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I did not know who or how to contact someone with this "sighting" and still a little apprehensive to call my local TV station. My fiance and I were driving in Tampa this morning and at around 9:50 am, we saw what appeared to be a craft which was white and bulbous (which I assume to be the front) and a lip on the back-end; it looked like a side view of a horse shoe crab.

By Diana L. Marquez The UFO Chronicles 10-8-06

We had a very good view of it and we could tell that it was traveling far into the distance at a very high rate of speed and then it was gone. it just seem to disappear.

This went on for less than a minute and about 2 minutes later we saw a fighter jet (MacDill AFB is not far from where we were) which seemed to be in pursuit, it was following the same trajectory as this craft. Just so you are aware, Tampa International Airport is not far from where we were and we can always see the planes come and go and there is NO WAY that a commercial airplane could be traveling at that rate of speed and so high up taking off from the airport.

We were just wondering if you have heard about any sightings in or around this area recently, or maybe explain to us what we saw. Any information would be much appreciated, thanks!
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Don’t know about you, but I’m loving those mystery lights on Ceres as NASA’s surveillance probe, Dawn, bears down on the biggest chunk of real estate in the asteroid belt. And not because of the prospects for discovering alien activity – they’re remote, at best – but because of the opportunity to witness, again, the ritual disconnect that characterizes institutional science whenever The Great Taboo legitimately insinuates itself into a news cycle. Let’s go back a few years when, after half a century of logging zilch in the Great ET Radio Signal Experiment, SETI pioneer Jill Tarter proposed

By Billy Cox De Void 6-24-15

a new name for their endeavors, the Search for Extraterrestrial Technology (SETT). This was a tacit grudging concession that maybe radio astronomers had been working with a flawed model. In 2011, the International Journal of Astrobiology published a paper by astrophysicists Martin Elvis and Duncan Forgan proposing an even more specific tack, that maybe Earthlings ought to consider scanning the asteroid belt for evidence of ET “macro-engineering projects.” Translation: mining operations. Made sense. After all, they noted, asteroids are repositories for raw material like gold, platinum and silver, the kind of stuff you'd likely need to repair or refuel extended planetary missions.

And, as Forgan would hypothesize two years later in the IJA, ET wouldn’t even have to bend the known laws of physics to reach the rocky debris zone between Jupiter and Mars, no matter which part of the Milky Way he/she/it came from. Upon crunching the numbers, Forgan and a mathematician hypothesized that robotic technologies could have mapped this galaxy well below light speeds, in about 10 million years. On the cosmic scale of time, that's no big deal.

So here's what's going on. In 2007, NASA hurls an unmanned vehicle toward the asteroid belt to look for clues to the formation of our solar system. Destination: “dwarf planets” Vesta and Ceres. Dawn enters a 14-month mapping orbit over Vesta in 2011, then moves on toward the bigger prize. In February, as it closes to within 29,000 miles of Ceres, Dawn’s cameras detect something totally off the charts – lights on the surface. Their luminosity doesn’t appear to be significantly affected by different sun angles. Two months and 25,000 miles closer, their intensity is still unblinking. Planetary scientists are stumped; at the Jet Propulsion Lab’s website, PR flacks do a very savvy thing by letting visitors vote on the most likely suspects: “volcano,” “geyser,” “salt deposit,” “ice,” “rock,” and “other.” Wonder what "other" could be. Hmm. Anyway, we'll get an even better peek by summer’s end, when Dawn dips to within 900 miles of the surface.

No matter what those lights are all about, this sort of suspense is cool. Talk about a teaching opportunity for schools.

Now let’s review some of NASA’s recent headline-grabbing statements. In 2014, given our ongoing exoplanet transiting searches and the impending exploration of more local worlds like Europa, space agency scientists predicted Earthlings will discover ET life within 20 years. That forecast was reiterated just last week at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago. In fact, NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate (there's a mouthful) and former astronaut John Grunsfeld suggested that ET civilizations might already have detected us, the same way we’re locating and confirming the existence of deep-space planets. Quote:

“We put atmospheric signatures that guarantee someone with a large telescope 20 light years away could detect us. If there is life out there, intelligent life, they’ll know we’re here.”

Left unsaid, what none in that sheltered crowd wants to contemplate: And if they discover us before we discover them, maybe they’re already a lot closer than we think. But of course, there was no room in Chicago for a discussion of UFOs. That would be a little too declasse, like farting in church. Oh, and just to make sure nobody got terribly excited, coverage of last week’s Windy City pow-wow also included a canned statement from NASA chief scientist Ellen Stefan. In April, during a discussion about Mars, she drew distinctions between the discovery of biological life and some other silly alternative like, well, the 2011 peer-reviewed paper's "targeted asteroid mining" scenario. “We are not talking about little green men," she insisted. "We are talking about little microbes.”

Stofan could’ve said “intelligent life.” But she went for the gag line instead. Knowing full well how much everybody loves microbes.

Hey, no one wants to look like an idiot as we approach the biggest discovery of all time, wherever that may be. The solution to the Ceres lights will likely fall far short of little green men. But the language we employ as we draw closer to the inevitability doesn't inspire much confidence; it suggests we’re deeply conflicted in our enthusiasm for confirming The Other. Or at least the people at the top of NASA appear to be. Fortunately, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that science and politics never mix.
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For whatever reason, my farewell-to-De Void post from 9/13/16 has vanished. It was titled “A shift in the weather.” Don’t know exactly when or why it was removed … but if only the bewilderment ended there. When I went noodling through some of the earliest blogs that still hadn’t auto-purged, from 2009, it was like getting punted into some parallel universe. The comment threads had been erased and replaced with exchanges in Cyrillic. Seriously, I’m not making this up. There were, ostensibly, Russians having conversations by piggy-backing off my blog. This sounds totally insane, but this actually happened. And why me? My biggest regret

By Billy Cox De Void / Herald Tribune.com 7-14-17

is I didn’t do a screen grab, because when I revisited the same posts the next day, all reader comments – Cyrillic, English, whatever – had been removed. A clean wipe.

Anyway, I’m reposting a version of that mysteriously spiked September blog because I’m still a little pissed. So don’t be erasing my history, whoever you are, or I’ll rewrite it with even less accuracy.

Due to professional circumstances beyond my control, I have been reassigned to a new job here at the Herald-Tribune, a beat which involves a steep learning curve and my undivided attention. As you know, newspapers are undergoing a radical downsizing transition, and no one is immune to these pressures. So at least for now, and for the foreseeable future, I will step away from De Void, which I started writing in April 2007.

By serving up a combination of reporting, analysis, industry criticism and a few other quirks in between, I had hoped I might be able to make a difference in the way my colleagues in traditional media cover UFOs. And in fact, the last nine years have provided some remarkable opportunities for the MSM to rethink its strategy in the way it approaches The Great Taboo. But that was the flaw – assuming there might actually be a strategy in play. Beyond resorting to requisite clichés (e.g., “This next story is out of this world” and “Is the truth really out there?”), chasing balloons (“Mystery shiny objects floating over Manhattan, spark UFO frenzy” – NY Daily News), and hyping common lens flares for ratings (“UFO or Lens Flare in Google Street View? You Decide” – ABC’s “Good Morning America”), big media falls apart when approaching the gorilla in the room. Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper, maybe the most qualified interviewer on corporate television – even his brains roll around in suntan oil and head for the beach whenever he gets near UFOs. And that’s what’s making the blown opportunity of 2016 so dispiriting.

Contrast where we are today with the 2007 Democratic primary debates. That’s when NBC’s Tim Russert asked longshot pacifist Dennis Kucinich to confirm a report that he was eyewitness to a UFO event. Russert, of course, had no interest in the material, and simply wanted to muscle the fading Ohio congressman off the stage and back to the fringe where he belonged. Remember that? Looking like he didn’t know whether to wet his pants or vomit, Kucinich fell back into the shopworn stance of trying to joke it off. And it didn’t help him a lick. Now fast-forward to 2016 and a scenario that would’ve been unthinkable nine years ago – a presidential frontrunner has not only publicly and repeatedly discussed her curiosity about UFOs, she has even advocated releasing related government documents.

Put aside, as if that’s possible, your emotions, pro or con, about Hillary Clinton. Because this is not about her. Nor is it about veteran Beltway operator John Podesta, whose gamble to encourage the former First Lady to speak rationally and fearlessly about The Great Taboo has provoked negligible media blowback. Think about that for a moment. Whenever a public figure in this country utters something stupid or outrageous, the peanut-gallery microphones are always there to rain torrents of snark and reality-based facts and figures on the offender (not that facts make much difference in this day and age). And yet, although the echo chamber has dutifully regurgitated the quotes Clinton has made on three separate occasions about reassessing UFOs, no significant major news platform has bothered to follow up or ask what the hell she means by that. No debate moderator has raised the subject. Not even Clinton’s myriad foes have chosen to weaponize or even make an issue of her remarks concerning undoubtedly the most unconventional topic ever raised on a campaign trail. They’d rather talk about pneumonia.

Folks, this is flat-out freaky. And it begs the question of just how far watchdog journalism has strayed from the public interest. Even badly worded polls show nearly half of Americans believe UFOs are all about ET activity in our own atmosphere. Into this vacuum of empty space comes Hollywood, advertisers, cable television, tabloids, etc., all of whom are far more astute about engaging sustainable numbers than the press. The entertainment industry has also enabled conspiracy paranoia, stoked delusional hopes and unreasonable fears, and made loads of cash off a growth market that shows no signs of dissipating. And for reasons likely best summarized in a groundbreaking 2008 essay appearing in the journal Political Theory, America’s most influential institutions have proven incapable of leading us out of the woods. They remain stubbornly, willfully, perhaps even aggressively, uninformed.

For more than nine years, De Void attempted to bridge that gap, at least on the journalism frontier. With the discoveries of extrasolar Earth-like planets becoming so common they rarely make headlines anymore, with millions of research dollars being dumped into radioscope dishes trolling for alien signals, and given innovations in portable technology designed to track anomalies in our skies, there would appear to be no better moment for the media to snatch the permission slips extended by Clinton/Podesta this year and start asking truly skeptical questions. But that hasn’t happened. Maybe it can’t. Denial and avoidance are the results of faltering attention spans, national and global. We don’t read anymore. We want shortcuts. We think in bumper stickers. Glossy campaign pamphlets are called literature. We want our Cliff Notes rationed in 30-second video bites. We want our favorite colors back, black and white.

Despite the gloom, however, De Void has actually been a lot of gun. It’s forced me to become more discerning and (hopefully) a more careful thinker. It’s given me a deeper appreciation for those who’ve chosen the thankless tasks of attempting to rescue history buried in forgotten archives, for those who pressure bureaucracies for radar records, and the researchers giving voice to veterans whose stories have been disregarded, mocked or repressed for half a century or more.

Most of all, in this era of anonymity and internet cowardice, I have appreciated the civil, thoughtful and provocative tones that often characterize these comment threads. We don’t always agree – in fact, we may rarely agree – but I appreciate the level of sophistication you guys have been bringing to the table. And who knows, we may, in fact, have future discussions here on De Void. If, for instance, Stephen Hawking’s projected ET conquistadors do something as callous and disrespectful as zapping the Kremlin or the newly refurbished Capitol Dome, I’ll probably make time to weigh in as soon as I get through cheering.

And I’ll remain keenly interested in whatever comes next.
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My girlfriend an I were camping in the backyard in the west end of Council Bluffs,IA. I noticed an object high in the sky traveling from horizon to horizon like a satellite except it was red and traveling somewhat faster and moving side to side in a wave motion, not a fixed pattern but not exactly random either. It went much slower than a meteor. We stood up from our cots to better watch the skies; a short

By Monte J. Gottbrecht 11-28-08 (Event: 7-7-1974) [unedited]

time later we saw a disc shaped object with red lights on its perimeter from a distance of about two miles. it seemed to be moving above the trees near the Missouri river or following the river itself. not quite hovering, but moving slowly while tipping on its sides and demonstrating to us that this was something very unusual. We watched it head south until we lost it below the trees.

We stayed alert and debated if we should go to Lewis and Clark monument, a park on the bluffs overlooking C.B and Omaha. About 5 or 10 minutes after last seeing the object, it flew almost directly over our heads, about a block away, now going north and still just above treetop level. we lost site of it and decided to go ahead and drive to the park.

On the way we were driving through Big Lake park and I was keeping watch. I saw the object coming in our direction, still at treetop level, except I had the eerie feeling that it was coming for us. We panicked. I wanted to hide under the train bridge near the tennis court and my girlfriend stopped the car about 50 yards short of the bridge. we ran to and under the bridge to hide.

I've never experienced that kind of fear before or since, but, like a couple of prairie dogs we felt compelled to peek out and see more of this incredible object–so we did. It was hovering above a large cottonwood tree near the tennis court about 50 to 75 yards away from us. It was still dark out.

The disc looked about 100 feet in diameter with large red rectangular lights flashing in sequence around its edge which seemed to be about 15 feet thick. As we watched, frozen with awe and fear it dipped its edge while hovering. one of the red light went out and in its place a beam of light shot out of it and shined directly at us.

The next thing either of us remember is that it was now daylight and we were back in the car driving towards our original destination of Lewis and Clark monument.

We called police and they said they had a report of something in Missouri Valley, IA, about 20 miles to the north. Animals were behaving strangely; either they were oddly quiet or behaving wildly. When we drove back through Big Lake Park there were people there who said they saw nothing.

I don't really know how much time we are talking about here. In 1974 I had never heard of the phenomenon of "missing time", but over the years I became well schooled with the term. We make no claims of abduction.

Dr. kasher of Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha, after hearing my story referred me to a hypnotist. I never went ... maybe out of fear. I was afraid to know anymore. To this day I feel I know enough.

My girlfriend and I went home that morning and drew identical pictures and repeated identical stories. I've had no credibility ever since. You have to understand at the time I thought the world was coming to an end or something.

In 1977 an article came out in popular mechanics about an incident that happened very near there involving a blob of molten metal falling 500 feet from an object similar in description to what we saw. Jacqes Vallee came to investigate that occurrence. That is why I repeat my story and will always harbor these hazy memories and questions.

In 2001 I filed a report with NICAP, but I know that MUFON is the proper agency for that now. I've never seen or experienced anything like that since. but I feel it in my gut every day.
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Following my recent appearance on Coast to Coast (6/20/16) I have received a great many emails from persons asking me to elaborate on one subject or another, including the MJ-12 affair. Given this, I hereby offer an article I wrote in 2014:

Stan Friedman and I once had a brief face-to-face debate about the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents, as I was helping him move his luggage from his hotel room to the lobby, to await the taxi to the airport, following the III World UFO Forum in Curitiba, Brazil in June 2009, at which we both spoke. One of those documents, the key Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD), purports to be a Top Secret report to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, in which the Roswell Incident—the recovery of an alien spaceship and the

By Robert Hasings The UFO Chronicles 7-1-16

bodies of its crew—is outlined for the soon-to-be new chief executive.

Along with this earth-shattering news, Eisenhower is told of the existence of a Top Secret group, the Majestic 12 or Majik 12, a “Research and Development Intelligence” operation whose 12 members oversee basically everything related to the case.

After I pressed him on the point, Friedman actually agreed with me that the obscure elements in the EBD—which he publicly claims prove its authenticity—could have been researched by counterintelligence personnel, military or civilian, and planted in the “document” to lend it an air of legitimacy. This includes the mention of UFO skeptic Dr. Donald Menzel as a member of MJ-12—whose covert relationship with the National Security Agency was only exposed after the EBD was made public—as well as other items.

In other words, if the MJ-12 affair is a disinformation scheme involving a counterintelligence group, and not just a simple hoax—as I maintain—the arcane aspects of the Eisenhower Briefing Document (and Cutler-Twining Memo and Truman-Forrestal Memo) that Friedman holds up as evidence of their authenticity, might instead be explained by the spooks who created them having done their homework. If their task was to muddy the waters, so to speak, certainly they would have been allowed access to various relevant historical materials that would have assisted them in the creation of passable forgeries.

As one of the first investigators of MJ-12, who helped expose its bogus origins—together with Barry Greenwood, Kevin Randle, and the late Bob Todd—I have detailed information about the early manifestations of the caper. My widely-circulated March 1, 1989 paper, “The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments” is available at www.sacred-texts.com.

● While Greenwood and Randle believe that a simple hoax, designed to make money, was perpetrated by researcher Bill Moore and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard Doty, I contend the available evidence strongly suggests that the MJ-12 fraud, while originating as a hoax, was quickly co-opted by AFOSI and perhaps other intelligence groups, as a means to disinform/misdirect ufologists and the public-at-large, regarding the nature and extent of the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.

I am fully aware that Stan Friedman will never agree with this scenario—and may claim that our conversation in Brazil never happened—so I am merely going to itemize the following for the benefit of others who have an open mind about the subject:

According to files donated to MUFON by the late Bob Pratt, the name “MAJIK 12” was assigned to a proposed work of fiction about UFOs, the official cover-up of them, and one intelligence agent’s quest to expose the facts. The novel was to be co-authored by journalist Pratt and researcher Bill Moore, probably with the assistance of Richard Doty.

All of this was discussed some three years before the first supposedly real Majestic-12/Majik-12 “document” surfaced. MAJIK 12 was the book’s working title; IAC, for Identified Alien Craft, was an alternate title. However, at some point, The Aquarius Project was unilaterally selected as the title by Moore. The terms “Project Aquarius” and “IAC” later appeared in the allegedly real Majestic-12 documents, as did “EBE” for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, another term associated with the proposed fictional work.

● Two years before the MJ-12 documents were released to the public, Moore suggested to researcher Brad Sparks that fake documents relating to the Roswell UFO recovery be created and disseminated, the idea being that military veterans with a knowledge of the event would be enticed to come forward with their stories, thereby breaking the case wide open. Sparks states that he strongly recommended that Moore not do it.

● The undeveloped roll of film containing images of the EDB and Truman-Forrestal (TF) documents was mailed to Moore’s associate Jaime Shandera from Albuquerque, New Mexico, coincidentally the location of Kirtland AFB—where OSI agent Richard Doty worked.

● In April 2009, the late Gabe Valdez, a retired New Mexico State Policeman famous for his cattle mutilation work, told me that fellow state trooper Richard Doty had confessed to him that he had forged “lots” of UFO-related documents while working as an OSI agent. Doty became a New Mexico State Policeman after retiring from the Air Force in 1988.

Doty’s fraudulent “Craig Weitzel letter”, “1977 Ellsworth AFB incident document”, and “Aquarius Telex”—the first document to surface that actually mentioned MJ-12—were exposed in the 1980s. Three fakes hardly constitute “lots” of forgeries. What other “documents” did Doty foist on ufology and the rest of the world?
Gabe Valdez asked me not to tape our 2009 conversation or to quote him publicly; now that he is dead, I feel I can do so.

●In May 2009, I posted various MJ-12-related statements on a blog, at one point referring to Doty as “a government disinformation agent who forged documents.” On May 24, 2009, Doty emailed me, angrily saying, “A simple fact, Mr. Hastings, everything I did during my intelligence days were [sic] sanctioned.”

This is classic Doty, notorious for his frequent grammatical and spelling errors. I note here that the MJ-12 documents have a number of such errors sprinkled throughout them.

Not that Doty is necessarily a candidate for the forgery of the EBD in particular; its somewhat complex content required a level of sophistication arguably beyond Doty’s rather limited abilities. Instead, higher-level intelligence types, and Bill Moore himself, must be considered to be high on the list of persons who might be responsible for its creation.

Remember, Moore once told researcher Lee Graham that he was an intelligence operative, and even showed Graham an ID badge that Graham said was “identical” in appearance to the badges shown to him by two members of the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) who had once visited him.

When I published Graham’s comments in 1989, Moore quickly said that he had only been joking with the hapless researcher and that the badge was actually a laminated MUFON field investigator’s card. However, Graham remains adamant that the badge he was shown was a genuine government ID card.

But if Doty is not responsible for the creation of the EBD, the ridiculous mumbo jumbo found in the so-called “MJ-5 Memo” is right up his alley. On October 14, 1988, Doty appeared anonymously (back-lit and voice-altered) as “Falcon” on the absurd TV farce UFO Cover-up Live!, together with USAF intelligence officer Capt. Robert M. Collins, who also appeared anonymously as “Condor”. The pair claimed to be high-level intelligence insiders who knew about multiple UFO crashes, live aliens being held captive by the U.S. government, and other such fare. Apparently the aliens liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music, according to Doty and Collins.

In November 1987, the same Capt. Robert Collins showed Linda Moulton Howe a ring-binder full of MJ-12 documents at his home in Albuquerque. According to Howe, Collins had been “frantically” trying to reach her so that he could present those supposedly important files. The EBD was prominently featured, as was the MJ-5 Memo, together with another memorandum that mentioned the live aliens held at Los Alamos—among other items.

Howe swallowed it all, of course, soon sharing information about the bogus evidence with ufologists and the public, following-up on her earlier “revelations” about alleged secret U.S./alien treaties, underground alien bases, and other such disclosures—all of which had been provided to her by OSI Special Agent Doty.
In 2009, Collins denied showing documents to Howe (and John Lear) at his house in 1987. Fortunately, I recorded my conversation with Howe less than a year after the event and she described the goings-on in detail. A summary of all of this, as well as my telephone transcript, may be read in my Operation Bird Droppings article.

According to his self-written bio at Amazon.com, appearing with a summary of his book, Exempt From Disclosure, Robert Collins is a “former Air Force Intelligence Officer, Capt, O-3 (Chief Analyst/Scientist in theoretical Physics holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance) at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD)...Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, with an extensive background in Aircraft Avionics Systems, Ground Communications, and Engineering Physics (graduate school—Electro-Optics, Plasma, and Nuclear Physics) totaling over 22 years…”

Gee, not a single word from Collins about his appearing on a national television program masquerading as a “high-level intelligence source, code-named Condor” who also “frantically” disseminated disinformation relating to MJ-12.

Summarizing here, in the early days of the ruse, two of the leading proponents for the legitimacy of the now-discredited MJ-12 material were a counterintelligence OSI agent, who later confessed to forging UFO-related documents, and a positive intelligence officer who willingly posed as something he was not—someone having intimate knowledge about various crashed UFOs and captured aliens being held by the U.S. government.

Try as he may, Stan Friedman cannot credibly distance the supposedly “good” MJ-12 documents—EBD, CT, TF—from the “bad” ones that were circulating in the 1980s. They were all lumped together and presented as equally important and legitimate by two Air Force intelligence operatives—clearly acting as disinformation agents—who were aggressively foisting them on well-meaning but gullible people such as Linda Howe.

Once the shenanigans perpetrated by the Kirtland AFB Cabal were effectively exposed, by Greenwood, Todd and myself, Bill Moore saw the writing on the wall and finally acknowledged much of what we had written.

During his infamous “confession” speech, at the MUFON conference in Las Vegas, on July 1, 1989, Moore said, “Disinformation is a strange and bizarre game. Those who play it are completely aware that an operation’s success is dependent upon dropping information upon a target, or ‘mark,’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it to others as if it were true. Once this has been accomplished, the work of the counterintelligence specialists is complete. They can simply withdraw in the confidence that the dirty work of spreading their poisonous seeds will be done by others.”

Linda Howe and others—including Stanton Friedman—certainly did their part in the game, helping to create a mythology that endures today.

As I wrote earlier, the available evidence strongly suggests that while the MJ-12 Affair began as a legitimate money-making project, involving the writing of a novel, it eventually became a hoax, involving forged documents—with money again being the objective, resulting from various related schemes—before finally morphing into a disinformation ploy orchestrated by intelligence and counterintelligence groups within the U.S. Air Force.


I am distressed that the MJ-12 debate (actually, debacle) continues to have ramifications 30 years later, perpetually polluting the legitimate UFO research database.

For example, MJ-12 was prominently featured during the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, held in Washington D.C. in May 2013. Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly characterized the MJ-12-related SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual—which directs military personnel how to recover crashed UFOs and dead aliens—as having “stood the test of time”. Hardly! Military document expert and longtime UFO researcher Jan Aldrich has discovered over 50 factual errors and/or discrepancies in military protocol in the so-called “manual”.

Another high-profile personage in ufology, self-described “historian” Richard Dolan, has repeatedly vouched for the legitimacy of the MJ-12 materials in various UFO “documentaries” on television.

And Robert and Ryan Wood, at their Majestic Documents website, still regularly churn out pro-MJ-12 “evidence” and commentary. As I pointedly said to them, from the podium at the 2012 Society for Scientific Exploration conference, if one is going to have any hope of deciphering the U.S. government’s covert response to UFOs, one must adhere to the fundamental principles underlying academic scholarship or, at least, traditional investigative journalism, to figure out what is real, as opposed to what is not.

In other words, relying only on authenticated documents and vetted witness testimony when evaluating historical developments. In response, the Woods just stared at their shoes and said nothing.

Given that the MJ-12 proponents routinely ignore this valid advice, and spout off incessantly about their supposedly-insightful “findings”, it’s no wonder that the bullshit typed-up by OSI Agent Doty, con artist Bill Moore and, later on, hoaxer Tim Cooper, has only gained ground on the Internet over the years, at least among the less-discriminating members of the public.

At least Cooper has now completely disavowed the MJ-12 2.0 “documents” that he was actively disseminating a few years ago. Oh, you didn’t know about that? See my “Operation Bird Droppings” article addendum. Regardless, questions about Cooper’s possible role in creating those forged files remain unanswered.

Jeez, what a colossal waste of everyone’s time! There are legitimate areas in ufology that go begging for attention by qualified researchers. It’s nothing short of pathetic that so much effort has been spent on the MJ-12 Affair, especially when the basic facts about its dubious origins and early machinations have been well researched and publicized for years.

To the reader, I say this: Please do your homework. The facts are indeed available, if one is willing to take the time to discover them. Start by asking yourself whether any “evidence” offered by the MJ-12 proponents would meet the standards of academic or journalistic investigative research. Can even a single MJ-12 “document” be proved to be genuine, by any accepted definition of that word?

Bizarrely, Stan Friedman has recently asserted that provenance—the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object—is not even an issue when it comes to analyzing the MJ-12 documents! Would any academician or investigative journalist dare make such a claim about a disputed document that has mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, if he/she hoped to have any credibility at all after doing so? Of course not!

The great many documents underlying my own UFO-Nukes Connection research can be verifiably traced to a given government department or agency. Can the MJ-12 proponents honestly make that claim? No, they cannot. All they can offer are their opinions about how it might be possible for these supposed documents to be real.

Whoopee...

For the record, I personally believe that the Roswell Incident—the secret recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—did in fact take place. I recommend a review of the on-the-record statements by the late U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, as presented at roswellproof.homestead.com. While having only an indirect knowledge of the incident and its aftermath, acquired from some of the military participants who were involved in the operation, Exon’s revelations are far more insightful and valuable than anything emerging from the MJ-12 fiasco.
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On Tuesday, August 5, 1997, Capt. Drew Sullins, of the Maryland Air National Guard was interviewed by Kenny Young of T.A.S.K. regarding the March 13th Arizona UFO reports.

By Kenny Young 8-5-1997

YOUNG: Thanks for taking time from your busy schedule to talk this afternoon about Project Snowbird and the flare droppings over Arizona that generated some attention. One of the things I want to discuss is the TIME DELAY in announcing the explanation for this event, which was a duration of almost 4 to 5 months. Is there any reason to your knowledge for this delay?

SULLINS: Yes there is, and I don't think people are going to believe it, but it's the truth... it's a simple miscommunication. Apparently when the military in Phoenix was first approached, they looked at their flight logs, which are kept in two separate categories called "RESIDENT" and "VISITING" logs. These logs chart all of the incoming or outgoing air traffic. When the first inquiries of this went out, DAVIS-MONTHAN didn't check the visiting flight logs. The Public Affairs Officer down there called the people at operations who kept the flight logs, and they said, "we didn't have anything up that day." After several months, Captain Eileen Bienz was told by someone, and I can't remember who, that there was a project called Snowbird, which was an Air National Guard 'Op.' Bienz didn't have information on Snowbird, because Arizona units don't participate in it. Snowbird is an operation run during the winter when they take A.N.G. units located in the northern U.S. When it snows and the weather gets bad, they fly their units out there for a couple of weeks and train during the winter because the weather for flying is so good. Bienz put two and two together and checked the visiting flight logs, and sure enough it was discovered that there was an Air National Guard unit flying around.

YOUNG: So the miscommunication was due to Davis-Monthan?

SULLINS: Yeah, it wasn't on my part. Captain Bienz called me up and told me the whole story, just a couple of weeks ago and first I ever heard of it, and said, 'now can you confirm these things?' So I called our Ops guys of the 175th Wing & 104th Fighter Squadron, and they were able to confirm for me that they were flying that night in that area and dropping flares. The information was not held, as soon as we got it together it was released.

YOUNG: Why had the pilots in this unit, knowing they did this, not come forth in the hours after the publicity to announce the proper explanation?

SULLINS: First of all, the deployment for the unit was on the last day of a 15-day training mission happening during the first 2-weeks of March. It was one of the last missions they flew out there, and by the time it hit the news, they might have been gone. The story wasn't the big news event in Baltimore that it was in Phoenix. I think they seemed genuinely suprised that they were the cause of all the hub-bub.

YOUNG: When you say they were 'gone,' what do you mean by that?

SULLINS: They came back to Maryland. It was a 2-week training mission. They were there the first 2-weeks in March, and so by March 13th, that night, they landed and probably got up on March 14th or 15th and rolled out of there.

YOUNG: There was plenty of national media exposure regarding this, and also a second-wave of publicity in mid-June following the USA TODAY article. Is there any reason these pilots or affiliates with the squadron would not have come forth with this explanation in spite of all this?

SULLINS: Well I honestly don't think that they knew. I really don't. The lead pilot that night, a Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Ron Henry, was retiring about that time... he's retired now and commuting back and forth to Minneapolis and he's really busy. He's in the flight training program for Northwest Airlines learning how to fly a DC-9, and all these guys are really busy. They're citizen airmen and citizen soldiers, so they have full-time jobs and careers, families and other things they have to manage. Look, I'll be honest with you, until Captain Bienz called me up, I honestly had not even heard about this. I read two papers in the morning, one of them on the internet, one in my office, and so if I could miss it, then I guess they could too.

YOUNG: Was the lead pilot and others involved aware that dropping these flares would produce the results among the population below that it did?

SULLINS: No, I don't think they would have known because it's a standard routine training mission out there. Flares are dropped alot on that range. On that particular night, the visibility and atmospheric conditions were such that the things could have been viewed from the southwestern suburbs of Phoenix. These flares can be seen from hundreds of miles if the weather conditions are right. Apparently, they're not the only unit out there that dropped flares. Who's to say, perhaps the weather conditions and every thing just kind of came together and these things could be seen from Phoenix.

YOUNG: You speculate that other units could have also been involved?

SULLINS: The only units we had flying that night were the eight aircraft from the 104th Fighter Squadron.

YOUNG: What about the arguments that the flares were visible longer than 1-hour, when the actual burn-time for parachute flares would be around 4 or 5 minutes?

SULLINS: They were dropping alot of flares. They were over that range for over an hour. One aircraft would go in, drop a couple of flares, make its run and attack a target, then another aircraft would come in from behind and illuminate the range again, so they were continually dropping flares in that area.

YOUNG: So the pilots could see the flares from their plane?

SULLINS: Oh yes.

YOUNG: Would they have been able to visualize that this could be something the population below would notice as well?

SULLINS: I can't speak for the pilots because I wasn't flying, but the dropping of flares out there is so routine that I don't see why they would've had any cause for alarm.

YOUNG: Again, the delay in this announcement is somewhat odd. How many men would have been involved with the 104th Fighter Squadron that would have had knowledge of this operation?

SULLINS: There were eight aircraft. Eight pilots.

YOUNG: Were there also officers loading the flares in pods under the wings who would have had knowledge of this?

SULLINS: I'd have to call the squadron on that, but once Davis- Monthan checked the visiting flight logs, they were able to explain it. The base knew about it, but they just didn't check the visiting flight logs.

YOUNG: How would this activity have been specified or listed on a flight log?

SULLINS: That's a good question. I don't have an answer to that one.

YOUNG: Do they list flare exercises in flight logs?

SULLINS: Anytime you're flying at night in the A-10 Thunderbolt on a night training exercise, it's probable that you'll always be dropping flares. It's very routine, there's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY about what they did out there.

YOUNG: It was obviously extraordinary in light of the public reaction to the operation.

SULLINS: Well that was, but not the mission itself.

YOUNG: Do they announce flare exercises in advance so as not to cause public alarm?

SULLINS: No.

YOUNG: They do not?

SULLINS: No, they never have before. It's never produced this public response before and our pilots have flown this same mission out of that range a number of times before, and done so without so much as raising an eyebrow.

YOUNG: Would all the reports of a triangular object, mentioned in the USA Today article, be attributable to the flare droppings?

SULLINS: I don't know. I've only seen videotapes twice, and they looked like flares to me.

YOUNG: I recalled that some of the early reports on this that some Air Tower Operators were looking at these flares and at the same time detected no radar track of any aircraft on radar. Could you please tell me if eight A-10's which were dropping flares would have any Stealth capabilities which would have caused them not to be detected by radar?

SULLINS: Nope, and the pilots told me that they had everything operating that night and that they should've shown up on radar. Sky Harbor International Airport held radar surveillance for this area, and I don't want to speak for them, and don't know what their coverage area is, but I understand that the area is restricted military airspace. Sky Harbor International Airport will have to answer for those questions. The A-10's do not have any Stealth technology on it, and they were flying with all of their navigation radar systems and everything operating.

YOUNG: Since we had some alarm and concern generated from the public over the March 13 flare droppings, would it be possible to duplicate an identical event for the public, and arrange for the media to be present to document the event?

SULLINS: As the pilots explained it to me, it may have been the atmospheric conditions that night which allowed this thing to be seen so far away in Phoenix, but I'm not so sure we could replicate or duplicate the exact conditions that night. But secondly, it costs a hell of a lot of money to fly these planes for an hour, and I don't know that the United States Air Force would authorize that expenditure. I'd be willing to bet that since this has happened, a whole bunch of flares have dropped over that range since then.

YOUNG: So a repeat performance to satisfy the populace would not be
possible?

SULLINS: I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying that I'm the wrong guy to ask. You're not going to get the Maryland Air National Guard t o fly all the way across the country to replicate the event. That's a request that'll have to be made to the United States Air Force in the Pentagon, and that would then be handed down to the National Guard Bureau, and it goes from echelon to echelon, through the bureaucratic process. Davis- Monthan could assist there, if one were to inquire when the next training mission would be scheduled over Luke AFB where A-10s will be dropping flares from between 10 and 15 thousand feet. That is essentially all you have to replicate. The thing that people are getting all bent out of shape about is the fact that I never offered this as the 'definitive explanation' for what happened. We only offered this up because an inquiry was made to the military regarding unidentified lights. We released all the information on our operation, but we are not prepared to say definitively that these are, in fact, the lights. I'm not trying to stir anything up here, but I can only say that our unit was there, we flew these missions, we dropped these flares. Alot of people think it's flares. Some of the pilots who've looked at the videos flat out said it was flares. According to what every military expert and A-10 pilot told me leads me to believe it was flares.

YOUNG: Since another demonstration would be difficult, would it be possible to notify the public in the event of future exersizes of this nature?

SULLINS: Look, I gotta be completely candid here, we're not going to pick up the phone every darn time we do something. Military operations are just that - military operations. They're not things that the public is used to seeing on an everyday basis, and if everytime we conducted something that we thought the general public would find unusual, I'd spend my whole life on the phone telling people about our training. And in Maryland, we don't drop flares. And the reason we dropped so many flares in Tucson is because its one of the few places we can go to execute that mission. There is no place in Maryland that we could drop these flares safely. The Warfield A.N.G. base outside of Baltimore is not properly equipped to load, handle and store these type of flares and other ordinances. When we go to Arizona, we fly lots of these missions, and try to maximize our time out there because we can't do it at home. So we don't have any need to call people here at home and tell
them our plans.

YOUNG: If it were ever deemed needful to announce anything, who would be contacted?

SULLINS: I would put out the release. If my boss came to me and said that we were going to be conducting an exersize that would alarm the general public, then I would put out a news release to the TV, radio and newspapers.

YOUNG: Do you also handle NOTAM (Notice To Airmen) reports or advisories to other airports or pilots in the area of exersizes?

SULLINS: I don't know what a NOTAM report is, I've never heard of one here.

YOUNG: I do appreciate your time and detailed information today.

SULLINS: My pleasure.


It was obvious that Capt. Sullins was knowledgeable about the flight operations of the Maryland A.N.G. and familiar with the flare maneuvers.

He had clearly handled several of these questions previously, and had also indicated that he interviewed several of the pilots involved. He may have been briefed on how to handle these inquiries, as much of what he said was strikingly similar to comments made to me by a captain from the 178th Fighter Group and 162nd Fighter Squadron Flying Unit Fighter Operations division from Springfield Air National Guard base after a separate but identical incident happened in Southern Ohio on March 26. I found Sullins to be courteous and very professional.

However, I am uncomfortable by the fact that the pilots of the eight aircraft responsible, or the other airman involved in the unit operations of the 175th Wing & 104th Fighter Squadron, would supposedly have 'not heard' of the March 13th debacle involving UFOs over Arizona. I cannot fathom that these persons would not "do the right thing" and put the matter to rest as abruptly as possible.

Recall that Snowbird remained in Arizona at least the following afternoon, or possibly several days after the March 13th event, giving them plenty of opportunities to hear of the UFO reports which had saturated the Arizona media.

Furthermore, Sullins seemed befuddled by the lack of radar returns for the A-10 activity from Sky Harbor International Airport. He also didn't elect to address the reports of a triangular object supposedly observed, and dismissed the public reaction of a 'routine' exersize to weather conditions, an identical scenario first advanced to T.A.S.K. from the Springfiled A.N.G. units after the Ohio disturbance on March 26.

In an honest assessment of this drama, I must observe that the Arizona scenario is highly suspicious and all-too-similar to the March 26th Ohio happening. And due to the delayed confession from the Maryland Air National Guard, one must seriously consider if an ulterior motive may be at work in this travesty.

The Ohio event dealt also with a large, triangular object traveling overhead, and also a 'bouncing' object that was witnessed by a fire and E.M.S. coordinator from New Vienna, Ohio. The Arizona flare explanation, like the Ohio story, is complicated by nagging inconsistencies that come against the flare explanation.

I am satisfied that flares were there, but if the other reports are to honestly considered, then we only have a partial resolution to this very interesting mystery.
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In the May issue of the MUFON UFO Journal, there appeared a very misleading article by Bill Hamilton on the Phoenix Lights of March 13, 1997. That article represented a biased judgment of events and incorrect facts. Now, with these facts in mind, I am presenting the true information of the still ongoing investigation. At about 8:30 p.m. Thursday, the 13th of March, Peter Davenport at the UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, WA, started receiving calls, first from the northwest part of Arizona, of a formation of lights moving south toward Prescott, AZ. These lights formed a basic triangle with as many as six or seven lights per side with two red lights trailing.

By Richard Motzer Field Investigator for Arizona MUFON © July, 1997 / 2016

The real time line for this event is somewhere around 8:00 p.m. MST. As the calls kept flowing in, the description changed as to how many lights were involved. Some even said there were no lights at all, but they could see a black mass blocking out the stars as it passed between the viewer and the sky. The general description was of a "V," but it also resembled a crown with lights that formed an upward triangle. These lights were not like aircraft landing lights but more like stars. This description would change as the objects moved into the Phoenix area. The only consistent properties of the object(s) would be that there were no sound and very slow movement. However, if there was only one object, it could not have covered that distance in such a short time. This is a real "Catch-22," but may be the key to the solution. I know of three V formations that night and there may be more.

As the readers may know, all of this was broadcast worldwide at 11:00 PST on Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast talk radio program. I knew it would be a very busy day for me the next morning, so I retired. I was involved with the videos of this event even before it happened. I received a call from Tom Taylor, our state director for MUFON, that a person in Paradise Valley had been taping lights west of the TV towers on South Mountain for over two years, suggesting that I make contact with her to view the footage. I did so and set the next Wednesday, the 12th at 9:00 a.m., for her to come to my home to view the tapes. Due to the death of Mr. Taylor's mother, I changed the meeting date to the 14th, Friday, the day after the events of the 13th. While talking to her on the phone, I discussed the idea that she might be seeing flares from the Gila Bend Gunnery Range. She felt this was not the case, so we met Friday around 10:15 a.m. Even before her arrival, the news media were at my house getting my reaction to the events of the night before. I had only seen one video, the formation shot by Chuck Rairden from Apache Junction. I told them that in a few minutes I would have a second video for all of us to see, because this lady had caught the event, too. The news programs broke the story with their 4:30 p.m. edition. From that time on, the phones never stopped ringing and the news people kept coming.

I started to collect all the videos I could find and interviewed other witnesses. The first videos I obtained were of lights that appeared to be over the city of Phoenix and it was those videos that made the news programs. It would be some days later before I could obtain the only video of five lights flying to the south taken at 56th Street and Carefree Highway. I have been involved in the collection of data, returning calls, and doing the interviews, which now number over seventy witnesses, of which I found 53 to be credible. The real investigating doesn't start until the last reports come in. One of the best investigation tools was a two-hour talk show I did with Bill Strauss on KTAR radio. Mr. Strauss is a very fair talk show host and allows the callers to tell their stories.

It was during that show that I realized that the people who saw the V formations flying overhead out-numbered the people who saw the lights near the Estrella Mountains by a very high ratio. The V formation lights looked like stars with the brightness of Sirius, whereas the lights over the Estrella Mountains appeared as super bright landing lights. This was very puzzling, because I had the video of the flying V formation where the lights are barely noticeable. So, why did 98% of the sightings pertain to the V formation? Four things are responsible for this:

1. People were outside looking to the northwest to see the Hale-Bopp Comet.

2. The best time to view Hale-Bopp was between 8:00 and 8:30 p.m. MST.

3. It was in motion flying toward them.

4. The altitude didn't matter as long as you were outside. You had to be at a higher elevation and have a clear view to the southwest to see the lights above and behind the Estrellas.

We will come back to the V formation again. Now we needed to find out why we had seven videos of the Estrella lights, but only a few witnesses.

At this point, all of the TV stations were running the same video clips. People were being confused and thought the videos showed the V formation, which they didn't, but instead showed the lights to be over the city of Phoenix and that is what I mistakenly thought, too.

I don't know how many times I looked at those tapes and couldn't find the common thread. I received a call from a family far to the west of Phoenix where they, too, had taped the lights the night of the 13th and many other times. I made the long drive out to 222nd Avenue and Jackrabbit Blvd to view the tape. The tape did not impress me but the people did. They said that the lights appear between 8:00 and 10:00 pm were always in the same place and would drift laterally. They also said that a lot of helicopter and fighter aircraft traffic was observed at times when these lights appeared. The highest activity was in the mid-part of the month and the most common days were Monday through Thursday. The other key item was that a large area of Bureau of Land Management land had been cordoned off in the direction of the lights. The woman's future son-in-law could see the land below the lights being illuminated like daylight. This was one of the keys, but I couldn't see how it would fit into the puzzle at that time.

The next key was the person who taped both the Estrella lights and the V formation. He had some airline pilots, "off the record," mark on the map the location and estimated elevation of the Estrella lights. Since I could not talk to them directly, I simply noted this on my map.

The final key to the solution was also the biggest mystery. Why did all videos of 3-13-97 at 10:00 p.m. have a different number of lights, different order of starting and decay, and shapes?

It was really dependent upon the observation point of the witness in the Phoenix area and, most important, how high their viewing point was. It turned out that the lights were not over Phoenix, but near the Estrella Mountains to the southwest. This determination was made after viewing all the video tapes and going to all but one of the sites and shooting 35mm film in daylight. Using the point marked by the pilot, I drew a line from each of the sites where the Estrella lights were taped. On the Rairden tape there are nine lights, but only eight lights on the Moon Valley footage. I re-ran the Moon Valley footage and just in the early part you see a light form briefly which then goes out, but did it really? No, something must have blocked it out, but it was still there in the Rairden footage. As the lights drifted downward, some lights were blocked out by the many small peaks making up the Estrella range.

In the videos that I acquired, there were two people who had been recording these Estrella lights for months. What I wanted to find was footage where a tripod was used and the zoom lens was left in one spot. To my surprise there were several clips that met these specifications. What I did next was to mark at the end of each segment the ground position on a monitor and the ending position of each light. When I ran the editor video deck in reverse, I could see each light rise in altitude and drift to the right or to the left. In all the video clips the results were the same. Just before each light went out, there was an increase in the descent of each light.

So what did this prove? Going back to the first newscasts, they ended by saying the Army National Guard said that just before 10:00 p.m. on March 13, 1997, they shot off target flares for training. We had dismissed this at first because the witnesses felt certain these lights were in front of South Mountain and over the city. This caused the early confusion of the V formation with these lights. The flares are very bright even at a distance of 50 miles and will overload a camcorder chip. They also have a parachute attached to them. As the flare is positioned and ignites, the heat from the flare heats the air above, which is trapped in its parachute, causing it to slow down its descent. Toward its final phase, before extinguishing, the heat output decreases and the flare will start to fall faster. It will also have a lateral motion due to its delivery system, either hindered by the prevailing winds or accelerated. All the videos that I tested for that night or other nights showed this feature. Even the control tower people at Sky Harbor Airport said they saw smoke emanating from the flares. Let's quickly review the evidence for the case for flares behind the Estrellas:

1. These events have been going on for some time, three months or more.

2. The color is bright amber.

3. Smoke was seen by some.

4. The on to off time of each light is very consistent.

5. The general time lines and dates are repeated (for that night they occurred at 8:30, 9:25, and 10:00 pm)

6. Mostly week nights.7. The Gila Bend Gunnery Range hours match the time line.

8. All drop vertically and move in a lateral direction consistent with flares.

9. All video tapes that have the complete cycle, that is, from start to finish, show this.

10. Two videos, shot at close range, seem to show smoke flowing around them.

11. On one of the tapes, the person asks if they are flares.

12. The Army National Guard said they shot-off these flares.

13. Six news programs announced that the military said they were flares and two reports were from military pilots who located them at the Gila Bend Gunnery Range behind the Estrella Mountains.

Due to the multitude of events that night and the confusion of these lights with the V formation, I didn't concentrate on this event. In fact, if these nine flares hadn't been fired off that night, the real big story—the one that needs to be solved—would not have made the TV news. The reason is that there is only one video, so far, that has been brought forward, and even though it was shot with a Sony Hi 8, the lights can barely be seen. I had to stretch the light scale in Adobe Premier for it to be used on the first Strange Universe show.

Flares, then, appear to be the answer for the lights near the Estrella Mountains. Journal readers may have seen these videos on the national TV news coverage. However, they cannot be the answer for the V formation.

What was this V formation seen by so many across the state of Arizona the evening of the 13th? If you use the 42 second video clip to make a judgment, you will see the last light on the western side move to the rear and maintain its alignment. If you drew lines through the points to make a five-point V, the sides appear to be slightly bowed to the outside. You hear no sound but only the person taking the video and his comments. The night was hazy at that location so no stars appear in this video clip.

Luke AFB floated four stories about the V formation:

1. It was a flight of Blue Angels coming from Nellis AFB in Nevada. (Linda M. Howe said that a formation of five was also seen over Las Vegas heading southwest. The Blue Angels were not due for another day.)

2. It was a squadron of A 10s on a night training mission heading back to Tucson.

3. None of ours!

4. A private plane with a skilled pilot flying between restricted air corridors with a string of lights a mile long. I like that one myself — yeah, right!

The question is why did Luke AFB change their stories? The Army National Guard didn't.

Even though the V formation may or may not prove to be a real UFO after a thorough investigation, the other so-called "sightings of the decade" may well fade into history.

As Paul Harvey says, "Now you know the rest of the story." In the meantime, the real investigation is still going on ...

Please see the map which shows the directions in which the witnesses were observing the flares beyond the Estrella Mountains. Thomas R. Taylor, State Director for Arizona, supports this investigation and preliminary report.

* Special Thanks To Clifford Clift, MUFON International Director, and especially to Richard Motzer for his excellent field work and report.
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     I want to share two things that happened when I was 13 and 14 years old. I am now 66 years old:

When I was 13, my mother and I saw a tear-dropped shape UFO, flying over Newport Rhode Island after dark. It went at a moderatly fast rate of speed high accross part of the sky and then just shot staight up at an incredible rate of speed and dissappeared.

My Father was a Naval officer, and my mother called the sighting into the Newport Naval Base.--Then about a year or two later, after we were transferred to San Francisco, My father was given the position of Naval Representative to the Joint Chiefs of Staff also working somewhat with the CIA.

One day he called me upstairs and because of my interest from a couple of years before, showed me a telegram that went through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA, describing a sighting of a UFO entering the ocean a a certain latidude and longitude. He told me that they received these telegrams two or three times a week, always in the same location of the ocean. He said the telegram was classified and for me to tell no one else. My father passed away in 2000, and my mother gave me permission to share this. I found out last year that my brother was also shown the telegram.
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