Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
You know I like my deets flame grilled.
I came across this while searching for pics of a gentleman warrior, which I quite liked.
Hm, it's apparently attributed to William Butler, an 19th century Lieutenant General in the British army. By current standards, he would considered to be a war mongering invader of African. So...yeah. Still, great quote.
I dig that meme too.
I supposed perspective makes all the difference when regarding if a person is perceived as an invader or hero.
Yes though, still a good quote...thanks!
@Disguised
Here are several videos that explain the 11 Dimensions of string-theory, superstring theory and beyond.
Enjoy!!
TEDxBoulder - Thad Roberts - Visualizing Eleven Dimensions
Michio Kaku: The Multiverse Has 11 Dimensions
Making sense of string theory | Brian Greene
Here are several videos that explain the 11 Dimensions of string-theory, superstring theory and beyond.
Enjoy!!
TEDxBoulder - Thad Roberts - Visualizing Eleven Dimensions
Michio Kaku: The Multiverse Has 11 Dimensions
Making sense of string theory | Brian Greene
Now for a bit of strangeness...real or not?
You decide!
Muhahahaha!
Enjoy!
Mel's Hole Is A Supernatural Infinite Pit That
Revives Animals From The Dead And Remains A Mystery
So many weird things happen in the Pacific Northwest that, comparatively, a mysterious hole in the ground seems pretty innocuous - at first.
Next to numerous Bigfoot sightings and miles of giant mushrooms, the phenomenon of Mel's Hole seems pretty straightforward until you realize that it also happens to be a bottomless pit that brings animals back from the dead.
Mel's Hole is one of the most mysterious places in the state of Washington.
The mystery of Mel's Hole all started with an interview on Coast to Coast AM radio when a caller identifying himself as Mel Waters claimed that he found a real-life bottomless pit on his property.
As you can imagine, things only got creepier from there - Pet Sematary creepy.
Today, this supernatural phenomenon in Washington, like so many others, straddles the line between being famous and elusive.
Curious?
Unnerved?
Both?
Read on for more facts about Mel's Hole, its rise to notoriety, and the bizarre secrets said to hide somewhere in its bottomless depths.
Mel's Hole Used To Be Known As The Devil's Hole
Though Mel Waters (if he ever existed at all) is credited with having brought attention to the pit, the legend itself began long before he came around.
Local residents, authorities, and indigenous tribes knew of the hole for decades before Waters bought his property.
As the story goes, the pit was about nine feet in diameter, with walls constructed out of hand-placed bricks stretching 15 feet down before transitioning into dirt and darkness.
Known popularly as “the Devil's Hole,” the locals all agreed that there was something rather unsettling about the hole's existence, but no one cared - nor wanted - to think too hard about what that "something" might be.
Manastash Ridge residents instead used the hole as a garbage dump and decided not to question the eerie fact that the pit never appeared to fill up.
If It's Not Bottomless, Mel's Hole Is At Least 80,000 Feet Deep
According to Waters's interview with Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell, once Waters realized that the hole wasn't showing any signs of filling up, he decided to test it.
His plan was to bring thousands of feet of fishing line and a sturdy fishing rod out to the hole, add weight to the fishing line, and then measure how far down it went before hitting the bottom.
By the end of hist test, Waters got more than he bargained for: the hole had no bottom.
And if a bottom does exist, it's deep enough that the weighted line failed to go slack after 80,000 feet.
Neither Waters nor anyone else has ever confirmed reaching the bottom.
Animals Are Terrified Of The Hole And Refuse To Go Near It
People who have been brave enough to approach the pit all noticed something peculiar about the area's wildlife - or more aptly, the lack thereof.
Animals obviously hated the hole and would do their best to stay as far away from it as possible.
Waters even reported that his own dogs refused to approach the hole.
When he tried to bring them closer to it, they dug their paws into the ground in protest.
Other visitors even took note of the fact that birds avoided flying directly over it and no other small animals ever appeared near it.
According to various reports, the only signs of wildlife were piles of bones strewn around the mouth of the pit.
The Laws Of Nature Don't Apply To Mel's Hole
After Waters allegedly lowered 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole on his property to try and locate the bottom, he suspected that there might be something more sinister about the hole than its infinite depth.
Waters began performing a variety of other tests in an attempt to better understand this seemingly endless pit.
When he yelled directly into the pit, he heard silence instead of an echo; and if he brought a handheld radio near the hole, it would play music that sounded decades out of date.
Further tests were conducted at a location known as the second Devil's Hole, a pit in Nevada believed to have properties identical to those of the Washington hole.
When a bucket of ice was lowered about 1,500 feet down into the hole, the ice had changed by the time it was brought back up—it felt inexplicably warm, seemed to dry out the air near it, and even became flammable.
Mel's Hole Is Believed To Have The Power To Bring Dead Animals Back To Life
Mel Waters's interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM brought the hole into public consciousness, and one of the stories he told during the call was absolutely chilling.
According to Mel, locals have used the hole to get rid of anything from old equipment to dead cattle.
But, apparently, throwing something down the hole didn't guarantee that it would stay there.
During the interview, Mel claimed that when one of his neighbors' dogs passed away, his neighbor brought the dog to the hole to get rid of it.
The neighbor then allegedly told Mel that after he'd done so, he later saw his dog running in the forest, alive and well—and still wearing the collar that had been around its neck when its body had been brought to the hole.
The Hole Is Believed To Be Haunted By A Nameless, Unexplainable Creature
One of the most skin-crawling stories about Mel's Hole details the fate of a sheep that Mel Waters claims to have lowered into the pit as one of the many experiments he conducted.
The sheep, like Mel's dogs and other local animals, was absolutely terrified of the pit and Mel had to tranquilize it in order to get it close enough to the mouth of the hole.
Curious after hearing about the strange fate of a bucket of ice that apparently became warm and flammable after being lowered into a similar hole, Mel decided to do the same thing with the sheep.
What happened to the sheep, though, was even stranger.
When Mel hoisted the sheep back up out of the hole, it was dead, and it appeared to have been cooked from the inside.
Even stranger was that something appeared to be moving inside it, and when it was cut open, Mel saw something that he described as resembling a fetal seal with human eyes staring back at him.
He immediately threw the creature back into the hole.
When he told the story to curious neighbors, some said that they too had seen a similar creature around the hole before.
Whatever it is, it may be the only thing that can get in and out of Mel's Hole.
There's Another Mel's Hole In Nevada
Mel Waters's property in Washington is home to the original pit that spawned the legend, but it's not the only one.
Another hole is said to exist in Nevada that displays properties very similar to those attributed to the original Mel's Hole.
According to Mel, he's visited the second hole as well, and it's every bit as bizarre and fascinating as the one found on his property.
Birds of an unidentifiable species have been seen circling the Nevada pit, and when Mel attempted to shoot one down for study, he found that the bullets seemed to ricochet right off of them.
If bulletproof birds are any indication, the Nevada hole is likely hiding just as many supernatural secrets as Mel’s.
Mel Claims That The Government Bought His Property To Guard The Hole
The alleged interaction between Mel Waters and the US government, if true, means that Mel's Hole is more important than even Mel himself realized. According to Mel's story, government agents attempted to prevent him from entering his own property, claiming that a plane had crashed there.
When he refused to believe their story, they abruptly switched tacks and offered to lease his land from him for $250,000 on one condition: if he accepted, he would have to leave the country.
Mel, being in dire straits at the time, accepted. He then moved to Australia and didn't return for several years.
When he did, government agents insisted that they had bought his land.
Locals then informed Mel that the area around the pit had been guarded by black vans and helicopters since he left.
Mel Waters Might Not Even Be Real
After Mel Waters's first interview on Coast to Coast AM, no one had any reason to question his identity.
Then his story started to strike a chord. Coast to Coast listeners were enthralled by stories of the pit, so Mel decided to give a second interview.
But, paradoxically, the more Mel stepped into the spotlight, the more interesting he - and his story - seemed to become.
He had been featured on Coast to Coast AM several times before followers of the story began to search local records for his name in hopes of determining the exact location of the hole—and they found nothing.
No property transfers had been conducted in the area during the time that Mel claimed to have sold the land to the government, and no one named Mel Waters had voted, paid taxes, or even lived there.
Whether "Mel" was a hoax or a pseudonym, Mel Waters was ultimately consumed by the mystery of the hole himself.
Mel's Hole Is Geologically Impossible – Or Perhaps It Has Its Own Geology
Among the Coast to Coast AM listeners who took an interest in the story of Mel's Hole was a geologist named Jack Powell.
After hearing Mel describe the characteristics of the pit on the radio, Powell thought he recognized the hole as being an abandoned mine shaft that he had was familiar with from his childhood.
But when Mel revealed that he had lowered at least 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole in order to test its depth, Powell realized that the story was much stranger than he had thought: a hole that deep would not be physically possible.
Based on Powell's geological expertise, this can only mean that Mel Waters designed a spectacular hoax—or that among the many mysteries presented by Mel's Hole is a localized geographical anomaly.
You decide!
Muhahahaha!
Enjoy!
Mel's Hole Is A Supernatural Infinite Pit That
Revives Animals From The Dead And Remains A Mystery
So many weird things happen in the Pacific Northwest that, comparatively, a mysterious hole in the ground seems pretty innocuous - at first.
Next to numerous Bigfoot sightings and miles of giant mushrooms, the phenomenon of Mel's Hole seems pretty straightforward until you realize that it also happens to be a bottomless pit that brings animals back from the dead.
Mel's Hole is one of the most mysterious places in the state of Washington.
The mystery of Mel's Hole all started with an interview on Coast to Coast AM radio when a caller identifying himself as Mel Waters claimed that he found a real-life bottomless pit on his property.
As you can imagine, things only got creepier from there - Pet Sematary creepy.
Today, this supernatural phenomenon in Washington, like so many others, straddles the line between being famous and elusive.
Curious?
Unnerved?
Both?
Read on for more facts about Mel's Hole, its rise to notoriety, and the bizarre secrets said to hide somewhere in its bottomless depths.
Mel's Hole Used To Be Known As The Devil's Hole
Though Mel Waters (if he ever existed at all) is credited with having brought attention to the pit, the legend itself began long before he came around.
Local residents, authorities, and indigenous tribes knew of the hole for decades before Waters bought his property.
As the story goes, the pit was about nine feet in diameter, with walls constructed out of hand-placed bricks stretching 15 feet down before transitioning into dirt and darkness.
Known popularly as “the Devil's Hole,” the locals all agreed that there was something rather unsettling about the hole's existence, but no one cared - nor wanted - to think too hard about what that "something" might be.
Manastash Ridge residents instead used the hole as a garbage dump and decided not to question the eerie fact that the pit never appeared to fill up.
If It's Not Bottomless, Mel's Hole Is At Least 80,000 Feet Deep
According to Waters's interview with Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell, once Waters realized that the hole wasn't showing any signs of filling up, he decided to test it.
His plan was to bring thousands of feet of fishing line and a sturdy fishing rod out to the hole, add weight to the fishing line, and then measure how far down it went before hitting the bottom.
By the end of hist test, Waters got more than he bargained for: the hole had no bottom.
And if a bottom does exist, it's deep enough that the weighted line failed to go slack after 80,000 feet.
Neither Waters nor anyone else has ever confirmed reaching the bottom.
Animals Are Terrified Of The Hole And Refuse To Go Near It
People who have been brave enough to approach the pit all noticed something peculiar about the area's wildlife - or more aptly, the lack thereof.
Animals obviously hated the hole and would do their best to stay as far away from it as possible.
Waters even reported that his own dogs refused to approach the hole.
When he tried to bring them closer to it, they dug their paws into the ground in protest.
Other visitors even took note of the fact that birds avoided flying directly over it and no other small animals ever appeared near it.
According to various reports, the only signs of wildlife were piles of bones strewn around the mouth of the pit.
The Laws Of Nature Don't Apply To Mel's Hole
After Waters allegedly lowered 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole on his property to try and locate the bottom, he suspected that there might be something more sinister about the hole than its infinite depth.
Waters began performing a variety of other tests in an attempt to better understand this seemingly endless pit.
When he yelled directly into the pit, he heard silence instead of an echo; and if he brought a handheld radio near the hole, it would play music that sounded decades out of date.
Further tests were conducted at a location known as the second Devil's Hole, a pit in Nevada believed to have properties identical to those of the Washington hole.
When a bucket of ice was lowered about 1,500 feet down into the hole, the ice had changed by the time it was brought back up—it felt inexplicably warm, seemed to dry out the air near it, and even became flammable.
Mel's Hole Is Believed To Have The Power To Bring Dead Animals Back To Life
Mel Waters's interview with Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM brought the hole into public consciousness, and one of the stories he told during the call was absolutely chilling.
According to Mel, locals have used the hole to get rid of anything from old equipment to dead cattle.
But, apparently, throwing something down the hole didn't guarantee that it would stay there.
During the interview, Mel claimed that when one of his neighbors' dogs passed away, his neighbor brought the dog to the hole to get rid of it.
The neighbor then allegedly told Mel that after he'd done so, he later saw his dog running in the forest, alive and well—and still wearing the collar that had been around its neck when its body had been brought to the hole.
The Hole Is Believed To Be Haunted By A Nameless, Unexplainable Creature
One of the most skin-crawling stories about Mel's Hole details the fate of a sheep that Mel Waters claims to have lowered into the pit as one of the many experiments he conducted.
The sheep, like Mel's dogs and other local animals, was absolutely terrified of the pit and Mel had to tranquilize it in order to get it close enough to the mouth of the hole.
Curious after hearing about the strange fate of a bucket of ice that apparently became warm and flammable after being lowered into a similar hole, Mel decided to do the same thing with the sheep.
What happened to the sheep, though, was even stranger.
When Mel hoisted the sheep back up out of the hole, it was dead, and it appeared to have been cooked from the inside.
Even stranger was that something appeared to be moving inside it, and when it was cut open, Mel saw something that he described as resembling a fetal seal with human eyes staring back at him.
He immediately threw the creature back into the hole.
When he told the story to curious neighbors, some said that they too had seen a similar creature around the hole before.
Whatever it is, it may be the only thing that can get in and out of Mel's Hole.
There's Another Mel's Hole In Nevada
Mel Waters's property in Washington is home to the original pit that spawned the legend, but it's not the only one.
Another hole is said to exist in Nevada that displays properties very similar to those attributed to the original Mel's Hole.
According to Mel, he's visited the second hole as well, and it's every bit as bizarre and fascinating as the one found on his property.
Birds of an unidentifiable species have been seen circling the Nevada pit, and when Mel attempted to shoot one down for study, he found that the bullets seemed to ricochet right off of them.
If bulletproof birds are any indication, the Nevada hole is likely hiding just as many supernatural secrets as Mel’s.
Mel Claims That The Government Bought His Property To Guard The Hole
The alleged interaction between Mel Waters and the US government, if true, means that Mel's Hole is more important than even Mel himself realized. According to Mel's story, government agents attempted to prevent him from entering his own property, claiming that a plane had crashed there.
When he refused to believe their story, they abruptly switched tacks and offered to lease his land from him for $250,000 on one condition: if he accepted, he would have to leave the country.
Mel, being in dire straits at the time, accepted. He then moved to Australia and didn't return for several years.
When he did, government agents insisted that they had bought his land.
Locals then informed Mel that the area around the pit had been guarded by black vans and helicopters since he left.
Mel Waters Might Not Even Be Real
After Mel Waters's first interview on Coast to Coast AM, no one had any reason to question his identity.
Then his story started to strike a chord. Coast to Coast listeners were enthralled by stories of the pit, so Mel decided to give a second interview.
But, paradoxically, the more Mel stepped into the spotlight, the more interesting he - and his story - seemed to become.
He had been featured on Coast to Coast AM several times before followers of the story began to search local records for his name in hopes of determining the exact location of the hole—and they found nothing.
No property transfers had been conducted in the area during the time that Mel claimed to have sold the land to the government, and no one named Mel Waters had voted, paid taxes, or even lived there.
Whether "Mel" was a hoax or a pseudonym, Mel Waters was ultimately consumed by the mystery of the hole himself.
Mel's Hole Is Geologically Impossible – Or Perhaps It Has Its Own Geology
Among the Coast to Coast AM listeners who took an interest in the story of Mel's Hole was a geologist named Jack Powell.
After hearing Mel describe the characteristics of the pit on the radio, Powell thought he recognized the hole as being an abandoned mine shaft that he had was familiar with from his childhood.
But when Mel revealed that he had lowered at least 80,000 feet of fishing line into the hole in order to test its depth, Powell realized that the story was much stranger than he had thought: a hole that deep would not be physically possible.
Based on Powell's geological expertise, this can only mean that Mel Waters designed a spectacular hoax—or that among the many mysteries presented by Mel's Hole is a localized geographical anomaly.
A repost from long ago...
I grew up thinking that beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider.
Beliefs are easy.
The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because “strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself.
As soon as you are proud of a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made it a part of your ego.
Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless you believe the same.
It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are chasing.
Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door.
Take on the beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never be afraid to lose them.
Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.
Believing something is not an accomplishment.
I grew up thinking that beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider.
Beliefs are easy.
The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because “strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself.
As soon as you are proud of a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made it a part of your ego.
Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless you believe the same.
It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are chasing.
Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door.
Take on the beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never be afraid to lose them.
So we occasionally talk about UFOs on this thread.
This story seems to have blown up, so obviously I couldn’t ignore it here.
Usually it’s talk of soft disclosure...as the govt. eases everyone into the idea of life existing elsewhere.
For those of us who have seen strange lights that seem to defy physics of anything human made - this is an interesting bit of validation.
Who or what they are is still debatable and there are many theories and narratives out there as to that answer...perhaps we are a bit closer than we have been for some time.
This has been making the rounds on the national/international news....four Navy pilots witnessed it and confirmed it was not anything “human”.
You can’t get much more reliable in your sources than that.
What do you think?
Enjoy!
WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.
Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.
For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times.
It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.
The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012.
But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence.
For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena.
Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, has had a longtime interest in space phenomena.
Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.
Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program.
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”
Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.
While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy.
“When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said.
But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”
James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said.
“Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”
Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.
In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.
“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.
But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012.
From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A.
He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Pentagon officials say the program ended in 2012, five years after it was created, but the official who led it said that only the government funding had ended then.
Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.
U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military.
In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969.
The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.
Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow.
In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.
Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.
“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016.
Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.
Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate U.F.O.s until October.
He resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program.
The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.
The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”
He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’”
(The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)
During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.
None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said.
“Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.
Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid, received most of the money allocated for the Pentagon program.
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011.
The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.
The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.
Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.
Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.
In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program.
“First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”
The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves.
The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims.
Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.
“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”
By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it.
“Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.
A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.
Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.”
He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science.
They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”
But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”
This story seems to have blown up, so obviously I couldn’t ignore it here.
Usually it’s talk of soft disclosure...as the govt. eases everyone into the idea of life existing elsewhere.
For those of us who have seen strange lights that seem to defy physics of anything human made - this is an interesting bit of validation.
Who or what they are is still debatable and there are many theories and narratives out there as to that answer...perhaps we are a bit closer than we have been for some time.
This has been making the rounds on the national/international news....four Navy pilots witnessed it and confirmed it was not anything “human”.
You can’t get much more reliable in your sources than that.
What do you think?
Enjoy!
Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’:
The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object.
It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on Publish Date December 16, 2017.
Photo by Courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense.
The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on Publish Date December 16, 2017.
Photo by Courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense.
WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.
Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.
For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times.
It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.
The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012.
But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence.
For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.
The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena.
Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, has had a longtime interest in space phenomena.
Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.
Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program.
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”
Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.
While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy.
“When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said.
But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”
James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said.
“Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”
Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.
In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.
“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.
But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012.
From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A.
He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.
“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Pentagon officials say the program ended in 2012, five years after it was created, but the official who led it said that only the government funding had ended then.
Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.
U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military.
In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969.
The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.
Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow.
In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.
Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.
“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016.
Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.
Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate U.F.O.s until October.
He resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program.
The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.
The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”
He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’”
(The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)
During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.
None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said.
“Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.
Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid, received most of the money allocated for the Pentagon program.
On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.
Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011.
The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.
The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.
Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.
Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes.
In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.
“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program.
“First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”
The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves.
The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims.
Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.
“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”
By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it.
“Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.
A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.
Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.”
He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”
Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science.
They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.
In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”
But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”
Personally, do you think that things like this are getting more and more difficult for governments to cover up with all the technology in the general publics hands?
To clarify, decades ago we had to rely on 'eye-witness' accounts that were far too easy to disprove. Modern day technology has allowed us to capture various imagery, energy imprints, and misty apparitions...it's easier to show others the 'what if what we saw/felt'. Do you think that with all the leaps in physics that scuentist are finding that spectres are indeed among us?
http://taylormarshall.com/2013/04/can-humans-see-bodiless-angels-answer.html
Lately I've been re-reading St. Thomas' thoughts on how we are to live. In his book he speaks of Angels as inhabiting and walking earth same as human beings...he makes a valid therory.
Perhaps these 'UFO's' and Alien sightings are linked to Angelic movements, what are your thoughts?
I'm thinking that, as with much of life, with more and more folks becoming aware that more of the nature of things are being revealed ?
Yes, absolutely.
I think what were once called “angels” or “star people” or “gods”....”thunder birds” ect. could have very well been UFOs or aliens imho...it would have been put into the context of that society and how advanced they are/were...so we have similar accounts from all around the world of similar events, but they all have a twist of that country or society as the lens they view it through...just as we use the knowledge of “today” and our state of scientific advancement to come up with our best guess or theory of what and who the UFOs are.
Certainly people have seen ghosts going back to the earliest writings and stories of humankind...to them it was very simple - they were the spirits of the dead....now though, it’s dismissed if one hasn’t experienced it themselves...I can’t say I blame them.
Interestingly enough very often accompanying “aliens” as someone is abducted - either in their home before or after, or on the craft itself - the abductees will often see someone who is supposed to be dead...some have talked with them, some really believe it was their loved one - now what does that say?
Is it aliens reading our minds and taking a form we are comfortable with?
Also, there are connections to “alien abductions” and those who suffer from sleep paralysis at the hands of so-called “shadow men” - perhaps they are aliens....maybe they are demons...maybe they are us from the future....maybe they are from another dimension or universe entirely...maybe they can quantum jump dimensions...it certainly seems to be the case with most paranormality that multiple dimensions are probably crossing in some form or manner.
Now what they want is a whole other subject...it depends also on if you believe they are all from the same source or are we looking at multiple types of “visitors” with different agendas?
So there is certainly room for both a “guardian angel” type entity to exist, and for something more negative as well.
For all we know Jesus was an alien trying to help the humans.
It would make sense that there would be both good and evil within UFO and paranormal occurrences.
As for modern day tech...we certainly have lots of bad, out of focus, shaky videos of lights in the sky that could be anything really...
Which is why it is strange that we now have a release of a clear video from a fairly reliable source with 4 witnesses besides the ground crew.
I’m sure it is not the only video out there that the military has - the question in my mind is - why now?
And where does it go from here?
Thank you for your candid answer. I am happy to see that we're questioning similar things. I sure wish our current prez would help citizenry get some answers from that stack of data the US gov't is sitting on.
Time will tell I suppose. Take care, and thank you again. Have a wonderful holiday <3
Perhaps this is just the beginning?
If we start to see even more videos come forward I would tend to think that we are getting more concrete in the “soft disclosure” that some believe is happening and would be very curious if there ever would be full disclosure and how that would impact our society, religions, etc.
It could be a unifying event maybe perhaps...or we will burn the world down (which may be why they aren’t fully disclosing it or trying to do it slowly).
Perhaps aliens and their appearance are the same as what people used to call “angels”, and maybe some “aliens” would still be considered such a thing...who knows what kind of intelligence would live in the higher dimensions such as the 11 that super-string theory implies...if we are 3D and time is the fourth - then what is beyond that?
Does it circumvent time and space and the laws of physics and normal reality?
YOU have a wonderful holiday!!
Grateful for more ideas to contemplate...*shuffles off to do just that
So last night I attended a conference - Psychedelics for the Treatment of Mental Illness.
It was highly enlightening!
There was even a fellow there who had Aphantasia (the lack of being able to picture things in your head, to imagine, to remember smells, etc.), sounds terrible...what was interesting with his experience was though he had zero visually going on from taking LSD (though he does say that he sees himself from a third person perspective which has blown his mind having never been able to see such things in his head), he still felt the great connectivity and spirituality that comes along with such things - he even went from being an agnostic to believing in an afterlife though not necessary God.
I find that fascinating!
Many people are now learning of the incredible benefits of some of these substances when taken in a safe and responsible manner and for the right reasons....those with chronic depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and many other ailments have shown remarkable responses with very few to no side-effects and no reason to remain on them long-term either.
Your set and setting of your intentions are very important - but sometimes you will get what you NEED to see rather than what you want to get from it.
PM if anyone has any safety questions I can answer for you.
Here is an interesting talk by one of the leading researchers in the field.
Enjoy!
It was highly enlightening!
There was even a fellow there who had Aphantasia (the lack of being able to picture things in your head, to imagine, to remember smells, etc.), sounds terrible...what was interesting with his experience was though he had zero visually going on from taking LSD (though he does say that he sees himself from a third person perspective which has blown his mind having never been able to see such things in his head), he still felt the great connectivity and spirituality that comes along with such things - he even went from being an agnostic to believing in an afterlife though not necessary God.
I find that fascinating!
Many people are now learning of the incredible benefits of some of these substances when taken in a safe and responsible manner and for the right reasons....those with chronic depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and many other ailments have shown remarkable responses with very few to no side-effects and no reason to remain on them long-term either.
Your set and setting of your intentions are very important - but sometimes you will get what you NEED to see rather than what you want to get from it.
PM if anyone has any safety questions I can answer for you.
Here is an interesting talk by one of the leading researchers in the field.
Enjoy!
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris - Psilocybin and the Psychedelic State
WHAT TO DO IN THE DARKNESS
Go slowly
Consent to it
But don't wallow in it
Know it as a place of germination
And growth
Remember the light
Take an outstretched hand if you find one
Exercise unused senses
Find the path by walking it
Practice trust
Watch for the dawn
-- Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Finding
I was lost, wandering in the dark when, through a stroke of luck,
I beheld a faint glimmer of light in the distance.
Though curious, I was also afraid; I regardless continued toward the light.
Though the glimmer shone brighter as I continued on,
the darkness began to thicken as I neared the light and crossed colorless valleys.
My fear grew, and my hope disappeared as I watched the darkness nearly solidify around me.
I had forgotten the light.
Time was leisurely swallowed by the darkness, and how long I sat there, wallowing in grief, I did not know.
As I was once again on the verge of being blotted out by the darkness,
I felt the light gently call out. "Don't forget me", it begged.
With all the heart I could summon, I boldly replied back. "I'll never forget!”
I was stunned by the might of the squall that had come from the nothingness I had thought was myself.
With renewed strength I again pushed forward for the light.
Through many pains and pitfalls I traveled, until I finally arrived at the source of the light.
In awe, I gazed at the source.
This shining beacon that had led me so through the dark, had come from a small, simple window.
My journey finally over, I wondered what I might see when looking through the window.
What was the warm light that had freed me from wandering, from remaining forever in eclipse?
What caused the light?
Could it be a field of blooming flowers on a perfect spring day, or perhaps a sky full of newborn stars?
What if the light was superficial or just as malevolent as the darkness was, if not more?
Could it be a sun waiting to set, that will soon leave me once again in darkness?
Setting aside these thoughts for a moment, I gathered all the courage I had, and peered through the window.
What I saw was another pair of eyes, staring wearily back.
~ Anonymous
Yeeeeeppp.... no.... definitely stumbled into the wrong thread....