8/5/11  #631
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They live deep underground in the stygian caverns carved from the virgin rock millions of years ago.  They are the Old Ones, the first to call Earth their home -- but their original home, somewhere in the vast curtain of stars in the heavens, has been lost in antiquity.  They now sit and watch their descendants on the surface who talk of love and forgiveness,  but scheme to kill each other for the love of profit and power.  They wonder how people who talk of peace and freedom are now considered evil and wrong,  fit only to be taken to concentration camps for the ultimate walk down the fiery path.  Blessed are the peace makers it was once written -- but now, such words are considered blasphemous and must be silenced. The Old Ones are glad that they live underground, free from the madness that envelopes the surface.

This week Conspiracy Journal brings you such soul-searching stories as:

- Scientists Find Signs Water Is Flowing on Mars-
-
Can Physics Explain Mysteries of Crop Circles? -
Paranormal Warnings, Mothman, UFOs, and Bridge Collapse -
Paranormal Team Claims It Caught Photo of Ghost -
AND: Man Tries to Build Nuke Reactor in Kitchen

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~


NEW FROM CONSPIRACY JOURNAL

Alien Space Gods Of Ancient Greece And Rome - Revelations Of The Oracle Of Delphi


WAS THE MEDITERRANEAN REGION OF OUR PLANET VISITED BY A RACE OF "SUPER BEINGS" IN ANCIENT TIMES?

WAS THE ORACLE OF DELPHI A CONDUIT FOR PROPHETIC MESSAGES FROM OUTER SPACE -- PERHAPS THE FIRST TELEPATHIC CHANNELER?

British historian W. Raymond Drake is one of the most careful researchers of the "Ancient Astronaut" theory which maintains aliens arrived on earth and interacted with the human race throughout antiquity and in all parts of the globe. Author of a dozen works on the Space Gods phenomenon, Drake's work complements that of Chariots of the Gods? by Erich Von Daniken, his first book appearing in print prior to Von Daniken's international bestseller.

In this work about the ancient Mediterranean's strange relationship with the Sky Gods, Drake utilized over fifty writers of antiquity and scrutinized their main works through a UFO "lens." His astute contributions regarding the Land of the Gods have been expanded upon and updated by contemporary researchers Timothy Beckley and Sean Casteel.

Questions That You Will Find Answered. . .

Did giants from space establish a UFO base atop the picturesque Mount Olympus?

Were they the gods and goddesses of "Mythology" idolized and given names such as Apollo, Hades, Athena, Hermes, Zeus, Artemis and Hestia?

Did the powerful deities of Greece help save Athens from being invaded by the mighty armies of Atlantis in 10,000 BC?

Is there reason to believe that the Greeks and Trojans were inspired to fight for the beauteous Helen, surely a space queen?

Do the great plays and sublime philosophies of the supreme thinkers of the ages show a reverence for the gods' who intervened at Marathron and Salamis, sending flying shields to aid Alexander storming the walls of Tyre?

Did a UFO encountered near Troy save the army of Lucullus from destruction?

Were omens observed in the sky just before the murder of Caesar?

How does one explain the manifestation of mysterious voices and apparitions in the heavens as Hannibal ravaged Italy?

In a marvelous update, recent activities, including encounters with humanoids and men in black-like individuals, are taken into consideration offering proof that the ancient aliens of antiquity are returning to their original haunts and are guaranteed to make open contact soon! 

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Strange, Amazing, Rare, and Exotic Items from Worldwide Sources.

This PDF file is available FREE to read online or to download. Take this link to check out the weirdest catalog in the galaxy!



- MYSTERIES OF THE RED PLANET DEPARTMENT -

Scientists Find Signs Water Is Flowing on Mars

Shifting dark streaks on the surface of Mars are signs that water is flowing there today, scientists have announced.

The possible presence of liquid water is certain to revive speculation that Mars is teeming with microbial organisms. The recipe for life, at least as we know it, calls for liquid water, carbon-based molecules and a source for energy.

There is plenty of ice on Mars, but the chemical reactions for life come to a halt when water freezes.

High-resolution photographs taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2006, show fingerlike streaks up to five yards wide that appear on some steep slopes in the planet’s late spring. These streaks grow and shift through summer, reaching hundreds of yards in length before they fade in winter. One crater had about 1,000 streaks.

But finding streaks is not the same as finding water. An instrument on the Mars orbiter capable of detecting water has not found any, but that might just mean that the amount of water in the flows is too little to be seen.

“We have this circumstantial evidence for water flowing on Mars,” Alfred S. McEwen of the University of Arizona, who is the principal investigator for the camera, said Thursday during a news conference. “We have no direct detection of water.”

Dr. McEwen and his colleagues report their findings in an article published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. The scientists said the best explanation they could offer for the streaks was that they were caused by a flow of extremely salty water down the slopes. The salts, which have been detected all around Mars, would allow the water to remain liquid at much colder temperatures than pure water.

However, the scientists said, they have yet to fill all the holes in their story. They cannot, for example, explain how the water darkened the soil. They are also at a loss to explain why the streaks vanish each winter.

But, Dr. McEwen said, “We haven’t been able to come up with an alternative that we believe.”

The streaks have been definitively seen in seven locations and tentatively identified in 20 others. “The sites where these occur are rare,” Dr. McEwen said.

Scientists have known for years of vast swaths of frozen ice on Mars. Many geological features like canyons, dried-up lakes and river channels point to the flow of liquid water in the distant past when Mars may have been warmer. In 2000, images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft showed fresh-looking gullies, which some scientists hypothesized had been carved by water. More recent looks indicate that they were more likely cut by carbon dioxide frost.

However, the areas where the dark streaks occur, located in the southern midlatitudes, are too warm for carbon dioxide frost.

“I think this is the best evidence to date of liquid water occurring today on Mars,” said Philip R. Christensen, a geophysicist at Arizona State University.

Scientists are not likely to be able to confirm their suspicions anytime soon. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled to launch late this year, will not be able to help. Its landing site is far from any of the streaks, and it would not be able to navigate the steep slopes. Dr. McEwen said that experiments on Earth mimicking Martian conditions provided the best hope for understanding what is going on.

At the news conference, Lisa M. Pratt, a biogeochemist at Indiana University, said that the best analog on Earth might be the Siberian permafrost. “This is very speculative, because we really have no idea whether or not there are extant organisms on Mars or whether there ever was life on Mars,” Dr. Pratt said.

But on Earth, microbes can live in pockets of salty water that never freeze, or even if the water froze solid, organisms could go dormant and “patiently hang out near the surface until spring comes around again,” she said.

“If there were to be evolving organisms on Mars,” she said, “I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t adapt to that kind of seasonally available, very brief access to resources. You bloom quickly, you do what you need to do, and you go dormant.”

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/science/space/05mars.html?_r=1

- ART OF THE FIELD DEPARTMENT -

Can Physics Explain Mysteries of Crop Circles?

Crop circles have confounded farmers and scientists alike since they were first recorded in the 17th century, and now physicist Professor Richard Taylor says the phenomenon is growing alongside advances in technology.

The complexity of modern patterns, which can involve up to 2,000 individual and elaborately arranged shapes, suggest that clandestine groups of hoaxers must use sophisticated methods to complete their projects in a single night.

GPS systems enables the artists to cover vast spaces with absolute precision, while microwaves can be used to flatten large numbers of stalks at great speeds, it was claimed.

An analysis of evidence in the Physics World journal reported that researchers had used magnetrons – tubes which use electricity and magnetism to generate intense heat – to mimic the physical changes in flattened stalks in some circles, which are linked to radiation.

Prof Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, said the findings suggest that crop circle artists may be using magnetrons, found in microwave ovens, or similar technology to complete their detailed patterns in the space of a few hours.

Traditionally planks of wood known as "stompers" and lengths of rope have been used to make accurate patterns in fields, with designers even using bar stools to hop from one flattened section to another.

Other theories of how the patterns appeared over the centuries include freak wind patterns, rolling hedgehogs, copulating couples and, in a 1678 report, the actions of a "mowing devil".

More recently, conspiracy theorists have linked the patterns to UFOs or other alien activity, though some hoaxers have admitted to deliberately imitating flying saucer "nests".

More than 10,000 examples have been documented in the past 500 years, with one new pattern now appearing somewhere in the world every summer evening.

Prof Taylor said: “Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily. This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.”

Matin Durrani, Editor of Physics World, said: “It may seem odd for a physicist such as Taylor to be studying crop circles, but then he is merely trying to act like any good scientist – examining the evidence for the design and construction of crop circles without getting carried away by the sideshow of UFOs, hoaxes and aliens.”

Source: Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8671207/Crop-circles-created
-using-GPS-lasers-and-microwaves.html

- GUEST AUTHOR DEPARTMENT -

Paranormal Warnings, Mothman, UFOs, and Bridge Collapse
By Diane Tessman

W
ith the battle over the budget, funds being severely cut, and no new monies allotted for anything, one has to wonder about America’s aging infrastructure. Electric power grids are needlessly convoluted at this point, over-worked, and in need of repair and updating. Interstate highways which are now old enough to require considerable maintenance are in poor shape and growing worse. Risky overpasses and entrance/exits ramps often need repair. However, bridges and tunnels offer the most dramatic potential for disaster when their aging components finally collapse, having had little or no comprehensive repair their entire lifetimes.

If the Silver Bridge collapse of December 1, 1967, and the Skyway Bridge collapse of May 9, 1980, are any indication, our aging infrastructure today should have Mothman hovering overhead, UFOs zooming from one potential bridge disaster to another, and paranormal activity beeping, popping, and swirling. Yes, perhaps a silly idea, but there are numerous accounts of UFOs near disasters, including the footage taken of them near the 2011 Japanese 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunamis.

Mothman was so prevalent in the year before the Silver Bridge collapsed, that he established his identity at that point to the paranormal investigative world. Silver Bridge was for Mothman, like the first mega-hit for a celebrity singer.

Super-natural happenings and UFO sightings also abounded near Silver Bridge in that year before the collapse, which killed 46 people. That collapse unfolded like a disaster film with cars which seconds before had been crawling along in Christmas rush hour traffic, now hung on fragments of the bridge before plunging, filled with passengers, into the frigid Ohio River.

In 1975, John Keel wrote ”Mothman Prophecies,” which documented the paranormal events which various people around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, experienced leading up to the bridge collapse. Point Pleasant had also had an abundance of UFO sightings during that time. After the demise of the bridge, the super-natural events and UFO activity lessened and soon were nearly non-existent, according to Keel’s careful research.

Mothman himself (could he actually be Mothwoman?), was reported to be a huge, semi-human winged creature with glowing red eyes, sighted in and around Point Pleasant in 1966 and 1967. Between 6.5 and 7 feet tall, with a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, this shadowy creature was said to fly great distances at speeds up to 100 miles per hour.

Even though I respect John Keel’s work and consider him one of my favorite Fortean writers, I might be a bit skeptical if I had not had paranormal events in and around my house, UFO sightings near my house, and, yes, a Mothman sighting, right before the Skyway Bridge plunged into Tampa Bay on May 9, 1980, as I got ready for another day of teaching school. Strange things had been happening at and near my house, since 1979; they eased off after the Skyway disaster in 1980.

The most spectacular UFO sighting of my life thus far, at least which I remember consciously, was over a small park at the end of the street on which I lived. I lived one block from Tampa Bay and the dual-bridge Sunshine Skyway could be seen from this park. It was a summer night in 1979, when my daughter and I walked our dog Bailey to the park. I was a field investigator for MUFON and APRO at the time, and so the two huge glowing white orbs which were hanging in the dark sky over Tampa Bay, were absolutely thrilling!

We took the dog home, and raced back to the park. A small group of people had gathered to watch the orbs, which had not moved. Unlike weather balloons, there was absolutely no drifting in the breeze. Perhaps this was rocket fuel from a military test at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa? Then this phenomenon should have slowly disappeared.

Instead, as I looked down for just a second, one of the two dazzling white orbs, just disappeared. Not a trace of it was left. Oddly, it was the one with which I felt I was in communication, or trying to establish communication.

The other orb stayed there, not budging an inch, until I gave up and went home at 2:30 a.m. I had to teach school in the morning but I have kicked myself ever since, for leaving. No weather balloon, rocket fuel debris, helicopter, or Chinese lantern hoax, would have stayed stationery for all those hours.

In the year before 35 people in cars and a Greyhound Bus, plunged off the Skyway Bridge when the Summit Venture barge hit it, my small house, one block from Tampa Bay, which I shared with my parents and daughter, was full of paranormal activity. The walls beeped. The television beeped, at first at set intervals, and then randomly. Lamps beeped. Ok, maybe the house was on the path of some kind of waves from MacDill Air Force Base, so I took a cassette recorder on batteries, about half a block away from the house, and it beeped too. My daughter and I recorded “the beeps” but when we re-played the tapes, the beeps were always gone.

1979 was also my time of awakening as a UFO abductee and subsequent cosmic citizen. In 1980, I underwent hypnosis with Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle and remembered a UFO encounter when I was a child in Iowa, in which I met Tibus, my lifelong (as it turns out), guide.

After the Skyway fell down, and after I embraced my own UFO connection, the beeps eased off and then stopped entirely.

But, back to the morning of the Skyway disaster:

May 9, 1980, at 7:33 in the morning, I was hurriedly getting myself and my daughter ready for school, when our smoke alarm started to beep. Of course I raced around to check for fire, and then realized it was not the fire warning, but also not the “battery low” signal. It sounded exactly like Morse Code, but I don’t know Morse Code. My dad was trying to get his brain going to remember what he knew of Morse Code, when we heard on the tv news that a barge had just rammed into the Skyway Bridge at 7:35 a.m.

The smoke alarm had stopped. And it never did that again.

Was this a desperate call for help from the energy-bodies of those who had just left their physical form? The Skyway Bridge was/is a tall structure and to plunge off it, there would be a few seconds of falling, falling, falling in sheer panic, through the air in your vehicle.

Or, had whatever been beeping at me all those months, finally arrived at the awaited hour, and madly sent its message?

It was several months after the Skyway disaster that it struck me: I had been outdoors by myself in the summer of 1979, and the stars had suddenly been blotted out by something very large and dark, but outlined in blood red. It had whooshed over, giving me the impression of a giant wingspan or, a giant cape, all spread out. It swooped low overhead, going faster than a large bird would fly (and too big for a large bird anyway!), and then the stars re-emerged.

Mothman, I presume?

Find out more about Diane Tessman at her website: Earth Change Predictions - http://www.earthchangepredictions.com/

- VANISHED IN THE WINK OF AN EYE DEPARTMENT -

Mystery Surrounds Loss of Records, Art on 9/11

Letters written by Helen Keller. Forty-thousand photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy taken by the president's personal cameraman. Sculptures by Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. The 1921 agreement that created the agency that built the World Trade Center.

Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art.

In some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records. And the loss of human life at the time overshadowed the search for lost paper. A decade later, agencies and archivists say they're still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history.

"You can't get the picture back, because critical pieces are missing," said Kathleen D. Roe, operations director at the New York State Archives and co-chairwoman of the World Trade Center Documentation Project. "And so you can't know what the whole picture looks like."

The picture starts in the seven-building trade center complex. Hijackers flew jetliners into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, which collapsed onto the rest of the complex, which included three smaller office buildings, a Marriott hotel and U.S. Customs. 7 World Trade Center, a skyscraper just north of the twin towers, collapsed that afternoon.

The trade center was home to more than 430 companies, including law firms, manufacturers and financial institutions. Twenty-one libraries were destroyed, including that of The Journal of Commerce. Dozens of federal, state and local government agencies were at the site, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Central Intelligence Agency had a clandestine office on the 25th floor of 7 World Trade Center, which also housed the city's emergency command center and an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service.

The first tangible losses beyond death were obvious, and massive.

The Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage, where more than 650 employees were killed, owned a trove of drawings and sculptures that included a cast of Rodin's "The Thinker" — which resurfaced briefly after the attacks before mysteriously disappearing again. Fragments of other sculptures also were recovered.

The Ferdinand Gallozzi Library of U.S. Customs Service in 6 World Trade Center held a collection of documents related to U.S. trade dating back to at least the 1840s. And in the same building were nearly 900,000 objects excavated from the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan, a famous working-class slum of the 19th century.

The Kennedy negatives, by photographer Jacques Lowe, had been stowed away in a fireproof vault at 5 World Trade Center, a nine-story building in the complex. Helen Keller International, whose offices burned up when its building, a block from the trade center, was struck by debris, lost a modest archive. Only two books and a bust of Keller survived.

Classified and confidential documents also disappeared at the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into it on 9/11.

A private disaster response company, BMS CAT, was hired to help recover materials in the library, where the jet plane's nose came to rest. The company claimed it saved all but 100 volumes. But the recovery limited access to information related to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, as the U.S. prepared to launch an attack a month later.

In New York, CIA and Secret Service personnel sifted through debris carted from the trade center to a Staten Island landfill for lost documents, hard drives with classified information and intelligence reports. The CIA declined to comment.

Two weeks after the attacks, archivists and librarians gathered at New York University to discuss how to document what was lost, forming the World Trade Center Documentation Task Force. But they received only a handful of responses to survey questions about damaged or destroyed records.

"The current atmosphere of litigation, politics and overall distrust surrounding the 9/11 attacks has made information sharing and compilation a complex task," said the final 2005 report of the project.

Federal agencies are required by law to report the destruction of records to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration — but none did. Federal archivists called the failure understandable, given the greater disaster.

After Sept. 11, "agencies did not do precisely what was required vis-a-vis records loss," said David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, in an email to The Associated Press. "Appropriately, agencies were more concerned with loss of life and rebuilding operations — not managing or preserving records."

He said off-site storage and redundant electronic systems backed up some records; but the attacks spurred the archives agency to emphasize the need for disaster planning to federal records managers.

Said Steven Aftergood, the director of the project on government secrecy at the watchdog group the Federation of American Scientists: "Under extreme circumstances, like those of 9/11, ordinary record keeping procedures will fail. Routine archival practices were never intended to deal with the destruction of entire offices or buildings."

Only the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District formally requested help from federal archivists after discovering stored case files kept had been damaged by mold and water.

The EEOC had to reconstruct 1,500 discrimination case files, said Elizabeth Grossman, supervisory trial attorney for the agency in 2001 at the time of the attacks. Cases were delayed for months. Computers had been backed up only as of Aug. 31, 2001. Witness interviews had to be conducted all over again.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the region's airports, bridges and the World Trade Center, had much of its archives and the contents of its library — which had closed in 1995 as a cost-cutting measure — in the building.

But a decade later, it only has "a general idea" of what documents were destroyed, Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said, including most of its video and photo archives, board meeting minutes and the compact that created the bi-state agency. It was kept on the 67th floor of the north tower.

"We do not have a detailed list" of the missing records, Coleman said in an email. The agency meticulously stores thousands of tons of steel from the building and other wreckage of the trade center in a hangar at Kennedy Airport.

A meeting had been scheduled — on Sept. 11, 2001 — between the agency and a group of libraries that had wanted to claim parts of the Port Authority collection, stored in the north tower. The meeting had been postponed at the last minute, said Ronald Becker, the head of special collections at Rutgers University Libraries, who was supposed to attend.

Not everything was lost. Copies of inventories had been sent out to the libraries that had sought to take parts of the collection, and as workers sifted through the rubble at ground zero, they found remnants of a photographic collection kept by the agency. Tens of thousands images dating back to 1921 were restored from what had been a collection of one million before the attacks.

One photo contact sheet — a picture of the Port Authority's aviation director — was discovered by a recovery worker two days after the attacks. It was given to the Sept. 11 museum, along with office IDs, letters and other bits of paper that were recovered in the rubble in the days and weeks afterward.

Jan Ramirez, the curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, said there was no historical consciousness surrounding the site before it was destroyed.

"It was modern, it was dynamic. It was not in peril. It was not something that needed to be preserved," she said.

"Now we know better."

Source: SF Gate
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/07/30/national/a094704D01.DTL

- WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR DEPARTMENT -

UFOs and Disney: Behind the Magic Kingdom
By Robbie Graham - Silver Screen Saucers

The role played by Hollywood in shaping our notions of potential alien life has long been a subject of fascination and contention in the UFO research community. Although there seems to be a consensus among UFOlogists that big screen depictions of UFOs serve to acclimate the populous to the reality of the phenomenon, opinions diverge on whether this acclimation effect is the product of design (inferring the existence of a "Hollywood UFO conspiracy"), or is merely the result of a natural cultural process driven by generic trends and stemming from a simple recognition among Hollywood executives that, when it come to the box office, aliens sell like hotcakes. Within this ongoing debate concerning UFOs and Hollywood, the name of one studio consistently has rung out over the decades – Disney. The House of Mouse has overseen the production and/or distribution of numerous UFO and alien-themed movies in recent times, with the best known examples including Flight of the Navigator (1986) Signs (2002), Lilo and Stitch (2002), Chicken Little (2005), Lifted (2007), I am Number Four (2011), Mars Needs Moms (2011) and the forthcoming John Carter (2012).

Once Upon A Time...

The Disney/UFO connection can be traced back to 1953 when the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel recommended that the US government make efforts to strip UFOs of their "aura of mystery" through the exploitation of mass media including television and motion pictures. In this context, the panel highlighted Walt Disney Productions specifically as a potential conduit for its propaganda. The panel’s singling-out of Disney made sense given the animation giant’s then firmly established working relationship with the US government: during World War II Disney made numerous propaganda shorts for the US military, and in the 1950s corporate and government sponsors helped the company produce films promoting President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" policy, as well as the retrospectively hilarious Duck and Cover documentary, which depicted schoolchildren surviving an atomic attack by sheltering under their desks.

That the Robertson Panel highlighted Disney is significant in that the Panel’s general recommendation to debunk UFOs through media channels is known to have been acted upon in at least one instance: this being the CBS TV broadcast of UFOs: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy? (1966), an anti-UFO documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite. In a letter addressed to former Robertson Panel Secretary Frederick C. Durant, Dr Thornton Page confided that he "helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel conclusions," even though this was thirteen years after the Panel had first convened. In light of this case alone, it seems reasonable to assume that the government may at least have attempted to follow through on the Robertson Panel’s Disney recommendation.

With this in mind, consider the case of the Oscar-winning Disney animator Ward Kimball. Best known for creating iconic Disney characters such as Jiminy Cricket and The Mad Hatter, Kimball also worked as Directing Animator on Disney classics including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) and Pinocchio (1940). While at a MUFON symposium in 1979, Kimball claimed that the United States Air Force (USAF) had approached Walt Disney himself in the mid-1950s to request his cooperation on a documentary about UFOs that would help acclimate the American public to the reality of extraterrestrials. According to Kimball, in exchange for Disney’s cooperation, the USAF offered to furnish the production with genuine UFO footage. Kimball claimed that Disney accepted the deal and – ever faithful to Uncle Sam – began work immediately on the USAF project. It wasn’t long, however, before the USAF reneged on its offer of UFO footage. When Kimball challenged the USAF Colonel overseeing the project he was told that "there was indeed plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Kimball, nor anyone else was going to get access to it." The Kimball case, though, seems to be at odds with the Robertson Panel’s recommendations, which were to debunk UFO reality through media channels, not promote it. But perhaps another faction within the military-intelligence community – one with a UFO acclimation agenda – had similarly recognised Disney’s propagandist potential? We can only speculate.

Disney’s Alien Encounters

A tantalising case of alleged Disney/government UFO collusion is that of the 1995 documentary Alien Encounters from New Tomorrowland, which officially was produced with the sole purpose of promoting Disneyworld’s then-new ‘ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter’ ride. Yet, the content of this curious "promotional" documentary raised was viewed with suspicion by UFO researchers for the following reasons:

 - Throughout its forty-minute run-time, the documentary’s presenter/narrator, Robert Urich, makes numerous declarative statements to the effect that UFOs are one-hundred-percent real and extraterrestrial in origin. Such statements include: "For nearly fifty years, officials have been documenting routine alien encounters here on earth; "More than one alien craft crashed and was recovered for secret U.S. military research. The most famous case took place in July of 1947 just outside the community of Roswell, New Mexico"; and "Indications are that government, military and scientific leaders will soon release nearly a half-century of official documentation of ongoing alien encounters on earth."

- The documentary tells us of alien microbes found in meteorites in Antarctica that had been analysed by NASA. At the time the documentary was televised in 1995, NASA was indeed analysing a Martian meteorite recovered from Antarctica, and had indeed reached the tentative conclusion that it contained fossilised microbial alien life. The inclusion of this information in Disney’s 1995 documentary is intriguing, however, as NASA did not make a formal announcement about its findings until August of 1996 – 17 months after the documentary was televised.

- The actual ‘Alien Encounter’ ride received very little screen time, with the vast majority of the documentary’s content being focused on UFOs and extraterrestrials as a factual reality. The ride itself seemed like an afterthought.

- The documentary was aired in only a handful of US cities at seemingly random times on selected dates in February and March, 1995, with no advance notice – a rather odd marketing strategy considering its purpose was to promote a major theme park ride for families.

For the reasons cited above, many in the UFO research field felt that Disney’s Alien Encounters documentary was an effort by the powers that be to prepare us for Disclosure – a subtle test of public reaction to an official declaration that we are not alone. But in the sixteen years since the documentary was produced, not one UFO researcher has attempted to contact the film’s writer and director, Andrew Thomas, in order to learn the truth of the matter. So, in February 2011, I decided to do just that.

In an hour-long telephone interview, Thomas revealed to me that he had been selected by Disney for the documentary project based on his background in reality television, having been the original producer of the phenomenally successful TV show, Cops: "Making things exceptionally real was the line of work that I was in at the time," he said. The other key factor was Thomas’s previous position as head of "special marketing" for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in the mid-to-late 1970s. Regarding Close Encounters, Thomas explained that marketing executives at Columbia Pictures were concerned that Spielberg’s chosen title for the film made it sound "suspiciously like a pornographic movie, because no one had any reference to what that vocabulary meant." This was where Thomas came in:

"Eighteen months before the film [Close Encounters] was going to premiere... before we’d even sold it to audiences, we had a campaign to introduce that vocabulary and make it part of the vernacular, so when the film opened-up everyone would know what was being discussed, and there wouldn’t be any question. So what I did was I worked with a planetarium to create a planetarium show that was about twenty-minutes long... you sit down and a UFO shoots across the planetarium dome and then the audience is trained on how to figure out whether that was a meteor, a comet, or actually an extraterrestrial. We managed to bus-in tens-of thousands of kids from all around the country on the pretence of seeing an educational planetarium show, but what they really got was a sophisticated message to explain to them that extraterrestrials and UFOs are real and what an encounter of the first, second and third kind actually meant."

Clearly, then, Thomas was a natural choice for Disney’s Alien Encounters documentary, the entire purpose of which, according to the director, was to promote the ride itself. Thomas told me that Disney had requested a documentary "about the history of mankind and aliens. Not a film history, but more of a realistic approach... a special about the history of UFO sightings," with Disney’s only stipulation being that "the last five minutes had to focus on the ride." Thomas confirmed to me that, instead of giving the documentary network time, Disney’s plans from the outset were to "seed it into independent television stations across the country."

But why did Thomas’s documentary take such a strong stance in favour of UFO/ET reality? He summed-up his approach as follows:

"I figured... instead of asking people to question ‘could it be possible?’ to just adopt the point of view that this [alien visitation] has been going on for 50 years, everybody’s known about it... And I thought it fit with the hyperrealistic nature of the ride that we were eventually trying to promote... I did it really kind of naively – I said to myself 'okay, I’m going to believe this right now, and I’m going to believe everything and I’m going to collect all this stuff and construct what would be a documentary if we all just had a consensus that it [the UFO phenomenon] was real...' We didn’t make up anything, but it certainly surprised the people at Disney."

Somewhat disappointingly for conspiracy theorists, Thomas claims to have written the script in just a few hours while flying back from Florida to his home in Los Angeles. "There was nothing to it," he said, "it just kind of came out, it was easy." Furthermore, Thomas claims to have conducted the vast majority his research at the National Archives and stressed that, beyond these archival visits, "there was no direct government contact" on the production. "I didn’t get any special access from anybody," he said.

But how did Thomas come to acquire his information about the NASA meteorite? "I found it on the Internet," said the director, matter-of-factly:

"It wasn’t a big secret. NASA had been doing that – they’d been getting meteorites... and inside I believe they were finding some complex amino acids, some material that could only be produced organically, that sort of thing, so it was an easy jump [in logic]. And the reason that NASA released the information months later is because they take their time. They don’t find something and release it. They find it and they study it."

Thomas’s meteorite information did raise a red flag at Disney, however: "They called me in and they said ‘we’re really concerned about this thing about NASA exploring rocks in Antarctica.’ I told them it was absolutely true and to let me go back to the office and I’ll get the material [sources] so they can check my facts... no big deal. So it wasn’t any big secret, it was just that the official [NASA] announcement came later."

There were aspects of the Alien Encounters project, however, that even Thomas considered strange – not least of all was the fact that Disney CEO Michael Eisner took a direct interest in the documentary, personally vetting its content and even filming his own introduction for the piece:

"I thought it was really odd because to me this was kind of a minor marketing project, but they [Disney] put a lot of weight into it. I mean Eisner doesn’t have to stop walking down the street to pick up a twenty-dollar-bill – it’s not worth his time. But they had him look through this. And he filmed this intro to the show. I didn’t do that. He had his own film crew take him out to a sound stage and film his own intro, which I thought was just really surprising."

Also surprising to Thomas was Disney’s inexplicable TV scheduling for the documentary, which he described as "completely counter-intuitive," because "it played on independent stations in the afternoon at like 2 o’clock or 3 o’ clock, or some horrible time when no one would be watching it."

Overall, Thomas’s testimony punches serious holes in the theory that Disney’s Alien Encounters documentary was a government-sponsored UFO acclimation effort. Yet questions remain; indeed, some of Thomas’s statements only add fuel to the fire: why was Michael Eisner so personally invested in what – on the surface at least – was a minor TV marketing project? And why the bizarre and "totally counter-intuitive" TV scheduling for the documentary?

Indulging the conspiratorial interpretation of events for a moment: if powerful UFO-related interests were involved in the documentary – perhaps having recommended Thomas knowing what he would produce based on his sophisticated work on Spielberg’s Close Encounters – then Thomas himself would likely be oblivious to this fact. He would have been a pawn in a much larger game, so to speak. I’ll be the first to admit that this interpretation sounds farfetched; but it is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility. Certainly, during the time the Alien Encounters documentary was produced in the mid-1990s, Disney was working closely with the Pentagon on two separate pro-establishment Hollywood movies: In the Army Now (1994) and Crimson Tide (1995), both of which received generous production support from the Department of Defense in the form of expensive military hardware and on-set advice from DoD personnel. Indeed, Disney’s continuing willingness to support establishment power structures was effectively demonstrated more recently when it released the TV movie The Path to 9/11 (2006), which was heavily skewed to exonerate the Bush administration and blame the Clinton administration for the 9/11 attacks – provoking outraged letters of complaint to Disney from former high-level Clinton Administration staffers. The nature of Disney’s output makes sense given the company’s historical ties not only to the US defence department, but to the arms industry also. Even now, a long-time Directors Board member of Disney is John Bryson – also a director of The Boeing Company, one of the world’s largest aerospace and defence contractors.

Despite Disney’s demonstrably cosy relationship with secretive institutions, however, and putting aside a couple of unanswered questions regarding the documentary’s personal vetting by Eisner and its curious TV scheduling, there simply is no direct evidence to suggest that Alien Encounters was ever anything more than marketing project for a theme park ride. However, a much more compelling case for Disney/government UFO collusion recently has come to light.

Race to Witch Mountain

Directed by Andy Fickman – a self-confessed "UFO buff" born and raised in Roswell, New Mexico – Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain (2009) depicts the arrival on Earth of two blonde-haired, blue-eyed, human-looking extraterrestrials (UFOlogy’s ‘Nordics’) and their plan to save their own dying planet from total atmospheric degradation. In a September 2010 interview, Fickman explained to me how he had sought to ground his movie as firmly as possible in UFOlogical reality by personally schooling his cast in UFO history: "I would spend time with my actors literally just going through ‘UFO 101’ – we’d watch every DVD that was out there, every documentary; I would give them book, upon book, upon book."

Although the vast majority of the film’s UFOlogical content came from Fickman, at least some of it was the result of CIA input. In a highly unusual production arrangement Fickman claims he was closely assisted by an active employee of the CIA whose advice extended so far even as to designing the alien writing seen in the UFO during the film’s climactic scene. Fickman is unwilling to name this advisor, but claims he is an Air Force Colonel with a background in Technical Intelligence, that he had been "very active in Hollywood" and "had a lot of connections in the computer world and experience in satellite imagery." Fickman said of his CIA advisor:

"All of the on-camera alien language in terms of their spaceship and everything – that was all designed by him in the sense [of what] the mathematics of communication would be, so you know... there would be a similar mathematical equation that the government probably has if they were to ever come across an alien race. So a lot of the things we ended up using were things he was bringing to me... and the next thing you know, that’s what I had on screen."

While on-set, Fickman took the opportunity to ask his CIA man some probing questions: "In typical ‘can’t confirm, can’t deny’ manner," said Fickman, "no matter what I would personally ask him about anything from ‘who killed Kennedy?’ To ‘what happened at Roswell?’ He always played it with a nice smile that implied 'I don’t think you have the security clearance for me to talk to you about anything.'" The CIA advisor also recommended that certain UFOlogical content be removed from the script: "there were things we got rid of in the script that he was just trying to follow logic on from a protocol standpoint," said Fickman, although he would not elaborate on the nature of the changes made.

Fickman further claims that he was afforded a visit to NORAD’s sensitive Cheyenne Mountain facility in 2008, where – accompanied by his CIA advisor – his team spent 12 hours taking photographs and talking with on-duty military officers, including the heads of NORAD. "We wanted our Witch Mountain to resemble what NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain look like inside," he said. "We took a thousand photos and then by the time they released us into the wilderness maybe we had three hundred that had been approved for us to somewhat copy [for production design purposes]."

Incidentally, Fickman’s Cheyenne Mountain visit took place just a few weeks after the high-profile Stephenville Texas UFO sightings. Remembering that witnesses had described seeing fighter jets in pursuit of the Stephenville UFO/s, Fickman raised the incident with NORAD officers: "I asked the question of all the NORAD people point blank: ‘so, what about those jets – did you guys release those jets?’ And after a kind of thoughtful pause, the guy in charge said ‘hypothetically, if something had invaded US airspace, we would have responded in kind. I have no indication one way or another that jets ever pursued any unknown object at the time you’re referring to.’" Fickman found NORAD’s ‘non-denial denial’ to be "very telling."

The CIA, for its part, claims to have had no involvement in Race to Witch Mountain. In an email to the author, Paula Weiss, Media Spokeswoman at the CIA Office of Public Affairs, said: "We have no knowledge of any CIA officer having assisted with this film…It’s very easy for outsiders, including Hollywood film people, to assume any US intelligence officer is CIA when in fact he could be from DIA, NSA, NGA, etc. Sorry I can’t resolve this for you based on the available information." ?

Fickman was puzzled by the CIA’s denial. When I asked the director whether or not the CIA man could have been retired from the Agency and had been acting in a private capacity (as is the case with a number of ex-CIA operatives in Hollywood, including Robert Baer, Milton Beardon and Chase Brandon), he replied: "there’s no way we would have had what we had, had he not been an active CIA employee..." Indeed, throughout the NORAD visit, Fickman claims he relied heavily on the influence wielded by his CIA man: "Nothing happened at NORAD without him flashing his card and making his calls."

Fickman believes it was due in large part to the fact that his military and intelligence advisors were secured "through back door channels" that his production was granted such extraordinary access to the inner-workings of the national security apparatus, but he insists there was no hidden agenda behind his government’s uncharacteristic generosity in this regard: "All of a sudden I was in places that I don’t know I would have been had I gone through normal channels. I don’t think there was anything abnormal about what they were doing, I just think it was [that] phone calls were being made and doors were sort of opening."

Fickman’s claims carry with them the weighty implication that the CIA may be operating in Hollywood beyond the dry remit of its media liaison office, which is to provide "impartial advice on matters of accuracy and authenticity" in relation the CIA’s image while on set, and certainly does not extend to accompanying a director on a private trip to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain facility, nor designing fictional alien language for a feature film in which the CIA itself is not even depicted.

Behind the Scenes

The real reasons for the CIA adopting an "advisory" role on Disney’s Race to Witch Mountain (as well as on numerous other Hollywood productions) were pointed to in a solitary comment by former Associate General Counsel to the CIA, Paul Kelbaugh. Whilst at a College in Virginia in 2007, Kelbaugh delivered a lecture on the CIA’s relationship with Hollywood, at which a local journalist was present. The journalist (who has since requested anonymity, but who is known to me) published a review of the lecture which related Kelbaugh’s discussion of the 2003 Disney-produced thriller The Recruit, starring Al Pacino. The journalist noted that, according to Kelbaugh, a CIA agent was on set for the duration of the shoot under the guise of a consultant, but that his real job was to misdirect the filmmakers: "We didn’t want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying. In a blunt email to my colleague Matthew Alford, however, Kelbaugh denied having made the public statement and claimed that he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content – EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to be drawn into further discussion of the matter.

As a closing thought on Disney’s establishment ties in relation to the UFO question, in January 2011, the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) staged its 5th Annual Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) – a major International business convention which this year featured keynote speeches by the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Intriguingly, this year’s GCF event also featured a special panel discussion entitled: "Contact: Learning from Outer Space," in which names such as Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallee, Nick Pope and Professor Michio Kaku addressed the wide-ranging implications of UFOs and potential extraterrestrial life. How is this relevant to our topic? Well, it might not be, but the primary sponsor of the GCF event was Boeing – a company highlighted by Disclosure Project witnesses as being a key player in UFO-related ‘deep black’ programmes and which you’ll also recall is linked at a directors-board-level to the Walt Disney Company – and a key note speaker at the event was none other than Chairman of Walt Disney International, Andy Bird. UFOs, Disney, Boeing, even former heads of state – all under one roof, so to speak. It proves nothing of course, but is nevertheless worthy of mention in that it brings to mind what the famous ex-CIA operative Robert Baer once told me regarding the Hollywood/Washington relationship: "All these people that run studios – they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board." Certainly, Disney has long been "on board" with supporting government and military power structures; as to whether or not this support extends to an involvement in some indefinable "Hollywood UFO conspiracy" is impossible to say. For now, at least, all we can do is weigh-up what little evidence is available to us and each draw our own conclusions as to precisely what UFO secrets – if any – might lie behind the Magic Kingdom.

Copyright © 2011, Robbie Graham

This article was first published in UFO Matrix magazine: Vol. 2, Issue 1: Summer, 2011.

Source: Silver Screen Saucers
http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.com/2011/07/ufos-and-disney-behind-magic-kingdom.html

- LET ME HEAR YOU SAY "BOO" DEPARTMENT -

Paranormal Team Claims It Caught Photo of Ghost

(Springfield, MO) -- The Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team has explored some of the areas most haunted homes.

Their skeptical team members always take hundreds of pictures in the dark.

But their most recent trip brought back a shocking image that is making believers out of the biggest of skeptics.

"The first thing I want to do is disprove it." says Robert McCall, skeptic and co-founder of the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team.*

Robert spends a lot of time disproving apparent haunting in the region.   "A lot of times people think there is a presence in the room and it turns out the room is where the breaker box is.  Or your meters on the outside of the wall and there is a lot of energy there.  Sometimes people think they are hearing things and it turns out they are just hearing things."

But something that happened during his latest ghost hunt left Robert with no explanation.  A family in north Springfield contacted the group because of some odd things that were happening.

"All the lights were shut off and the doors were locked," says Robert.  "I came around to lock up the front door and as soon as I turned the corner I heard a growling disturbance on my EVP and seen something darker then dark move around in the hallway so I just started taking pictures of a completely dark hallway with nobody there."

There was no one in the hallway but something else showed up on camera.

"When I first seen the picture, I saw a reaper," says McCall.  "Typical of what you would think."  Now it almost looks like a mother and child."

"First I thought that maybe he took a picture of himself in the mirror," says Courtney Cunningham, co-founder of the Ozark Mountain Paranormal Investigation Team.  "But when we switched it to black and white and filtered out some of the contrast I was terrified.  And I was a huge disbeliever at first that picture changed my mind."

And now this team of skeptical ghost hunters has a few less skeptics.

"Ghosts are real - ghosts are very real," says Courtney.  "You just got to believe in something bigger then yourself."

Robert says the photo has been sent off to a paranormal investigative organization in the St. Louis area for authentication.

Source: Ozarks First
http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=500207

- NEEDS A LITTLE SALT DEPARTMENT -

Man Tries to Build Nuke Reactor in Kitchen

A Swedish man who tried to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen says he started the experiment "just for fun".

Richard Handl, 31, from Aengelholm municipality in south-western Sweden, was detained by police two weeks ago and says he started the project as a hobby.

"I have always been interested in nuclear physics and particle physics," he said.

In May, he launched an English-language blog, Richard's Reactor, in which he charted his progress in the project, complete with pictures.

His plan was "to build a working nuclear reactor. Not to gain electricity, just for fun and to see if it's possible to split atoms at home."

Just to make sure everything was above board, he sent an email to Sweden's Radiation Safety Authority.

"Hi! I'm really interested in nuclear physics and radiation," he wrote.

"As a hobby, I have ... gathered the basic materials (and) planned a project to build a very primitive nuclear reactor. You can see my plans here," he added, complete with a link to his blog.

"I'm now wondering if I am breaking a law with this?" he asked in the email.

At that point, his experiment came to an abrupt end.

Two days later "the police and the radiation safety authority came to my apartment," Mr Handl said.

Police questioned him for about half an hour, before releasing him, he said.

Source: ABC
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-05/swedish-kitchen-nuke-reactor/2825356

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