'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Tom Carey Retires

 

This week I reached out to Tom Carey, who, while in Roswell for the 75^th Anniversary, announced his retirement from UFO research. I thought it would be interesting to talk about that and learn just what it meant. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50879536

And for those with a more visual orientation, you can watch the show here:

https://rumble.com/v1fjsbd-kevin-randle-interviews-tom-carey-his-retirement-from-ufo-research.html

Before we got to that, we did talk about how he had gotten into UFO research, and I learned it wasn’t so much an interest in UFOs as it was an interest in the Roswell case. He had joined MUFON and later CUFOS, for the publications rather than being sucked into UFO investigation. He did do some of that, but soon realized that a tale of another light in the sky didn’t actually advance our knowledge. There were lots of those stories but with little evidence other than the testimony of the witness.

Tom Carey at his table at the Roswell Festival.

This was a conclusion that I had realized as well. A private pilot flying over the town at three in the morning with his landing light on and the wind blowing away from the witness might only see the light. Without other information, just the witness on the ground reporting the light, there is no real way to find an explanation.

Tom concentrated on the Roswell case to the exclusion of most other cases. But he said that the witnesses are all gone now. If the soldier was twenty in 1947, he was now 95, if still alive. The case had devolved into the second and third hand witnesses. Those who heard the story from fathers or brothers or others who had been in Roswell in 1947.

I mentioned Dalton Smith who had popped up on my radar about a week earlier. As noted in the posting about him, we hadn’t run into that name before. I learned through the documentation available that he had served in Roswell and more importantly, had shared an office with Jesse Marcel.

What I hadn’t mentioned in that earlier post but did during the show, was that the diary, that had been the focus of a documentary a few years back, which wasn’t written by Marcel based on a handwriting analysis, might well have been written by Smith. It was in a “Memorandum” booklet that was everywhere in the Army as one point. Tens of thousands of them had been issued for taking notes. It is possible that when Marcel was reassigned and took his person possessions with him, had picked up the diary that Smith had been keeping… or when Smith left, he didn’t take the diary with him so that Marcel ended up with it.

None of that really matters because there was nothing in the diary about the UFO found near Corona in 1947. Not even a reference to the “official answer” of weather balloon. It was an interesting but irrelevant document.

And speaking of documents, I asked Tom about his opinion of the Ramey Memo. Tom said that the first time he had projected the memo in an enlarged fashion, he saw the critical term, “victims of the wreck.” That reading is not universal and there are other interpretations of it that do not lead to the extraterrestrial.

There were other questions I wanted to ask but we ran out of time. We could have talked about MJ-12 and the Alien Autopsy, for example. Next week, however, I’ll be talking with John Shirley who has a more skeptical approach to the subject of UFOs.

Coast to Coast AM - Alien Abductions

 

Those who follow my work know that I’m not a fan of abduction tales. I believe that many have a terrestrial explanation but also think that some, such as the Hickson – Parker abduction of 1973, with its multiple witnesses makes a good case for a 

Calvin Parker

limited number of abduction tales. In the Hickson – Parker abduction, there is an Air Force document dated October 12, 1973, the day after the abduction in which two other men are named as having witnessed part of the event. That makes for some interesting corroboration.

We now might be able to supply another case that has some outside, corroborating evidence, thanks to Fran Ridge and his MADAR network. On April 10 of this year, near Clarksburg, West Virginia, the witnesses, returning home, saw a cigar-shaped object hovering about 30 feet in the air displaying rainbow-colored lights. As the witnesses approached a blue-green light was shined down on them.

After about three or four minutes, the UFO shot up to a few hundred feet and disappeared into the northwest. The witnesses heard no sound but said they were aware of a low audible hum or buzz while it hovered near them.

One of the witnesses looked back down the hill and saw another object that seemed to appear out of nowhere. This second craft scanned the car with a blue-green light, paying particular attention to the woman, who was pregnant. The light seemed to linger on her, worrying the man greatly. This apparently lasted about ten minutes and then the UFO climbed rapidly and disappeared in the same direction as the first object.

Once the UFO was gone, the couple finished their journey home. They realized there was a time lapse of about two hours, suggesting an encounter that lasted much longer than they thought. Once they reached home, they both worried about possible contamination from the UFO. They both showered. The male witness said that he hadn’t felt right since the encounter.

Ridge reported that MADAR Node 192 recorded interesting spikes at the time of the incident. There were multiple sensor readings, including a compass heading deviation. This is, of course, suggestive of some sort of anomaly in the area at the time of the encounter, providing corroboration for the report.

Fred Saluga, the MUFON State Director for West Virginia and Brian Seech, a MUFON Field Investigator, made several attempts to contact the witnesses through phone, email and letters, but have received no responses. Fran Ridge tried as well and failed as well.

Ridge said that this was strange because the witnesses had reported the sighting to the National UFO Reporting Center and checked the box for investigation, meaning, of course, they were interested in someone following up on the case.

What they don’t know, which is important, is that the closest MADAR site recorded anomalies at the time of the sighting. That might influence them to cooperate with some of the investigating parties but if they continue to refuse, then there is little else that can be done.

Bob Spearing reported that this was similar to two cases from Yorkshire, England, including one told by Police Constable Alan Godfrey. While out on assignment in late 1980, he saw a rotating, diamond-shaped object some twenty feet tall and fourteen feet wide. He said that bushes under the craft were trembling though there wasn’t any wind.

Godfrey said that he was attracted to the object, but that he was also frightened by it. While he sat in his car, he realized that he was seeing something unconventional and tried to use his radio. When that failed, his police training kicked in and he made a sketch of the UFO.

He reported that one moment he was looking at the UFO and the next he was about one hundred yards down the road. The object was gone but he had flashbacks of getting out of his car and a voice telling him he should not look at the UFO.

Realizing that something did not fit, Godfrey was eventually put into a hypnotic trace by psychologist Dr. Robert Blair and psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Jaffee. That provided additional information. Godfrey said that he had gotten out of the car, but then returned to it, but it wouldn’t start. He was then struck with a light and lost consciousness.

He was floated to the craft and through an opening in it. There was a rounded room that had some corners, seemed to be carpeted, contained a bed and machinery. There was a man called Joseph sitting at a table, who was described as human with a thin nose, beard and moustache. Although sitting down, Godfrey said the man was six feet tall, was wearing a skull cap and sheet, making him look somewhat biblical.

Also present were eight metallic robots about three and a half feet tall, wearing what was described as lampshades on their heads, and eyes that were in a line. They touched him, making beeping sounds. There was a large black dog present.

Without resisting, Godfrey was led to the bed and laid down. A light from the ceiling shone down on him and through telepathy was told that all this was not meant for him. Joseph touched Godfrey and everything went black for a while.

He said that the robots removed his shoes and manipulated his toes while instruments were painfully attached to his arms and legs. While this was happened, Godfrey remembered a ball of fire he had seen as a child and Joseph explained they had met before.

Godfrey remembered other events that can only be called paranormal. In one, he and his girlfriend were driving when a woman stepped out in front of the car. Although he thought he hit her, they could find no trace of the woman. He said that when he got home, he could not account for two hours.

I’m not sure why Spearing thought this case matched the latest report, but it is one of the two he pointed out. There wasn’t enough information available, at the moment, to locate the other report.

All this information was assembled thanks to Fran Ridge, NUFORC, Jennie Randles (no relation, please note the ending “S”) and Dr. Thomas Bullard. I will attempt to learn more about that second case and will report anything of interest that I find here.

Roswell Intelligence Officer Dalton Smith

 

I have been asked many times if there is anything else we can learn about the Roswell UFO crash now that the first-hand witnesses are no longer available. We are now talking with the second and third hand witnesses, meaning the children and grandchildren of those who were there. As the stories become farther removed from the original, there are distortions that develop through no fault of those telling them. It makes it more difficult to get at the truth.

However, to my surprise, sometimes things happen to suggest there are some important avenues that we can follow. Just this last week, I received an email asking that if I had ever heard of Dalton Smith. According to the email, Smith was an intelligence officer who had been assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in Roswell in 1947. The correspondent wanted to know if that was true, or more precisely, what I knew about Smith.

The late Dalton Smith

In all the years of research, Smith’s name had never come up. In the discussions with those who had been there including the counterintelligence soldiers assigned, no one had mentioned him. We knew of James Breece who had died long before we began our research, but nothing about Smith.

The first place to look was the index for the 509^th Yearbook. George Eberhart had created the index decades ago and for those interested, it is only good for my copy of the Yearbook. I had all the pages that had information and photographs of those assigned to the base but the numbering didn’t include some of the other pages that were, more or less, irrelevant. So, if you attempt to apply that index to other copies, it just won’t match. But I digress.

Smith’s name was not among those in the Yearbook. Walter Haut, who created the Yearbook told me that some 10 to 20 percent of the personnel assigned to the base were not in the book. Next stop was the base telephone directory. I quickly found Major Dalton Smith listed with a telephone number of 312.

On the same page and not far from Smith’s name was that of Jesse Marcel and Marcel’s telephone number was 312. That meant that Smith had shared an office and a telephone with Marcel, which put him right in the middle of the activity in 1947.

Given that, I knew that Breece was assigned to the intelligence section, but his telephone number was 459. Breece was not in the same office as Marcel. Given that I’d discovered that Smith and Marcel shared a telephone, I wondered if I could find a similar pairing with Breece. I didn’t find another person who shared his telephone but did find that he was located in Building 31, as were Marcel and Smith.

Under Intelligence Officer in that phone book, I learned that the base S-2 (Intelligence) number was 312, which would be Marcel. The Security Office was 316, Combat Intelligence (Breece) was 459, and the Historical Office was 312.

I also learned that Building 31 was apparently assigned to the 715^th Bomb Squadron and housed its Operations, Communications and Personal Equipment offices as well as the base Intelligence Office. It does strike me as strange that the base Intelligence Office is found in a building assigned to a specific squadron, but it’s probably not overly significant.

There is little more to be said about this. I did learn that at the time Smith retired from the Air Force, he was Chief of Staff for Air Force Intelligence at the Pentagon. He left the military after more than 23 years of continuous active duty including World War II, in which he served in Europe and North Africa. Among numerous decorations, he received the Bronze Star Medal, the European-African-Middle East Medal with twelve bronze service stars, and the Korean Service Medal. At one point, he was Deputy for Intelligence in the Far East Air Force Bomber Command in Japan.

When Colonel Smith retired in 1964, the Director of Administrative Services of the U.S. Air Force cited his "sound judgment and high professional ability" during "a long and honorable career."

All of this does verify his service. The telephone directory verifies his position in Roswell at that critical time. There are a few additional leads to follow now. I’ll see what I can learn but I fear I learned all this too late. Smith died in 2013. Had we only known.

Coast to Coast AM - Changes to the AARO Directive

 

First, an update from last week. The Bruce, South Dakota, sighting on June 19, has been positively identified as a SpaceX launch. Tim Printy found a picture of it.

Second, it seems there has been a bit of a change in the latest version of the government’s directives on the investigation of UFOs. The House of Representatives has included a requirement that the agency with the responsibility to investigate UFOs include a section on crash retrievals.

Specifically, the new language in the House version requires, and I quote:

…compile and itemize a complete historical record of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena, including successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena, efforts to recover or transfer related technologies to United States-based industry or National Laboratories, and any intelligence community efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide unclassified or classified misinformation about unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena or related activities, based on the review conducted …

The key words here refer to efforts to the recovery or transfer of related technologies to United States industry or National Laboratories. Or, in other words, debris from crash retrievals.

The problem here is that I don’t think they understand the complexity of that investigation. Working on my book, Crash: When UFO’s Fall from the Sky, I listed more than one hundred alleged crashes. Most are single witness with no supporting evidence. I have seen lists that suggest there are more than 300 crashes. At best, there are only a handful and by that, I mean fewer than five. Unless they truly understand the nature of the problem, they are going to be overwhelmed by these mistakes and miss the important crash evidence.

The home of the UFO crash/retrieval information?

While the tales of crash retrievals are interesting and might provide the physical evidence, we still have good sightings going on. For example, in American Fork, Utah, on July 19 of this year, the witness said that he was outside smoking and looking up into the twilight. He noticed a bright object that he thought was Venus and then realized it was in the eastern sky. As he watched, it came closer and he saw that it was disk shaped, with blue and yellow lights. It made no sound that he could hear. It crossed the sky turned to the north and disappeared. He thought it was in sight for two to three minutes.

Finally, two couples at a backyard BBQ near Dallas, Texas, on July 7 of this year reported spotting three dim red lights slowly approaching. At first, they thought nothing of it, believing it was some type of aircraft. As it got closer, they could see a dim, triangular-shaped object that seemed to connect the three lights, which had become slightly brighter and had taken on a yellow glow. They said that the craft made no noise and its movements were steady, crossing the sky in four or five minutes. They all got a good look at the object but the lights were so dim that they couldn’t get an image on their cell phones. This is just one more example of the triangular objects that have become more common in the world today.

Understanding Roswell - Addendum 1

 As has become normal, in reviewing one thing, I find another that is of interest to all of us here. To get to that point, let me explain that for decades, I have believed that the Glenn Dennis tale of a call from the Army about small coffins and later of a nurse who had seen the bodies of the alien flight crew killed in the Roswell crash, was bogus. I believed that because, after we had proven there was no nurse in Roswell named Naomi Self and that there had been no nurse anywhere in the Army named Naomi Self, Dennis changed the name. Not exactly a small difference.

Glenn Dennis

I’ve laid all this out in several arenas, explaining why this, and a few other things, led me to the conclusion that the Dennis testimony was fabricated. There was some evidence to the contrary. L. M. Hall, a former military police man at the Roswell Army Air Field, and later a motorcycle police officer and then police chief in Roswell provided some confirmation of the Glenn Dennis tale. Hall signed an affidavit about his experience. He wrote:

One day in July 1947, I was at Ballard’s on a break, and Glenn and I were in the driveway batting the breeze. I was sitting on my motorcycle, and Glenn stood nearby. He remarked, “I had a funny call from the base. They wanted to know if we had any baby caskets.” Then he started laughing and said, “I asked what for and they said they wanted to bury those aliens,” something to that effect. I thought it was one of those “gotcha” jokes, so I didn’t bite. He never said anything else about it and I didn’t either.

Ballard's Funeral Home in Roswell, New Mexico.

I hadn’t thought about this little bit of information in a long time because I didn’t believe Glenn Dennis. However, there is another aspect to this story. After I had published a story about all this in April 2020, in a post to the blog, I received an interesting comment. You can read that story here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/01/glenn-dennis-revisited.html

There were 47 comments on that story, some of which were others repeating the same tired arguments about the reliability of the Dennis testimony. However, you can read the comment here (it is number 47):

I'm Chief Halls Granddaughter, Cynthia (Hall) Ortiz. Ramm is my mother's maiden name and an alias. My Granlaw [sic] didn't say anything that he actually saw but just verified what Dennis said. He was a city councilman at the time of his affidavit. That museum makes a ton of money for Roswell so they revived the story for that reason and frankly it was a brilliant idea. The story at home from was that he didn't believe aliens even exist much less that they landed in Roswell and his affidavit is frankly indicative of that as it's basically benign. It's not a smoking gun for sure.

The point is that if Dennis was lying, then the affidavit is in error. Dennis may well have told Hall the story, and Hall believed it but it probably wasn’t told to him in 1947. Dennis didn’t become involved in all this until the 1990s. Prior to that, Dennis was a non-entity in the Roswell tale and now he has been rejected as a participant.

I just thought that it was interesting that we have a different perspective on both Dennis and Hall at this point. All Hall ever did was suggest that Dennis had told him the story about small coffins in 1947 and I believe that is in error. At this point, Hall becomes a footnote in the sorry saga of Glenn Dennis and his ordering child-sized coffins.

Coast to Coast AM: AARO and Current Sightings

It seems that Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, in coordination with the Director, National Intelligence, has renamed the nearly incomprehensibly named Airborne Object Identification and Management Group to the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which I suspect will be called Arrow by those in the know. The responsibilities of this will be broader than those of the old office whose name I won’t try to pronounce.

Dr. Sean M. Kirkpatrick who was the chief scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center, is the director of AARO.

The mission of AARO will be to synchronize efforts across the DoD and other federal agencies to detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest, and to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security and this includes anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.

I will note here that the emphasis seems to be on military and official sites and that this seems to ignore sightings and reports from the civilian population. This seems to be an effort to control the data under the umbrella of national security which will mean that the reports are born classified. It doesn’t scream transparency to me.

Reports that might be ignored are like the one from June 19 this year, in Bruce, South Dakota. The witness said he watched the object, that was about 75 degrees above the horizon for four or five minutes. He said that the object was a bright light behind a “V” shaped object. It was slightly smaller than the full moon. He said that a cloud started to form above the “V.” The cloud was lighted by a glow from the UFO.

Given the date and the description, it seemed that this might be another sighting of the SpaceX launch. However, he mentioned a triangular shaped UFO with an aura or cloud around it. The time, however, seems to suggest the sighting was about two hours after the launch on June 19. If the witness’ timing is off, then a SpaceX launch might be the solution. Without a photograph, and with the witness talking about a distinctive “V” shape, and the timing issue, this is a tough call.

I’ll note here that Project Blue Book would have ignored the differences and listed this as the SpaceX launch. Given the circumstances, and the mission of the new AARO office, this sighting would not be of importance. Blue Book’s mission was to clear UFO sightings, keeping them from the dreaded “unidentified” category. With the new AARO office, similar sightings might not be investigated at all.

Without more information or a photograph, this is more of an insufficient data for scientific analysis sighting than an unidentified one.

A photograph was taken in Utah on May 16 of this year. The witness said that he was taking panoramic views in the area for scenery purposes. It wasn’t until he was reviewing the pictures that the UFO was spotted. He supplied both the panoramic view and the enlarged version of the UFO which shows its triangular shape.

The UFO is the small black dot on the right side of the photograph.

A close up of the UFO.

I currently have no explanation for the object in the photograph, other than to say it doesn’t seem to be an artifact created in the camera or a lens flare or some sort of natural phenomenon. And, I suspect, given there was no visual sighting that the new AARO office wouldn’t be interested in it. There is a real lack of scientific information and no witness testimony to accompany the picture. 

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - The Allende Letters with Blair MacKenzie Blake

 

Several weeks ago, I learned about a man, Blair MacKensie Blake, who had found an original copy of the Varo Manufacturing reproduction of Morris K. Jessup’s The Case for the UFO that had been filled with bizarre annotations. This book, and several letters that were written about it, created a subset of UFO study known as the Allende Letters. It suggested, in part, that the Navy had successfully teleported a ship during World War II and that those who had annotated Jessup’s book an a unique and insider knowledge of the UFO. You can listen to that interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50565617

And for those of a more visual mindset, you can watch the interview here:

https://rumble.com/embed/v19kurz/?pub=yqkns

Now, I suspect that those of you who are not fully cognizant with the tale of the Allende Letters, might find some of this to be confusing. I have written about the topic in the past. You can read those postings here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/07/allende-letters.html

And for those who enjoy chasing footnotes and are interested in another reason not to believe the Allende Letters are anything other than a hoax, you can read another theory here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/08/chasing-sources-philadelphia-experiment.html

And there is even more commentary that you can read here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/06/ufos-never-ending-saga.html

With all that background, it will be easier to understand the discussion about the Allende Letters and how the Varo edition of the book came to be. Allende, who was born Carl Allen, had bought a copy (and yes, I am assuming that he bought the copy) of Jessup’s book and then filled it with annotations about his beliefs and theories as they might have been postulated by three men rather than one. Because of the nature of the book and because of those notations, and because of the letters, all of which ended up in the hands of several Naval officers, the nature and tone of the book changed. Blair suggested that this made the book better because of the hint of authenticity buried in those annotations. I found that to be an interesting remark.

Anyway, we learn of Blair’s quest to find the rarest UFO book, which is an original copy of the Varo edition. I, of course, have a xerox copy of the book and I know the provenance of it. Sidney Sherby, who was one of the Naval officers responsible for it, loaned me a copy of the Varo edition if I had a way to, well, copy it. I did and I did. This is a mock up of one of the pages from the book so that you can see what was done.

The annotations in the book were not as neatly done as this.

During our discussion, there is some mention of the Philadelphia Experiment, mentioned in the letters, and the disappearance of the Star Dust, a BOAC passenger plane that vanished on a routine flight. Rather than go into the details here, which are interesting, you can read about that here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/08/disappearing-aircraft-part-1-stardust.html

Anyway, it turns out that Blair hadn’t conducted an in-depth investigation of the Allende Letters case, but he was able to provide some interesting insights to aspects of it. His real purpose was to find the book, which took about 35 years. He had found other copies, and I even had an edition that had been produced by the French years ago, thought the notations were in blue rather than the red of the Varo edition or the colored inks used by Allende. You can see a sample of that here, courtesy of Blair:

A book annotated by Allende, but not the Jessup book.

And yes, I did write a magazine article about all this that Allende found and annotated. A sample follows here:

For those interested, I believe that provide an interesting perspective on this narrow aspect of the UFO world.

Coast-to-Coast AM: SETI, Proxima Centauri, and Recent Sightings

 

We’ve talked about the SETI program of searching for intelligent signals from other planets in the past. We’re not necessarily looking for a message directed out into the cosmos, but any electronic signal that is not natural, though some sort of message would be a bonus. On Earth, we’ve been beaming these radio waves out for about a century and a quarter, meaning that scientists on worlds 125 light years radius of Earth might be able to detect a signal sent from here. That incorporates a lot of space because this is a bubble around the planet, not just a linear distance.

We’ve talked about the WOW Signal that was detected in 1977 that has not been explained as either a natural signal or interference from all the electronic devices in use at the time. You can read more about that here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/03/wow-signal.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/05/new-theory-on-wow-signal.html

There have been other examples, none quite as famous, and we just learned about the Chinese detection that has now been explained as some of that electronic interference.

There are other examples including a detection of a signal coming from Alpha Centauri C, better known as Proxima Centauri, which is not all that far from Earth. Just 4.2 light years. There is information suggesting this too, might be electronic interference from Earth, but there are important points to be made. There are two planets circling Proxima Centauri, one of them in the Goldilocks Zone, meaning it is warm enough for liquid water, and it is a rocky planet about one and a half times the size of Earth.

Proxima Centauri as seen through the Hubble Telescope.

There is another aspect that affects the Barney and Betty Hill abduction, or rather the identification of Zeta I and Zeta II Reticuli, as the home world of the grays. Remember, Marjorie Fish, using the information that Betty Hill had provided on the Star Map shown by the leader, attempted to determine the alien’s home world. She created a three-dimensional model of our section of the galaxy, looking for the same pattern among the stars.

Here's the problem. Fish rejected putting red dwarf stars into her models because there are so many of them, and she could think of no reason for the aliens to visit red dwarf star systems. However, if Proxima Centauri has planets, including one in the Goldilocks Zone, then that suggests that there might be something of interest there. The latest estimates that there are 1.5 planets for each star. This means, frankly, that Fish elimination the red dwarf stars was a mistake. It means that her identification of the Zeta Reticuli system is flawed and we should reassess this. You can read more about this here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/12/betty-hills-star-map.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-hillfish-star-map-revisited.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/09/hill-star-map-badly-out-of-date.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/03/revisiting-hill-star-map.html

Getting back to Proxima Centauri, if the signal recently detected is from an alien race, it means that our galaxy might be teeming with life, and if so, then that increases the possibility that some UFOs are alien visitors, though not necessarily from Proxima Centauri.

My thinking here is if the star closest to the Earth (other than the sun) had intelligent life on it, then it provides a good case for life throughout the galaxy. That doesn’t mean that every star system that has planets in the Goldilocks Zone will have intelligent life, but it certainly suggests that intelligent life will not be overly rare.

So, while SETI searches for radio signals and other electronic emissions, there are still important UFO sightings such as the one from Lamoni, Iowa, on March 26 of this year. According to MUFON’s Cases Management System and the Iowa MUFON Assistance State Director Jason Moran, the witnesses, a man and his wife, had been observing strange lights in the late evening and early morning for a number of years.

On March 26, the lights were spotted about midnight and remained in sight for about two hours. They moved slowly, mostly in an east west path but often stopped to hover for short periods. The objects emitted a sparkling star-like light of various colors. The lights were observed through a telescope and the witnesses took pictures through the telescope, using a cell phone. Moran closed the case as an Unknown Aerial Vehicle.

I’ll note here that such cases, of repeated observations, usually result in the identification of a terrestrially based source or some astronomical object just as Venus. However, in this case there are photographs that do not resemble anything in the area, and both the observations by the witnesses and the photographs tend to rule out many astronomical objects especially since it was viewed and photographed through a telescope.

In another report that is also part of the MUFON Case Management System, Florida MUFON State Section Director Vincent Maynard, reported on a sighting made on April 14 of this year in Davenport, Florida. The witness was taking a photo of a sunset and when reviewing the picture later, spotted a triangular-shaped UFO that he had not seen at the time. Maynard, who labeled the case as an Unknown Aerial Vehicle wrote, “…there is no way on Earth this [object could be confused] with anything terrestrial… it is either a craft from another world, dimension, time, deep within the planet or from light years away or something made… on Earth that the government owns and is it secret.”

The dark triangular-shaped UFO with a blunt nose and no visible surface features, resembles sightings made of such craft for the last several years. David Marler has cataloged many such sightings. This does not appear to be an artifact from the digital camera or some sort of lens flare or internal reflection.

I will note here that the photographs from both cases appear in the latest issue of the MUFON Journal.