The modern understanding of the Pentagon's relationship with unexplained flying phenomena has become remarkably more pointed in the last six months since the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program was uncovered. Its disclosure came in between our own exclusive reporting on two very strange and well-documented encounters with strange aircraft operating in U.S. airspace. Now, new documents are coming to light that show the Department of Defense's own spy agency was also interested in subjects that border on science fiction and the even the paranormal, including warp drive, extra-dimensional manipulation, dark energy, and other highly exotic forms of space travel.

The documents were first discovered by George Knapp's I-Team, part of Las Vegas CBS affiliate Channel 8 News, which has been investigating the government's supposed connection with 'UFOs' for decades. Recently Knapp has been digging deeper into Bigelow Aerospace—which is located in Las Vegas—and its starring role in the previously classified program. It is no secret that Robert Bigelow, a former real estate developer turned inflatable space station entrepreneur, has been highly interested in UFOs, but the depth of the company's official relationship with the Defense Department regarding the topic was something entirely unheard of before the disclosure of the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program occurred in December 2017.

Abbreviated AATIP, that effort, and its funding, sprang from Nevada Senator Harry Reid's interest in the topic, along with that of a Defense Intelligence Agency official. The program, which eventually cost $22 million and ran roughly between 2008 and 2012, began after Bigelow won the contract, apparently to investigate UFO sightings, along with pretty much everything else that goes along with the topic for better or worse, on behalf of the military.

A team of nearly 50 scientists, analysts, and investigators were assembled to work on the program, which was originally and very cryptically dubbed the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program before gaining its more recent moniker. The contract between the DIA and Bigelow made sure not to spell out its focus, instead referring to exotic technologies without mentioning UFOs. The I-Team writes:

    "The agreement with DIA did not mention UFOs at all. It used more generic terms such as future threats and breakthrough technologies, and specified 12 focal points including, lift, propulsion, materials, versions of stealth as well as human interface and human effects."

It was under the AAWSA name that the organization funded at least two studies into advanced propulsion and space technology research that border on the fantastical. The first of these studies, dated March 29, 2010, deals with "advanced space propulsion" for faster-than-light travel, discussing theoretical physical constructs such as "spacetime-altered regions" and "gravity/antigravity" forces. The second study, which the AAWSA program published on April  2, 2010, covers similar ground, but also includes discussions about "dark energy" and "extra dimensions."

The AAWSA experts did this work under the auspices of DIA's Defense Warning Office, which makes good sense, at least conceptually. This organization first came into being in 2002 and is "charged with identifying sources of increasing threats to U.S. interests in critical regions," according to an official briefing.

"This office will also identify opportunities to affect adversary behavior prior to and in the early stages of a crisis." that presentation notes. In 2003, these tasks expanded to also include work "to provide the earliest possible warning of technological developments that could undermine U.S. military preeminence."

UFO sightings are often indications of advanced and secret military aircraft research and development projects. Having a team of experts try and determine if any of the reports translated to real programs, especially those that potential opponents such as Russia or China might have been working on, would be well with DIA's mandate for the office.

That AAWSA team would have delved into known developments in associated fields would also make sense in this context. If America's adversaries were rapidly advancing toward practical warp drives and other advanced propulsion and space research, DIA would definitely want to know in order to help inform U.S. policy responses.

"These studies are so loaded with information," Senator Reid reportedly said at one point, according to Las Vegas' Channel 8. "One thing we learned is over the decades a lot of things happen there's no explanation for. Well there are now."

But the applicability of these studies to the Defense Warning Office's core mission seems dubious, as do portions of the underlying research itself. Neither report suggested that the technology they described was anywhere near practical or that any foreign government was close to achieving a relevant breakthrough.

"This paper has considered the possibility—even likelihood—that future developments with regard to advanced aerospace technologies will trend in the direction of manipulating the underlying spacetime structure of the vacuum of space itself by processes that can be called vacuum engineering or metric engineering," the March 2010 study says in its final discussion section. "Far from being simply a fanciful concept, a significant literature exists in peer-reviewed, Tier 1 physics publications in which the topic is explored in detail."

"The idea that a sufficiently advanced technology may interact with, and acquire direct control over, the higher dimensions is a tantalizing possibility, and one that is most certainly worthy of deeper investigation," the second document concludes. "Of course, this may not be actualized until many years in the future, but consider the many spectacular physical phenomena that are believed to be true at this early point in the 21st century."

What these statements do clearly reflect is the vision of the primary "contractor" for these studies, EarthTech International, Inc., a small firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. This company no longer has a functional website and otherwise has a virtually non-existent presence on the internet. "We strive to translate these ideas into laboratory experiments," according to an archived copy of the company's website from 2017.

A cursory internet search on EarthTech's CEO Harold Puthoff, Ph.D., who authored the March 2010 study, and Eric Davis, Ph.D., another employee who co-authored the other report, quickly turns up a web of links to Bigelow and his other fringe scientific and paranormal investigative endeavors, including the now defunct National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDSci. You can find a mirrored copy of that entity's website, circa 2008, here. Independent consultant Richard Obousy, who helped produce the April 2010 document, also has connections to the Nevada businessman.

Puthoff is now Vice President of Science and Technology at To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a non-profit organization that reportedly is, at least in part, continuing the AAITP's work independently. Luis Elizondo, who was the government head of AAITP and its follow-on guise, is its Director of Global Security and Special Programs.

The full extent of the AAWSA effort, including how many similar studies it funded and at what cost, as well as the later AAITP, still remains unclear. So far, two videos the latter iteration of the group examined in detail have captured the most public attention through the media. F/A-18 Hornet Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) targeting pods shot both of these clips and they feature small "tic-tac"-like objects racing around at high speed over the water.

But the main video and pilot account wasn't new when news of the existence of AAITP first broke. It had been floating around in defense circles for over a decade, but more open disclosure about the origin of the video on an official level, as well as subsequent interviews with the pilot that took it, certainly elevated it to mainstream news.

Beyond that, accounts of Bigelow's special unit's investigation include claims that mysterious material from downed objects was being stored in storage lockers and that the program went far beyond documenting and evaluating eyewitness reports of UFOs. Instead, it took a holistic approach, which may have included evaluating the impact on human biology in association with sightings and other unexplained events and even seemed to have delved into other paranormal domains.

This would seem to match up with the picture of the program's work we now have based on the documents Knapp's I-Team obtained. What we know for sure, beyond the basic facts surrounding the project and information that Elizondo, the guy who led the program on the DoD side, has given to the press, is that some very strange studies resulted from its mandate. Once again, the studies Las Vegas' Channel 8 uncovered are official DIA documents that the United States Government paid EarthTech and other Bigelow associates to produce and kept on file for its own internal use.

If nothing else, the existence of these studies supports the perception that this program went far beyond just trying to interpret and document eye-witness accounts of UFOs and trying to identify what was buzzing around in earth's atmosphere. And they are bound to leave just about anyone wondering if this is what has been released, imagine what else exists that hasn't, whether out of fear of embarrassment or risk to national security.

Source: The Drive
http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20797/the-pentagon-paid-for-these-reports-on
-warp-drive-extra-dimensions-anti-gravity-and-more

- OF GHOSTIES AND GHOULIES DEPARTMENT -

This Old House has Ghosts

John Knott, the owner of Quadrille, a fabric and wall coverings company based in Manhattan, expected surprises when he bought a weekend home in the country, an 1839 Greek Revival house in Kinderhook in Columbia County, N.Y. Inconveniences were bound to crop up — a leaky roof, problematic plumbing, boiler issues.

But he was not expecting ghosts.

Even after the signs began to appear, he was skeptical. A French guest was roused from a deep slumber at dawn — despite wearing earplugs — by repeated rapping noises on his bedroom door, though no one had knocked. A visitor staying in an upstairs bedroom awoke to a startling vision of African slaves working in fields. And a close friend, the New York florist Helena Lehane, cut a visit short after being beset by torturous nightmares; her screams — described by Mr. Knott as bloodcurdling — sent everyone running into her room. Ms. Lehane, who describes herself as psychically sensitive, recalls her experience in the house as an encounter with a “malevolent presence.” She hightailed it back to Manhattan the next morning.

“I heard about all these crazy things happening,” Mr. Knott said. “But I could not believe I was living in a haunted house.”

Then one night as he read in bed, wide awake at 3 a.m., the sounds of a man’s labored breathing, seeming to come from the ceiling, filled the room. “Apparently,” he said, “the fact that I had been awake all night in a brightly lit room was not a deterrent to whatever this was.”

The heavy breather hasn’t reappeared, but if he does, Mr. Knott is prepared to treat him with respect.

The Hudson Valley has long inspired tales of the supernatural, many of them set in Columbia County, east of the river some 30 miles south of Albany. The area fed the spook-seeking imagination of Washington Irving, who gathered material for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” while living in Kinderhook as a tutor to the children of Peter Van Ness, a prominent local judge. Nearly two centuries later, Hans von Behr, a retired metallurgist and photographer from Greenwich Village, used 17 accounts of haunted houses in Columbia County — including his own summer home in Old Chatham — in his book “Ghosts in Residence” (North Country, 1986).

Mr. von Behr’s house, built in 1790 and known as the Old Chase Place, had a reputation as haunted, said his son, Bob, who now lives there full-time with his wife, daughter and mother. During the days when his father entertained there as a bachelor, Bob von Behr said, houseguests reported rushes of cold air, visions of floating figures, footsteps and rattlings, although now things have quieted down. “We’re convinced our ghost has moved out because our family is too boring or too noisy,” he said.

While longtime residents are hardly immune, the spirits seem to have a particular affinity for the urban outsiders who buy big old houses as second homes. Lured by the romance of restoring an old dwelling, a weekender may feel a sudden unease when the time comes to settle into slumber in a big, creaky house on a lonely road. The discomfort grows if neighbors pass along rumors that the house is haunted.

“As one of the first settlements in New York State, Columbia County has an abundance of old houses, with a fair share claiming to be haunted,” said Jim Eyre, a board member of the Columbia County Historical Society and editor of its magazine, Columbia County History and Heritage. “This area has always been loaded with ghost stories.”

In 1941 Esther Leeming Tuttle, a model and actress, and her husband, Ben, received some warnings of this sort when they bought the Jesse Merwin Dutch farmhouse in Kinderhook as a summer home. Merwin was a friend of Washington Irving’s and served as the inspiration for Ichabod Crane. Mrs. Tuttle, who is now 95 and still living in the house, said that although she had never experienced any ghosts there herself, members of her family had. An apparition appeared to one of her young sons on the porch; the door to the bedroom where her mother-in-law stayed would mysteriously unlock and swing open of its own accord. The Tuttles refused to be spooked. “We figured if we had ghosts, they were the friendly sort,” she said. “I felt privileged to have them.”

Jean Hamilton, the chief executive of Xonos, an Internet commerce and software company, and a member of an investment banking firm, and her husband found themselves with a less friendly ghost at Broadstairs, their house in the Columbia County town of Ghent. They shrugged off vague rumors of hauntings before buying in 1984; they had fallen in love with the house, a 10-room, three-bathroom 1720 center-hall Colonial that was once an inn and is situated on 350 acres. “We prided ourselves as hard-headed realists, and we were definitely nonbelievers,” Ms. Hamilton said. Even after they moved in and began hearing odd noises — what sounded like furniture being rearranged, a low chorus of murmurs on the landing and footsteps in the dead of night — they brushed off supernatural explanations.

Then a guest, Bill Placke, a banker from Summit, N.J., was dozing off in the guest bedroom, lying next to his sleeping wife, he said, when a smiling skeletal apparition robed in a white gown and ruffled collar appeared at the foot of his bed. It bobbed toward him, then vanished. “I have never been gripped by such fear!” he confessed.

And when Ms. Hamilton’s brother-in-law, Jim McCarthy, a Connecticut-based lawyer, stayed alone at Broadstairs one frigid winter evening, random noises that he had attributed to the house’s “settling” in extreme cold suddenly morphed into distinct footsteps ascending the staircase, growing louder and closer and abruptly stopping outside his bedroom door. He waited for some flesh-and-blood “ferocious individual” to burst through, he recalled. But then, nothing — only dead silence. “I’ve never slept alone in that house again,” Mr. McCarthy said. “If I had to, I’d probably bring a gun.”

Ms. Hamilton and her husband researched the history of their house and found it had been the site of at least two murders: in 1791 a former owner, Cornelius Hogeboom, had been shot on the premises, and a century later John Schmidt, a farmer employed at Broadstairs, beat his stepson to death with a hammer and was accused of killing another man, whose body was found buried in the cellar.

It all makes sense to Dr. Hans Holzer, who lives in Manhattan and has written over 100 books on the paranormal, including “Ghosts” (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1997). In cases of unnatural or violent deaths, the etheric body (aura, soul) may fail to make a transition to “the other side,” he said, because it is unaware of its own death or has unfinished business.

Dr. Paul Kurtz, a well known skeptic about all things supernatural, offers less romantic explanations. “Knowing the history of a house can stimulate creative imagination,” said Dr. Kurtz, chairman of the Committee of Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in Amherst, N.Y., which publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine. He even has personal experience.

About 35 years ago, he said, he and his wife bought an old farmhouse in Saratoga County. From the day they moved in, they began hearing strange, disturbing noises, and their initial alarm was fueled by local gossip that their house was haunted. Upon further investigation, however, it turned out their ghost was a den of squirrels rolling acorns on the attic floor.

What most terrifies many owners with houses said to be haunted is not the ghost itself, but its possible deterrent effect on future buyers. Sellers tend to keep quiet about resident spirits, and real estate agents may do the same.

“If someone is very sensitive to a house’s vibes, I’ll likely say something,” said Marjorie Cartwright, a real estate agent for Arthur Lee of Red Rock in East Chatham specializing in weekend and second homes. “Others may not pick up anything, so why mention it?”

Disclosing the presence of a ghost isn’t normally required by law, although a 1991 court case canceled a $650,000 deal downriver in another Hudson River town, Nyack, N.Y., on a related point. The prospective buyers, who lived an hour away and weren’t familiar with local lore, complained that they hadn’t been told that the house had a reputation as haunted. The court ruled that the owner had potentially injured the buyers’ resale value by including her house as a “haunted” attraction on local walking tours and telling the local press about it in interviews.

Sometimes an owner (the seller in Nyack apparently was an example) actually relishes a house’s reputation as haunted, talking proudly about it to friends and strangers alike. And country inns have been known to advertise their rumored ghosts as attractions on their Web sites.

Mr. Knott has never considered selling his weekend house, despite the hauntings. But his attitude has more to do with tolerance than with pride. “I’m not so tuned in that it drove me totally crazy, nor did it affect me personally — except one time,” he said. “Frankly, the renovation of my house — and dealing with contractors — proved a bigger headache than any ghost.”

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/realestate/13ghost.html?_
r=1&em&ex=1160971200&en=89ddb2b4c619aa7a&ei=5070&oref=slogin

A train passenger claims he saw a Bigfoot-like creature walking in a field while on a train from Exeter to Bristol.

The eye-witness said he was on a train to Bristol Temple Meads, which was approaching the city on a Friday morning in November last year, when he saw a massive creature taking huge strides along a hedgerow.

The Bristol Post write that the report was made to the British Bigfoot Sightings group – a team of researchers based around the country who collect and investigate sightings of upright hairy ape-like creatures in this country.

The man reported that he left Exeter late in the morning, and there were few people on the train as it approached Bristol.

“In my carriage was probably ten to 12 people - most of them with their head in either mobile phones or morning newspapers,” he told researchers.

“I haven’t been on a train for years so I was keen to take in the scenery.

“About ten miles from Bristol we were travelling through an area and in the fields to my right I saw something large in the middle of the field walking, it was walking kind of hunched over, and all I could tell you was it was a black figure.

“At a guess I would’ve said it was 70 to 100 metres away from the train. My eyes were glued on it at this point.

“I was watching the way the ‘thing’ was walking, almost towards the side of the field, it was edged right up to the hedgerow as if to walk alongside the hedge itself, almost like it was using the hedge for cover?

“To my eye whatever it was seemed to take massive strides, and ‘it’ was covering the ground very quickly.

“As I spun my head to the left to see if anybody else on the train had seen what I was looking at, I was surprised to see that nobody was really looking out from the seats in my direction, or any direction other than down to be fair,” he added.

If the eye-witness's judgement that the sighting took place around ten miles before the train arrived at Temple Meads is accurate, it would put the sighting to the south of the railway line between Nailsea and Yatton stations.

The countryside in this point is low-lying wetland, between the M5 and the wooded hillside escarpment that runs up to Bristol Airport.

“I would imagine five to ten seconds was all I saw it for,” the eyewitness added.

“But it stood out to me as strange. To start off with, I didn’t think it was a Bigfoot or anything like that, until I watched how it walked and the way it hugged the hedgerow.

“I thought it was just somebody walking through a field, and if they were not acting in such a strange manner, with a strange gait, and hugging the bushes to stay hidden, surely a person wouldn’t do that? Or would look like that?

“Then, about two minutes later, after viewing this figure I saw a couple walking a collie dog in a field, roughly the same distance that I’d seen the black figure.

“They were to the side of the hedge line. I was gobsmacked to see that I could hardly make them out, I mean, I knew they were humans walking with the dog but I couldn’t really see what they were wearing apart from the brightly coloured coats.

“And it dawned on me that they were probably of average size male and female, although what I had seen five minutes earlier was clearly not. It was an all-black figure in a field, ‘it’ was huge.

“I could see the black figured arms and legs and chest, compared to the two humans I had just seen walking the dog.

“At the point of seeing the black figure I realise the tree line behind it was probably around 200 m away and had a thick dense forest behind it. I have no proof whatsoever to show you, only my word.

“I’m 100 per cent sure what I saw was the English Bigfoot - and what makes me so confident is the way it walked, with slightly bent legs, long strides but a graceful fluid walking motion,” he added.

While sightings of a hairy creature which walks on two legs are an almost daily occurrence somewhere in North America – and the subject of TV series, books and films – even seasoned Bigfoot experts have questioned whether the animal could exist in the British Isles.

But sightings continue to be reported to British Bigfoot researchers, from the dense woods of Suffolk to the remote mountains of Scotland.

There have always been folklore tales of a hairy man-like creature living in forests of England - back in the Middle Ages they were known as 'woodwose'.

One leading British Bigfoot researcher Deborah Hatswell said it was possible a Bigfoot-like creature could still exist in Britain.

“In 2012, the Government produced the National Eco-System Assessment, and it showed that only between six and eight per cent of the land in Britain is actually built on – the rest is either forest, farmland or wild mountains or downs,” she said.

“People who are open-minded about whether such a creature could exist in the vast forests of North America, might think Britain is too built-up, but it’s actually not. When you look at the reports of sightings in this country, they tend to follow rivers and forests,” she added.

“There have always been folklore stories about wildmen living in the woods in this country – they date back centuries and have those stories have continued.

“People are still reporting seeing these creatures that look like monkeys in the woods, running across the road at night, and in this case, walking along a hedgerow in a rural area near Bristol.

“The thing that makes this witness so sure is that he was able to compare the size of the thing he saw with two people he saw a couple of fields away. The first thought is always ‘is this a man in a hunter’s ghillie suit?’, but the way it walked and its sheer size makes him 100 per cent certain,” she added.

“He wasn’t someone with an active interest in Bigfoot before this incident, but it has changed his life. He found our research group online, and found somewhere to report what he saw. Now he’s going out doing his own research, looking for signs in the woods near his home,” she said.

Source: Devon Live
https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/man-train-exeter-100-sure-1552070