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Location: Santa Barbara Channel
Date: 14th Nov. 1997
Time: 10.05pm
At approximately 10:05 pm on Friday 14th November 1997, Dr. Ted Loder and Tony Craddock were checking out new nightscopes from Tony's house overlooking the Santa Barbara Channel. Ted was using an ITT Night Mariner (Model G3) and Tony a Litton NightMate (Model Nav3) each with a light magnification of 30,000 to 50,000x.
They both happened to be looking through the nightscopes at Jupiter, which was about ten degrees above the horizon and over the island of San Miguel. Simultaneously they both saw a set of lights near Jupiter in the shape of a large triangle silently flying eastward down the Santa Barbara Channel.
They followed it for about six seconds until it disappeared behind some trees. Both realized that the visible lights were on the outside edges of a large craft which was not itself visible in the night scopes.
A few seconds after the initial recognition, both saw the craft tilt slightly on its side so that its triangular shape could be more clearly seen. Its shape was delineated by five to eight lights along its edges clearly visible through the nightscopes. Ted Loder counted five or six lights in the shape of a triangle seen partly on its side, while Tony Craddock saw an additional one or two lights in the center towards the rear, making it appear chevron or boomerang shaped. Tony had the clearer nightscope which may explain why he was able to see the extra lights. Both had the impression that it was not lights independently flying in formation but a solid craft. The length of the craft appeared to be longer than the sword on Orion's belt and shorter than Orion's belt itself.
The craft was not visible with the naked eye and was not seen by the two other people who were present without nightscopes.
It was later estimated that the craft travelled through a visible arc of 75 degrees in about 6 seconds. It was estimated that the craft was at a distance of 5-10 miles, which would have meant it was travelling at approximately 4000-8000 mph.
Both Ted Loder and Tony Craddock are members of CSETI (Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and attended CSETI's Congressional Briefing on UFO/ET in Washington DC on April 9th of this year. Dr. Loder is a Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Tony Craddock is President of an international petroleum consulting company and co-ordinates Santa Barbara's CSETI Working Group.
Location: Earth Orbit
Date: September 1997
This extract was sent to me via the Internet, so I cannot vouch for its authenticity. I have however, seen it reported a couple of times from different sources so, as they say, The Truth is out There. [Ed.]
Space Shuttle Reports Near Miss With UFO!
WASHINGTON - The Space Shuttle Endeavour narrowly avoided a collision with a gigantic UFO during its 12-day mission in September and a top-secret NASA audio tape proves it!
That's the word from author William Kliner, who claims to have obtained a copy of the tape from highly placed NASA sources and flatly calls the incident "the most dramatic close encounter in history."
In the 23-second tape, which was recorded off one of several secret radio frequencies that NASA reserves for classified conversations with space shuttle astronauts, Commander David Walker is heard to say:
"Bogey at 3 o'clock . . . God . . . what is it? My God - it's coming right at us . . ."
NASA: What's there?
Walker: THERE'S NO WAY! Oh God! Get back. MOVE!"
NASA: Endeavour! Endeavour! What . . . explain . . .
Walker: What the . . . where are we? Where is it? Where . . . it's gone. IT'S GONE. Not (unintelligible) . . . UFO. Spacecraft . . . huge . . . intelligent . . . OVER THERE!
NASA: Endeavour. Switch . . . NOW!
The tape ends abruptly with what would appear to be a NASA order for Walker to change radio frequency.
And while nobody other than Walker, his crew and a handful of NASA officials knows exactly what happened next, the Endeavour returned to Earth safely on Sept. 18, indicating that the close encounter ended without further incident.
"This is dazzling proof that UFOs not only exist, they are piloted by extraterrestrials who are interested in our technology and possibly even mankind's ventures into space," declared Kliner, who has published hundreds of articles on America's space program over the past 25 years.
"Until now, I didn't believe in the existence of UFOs and I certainly didn't believe that extraterrestrials were visiting our planet.
"But now I know better. Space aliens actually observed our shuttle astronauts as they orbited Earth - and NASA's own tape proves it."
NASA spokesmen declined to comment on the author's report pending the outcome of what one official called "an investigation into the source of unauthorized information that might or might not have basis in fact."
Like NASA, Commander Walker and his crew - Pilot Ken Cockrell and Mission Specialists James Voss, James Newman and Michael Gernhardt - aren't talking.
But Kliner's sources say the Endeavour and crew did, in fact, avert an in-orbit collision with "a massive, walnut-shaped spacecraft of unknown origin."
"From what I understand, the spacecraft was the size of a small city and glowed bright green as it approached the shuttle," he continued.
"At some point during the encounter, the UFO veered off course to avoid a collision.
"As far as I know," he continued, "there was no contact between the UFO and the shuttle. If there was contact, my sources are unaware of it."
Another extract sent to me via the Internet. [Ed.]
Global Surveyor's Launch Monitored By UFOs?
This is a rather old, but very interesting item that I just found on Florida Today's Internet site. URL:
www.flatoday.com/space/explore/stories/1997/022897a.htm
FLORIDA TODAY Space Online
(For February 28, 1997 )
By Billy Cox
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - OK - even though the Air Force is now 39 days late in responding to its own Freedom of Information Act deadline, and its public relations officer at Los Angeles Air Force Base isn't returning calls, I still don't buy the conspiracy stuff. I'd have to be paranoid, and I'm glad I'm not one of those raving lunatics.
ON THE OTHER HAND ... !!!
On Nov. 7 last year, shortly after 11 a.m., Jim Graw, a security guard at Aquarina in Melbourne Beach, was glancing east when he became transfixed by two elliptical metallic objects, each roughly the size of a jumboliner, cruising north at a leisurely pace along the shoreline. Glinting sunlight, they were visible for about a minute, not even a mile away. Graw was amazed. "I couldn't identify them. They were definitely round and disc-shaped," he said.
Less than an hour later, after watching the Delta rocket's first-stage separation that launched Mars Global Surveyor from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Wes Clark noticed a white pinpoint of light entering the picture some 40 degrees above the horizon. Several moments later, the blip was joined by two identical UFOs, which proceeded to perform strange manoeuvres in a triangulated formation.
At 12:16 p.m., as Clark and perhaps a dozen fellow USA Flight Systems employees watched from the parking lot of the space station processing facility, what appeared to be a single jet fighter slashed in from the south, briefly scattering the UFOs. With the jet banking and cutting "lazy figure-8s, as if it was on an intercept pattern," Clark took meticulous notes on the chronology of events, which included an entry at 1:05 p.m. listing a pass by a "high-flying aircraft with a short fuselage and long wing and white on the bottom, going from northeast to southwest, as if tracking the objects."
Clark finally went back to work at 1:08 p.m. because he'd spent his entire lunch break in the parking lot. A while later, Clark got a "holy cow!" phone call from a buddy, space shuttle inspector Scott Cook at the logistics building, several miles away.
Cook had seen the objects, too. "They looked like three stars, in broad daylight, arranged like a pyramid, before they started moving," Cook said later. "When I showed them to other people, they said, `Oh, they're probably just weather balloons.' But I didn't think weather balloons could move like that. And I thought the winds would've carried them away by then, because they were there for an hour."
Cook also saw the first jet ("I'm not sure what it was - an F-15 maybe, or it could've been a T-38") as well as the second, which he surmised was a U-2. Cook watched the show until 2:30. He counted eight U-2 passes. During the last, Cook says one of the UFOs began following the U-2. Cook says he also watched two more jets streaking into the area, apparently surveying the objects. "The (UFO) I got the best view of, the bottom one, looked like a perfectly round star," Cook says.
Rawinsond and/or jimsphere weather balloons? Or something else?
A circuitous maze of queries meandered from the Lockheed Missiles and Space Ops to the Eastern Test Range to the Federal Aviation Authority before finally crunching into a FOIA request for data records with the USAF in Washington, D.C. They've got this really cool picket fence of Defence Support Program satellites that can allegedly track the nose hairs of a garden snake. The most interesting lock-ins - the unknowns that enter the atmosphere and then veer out again - are rumoured to be called "fastwalkers," although that term doesn't officially exist.
Well, you know how zany things can get in Bureaucracy World, being understaffed, underfinanced, overworked and all that. No surprise here that USAF/Washington exceeded its legal mandate to acknowledge receipt of my FOIA within 10 days by nearly two weeks. Like, when was the last time any of those paper-pushers got a raise, anyway?
The last I heard, the FOIA had been peddled off on LAAFB, which wrote on Dec. 20, "We will provide your office with the determination and/or the current status of your FOIA request on or before 20 Jan 97." Just for grins, LAAFB even included a phone number.
You know, they probably were weather balloons, after all. But this is how weird rumours get started. I'm glad I'm mature and professional enough not to participate.
Billy Cox's column runs every Friday. He can be reached at 242-3774, or FLORIDA TODAY, P.O. Box 419000, Melbourne, FL 32941-9000.
Location: Mexico City
Date: 22nd Dec. 1997
Amazing Daylight Costa Rica UFO Sightings ...
... At Least A Dozen Craft Filmed By TV Crews
12-26-97
MEXICO CITY (Itar-Tass) - The Costa Rican mass media reported on Thursday that unidentified flying objects were spotted the day before in the country's air space over Golfito District, which is 330 kilometres to the south of San Jose. However, TV cameramen were unable to film them as they did on Monday.
On December 22 cameramen from two local television channels filmed at least a dozen "flying saucers" in the sky south of the Costa Rican capital. Before the eyes of hundreds of people, they made zigzag manoeuvres for several minutes. Flight controllers of the International Juan Santamaria Airport counted "approximately fifty thousand traces" of their movements. Some car drivers stopped to watch the phenomenon.
According to Ufologist Carlos Vilchez, most remarkable is the fact that these UFOs appeared in daytime, that they were seen by hundreds of people and were filmed by TV cameramen. He also expressed the view that an influx of UFOs into the air space of this Central American country could be expected within the next two months.
About ten "saucers" were watched by hundreds of people over San Jose exactly one month ago. They flew over the city for several minutes. They were also filmed by TV cameramen.
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