Thursday, June 23, 2022

Coast-to-Coast AM: Updaptes and Sightings

Periodically, I find it necessary to update some of the reports. Last week, I mentioned the Chinese had detected a signal, using their Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope know as FAST. At the time, they believed the signal had been sent by aliens. Specifically, they thought the signal came from Kepler 438b, which would be the second planet in the Kepler star system. It is described as a rocky planet, estimated as being one and a half times the size of Earth and is in the Goldilocks Zone, meaning it was warm enough to have liquid water. Kepler 438 is a red dwarf star in the constellation Lyra.

The Chinese FAST Radio Telescope.

Dan Werthimer, from the University of California at Berkely, who, among others wrote a paper about the discovery said that the signals were radio interference from Earth. It is radio pollution.

This sort of thing has happened in the past. Each time the signals have ultimately been identified as natural phenomena or from a terrestrial created sources. The lone exception is the WOW signal detected by the Big Ear Radio Observatory at The Ohio State University on August 15, 1977. It has not been repeated which is one of the criteria set up as the standard for proof of alien life. I have posted information about the WOW signal and you can read it here:

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

I should note that I had posted an article about a possible identification of the signal which you can read here:

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

I mention that simply because it is necessary to view all the information available before making a decision on the importance of the WOW Signal. Given that, it is necessary to point out now that this theory has been discredited. Scientists with the Big Ear research team dismissed the claim because there were no comets in the right position as the time the signal was detected. Seems that there still is no natural solution for the signal.

I mentioned a sighting from Evansdale, Iowa, on April 21 and posted a photograph here. This was probably a picture of a Starlink satellite. More of these satellites are being launched and we’ll have to aware of them as possible sources of UFO sightings. You can find out about Starlink satellites at their tracking website found at https://findstarlink.com/.

But there are interesting cases out there. Just last week, on June 16, two witnesses, a man and a woman, were eating dinner in their home between Weatherford, Texas and Mineral Wells. Out the window they have a good view of the prairie and to the west, saw what at first looked like a glowing ball of bright orange light. It came closer and they said that they could see that it was elongated, which is what I call cigar shaped. They estimated that it was about fifty feet long and they thought it was twenty feet in diameter. It was flying above the trees in a straight line. Although it was in view for about four minutes, neither thought about getting any video of it. They were just amazed at what they were seeing. It finally just flew out of sight.

A witness was preparing for bed in Comfort, Texas, and was looking out the window over the hay field. He saw a bright light flash across the sky. He said, “It moved extremely fast… the light was bright and did not have a tail or appear to be a shooting star.”

He said that the light seemed to be already in motion when it appeared and that it disappeared just as fast as it had shown up. He said that his wife and kids were in bed at the time so they didn’t see anything.

It was only about two to three miles away by his estimate. He said that he lives on a farm and is familiar with the night sky. He said that he was stumped by the sighting and said he reported it to see if anyone else had seen the same thing.

And finally, here’s a quick one. The witness in Middletown, Rhode Island, said he saw a slow moving, tic-tac shaped object that was in sight for about ten seconds. There was no exhaust. I mention this only because it resembles the case from the Weatherford, Texas, area. 

Saturday, June 18, 2022

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Michael Schratt

This week I talked with Michael Schratt who has produced a book that is interesting, not only for the information included in it, but for the beautiful, color illustrations of the UFO sightings featured in it. Schratt has a long history of UFO research and he has an extensive knowledge of the topic. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50224682

And you can watch the show here:

https://rumble.com/v18nyur-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-michael-schratt.html

First up, we talked about the Cape Girardeau UFO crash of 1941. I had explored that in my book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. The problem is that the case is basically single witness and she didn’t see anything first hand other than a photograph that has been long lost. You can read a longer analysis here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Cape+Girardeau

From there we moved on to some of the sightings for which Michael had supplied some of the paintings. First up there was the Temple, Oklahoma, landing in which the witness not only saw the landed craft, but one of the beings, though he said the being was human as opposed to humanoid. The case was investigated by Project Blue Book and is one of the three labeled as “unidentified,” in the files that involve occupant sightings. In almost all the other cases, if a witness reported creatures, it was labeled as psychological, meaning there was something wrong with the witness. You can read more about the Temple case here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/12/temple-oklahoma-ufo-landing.html

And for those who would like to see some of the Project Blue Book documents, you can see them here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/canadian-texas-vs-temple-oklahoma-minor.html

The illustration for the Temple, Oklahoma sighting based on the Air Force file.

The actual illustration from the Project Blue Book files.

We also talked about the Canadian man, Stephen Michalak, who was injured by the close approach of a UFO in 1967. Pictures of the injury have been published around the Internet, which provides some additional evidence of the sighting.  You can read some of the official documentation here:

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/unusual/ufo/Documents/1967-06-26.pdf

We also talked about a sighting from Mobile, Alabama, which interested me based on the illustration. It was a single witness sighting but the craft described was quite elaborate. The problem I have is that is single witness, and given the size of the craft, I am surprised there was no corroborative sightings. That might be explained by a reluctance of the witnesses to come forward with their stories. It also might be explained by there being no other witnesses. You can see all the illustrations and the accompanying stories at Dark Files: A Pictorial History of Lost, Forgotten and Obscure UFO Encounters, available at Amazom.

The illustration of the Mobile, Alabama sighting.

In the final segment, I talked about Moon Dust. I had just published an updated version of my 1998 book, Project Moon Dust. Brad Sparks had said that there was no Project known as Moon Dust, which I found difficult to believe because of all the documents we have labeled Moon Dust. It seems that Moon Dust was a code word that covered the Moon Dust activities. So, there was Moon Dust, just not as a project, but an activity.

Next up, I’ll be talking to Ron James about involvement in the UFO field and what his research has turned up. This was postponed from earlier in the month. 

Thursday, June 16, 2022

Coast-to-Coast AM: Drones, Disclosure and Sightings

 

When the Navy released the videos several years ago, I thought Disclosure had taken a step or two forward. Congress demanded a report from the Director, National Intelligence that did nothing to move us forward. Now we learn that the 2019 sightings over Navy ships in the Pacific were, in fact drones. I haven’t seen the full report yet, but it seems that the drones might have been controlled by a “mother ship” owned by Hong Kong. This doesn’t bode well for Disclosure.

However, on the other side of the coin, NASA announced that they were commissioning a team to begin studying the UFOs this fall. The study will focus on identifying available data, how best to collect it and how NASA can use the data for a scientific understanding of UFOs… which is what the Condon Committee was supposed to do a half century ago but had a different, secret agenda.

This, however, seems to be a step toward Disclosure because, in years past, NASA wanted nothing to do with UFOs, no matter the scientific answers that might be found.

So, while NASA and the government are gearing up to do what has been done in the past, there are still interesting sightings being reported. MUFON’s Case Management System provided the following.

The witness, out walking his dog in Scotland on January 22 of this year said that he noticed a star-like object and thought it strange enough that he began filming with his cell phone. It was a triangular-shaped object moving at a slow speed. He said the UFO flew behind a cloud and he thought it should emerge quickly into a clear sky. That didn’t happen. He said that he waited for about thirty minutes and believed that cloud had drifted inland. About fifteen minutes later he filmed a helicopter returning from off shore.

The witness said that this was the third sighting in under a month. MUFON Field Investigator James Dallas investigated, closing the case as an Unknown Aerial Vehicle.

In a report filed to the National UFO Reporting Center on the day it happened, May 30 of this year, from Ocotillo Wells, California, the witness said that the UFO popped out of nowhere. The object was spinning and seemed to be moving from side to side. The witness said that there was pod on top of the object like that seen on other UFOs, which I took to mean a dome. There were short legs under it and the craft had a disk shape. It was a yellowish-orange color that slowly faded.

The witness and his father took pictures of the UFO and video of the movements. Both Jupiter and Venus were visible in the sky and the witness was able to identify them both, ruling them out. Given the shape and the size, they ruled out a drone, and as the sky darkened, the UFO began to camouflage itself.

The Ocotello Wells, CA UFO


One of the interesting aspects of the report was that everyone saw many aircraft in the sky, except when the UFO was there. Then they didn’t see any aircraft.

Friday, June 10, 2022

Government UFO Hoaxes

This week, because of scheduling issues and travel arrangements by the guest, we weren’t able to connect for the show. Ron James will be the guest on June 29 so we didn’t lose anything. We just have to wait a few extra weeks.

Instead, I flew solo because I knew that something like this would happen eventually and I’d need a backup. I wanted to talk about Government UFO hoaxes, which is something we all know about but might not have understood the significance of them. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50130768

And for those of you with a little more adventurous nature, you can actually watch the show here:

https://rumble.com/v17sl7t-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-government-ufo-hoaxes-the-key.html?mref=yqkns&mc=7zk0c

Before we delved into that, I talked about so some of the trouble inside the UFO field. We have examples of bad faith players but seem to embrace them rather than ignore them. These are people who have burst onto the UFO scene with terrific stories of their involvement in many of the best UFO cases or their travel to other planets. Normally, I just sort of make generic comments about how something doesn’t make sense or is illogical or there is no evidence for it. In this case I named Philip Corso, suggesting that his story was largely false.

I pointed out a few problems, mentioning that we had no evidence and no testimony of a convoy leaving Roswell with the bodies of the alien crew. Given that they were an aviation asset, meaning they had both cargo airplanes and Air Force bombers, they could fly the bodies to Wright Field in a matter of hours. There was no reason for them to drive cross country in a trip that could take two or three days. This suggested that Corso couldn’t have seen the bodies at Fort Riley, Kansas, because they had never been there.

I didn’t note that I found it difficult to believe that they would have unloaded the trucks at Fort Riley and left the crates guarded by soldiers stationed there rather than members of the convoy. Nor can I believe that the guards assigned would have been snooping around the crates opening them… and then once having violated military regulations by compromising the integrity of the crates, would call a field grade officer to allow him to see what they had found. This just doesn’t work on so many levels and is obviously an invented tale.

There has been push back suggesting that I have become too opinionated. No, I have just become annoyed with those making up tales, whether it is men, and a few women, telling tales about their exploits in Vietnam, and then learning that some of them had been clerks or cooks or maintenance men, all important jobs, but not combat jobs, and learning that some of them hadn’t served in Vietnam and that many of them hadn’t served in the military.

Here was Corso plugging himself into the Roswell story with no evidence that he had anything to do with it. I don’t believe his story and see the problems with it. I suppose that those who haven’t served just don’t see the trouble, but I do.

Having finished my rant about the charlatans in the field, I moved on to the government hoaxes starting with Project Sign. True, it started out as a legitimate investigation, it soon devolved into a propaganda operation with lies about the outcome of investigations. The result was the Estimate of the Situation (EOTS). This was the document that basically guided UFO research by the Air Force for the next two decades.

I did get into the Robertson Panel, which is one of the biggest UFO hoaxes by the government. As Dr. Michael Swords pointed out, it seemed unlikely that after a week of investigating the UFO reports, Robertson would have a draft of the report ready for signature the next day. How had it been written so fast. It smacked of a document written before the panel was even seated.

Edward Condon

And, of course, there was the Condon Committee in which an Air Force officer discussed the final report with a member of the committee before anyone had begun the investigation. In the end, that letter, written by Robert Hippler provided the answers the Air Force wanted found. I have discussed this on the blog a number of times. You can review them here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Finally, I did talk about the Project Mogul hoax as an explanation for Roswell. One of the points was that Flight No. 4, which never flew and was disassembled according to Charles Moore, had no rawin radar targets on it, which therefore couldn’t have left

Charles Moore

the metal debris Mack Brazel found or supplied the debris displayed in General Ramey’s office. I laid all this out in Understanding Roswell, which those of you who want to know the truth rather than reading about the exciting “memories” of those who weren’t involved or weren’t there, should find interesting.

Next week, I’ll be talking to Michael Schratt about his new book and some of the incredible paintings that show some of the encounters. 

Thursday, June 09, 2022

Coast to Coast AM: UAP, UFO History and Current Sightings

As those of you who visit here know, I’m not a fan of the term UAP. I think it is an attempt to disassociate the idea of alien visitation from the observations made by military personnel. I think we all need to reject it simply because it denies the history. But. I have a document dated 1949, while the Air Force was struggling with the term flying saucers. It uses the phrase Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to describe, well, a flying saucer. I found it interesting that we have actually returned to one of the original descriptors of the flying saucers yet are using it to reject the history of them.

And speaking of history, on one of the UFO lists that provides me with interesting information there was a query from one of the list members. Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos wrote to ask for help about a UFO seen during the Belgium UFO wave. According to the information, on June 26, 1989, the witness and his wife saw a strange, globe-shaped object with four landing gear. The witness was a mechanical engineer and was reported to be quite credible. His wife saw the UFO as well, and Olmos asked if anyone knew of other sightings with a similar object.

The Belgium UFO from 1989.


Moving to a more current report, the witness and his wife were sitting outside at their home in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa, at about 6:30 on May 18 of this year when an odd-looking object glided over them from west to east. The object consisted of about 20 square lights on each side in two straight parallel lines. They estimated it to be one kilometer in length. He said he could not tell whether it was in space or in our atmosphere. They both got their cameras, but could not film the UFO. He said he had never seen something so large in space. It took about 3 minutes to cross the sky. He said they spend quite a bit time in the evening sitting outside and always look for satellites and shooting stars, suggesting some knowledge about what is in the sky around them.

I mention this sighting only because it reminded me of the sighting by Clyde Tombaugh, a reputable astronomer who discovered Pluto. On August 20, 1949, Tombaugh and his wife were in the backyard. He wrote, “I happened to be looking up… admiring the beautiful transparent sky of stars, when suddenly I spied a geometrical group of faint bluish-green rectangles of light similar to the Lubbock Lights… As the group moved south-southeasterly, the individual rectangles became foreshortened, their space in formation smaller and their intensity duller, fading from view about 35 degrees above the horizon.”

Tombaugh said that he thought they were individual lights but his wife suggested they were on a larger object. Donald Menzel, the Harvard UFO debunker, said it was probably lights from the windows of other houses reflecting on the nonexistent haze, but Tombaugh disagreed because the night was clear without a hint of haze. Since Menzel wasn’t there and Tombaugh was, I accept Tombaugh’s denial of the alleged identification.

Finally, on April 21 of this year a man in Evansdale, Iowa, photographed a cigar-shaped craft that was in sight for about a minute. He said that his daughter first saw the UFO and asked him what it was. He thought she meant something on the ground, and then looked up to see the UFO. He took two photos of it, along with a short video as you can see.


Top picture includes the roof to show that the object is not a streak based on
movement of the camera. The size might be the result of the object moving.


As usual, with many of these current sightings, I have not had the opportunity to completely vet the photographs. There is not evidence of a hoax here but that doesn’t mean we’re looking at an alien spacecraft. That is something that we all need to remember when looking at these sightings. 

Friday, June 03, 2022

Coast to Coast AM - Editorial Comment and Recent Sightings

 

First, I want to make a couple of editorial comments. In the last week or so, there have been stories of a door spotted in a photograph taken by the Curiosity Rover on Mars. NASA, and most of whom have commented on it, say that it is a small crevice and a natural formation.

Second, a growing number of my colleagues and others are already tired of the term UAP. This new designation seems to be a way of separating the long UFO history from the more recent sightings beginning with those from the USS Nimitz. We need to reject this attempt to eliminate the past and realize that there is much that can be applied to the new study regardless of the desire to ignore it. We have already seen an example of this when those in front of the congressional committee in May had no real knowledge of the Malmstrom AFB sightings of 1967 that were a matter of national security importance.

Of course, sightings outside the military and the interest in the new investigation continue. Rich Reynolds linked to an interesting video that was made on the afternoon of April 25, 2014. The witness said that he used a 300 mm lens when he captured the image.

There has been some analysis suggesting that the video is real. One analyst said that the cloud behind the airplane seemed to be dispersing but the airplane did not show any manipulation. If nothing else, it is an interesting video with a fairly good view of a disk-shaped object.

https://www.ufosightingsfootage.uk/2022/04/clear-ufo-hiding-behind-clouds-zooms.html

More recently, on May 12 of this year, the witnesses in Wilsonville, Oregon, spotted a contrail made up of four parallel lines, which in and of itself is interesting. The witnesses said that they hadn’t seen or heard any aircraft.



Moving toward the front of the contrails, the photographer said that he saw the object. It is somewhat circular with a bright top surface and an underside that is in shadow. 



From Windham, Maine, the witnesses were outside also on May 12 of this year. They were watching the rising of the planets, which suggests some familiarity with what is in the sky. They spotted a line of UFOs that appeared to be about the size of Venus, perfectly aligned, traveling to the northeast about 45 degrees above the horizon. At first, it looked like about twenty planets traveling together and I thought it sounded like the starlink satellites. The witnesses, however, said they were moving slower than satellites, there were too many objects in the line and they were in sight for about five minutes which seems to rule out the starlink satellites.

Finally, I mention this merely because it links back to the Green Fireballs of the late 1940s. The witnesses were heading home near Patrick Springs, Virginia, when the driver spotted a bright green fireball on May 11, 2022. All three in the truck saw the object, which was in sight for about 30 seconds. It disappeared as it flew beyond the nearby mountains. The fireball was described as very large, it left no trail, had no tail and it fell very fast