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Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 08:38 PM
Original message
Uncovered at last: sightings found in Britain's "X-Files"
Edited on Fri Jan-21-05 08:50 PM by Minstrel Boy
Uncovered at last: the sightings of strange flying objects found in Britain's 'X-Files'

By Robert Verkaik
22 January 2005
The Independent


They contain Britain's very own X-Files: thousands of classified documents detailing credible observations of unidentified flying objects reported by RAF personnel, British Airways pilots and senior police officers. Now under the Freedom of Information laws, files previously held by the Ministry of Defence's special UFO department, known as SF4, are being released to the public.

...

In July 1977 Flt Lt A M Wood reported "bright objects hanging over the sea''. The MoD document adds that the RAF officer said the closest object was "luminous, round and four to five times larger than a Whirlwind helicopter". The UFOs were reported to be three miles out to sea at a height of about 5,000ft.

The officer, whose report is supported by Cpl Torrington and Sgt Graham, said: "The objects separated. Then one went west of the other, as it manoeuvred it changed shape to become body-shaped with projections like arms and legs." The men who were positioned at the picket post at the RAF station were able to observe the strange objects for an hour and 40 minutes.

At the same time a radar station detected the objects in exactly the same position as the men had observed them. It registered them to be between 30 to 35 degrees before they disappeared from the screen.



http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=603470
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Don1 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 09:03 PM
Response to Original message
1. Dox Online?
The ACLU has an online repository of all the US torture documents from Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo, etc...,

Is there a similar website that has any of these RAF documents online? Would be nice to take a critical look.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 11:02 PM
Response to Original message
2. How UFO sighting baffled X-Files team


This is the strange tale of a UFO sighting which was reported by two Devon policemen and placed in Britain's X-Files. More than 35 years on, there's still no explanation as to what it was that the two officers saw in the sky above West Devon that October night...

You're driving along a country lane in rural Devon when all of a sudden something appears in the skies above you.

It's a series of bright lights arranged in the shape of a cross - and you've never seen anything like it before.

It's not an aircraft, and it's definitely not the stars. It must be a UFO.

Far fetched? Try telling that to retired policemen Roger Willey and Clifford Waycott, because this is exactly what happened to them one weird October night back in 1967.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/news_features/2004/ufos.shtml
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JohnOneillsMemory Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 11:11 PM
Response to Original message
3. Next we'll hear that the US flies planes by remote control in Iran! HA!
Edited on Fri Jan-21-05 11:24 PM by JohnOneillsMemory
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/idr/idr010504_1_n.shtml
(Jane's Military Aerospace News of Boeing X-45 from May 2001)





The tailless X-45A design shares some features with the X-36 experimental UAV, flown in 1996. The wing shape is similar, as are the trailing-edge control surfaces and the yaw-axis-vectoring exhaust nozzle. The low-observable nozzle has no external moving parts and is still nominally classified, although a 1994 McDonnell Douglas patent shows a similar nozzle with internal moving ramps. The X-45 is considerably larger than the X-36 and is autonomous, rather than being remotely piloted, but there are enough similarities to reduce some of the basic design risks.

Next year, following the initial tests, the second aircraft will join the first for Block 2 tests, intended to evaluate the operational concept for the UCAV. Both aircraft will be fitted with electronic surveillance measures (ESM) equipment supplied by Northrop Grumman's Defense Systems Division in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and satellite datalinks, and will be used for a series of increasingly complex tests. These will culminate in a series of 'graduation exercises' in which the two X-45As will work together, under the control of a single operator, to perform pre-emptive and reactive SEAD missions.

Command and communications, and the ability to make the UCAV as intelligent and autonomous as possible, are the core of these demonstrations. "When the enemy cuts the communications link between the UCAV and the controller - and they will - we want to be able to prosecute the mission," comments DARPA program manager Colonel Mike Leahy. Hunting and targeting relocatable SAM systems, the UCAVs are working in a dangerous environment, where a combination of stealth and tactics are essential for survival. This means, for example, that the UCAV will have to be able to change its ingress and egress route if its ESM detects a new threat, ensuring that it keeps its least detectable aspects towards the radar.

ESM is an important technology for UCAVs in the SEAD mission. In 1990, the state-of-the-art in combat ESM was the Litton Amecom ALD-11, a system that weighed more than 700kg and cost tens of millions of dollars, but could locate and identify a radar emitter in real time. Smaller, compact radar warning receiver (RWR) systems could provide only a rough bearing measurement. In the past few years, however, the EW industry has made great strides in creating small, low-cost receiver systems which provide full-scale ESM capabilities for the weight and cost of an RWR.

The UCAV system is intended to use co-operative tactics to locate and destroy targets. Although their ESM sensors will have some ability to provide precision location data, a pair of UCAVs will be able to pin down a target's position more quickly and more accurately if they each detect it from different angles. Operational UCAVs will use a 'spotlight' synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to help positively identify targets and further refine their location data: tactically, it may make sense for one UCAV to pop-up and image the target while its robotic wingman delivers the weapon. The key, says Col Leahy, is to make sure that the UCAV team can do this within a timeline defined by the threat's ability to move. Block 2 tests will cover preemptive and reactive SEAD; the latter tests will include manned aircraft to show that the UCAV can effectively escort the manned strikers.

Within a few months, the DARPA/Boeing team expects to start detailed design of the third UCAV prototype, the X-45B, using funds added to the program by Congress. The X-45B will resemble the two X-45As externally, but will incorporate a number of important differences. It will be built more like a production aircraft, with a low-cost, almost-all-composite airframe. It will also incorporate a complete suite of LO materials, and will be used for tests to show that the UCAV's LO systems can be maintained economically.

The X-45B could join the program as early as mid-2003, for Phase III of the program, including three test blocks. "The big change," says Col Leahy, "is the switch in emphasis from technical feasibility to military utility".
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jan-21-05 11:16 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. remote piloting tech necessary for B-720 to fly as a drone aircraft


"Before the final flight on December 1, 1984, more then four years of effort passed trying to set-up final impact conditions considered survivable by the FAA. During those years while 14 flights with crews were flown the following major efforts were underway: NASA Dryden developed the remote piloting techniques necessary for the B-720 to fly as a drone aircraft; General Electric installed and tested four degraders (one on each engine); and the FAA refined AMK (blending, testing, and fueling a full size aircraft). The 14 flights had 9 takeoffs, 13 landings and around 69 approaches, to about 150 feet above the prepared crash site, under remote control. "
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/CID/HTML/index.html
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JohnOneillsMemory Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 02:17 AM
Response to Reply #4
5. Kick. For the X-Files Wing of the Democratic Party and Tom Delay.
Edited on Sat Jan-22-05 02:42 AM by JohnOneillsMemory
French Agree to Military Project



http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/01/21/011.html

ST. PETERSBURG -- Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said he and his French colleague Michele Alliot-Marie had agreed Thursday to study the feasibility of jointly developing an unmanned combat aircraft.

Meeting in the northern city of St. Petersburg, the two ministers also discussed cooperation in the development of munitions and heavy helicopters, as well as in space, Interfax reported.

"The joint design of military hardware will make our compatibility better," Interfax quoted Alliot-Marie as saying.

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier was due to arrive in Moscow later Thursday for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. All four ministers were due to take part in a session of the Russian-French Security Cooperation Council.

more

(What will the world be like with remote jets zipping around with impunity and no pilots to worry about getting home?)
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 12:00 PM
Response to Reply #5
11. PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR - Part I
PROMIS Connections to Cheney Control of
9/11 Attacks Confirmed
by
Jamey Hecht

With research assistance by Michael Kane
and editorial comment by Michael C. Ruppert

© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be posted on any Internet web site without express written permission. Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted for non-profit purposes only.


In the long ordeal to secure a publisher for Crossing the Rubicon, my agent and I went through a number of publishers who expressed keen interest in the book. The problem was that almost every one we dealt with came back to us and said, "We'd like to publish the book but we need for you to remove certain things." By a great margin, it was our chapter on PROMIS and my many subsequent references to it that appeared to be public enemy number one for mainstream publishers (most owned by multi-national corporations).

By definition, PROMIS progeny are the backbone of a current DoD plan to develop a "Godlike" view of all human (or battlefield) activity from space. They are also inherently a part of the data processing being envisioned for advanced space weapons requiring machines to think as they share data in virtual real time. MIT in a recent scientific publication titled "Space Weapons: Crossing the US Rubicon"(a possible tip of the hat to my book) described a number of capabilities to which FTW referred in our October 2000 story on PROMIS, including a statement that space is "the ultimate high ground."

The MIT article also contains a reference to one of the greatest fears expressed by all who wonder what hidden technologies might be making the Neocons so brazen in their attempts at bullying the world into submission: "On the other hand, the prospect of weapons in orbit-poised to strike anywhere on the globe at any time-has elicited vigorous opposition, both in the United States and abroad."45 The Neocons have placed their faith in technologies we have only begun to evaluate and discuss, and this is an area needing much additional research by authentic journalists.

Iran is a much more industrialized and automated nation than the ruin and rubble of Iraq. What if Donald Rumsfeld believed that he could use computers through the Internet to turn off all of the power generating stations supplying Tehran? What if Dick Cheney could shut down all of the computerized pumping, pipeline, refining and chemical technology used to keep Iran's oil flowing to the rest of the world? This is how the American, British and Israeli elites (including corporations) think and how they plan.

All three countries have long, deep and continuous links to PROMIS software. As time passes it is beginning to appear that PROMIS is literally what made possible not only 9/11, but everything that has followed since and what is being planned.

Recently the New York Times published a story about how the US military was envisioning a costly new "Internet" in space to control all military operations worldwide, calling it a "God's-eye view" of battle. Called Global Information Grid or GIG, this new platform performs the exact functions we described in an FTW article more than four years ago. Then we were called delusional conspiracy theorists. Four years later we are shown to have been right on the money.

Giant, expensive technology programs like SDI and GIG are sometimes neither wasteful porkbarrels nor the actual instruments that are presented to the public; instead, they are some third thing nobody knows about. This is the way large black projects are funded.

Total Information Awareness or TIA, an Orwellian nightmare of data mining that uses PROMIS-evolved technologies and artificial intelligence, is now operating and able to incorporate vastly divergent data bases of personal information on private citizens from computer systems using different languages in near-real-time. Every bit of personal information from grocery shopping habits to driving records, credit reports, credit card transactions and medical records is now almost instantly accessible. Access will be expedited and broadened to local law enforcement agencies when what will become a national ID card comes into being. That will happen as driver's licenses are standardized nationwide (following the recent intelligence reform act) to include a simple UPC-like code that will allow approved agencies to get all of our data. The surveillance and intervention capabilities of PROMIS progeny can now be used to prohibit a credit card purchase or (soon) prevent someone from boarding a commercial aircraft. These capabilities could also be used to empty a private bank account or - when coupled with biometric face recognition technology - prevent you from making a withdrawal from your bank or even buying food.

In every one of these software applications there are two themes: machines that "talk" to each other and artificial intelligence. (Please see Crossing the Rubicon.) As you will see below these capabilities are now known to exist.

TIA has been renamed several times. We know that the first software was delivered to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2003. Its latest nom de guerre is TIE or Trusted Information Environment. According to the San Francisco Chronicle last October TIE now allows the government to access private databases without a warrant. I go one step further to assert that TIE allows access to private databases without the knowledge of the database owners, provided only one condition exists: the database can be accessed through the internet.

And although the public face of TIA pretends that these technologies have not yet been applied, we are certain with the publication of this story that the same software the government needs is already in use by private corporations - the big ones - and we remind the reader that FTW's map of the world states that the government has been turned into a franchise operation of these corporations anyway. So where's the seam?

What the courageous and brilliant Indira Singh has to tell us is a matter of monumental importance. Based upon these new revelations which confirm what I suggested in Crossing the Rubicon every American and quite likely every citizen of an industrialized nation should assume that all of these technologies are operational today. A bit of breathing room is left as I conclude that they have not been sufficiently deployed yet to monitor all citizens in real time. My best assumption is that right now perhaps a million or so high-interest Americans are under constant surveillance; all by computer technology which has proven so accurate that it can detect suspicious movements just by correlating gasoline and food purchases with bank withdrawals and utility consumption. <--MCR>

FTW readers are aware that on the morning of 9/11 NORAD was engaged in multiple war games which drew fighter jets away from the doomed airliners, and polluted air traffic control screens with false information from the exercises. One of those injected blips was the so-called "phantom Flight 11," which appeared and persisted on control screens after the war games had been aborted.1 That would require exactly the kind of technology that Ptech (with whom Singh did business) and its partner Mitre had been providing to each of the three agencies involved: the FAA, NORAD, and - most significantly for Dick Cheney that morning - the Secret Service. In other words, one of the most central arguments in the Rubicon's case has just been independently validated. (See Part II)

In this electrifying timeline-driven report, Wall Street whistleblower Indira Singh lays out the connections between the providers of this advanced software (derived from the PROMIS software stolen from the Inslaw corporation in the 1980s by the US Justice Department and others) and the network of terrorist financing (sustained with US blessing) that has pervaded U.S covert operations for years. That deep-political relationship is at its strongest in the Bush administration, whose Saudi and Pakistani ties go back decades.

Dick Cheney, James Baker, GHWB, Dubya, and the people in and around the once and future American ruling junta have financially live links to the Muslim Brotherhood milieu that formed part of BCCI and, more recently, al Qaeda (this is also the context of a fascinatingly influential relationship among Kermit Roosevelt, GHWB, and Adnan Khashoggi). Nazis and their admirers are the third piece in the triangle, connected to Islamists since the Muslim Brotherhood's creation in 1928 by Hitler ally Hasam al-Banna, and connected to the Bush clan through decades of interdependence with American oil and intelligence elites - including the Rockefellers (Standard Oil) and the Harrimans (Brown Bros. Harriman / Kellogg Brown and Root / Halliburton).2

Viewed in this context, the Ptech story is a chilling reminder that this network is still in charge; that it facilitated the 9/11 attacks that murdered thousands and destroyed the health of thousands more; and that "our" American defenses against sabotage are woefully dependent upon the goodwill of saboteurs (both foreign and domestic). - JAH]
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/012005_ptech_pt1_summary.shtml
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bin.dare Donating Member (517 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 09:59 PM
Response to Reply #11
15. There are two Ptech stories ...
Edited on Sat Jan-22-05 10:00 PM by bin.dare
... one dealing with the software that your article alludes to, and the other dealing with a mainly muslim company trying to prosper in america. The latter is what gets the most press unfortunately with the slant about how "Al-Queda cells have infiltrated american corporations" etc etc based solely on the fact that muslims worked there and some funding came from Saudi's. So-called whistle blower Indira Singh is in this category. You can get a sense of the vitriol if you go to FrontPagemag and the GreenQuest operation.
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jayfish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 02:46 AM
Response to Reply #4
6. Hmmm... Looks Alot Like...
how I imagine flt. 77 looked on final to the Pentagon. (Queue Twilight-Zone Theme)

Jay

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truth2power Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:47 AM
Response to Reply #6
10. Yep! n/t
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jayfish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 12:05 PM
Response to Reply #10
13. If You Look At This Photo,...
Edited on Sat Jan-22-05 12:10 PM by jayfish
it even looks like the wingtip dropped in the same manner. If I were prone to believe the coincidence theories regarding flt. 77,(hows that for a hedge?) I would say this looks like a limitation in the remote piloting system used to bring the plane in.



But I'm not quite there. ...yet.

Jay
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truth2power Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 11:53 PM
Response to Reply #13
16. Pardon my stupidity, but
I'm not really sure what I'm looking at here. Is that long gash from the fuselage or from the wing?
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jayfish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 10:14 PM
Response to Reply #16
18. I Have No Idea.
It would seem to me though, that if it was from the fuselage, it would not have been intact enough to penetrate the Pentagon like it did.

Jay
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hippiechick Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 10:56 AM
Response to Reply #3
9. Please excuse my stupidity but ...
If indeed we do have these things - and your post shows that we do - why in God's name did we have to roll through Afghanistan and Iraq with tanks and 'shock and awe' and kill/maim thousands of innocent civilians and over 1,300 US soldiers (to date) --- when a handful of these puppies could have delivered Bush's farewell notes to OBL and Saddam Hussein with less than 1/100th the destruction ?


/rhetorical rant


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bin.dare Donating Member (517 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 12:19 PM
Response to Reply #9
14. you are not stupid and they did ...
http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=3943

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA put the armed drones into the sky within days - and they soon played an important role in one of the early successes of the war on terror.

In November 2001, an armed drone helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul, Afghanistan, and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the attack.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP the extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using an armed Predator to kill bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the classified nature of the information.

These officials said that within days of President Bush taking office in January 2001, his top terrorism expert on the National Security Council, Richard Clarke, urged National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to resume the drone flights to track down bin Laden, citing the successes of late 2000.

The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, had devised in the final days of the Clinton administration to go after al-Qaida after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Clinton officials decided just before Christmas 2000 to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.

....
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dbt Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 07:54 AM
Response to Original message
7. Kick!
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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 09:38 AM
Response to Original message
8. Operation Blue Book was a cover up job to classify pesky
state secrets that the Brits didn't want to admit to.

The 1980 sightings in rendelsham Forest near a US Airforce base in the Suffolk/Essex border area was the official line of MoD investigation into "strange lights".

What was behind this MoD paperwork was an attempt by Margaret Thatcher to seize total control of the UK by means of a coup d'etat, sortly after Ronald Reagan's Novemver 1980 election victory.

The resolution of this coup plot and the fate of the principal characters are still officially classified by the counter-terrorism story the MoD put out was the UFO biz at Rendelsham.

Many other such instances in the UK also relate. A 1984 story about an UFO over London's Hampstead heath relates to classified papers about another coup attempt under Thatcher, whereby operatives paid by the Stasi's Markus Wolf tried to explode an atomic weapon on the London underground near Bond Street Station and demanded a massive cash ransom, release of assorted thugs interned in Northern Ireland and a deal on Hamas detainees in the Middle East.
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Psephos Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jan-23-05 12:56 AM
Response to Reply #8
17. Sorry, but the UFO story is a lot more believable
Besides, the eyewitness accounts are fascinating, and to students of UFOlogy, considered among the most corroborated and most credibly-reported sightings of the last thirty years.
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gulfcoastliberal Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-22-05 12:05 PM
Response to Original message
12. I know a Delta pilot who flies transatlantic; he's told me some crazy
shit. He says the company and FAA tacitly make it clear not to report the sightings. I'd also like to read the reports by the BA pilots.
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