Mr Janus: The spaceman who came to tea

…in addition to being disturbed by the realization that Janus was reading his mind, he was even more disturbed by the fact that this extraordinary man ‘knew all Britain’s top-secret nuclear secrets’…. [Horsley was convinced that] they come from another planet somewhere in the universe but not in our galaxy. They are benign, not aggressive and, like us, are explorers.

Nick Redfern on the strange case of RAF Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley and his visitor from Outer Space, Mr Janus. Was it a high-concept prank, a test of Horsley’s sanity, or of his loyalty to Crown and Country? Or was Mr Janus really who he claimed to be?

Read all about it here

Iranian space tech brought down US drone?

 [AFP]

In a topical variant of the super-weapon myth discussed in Mirage Men,  an Iranian scientist with a background in nuclear reactor technology claims that the US RQ-170 drone, allegedly brought down over Iran on 4 December 2011, was captured using his own ‘advanced space technology’.

It’s unclear whether Mehran Tavakoli Kashe’s technology also informed the Iranian flying saucer programme, but the engineer is adamant that there is no space technology in the world to compete with his own.

Pinochet buzzed by UFO?

One for the very interesting if true dept, from Inexplicata:

Mexico’s NOTIMEX news agency published an interesting news item yesterday: a statement by Spanish UFO researcher / novelist J.J. Benítez suggesting that former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet’s estancia was visited by a UFO on September 6, 1986. 

The object hovered over the property and was seen by “the General and all of the Police forces,” said Benitez…“A day before the coup attempt against General Pinochet, a UFO hovered over his estate and was seen by all the Police forces, his entire escort, the Carabineros – everyone, both inside and out. Weapons were drawn and bedlam ensued.”

The next day

…a commando raid by elements of the FPMR group (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez) ambushed the dictator’s motorcade as it traveled through the Cajón del Maipo region outside the capital city of Santiago. Five escorts were killed during the attack, and Pinochet himself sustained injuries.

What did the UFO look like?
Was it a portent of the changes to come?
A warning from the Mirage Men?
A Soviet drone sent to sow fear and confusion before the FPMR strike?
Or is it a plotline for a new novel from Benítez?

Japanese spherical drone

With material costs of about £1000 per unit, this incredibly maneuvrable UAV could make for a great surveillance tool or perhaps an upmarket big boys’ toy.

I wonder if it might be related to the spherical flying somethings that I saw in Yosemite in 1995 and describe in the opening chapter of Mirage Men.

RIP Gabe Valdez

Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Valdez  passed away in his sleep at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico aged 67, on 7 August. Here he is on the right, alongside our mutual friend Project Beta author Greg Bishop.

Retired for some years, Gabe was a much-respected and honoured New Mexico State Police Officer and Gaming Control Board Investigator, based for many years around Dulce, New Mexico. It was here, during the mid-1970s, that Gabe took a lead in investigating a rash of bizarre cattle ‘mutilations’, conducted by persons unknown, and a wave of seemingly-connected UFO sightings. As a result, he was drawn into the sad and strange story of physicist and UFO enthusiast Paul Bennewitz, as told at length in Mirage Men.

John Lundberg and I met and interviewed Gabe twice at his home, where he was unfailingly friendly and generous with his time. Gabe had clearly been a fearless lawman, but he was still uncomfortable talking about the complex story that he’d uncovered around Dulce and the looming Archuleta Mesa, making at times for an awkward interview. Gabe believed that he had discovered a clandestine military operation and felt sure that his research back in the 1970s and ’80s had drawn the attention of some unpleasant characters, leading to his phone being tapped, amongst other things.

While no doubt some natural animal deaths were mistakenly attributed to the unseen mutilators, there’s a great deal of evidence, much of it pieced together by Gabe and his fellow investigators, pointing towards an organised programme of some kind. Although its true purpose remains unclear, over the years writers and researchers have connected the cattle deaths to the monitoring of radiation leaks or viral contagion and secret biological weapon tests, as well as to the inevitable extraterrestrials, Satanic / Masonic / Illuminati / NWO activity and, more mundanely, human poachers.

I’d like to think that one day we’ll learn what was really going on around Dulce, New Mexico, no matter how sinister, or prosaic, it really was. In the mean time, hats off to Gabe Valdez, a man who put himself on the line and made the concerns of his community his own.

Here are the Wikipedia and FBI pages on the mutilation wave, the now defunct National Institute for Discovery Science’s cattle mutilations archive – Gabe did research for the group – and an interesting NIDS paper connecting the deaths to an American BSE epidemic. Be prepared to open a steaming can of worms. 

For those seeking a more digestible summary of the mutilation phenomenon, after the break I’ve posted some video featuring Gabe, and extracted material from Mirage Men about his research.

Mirage Men at dorkbot #75, 15 July 2011

dorkbotlondon #75

When:

19:00-22:00, 15 July 2011
Where:

Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL (directions below)

Featuring the scientific and slightly irrational…

• Automatically generating dubstep - Dan Stowell
• e-Material Girl - Rain Ashford
  some examples of my adventures exploring wearable technology & electronic art using microcontrollers, sensors & e-textiles
• Persuading global brands to Open Source - Joel Gethin Lewis
  Joel is going to talk about his experiences with Coca Cola, and persuading them to embrace Open Source in their recent 24 hour music project
• Flying Saucers are (almost) Real! – Dreaming the Future from 1716 to the Present - Mark Pilkington
  Mark Pilkington, author of ‘Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs’, presents a true history of human attempts to build flying saucers.
• Chrominoes - Mike Harrison

  By the way, Mike Harrison was behind this awesome UFO installation:

More at dorkbot

Marketing the saucers, Mirage Men style

March 1950: was the USAF testing the limits of belief with a far-out flying saucer lecture at a Colorado University?

Earlier this year there was an unwarranted kerfuffle surrounding a report by FBI agent Guy Hottel, filed on 29 March 1950, that begins:

An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico…

As newspapers all over the world disingenuously ran the story as evidence of the US government’s ET coverup  – all very healthy for click-through rates, of course – those in the know pointed out that the memo was rather old news (61 years young in fact!) and the end product of an intricate game of Chinese Whispers.

At the root of the memo’s claims were a shady businessman looking to make a fast buck and, perhaps, the grander agenda of a rather more respectable organisation.

BUFORA conference, 2 July 2011

I’ll be speaking at the  British UFO Research Association conference on 2 July, in the Victoria Room of the Royal Station Hotel, Newcastle.

The conference runs from 10.30am until 7.30pm and my presentation is at 6pm.

Also on the bill are Nick Pope, Andy Roberts, Tony Eccles and John Hanson.

More info here

Aliens and the Imagination 28 June, British Library

On Tuesday 28 June I’ll be on a panel as part of the British Library’s excellent ‘Out of This World‘ science fiction exhibition alongside film director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, above), author Gwyneth Jones, scientists and writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, (What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life) and David Clarke, consultant to the National Archives UFO project.

It should be a wide-ranging and enlightening discussion, do join us if you can.

Tue 28 Jun 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

Price: £7.50 / £5 concessions

Book

Gaddafi in spaaaace?!!

The militarisation of space, or at least near-Earth space, has long been a matter of serious concern for warhawks and peaceniks, and has given rise to a number of conspiracy theories of the sort that got Gary McKinnon into so much trouble.

The extent to which the world’s militaries have taken the fight out of the atmosphere remains something of an unknown to those of us not privy to their secrets. Sure, we know that there are dozens, if not hundreds of military satellites whirling around the planet, some of which may now be capable of destroying other satellites. We also know that just over the horizon (or at least the visible horizon) wait the next generation of manned and unmanned spaceplanes, like the Boeing X-37B and DARPA’s Falcon (pictured above). Some of these may soon emerge as real nuts and bolts vehicles, others will forever be gleaming pies in the sky.

But what are we to make of this titbit, revealed in the 18 March 2011 issue of Private Eye? A short article on the editorial page details some of the recent arms sales to Libya approved by the UK’s Foreign Office. Alongside the usual roster of military transport aircraft, APCs, tear gas, smoke grenades, water cannons, machine guns, tanks, night vision equipment and the like is a listing, from July and September of 2010, for ‘spacecraft’.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention the spacecrafts’ country, or planet, of origin, but I’m certainly curious to know what they were. Sensible suggestions in the comments box please!