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There has been a stunning development in the half-century-old mystery of what happened to a Truax Air Force Base F-89 Scorpion jet airplane that disappeared over Lake Superior on Nov. 23, 1953.

The plane and its Madison-based crew - pilot Felix Moncla and radar observer Robert Wilson - were never found. The F-89 had been dispatched to track a large unidentified flying object that radar had spotted near the U.S.-Canadian border, and the plane's disappearance has been fodder for extraterrestrial theorists ever since.

It now appears the missing plane has been located.

Earlier this month, divers and engineers from the Great Lakes Dive Co. posted on their Web site sonar photographs of what the group calls "the legendary missing F-89 Scorpion."

Gord Heath, a Canadian UFO investigator who has devoted considerable time to researching the F-89 disappearance - including several visits to Madison, most recently this past July - called the new find "a huge development" when we spoke Monday.

At the time of its disappearance in 1953, the F-89 was based not in Madison but rather at the Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan. A Capital Times story at the time explained that the plane and its crew "were part of a Truax Field contingent stationed temporarily at Kinross Air Base to substitute for Kinross personnel engaged in gunnery maneuvers at Yuma, Ariz."

In an incredible and tragic coincidence, the F-89 Scorpion temporarily stationed at Kinross was only one of two Truax F-89s to encounter serious difficulty on Nov. 23, 1953.

Shortly after noon that day, another F-89 Scorpion, this one at Truax with Lt. John Schmidt and Capt. Glenn Collins aboard, took off to test the afterburners of newly installed engines. While the test seemingly went fine, when the plane headed back toward Truax, witnesses below reported hearing an explosion, and then the jet crashed into a marsh in the Arboretum, killing both Schmidt and Collins.

It was less than six hours later that radar operators at Kinross, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula, spotted the UFO in restricted air space over the Soo Locks.

Moncla and Wilson went up in an F-89 Scorpion to track the unidentified craft. Back at Kinross, radar tracked their plane closing in on the UFO over Lake Superior. Moncla's last words from the cockpit were, "I'm going in for another look."

The Capital Times reported what happened next: "The Truax jet was followed on the radar screen at Kinross until its image merged with that of the plane it was checking - then it was lost."

That odd radar image - of the mystery craft seeming to swallow the Truax jet, then both disappearing from the screen - has fueled the extraterrestrial theories. U.S. officials claimed the rogue blip on the screen was an off-course Canadian airliner, but Canadian authorities have denied that any of their planes were in the area.

In his 1955 book, "The Flying Saucer Conspiracy," Donald Keyhoe wrote: "The mystery craft and the F-89 came together far off-shore, about 100 miles from Sault Sainte Marie. ... As quickly as possible, search planes with flares were roaring over Lake Superior. After a fruitless night search, boats joined the hunt as American and Canadian flyers crisscrossed a hundred-mile area. But no trace was ever found of the missing men, the F-89 - or the unknown machine."

But then, in October 1968, the Sault Daily Star newspaper carried a story headlined, "Do aircraft parts belong to missing F-89?" Two prospectors had found the parts, including a tail section, on the eastern shore of Lake Superior. The paper quoted Air Force sources saying the parts belonged to "a high performance military jet aircraft."

Years later, when Gord Heath, the UFO investigator I spoke with Monday, tried to get records from the Canadian government of the jet parts found in 1968, he was told no records existed.

Heath has spent much of the past five years trying to learn the fate of the missing Truax F-89. He has a Web site - www.ufobc.ca/kinross - devoted to it. He has made research trips to Madison and has a section on the city on his site. A documentary film crew from Canadian television accompanied Heath on his last trip here in July.

Now, suddenly, the Great Lakes Dive Co. find has considerably upped the ante on this 53-year-old mystery. You can learn more about the company, and view the sonar photos of the F-89, on its Web site, www.greatlakesdive.com.

According to Adam Jimenez, spokeman for the company, the group formed in 2001 out of "a yearning to explain some of the enduring mysteries of the Great Lakes." Late in 2005, members were searching for two sunken French minesweepers when circumstances led them to the area over which the F-89 had disappeared. Five days into their sonar search, the site notes, "the computer returned some amazing images." It is, they seem certain, the Truax F-89.

Incredibly, sonar has also discovered an "unknown" near the sunken jet.

Jimenez describes the unknown as, "The object that the F-89 collided with is metallic and plowed into the lake bed in a similar manner as the F-89 south of the aircraft wreckage. The object bears a strike mark that matches a hole where the port side wing of the F-89 used to be (this supports the collision theory). We are a little baffled by the actual physics of the crash though...if you can imagine a plane colliding with another object and a wing shearing away, it seems as though the plane would spin out of control and disintegrate on the surface of the lake. Also, the plane is in deep water, yet appears to be plowed into the lake bed, how could the plane (or object for that matter) maintain enough power to accomplish this. I'm telling you this because we don't have all of the answers to this mystery yet. Our best guess is that the collision took place at or near sea level at relatively low speed. This scenario would preserve most of the aircraft structure, but still doesn't account for the plowing. We do have side scans of the object, and are currently discussing the possibility of releasing them."

There has been a lot of discussion within the team about the mystery object... but without ROV footage, it is very hard to determine what exactly it is. It is not a part of the F-89, and does not appear to be a part off of another aircraft...it is simply a mysterious object.

But like all great quests this one has hit a snag.

"2006 began as an ambitious project season for us, we were looking forward to further work at the F-89 site", said Jimenez . He added, "Then we received some bad news. The Canadian government refused to allow us to use our ROV at the wreck site without first providing them the GPS coordinates of the site and allows either a Coast Guard escort or government official to accompany the expedition. We were stuck, we don't want to give up the site (especially because of the object, and it's potentially huge significance) but we need stay on the good side of the Canadians."

"So as it stands now, we have just issued a letter to the Canadian government essentially abandoning work on the F-89 site this season", sums up Jimenez.

They next plan to take underwater video of the plane, which seems in remarkably good condition in perhaps 500 feet of water. Heath, who has been in contact with the Great Lakes Dive Co., says its condition - part of the tail is missing - matches up with the parts that were purportedly found in 1968.

Heath does not believe that the discovery means there wasn't an extraterrestrial ship involved in the 1953 disappearance. What if they were after the crew and not the plane? The sonar photos indicate the cockpit canopy of the F-89 is still intact. In time we should learn if the bodies of Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson are inside. If they aren't, it won't mean aliens got them - they might have bailed out - but if they are, the extraterrestrial theory might be put to rest. Some dead men can tell tales.

Source: The Capital Times
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/index.php?ntid=96691&ntpid=6
Photo: The Great Lakes Dive Company - www.greatlakesdive.com

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Fund for UFO Research wants answers to lingering questions.

In the summer of 1952, the mayor of Alexandria was trying to clean up the city’s “skid row” on lower King Street, Virginia farmers were suffering through a punishing drought, the United States Senate was investigating a communist plot to infiltrate the Boy Scouts. But over the nighttime skies of the Washington area, something far more dramatic was happening.

“Until unidentified objects — we call them targets — began moving onto our radar scopes, I thought people who reported flying saucers were just seeing things,” said Air Force Radar Specialist James Ritchey at the time. “Now, I don’t know what to think.”

Ritchey’s bewilderment — splashed across the front page of the July 29, 1952 edition of the Alexandria Gazette — was understandable. Experiencing the unexplainable can be an existential threat for many people. But for an Air Force guy whose job it was to identify objects in the sky, being unable to recognize an airborne craft can be a tough pill to swallow.

“I don’t think the objects were balloons or anything moving with the wind because their speed was greater than that of the wind,” Ritchey told a Gazette reporter. “I don’t see how they could have been ducks, geese or any kind of night birds — these can be picked up on radar, but they wouldn’t explain the lights. As I said, I just don’t have an explanation, and neither does anyone else as far as I know.”

Over the next few weeks, several explanations emerged in the pages of the Gazette. Winthrop Coxe and Rollin Gillespie — two writers with the International News Service — theorized that the unexplainable phenomenon had been “swarms of electrical particles” whirling through the air at high speeds. In a column that appeared on the editorial page, they attempted to put a scientific face on debunking the widespread notion that Washington was being visited by extraterrestrials.

“In the laboratory, any studious schoolboy can wind a wire around an iron bar, send through the wire a current of electricity and produce a magnetic field,” Coxe and Gillespie wrote. “They are real, but there is nothing to fear from them.”

Their explanations didn’t wash for many skeptics, and Washington’s famous 1952 experience with UFOs became a local legend. To this day, events from that summer have yet to be fully explained. And for many who research UFOs, this is only one story among thousands — disparate pieces of a mystery that has yet to be solved.

For many years after World War II, UFOs gripped the American imagination. The phenomenon began in the summer of 1947, when a west-coast pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine disk-like objects flying over Mount Rainier, Wash. He said they were traveling at tremendous speeds, which he estimated to be at least 1,200 miles per hour. The next month, mysterious debris was found at a crash site near Roswell, N.M. The subsequent newspaper coverage opened a floodgate, with reports of UFO sightings becoming commonplace.

“Right after the war, people started seeing things that nobody could identify,” said Don Berliner, chairman of the Alexandria-based Fund for UFO Research. “The press doesn’t cover these things anymore, so it appears that nothing is going on. But we have just as many UFO sightings now than we did back then. It’s just that people are afraid of being laughed at.”

Berliner doesn’t want people to laugh. He’d rather that they think — and maybe apply a little science. The fund that he helped create in 1979 has been doing this for more than 25 years: providing grants to clinical psychologists, publishing scientific articles, sponsoring conferences, hosting seminars and holding press conferences. From his apartment on the second floor of Hunting Point, Berliner oversees the operation of the fund.

“I want proof,” said Berlinier. “Scientists say that there could be millions of other civilizations. Are they interested in travel? We don’t know?”

Half the money comes from the sale of publications like “UFO Sightings in the New Millennium” by Richard Hall or “Final Report on the Psychological Testing of UFO Abductees” by Ted Bloecher. The other half of the fund’s money comes from donations from private individuals. The group’s executive committee meets when needed to make decisions about how and when to invest.

“Unfortunately, we don’t make that many decisions because we don’t have that much money,” said Rob Swiatek, a member of the executive committee. “Things pick up when there is more interest in the subject, like in 1997 when it was the 50th anniversary of the 1947 sightings.”

Swiatek, a physics patent examiner with the United States Patent Trade Office, said that he would like to see more mainstream scientists and academics working on the subject. He said that would lend some credence to the topics, which is often overlooked or scorned. The mystery of unexplained events is a lingering source of interest for Swiatek and many devotees, who see the UFO phenomenon as a series of unanswered questions.

“I am convinced that something is going on that is not prosaic or mundane,” Swiatek said. “We’re having encounters with non-human intelligence.”

Critics of UFOs say that it’s all a hoax, or that weather patterns are responsible. Yet those who claim to have seen them swear by their presence. After the Washington flap in the summer of 1952, the Air Force was at great pains to explain itself. So it initiated Project Bluebook, a 17-year investigation of the UFO sightings culminating in a controversial report by nuclear physicist Edward Condon. Titled “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,” the document was popularly known as the “Condon Report.”

“Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” the 1968 report said. “We feel that the reason that there has been very little scientific study of the subject is that those scientists who are most directly concerned, astronomers, atmospheric physicists, chemists, and psychologists, having had ample opportunity to look into the matter, have individually decided that UFO phenomena do not offer a fruitful field in which to look for major scientific discoveries.”

Essentially, Condon’s committee of scientists reported, there was nothing to it. But many critics of the Air Force investigation said that the unexplained events in the body of the text were not considered in the sweeping denial at the conclusion of the report. At the time the report was issued, Don Berliner was working for a group known as the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena — a private group that acted as a central clearinghouse for reports of UFO sightings, making television appearances and conducting radio interviews from its Dupont Circle office.

“We established ourselves as a reliable source of information in a field where there’s not a lot of reliable information,” Berliner said. “I had never worked so many hours in my life. I was supposed to be a staff writer and sighting analyst, but I did everything except sweep the floors.”

In the late 1960s, the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena was expanding its membership dramatically, and the involvement of prominence scientists gave the organization academic credibility. But after the 1968 Condon Report, mainstream scientists abandoned the cause in droves. The Air Force shut down its investigation, and reports of UFO sightings became the topic of ridicule and scorn.

“Even today, the vast majority of people who see UFOs keep quiet about it,” Berliner said. “They are afraid of being laughed at.”

But reports of sightings persist, and questions linger. That’s why Berliner and others continue to investigate the subject, asking questions they say remain unanswered. Berliner has written a number of books on UFOs, published countless articles and remains one of the country’s preeminent experts on the topic. For him, the Holy Grail of UFO research would be for his organization to get its hand on a piece from the 1947 crash landing at Roswell.

“Somebody out there had to have taken a piece when nobody was looking,” Berliner said. “We’ve got pages of protocol for what we want checked.”

A native of Columbus, Ohio, Berliner graduated from Bexley High School in 1947. He studied journalism and accounting at Ohio State University before joining the Air National Guard to help pay for college. One day, he read a newspaper account in the Ohio State Journal of a UFO story that was being investigated by a Ground Observer Corps headquartered across the street from his father’s accounting office.

“So I threw around some military language and BS’d my way in,” Berliner said. “I had no more business there than my Aunt Sophie. But they didn’t know that.”

Berliner said that he then passed along a series of reports to newspaper reporters covering the subject in the local press that documented regional UFO sightings of aluminum-colored discs zooming through the air at tremendous speeds. The chance encounter was an early experience with UFO sightings, and Berliner later left the Air National Guard and took a job as a reporter for the Painesville Telegraph.

“The city editor found out that I had an interest in UFOs,” Berliner said. “So I got calls from all the people who said they had seen UFOs. Most of the calls were nothing, but one sighting was a real mystery.”

He wrote a story about that sighting in 1961 and sent one copy to the Air Force and another copy to the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena. The Air Force initially claimed it was a rocket launch at Wallops Island, Va. That didn’t seem to make sense to Berliner, who wrote a letter disputing the ability to see such a launch from Ohio. An Air Force officer wrote again to change the explanation to a scientific research balloon launched in Iowa that was 600 miles away from the eyewitnesses who reported the sighting. He wasn’t satisfied with that explanation either.

“The government was playing fast and loose with the truth,” Berliner said. “If I hadn’t challenged their initial explanation, it would have gone into the record book that way.”

In 1962, Berliner packed up and headed for Washington, D.C. He wanted to be at the center of things, and he knew that the nation’s capital would offer him the kind of research opportunities he wanted to pursue a writing career. He took a series of jobs writing newsletters for various Washington associations like the National Aeronautics Association, which was then engaged in a massive effort to put a man on the moon. But his interest in UFOs persisted, and he eventually joined the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena as a staff writer and sighting analyst.

“We were at the center of the world,” Berliner said. “Every week, we would get calls from airline pilots who had seen things. This convinced me even more that were was something going on.”

But the Condon Report abruptly ended public fascination with UFOs in 1968, and Berliner left the organization to launch a freelance writing career that includes a wide range of subjects: aviation, space travel and, of course, UFOs. He moved to Hunting Point in 1969, and has lived in the same second-story apartment ever since. By the late 1970s, the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena had all but vanished — and many people skeptical of the official explanation were eager to continue its work.

“The press wasn’t covering it anymore,” Berliner said. “So it appeared that nothing was going on. But it was.”

By 1979, Berliner and others decided to take matters into their own hands. They created the Fund for UFO Research as a way to funnel resources toward investigating the unexplained UFO sightings as well as alleged alien abduction stories.

“Some of my best friends are abductees,” Berliner said. “Their stories are consistent in ways even they don’t recognize.”

One of the Fund of UFO Research’s major undertakings involved giving a grant to a clinical psychologist who looked for similarities in the psychological makeup of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The study was unable to find any — evidence to Berliner and others that there is more to their stories than delusion.

“People all over the world are having highly consistent experiences,” Berliner said. “There’s got to be something to it.”

With public interest in the topic of UFOs at an all-time low, the subject receives little attention outside of late-night cable television. The Fund for UFO Research continues to conduct seminars on UFO-related topics and host conferences where abductees can get together and share their stories. But the group continues to have a hard time attracting scientists and academics.

“Scientists flee in terror when you bring up the subject,” Berliner said. “Probably 90 percent of the people who see things don’t’ want to report them. And those 10 percent who do have no idea who to call.”

But Berliner’s group carries on — with every phone call to the group’s voice mail and every hit its web site. For many people, the mystery of the unidentified flying objects continues to be obscured by unknown facts and missing pieces to the puzzle.

“I’ve been at this for 40 years, and I still don’t know what the blasted things are,” Berliner said, staring out the window into the middle distance of the sky over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. “A lot of people want to know. I want to know.”

Source: The Connection Newspapers
http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/article.asp?article=70393&paper=59&cat=104

Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences’ astronomical observatory’s report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.

Environmentalists and scientists warn not about the dangers of global warming provoked by man’s detrimental effect on the planet’s climate, but global cooling. Though never widely supported, it is a theory postulating an overwhelming cooling of the Earth which could involve glaciation.

“On the basis of our [solar emission] research, we developed a scenario of a global cooling of the Earth’s climate by the middle of this century and the beginning of a regular 200-year-long cycle of the climate’s global warming at the start of the 22nd century,” said the head of the space research sector.

Khabibullo Abdusamatov said he and his colleagues had concluded that a period of global cooling similar to one seen in the late 17th century — when canals froze in the Netherlands and people had to leave their dwellings in Greenland — could start in 2012-2015 and reach its peak in 2055-2060.

He said he believed the future climate change would have very serious consequences and that authorities should start preparing for them today because “climate cooling is connected with changing temperatures, especially for northern countries.”

“The Kyoto initiatives to save the planet from the greenhouse effect should be put off until better times,” he said, referring to an international treaty on climate change targeting greenhouse gas emissions.

“The global temperature maximum has been reached on Earth, and Earth’s global temperature will decline to a climatic minimum even without the Kyoto protocol,” Abdusamatov said.

Source: Mosnews
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/08/25/globalcooling.shtml