More interesting Mars Related News

NASA http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/phobos-is-falling-apart

Mars’ Moon Phobos is Slowly Falling Apart

The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.


Orbiting a mere 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars, Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Mars’ gravity is drawing in Phobos, the larger of its two moons, by about 6.6 feet (2 meters) every hundred years. Scientists expect the moon to be pulled apart in 30 to 50 million years.

New modeling indicates that the grooves on Mars’ moon Phobos could be produced by tidal forces – the mutual gravitational pull of the planet and the moon. Initially, scientists had thought the grooves were created by the massive impact that made Stickney crater (lower right).

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

“We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves,” said Terry Hurford of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.


The findings by Hurford and his colleagues are being presented Nov. 10, 2015, at the annual Meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society at National Harbor, Maryland.
Phobos’ grooves were long thought to be fractures caused by the impact that formed Stickney crater.


That collision was so powerful, it came close to shattering Phobos. However, scientists eventually determined that the grooves don’t radiate outward from the crater itself but from a focal point nearby.


More recently, researchers have proposed that the grooves may instead be produced by many smaller impacts of material ejected from Mars. But new modeling by Hurford and colleagues supports the view that the grooves are more like “stretch marks” that occur when Phobos gets deformed by tidal forces.


The gravitational pull between Mars and Phobos produces these tidal forces. Earth and our moon pull on each other in the same way, producing tides in the oceans and making both planet and moon slightly egg-shaped rather than perfectly round.



The same explanation was proposed for the grooves decades ago, after the Viking spacecraft sent images of Phobos to Earth. At the time, however, Phobos was thought to be more-or-less solid all the way through. When the tidal forces were calculated, the stresses were too weak to fracture a solid moon of that size.


The recent thinking, however, is that the interior of Phobos could be a rubble pile, barely holding together, surrounded by a layer of powdery regolith about 330 feet (100 meters) thick.



“The funny thing about the result is that it shows Phobos has a kind of mildly cohesive outer fabric,” said Erik Asphaug of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University in Tempe and a co-investigator on the study. “This makes sense when you think about powdery materials in microgravity, but it's quite non-intuitive.”



An interior like this can distort easily because it has very little strength and forces the outer layer to readjust. The researchers think the outer layer of Phobos behaves elastically and builds stress, but it’s weak enough that these stresses can cause it to fail.


All of this means the tidal forces acting on Phobos can produce more than enough stress to fracture the surface. Stress fractures predicted by this model line up very well with the grooves seen in images of Phobos. This explanation also fits with the observation that some grooves are younger than others, which would be the case if the process that creates them is ongoing.


The same fate may await Neptune’s moon Triton, which is also slowly falling inward and has a similarly fractured surface. The work also has implications for extrasolar planets, according to researchers.


“We can’t image those distant planets to see what’s going on, but this work can help us understand those systems, because any kind of planet falling into its host star could get torn apart in the same way,” said Hurford.
 

---

Elizabeth Zubritsky
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Some Times Coincidences ARE Stranger Than Fact

A lot of things in my files, reports, notes etc., I still treat as confidential.  Most of those associated with the AOP Bureau are now dead but as I found out recently, their families are very clear that names not be published.  Pity really. But the families of Lords and Ladies as well as ranking military men can afford the lawyers!

But this is the problem I am left with and I will not waver from having given my word (over 40 years ago) on confidentiality. 

With reports there are other problems.  At the very outset I pointed out to "The Committee" that if we expected astronomers, meteorologists as well as military persons to cooperate with the work then there had to be something in place to guarantee them anonymity.  My idea was the Joint Scientific Intelligence Communications Document (JSICD).

As the AOP Bureau expected to exchange and forward reports as well as information the term "Intelligence" was used.  Ufologists jumped on this and I was told it was "very James Bondish" and even sounded "very fantasy".  This showed the narrow thinking of Ufologists. "Intelligence", "Intelligencer" was a word used in old newspaper titles and magazines.  It referred to gathered news and information not spying and I got sick of explaining that to dim-wits.  JSICD just meant that a document containing reports, analysis and technical information was guaranteed confidentiality. Then some astronomer said "Yes but what about-" and so the JSICD had to be ammended and each time was designated an amendment letter so by 1995 we had gone from JSICD (A) to JSICD (I).

It just guaranteed confidentiality of persons involved nothing more.  It was always taken for granted the Grey Book project itself would last ten years (1977-187) but eventually, I was the only one left alive so officially stopped Grey Book in 1995.

All these years later, I think it "safe" to reveal bits and pieces and what went on "behind the scenes" could get odder than the reports we received.

You know, Franklyn Angus Davin-Wilson really ought to be far better known than he is. That's him to the right with that smile!

I first met Franklyn at a Bristol meeting of the British Flying Saucer Bureau (BFSB f. 1953) back in 1976, I think. I was speaking to a few people and grabbed a break when this short, skinny chap wearing a Russian style fur hat came up to me. Someone said to me:"That's Franklyn Davin-Wilson" and then moved off. Franklyn stretched out his hand and beamed a huge smile -displaying a large set of canid teeth. I shook his hand and said "Fox teeth aren't they?" His smile grew as he popped out the false set of teeth he had a dentist make from fox teeth. "I like you!" he said.  Apparently people normally gasped or backed off when he gave them his vampiric smile!

Franklyn had become interested in UFOs reports after leaving the army in the 1960s and reading the accounts of astronomers and astronauts about their own encounters. A former Bristol Grammar School student (the BGS seemed to spawn, uh, "eccentrics"!) he was a founding member of the British Computer Society as well as a keen astronomer. Franklyn was a constant ally while I was at the BFSB as a committee member and later editor of its UFO News Bulletin and his support continued on into the days of UFO International.  Along with Dennis Cowdy, a founder in 1952 of Manchester Flying Saucer Research, Franklyn was at the core of the Anomalous Observational Phenomena Bureau and Project Grey Book.

Franklyn advocated that every published UFO account should not be accepted as suitable for inclusion unless there was a second or third source -even then, the more sources the better and if you could check the report yourself -much better.  This has stuck to me every day since.

In the mid-1970s Franklyn even advocated the use of computers in UFO reports analysis and also for the analysis of UFO photographs.  He did design a computer card system for BUFORA but they seemed to drop the idea.

His specialist field of research were Signals From Space, Astronomers and UFOs, Unidentified Orbital Objects and photographic analysis.

Franklyn could be somewhat fractious at times when dealing with fools and although interested in the possibility, after speaking to Leo Sprinkle at a BUFORA Convention (scribbled on a margin of the notes of his meeting is :"The Day Mountbatten was murdered") on retrievals of crashed "flying saucers", Franklyn was in two minds because "so many of the buggers are supposed to have crashed!"

As seemed to be his wont, Franklyn often set me off on searches and some lasted decades -"The Vampiric Sheep Killer of Badminton" started after Franklyn mentioned the case featured in The Books Of Charles Fort and thirty years later I wound the whole mess up and even discovered a lynx had been shot at the time. The full story can be found in The Red Paper: Canids.  The other little mystery that took up many years was "The Dead Aquatic Creatures Of Canvey Island" -again, detailed in Some Things Strange & Sinister.

There are others but I still keep busy on those.

On New Years Eve, 1983, Franklyn felt unwell and went to bed.  He died of a heart attack caused by a possible blood clot.  He was around 43 years old. He was the third member of the AOP B to die of a heart attack (Dennis Cowdy was the first) but his loss was deeply felt and his research notes are still with me.  Every new years eve at Midnight I remember the old sod.

Some of my strangest moments were with Franklyn.

In the 1970s after late night meetings we would drive back to where I lived in Downend and we would often talk for an hour or two in his car before I was "released"! We were discussing signal frequencies on one dry Summer night -Franklyn had been talking about this at a meeting.  So, out of the blue, Franklyn suggested we use his specially converted car radio to send a signal out to "any green little buggers -or tall, blond Venusian women!"  I joked that it was worth a try in an attempt to humour him.

Franklyn sent out a Morse Code signal. We sat in the silence listening -only the occasional owl call interrupting the silence.  We started to nod off.  Suddently, we sat bolt up-right: a strange, guttural voice was coming from the car speaker.  Franklyn's response was: "Ah. I didn't expect that!"

So Franklyn send another Morse message and the voice came through again. We just could not understand what was being said.  Franklyn tapped out the code again and the voice seemed snappier in tone.  We checked frequency, direction but could not explain what was going on.

"You don't suppose-?" asked Franklyn rather sheepishly and before he even finished I told him I did not think it was an alien.  At Franklyn's insistence I opened the passenger door window to look up "in case". The voice suddenly became clearer.  We were being warned that we were "fouling up" an emergency radio band.  With the speed of light, Franklyn disconnected his radio and turned to me with a rather sheepish grin: "Perhaps this ought to be our little secret?" he suggested.  And it was.  Until now.

On another occasion, Franklyn had decided that some of my talks needed props.  In the 1976-1983 period I wrote numerous articles and gave talks on, obviously, Alien Entity and CE IIIK cases.  I dreaded what he had planned but just before I was about to leave to give the talk in question the doorbell rang.  On my doorstep was a 6 feet (1.8m) tall figure in all encompassing lycra-like suit and  -only the face was uncovered. Suddenly,  a 3 feet (90cms) high little figure with large head and dressed in silver came into view: "Now say you don't believe in us!"   came the campy mocking voice.  The props had arrived.

The demonstrate various entity types (there were no "Greys" back then), Franklyn had scoured old shop bins until he found a mannequin and then the necessary clothing.  A childs doll (a rather large one!) was found and its head replaced with an adult mannequin head that he had worked on. Silver spray-paint and job done.

Giggles abounded at the talk but the props made the point.  Talk over, the 'aliens' were loaded into Franklyn's car.  We had to go back to his home to drop things off but as we were heading back to Downend we both realised we had a couple of aliens seated behind us. It was eventually around Midnight that we arrived in Downend (where all activity seemed to stop after 5 P.M. on Winter evenings) but such was my insomniac reputation that two old friends were waiting.  One was an RAF man the other in the Army and both were in uniform.  Franklyn suggested getting the props so while I made coffee he and my two friends went to the car to get them.

A female journalist who had been covering UFO stories was on her way back from covering a UFO sighting and with her was a press photographer.  She decided to call in and so her car had arrived only a few minutes before the photographer said "Look!"  The duo watched as they saw me over-seeing two military men as they walked to the back of my house...carrying a dead alien in a clear body bag. The photographer realised -too late- that his loaded camera was in his lap.

Things looked bad for me but it got worse.

I got to know a few police officers and some had a very wry sense of humour.  A patrol car pulled in behind the journalists wondering what they were doing.  The officers approached the car and spoke to the duo who explained what they had seen. One officer then told them: "Mr. Hooper is engaged in secret work of a nature we cannot divulge but we must ask you to move on and say nothing of what you have seen. Understood?"  The journalist nodded and they drove off.

So, next day, after talking to her editor, the journalist contacted me.  She explained that she and a colleague had seen me lead two military men carrying a small, large headed body wearing silver in a plastic bag into my house.  Also, they had been cautioned by on duty police officers who told her they were "on security detail."    As I tried to explain the situation (the two policemen had told me about a joke with a couple in a car) it all seemed very odd...two military men...a dead alien...police on security duty.  I then learnt that the photographer had completely forgotten to take photographs due to shock at what he was seeing.  Pity.

A very embarassing moment came one Winter's night when Franklyn answered the phone for me.  A woman reported that she had gotten home after a weekend away and was observing an orange ball of light over her house.  The police had given her my number and when I talked with her I learnt that the ball of light was about 2 feet (60cms) in diameter and seemed to be moving around a chimney stack. "To the Bat-mobile!" shouted Franklyn as he ran to get the car ready.

Another mad drive and we arrived in the Clifton area of Bristol. And there, as the woman pointed out, was the orange ball of light, slightly flickering.  Two police officers who had been called to the scene were asked whether they had gone up to check it out? "Sorry, mate" said one with a smirk "burglars we investigate but UFOs -you're the professional!"  I turned to Franklyn and told him one of us needed to go up onto the roof.  He wished me good luck and added "It'll help cure your vertigo!"

So, I got up onto a wooden shed, then the house extension and up a fire ladder (never used but in good shape thankfully) and on to the flat roof of the house. I took out a pen knife with the aim of tossing it into the ball of light -I never saw the old lead pipe on the ground.  I literally went flying.  Apparently, the police below saw me reaching for the light then scream out (more a yell really) and I was down.  The police entered the house with Franklyn and the owner in pursuit.

Rubbing my knees, I went over to the light that just was not convincing me...it turned out to be an old roofers lamp that was still wired in and seemed to be shorting out.  So much for a "mini UFO".  But why was there a woman screaming inside the house?

The skylight opened up behind me and up popped Franklyn's head -a big grin on his face. "We're having much more fun down here!" he told me.  I disconnected the lamp and walked over to the skylight and looked down. On the staircase stood the woman, very embarassed and uttering "sorries" all round. The smiling policemen were leaving.  "What the hell is going on?" I asked myself.

A young woman in a bathrobe came from a bedroom followed by a hurriedly dressing young man.  Apparently, the woman's daughter, who was supposed to be away, invited her boyfriend for the weekend and at one point adjusted the roof top TV antenna and had pushed the wire from the roofers lamp back into a hole on the chimney -causing the shorting.  The couple were then "amorously involved" when the daughter noticed a large bearded man skulking past the skylight (I'd not even seen it).  My yelling out followed by her screaming and all sorts of things were being assumed -especially as I had 'vanished'- and all rushed to the rescue.

Oh, how Franklyn thought it was so funny. He even told me: "You know, as I saw you climbing onto that shed I suddenly thought that it would have been easier to ask the house owner to let us in so you could get up onto the roof"  and when I said "Well, why didn't you say anything?" the reply was "I didn't want to spoil your 'moment' of course!"

At least on other occasions Franklyn and I chased UFOs together -particularly at Cradle Hill, Wiltshire. Fun days.

The Complete Review: Alien Dawn by Colin wilson

 

I have to say that I was really looking forward to Colin Wilson's"investigation into the Contact experience" -Alien Dawn as you probably read here:http://terryhooper.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/colin-wilsons-alien-dawnwhoa.html

 When I read what he had concluded I could not wait to see what he had discovered in the way of facts to reach that conclusion.  I count Wilson's book, Poltergeist, as a classic of research so I opened up the book.

I have this habit of using Post-It notes in books and magazines with scribbles denoting points of interest. There are a few in this book.  However there are many where I have corrected the sources and information Wilson bases his findings on.

For one thing, waxing lyrical over John Keel and his adventures and ultra terrestrials or whatever is bad. B A D because, as I discovered through research, Keel was quoting sources that were very dubious and spinning a yarn -this was his "business" after all.  Like the "fact" that an officer in the British Army during World War 2 headed a flying saucer project -which Air Vice Marshal Sir Victor Goddard had to point out more than a few times was a fantasy.  Never happened. The UK at that time expercted a German invasion at any time and "we did not expect to survive long" -as Sir Victor and others pointed out.  To suggest that at that time an Army officer was acting outside of all Military Intelligence departments and taking money to look at "lights" was ridiculous.

I do not for one minute accept anything Keel wrote unless I can check original sources.

Jacques Vallee and his theories which he seemed to hot then cold then hot on again. Vallee quotes sources such as Italian Ufologist Fenoglio -a KNOWN hoaxer- and never corrects the record and still uses those cases. One of the first things the AOP Bureau did was look at Ortotheny, the "Mars Cycle" and cases cited by Vallee -the first two took two days to dismiss (a day in the case of "ley lines") and then Vallees case data base proved far from accurate. In fact, I, personally, began to doubt Vallee had done any original research on reported cases -as with Alencon, 1790.

But there is worse.  Wilson uses information from Harold T. Wilkins whom my late colleague Franklyn A. Davin-Wilson noted: "Has just as many un-named sources and dubious facts as Frank Edwards".  Wilkins was known to make up really good sounding sources that turned out to not exist or have the information in he had 'quoted' and he was a known plagiarist. I have tracked down a number of sources he referred to and found details not to match or to have been "re-edited" by Wilkins.

Wilson cites flying saucer Contactee hoaxer, criminal and terrorist Aladino Felix who wrote as Dino Kraspendon!

Wilson refers to the Byland Abbey UFO sighting in the Middle Ages -PROVEN and ADMITTED to be a hoax in the 1950s and 1960s as an example of UFOs in the past -and the Alencon episode!

Add to this mix dubious Crop Circles, ghosts and poltergeists, Uri Geller and Puharich, the Fatima Miracle, "synchronicities", time slips and a heap of other stuff and the conclusion Wilson reached is (I'm trying not to use a very rude word) bovine excrement.

Sure, Wilson says he purchased lots of UFO books but had never really been into the subject and it shows.

This is what happens when you get someone who is just jumping into a subject but has only books as reference and has never investigated cases of abduction or UFO sightings but relies on second hand information from sources as noted.  There are examples in the book of abductees (yes, he does mention them now and then) who are describing -clearly- altered state trances but Wilson seems to accept this as part of the manipulating force behind UFOs and other things that seem strange.

There are glimpses of Wilson citing cases and ideas that he does not follow through on and it makes you wonder what he was thinking?  Although there are some interesting points I think that, by writing this book and using the sources he did, Wilson negates his own conclusion.  As Franklyn used to say "With computers the person puts in wrong data the computer spits out wrong data" and that's what we have here.

Want to see how many correction notes I put in the book until I gave up (but I will be adding more later!)?

 

Now back to the last couple chapters and I will return to this book! 

And here I am!

This book is around 1" thick (2.5cms).  With all the new notes I have added it is now 3" (7.5cms) thick. I have to say I am more than a little disappointed. Wilson certainly has a big "man-crush" on keel and Vallee.

Robin Collyns book Did Spacemen Colonise The Earth is cited in one chapter but as my late colleague Franklyn Davin-Wilson wrote about it: "He (Collyns) spent 12 years researching this book -yet it still contains glaring errors" and Franklyn annotated the book with many corrections. 

Wilson also seems to greatly admire a man who challenges Einstein and many others in science, Donald Hotson. In fact, Wilson gives up a great deal of space to Hotson's theories which had me asking out loud "What the **** has this to do with UFOs??"  But who is this great thinker who, like Wilson it seems, thinks Einstein was wrong? Bill Zebuhr in  Issue 86, July/August 2009, of Infinite Energy Magazine http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue86/hotson.html   writes:

" Don has studied a lot of physics but does not have a formal degree in it. In an undergraduate course he was told to forget a career in physics..."

Zebuhr praises Hotson but others tend not to.  But I'm not arguing physics just stating Wilson goes off on a tangent over unproven theories.

Then: "It is often stated that the 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill is the first abduction case on record..."  Wilson claims he read about 200 UFO books but he clearly did not take much in if Vallee or Keel or Watkins were not involved.  Incidentally, I've read far, far more that 500 UFO books not to mention thousands of UFO publications, edited them and even carried out a few hundred UFO sighting/entity case investigations and been researching for well over 45 years. I DO take it all in.  The Hill case is described as "the first fully documented UFO abduction case" not the very first (see my review of Captured! here: http://terryhooper.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/captured-betty-and-barney-hill-ufo.html )

On p. 227 Wilson cites the case of teenager Andrea (one of Hopkins' subjects) who was a "virgin, and her hymen was still unbroken" and Andrea got pregnant after "dreaming of having sex with a bald man with 'funny eyes'" -so  another alien experiment, right? Foetus no doubt went missing? No. Andrea had an abortion....something off here?

Wilson does refer to the possibility of the hypnotist somehow telepathically conveying ideas to a hypnotised subject (as suggested by Ann Druffel in How To Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction).  I will not knock that theory.  It is odd how Hopkins' subjects had stories conforming to his theories, Jacobs ditto and Mack -ditto.  Wilson also notes how easily hypnotised subjects were used in crimes -one woman to forget her rape and being sold on to other men (p. 228).

Now, then comes the Linda Cortile case (as outlined in Hopkins' book Witnessed) -and abduction from a tower block witnessed  by diplomats and security and head of the United Nations at the time, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.  Wilson notes how Hopkins knew one of the security men, Richard, was a top security man because he had a photo of the man standing next to President Regan -but writes that Hopkins never met Richard; all contact was via letter!  In fact, I had supported Hopkins since his first published book but Witnessed just read like a man being "fed a line" -conned.  And De Cuellar never witnessed anything -and I believe everyone accepts that.  Why the hoax was perpetrated who knows but Hopkins realising Linda "was one of them (alien)" was the nail in his coffin.  Read the book and you will see why.

But Wilson seems to accept all of this...it is we narrow, closed-minded folk who do not understand.

Wilson points to the "missing foetus" and Ann Druffel, again, solved this back in the early 1990s but Wilson does not know this.

I did choke when I read that an account came from the "Highly respected Timothy Good"  but then, Wilson quotes cases of what seem to be "altered states" -abductees leaving their bodies from cars and even in a crowded hall.  There are obvious fantasists and even hallucinatory experiences but all point toward Wilson's theory.  "Psychic Warrior" David Morehouse is quoted stating that he had used his powers to learn that Korean Flight 007, shot down by the Soviet Union in 1983, was on a spying mission. Bit of a fib based on facts that Wilson could have checked to see how good a source he was.  No mention of the USAF RC-135 spy plane that the Soviets took KAL 007 to be.

And on p. 294 the great Ufologist Wilson tells us how, by the 1960s, the idea of extra-terrestrial visitors was a dead theory.  Feck me I missed that one!  Utter, pardon the language, bull-shit.

But then we have "past life experiences", Out Of Body Experiences, cases of the paranormal and psychic abilities basically telling us that we do not know the power of our own minds.

Oh, and though I do think that Richard Dawkins is full of himself but stating "trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it is not there"??? And Stephen Hawking ("the cosmologist" -oooh, bitchy) comes in for a blasting (have I mentioned that Wilson does not rate Einstein highly either?) because he believes science will eventually find the answer to almost everything "this entails the corollary that God is an unnnecessary hypothesis".  And "Hawking is burying his head in the sand". 

Then he meanders into Planck, Bohrs, Heisenberg and Quanta for pages while I sat wondering what was going on.  He mentions the 1974 Avely (Essex) Abduction but then goes on to say that up until 1977 "there were no other abductee reports in Britain" and I again swore.  What was I cataloguing and investigating since 1974 then?  By this time I was mentally shouting "You utter ill-informed ass!"

"Indian Miracle Man" Sai Baba stated that UFOs come from the heart and the heart is God and this is where UFOs come from.  Well...mystery solved....or is it?  Because Sai Baba was not the best person to add theory to your data just read Miracle Man Or petty magician? Will the real Sai Baba please standup: http://www.saibaba-x.org.uk/15/Sunday_Magazine.html

But it goes on.  Abductee Linda Porter stating that all abductees are part aliuen if not actually aliens -putting a target on those claiming to be abductees -the aliens "fifth column" on Earth.  David M. Jacobs also claims this but seems to have no thought of consequences for people who have claimed to be abductees.

Wilson seems to reiterate on p.338 in a massive outlet of ego, that He never thought Einstein got it wrong.  T. C. Lethbridge in 1931, during a heavy rainstorm saw a "typical ball of light"...yes, we would call it "ball lightning", dear.

It seems that the chief mistake of we mere mortals is that we assume all UFOs are solid craft.  But Wilson realises the truth. Well, with the AOP Bureau in 1982 we realised that UFO catalogues and sighting reports consisted of those of alleged solid constructed craft (if those reports were true), misidentifications, meteorites, various meteorological phenomena and unknown natural phenomena -that I witnessed at least three times at close quarters.  A jumble of things making up a very strange and almost impossible to believe 'phenomenon' or, rather, "phenomena".  THAT is why it makes no sense. The AOP came to understand this, or rather I did since it was my job to assess cases for study, in three hours of just looking at the reports.

Vallee obviously did not and took it all at face value.

Wilson notes how abductions have a lot of similarities but not all the dissimilarities.  And that they "make no sense".  You think he'd get the point.  Even when he mentions an H. G. Wells story of rays from space changing Earth children into highly intelligent 'Martians' -and the story teller then realising he himself is "one of them" the penny does not drop. 

 The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John Wyndham has been summarised thus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midwich_Cuckoos:

"Ambulances arrive at two traffic accidents blocking the only roads into the (fictional) British village of Midwich, Winshire. Attempting to approach the village, one paramedic becomes unconscious.

Suspecting gas poisoning, the army is notified. They discover that a caged canary becomes unconscious upon entering the affected region, but regains consciousness when removed. Further experiments reveal the region to be a hemisphere with a diameter of 2 miles (3.2 km) around the village. Aerial photography shows an unidentifiable silvery object on the ground in the centre of the created exclusion zone.


After one day the effect vanishes along with the unidentified object, and the villagers wake with no apparent ill effects. Some months later, the villagers realise that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant, with all indications that the pregnancies were caused by xenogenesis during the period of unconsciousness referred to as the "Dayout".


When the 31 boys and 30 girls are born they appear normal except for their unusual, golden eyes and pale, silvery skin. These children have none of the genetic characteristics of their parents. As they grow up, it becomes increasingly apparent that they are, at least in some respects, not human. They possess telepathic abilities, and can control others' actions. The Children (they are referred to with a capital C) have two distinct group minds: one for the boys and another for the girls. Their physical development is accelerated compared with that of humans; upon reaching the age of nine, they appear to be sixteen-year-olds.

The Children protect themselves as much as possible using a form of mind control. One young man who accidentally hits a Child in the hip while driving a car is made to drive into a wall and kill himself. A bull who chased the Children is forced into a pond to drown. The villagers form a mob and try to burn down the Midwich Grange, where the Children are taught and live, but the Children make the villagers attack each other."

Alien hybrid kids with mind control powers -familiar?  Two films from this Village of The Damned (1960) and then Children of The Damned.  Lots of publicity for the MGM remake of 1981 that never happened but John Carpenter remade Village of The Damed in 1995.  There are lots of sci fi films, TV programmes, comic books and magazine stories and articles on the same theme.  Wilson doesn't mention these.  However about ten years ago I termed "alien hybrid children" with the better name of "Midwich Cuckoos".  Andrija Puharich of Uri Geller fame was looking into such "mentally gifted" children before his death.

Wilson feels that 'aliens' or whatever force is behind the alien fakery, is helping to develop new humans -like the ones Puharich was looking into.  John Mack was right, it seems...in a way.

I re-read what Publishers Weekly wrote about this book:

 "In over 80 books, Wilson (From Atlantis to the Sphinx) has reported on a wide variety of alternate realities involving crime, sex and the occult, all based on the underlying premise that our everyday consciousness is meager compared with powers potentially available to us.

This attempt at a synthesis of the alien/UFO phenomenon shows Wilson's encyclopedic strength to be also his weakness. In his zeal for inclusiveness, he reports not only on the history of UFOs from mythology through Kenneth Arnold to Philip Corso (The Day After Roswell), but also writes about Uri Geller, LSD research, crop circles, ley lines, the Loch Ness monster, remote viewing, Jung, hypnotism, poltergeists, Ouspensky, out-of-body experiences, quantum physics and a great deal more.

There is little new here: much of the book is composed of un-foot noted second- and third-hand accounts of UFOs, alien encounters and (perhaps) related phenomena drawn from other sources, resulting in an unfocused catalogue of anecdotes, the larger import of which is rarely assessed.

Periodically Wilson asks, as if talking to himself: "What, then, are we to make of it all?" At times he finds unbelievability a plus: after all, if someone were simply fabricating a story, wouldn't they make it more plausible?

By the time readers reach the chapter titled "Oh no, not again!" the phrase has an unintended inflection. In the end, Wilson seems to regard aliensAwhatever they areAas agents in the transformation of human consciousness, but he provides little solid support for, or elucidation of, such a hypothesis."

I purchased this book because I really rated Wilson from some previous works including Poltergeist, which I consider(ed) a classic.  I just could not believe what I read.  This is a classic example of jumping on the abduction bandwagon and spouting so much nonsense -as stated in the quote above.  This is what you get when someone who has no knowledge of the history or subject matter buys a lot of books and splutters on for 371 pages.  This is NOT "the most comprehensive bird's eye view of the subject ever undertaken" -that is a pure bull shit statement (well, its Virgin Books).

Pilot sightings of UFOs, radar-vizual cases...I could go on but these are not even touched on.  Just "Keel and Vallee were almost right but I've sorted it all out from my study"

A very, very, very, VERY disappointing book and I would never recommend it.

Review: Bigfoot Research: The Russian Vision

 This review from 2014 I am posting again because I still believe that it is one of THE most important books on the subject and, yes, even I learnt much more from this one!

Dmitri Bayanov 

Paperback: 431 pages

Publisher: Hancock House Publishers Ltd ,Canada; American Edition, Second Printing edition (January 1, 2011)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0888397062

ISBN-13: 978-0888397065

Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches

So, I looked at the cost.  Quite expensive but 430 pages on Russian Hominology… now it is near impossible to find much of Russian Hominology and so I bit the bullet and ordered the book.

I had a brief correspondence with Dmitri Bayanov in the early 1980s –mainly regarding Sasquatch researcher John Green’s call for a Sasquatch to be shot and killed “for science”. I even got some new information on the Russian hominid scene.  It was certainly an eye-opener to me.  Sadly, TV has never fully looked at Russian hominology but prefers to stick to Sasquatch/Bigfoot with only an occasional look at Almas or, rarer still, the Chinese Yeren.

Anyway, the book arrived and I sat down to read it.  Oh. It was not going to be all about Russian hominology after all.  Serves me right for believing the advert. I’ve now found another advert and the book blurb reads:

“Bigfoot is a familiar word today around the world. Since the middle of the last century it indicates a mysterious giant primate of North America, who is also called Sasquatch. The Russian vision of this research is distinguished by at least three peculiarities: it is based on the combined evidence regarding these primates; it regards these humanlike beings as relict hominids (hominins by latest primate classification), i.e., the closest relatives of modern man, Homo sapiens; and it firmly takes the existence of these still enigmatic bipeds for a biological fact, not a popular myth or a scientific hypothesis. The purpose of the book is to substantiate these views and claims. The main philosophic question posed by it: What is it to be human?”

Seriously, that does not tell much about the book.  In fact, as I started reading it I realised that my disappointment was uncalled for.

It is never really mentioned –especially on US TV- that the Russian hominologists and experts were the first to fully analyse and affirm that the Patterson-Gimlin film of a Sasquatch from Bluff Creek, in 1967, was genuine.  It took a while longer for American experts to do the same.  In fact, it was only after the advent of computer technology, enhancement and analysis that US experts deemed the short film “genuine”. The nice thing about this book is that it contains papers and extracts from papers that most of us in the West have not seen for various reason.  The Patterson footage is looked at and discussed here.

The big debate on whether to shoot and kill (“humanely”?!!!) a Sasquatch for science still rages on and, as I have written a number of times before it should be totally abhorrent to anyone –let alone someone claiming to be a scientist- to just go out and kill a living creature “for science”!  We live in the 21^st century.  The age of DNA –DNA which can convict a person of a crime in a court of law- and if the nay-sayers tell us this sort of evidence is not good enough then they are actually snubbing their noses at the very science they claim to uphold the principles of.

“Why do those hairs said to be from a Bigfoot not result in a ‘This is Bigfoot hair’ announcement by the labs testing it?”  It’s a question I have been asked.  Well, we find a hair and on testing the data base shows a scientifically known animal –Brown bear, deer or whatever.  However, there is no “scientifically known” Sasquatch.  I’ve mentioned many times how evidence needs to be gathered.  “Unknown primate” is what we get from test results.

Russian hominologists are aware that killing an Almas is wrong but to “habituate” –get it used to one or two people- and film then gather samples is a good way to go.  This is dealt with in depth in this book.

I mentioned in Some More Things Strange & Sinister, the American newspaper report I had found in library archives of a Sasquatch jumping onto and then riding a horse.  “Ridiculous” was what I thought.  I wish I had read this book first!  Evidence of horse-riding DOES exist!!!    Horse-mane braiding.  

 Sasquatch/Almas vocalisation is also dealt with along with several claims of long term Sasquatch-human interaction in the US.  But looking at reports and more, Bayanov tells us Almas-human interaction is not unknown.

Buy Bayanov also looks at the Chinese Yeren and the Australian Yowie.  It is incredible that in such widely separated geographic areas there are so many correlations.  There was no free access to the US press in the Soviet era so no country folk could read of Sasquatch and think “That’d be a great joke to pull!” Access to Australian newspapers and Yowie reports? No. But it worked both ways and as someone always on the look out for these reports the only thing I ever saw from China was in China Reconstructs in the 1970s and that I saw by accident as my brother had a copy!

Bayanov also looks at reports of alleged Almas kills and why hunters might not report such kills in Russia or the United States.

And Bayanov makes a very –VERY- good case for the “Father of Hominology” to be his old professor Boris Fedorovich Porshnev (1905-1972).  In point of fact, reading the book you realise that, like the Chinese, the Russians were taking hominology very seriously and the only thing getting in the way of greater progress for the Russians was/is lack of financial resources.

I do not normally sit down and read a 400+ paged book over a day-and-a-half and ignore everything else.  But in this case I had no choice!  If reading about Russian hominology was not enough then Bayanov’s study of folklore about wildmen as well as looking at accounts of these dating back to ancient Greece and artistic depictions of wildmen in archaeological finds is a clincher.  I think that a lot of us interested in hominology suspected that wildmen in folkore and Medieval accounts might have been some kind of relic hominid –“European Bigfoot” if you want to dumb it down. But in this book Bayanov makes the strongest case for this based on known literature and finds.  He even refers to Linaeus and his classification of hominid types.  Naturalists today use the Linnaean system of classification yet many are unaware of his hominid classifications because they were censored and then omitted later by ‘scholars’ who would have no such officially recognised “other species”.

The scope of this work covers far more, though –including the Minnesota “Ice Man” and just WHO may have really owned it.

I have always cherished my Sanderson Abominable Snowman: Legend Come To Life and I always will.  However, if I had to recommend a book on the subject to anyone it would be this one. The fact that Bayanov’s book is decades newer and up-to-date on hominology helps!

Lots of images regarding wildmen in history and more make this the must read on the subject.

Review: In The Footsteps Of The Russian Snowman, by Dmitri Bayanov

I posted this review in January but I feel that it is a very important book and one that anyone interested in the subject or thinking of getting into Sasquatch research should read.

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Crypto-Logos Publishers; 1st edition (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 5900229181
• ISBN-13: 978-5900229188
• Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 5.2 x 8 inches

The world's first English-language book on the searches for the elusive relict hominoid (popularly known as the snowman) in the lands of the former Soviet Union, written by Russian researchers themselves.

The information is given in full detail, soberly discussed, arranged geographically and presented chronologically, from the accounts of medieval travelers to the sighting reports of the current decade.

Numerous observations of relict hominoids in the wild or in captivity include a case of interbreeding with humans. But is the snowman a reality? This book does its best to answer that very question.


Well, this is a book I wanted to get hold of for years but never managed to -the price for a copy was way too steep but now, well I bit the bullet and ordered a copy.  If you search around on the internet you can get the best price.

So I received the book Tuesday and decided to sit down and read it.

I got to the last page at 23:20 hours.  It was a very fascinating book.  I did this with Bayanov's last book, Bigfoot Research The Russian Vision which you will find reviewed here:

http://terryhooper.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/review-bigfoot-research-russian-vision.html

Some material from this book is repeated in the larger (previously reviewed) book but there is a great deal that, if my memory serves me right, was not included so reading the papers again is like reading something new anyway!

And what a book this is.  I think that it is fair to say that, annoying though it may be to our American cousins, researchers in the old Soviet Union actually led the way in field work and scientific research on the subject of Relict Hominoid research  It cannot be argued as all the facts are there in print.  There was the officially approved search for the "snowman" in 1958 (under the watchful eyes of a border police unit), then the attacks by those who ridiculed the subject but refused to even look at the reports or go on any field trip.  People that my late colleague Franklyn A. Davin-Wilson defined thusly: "Expert. "X" ="The Unknown" and "Spurt" ="A Drip Under Pressure"!"

Some hominologists, such as Vladimir Pushkarev, paid the ultimate price in the quest and others such as Maya Bykova faced a certain amount of name calling and derision and in Bykova's case it was because of her unshakable stance in not identifying the witnessor the geographic location of the sightings, including her own, of the hominid named "Mecheny" and I think her reasons were sound if annoying to other hominologists.

If you are involved in studying wildlife you are acutely aware that for every group of supporters there is another group wanting to hunt/kill.  Badger groups in the UK are very secretive and not surprisingly so. There are also mammals and birds that have been/are being reintroduced and there are people who want to hunt and kill those re-introduced species.  Between 1977 -2007 I was a wildlife advisor to UK police forces on exotic species, mainly large non-Native cats.  I would talk to country estate owners, game keepers, naturalists, villagers, police officers and many others but there was one edict I set myself and that was "by neither word nor deed to cause harm to any animal".  There are people who knew of animals locally but would not talk until they knew that even there names were given in total confidence let alone a sighting location.  Even the police kept quiet!  There were hard times when I was offered what I consider to be very high and ridiculous amounts by national newspapers for a map of which animal was there. I rejected all offers.

So, if you are taken into the confidence of a person(s) locally you keep your word.  If you are given the opportunity to get a first hand viewing of a hominid and you are sworn to secrecy then you record everything you can.  Locals granting you that opportunity are accepting you as a trusted friend.  You do not betray that trust.  Bykova never did. And then you have the very protective locals who think you should leave hominids alone -Nikola Avdeyev came under fire for closing in on a hominid's home:the warning was very clear -"Leave it. Go!"

There are researchers named in this book who should, rightly, be as well known as Ivan T. Sanderson, Bernard Heuvelman, John Green or Rene Dahinden.  They went into the remote parts of the old Soviet Union and they spoke to locals, found out histories and regional names for hominids.  Documented personal observations and much more that makes a great deal of what far better financed American researchers have done look like "basics" (and I am not insulting North American hominologists here).

What I found fascinating is the history of what we call "Bigfoor", "Yeti" or "Almasty" back into ancient times -the relics and records of their existence.  It is amazing and even with all of this available to the more learned historian in the West what have they done?  They confine these accounts to fairy tales and myth because "these things don't exist" -but I could write a book on that attitude alone!

How Russian hominologists solved Horse mane-platting as "natural"....but then got a shock.  Habits, descriptions, histories that I have read elsewhere but which were watered down somewhat.  This book may need up-dating since it was published in 1996 but it is the source if you want the first hand details from the people who did the work and were there rather than the cut-up versions by authors who were not.

It is rare for a book to actually grip me enough to read it in one go.  I can only give it my highest recommendation as a must buy if you have even a passing interest in the subject.

Sadly, the current situation in the fragmented country is such that researchers really cannot travel as far and wide on field trips as they used to. War and political turmoil are the enemy of any serious field worker -there are enough dangers without having to risk being shot at.

This book does Russian hominologists, the founders of the science, true justice.  Perhaps one day some TV people will not treat them as "the Russian oddballs" in their documentaries but will take them seriously and give them and the work they have done the respect they are due.

Bigfoot Photographed In Sussex Countryside

I have said it over and over again: there is no Bigfoot-like creature in the UK countryside. We are looking at reports from hoaxers and the "cryptozoological" (less than honest) fringe.

In this case the figure bears none of the physiological traits reported in Sasquatch reports from Canada and the United States.  Everything marks this out as a regular person and the all black gear and what seems to be a grey face-mask is indicative of either (a) someone perpetrating a hoax, or, more worryingly, (b) a person stalking the forest with unknown intentions.  He/she is carrying nothing to indicate a poacher.

Someone living rough in the forest?  Quite a few of those and not all bad as people but there are some "crazies" out there.

Here is the account from the Mirror online.

Is this proof Bigfoot exists? Dog walker claims to have spotted mystery beast in Sussex countryside

• By Ben Cusack http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/proof-bigfoot-exists-dog-walker-6799363

"Caroline Toms, 34, was walking border collie Ash when she says the huge ape-like beast ran across her path leaving her dog running off terrified

SWNS

Bizarre: Caroline Toms managed to capture this grainy image of a mystery beast

"A dog walker claims to have captured images of ' Bigfoot ' roaming in the Sussex countryside.

"Caroline Toms, 34, was walking with her border collie Ash when she says she was confronted with a huge ape-like beast as it ran across her path.

"Her dog was first to spot something was amiss and began barking before shooting off into undergrowth at Angmering Park Estate in Arundel, West Sussex.

"She managed to quickly capture a grainy image of the creature as she was taking pictures of Ash playing during their visit to the estate on Tuesday.

"Caroline, from nearby Littlehampton, said: "It all happened so fast. Ash started acting a little bit bemused and barking.

"Then she quick as a flash shot off into the undergrowth - then I saw this big black thing flash out in front of me.

"I only had my camera out because I was taking pictures of Ash playing.

SWNS

Her dog started barking then shot off into the undergrowth before she spotted 'Bigfoot' run across her path

"She came running back quick-as-a-flash though.

"I don't know what it was, but when I had a closer look at the pictures, it certainly does look like Bigfoot to me."

"The building society worker said the incident was over in seconds, and she has no idea what it is that she photographed - but won't rule out the mythical North American ape-like creature.

"She said: "I posted this photo I took last week on my Facebook page.


 

 "I took it whilst walking my dog through Angmering Park Estate last week.

"I have no idea what it is, but I wonder if anyone else has seen it."

"The Angmering Park Estate is a private nature reserve set in the heart of the South Downs National Park, and covers a whopping 6,750 acres - the equivalent of 3,375 football pitches.

Caroline was walking her dog Ash in Angmering Park Estate (pictured) when she claims she saw the mystery beast

"Caroline said: "I think it could be Bigfoot, but it happened so fast I cannot be absolutely certain.

"It was just luck I had the camera out.

"It was so big and massive, I don't know if it could be anything else.

"That's what it looked like - I don't know for sure, but I've seen other pictures of supposed Bigfoot, and what I saw looks like the other ones."

"The Sussex Big Cat Watch is a group that claims there has been 'countless sightings' of a puma or leopard over the years.

Among them, they say, was back in September 2009, when a walker saw a big black cat the size of a small Labrador walk in front of him on the edge of a dense forest. "

Here I will note that non-native exotic cats DO live and breed in the UK.  So let's get that out of this account.  But maybe the police should be warning people, especially women, walking alone in the area?

***************************************************************************************
Here's a video with the account spoken by an anonymous robot!

'UFO Clouds' Captured Hovering Over Cape Town

Call me sad but I think clouds provide good subject matter for photographs!  Take a look at these from South Africa:http://news.sky.com/story/1584869/ufo-clouds-captured-hovering-over-cape-town

A local photographer captures the formation of the saucer-shaped puffs amid a skyline he described as "unbelievable".

Lenticular clouds over Cape Town. Pic: @instagram_sa/Kyle Mijlof

Residents of Cape Town may have thought they were seeing UFOs in the sky - but instead they were being treated to a special cloud formation.

The lenticular clouds appeared over the South African city late on Sunday afternoon and photographer Kyle Mijlof was among those capturing the scene, which he described as "unbelievable".

Mr Mijlof told Sky News the clouds started forming over Table Mountain - about five miles from the city - at around 3pm and his picture was taken three hours later as the formation peaked.

He added: "Honestly, the whole skyline that day was unbelievable and a bit of an eerie stillness in the air.
"I was on my scooter at the time, driving along Signal Hill back home to Camps Bay, I stopped to get this quick shot - I still had my helmet on."

Mr Mijlof said he has seen similar clouds during his travels elsewhere in the world but not in Cape Town.
Sky News meteorologist Chris England said: "They are formed at the top of waves in the atmosphere caused by air going over mountains and are quite common, although more often as long bands of simple arcs."

He said the shapes are formed by either variations in humidity within the air or the originating hills being "fairly isolated peaks".

Picturesque Cape Town is framed by peaks, including Table Mountain, which is around 3,500ft high.
England added: "Lenticular clouds don't really signify anything in particular about the weather, apart from fact that the atmosphere is stable at the time and so not much convection likely - and that can change quite rapidly."

Lenticular clouds, which come from a Latin word meaning "lens-like", can form in many places around the world and have been blamed for a number of previous "UFO sightings".