed on the ground or touched by any but the elect. It circles Jericho behind the trumpets to bring the walls tumbling down. The Bible last places the Ark in Solomon's temple, which Babylonians destroyed in 586 BC. Scholars debate its current locale (if any): under the Sphinx? Beneath Jerusalem's Temple Mount (or, to Muslims, the Noble Sanctuary)? In France? Near London's Temple tube station?

Parfitt, 63, is a professor at the University of London's prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies. His new book, The Lost Ark of the Covenant: Solving the 2,500 Year Mystery of the Fabled Biblical Ark (HarperOne) along with a History Channel special scheduled for March 2 would appear to risk a fine academic reputation on what might be called a shaggy Ark story. But the professor has been right before, and his Ark fixation stems from his greatest coup. In the 1980s Parfitt lived with a Southern African clan called the Lemba, who claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Colleagues laughed at him for backing the claim; in 1999, a genetic marker specific to descendants of Judaism's Temple priests (cohens) was found to appear as frequently among the Lemba's priestly cast as in Jews named Cohen. The Lemba — and Parfitt — made global news.

Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa."

That story, by Parfitt's estimation, is partly true, partly not. He is not at all sure, and has no way of really knowing, whether the Lemba's ancestors left Jerusalem simultaneously with the Ark (assuming, of course, that it left at all). However, he has a theory as to where they might eventually have converged. Lemba myth venerates a city called Senna. In modern-day Yemen, in an area with people genetically linked to the Lemba, Parfitt found a ghost town by that name. It's possible that the Lemba could have migrated there from Jerusalem by a spice route — and from Senna, via a nearby port, they could have launched the long sail down the African coast. As for the Ark? Before Islam, Arabia contained many Jewish-controlled oases, and in the 500s AD, the period's only Jewish kingdom. It abutted Senna. In any case, the area might have beckoned to exiled Jews bearing a special burden. Parfitt also found eighth-century accounts of the Ark in Arabia, by Jews-turned-Muslims. He posits that at some undefined point the Lemba became the caretakers of the Ark, or the ngoma.

Parfitt's final hunt for the ngoma, which dropped from sight in the 1940s, landed him in sometimes-hostile territory ("Bullets shattered the rear screen," of his car, he writes). Ark leads had guided him to Egypt, Ethiopia and even New Guinea, until one day last fall his clues led him to a storeroom of the Harare Museum of Human Science in Zimbabwe. There, amidst nesting mice, was an old drum with an uncharacteristic burnt-black bottom hole ("As if it had been used like a cannon," Parfitt notes), the remains of carrying rings on its corners; and a raised relief of crossed reeds that Parfitt thinks reflects an Old Testament detail. "I felt a shiver go down my spine," he writes.

Parfitt thinks that whatever the supernatural character of Ark, it was, like the ngoma, a combination of reliquary, drum and primitive weapon, fueled with a somewhat unpredictable proto-gunpowder. That would explain the unintentional conflagrations. The drum element is the biggest stretch, since scripture never straightforwardly describes the Ark that way. He bases his supposition on the Ark's frequent association with trumpets, and on aspects of a Bible passage where King David dances in its presence. Parfitt admits that such a multipurpose object would be "very bizarre" in either culture, but insists, "that's an argument for a connection between them."

So, had he found the Ark? Yes and no, he concluded. A splinter has carbon-dated the drum to 1350 AD — ancient for an African wood artifact, but 2,500 years after Moses. Undaunted, Parfitt asserts that "this is the Ark referred to in Lemba tradition" — Lemba legend has it that the original ngoma destroyed itself some 400 years ago and had to be rebuilt on its own "ruins" — "constructed by priests to replace the previous Ark. There can be little doubt that what I found is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses."

Well, perhaps a little doubt. "It seems highly unlikely to me," says Shimon Gibson, a noted biblical archaeologist to whom Parfitt has described his project. "You have to make tremendous leaps." Those who hope to find the original biblical item, moreover, will likely reject Parfitt's claim that the best we can do is an understudy. Animating all searches for the Ark is the hope — and fear — that it will retain the unbridled divine power the Old Testament describes. What would such a wonder look like in our postmodern world? What might it do? Parfitt's passionately crafted new theory, like his first, could eventually be proven right. But if so, unlike the fiction in the movies, it would deny us an explosive resolution.

Source: Time
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1715337,00.html