May 31, 2021

That's one reason why I so appreciate JFK...

While he was brave and volunteered for combat — the story of PT-109 demonstrates his courage — President Kennedy hated war for the reasons you know. He lost his big brother, a US Navy aviator, fighting the NAZIs.



Lt. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

The President’s big brother was the one being groomed for a life in politics by The Old Man, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. The younger Joe had served as a delegate from Massachusetts at the 1940 Democratic convention. A brave, athletic and conscientious young man, he volunteered for service in the US Navy before World War II.

After completing his tour as pilot of a US Navy B-24 Liberator on anti-submarine warfare patrol from 1943-44 over the North Atlantic, flying out of an airbase in England, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. volunteered for a top-secret mission, Project APHRODITE. The objective was to knock out the NAZI V-1 buzz bombs that were killing civilians in London and other English towns.

The Navy, in cooperation (and in competition) with the Army Air Corps, worked to develop a secret weapon — a remotely piloted flying bomb. They would convert four-engine bombers into flying bombs that would be flown by remote control into the V-1 sites along the coast of France.

Joe and other pilots were needed to get the experimental versions of the 4-engine B-24 and B-17 bombers airborne. The planes had been converted from being a 10-man bomber, capable of carrying sixteen 500 pound bombs, into one giant flying bomb with a crew of two — the pilot and the bombardier-engineer.

For the time, it was state-of-the-art science, engineering, and warfare. Joe Kennedy’s plane was among a few Liberators and Flying Fortresses modified for a very early version of remote control. The ship, basically, was history’s first guided missile. The entire fuselage was filled with Torpex and gelignite, IIRC, and was to be armed by a rather elaborate, and untested, electronic arming panel.

Like something out of Buck Rogers, the Navy equipped the airplane with a primitive 2-channel remote-control pilot. One radio signal could make the plane dive and climb and another signal could make it turn left and right. A prototype video camera would also send information to the Mother Ship, where the remote pilot sat before a tiny TV monitor.

The scientists and engineers in the Mother Ship would take over and signal on two radio frequencies: One to turn the stick RIGHT or LEFT; or push the stick FORWARD or pull the stick BACK. Primitive today, they were the first remote-controlled weapon of mass destruction. The Mother Ship would follow two miles or so back and then fly it over the English Channel and guide it down into the rocket launch sites.

The technology was so primitive, human pilots were needed to get the flying bombs aloft. Once aloft, they were to turn on the radio-guidance controls and arm the flying bomb. Then, somewhere over the English countryside, they were to bail out. Sounds simple, but it was anything but.

The pilot and bombardier were to bail out at an altitude of about one thousand feet. Bailing out from the modified aircraft was extremely dangerous work. One B-17 pilot was killed and another lost an arm in the process. By the time it was Joe’s turn in the first APHRODITE B-24, there was reason for concern about a plan that looked like a suicide mission.

For the Kennedys and the future of American politics, the tragedy was that the Navy ship used a rather primitive arming panel. The regular engineer/co-pilot refused to fly and instead the Navy sent aloft the engineer who designed and installed the system.

Over the English countryside, the ship exploded, killing the two flyers and changing American political history. Joe's younger brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy then became the heir to the family's political ambitions.

John F. Kennedy made an outstanding President, living up to his brother’s promise of greatness. JFK, it should be remembered, saved the world from nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While he never lived to see the dream realized, JFK also stretched mankind’s imagination and reach to the moon. Ironically, he even used the NAZI rocket scientist who developed the V-1 to do so. The same von Braun who the allied air command sent his lost brother, Joseph, to destroy.

One of Hitler's superweapons, the V-2 was developed by Werner von Braun and his team at Peenemünde. History's first ballistic missiles were used to rain death, destruction and terror upon London. The allies were worried that if the Nazis continued developing their super-weapons, the V-2’s descendants would be delivering bombs — possibly atomic — to New York City.

# # #

Two outstanding books on the subject of Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and his service in World War II:

“Aphrodite: Desperate Mission” by Jack Olsen

and

“The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy” by Hank Searls.

May 31, 2021

NAZI Rebranded

QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded

Gregory Stanton
Just Security, Sept. 9, 2020

Excerpt...

I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.

The plot, described above, was the conspiracy “revealed” in the most influential anti-Jewish pamphlet of all time. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was written by Russian anti-Jewish propagandists around 1902. It collected myths about a Jewish plot to take over the world that had existed for hundreds of years. Central to its mythology was the Blood Libel, which claimed that Jews kidnapped and slaughtered Christian children and drained their blood to mix in the dough for matzos consumed on Jewish holidays.

The Nazis published a children’s book of the Protocols that they required in the curriculum of every primary school in Germany. The Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer (derived from the German word for “Storm”) spread the Blood Libel. Hitler’s Mein Kampf, his narcissistic autobiography and manifesto for his battle against the Jewish plot to rule the world, copied his conspiracy theories from the Protocols.

The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the Leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot. Nazi “storm troopers” (“storm detachment” – Sturmabteilung) helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people.

America had its own dark side. Henry Ford echoed Nazi hatred of Jews and had 500,000 copies of the Protocols printed and distributed in the U.S. Father Coughlin preached the Protocols on national radio. The Ku Klux Klan combined its white supremacist racism with hatred of Jews.

QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Continues...

https://www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/

May 31, 2021

"I see death. Death that should not happen."

A soldier who photographed World War II in Europe describes 6 of his photos that reveal the 'insanity of war'

Katie Sanders
Business Insider, Sun, May 30, 2021

Michelantonio "Tony" Vaccaro wanted to serve his country with a camera during World War II, so he tried to join the US Army Signal Corps. But under Uncle Sam's rules, the 20-year-old draftee was too young for that branch.

So Vaccaro, the orphaned son of Italian immigrants, became a private first class in the 83rd Infantry Division. By June 1944, days after the first wave of 156,000 Allied troops descended on the beaches of Normandy, Vaccaro landed on Omaha Beach, where he saw row after row of dead soldiers in the sand.

Continues...

WARNING GRAPHIC IMAGES — Whose subjects represent WHY MEMORIAL DAY MATTERS.

https://news.yahoo.com/soldier-photographed-world-war-ii-221900188.html

May 29, 2021

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator, and Blink-182 Singer Took UFOs Mainstream

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream

The hidden history of how Washington embraced a fringe field of science.

By BRYAN BENDER
Politico, 05/28/2021

Excerpt...

Over the next few years, (Harry) Reid told me, he went to multiple such meetings. As Bigelow, Alexander and the others were publishing obscure journal articles and compiling a database of UFO sightings, the most influential member of the group quietly broached the topic with some of his colleagues in Washington, including former astronaut and senator John Glenn. Reid ultimately enlisted the support of a handful of powerful committee chairs, including Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, to fund hush-hush UFO research inside the Defense Department. The existence of that program was revealed publicly by POLITICO and the New York Times in mid-December 2017. One of the program’s main beneficiaries was an aerospace company owned by none other than Robert Bigelow.

Next month, the director of national intelligence, acting at the behest of Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is scheduled to release a report that collects from across the government all relevant material on what the officials now call “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Regardless of what ultimately emerges in this report—whether it’s a trove of blockbuster reveals or a disappointing dud—the mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of government UFO research, from the New Yorker to “60 Minutes.” A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a national security concern.

Reid had retired by the time his secret role in the program was revealed. But his willingness to talk openly now about the subject speaks to a profound change in the calculus of political and reputational risk. Far from a blot on his career, Reid sees it as a line to highlight on his legislative resume and he has no regrets about Bigelow benefiting from the program.

“I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it,” Reid now says. “I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.”

Continues...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/28/ufos-secret-history-government-washington-dc-487900

May 29, 2021

Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 reported enormous UFO in 1986

Unfriendly skies: The extraordinary flight of JAL 1628, Alaska’s best known UFO encounter

By Lawrence D. Weiss
Anchorage Press, Oct 28, 2019

November 17 of this year will mark the 33rd anniversary of one of the best documented UFO cases ever, and it happened in the skies above Alaska. Three UFOs played tag with Japan Air Lines (JAL) cargo flight 1628 for 50 minutes while they were visually observed by a sometimes terrified flight crew. During the last 30 minutes the UFOs were tracked on military and civilian radar, and the entire encounter was verified by a high-level administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The incident received media coverage all over the world. Here’s what happened...

Japan Airlines Captain Kenju Terauchi was an ex-fighter pilot and senior airline pilot with more than 10,000 hours flight experience. He was assigned to fly a Japan Airlines cargo flight from Paris to Reykjavik, Anchorage, and on to Tokyo.

On November 17, 5:09 pm Alaska time, the Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center contacted JAL 1628, which at that time was about 104 miles northeast of Fort Yukon. The flight controller asked the pilot to adjust his heading so the plane would pass south of Fort Yukon and Fairbanks. The copilot turned the plane to the left about 15 degrees. Captain Terauchi, sitting on the left side of the cockpit, saw unidentified lights out his side window to the left and below. He thought they were military planes and ignored them. After a few minutes he realized that these unidentified aircraft were pacing him.

Flight 1628 contacted the Anchorage Center twice in rapid succession and asked if there were any other aircraft in the area. The Anchorage Center responded that there were no military aircraft, and ground radar did not show any aircraft other than Flight 1628. Then the two lights began to move in an erratic manner. Terauchi recollected in his official report to the FAA, listed here below and edited for length and clarity:

The distance from the lights was far enough from us and we felt no immediate danger. I thought perhaps it is a UFO. The lights were still moving strangely. Most unexpectedly two spaceships appeared [directly in front of the plane], shooting off lights. The inside cockpit shined brightly and I felt [the warmth of the UFO’s thrusters’] on my face.

Then, three to seven seconds later, the fire — like from jet engines — stopped and became a small circle of lights as they began to fly in level flight at the same speed as we were. The middle of the body of the ship sparked an occasional stream of lights, like a charcoal fire. Its shape was a square, flying 500 feet to 1,000 feet in front of us, very slightly higher in altitude than us. Its size was about the same size as the body of a DC-8 [similar in size to a Boeing 707].

It is impossible for any manmade machine to make a sudden appearance in front of a jumbo jet that is flying 910 kilometers per hour and to move along in a formation paralleling our aircraft. But we did not feel threatened or in danger. Honestly, we were simply astounded. I have no idea why they came so close to us.

There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away, [pacing us]. The Anchorage Center replied that they saw nothing on their radar. I set our digital weather radar distance to 20 miles, radar angle to horizon. There it was, on the screen: a large, green, round object had appeared seven or eight miles away, in the direction of the object.

We arrived at the sky above the Eielson Air Force Base and Fairbanks. It was a clear night. We were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship! We must get away quickly!

A terrified Captain Terauchi, in coordination with the Anchorage Center, attempted evasive maneuvers such as flying in a circle and changing altitude. The gigantic UFO, later described by Terauchi as the size of two aircraft carriers, shadowed flight 1628 through all maneuvers.

Continues...

https://www.anchoragepress.com/news/unfriendly-skies-the-extraordinary-flight-of-jal-alaska-s-best/article_8e2d3270-f9d5-11e9-b9db-7ba9229138ae.html

May 29, 2021

Very Significant Case -- BOAC Labrador case in 1954

Study of an Unusual Phenomenon Observed by BOAC Aircrew over Labrador, Newfoundland

June 29, 1954
Martin Shough

This classic observation was made by crew and passengers of a 4-engine Boeing Stratocruiser3 of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Flight 510-196 was a luxury flight bound for London on the "champagne and caviar run", departing New York at 1703 local (2103 GMT) on June 29, 1954 with 51 passengers aboard. Four hours later at sunset, 19,000ft over Labrador en route for Goose Bay, an apparently huge shape-changing UAP and a swarm of small attendant objects was seen against the bright sky off the left wing. The strange display persisted for 18 minutes.

After a refuelling stop at Goose where they were met and questioned by US Air Force intelligence officers the crew proceeded to London, where the story rapidly appeared in national papers and magazines. Capt James R. Howard was filmed for BBC TV and cinema newsreels. It became big news and went around the world within days via the Associated Press syndicated wire. The standing of the witnesses, in particular 33-year-old Capt. Howard, a highly respected former RAF Squadron Leader with 7500 hours commercial flying on 256 Atlantic crossings to his credit at the time of the sighting, has never been called in question. They were convinced that their airliner was followed for 80 miles by a formation of solid flying objects under intelligent control. To this day the case is still hailed by many ufologists as one of the most significant unexplained cases.

Snip...



The report

Here is Capt Howard's first person account4 from the December 11, 1954, edition of the
British magazine Everybody's Weekly:

WE WERE SHADOWED FROM OUTER SPACE

Maybe it wasn't exactly a flying saucer. What I saw, on a recent New York to London flight, was more of a flying arrow, I guess you'd have called it at one stage. It seemed to keep changing its shape as it flew beside me, very much like a jellyfish assumes varying patterns as it swims through the water. Or maybe the apparent changes in shape were due to the different angles we viewed it from as it banked and turned about five miles off.

Whatever it was - a giant flying wing, jellyfish or saucer - of these things I'm quite certain: It wasn't a trick of light or a figment of the imagination. It wasn't any sort of electrical, magnetic or natural phenomenon. And it certainly wasn't a mirage.

No, it was something real and substantial; something that kept station with me for eighty miles and only sheered off when I got a radio call from the Sabre-jet fighter which had been sent up from Goose Bay to intercept the thing. It was something - the idea gives me slight goose-pimples when I think of it - which was keeping my Boeing Stratocruiser, Centaurus, under observation.
The date was June 29 this year. Just before sunset. Over Labrador. The sky was crystal-clear.

Snip...

I counted, re-counted, counted again. Six. Always six. Sometimes there were three stretched out in front of the main thing and three behind. Sometimes five stretched out in line ahead and only one behind. I had the impression that just before I got round to counting them there were more than six, which ties in with Lee Boyd's idea that they were flying in and out of the large central object like aircraft entering and leaving a flight hangar.

Lee said, as though he didn't believe it himself: "There's a lot of Air Force traffic in and out of Goose Bay some days. Maybe it's a formation of fighters way out in the distance. Want me to call up Goose and check?".

Continues... PDF:

http://www.martinshough.com/aerialphenomena/BOAC%20aircrew%20sighting.pdf

May 28, 2021

Check out today's (Friday, May 28) POLITICO mag, then go through the thread.

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream

The hidden history of how Washington embraced a fringe field of science.

By BRYAN BENDER
Politico, 05/28/2021

Excerpt...

Over the next few years, (Harry) Reid told me, he went to multiple such meetings. As Bigelow, Alexander and the others were publishing obscure journal articles and compiling a database of UFO sightings, the most influential member of the group quietly broached the topic with some of his colleagues in Washington, including former astronaut and senator John Glenn. Reid ultimately enlisted the support of a handful of powerful committee chairs, including Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, to fund hush-hush UFO research inside the Defense Department. The existence of that program was revealed publicly by POLITICO and the New York Times in mid-December 2017. One of the program’s main beneficiaries was an aerospace company owned by none other than Robert Bigelow.

Next month, the director of national intelligence, acting at the behest of Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is scheduled to release a report that collects from across the government all relevant material on what the officials now call “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Regardless of what ultimately emerges in this report—whether it’s a trove of blockbuster reveals or a disappointing dud—the mere prospect has catalyzed a wave of mainstream coverage of government UFO research, from the New Yorker to “60 Minutes.” A bewildering and still highly controversial subject has achieved a surprising level of public respectability as a national security concern.

Reid had retired by the time his secret role in the program was revealed. But his willingness to talk openly now about the subject speaks to a profound change in the calculus of political and reputational risk. Far from a blot on his career, Reid sees it as a line to highlight on his legislative resume and he has no regrets about Bigelow benefiting from the program.

“I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it,” Reid now says. “I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.”

Continues...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/28/ufos-secret-history-government-washington-dc-487900

Many of the people and ideas brought up in this thread are mentioned in today’s Politico cover story. To reiterate: I, like many of the people quoted in this thread and in the article, don’t know what UAP or UFOs are. Unsurprisingly, even when “President,” Dumpy has no clue or interest in what I find a fascinating topic. What I do want to do is to apply the principles of science to learn more.

May 27, 2021

Passport to Magonia

I agree with you, colsohlibgal. Ours is an amazing universe or multiverse or cosmos. We know and understand but the smallest fraction of it.

The person, IMO, who best understands the phenomenon and its impact on our civilization, writes that UFOs seem to tell a story in a “language” that transfers meaning in a way that people in different times can relate and remember. The purpose may be to accelerate progress or instill new customs. We need, of course, more study.

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/vallee_magonia.html



Three men and a woman, actually. They fell from the sky, it would seem, in the vicinity of Lyon in what’s now eastern France, early in the ninth century. They came from a place called Magonia.

So the local mob believed, as they prepared to stone them to death.

We have the story from Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon (c. 779-840), in a treatise directed against “the absurd opinion of the common folk concerning hail and thunder.” Agobard prided himself on his enlightenment; Scripture, not superstition, was for him the touchstone of truth. Here’s the story he tells, as translated by W. J. Lewis for the Internet Medieval Sourcebook:

“But we have seen and heard of many people overcome with so much foolishness, made crazy by so much stupidity, that they believe and say that there is a certain region, which is called Magonia, from which ships come in the clouds. In these ships the crops that fell because of hail and were lost in storms are carried back into that region; evidently these aerial sailors make a payment to the storm-makers, and take the grain and other crops. Among those so blinded with profound stupidity that they believe these things could happen we have seen many people in a kind of meeting, exhibiting four captives, three men and one woman, as if they had fallen from these very ships. As I have said, they exhibited these four, who had been chained up for some days, with such a meeting finally assembling in our presence, as if these captives ought to be stoned. But when truth had prevailed, however, after much argument, the people who had exhibited the captives, in accordance with the prophecy (Jeremiah 2:26) ‘were confounded … as the thief is confounded when he is taken.’ ”

This is a story well known in UFOlogical circles, for good reason. Forty-some years ago, it inspired the title of Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia (Regnery, 1969), a stunningly original book that set forth the practically unheard-of possibility that it was possible to believe in UFOs without believing them to be visitors from outer space. Vallee noticed, and took seriously, the resemblance of the small humanoid beings who piloted the UFOs to the “wee folk” of European fairy lore. He suggested the two species of alien might have more in common than their small stature.

Not that the fairies and elves were misidentified spacemen, as the UFOlogists might have said. Nor (as the “debunkers” held) that UFOs are the same sort of nonsense as the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. Rather, both traditions attested to some realm beyond consensus reality, yet co-existing with ourselves through the length of human history. A realm that, for want of a better name, we might call “Magonia.”

Continues...

https://www.davidhalperin.net/the-mystery-men-of-magonia/

May 26, 2021

Dr. Jacques Vallee should be science program director.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as “the flying saucer phenomenon.” I think it has three components and we have to deal with them in different ways.

First, there is a physical object. That may be a flying saucer or it may be a projection or it may be something entirely different. All we know about it is that it represents a tremendous quantity of electromagnetic energy in a small volume. I say that based upon the evidence gathered from traces, from electromagnetic and radar detection and from perturbations of the electromagnetic fields such as Dr. Claude Poher, the French space scientist, has recorded.

Second, there’s the phenomenon the witnesses perceive. What they tell us is that they’ve seen a flying saucer. Now they may have seen that or they may have seen an image of a flying saucer or they may have hallucinated it under the influence of microwave radiation, or any of a number of things may have happened. The fact is that the witnesses were exposed to an event and as a result they experienced a highly complex alteration of perception which caused them to describe the object or objects that figure in their testimony.

Beyond those — the physical phenomenon and the perception phenomenon — we have the third component, the social phenomenon. That’s what happens when the reports are submitted to society and enter the cultural arena. That’s the part which I find most interesting."

SOURCE: http://integralnews.blogspot.com/2008/01/jacques-vallees-integral-approach-to.html

May 26, 2021

Tapes and photographs are evidence.

For example, Radar-Visual cases, where eyewitnesses have their testimony supported by radar records. Here’s an excellent example from Michigan in 1994:

Eyewitnesses on the ground included police officers who shared what they saw, brilliantly shining lights over Lake Michigan.