Re-Grounding

Once you get deeply into any of the true anomalies, you find that as you have walked down the forest path you've gotten pretty far afield. You begin to wonder if you've "lost it" entirely and you're in danger of losing your critical facility completely. After an entry like "OZ" such thoughts properly come up. I'm fortunate, as a UFO researcher, that it's casually easy to re-ground. So, let's remember part of why we know UFOs are a real anomaly, even without all the high strangeness stuff.----------------------------------------------------------The guys at the left handle that task quite nicely. At the top left is the aerotechnology legend, Kelly Johnson. He was the genius behind the spooky [i.e. CIA Black Projects] Lockheed "Skunk Works", which developed much of our advanced aerotechnology. In 1953, I believe, Lockheed personnel had several UFO encounters [one even photo'd and put in the company magazine] and one of those encounters was by Kelly Johnson. To Johnson's right is Colonel John Stapp, another techno-legend, who was the "fastest man on Earth" due to being the experimenter in the 1950s "rocket sled" studies. In 1947, at the very start of the UFO flap in America, Stapp reported a saucer sighting to the Air Force. In the middle left is a picture of the original Apollo astronauts. Their claimed "UFO sightings" in space are probably all explainable sightings of mundane space trash and light reflections, but even if they aren't, they are controversial. Something that is NOT easy to explain away, however, is the fact that astronaut-to-be Deke Slayton had a UFO encounter in the 50s long before he joined the space program. [Slayton's portrait is middle right in the picture of the 7]. In the center is Captain Casey Pierman of the Washington DC sightings of July 1952. He was one of many witnesses [visually] to these intruders, despite the Air Force trying to calm people down by claiming that it was only radars making errors. One of the military pilots was directed to intercept the "bogies", and was the only one able to do so. When he got near, the objects suddenly turned and he found himself bracketed by four of them. This act was seen on the radar as well. He asked: uhhh, what do I do now? On the military end of the line was an understandable silence. Fortunately, the things shortly just raced away, doubtless doing an alien version of a chuckle. Middle right is General William Garland, Assistant to the Air Force chief of staff for Intelligence, John Samford. Garland also saw a UFO. It must have been interesting in the ol' Pentagon with the #2 AF intelligence officer KNOWING that UFOs were real, during that 1951-1953 era. At the bottom right is Moulton Taylor, who was the US Navy's assistant director for missile research during WW2 and the time just after. While at an airshow in Washington State in the 1950s, he and his military friends got more of an airshow than they bargained for when a UFO entered the sky and put on a display. Taylor grabbed the public address microphone and made sure that all 200 or so persons saw it. Everytime he and his buddies got together over the years, it was one of the first things that they thought about. He often said "I wish they'd land, so I could get a look inside". The guy at the bottom left is Dr. Charles Moore who led the top secret high-altitude balloon research projects in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As mentioned in a previous post, he and one of his teams had a UFO encounter and watched it in the theodolite. As it happens, this sort of intrusion was commonplace among the balloon researchers in both New Mexico [where Moore's team worked mainly] and in Minnesota [where the home base of the teams was located, at General Mills]. The General Mills incidents were so frequent that the researchers set up their own report form and "UFO log". Why in the world the UFOs liked to show up at our balloon launches only the drivers can tell. -------------------------------------------------------Such are the sorts of things that 99.999% certainties are made out of. Material like this is so numerous that it continuously stuns me that the "information management" policies of the Air Force have been so effective in burying it, even so far as to admit of no mystery whatsoever, leaving entirely aside hypotheses for what may be behind the events. I want to end this post with a case. It's not of some famous witness like Deke Slayton or Kelly Johnson, but of two military people who are just as believable even if we haven't "heard of them". It was the spring of 1952, just before the UFOs were going to go on a big "flap" of cases which would flood the entire country and culminate in the "militarily disturbing" intrusions over Washington DC airspace. "We" though are in Bainbridge, Maryland looking through the eyes of two Women's US Navy Reserve officers. The WAVES were walking in the morning near the Bainbridge US Navy Training Center at 5am. It was a dirt road, about 100 feet wide, and they were going up a slight hill. To the right, above the trees came a red light. Quickly it was obvious that this was only part of a larger object as the thing came and "parked' over the road at the crest of the hill. They were only about 200 feet from the thing, and judging at how it overlapped the road it was 250 feet in diameter. The disk part of the object was jet black. At each end was a bright red light. The object, thoroughly misbehaving if it were conventional, emitted no sound despite being so near. The WAVES watched stunned until the thing began showering "something" from below. "[It] began pouring sparks from an opening ... sparks fell in a conical formation, phosphorescent, but disintegrated upon hitting the road. We finally turned and ran as fast as we could to the base about a quarter of a mile away." This sort of case also "grounds" me. Everyday folks, but serious, and talking seriously and not grandiosely, about an event that has interested but not obsessed them. Plus, forgive me, but I can't help liking the ladies.