Statistiche
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
US Space Command Says It Has the Backs of NASA, Allies, Commercial Partners ( AIR FORCE Magazine )
Commander of U.S. Space Command Army Gen. James H. Dickinson speaks at the Air Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference, Sept. 21, 2021. Staff photo by Mike Tsukamoto.
The U.S. military plans to “be there” for NASA and commercial providers of “critical” space capabilities as activity picks up on and around the moon.
Commander of the joint-service U.S. Space Command, Army Gen. James H. Dickinson, made the pledge during his speech at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference on Sept. 21.
Newly reestablished in 2019 as the military’s 11th combatant command, U.S. Space Command’s “two-part focus” includes “traditional, enduring, no-fail, supporting space functions like position, navigation, and timing, satellite communications, missile warning, and support [of] the human spaceflight operations” at NASA, Dickinson said.
He added that the Artemis program, NASA’s planned lunar exploration campaign, “presents an exciting opportunity” for the command.
“The United States is going back to the moon, and one day we’ll put an astronaut on Mars,” Dickinson said. “U.S. Space Command will be there for NASA in support of those efforts.”
On the other hand, the second, “extremely important” part of the command’s focus—its “supported warfighting function”—is wholly new, Dickinson said. This includes “conducting space operations and protecting and defending U.S., allied, partner, and critical commercial space operational capabilities.”
He didn’t name a specific threat but alluded to “irresponsible behavior of our competitors” generally understood to include anti-satellite weapons tests that create hazardous debris fields in orbit.
In the past few years, the number of satellites in orbit tracked by the U.S. has about doubled, Dickinson said. The trend has given rise to the discipline of space domain awareness, which is one tool the command is sharpening to perform its mission.
Dickinson said that unlike the activities of space situational awareness and space traffic management—“largely passive” and “designed to keep us informed on what’s occurring in space, and when it will occur”—space domain awareness looks at, “more importantly, why it’s occurring.”
Leaders within the command have said that in cislunar space in and around the moon, space domain awareness is its only mission for now.
U.S. Space Command announced in August that it had reached initial operational capability, or IOC, meaning it had “matured to the point where we have strategic effects,” Dickinson said at the time.
At the AFA conference, he elaborated that IOC is “the point where we’ve built a solid enough foundation to pivot to a new objective. It’s where we can credibly claim to be organized and effective for employing both our enduring no-fail support functions to the Joint Force and our supported warfighting functions as well.”
Amanda Miller
The Experience: The Cultural Rise of Alien Abductions and Those Who Encounter Them ( The Debrief )
Former New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal explores the rise of the alien abduction phenomenon, and the people who experience it.
Don’t ask the Pentagon about aliens. Tracking UFOs flying hypersonic circles around F/A-18F Super Hornets is job enough without speculating on extraterrestrial origins or who (or what) could be behind the wheel.
The long-awaited June 25 “Preliminary Assessment” to Congress on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was silent on what these…things are — although it acknowledged they “probably do represent physical objects” and “clearly pose a safety of flight issue.” But the report pointedly avoided the question of whether they might be off-earth vehicles.
Yet some humans say they know what they know: We are not alone.
They are called experiencers – a word that describes nothing – because their experiences seem so impossible to imagine: Encounters with non-human entities, which sometimes involve UFOs and sometimes do not. Kary Mullis, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, wrote of a night in Mendocino County, California, in 1985 where he encountered a glowing, talking raccoon who greeted him with “Good evening, doctor,” after which Mullis found himself the following day some distance away with no recollection of the intervening time or any memory of a spacecraft.
Ordinary people acknowledge these experiences. So do celebrities. The rapper Kendrick Lamar told the Howard Stern Show in 2017 that at age 6, he had seen a UFO fly by and was asked if he thought he’d been abducted by aliens. “I probably did,” he said. “That’s probably why I’m doing music right now. Who knows? They probably gave me the energy.” Earlier, he had told JoJo Wright’s radio show, “I’ve seen ghosts before, for sure. I’ve seen UFOs too. I’ll never forget that, and that was my encounter, and still to this day, I know there is something else out there.”
The singer Demi Lovato has referenced their own “experiments” as well, announcing in May that they were producing and starring in a forthcoming four-part UFO series, “Unidentified with Demi Lovato,” for the NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock; Episode 1 is scheduled to air on the 30th of September. “Demi is a true believer, and during this courageous adventure, [Demi] hopes to convince [their] friends, family, and [their] millions of followers that not only are there intelligent beings beyond Earth but that they are already here!” the announcement said. “Demi plans to learn enough about the extra-terrestrials through interviewing scientists, alien abductees, and [their] own experiments to initiate those close encounters and make peace with the aliens, and ultimately save ourselves.”
The rapper Lupe Fiasco told a Los Angeles radio station in 2012 of an “extra-worldly experience” at age 11 when he saw a black disc at his window and felt paralyzed, “surrounded by all this electricity.”
Representatives of Mr. Lamar and Ms. Lovato did not respond to numerous interview requests. A publicist for Mr. Fiasco said, “he’s passing on speaking about his experience.” Other stars with reported UFO encounters include Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, and Tom DeLonge, who founded a study and entertainment group, To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science.
Jay Christopher King, a 42-year-old Jersey City artist who co-hosts an online support group of some 200 fellow experiencers, remembers his childhood fright at seeing a short grayish creature crouched in front of the family’s basement washing machine rummaging through the dirty laundry. More recently, he says, he has encountered spindly mantis-like beings that communicate telepathically in florid English — and Latin.
He knows it sounds crazy. “Now,” he says, “you’re diving into the deep end of the swimming pool.”
For Karin Austin, a 52-year-old former interior designer, construction project manager, and small business owner in Colorado working with an online group of fellow experiencers to advance Disclosure of secret UFO data, it was finding herself one night in her twenties far from her bed in a crowd of other humans in pajamas in a forest clearing near an abandoned roller coaster. There, she says, a tall skinny being presented her with a strange-looking little boy as her hybrid son.
Incredible, she agrees. But she’s convinced it happened, in some unknown dimension of reality, especially after finding a sketch of the same scene she remembers in a book by another experiencer. She has given up hope of being taken seriously. “People just think we’re…nut jobs.”
Other experiencers who also agreed to share their stories are participants in the support group co-hosted by Jay Christopher King and organized by Stuart Davis, an experiencer, artist, musician, and filmmaker in Boulder, Colorado, with a podcast “Aliens & Artists.” (Their accounts, below, have been condensed.)
Human encounters with gods, angels, fairies, ghosts, spirit animals, and other entities have been staples of folklore, religion, and myth since the dawn of recorded history, but space creatures quickly permeated mass culture with the postwar flying saucer boom. The lack of scientific evidence of extraterrestrial visitations did little to slow the avalanche of bestselling books and blockbuster movies.
Skeptics have laid the experiences to delusions, sleep paralysis, or other natural aberrant conditions.
Recent years, however, have brought growing physical confirmation by Navy ships and warplanes of unidentified flying objects, what the government now prefers to call unidentified aerial phenomena. In 2017, in The New York Times, we revealed that a secret Pentagon unit called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, was documenting their astounding aerodynamics while leaving aside questions of their origin, intelligent control, or occupants.
Yet UFOs and aliens remain inextricably linked in the public mind, especially after history’s first widely-publicized abduction case 60 years ago.
On the night of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through New Hampshire’s White Mountains when, as they later recounted in hazy recollections augmented in hypnotic regressions, they were overtaken by a flying disc and put aboard by gray humanoids with enlarged cat-like eyes and bulbous craniums. They recalled intrusive pseudo-medical exams before being released physically unharmed but deeply traumatized, unable to account for missing hours, stopped wristwatches, their strangely magnetized Chevy, badly scuffed shoes, and a torn dress.
A 2014 article in Scientific American, “Alien Abduction or ‘Accidental Awareness’?” cited studies by Britain’s Royal College of Anaesthetists and a Columbia University psychoanalyst, David V. Forrest, attributing abduction experiences like Barney Hill’s to hospital memories under anesthesia. It cited similarities between the accounts of intrusive probes by humanoid beings and operating room procedures, hypothesizing that Barney may have experienced a flashback to an earlier tonsillectomy, akin to recovered or sometimes false memories studied by PTSD researchers. Yet that would hardly explain Betty’s similar recollections or the bits of physical evidence — consistencies that deeply perplexed their psychiatrist, Benjamin Simon.
The phenomenon was next explored by two unlikely researchers, Budd Hopkins, an artist, and David Jacobs, a Temple University history professor. Both hypnotized their own experiencers and grew convinced that the recounted abductions were literal, occurring in our reality, by alien beings with an agenda hostile to humanity. Hopkins was particularly struck by the alleged missing time effetct that left experiencers mystified over lost hours and dimly recollected traumas.
Author and notable “Alien Abduction Researcher” Budd Hopkins in a hypnotic regression session with a man claiming to have been abducted by aliens. 2003. (Image Source: Wikicommons)
In 1990, a Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry, John E. Mack, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for a psychobiography of T.E. Lawrence and written books on borderline psychiatric states and nightmares, met Hopkins and grew captivated by the accounts of stupefying interactions with alien beings told by seemingly ordinary people from all walks of life and even young children.
Defying ridicule, they usually reported seeing a UFO after which alien beings materialized, commonly in their bedrooms but also sometimes outdoors, in their cars, or in one case, a snowmobile. Immobilized, with companions rendered comatose, they recounted flights through walls or closed windows into craft for examination and frequently the extraction of eggs from women and sperm from men for the apparent breeding of hybrid offspring that the abductees might later meet.
Their aversion to publicity and absence of any evident psychopathology, the consistency of their accounts, and agonizing affect in relating their experiences, occasional witness corroboration, as well as certain physical evidence like unfamiliar scars and association with sighted UFOs convinced Mack that something unfathomable yet real had indeed happened to them. Many emerged with a heightened concern for the despoiled planet and a loving connection to the beings and all creation.
But Mack grew to differ with Hopkins and Jacobs that the experiences were clearly literal, happening in our reality. Instead, he came to think they seemed more likely liminal, something less than completely physical, or perhaps penetrations from another dimension. His evolving position angered some of his experiencers who feared abandonment.
Mack wrote two books documenting his case studies, “Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens” (1994) and the more nuanced “Passport to the Cosmos” (1999), appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show with some of his experiencers, met with the Dalai Lama, was written up widely in mainstream publications, and lectured extensively. Embarrassed by the publicity, Harvard convened a secret committee to investigate his practice but ultimately found no cause for discipline. He was run over and killed in London by a drunk driver in 2004, days before his 75th birthday.
Dr. John Mack (Image: Stuart Conway)
How many people have undergone, or may still be undergoing, alleged abduction experiences seems indeterminable. But online chatter and a profusion of experiencer support groups suggest that the phenomenon, whatever its nature and extent, is still out there, mysterious as ever.
Personal Accounts from Experiencers
Editorial Note: These phenomena,
colloquially known as “alien abduction” or “alien contact” have not been
adequately studied, and according to contemporary scientific
understanding, are not a proven objective event. Due to the nature of
these accounts and the related phenomena, they can not be verified by
The Debrief’s editorial team. These unedited accounts have been included
strictly for the sake of posterity at the request of the author.
Jay Christopher King. When I was about 6, we moved to a house in Indiana that had what people called haunted phenomena. The movers stacked up these huge book boxes, my father’s old textbooks and engineering manuals. The next morning we discovered they had all been rearranged in a checkerboard pattern. Once I woke up to see a little boy my age playing with my toys. We heard later that a boy had once killed himself in the basement.
Afterwards, in a different house, I was about 9 or 10, in bed. I look and there are two beings, four and a half feet tall, gray-like. One to my left was holding a chrome rod about 18 inches long. It started raising the rod device just as the other one started moving toward me. I passed out.
Two weeks after or a few days later — this is something you want to forget, not remember — I was walking up the stairs from my bedroom to the kitchen. The stairs had slats so I could see through to the laundry room. Bizarrely, one of the beings was in the laundry seeming to be rifling through the clothes that were in front of the washing machine. For the next year and I half I ran up and down the steps!
In my 20s, when I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, sometimes there would be a hum and oddly the winter air would rush in almost as if a section of wall disappeared. The first time I saw a mantis I was confused because some grays are tall but mantis beings are even taller with a different body structure. At first I thought of them as grasshoppers. They have a different form of telepathic content.
The way you receive telepathy from a gray is more line by line, like receiving a telegram. Mantis beings have a much more elegant way of speaking. I also started picking up communication from a voice speaking in Latin. This entity was very interested in science and space. It made some criticism of us using fire and smoke to get off-planet and was strongly advocating for a device that seemed to involve plasma.
One evening in 2017, I had a feeling of being watched. A bizarre rectangular doorway developed on the wall. It looked like an amber and gray screen composed of pixels. A very large mantis stepped about halfway into the room, hunched over, about 6 feet tall, projecting through the portal. I spoke my mind. “Why tonight? Are you physically here?” It stepped further through, extended a long thin arm as it cocked its head looking at me. It reached its delicate fingers over the bedroom door and opened it further. That was its answer.
You don’t necessarily choose to be an experiencer, but I’m really hopeful for the experiencer community. We can work on this ourselves. We don’t need the vast world to validate this stuff. We have each other.
Karin Austin. I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida. When I was about 3, several beings woke me up from sleep; they were very friendly. I tried to call my mom in to show her, but watched them leave through my closed window before she made it into my room. Another time, I was playing outside with a bubble gum machine a friend of my mom’s had just given me as a gift. In a spliced-film kind of missing-time moment, I suddenly found myself running into the house without the bubble gum machine. We never found it.
Many years later, during a session with John [Mack], I easily recalled being outside playing with the bubble gum machine when a glowing object, egg shaped, appeared. Two gray beings with large black eyes emerged from it and asked me to go with them. They escorted me into a kind of shimmery room with curved walls, clinically white and misty. I found myself standing in front of a boy who was just a little older than me.
He had a being on either side of him. He spoke with a Scottish accent. The beings asked if I was willing to share my bubble gum machine with him. I agreed. He took it, they left, and I was returned home. I ran back to the house to tell my mom but instantly couldn’t remember what I wanted to share with her. Part of my memory was wiped.
Every experiencer will tell you when we share details like this, we know we sound insane.
Up to age 25 I would have said I was not an experiencer. But then, one night I “woke up” from a terrifying experience that didn’t quite fit the definition of a dream. I found myself at the edge of a forest clearing, standing alongside some 50 or so other human beings, all in various stages of night undress. I could see an old wooden roller coaster partially obstructed by trees.
Also present were a number of small-adult-size, skinny beings managing the gathering. I watched as one of the beings walked toward me. From a distance she looked like she could have been human and she had with her a shorter being who seemed to be a kid. As she stopped in front of me, I realized he didn’t look exactly human.
The taller being, apparently a caregiver of sorts, didn’t look entirely human either. In shock, it dawned on me I was interacting with some kind of alien-human hybrid life form. The adult caregiver kept pushing the boy, this hybrid, toward me. I kept pushing back, insisting there was a mistake. (I had had my tubes tied the previous year, after deciding not to have kids.) Finally, I understood she was telling me this child was mine.
I blacked out. The next second I was sitting straight up in my bed, severely dehydrated. I stumbled to the kitchen and drank an entire gallon of milk. I then found myself checking my body for marks. I recognized my behavior was strange. My fiancé thought it was a dream, but it felt real.
The next night, we were watching TV, and Whitley Streiber’s “Communion” came on. The movie showed two kids running down a path toward a flying saucer that was floating above a lake. The kids suddenly stopped and turned around. I instantly let out a scream and crawled up the back of the sofa, completely traumatized. They looked exactly like the hybrids I had seen just the night before in my “dream”!
Many years later after I met John [Mack], he was writing a foreword for Jim Sparks’s book [“The Keepers: An Alien Message for the Human Race”]. I happened to see an illustration that had been drawn for it. It showed the very same woods I had been in at the clearing, with a roller coaster in the background! Jim had obviously been present during the same encounter but was apparently in a different position in the woods.
When Laurel Chiten put her sizzle reel out for her documentary “Touched,” a guy from Canada reached out to Laurel and she put him in touch with me. He had been raised in Scotland. He talked about an incident that happened while playing in a forest as a kid.
He had been taken somewhere by two non-human beings into a white, misty room with curved walls, where he was introduced to a young girl who agreed to give him a bubble gum machine. Apparently, he later walked out of the woods without remembering how he got it. He told me he had kept it for a long time. Stunned, I asked if he still had it. He said he got rid of it when he moved overseas.
Robin Lassiter, 41, medical office manager in Grand Junction, Colo. I grew up with one older sister in southern Colorado. My parents were back-to-the-landers, hippies, and I grew up in the off-grid geodesic dome they built. Around 4, I have a memory of standing downstairs in the dome. I don’t know how I got down from my bedroom in the loft. A being was standing in front of me, an insectoid, with an exoskeleton. I called him Antman. I felt he was there to check on me. I didn’t tell anyone. I was so young, I didn’t realize it was unusual, but never forgot it.
Throughout my childhood I had vivid dreams and frequent out-of-body experiences. I had Armageddon dreams, dreams of war, explosions, the earth being destroyed and renewed, civilization coming back. I found the world very confusing and difficult to be in. I went to college, but dropped out. I had several years of drinking, drama, running from myself.
In my early 30s, I got sober and the anomalous experiences started again — sleep paralysis, waking with the bed shaking violently, and ultimately a life-changing out-of-body experience where I was surrounded by an overwhelming buzzing vibration and suspended in an intelligent, velvety darkness.
A being appeared and drew me towards a gateway. I knew that on the other side was where we go when we die. I became terrified and yanked myself back into my body. I had a vivid dream of four beings, joined together and surrounded by light, saying that they were there for me when I was ready. I called them the Four-Who-Are-One.
I started having dreams of colored orbs coming down from the sky. They began to teach me things, to tell me I needed to get ready for something, to help the planet. I gave away most of my possessions and moved into a yurt in southern Colorado to try to make my life as simple and connected to nature as possible. I continued to have out-of-body experiences and visitors, profound dreams and often saw U.F.O.s in the sky. It was really blissful.
After some time, I moved into an adobe house that was haunted. I started drinking heavily. I was depressed and had constant nightmares. I was on a path of self-destruction and in the depth of the darkness, I broke my ankle. As I fell, I saw the four light beings and they showered me with love, cradled my fall. Breaking my ankle that way stopped me in my tracks, and I was able to get sober again. I’ve now been sober for nearly five years.
After that, the anomalous experiences mostly stopped until the fall of 2019, right before Covid, when I broke the same ankle again, hiking. The sleep paralysis started up again, with messages that I needed to prepare for something, that I needed to help the planet. During hypnotic regression I was drawn into the cosmos and arrived on a different planet, standing before the Four-Who-Are-One.
I was afraid, until one of them pushed his face through the light and I recognized him as Antman. He told me that they are my guides, that I typically don’t incarnate on earth, but that I chose to come to work on a project. The project has to do with the earth shifting into a new paradigm, from evolution through suffering into creation and joy, to help end the cycle of self-destruction.
They told me I was in between two major blocks of my life and I needed to write a book to bridge the gap between them, that I would not be able to speak of these things until I wrote it. The experience deeply shook my reality, but after much resistance the book is nearly done.
My most recent experience was in January. I was meditating and felt the familiar pull of levitation. I was pulled high up into space, communicating with the Four. I found myself back in bed, my body heavy and strange. The light wouldn’t click on. I was in a honeycomb matrix that stretched out in every direction. The four beings emerged from where my bedroom wall should have been, and told me this matrix is what reality, this earth plane, hangs on.
They told me they were showing me a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the mechanics of reality. They said that it’s malleable and shifts in response to what I focus on, and I need to learn how to work with it.
Nadine Lalich, 69, retired paralegal in Albuquerque, and author of “Alien Experiences” and “Evolution.” I grew up in Michigan, south of Detroit. My grandparents were born in Croatia. My father was obsessed with astronomy. He told stories about flying, had disappearances. He said “they” would come back and take him off planet. My aunt Pat said men in black appeared to her at her door. I’ve seen several different species working together, small grays, tall whites, mantis beings, men in black. One was short statured with pointed ears, an elf figure.
At about 10, I walked into the living room and my parents and brother were slumped in front of the TV, unconscious. I could see the test pattern. There was somebody outside that came into the kitchen with me. We wouldn’t talk about this stuff. We weren’t that type of family. At 16, my boyfriend I drove to Metropark for an afternoon picnic. At dusk we saw this craft over our head. It jolted us. We followed it and lost time. We pulled over and fell asleep. He was never quite the same afterward. Later we married and divorced.
In 1991, on a camping trip to Sedona with my friend Pam, I woke up at 3 a.m. with rustling sounds outside the van. The door opened and I was blinded by the light. A long thin arm with three fingers and a thumb reached in. The next thing I knew I was standing at the back of the van paralyzed, with two small bald children on each side.
I felt myself levitate. I was going toward the light. An hour later I was dropped through the roof of the van. Boom! All my belongings were gone from the picnic table. I told Pam something terrible happened to me, I’ve got to go home.
For a few years I was in and out of denial. Thank goodness I began to record it in journals. I do believe some are physical entities who desire to eradicate hatred and violence within the human species. They may have eliminated it within themselves, or perhaps evolved without such intense emotion. They can show you your mind as a hologram projected into the air.
They showed me a picture of crafts coming, something that looks like a capsule burrowing down into the ground. And they showed me an area that looked like it was outside Las Vegas in the desert. You watched as it whirled in, scissor arms burrowing into the earth and telepathically suggested they had the capability to affect the neuro-processes of a whole city if they wanted to.
I no longer feel threatened. I’m not someone who believes they will take over our planet. They just don’t want us to expand our nuclear material. I do think some species are going to come into the open.
I have an innate trust in the infinite source that underlies all manifestation. It is an intelligent, powerful, and creative force that seeks to expand into the universe. Once you get through the fear, you realize, wait a minute! I’m still here. If they were going to take my life it would have happened by now. I have faith in the power that creates. Sometimes I call it “God” or the “Force.”
Ralph Blumenthal
Area 51 Engineer Reveals The Secrets Behind the Mysterious Base ( The Debrief )
Former Veteran and Author TD Barnes Dives Deep into The Real Story Behind Area 51
Since the CIA first revealed its existence in 2013, Area 51 has been host to exotic engineering projects both real and imagined.
Now, in the most recent episode of “Rebelliously Curious,” The Debrief’s Chrissy Newton sits down with Area 51 veteran engineer TD Barnes to learn about his decades working at the top-secret facility, how he and the other men who worked there still stay in touch all of these years later, and all of the top-secret things he did that he is finally able to reveal.
Barnes tells Newton he was first brought into the CIA-run Area 51 because of his expertise in cutting-edge radar systems he had used during his time with the United States Army. “Basically RADAR, I’m the electronic guy,” said Barnes. “I was the hypersonic specialist. I was tracking fast planes.”
That skill, said Barnes, along with his strong professional and personal resume, led the CIA to target him to work on the A-12. “We were developing the fastest plane that’s ever been built,” Barnes tells Newton. “And the A-12 actually flew higher and faster than the SR-71.”
An artist’s rendering of the upcoming SR-72. (Image: Lockheed Martin)
“Because it remained top secret until 1991, the SR-71 set all kinds of speed records,” Barnes adds with a sardonic smile. “But from day one, we were faster and higher flying.”
Barnes explained all of the technical challenges of making a plane that flies at Mach three, and at an altitude over 60,000 feet.
“Even the windshield gets to 800 degrees,” said Barnes, noting how this extreme heat not only necessitated the use of Titanium just like the SR-71, but also forced the team to invent an entirely new set of tools and equipment just to work with the incredibly hard metal. “We had to invent the fuel we used in them, new hydraulics, everything had to be reinvented for that plane.”
“We could have gone even faster if it wasn’t for the heat,” added Barnes. “Temperature was our biggest enemy.”
Next Barnes talks about the incredible advances made in RADAR systems during his long tenure at Area 51, noting that “we got it (the radar signature) down to where a bird showed up more [prominently] than the prototype.”
In fact, added Barnes, they were so successful in minimizing the plane’s radar signature that the vehicle itself was no longer the biggest risk factor for enemy detection. “We got the prototype down to where the rim of the pilot’s glasses showed up more than the plane did. And that was before computers.”
With recent declassifications, Barnes said he is finally able to talk about his work, including the rigorous selection process he and his fellow engineers underwent, a process he says eliminated 3 out of every 4 otherwise perfectly qualified candidates. “If your wife talked too much, or she gambled too much, that was it,” said Barnes “Your family could get you disqualified.”
“My wife didn’t know where I was working until 2009,” added Barnes. “And the CIA told us there were five spies for every one of us.”
This environment of secrecy, said Barnes, led to him and his fellow engineers socializing almost exclusively with each other’s families, primarily so the wives didn’t have to lie about where they worked. “They hated that,” Barnes said.
And, he says, that group has lasted through the decades, with a ‘Veterans of Area 51 Reunion’ taking place every other year since his retirement in 2006. Known as the Roadrunners, it’s a group that Barnes says not only includes his fellow civilian contract engineers but everyone and anyone that worked together at the notorious top-secret facility, including cooks, janitors, military officers, and even CIA agents.
“We did not take notes,” said Barnes when recalling the high level of secrecy employed by the CIA. “Even if you made a doodle or a Mickey Mouse on a piece of paper, it was confiscated.”
Unfortunately, said Barnes, that situation has made it hard for historians to piece together what exactly took place at the top-secret facility, a problem faced by Barnes himself since he has worked for the CIA in that capacity since his retirement.
In another segment of the video, Newton asks Barnes about the connection between Area 51 and UFOs. “No one talked about UFOs at Area 51 until the CIA took over in 1979,” said Barnes.
However, he added, if the sunlight hit the A-12 just right it looked like a silver dollar 15 miles up, leading his team to paint it. “The weight of the paint cost us 1,500 feet of altitude,” he recalled with a smirk that seemed to indicate he is still annoyed about the altitude concession to this day.
When asked whether some of the flights of the A-12 could have accounted for reports of UFOs in the area, Barnes detailed the procedure the CIA would go through to make sure the flights of the A-12 remained confidential. This included contacting the FAA and nearby military installations, warning them that something would be flying up at 60,000 feet and that they were not to record it or talk about it.
“There’s going to be a plane flying today above 60,000 feet,” Barnes said, acting out the CIA officer calling the various installations. “Do not report it. Do not mention it.”
“They alerted everybody,” added Barnes before once again acting out the CIA man on the phone. “There’s gonna be something flying today. Shut your eyes.”
At the end of the interview, Newton asked Barnes about a number of high profile UFO community figures and incidents, including alleged Area 51 whistleblower Bob Lazar, real-world DoD whistleblower and former AATIP head Lue Elizondo, the now famed USS Nimitz ‘Tic-Tac’ incident, and whether or not we are in possession of a crashed craft made from “off-world” technology.“This is just my opinion,” said Barnes about a possible alien craft at Area 51, “but I think we…”
Christopher Plain
Humans could do nothing if aliens invade earth in UFOs, says top expert ( IBT )
Seth Shostak predicted that even the advanced weapon developed by humans will not be capable enough to combat an advanced alien species
Several Hollywood movies like Independence Day and Mars Attack have showcased how a potential alien invasion will look like. In most of these Hollywood flicks, humans used to emerge victorious by defeating the deadly aliens that reach earth from the distant nooks of the universe. However, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) expert, Seth Shostak believes that a real alien invasion will not be like the ones often portrayed in films, as humans do not have the arsenal to combat an attack from an advanced civilization.
An alien invasion and its repercussions
SETI is a non-profit research organization in California's Silicon
Valley that scans the skies looking for alien life that could be
thriving somewhere else in the universe. Seth Shostak is now the
institute's senior astronomer, and he is coordinating missions that
could someday result in a crucial human-alien first contact.
According to Shostak, humans could do nothing if aliens come here. He also made it clear that humans did not have a proper plan to combat an alien invasion, as a species capable of reaching earth could be much advanced.
"Say you've got a plan, but it's like the Carib Indians planning what
they'll do if they see Chris Columbus coming across the horizon. He's
going to get into some small boats and come and land on your
island. What are you going to do about that? Bear in mind any alien
travelers that could reach us are very much more advanced
technologically than we are," Shostak told Daily Star.
Human weapons will not be sufficient to combat alien attack
Shostak also added that even the advanced weapon developed by humans will not be capable enough to combat an advanced extraterrestrial species that show the technological advancement to reach the blue planet.
"Our best rockets would take 100,000 years to get to the next star over let alone to one where there might be some aliens – so the conceit that you see in the movies where we take the invaders on is nonsense. If they want to come here and flatten Swindon there's nothing we can do. The only option you have is maybe to negotiate," added Shostak.
Recently, Nick Pope who had previously worked for the UK government in their UFO search program also claimed that humans are helpless if an alien invasion takes place. He added that there is no action plan to combat an alien invasion.
Nirmal Narayanan
Congress considers permanent UFO investigation office ( The Washington Times )
Congress is considering setting up a permanent UFO investigation office primarily focused on terrestrial threats.
Section 1652 of House Bill HR. 4350, referring to the “Establishment of [an] Office to Address Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” states: “Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence, shall establish an office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense to carry out, on a Department-wide basis, the mission currently performed by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force as of the date of the enactment of this Act.”
Consumed by more pressing budgetary matters, the House on Wednesday postponed further proceedings on the bill, delaying a final decision.
The House bill and its Senate companion make it clear that the federal government’s interest in UAPs — the official Department of Defense term for UFOs — strictly concerns possible foreign espionage activities rather than extraterrestrials.
On June 25, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published an unclassified preliminary assessment of UAPs, evaluating a growing number of sightings in recent years as a potential security threat.
Prepared for the congressional intelligence and armed services committees, the document noted that it came in response to a Senate request in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 “to submit an intelligence assessment of the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defense Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) has made in understanding this threat.”
Out of 144 reported incidents of UFOs, the report explained away only one as a weather balloon, leaving the remainder of the sightings unresolved.
Sean Salai
Atlas V launch spotted across West Norfolk called 'UFO' by stargazers ( Lynn News )
About two hours later it performed a reversing manoeuvre, releasing clouds of vapour.
One Lynn Resident posted to Facebook saying: "It's a UFO, I've never seen one this large before or moving in this way."
Another said: "I was staring in awe, I've been waiting years to see something like this and my heart was thumping hoping to make contact, I was disappointed when I learned it was just a NASA rocket."
Another just posted in a UFO forum saying "it's time."
John Millward, a resident of Downham, captured a great shot of the rocket as it entered the atmosphere.
He posted the image to social media saying: "The Atlas V rocket entering the atmosphere this evening."
Eve Tawfick
Savona e provincia: altri UFO ( MEDITERRANews )
Verso la fine di Agosto molte persone segnalavano all’associazione ricerca italiana aliena(A.R.I.A) il passaggio schizofrenico di un oggetto sferico bianco....
....di media grandezza( si presume come un campo da calcio o poco meno) che avrebbe tracciato il suo percorso da Imperia passando per Loano, Finale Ligure , Calice Ligure e dirigersi verso Alessandria . Anche stasera (27/09/2021)sono giunte segnalazioni di un oggetto sferico bianco descritto come quello avvistato in Agosto ,il presidente e investigatore ufologo Angelo Maggioni conferma l’esclusione del passaggio della ISS che avveniva tra le 20:20(in un primo passaggio) e tra le 21:50(secondo passaggio), il breve filmato è delle ore 20:00 circa . La sua velocità è alquanto sostenuta non compatibile con un satellite e si desume possa essere tra i 1000 e 6000 metri di altezza .La sua direzione , secondo la descrizione di un testimone era, provenienza Ovest diretto a Est luce prevalentemente bianca (viva) .L’ufologo spiega che la dinamica descritta e osservata sembrerebbe compatibile con quella svoltasi a fine Agosto il che potrebbe far supporre possa trattarsi dello stesso oggetto , non sarebbe una anomalia che nella stessa zona possa apparire lo stesso oggetto più volte, una di queste zone calde ad esempio è la Valmalenco (SO) e Capannori (LU) , dove possiamo indubbiamente scontrarci con oggetti di ultima generazione militare e che vengono testati all’insaputa della grande massa e per questo poi essere associati ad UFO.
Un altro fatto indubbio è che la Liguria ,e specialmente tra Finale e Savona vi sia un’alta frequenza di oggetti volanti non identificati ( sia chiaro la stima della frequenza si basa su una scala di anni e non di certo in giorni come alcuni visionari del Nord Italia vorrebbero far credere) La Liguria non è particolarmente attiva militarmente ma forse potrebbe risultare un ottimo teatro di testaggio militare in quanto è provvista di monti e mare in un arco davvero breve, insomma spiega l’ufologo , se dovessimo pensare a test militari la Liguria offre sia l’aspetto montano che marino e tutto a pochi passi , se invece dovessimo valutare l’evento sotto chiave ufologica intesa di altri mondi allora il mio pensiero va a qualche tipo di energia sconosciuta che a loro interessa e che noi o sottovalutiamo (non conoscendone tutte le proprietà) oppure a noi ancora sconosciuta… Invito tutti a inviarci il materiale e segnalazioni alla nostra mail di riferimento inforicercaaliena@gmail.com
Hamlet
Thursday, September 23, 2021
UFO special: The seven strangest unexplained sightings in Scotland's skies ( The Herald )
FROM the nation's fascination with Elon Musk's latest ventures to fevered speculation about military aircraft being spotted soaring above our rooftops, it suddenly seems like many of us are gazing towards the heavens.
Three declassified videos newly released by the Pentagon showing US Navy pilots encountering "unidentified aerial phenomena" – or what the rest of us might call UFOs – has helped stoke further intrigue about what mysterious objects may be traversing our skies.
There's been a flurry of unexplained sightings reported around the globe – in recent months Belgium has recorded its highest number since the country's famed "UFO wave" 30 years ago.
Scotland is no stranger to a stellar UFO story either. In May, an Airdrie supermarket worker took photographs that he claimed showed a strange blueish-green "flying saucer" and a diamond-shaped cluster of "neon beams" while walking home from work.
Here, we look at some of our favourite tales of strange sightings in the sky.
Seven of Scotland's strangest UFO sightings:
West Lothian: A close encounter
Forestry worker Robert Taylor, below, found himself at the heart of one of Scotland's most famous UFO mysteries when he stumbled across a "a huge flying dome" in a woodland clearing near Dechmont Law in Livingston on November 9, 1979.
As he approached the hovering object, two spheres, each about three feet wide with protruding metal spikes "similar to sea mines", dropped down and raced towards him.
Members of the British UFO Research
Association National Conference with Robert Taylor at the site he saw a
UFO near Livingston, West Lothian, in 1979
Taylor claimed to have experienced an acrid smell and the sensation of being dragged. He lost consciousness.
When Taylor awoke, disorientated and with a throbbing headache, the objects were gone.
His trousers were ripped in peculiar fashion, and there were grazes on his legs and chin.
Police who accompanied Taylor back to the site found "ladder-shaped marks" in the soil where the craft was said to have hovered, and further marks following the path of the mine-like objects.
While it would later be suggested that he had suffered an epileptic seizure, mini-stroke or hallucinated after ingesting deadly nightshade berries, Taylor, who died in 2007, never sought publicity or financial gain – and always stood by every word of his account.
The case remains unique in British history as the only example of a UFO sighting becoming the subject of a criminal investigation.
The Falkirk Triangle: Scotland's UFO capital
The phenomenon known as the "Falkirk Triangle" – which includes Bonnybridge and Camelon – first began to gain attention in 1992 with the area laying claim to around 300 sightings a year.
A family out for a walk on a March evening in 1992 spoke of witnessing a basketball-sized blue light hovering on the back road from Hallglen to Bonnybridge and claimed to hear a sound similar to a "door opening" followed by a "howl" (unsurprisingly they didn't hang around).
A video of an orange oval light above Falkirk, changing shape to becoming a white disc – the classic "flying saucer" shape – then disappearing suddenly was captured in October 1996. The clip went viral worldwide.
Billy Buchanan photographed in UFO hotspot Bonnybridge. Picture: Gordon Terris/The Herald
Reported sightings became so prolific that councillor Billy Buchanan, now the Falkirk provost, has lobbied three prime ministers – David Cameron, Tony Blair and John Major – over the years, asking that an investigation be launched (as yet that has been unforthcoming).
While many of the eerie accounts – which range from seeing "big, black and cigar-shaped" objects to "a bright light criss-crossed by stripes of different colours" – are thought to be misidentifications caused by planes, satellites, weather balloons or planets, some simply can't be explained.
One theory posited by ufologists is that the Falkirk Triangle could contain a window into another dimension, other worlds, the past or the future. We will leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Blairgowrie: Scotland's earliest UFO?
A bizarre incident in Perthshire was reported in the Annual Register of 1767. It described a pyramid-shaped object over the River Ericht that moved "with great speed and disappeared a little above Blairgowrie", leaving a trail of destruction that included a partly destroyed house and bridge.
The area surrounding the town is said to be another hotbed of UFO activity, with reports of strange balls of light in the sky and the location of Scotland's first ever crop circle in 1990.
Blairgowrie couple Sid and Gwen Freeman experienced a series of unsettling encounters during April 1984, including a UFO hovering over their garden and a visit from 12 men dressed in black.
Glasgow: Floating entities and a flying railway carriage
In the west end of Glasgow two curious incidents – 21 years apart – were reported within the same, small geographic area. The first, in 1955, was at Belhaven Terrace where children playing outside were terrified by several entities floating above the ground dressed in long white clothes.
In nearby Westbourne Gardens, in 1976, a resident said he watched a silver disc-shaped object move towards his flat window and hover 100ft above the ground. Witnesses in two nearby flats corroborated his account of events.
Have you spotted a UFO over Scotland? Get in touch! (Stock feature image)
Across the city, a man waiting at a bus stop on Menock Road saw what he claimed looked like a railway carriage-shaped object passing 20ft above his head.
The incident took place in December 1983, with the witness reporting being able to see three windows at the front and a glimpse of swirling yellow smoke inside. Afterwards, he described a sensation of time standing still while watching it.
Prestwick airport: An unexplained radar blip
A series of files released by the Ministry of Defence in 2010 revealed details of what has been dubbed the "Prestwick Airport incident", where an air traffic controller tracked a fast-moving and unexplained flying object on radar.
The event, recorded in February 1999, sparked an extensive investigation by RAF air defence staff who impounded radar tapes. However, a report concluded that no additional evidence could be found to corroborate what the air traffic controller had spotted.
In August 2003, a member of the public in West Kilbride wrote to the Ministry of Defence to report an a "fluorescent green UFO, saucer shaped" that was "harassing" a plane near Prestwick Airport.
The A70 Abduction: Missing hours
Travelling along the A70 near Harperrig Reservoir in West Lothian on August 17, 1992, Garry Wood and Colin Wright saw a two-tiered, disc-shaped object above the road.
According to their testimony, Wood put his foot down on the accelerator and as they passed beneath the UFO, it appeared to emit a "curtain of white light". The car began shuddering and they emerged to find themselves driving on the wrong side of the road.
When Wood and Wright arrived in the South Lanarkshire village of Tarbrax, where they were due to drop off a satellite TV system, they discovered that several hours were unaccounted for. Afterwards they underwent hypnosis sessions, with both men recalling an alien abduction scenario and being subjected to a medical-type examination.
Dunfermline: Angler's unexpected catch
A metallic disc-shaped craft was caught on camera as it hovered above Craigluscar Reservoir near Dunfermline, Fife, on February 19, 1994.
Ian Macpherson, a member of the local angling club and a keen artist, was taking photographs to assist with a painting he was working on. He was first alerted to something out of the ordinary by a humming noise, similar to that from high voltage power lines.
Macpherson describes a sudden uneasy feeling as he turned towards the water to see the object coming towards him. He stood frozen, watching it for more than 15 minutes.
According to his statement: "The craft came close enough for me to see that it was definitely metallic and had several points of diffused light on its underside, inside a darker coloured rim."
It was only as the disc flew off at high speed that Macpherson felt able to raise his camera and take two photographs. He said: "The craft's acceleration was phenomenal – by the time I'd wound the film on between the two shots, it was a mere dot in the sky."
By his own admission, Macpherson had no interest in the subject of UFOs. Subsequent checks with the RAF, airports and the police, confirmed no known air traffic at the time.
Susan Swarbrick
Blink 182’s Tom Delonge on leaving the group to prove that UFOs are real ( TORONTO STAR )
/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/entertainment/music/2021/09/23/blink-182s-tom-delonge-on-leaving-the-group-to-prove-that-ufos-are-real/ava_2021_jw_0701_v1_large.jpg)
Let’s get this out of the way: there are a lot of people that owe Tom Delonge an apology. Of course, it’s no surprise that when a pop culture figure vacates his empirical post to chase an unlikely cause, there will be detractors. But perhaps no case has been so public — and more importantly, publicly wrong — than those who doubted Delonge when he left Blink 182, one of the most popular bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s, to ostensibly prove UFOs are real. Yet here we are six years later, and the man who once waggishly sang about his desire to copulate with a canine is being credited for confirming the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (That’s govspeak for UFOs).
Which is why it would be understandable if Delonge spent his current promotional tour in support of “Lifeforms,” his group Angels & Airwaves’ upcoming sixth album, castigating his critics. But instead, as he sits in his car looking out at the Pacific Ocean not far from his home in San Diego, the 45-year-old offers grace to his detractors.
“I knew that it would be like that for a minute,” he said. “When I started saying that stuff people obviously thought I was crazy, that I’d lost the plot and was wearing a tinfoil hat. But that didn’t matter to me because I was in important briefings — I’d been brought into discussions that, frankly, no other civilian had. And now you see (the results): I mean, literally, the announcement that UFOs are real from the Navy and the Department of Defense had my name attached to it and now Congress is calling for an agency (in the style of) Homeland Security. That’s a big deal!”
Delonge’s path to becoming the face of viable UFO research predates his time in Blink 182. When he was in junior high school, he came across a book about the paranormal. Sparking his interest, he “put a pin in it” until he began touring with the group in the early 90s. As he set to travel across the United States in a van with nothing to do (“this was before smartphones”), he grabbed the paranormal book and went down the rabbit hole. With each successively larger tour, Delonge’s library grew to include more titles documenting UFO encounters with the military.
“I realized it’s a super rich vein of knowledge,” he said. “You’re reading about physics, quantum mechanics and national security, and you’re reading about more esoteric stuff like consciousness and so on.”
Despite Blink’s swelling success, as his interest in the world of investigations ballooned, Delonge said he became more estranged from the group’s juvenile outlook. “When we got into Blink, it was all about being as funny and as fast and energetic as we could be to rebel against our broken families; it was a very specific way of always laughing and having fun and feeling free,” he explains. “But as I got older and became more self aware, I kind of felt like it was time to go a little bit more inward.”
He soon quit the band for the first time and formed the “ultra serious” Angels and Airwaves to artistically explore this existential side of himself, a move he now admits came from insecurity born.
By 2014, Delonge had reluctantly reunited with Blink but said he was mentally ready to quit releasing “eternal youth” music in favour of exploring ”an art project that was communicating larger themes across multiple platforms, like film, music and books.” To facilitate this, he launched the production company To The Stars.
As he recalls, it was while chasing down one of these stories that he “stumbled upon a clearer picture of what was going on.”
“Over 20 years, I just kind of put a lot of pieces together and felt like I found the missing glue to how humanity got to this point,” he recalls.
In fear of being accused of releasing state secrets “like Ed Snowden,” he decided he needed to “socialize” his ideas with the people in power. He began seeking out officials associated with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a hiding in plain sight division of the Pentagon which investigates reports of unidentified flying objects. And, in 2017, launched To the Stars... Academy of Arts & Sciences, which included the AATIP’s former director, Luis Elizondo, alongside other prominent former intelligence and government officials.
When the New York Times ran its front page expose on the government’s UFO agency, To The Stars was credited for its work in making the program known to the public. The story set off a series of events which, this past June, culminated in an unclassified report by the secretary of defence and director of national intelligence on everything the government knows about UFOs.
“That was the first step,” Delonge said. Now, with the government “moving into the task force accountability, oversight, budget requirements and national security legislation,” he’s finally able to focus on “what I should be focusing on, like communicating the stuff through major motion picture television, series, nonfiction, documentaries.” And, naturally, his work in Angels and Airwaves. “My goal is, if the band ever demands that kind of a crowd or experience, that all these things will come to life in the performance and around the venue for people to interact with. Like a travelling ComicCon of sorts that is more real than science fiction.”
Which brings up an interesting side note to the revelations brought on by To The Stars research. While they have proved that the government had been keeping track of UFOs, they didn’t exactly make the point that they were extraterrestrial. A realization not lost on the author of Blink 182’s 1999 anthem, “Aliens Exist.” “The evidence does not seem to suggest that they’re coming from planets,” he concedes. Rather, “it seems to suggest that they are materializing and displacing rather than travelling in a linear fashion — that the physical reality, as we see it, is all taking place in the past, present and future all at one moment. That time is not linear, it’s parallel. So if that’s the case then you have sufficiently advanced societies that can traverse time through frequency and displacement of space time.”
“It gets a little tricky,” he adds.
If that concept makes you roll your eyes, consider the track record of the man saying it. Asked why he thinks he’s been able to succeed where so many truth seekers have failed, Delonge pauses.
“Having Blink become really big taught me anything’s possible,” he explains. “Once you feel success and realize that you’re capable of it, it just gives you the balls to go do anything you want.”
Jonathan Dekel
A UFO on the A70 and other out-of-this world encounters ( THE SCOTSMAN )
Events of a seemingly paranormal character are surprisingly common and can occur just about anywhere. Most of us spend a lot of time travelling on roads. Therefore, it's perhaps only to be expected that many encounters with the strange will occur on our highways and byways. Reports have come from all over the British Isles, with Scotland producing its fair share.
A popular view is that ghosts are spirits, but I have my doubts about that notion, not least because there are reports of inanimate objects, such as cars, appearing in an apparitional form. For example, a Dr Martin Moar informed me of an experience that he and a fellow climber had had while driving on the Isle of Skye in the early 1970s. Just before a small hump in the road, they pulled into a passing place to make way for an oncoming car. The approaching vehicle disappeared behind the hump but didn’t reappear, and there seemed to be nowhere it could have gone without being seen.
Over the years, there have been multiple reports of motorists encountering apparitional figures on the A75 and B721 roads between Gretna and Dumfries. For example, in March 1995, a couple called Garson and Monica Miller were driving towards Annan on a stretch of the A75 known as the Kinmount Straight when the figure of a man jumped out in front of their vehicle. A Donna Maxwell had a similar experience on the old A75 (now known as the B721) in the summer of 1997. The most dramatic story about the A75 concerns two brothers who allegedly encountered numerous apparitional figures, both animal and human, on the A75 one night in April 1962. However, I strongly suspect that this particular tale is an invention. Furthermore, some of the material available on the internet concerning ghostly phenomena on these roads is inaccurate and unreliable.
Road users sometimes report seeing out of place big cats. In October 1980, a live female puma was found in a baited trap on the Cannich Estate in the Highlands. That could be seen as lending support to the view that a population of flesh-and-blood big cats is living wild in this country. However, there are aspects of the big cat phenomenon suggesting that many of these entities could be of an apparitional or paranormal nature.
Peter McCue
The use of hypnosis to elicit recollections of supposed alien abduction experiences is controversial, given the possibility of fantasy and suggestion creating false memories. But setting aside the hypnotically elicited material, this case is still intriguing. In terms of an environmental theory, it might be suggested that Wood and Wright had experienced an electromagnetic event that had affected their brains, causing a period of amnesia. However, it’s noteworthy that Wood’s amnesia appears to have begun and ended at the same time as Wright’s. Since people’s physiology varies, that would perhaps be surprising if they were responding to some sort of ambient magnetic field or radiation. There’s also the question of where they and their car were during the period of missing time. Did they pull off the road and sit in the vehicle in some sort of trance for an hour or more, and while still in that state, was Wood able to drive away before he and his companion snapped back into normal consciousness? On the other hand, if the event is construed as an actual physical abduction, there’s still the question of what happened to the car during that period.
Paranormal Encounters on Britain’s Roads: Phantom Figures, UFOs and Missing Time by Peter McCue, published by The History Press, £12.99, is out now
Augmented Reality Dogfight Training For Fighter Pilots Has Made A Major Leap In Capabilit ( The War Zone )
Red 6 continues to make progress in developing its novel air-to-air training system after receiving a multi-million dollar US Air Force contract.
Red 6, a company that aims to completely upend how America’s tactical aircraft communities conduct air-to-air combat training through the use of augmented reality, or AR, has made new progress in the development of the software and hardware that make up its novel system. The firm recently demonstrated the ability to conduct training sorties that pit a real pilot against multiple simulated adversaries, as well as work with a friendly virtual wingman to engage a single mock threat, rather than just one-on-one engagements. The pilot “sees” these other synthetic “aircraft” through an AR headset, the design of which continues to become more capable, but also smaller, and is now able to fit entirely under the visor of a fighter pilot’s helmet.
Dan Robinson, the founder and CEO of Red 6, who is also a former U.K. Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot and the first non-American to get behind the stick of an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, shared details about these achievements and talked about where his company is looking to take its work in the future with The War Zone on the sidelines of the Air Force Association's annual Air, Space, and Cyber Conference yesterday. You can read more about Red 6's history and its vision in this past War Zone feature interview with Robinson.
Red 6 has already made important strides in the development of its technology in recent years. In August, the company announced that the Air Force had awarded it a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract, worth up to $70 million over the next five years, to continue work on "commercialization" of its artificial intelligence (AI) driven Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System (ATARS).
A pilot being able to use ATARS to interact with multiple simulated aircraft at once is an important step forward in that direction. While it is certainly impressive for a human being wearing the headset to be able to square off against a single mock opponent in this hybrid real-world/virtual training environment, a capability the company first demonstrated last year, it is hardly representative of what actual aerial combat would look like.
This would be especially true with regard to training meant to simulate higher-end air operations against a potential peer adversary, such as China. Red 6’s Robinson specifically highlighted how a potential major conflict with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would include a large number of hostile fighters, including advanced types such as the stealthy J-20, as well as dense integrated air defenses and other threats. He also noted that his company is now able to add surface-to-air missiles into the AR training environment, in addition to enemy jets, further adding to the overall realism of the simulated threat picture.
Beyond threats, Red 6’s system now also allows real pilots to work with simulated AI-driven wingmen in AR, allowing for two-on-one engagements with mock hostile aircraft. In the past, the company had said it was able to insert friendly aircraft, including tankers, into this synthetic training, but pilots were only able to conduct general flight maneuvers in relation to them. Red 6 plans to continue working to add more types of assets — in the air and on the surface — to its simulations as time goes on.As work on the software-based components of Red 6’s system has progressed, so has the development of the actual AR goggles that are key to the entire thing. Robinson told The War Zone the headset’s design is capable of displaying increasingly higher fidelity visuals and is otherwise becoming more powerful, while also becoming smaller and generally easier to manage. The latest iteration of the design is notably entirely self-cooled, whereas earlier versions had been connected to an external cooling system. This has helped to make it compact enough to go under the visor of a pilot's helmet instead of a more clunky add-on peripheral.
An older version of Red 6’s headset.
Red 6’s Robinson says his company’s ultimate goal is to provide an AR-enabled hybrid training environment that is so robust and comprehensive that the Air Force, or any other future customer, would never need to have a physical aircraft fly in a “red air” adversary role again. He described this vision as essentially being an extremely high-fidelity synthetic training capability similar to the one described in the novel Ender's Game and depicted in the 2013 movie adaption, as seen in the clip below.
The core issue that Robinson sees going forward when it comes to air-to-air combat training is an inability to scale up actual red air capacity to support scenarios that accurately represent high-end conflicts. He described a current reality in which there is a “chronic undersupply” of adversary capacity, but also a “massive demand signal” that military air arms such as the U.S. Air Force cannot reasonably expect to fill through a mix of their own organic manned and unmanned aircraft supplemented by contractor-operated jets. He noted that this would be especially true in the future, as the need to give pilots the opportunity to face advanced stealthy fifth-generation threats continues to grow. This is something The War Zone has touched on separately in the past.
While Robinson acknowledged that ground-based simulators would continue to be an important part of the overall air-to-air combat training picture, he said those systems cannot fully recreate the “cognitive load” and other stresses that a pilot experiences when flying a real airplane. This, in turn, inherently limits how realistic the training they provide can be.
In addition, the Red 6 founder and CEO pointed out that the company would provide a way for services such as the Air Force to get the very most out of what could be limited non-combat flying hours for individual pilots. An AR-enabled system could allow for even the most routine training sorties to include a large number of simulated aircraft, providing opportunities for more regular large force exercises without the costs and complexities required to get high numbers of real planes in the air together.
Red 6’s founder and CEO Dan Robinson wearing an earlier version of his company’s AR headset.
At the same time, there have been some suggestions that an AR-enabled training environment might offer more capability than is actually necessary, especially given the expectation that many air-to-air engagements in the future will be fought at beyond visual range (BVR). Other companies are working to expand their abilities to simulate a variety of threats synthetically in real-world training, but without the kind of direct visual representation that Red 6’s AR system offers.
Robinson countered by explaining that while future aerial combat will certainly involve a significant number of BVR engagements, the overall volume of aircraft in the battlespace, especially in a high-end conflict, means that visual-range engagements are inevitable. As a result, “we better know what we're doing within visual range,” he said.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether Red 6 can meet these ambitious goals. The recent contract award from the Air Force makes clear that there is substantial interest now in what the company is developing, which offers the potential for massive cost savings to the service over its current mix of air-to-air training capabilities. It could help free up fighters, especially advanced fifth-generation ones, and their pilots from having to spend valuable time acting as aggressors, too.
Red 6’s AR technology could also have future applications beyond air-to-air training, as well. Earlier this year, a number of Air Force pilots had the opportunity to experience what the system has to offer, with the service specifically highlighting how it could be useful for B-1 bomber pilots to conduct aerial refueling training without any need for actual tankers, which are always in high demand.
A member of the Red 6 team talks about the company’s AR headset with U.S. Air Force officers.
There is the also potential for personnel in the air, as well as at sea and on the ground, to interact with simulated assets and each other in future exercises using this system.
Right now, Red 6 is set to begin integrating its training system onto one of the Air Force's T-38 Talon jet trainers as part of its SBIR contract, with future plans to install it onto an F-16 Viper fighter jet, as well. The company has been conducting its own flight testing using a modified piston-engine Berkut aircraft.
The Berkut ultralight aircraft that Red 6 has been using to flight test its AR system.
“We are excited to continue to grow our presence within the U.S. Air Force as we harness the power of our one-of-a-kind technology in support of the warfighter,” Robinson said in a press release regarding the contract award in August. "I couldn’t be more excited for our future warfighters, as the adoption of the Red 6 technology will dramatically improve the quality of training that they will receive. We owe it to them to continue to innovate so they remain the best trained and best-equipped warfighters in the world."
Red 6 has already been able to advance the state of its potentially game-changing technology relatively quickly in recent years. It will be very interesting to see where the company can take it now with substantial cooperation and financial backing from the Air Force.
Joseph Trevithick
The Space Force Doesn’t Talk About UFOs, But New Legislation May Force It To ( The Debrief )
Last week, The Debrief reported that legislation contained within the FY 2022 National Defense Authorization Act called for the establishment of a permanent office to address “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “UAP,” more commonly known as UFOs. However, contained within that same bill, now on the floor of the House of Representatives, is a much more intriguing section concerning the Space Force, and its classified sensor data.
With countless classified sensor systems in Earth’s orbit, the Space Force is literally the “eye in the sky.” If something anomalous and weird is going on up there, it stands to reason that the newest military branch has data on it. Now, it may be forced to declassify that data.
BACKGROUND: The Space Force Sees Everything?
In December 2019, The United States Space Force was formally established and funded as the 8th branch of the US military. General John W. “Jay” Raymond, is the current Chief of Space Operations and sits as one of eight members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, junior to the Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Space Force stated mission is to train and equip space forces in order to protect U.S. and allied interests in space.
Within that stated mission are the capabilities to monitor, track and ultimately categorize space objects to provide warfighters a clear picture for Space Command and Control (C2).
“You can ask some people and they will say space is already a battlefield, similar to cyber.” Dr. Travis Blake, a former Senior Manager at Lockheed Martin who now runs the Physical Sciences division at Kairos Ventures and an expert in Space Domain Awareness, told The Debrief earlier this year. “That has been the case on land, sea, and air, and will be true in space. As soon as someone wants something that someone else has that is seen as required for national sovereignty and advancement above peer countries, fights usually start.”Significant portions of the Space Force’s sensors and data collection tools have remained in the shadows, but the 2022 NDAA may change all that.
With the assistance of the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Kobayashi Maru program and Section 31 team at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, Calif., personnel operating under the Combined Force Space Component Command are supporting U.S. Space Command, providing the United States and its allies with space-related services like GPS tracking and missile warnings to help with ground-based missions. (Image: U.S. Air Force/ Maj. Cody Chiles)
ANALYSIS: The Declassification Process
However, contained in section 1603 of the act, is a directive from the Armed Services Committee to the Chief of Space Operations to review each classified program managed under the authority of Space Force to determine if:
- The level of classification of the program could be changed to a lower level; or
- The program could be declassified.
This review is to be conducted no later than 120 days after the enactment of the NDAA.
Additionally, the Chief of Space Operations may also have to submit a report identifying each program managed under the authority of Space Force and a timeline for implementing classification changes or declassifications
As the Space Force is a newly established entity, the command structure is not readily available for public consumption. However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff developed and published Joint Publication 3-14 Space Operations to provide guidance to plan, execute, and assess joint space operations.
Contained within the publications Executive Summary, space operations would include Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets including “overhead persistent infrared (OPIR), is conducted by an organization’s intelligence collection manager to ensure integrated, synchronized, and deconflicted operations of high-demand assets.”
Furthermore, the document reads, that the Commander of the United States Space Command will maintain Command and Control (C2) through the National Space Defense Center, to integrate the multiple agencies and intelligence personnel for a unified space defense.
“The National Space Defense Center provides warning and attack assessment on spacecraft and executes mission orders received from the combined space tasking order (CSTO) and NRO space tasking order,” it states.
In basic terms, the American space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, which are managed by the Space Force, are about to be reviewed for down classification and potential declassification. It is not often you read legislation calling for highly sensitive classified programs to be placed into a lower classification level for wider dissemination. It’s almost unheard of for those same programs to (looks over left and right shoulder) become declassified.
OUTLOOK: UFOs and The Space Force
Our space-based capabilities have been some of our most guarded secrets for decades. As of May, 2021, the US Department of Defense and various intelligence agencies operate upwards of 170 (known) satellites. Many of these are dedicated intelligence/reconnaissance mission-oriented.
The data collected by these satellite-based intelligence collection platforms are often hidden behind a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) program. If a TS/SCI program is down classified to Secret or Unclassified, it will allow for a wider dissemination across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.
Ultimately, our warfighters will have imagery and potentially other sensor system information that was never available to them previously. However, for those interested in the UFO topic, this could be exciting news.
Back on March 22, 2021, John Ratcliff, former Director of National Intelligence, stated on Fox News Primetime, that UFOs have been observed by US satellite imagery collection platforms. Director Ratcliff further stated that he “wanted to get this information out and declassified before [he] left office” but was unsuccessful. These were surprising words, since American space-based sensors operated by the intelligence community follow a similar “Fight Club” rule. You just don’t talk about them.
It is not hard to imagine that if UAP are buzzing around our skies, they most definitely are being detected by highly sensitive satellite systems. It is not a stretch to suggest that these detections have been going on for some time now, and that elected officials that sit on the various intelligence and defense House and Senate committees have been provided TS/SCI briefings on UAP, some of which is undoubtedly coming from systems that now fall under the C2 of Space Force sensors.
If compartmented programs are down classified to Secret, the data will be easily shared with our international allies through existing mechanisms as directed under Sec. 1652, which was highlighted last week. Information that is Secret can be sanitized to the unclassified level and released to the public much easier than SCI. Furthermore, if the programs are declassified, then the data will be available for public release.
The Space Force has always played coy concerning the topic of UFOs, but if the bill passes, it is likely that they will be fielding a lot of requests concerning black triangles and flying saucers.
Bob Plissken