The following gem was found in February 11th 1996's Sunday Telegraph. Do scientists know something we don't?
AMERICAN astronomers, having found four planets beyond our solar system, believe they will soon detect radio signals from alien civilisations.
"I believe the odds on there being advanced civilisations in our Milky Way galaxy are a thousand to one on," said Prof Paul Horowitz, of Harvard University. His team operates an 84ft radio telescope near Boston that continually searches the sky for artificial signals.
"Every day we pick up radio 'noise' from space that is equal to 22 trillion bytes of data, equivalent in information content to 50 million novels," he told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
So far there have been many false alarms where likely signals have failed to repeat themselves.
Another astronomer, Prof Frank Drake, said: "The real signal, when it is found, will be unmistakable. I strongly believe that we shall find one before the year 2000."
Other scientists warn that it could be dangerous to advertise our own presence on Earth by transmitting signals.
Prof Robert Rood, of Harvard, said: "The civilisation that blurts out its existence on interstellar beacons at the first opportunity may be like some early hominid descending from the trees and calling 'Here, kitty' to a sabre-toothed tiger."
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence programme is being carried out privately by Prof Horowitz's team and another in Australia.
MOONWALKER ED MITCHELL CONVINCED SOME UFOS ARE REAL
[The following story appeared in FLORIDA TODAY on January 12, 1996.]
Apollo-14 Astronaut Searches for the Truth by Billy Cox, FLORIDA TODAY staff.
With the 25th anniversary of Apollo-14 coming up, the sixth man to walk on the moon hopes to swing the spotlight onto a more contemporary agenda - pressing for the declassification of government records on unidentified flying objects.
If his suspicions are true, former astronaut Edgar Mitchell says the lid of secrecy engages nothing less than "criminal culpability".
Mitchell, 65, returned to the Space Coast recently to do location shots for an "NBC Dateline" retrospective on the Apollo 14 adventure.
At the highlight of that mission - Jan. 31-Feb. 9, 1971 - Mitchell and Alan Shepard spent 33 hours roving the desolate lunar hills of Fra Mauro.
It was there that Mitchell first courted an avant-garde reputation by conducting off-the-clock mental telepathy experiments by transmitting symbolic images to an acquaintance in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell left the astronaut corps and founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences in an effort to integrate various scientific disciplines into the study of human consciousness.
Mitchell's upcoming book, "The Way of Explorers", will address the latest research upon its release in April. Perhaps because of the imminent publicity, Mitchell found himself invited to a private meeting of former government/military officials hoping to recruit his visibility for their most peculiar campaign.
"These were people who, in their official capacity, had an opportunity in the course of their duties to have ET (extraterrestrial) contact," Mitchell says. "The purpose of the meeting was not to convince anybody else of their stories, but to get people released from their security oaths with regard to these phenomena. Given who they were, and their credentials, I have to tell you it pushed my confidence level up five notches."
Taking a break from the NBC taping, the MIT-educated former Navy captain relaxed at the Villa Roma restaurant in Rockledge and rolled his own imported tobacco. He expressed his "total disbelief" in a recent U.S. Air Force report attributing the alleged crash of an ET spacecraft in New Mexico in 1947 to a classified military balloon.
Last summer, the General Accounting Office announced the failure of its 18-month effort to acquire the dispensation records of the debris from that celebrated event. In 1994, the Air Force admitted that it initially lied about the wreckage in order to conceal a balloon-based nuclear-monitoring system called Project Mogul. But - unable to produce the paperwork on the retrieval in question - USAF officials based their case on circumstantial arguments.
"I am convinced there is a small body of valid (UFO) information, and that there is a body of information 10 times as big that is total disinformation put out by the source to confuse the whole issue," says Mitchell.
"The information is now held primarily by a body of semi- or quasi-private organizations that have kinda spun off from the military intelligence organizations of the past. Just like we build a rocket through a private contractor, there have been private groups involved with this issue for a number of years because they have the expertise.
"The dangerous part is, they're still operating under a black budget, which has been estimated at over $30 billion a year. And nobody knows what goes into black budgets. The prime requisite is security first and everything else second. Imagine an organization that has a black budget, an unquestioned source of funds, reports to no one, and has this exotic technology that they can keep to themselves and play with."
Mitchell, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, and some 20,000 Americans have signed the Roswell Declaration, a grass-roots petition calling for an executive order to release UFO documents to the public. Mitchell, however, stresses he has no first-hand knowledge of the existence of recovered ET artifacts. And during his Apollo-era training, the subject of UFOs never arose.
"NASA at that time was so sure there were no such things, there was no discussion of it," he says. "I would say, however, that if there was knowledge of ET contact existing within the government, and we were sent into space blind and dumb to such information, I think it it a case of criminal culpability."
"To send us up there? Into a what-if scenario? If the evidence is real, and we were led to believe no such thing was possible? To me, that's criminal."
He says he's looking forward to the discussions his new book will generate. "We're talking about a revolution. It's a mind-blower."
According to the News of the World (Sunday, March 3rd 1996), a close encounter was witnessed at the Queen's Highland castle.
At just after 10.00pm on Wednesday 28th Feb 1996, witnesses claim to have spotted a bright light in the sky above the Queen's castle. Within minutes, two RAF Harrier GR7 jump-jets intercepted and started chasing the object.
One witness said that the jets were climbing so quickly, they were almost standing on end. It looked as if they were in some kind of 'dog fight' with the object.
The object seemed to just appear. According to another witness, it didn't seem to come from a particular direction. It was just there all of a sudden.
Suddenly the light vanished and after circling the castle the planes flew off in the direction from which they had come from.
An RAF spokesman said, "There were two aircraft in the area. They could have been on some kind of exercise. Pilots are not going to report such things as UFOs to anyone and I've been unable to get anything out of them."
What with the recent admission from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) about the UFO spotted near Manchester airport last year, things seem to be hotting up on the UFO front. Watch this space...
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