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FROM THE CONSPIRACY JOURNAL BOOKSHOP

Secrets of Death Valley - Mysteries and Haunts
of the Mojave Desert






Global Communications
P.O. Box 753
New Brunswick, NJ  08903 

New Book, Secrets of Death Valley - Mysteries And Haunts Of The Mojave Desert  offers the roadway adventurer a whole new world to explore.

The Mojave Desert region of California is a magnet for the strange. In such an inhospitable location, at least for humankind, there nevertheless flourishes a great many UFOs, ghosts and other paranormal manifestations of the unknown that make their presence felt there in no uncertain terms.
    
Why is there so much interest on the part of otherworldly denizens of the proverbial Twilight Zone? Tim Beckley of Global Communications has recently assembled and released a book called "Secrets of Death Valley - Mysteries and Haunts of the Mojave Desert" that tries to answer that question.
    
The highly skilled contributors include New Age Channeler Diane Tessman, UFO researcher Regan Lee, fringe topic author Adam Gorightly, as well as Paul Dale Roberts, Joe Parzanese, and a character called Cactus Jim. The lineup is, all in all, an excellent cross-section of experiencers and investigators who work to make the mysteries of the desert a little more accessible.
    
Regan Lee, for example, writes about the desert as a staging ground for numerous phenomena. "The desert has been the stage," she writes, "for otherworldly encounters with Jinns, Space Visitors, Mary, religious deities and entities." Lee goes on to say that contactee Dana Howard, who met the alien entity Diane there in the Yucca Valley, was no exception to that idea. Diane unequivocally states, "From the desert sands, cauldrons of magic will spring."   
    
It is in that same section of desert that the famous Giant Rock is located, as well as the domed device called the Integratron, a creation of early contactee George Van Tassel. Van Tassel is a major story himself, being one of the first to write about his encounters with alien beings in the early 1950s. Along with the perhaps better known George Adamski, he helped to create much of what we take for granted nowadays about Ufology and other New Age articles of faith.
    
Beckley has done another of his rescue jobs on the early contactee literature, this time resurrecting a history of Giant Rock written by Van Tassel that has the makings of a great movie. It started with a chance meeting with a traveler named Frank Critzer, who brought his car in for repairs to the auto shop run by Van Tassel's uncle in 1930s Santa Monica, California. Van Tassel and his uncle quickly made friends with Critzer, even allowing him to sleep in their garage and repairing his car for free. When Critzer, an experienced prospector, moved on, he promised to write from wherever he settled down. He left with a $30 gift from Van Tassel and his uncle, a lot of money in those dark days of the Great Depression.
    
It wasn't until a year later that Critzer was heard from. He sent a map showing how to get to Giant Rock, and the following weekend Van Tassel and his uncle made the trip to see him there. Critzer had made a home for himself by digging out a space under Giant Rock that was surprisingly livable and at least rent free.

One needs to realize that Giant Rock covers 5800 square feet and is seven stories high. It is believed to be the largest boulder in the world, and no one can explain how it got to its location so far from any likely point of origin. Critzer's living area was about 400 square feet, a small fraction of the bottom side of Giant Rock.

All was not well for Critzer however. In 1942, when the U.S. was at war with Germany, Critzer was falsely accused of stealing dynamite and failing to register for the draft. He also drew the suspicions of his neighbors, who felt his German name gave away the fact that he was a Nazi spy. Critzer had indeed served in the German Navy many years before, but he had also served in America's Merchant Marines and was a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Still, deputies from Riverside County came to interrogate him, which is odd, because Giant Rock is actually in San Bernardino County so the Riverside boys had no jurisdiction there, which Critzer pointed out. Critzer agreed to go with them anyway, and said he wanted to get his coat first. He went into his living quarters to retrieve it, but the deputies mistakenly thought he was defying them. They lobbed a tear gas grenade through the north side window, which set off some dynamite that Critzer kept for his prospecting work. Critzer died in the explosion and the deputies were injured.

Van Tassel came to visit Giant Rock in the aftermath of Critzer's death, and he and his family grew to love the place. After the war ended, Van Tassel bought the land from the Bureau of Land Management and built a small airport there. In 1953, Van Tassel began to hold weekly meetings under Giant Rock, which eventually led to his long series of UFO contacts there and to his creation of the Integratron, a device he built on instructions from the aliens that was believed to have regenerative health benefits for humans as well as to make travel in time possible.

Van Tassel's history of Giant Rock is followed by the Global Communications reprint of Van Tassel's contactee classic, "I Rode A Flying Saucer." After explaining a little about his own realization that his story was admittedly hard to believe, he next goes on to wax mystical and poetic about the nature of God as creator of the universe, a creator whose work extends far beyond merely earthly mankind.

From the sublimely innocent contactees, such as George Van Tassel and Dana Howard, the picture darkens to a shadow of hell with the appearance of Charles Manson and his demonically-inspired madness. Writer Adam Gorightly contributes a chapter that traces the history of Manson's time in the Death Valley region. One of Manson's followers told him about an abandoned mining claim called Myers Ranch, which was one of several desert outposts Manson would lead his followers to in his efforts to conceal himself and his "family" from the imagined horrors of "Helter Skelter," his Beatles-inspired term for the apocalypse.

Manson spent hundreds of dollars on topographic maps of the area to plan an escape route for himself and his cult. The flames of his paranoia were further fanned by his twisted interpretation of the Book of Revelation with the Beatles' White Album thrown into the mix. He believed the Fab Four were in reality angels sent to destroy a third part of mankind and that a total upheaval of the social order was just around the corner.

Manson also believed there was a magic hole located in the desert, spoken of in   Hopi legend, which would shelter his group during the apocalypse and permit them to return to the surface once the strife was over. A pit of water called "Devil's Hole," found near the northwest corner of Death Valley, was one possible location of the supernatural escape route. Manson would meditate in front of the hole for days at a time, until it dawned on him that the water in the hole was a door, or a blocking mechanism, that prevented entrance into the underworld. All he needed to do was to somehow suck the water out and the secret passageway would be revealed.

But sorry, Charlie. On the night of October 12, 1969, a contingent of Inyo County sheriff's officers, National Park Rangers and California Highway Patrolmen raided the Manson Family headquarters and took the entire group into custody for the Tate-LaBianca murders.

"Mysteries and Haunts of the Mojave Desert - Secrets of Death Valley" moves on to relate a series of ghost stories and legends that have been handed down through the years, such as the tale of the Serpent-Necked "Canoa," which is Native-American speak for "Canoe." The storyteller, a Santa Rosa Indian, described a boat with a long neck and the head of a beast that turns out to be a Viking ship, with serpent heads at both the bow and the stern, as pictured in the book. The Indian says that seeing the ship was a bad sign, and that to save himself he had needed to leave the area immediately.

Ed Stevens, the writer relaying the Indian's tale, argues for the plausibility of a ship venturing into the area in late spring, when the Colorado River would be flooded and other water-related factors would come into play. But given that the Indian saw a Viking ship, from centuries before, he was most likely experiencing a form of "retro-cognition," which can loosely be defined as crossing over into the past in an almost physical sense, seeing some scene from antiquity, and then returning to the present. The phenomenon has been reported on numerous occasions and is not as rare as some might think.

There are other chapters of a similar nature, with intriguing titles like "Butcher-Knife Ike and the Lost Ship" and "The Lost Spanish Galleon." Beckley also reprints newspaper articles dating back to the 19th century that report on odd occurrences there in the desert, such as one about a group of explorers who discovered yet another ship said to have been lost there many years before.

Another chapter, taken from a 1947 article in the San Diego Union, claims that the skeletal remains of several human beings eight to nine feet in height were discovered in the desert near the Arizona-Nevada-California borderline. The giant skeletons were found clothed in garments consisting of a medium-length jacket and trousers that extended to slightly below the knees. The material was similar to gray dyed sheepskin, but "obviously it was taken from an animal unknown today." The section also includes reporting on the same find from other newspapers at the time, providing a thorough cross section of media coverage of an extremely bizarre and grisly discovery.

Not to be outdone, Tim Beckley himself authors a series of chapters on some high strangeness in the forbidding desert region. For instance, there is his report on a Bigfoot-type creature often sighted near such desert towns as Twenty Nine Palms and Joshua Tree. Even more remarkable is the fact that Bigfoot has been seen frequently in the area around Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert just north of Lancaster. The presence of Bigfoot became a running joke among the military personnel stationed there, which some at the base connected to the frequent visits made by UFOs to the installation. The Bigfoot/UFO connection has been reported for decades in many other parts of the world as well, and one can only wonder about the relationship the two phenomena apparently have with one another.  

Beckley also talks about some ghostly manifestations in a Death Valley hotel and opera house located in a small town called Amargosa, noting that it was not the sort of situation he expected to encounter on his trips to the area. Amargosa was once the location of a borax mine, and was essentially built to be a company town.

"The Amargosa Hotel and Opera House," Beckley explained, "was originally put up for the borax miners and their families, who hadn't much to do in the 1920s. It laid abandoned for years until a woman named Marta Becket arrived from New York and cleaned up the place."
Becket was an accomplished actress, dancer, choreographer and painter. After restoring the Opera House in the 1960s, she began to give one-woman performances there, often without an audience.  A lot of paranormal activity has been reported there in the intervening years.
"We drew upon the research," Beckley said, "of Layla Halfhill of the Los Angeles Paranormal Association. Her group scoped out the place really well and noted some abnormalities of a parapsychological nature."

The book contains a haunting photo of an orb taken by the Los Angeles Paranormal Association, who maintain that the Amargosa Hotel and Opera House holds deep mysteries that need further investigation.

Add to that a chapter by Beckley on celebrities who had supernatural encounters in the desert, to include Sammy Davis, Jr., jazz drummer Buddy Rich, and actors William Shatner and Michael Boatman. Beckley also includes a number of other desert anomalies that have become part of the urban legends of the Mojave, such as a twelve-foot-tall levitating clown who is seen to wander down the middle of the road around midnight; a teleporting leprechaun that might direct a worthy party to gold; the repeated apparition of a stagecoach from over a century ago; and a singer who had an "in-your-nose" confrontation with a small orb-like UFO.  

In addition, the book is filled with numerous photos, some old and some new, of desert locales and the people whose lives were mysteriously touched there. As mentioned before, there are also numerous newspaper clippings provided that offer further evidence of paranormal events in the area stretching back many years.  

Beckley offers a wonderful smorgasbord of several writers making their individual contributions to a book that runs the gamut from the halcyon early days of Giant Rock and the contactee movement to the dark side manifested in the desert rat called Charlie Manson to the many ghostly appearances of the unknown in the barren wastes called Death Valley and the Mojave. By reading "Secrets of Death Valley - Mysteries and Haunts of the Mojave Desert," one can become a kind of tourist of the region without even breaking a sweat and shudder in fear in the privacy of one's own home. But it might be better yet to actually travel there and see for yourself.

[If you enjoyed this article, please visit Sean Casteel's website at www.seancasteel.com and read some of his previous work.]

Here is a sample chapter from "Secrets of Death Valley: Mysteries and Haunts of the Mojave Desert."


          
It was a clear, cold night in California's Mojave Desert, and I had never been closer to the stars. Nowhere else on Planet Earth do the stars shine and twinkle so brightly. The sky stretched overhead like a mystical black blanket with shining crystals everywhere.
        
Two friends and I had driven into the Joshua Tree National Monument to go UFO hunting. The Monument is a national treasure in the magnificent high desert. Incredible rock formations and bizarrely-shaped Joshua trees dot the desert landscape. It is all very alien and yet so richly of Earth.
        
The three of us sat huddled under a blanket for about an hour and then decided to go home because of the cold. As we headed for the car, a large, brilliant, white light raced across the sky. Just as we struggled to tell each other it must have been a meteorite, it raced back in the opposite direction, stopping overhead for a second. It hovered just long enough for us to see smaller red, yellow, and blue lights in a circular pattern while its brilliant light, which illuminated the whole object, remained incandescent white.
        
Suddenly, it zoomed away, over the horizon from whence it came. We felt we had just witnessed something utterly incredible and otherworldly. We were speechless for a few moments, and then we couldn't stop talking about what we had just seen. I will never forget that UFO sighting which the Mojave Desert offered us that cold, starry night.
        
It is fact: The Mojave Desert never fails to provide us with chilling phantoms, mysterious ghosts, and unexplained hauntings. It also offers us unidentified star ships overhead and alien encounters under the watchful eyes of monster rock formations. It tells us stories of Coyote Man and the dreaded Chupacabra, and it even sings of "Hotel California," where you can check out anytime you want but you can never leave.
        
When I lived near the town of Joshua Tree, California, I felt I was undergoing an intense two-year education in all things mysterious and alien. I could feel the ghosts at Giant Rock, that gigantic, enigmatic boulder a few miles from Landers, a village which suffered a devastating earthquake in the early 1990s.
        
The ghostly phantoms at Giant Rock were mostly Native American in "feel" and once I heard their flutes playing in the desert wind. Also, there was the spirit of George van Tassel.
        
In the 1950s and 1960s, tens of thousands of people streamed into Landers, blocking the highways for miles around. On they went to the flying saucer Mecca of Giant Rock, gathering with George van Tassel.  At several of those gatherings, it is said that van Tassel, at will, summoned his extraterrestrial friends, who appeared overhead. Many people felt the alien contact and followed van Tassel's enlightened, brilliant teachings.
        
In 1951, his friends from Venus astrally transported van Tassel aboard their giant star ship and introduced him to "The Council of Seven Lights." The Council told him to build a structure in that energized area of California's high desert; they promised that this building would extend human life and help humans become enlightened.
        
Built according to the precise directions and requirements of van Tassel's alien friends, The Integratron still offers mind-blowing acoustics and experiences of an almost psychedelic nature.
        
I recently reread George van Tassel's book, "The Council of Seven Lights" and was amazed at the cosmic knowledge in its pages. It is a book which reflects not only metaphysical wisdom but which also delves into quantum physics within a spiritual format. Van Tassel was a genuine contactee of great experience and wisdom.  
       
In 1995 and1996, my daughter and I traveled almost daily to Giant Rock from our home in the town of Joshua Tree. We wandered around it; we meditated beside it. In the harsh sunlight of the desert day, the white quartz which composes Giant Rock gleamed and glistened. We tried to figure out how that huge boulder came to stand alone in the desert. There were no other boulders like it anywhere around. On distant desert hillsides, there were a few boulders which were much smaller than Giant Rock. Did Giant Rock roll across the desert from one of those hillsides miles away during an earthquake? Or did it come from the sky?
        
Giant Rock sometimes made us sad; there was ugly graffiti scrawled all over it. Hundreds of dirt bikes and motorcycles had wrecked the environment around it. There was also the infamous crack at the bottom caused by bonfires. The crack seemed to lead to a cave beneath the boulder. Rumor had it that a Nazi fugitive had hidden in this cave.
        
And so it was not surprising when, several years later, enigmatic Giant Rock suddenly split in half. When it did so, I had already moved to Iowa, but I remembered how sad the giant boulder itself seemed to be. No one respected it or seemed to remember the universal light work which had gone on around its domain. Giant Rock was a phenomenon of Mother Nature and perhaps a gift from outer space, and all humans could do now was to scrawl ugly words on it, scraping away the environment with their noisy bikes. One theory says that the vibrations from motorcycles helped split the mighty rock.
        
The tragedy of Giant Rock leads me to an insight on the mystical energy of California's Mojave Desert: This unique quantum energy can be used for enlightenment and goodness, or it can be used negatively.
        
The Manson Family's Spahn Ranch was in the Mojave.
        
It has long been joked that bodies murdered in Los Angeles end up in a hole in the Mojave.      

The ghost of a rock musician who is said to have overdosed in the 1970s haunts the only motel in the town of Joshua Tree.
        
Yes, I do remember a feeling of panic sometimes in that hot desert sun, a feeling that the spirits there were restless. Coming home one noon, I saw a small child sitting under the Joshua tree across the road. The child was crying softly. I rushed over, only to have the child dematerialize.
        
My daughter witnessed a tribe of "restless spirits" one dark desert night as they seemed to be picking leaves off of one of the trees in our yard. She said they seemed confused and unhappy.
        
I researched various paranormal happenings for a video I did about Giant Rock and the Mojave. I traveled into Joshua Tree Monument to find the precise rock formation into which a teenage couple is said to have disappeared. I had just enjoyed the film "Picnic at Hanging Rock," which is the account of young girls on a picnic in Australia who disappeared without a trace into a mysterious rock formation.
        
The particular formation in Joshua Tree National Monument is actually two formations, standing right next to each other. Between them is a narrow "doorway" through which one can squeeze. Apparently the teenage couple went through the doorway and were never seen again. Their friends hurried through the same doorway minutes later, searching for them. Was there a dimensional portal which opened precisely as they went through, and which then closed again?
       
Mother Earth has given the Mojave Desert very unique and dynamic energies which give rise to endless paranormal events as well as beckoning visitors from other worlds and dimensions. There have been more UFO sightings in the Mojave than any other area on Earth.
        
It is past time that a book be devoted to telling a few of The Mojave's mysterious secrets. Enjoy.

[Diane Tessman's email address is dianetessman@hotmail.com  Visit her website at: earthchangepredictions.com to view a wealth of spiritual information and to learn how Diane can help you personally to contact your higher self. A subscription to Diane's publication "The Change Times Quarterly" is available there as well.

Diane also recommends her book "Earth Changes Bible," which is available for purchase directly from her. Her regular mailing address is: Diane Tessman, P.O. Box 352, St. Ansgar, Iowa, 50472. Below are links to purchase some of Diane's books from Amazon.com]     

"God Cloud - Earth Changes Revelations"
http://www.amazon.com/Cloud-Other-Earth-Changes-Revelations/dp/1892062577   

"Passport To Heaven"
http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Heaven-Timothy-Green-Beckley/dp/0938294881/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304455386&sr=1-4   
 
Diane is also a contributor to "It's Raining Cats and Dogs," a book about encounters with paranormal animals.

http://www.amazon.com/Its-Raining-Cats-Dogs-Ghostly/dp/1606110659/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304455386&sr=1-5

The May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s luxury compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, had it all: painstaking intelligence-gathering, a heroic Navy SEAL assault team, satellite and drone surveillance, and biometric forensics.

And now this: a possible super-secret, stealthy helicopter, unknown to the wider world before one crashed during the assault.

Aviation specialists are picking apart pixel-by-pixel the dozen-or-so photos of the copter that have appeared online. They’re assembling digital mock-ups of the aircraft and comparing them to lost stealth designs of the 1980s and ’90s. Speculation abounds, and so far no one from the government is commenting. But depending on what the copter turns out to be, it could shed new light on everything from the abilities of U.S. commandos to the relationship between the United States and Pakistan.

Opinions about the copter seem to fall into three basic camps. The most-cautious observers believe the wreckage is from a conventional chopper that got so badly mangled during the crash that it became unrecognizable. In the center, there are those who think the helicopter is an Army MH-60 Blackhawk tweaked to make it quieter and more stealthy. On the fringes, the true believers are talking about a brand-new, radar-evading helicopter design.

Considering the proliferation of bewildering photos from the crash site, the conservative viewpoint seems unlikely. Equally, the notion of a brand-new “black” helicopter seems far-fetched, especially considering the Army’s long history of heavily modifying existing rotorcraft for secret missions.

That leaves an upgraded, stealth-optimized MH-60 as the most likely candidate — a conclusion that jibes with CIA director Leon Panetta’s assertion Tuesday that the 25-man strike team was “carried in two Blackhawk helicopters that went in.”

A story by ace reporter Sean Naylor in Army Times, published just minutes after the initial version of this post, supports this conclusion. Naylor quotes a retired Special Forces aviator saying the special Blackhawk, modified by Lockheed Martin, has “hard edges, sort of like an … F-117? stealth fighter from the same company.

According to a source who spoke to our own Spencer Ackerman, the modifications might have taken place with the help of a mysterious Army organization called the “Technology Applications Program Office,” located at Fort Eustis, Virginia. The rumored nickname? Airwolf. That’s right, like the cheesy ‘80 TV show.

Aside from one IT consultant who unwittingly live-tweeted the bin Laden raid, reports from Pakistani sources of a crashed helicopter were the first evidence that something was going down in Abbottabad. “According to eyewitnesses, a low-flying helicopter crashed in a populated area, and as a result two houses were engulfed in flames,” a Pakistani news service reported.

One local news agency claimed the downed bird was Pakistani. It wasn’t until several hours later that U.S. government sources clarified the initial stories. “We lost one helicopter due to mechanical failure,” a senior U.S. official said. “The aircraft was destroyed by the crew, and the assault force and crew members boarded the remaining aircraft to exit the compound.”

The official’s insistence — echoed later by Panetta — that there were just two choppers involved in the 25-man raid raised some eyebrows.

According to Capt. Crispin Burke, a U.S. Army Blackhawk pilot and Danger Room pal, two of the copters together can just barely squeeze in 25 people plus their weapons and other gear. But it’s inconceivable that a single surviving Blackhawk could have transported all 25 members of the assault team. Anyone who’s ridden in a Blackhawk knows that.

More than two choppers were present over bin Laden’s compound, despite what the administration was saying. That was the first indication that, as far as helicopters were concerned, something unusual was afoot.

Then came the photos. When the sun rose in Abbottabad, enterprising photographers with the European Press Agency and the Associated Press snapped pics showing the remains of the destroyed U.S. helicopter. The snapshots apparently depicted features not found on standard Blackhawks. Late on May 3, the first headlines appeared announcing the existence of a previously unknown “stealth helicopter.”

The Invisible Rotorcraft

So what was it that betrayed the downed choppers’ secret roots? Nearly rivetless skin, odd control surfaces, a shrouded tail rotor and special infrared-absorbing paint, for starters.

“Note how the UH-60 has a large stabilator [horizontal fin] with plenty of rivets,” Burke commented. “The one in the crash is much smaller, very smooth and swept back. Strange.”

A “round shield-like affair over the tail-rotor hub is an airflow diverter, designed to eliminate the turbulence around the rotor hub, making it more efficient,” wrote “Bill” from the milblog Arrgggh!. The diverter “probably has a secondary effect of reducing the noise of the tail rotor by making it directional.”

A very clear photo of that “shield” was given to Reuters, and appear at the top of this story.)

“The aircraft skin is interesting,” Bill continued. “It’s perfectly smooth, and I have a nagging hunch it’s something I’ve seen before, back in the late ’80s” — on an experimental OH-6 “Loach” scout chopper.

To him, the paint on the wrecked chopper appeared to be a “variation on the Invisible Loach — a light-emitting appliqué film which, coupled to directional cameras, will exactly reproduce the light and color patterns on the opposite side of the aircraft. Think of the aircraft as being made of glass.”

The stealthy copter also has a “special coating” on its windshield to scatter radar waves, Naylor asserts in his Army Times story.

Combined, the details imply a helicopter design that is more stealthy than standard choppers in every sense of the term. “Such a helicopter would not be invisible or silent, but would be harder to detect and track using an X-band or Ku-band radar, and quieter than a conventional helicopter,” said Carlo Kopp, joint head of the Air Power Australia think tank.

Based on the evidence, and the assumption that these improvements were applied to a basic Blackhawk airframe, aviation artist Ugo Crisponi produced a quick rendering of what the secret chopper might look like. The components depicted in the new Guardian photos — plus Naylor’s detailed description — match Crisponi’s concept pretty closely.

Historians and analysts were quick to point out precedents for the elusive bird. The obvious example is the Army’s überexpensive RAH-66 Comanche, killed off in 2004. That bird, Copp said, featured “shrouded rotor heads and unspecified absorbent materials” just like the mystery craft from Abbottabad.

John Pike, from Virginia-based Globalsecurity.org, highlighted the “MH-X,” a low-signature transport chopper project from the 1980s that was reportedly tested alongside the F-117 stealth fighter and B-2 stealth bomber.

Based on Naylor’s reporting, it appears that a handful of special Blackhawks — probably no more than four — indeed originated from the MH-X program, but plans for a large, permanent unit to fly these birds was cancelled “within the last two years.” Instead, Army Special Forces aviators took turns training on the stealth copters in Nevada, possibly at the secretive base known by some as “Area 51.”

Stealth Copter, Clear Politics

Though the evidence is mounting that the newly revealed black chopper is more angular Blackhawk derived from the MH-X program, it could be a while before we know for sure. The Pentagon is slow to reveal its most-advanced aircraft.

Nearly two years have passed since the Air Force admitted it possessed a stealthy spy drone, the RQ-170 — and we still don’t have an official photo of that bird. Moreover, statements from Washington seem intended to obscure the issue of the mystery chopper.

In any event, the implications are potentially enormous. For one, the existence of a stealthy helicopter means we must revise upward our assessment of U.S. Special Operations Forces’ ability to strike fast and unseen, all over the world.

Second, we should take with a grain of salt all the recent hand-wringing over the supposed decay in the American military rotorcraft industry. If we really have already fielded the world’s first radar-evading helicopter, there’s less reason to worry that the United States might have lost its chopper-making skills.

Third, the fact that the Pentagon was willing to risk its most secret whirlybird “shows the importance of the mission in the eyes of U.S. commanders,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, who was, as usual, among the first to report on the new chopper.

Finally, the black helicopter sheds new light on the military’s suspicion of possible Pakistani interference in the bin Laden raid. In his speech announcing bin Laden’s death, President Barack Obama heaped praise on Pakistan. “Our counter-terrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden.”

But Panetta later admitted that the United States had deliberately not told Pakistan of the impending raid. That “could jeopardize the mission,” because Pakistan “might alert the targets.”

Moreover, Joint Special Operations Command wasn’t comfortable simply arriving on the scene in its decidedly radar-visible Army Chinooks or Air Force MV-22 tilt-rotors. That would’ve meant essentially barging into Pakistani airspace, and hoping that Islamabad would refrain from targeting the attackers with surface-to-air-missiles.

No, JSOC felt it was necessary to stay off Pakistani radar displays for as long as possible. The unavoidable inference is that the commandos feared Pakistan might actually shoot at unannounced American choppers. That revelation, more so than the mere existence of a stealthy helicopter, could be the most compelling news of all.

Source: Wired
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/aviation-geeks-scramble-to-i-d-osama-raids-mystery-copter/4/

---

Without doubt, one of the strangest aspects of cryptozoology, is it’s tie-in with the Crop Circle mystery. Although it’s a little-known aspect of both phenomena, more than a few accounts exist of strange creatures seen in and around Crop Circles. From Matthew Williams – the only British man ever arrested, charged and convicted for making a Crop Circle - come several such accounts.
 
It transpires that, unsurprisingly for someone who has spent years deeply immersed within the Crop Circle controversy, Matthew is a veritable fountain of knowledge with respect to tales of weird creatures either having been seen in, or at least in the direct vicinity of, complex Crop Circle formations. One such case is truly strange.
 
Matthew advised me that the story in question concerned a man who had felt curiously compelled to drive late at night to a certain field in Wiltshire many years ago. On doing so, he parked his car and duly, and carefully, began his walk into the depths of the crop. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large, black, human-like figure appeared in the air over the field.
 
“It reminded me a little bit of the Mothman sightings when I heard this story,” said Matthew, not without a high degree of justification. Matthew continued that the source of the story could only stand and stare in awe, while suddenly gaining the distinct impression that the hovering entity was the source of at least some of the Crop Circle formations that were appearing in Wiltshire.
 
At that precise moment, a simple Crop Circle suddenly appeared on the ground immediately below the black figure – after which it vanished from the skies and the man was left utterly alone in the field, and with no real option other than to make his shocked way back to his vehicle and drive home, baffled and bewildered by both the weird, aerial entity and what it was that had directed him to the field.
 
And still Matthew’s accounts were not over: “There was one time, I’d rather not say when or where exactly, as I could get into trouble for admitting I trespassed on the farmer’s land and made the crop circle formation. Plus, I had a friend named Paul helping me with this one. We were making this circle when we noticed these three bright lights – small balls of lights coming towards the field. We watched them; we were fascinated. But they split up and each of them went to a corner of the field – and which only left one corner for us to leave by without getting too close to these things.
 
“That was a bit unsettling. We didn’t know what these balls were; so we raced out of the open corner of the field. We looked back as we ran and could see the balls heading towards us: gliding very gracefully just above the top of the crop. It was like they were on a railway track, just moving very smoothly, but it left us sort of disturbed too: like they were almost ghostly and alive.”
 
The story was far from over, as Matthew notes: “Well, I went to get the car, and told Paul to wait in the bushes at the edge of the road so he wouldn’t be seen. The last thing I wanted was for him to get arrested if the police happened to drive past. But by the time I had got the car and got back to Paul, he was walking up the middle of the road with all his Crop Circle equipment in full view. I pulled up, wound the window down and shouted at him: ‘What the hell are you doing? If people see you carrying your [crop circle-making] equipment, we’ll get arrested.’
 
“Paul looked scared stiff and said: ‘If they had arrested me, I’d have gone with them, just to get me out of there.’ I asked him what he meant, and Paul said that while I was getting the car he had heard these strange, animal-like screaming noises coming from inside the field and he had just charged out of there and onto the road. We never found out what it was though.”
 
And Matthew Williams is not alone in commenting on such matters: in the summer of 2007, I spoke with Marcus Matthews, a researcher of mysterious big-cats in Britain, who told me that he was then currently investigating a case involving a person who had seen a “huge black cat” sitting inside the confines of a Wiltshire Crop Circle.
 
So, how do we define and explain such rogue reports as these? The answer, admittedly, right now is that we can’t. All I can say is this: if you ever find yourself deep in the heart of a huge Crop Circle, then keep a careful watch. There may be something monstrous keeping its eyes on you, getting ready to pounce…
 
Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including the newly-published Space Girl on Spaghetti Junction.

Source: Mania/Nick Redfern
http://www.mania.com/lair-beasts-creatures-crop_article_129761.html