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Post # 4 - Canadians report seeing UFO's in the sky at a rate of 3 times a day. 

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Post # 4 - Canadians report seeing UFO's in the sky at a rate of 3 times a day. 

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Definition: This article relates to the disappearance of Granger Taylor who left a note saying he boarded an alien spacecraft and never returned since he left the note. After that incident in B.C, there has been recent sightings in Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Quebec. All of those who seen the UFO have experienced pattern-like burn marks, plan crashed that have all of a sudden vanished, and weird flashing lights that occurred by each viewer.

Connection: The reason for belief in this article is unexplained and the red flag is confusion of causation and correlation because all the events that took place in the locations mentioned above have all been happening at the same time with the same affect on those who seen these UFO's. But it is still unexplained to how do we even know if these stories are actually true when the research is lacking when it comes to finding evidence of UFO's.

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Acclaimed Canadian ufologist Christopher Rutkowski can be best described as Canada's Fox Mulder.

He recently travelled to Duncan, B.C., a small town on Vancouver Island that was home to Granger Taylor, whose story is told in CBC Docs POV documentary, . Taylor, who became obsessed with space travel, left a note telling his family he could communicate with extraterrestrials and was going on an interstellar journey - and then vanished.

But Taylor wasn't only one who reported a strange encounter in Duncan. Lisa Nydahl was a teenager in 1980 when she saw a boomerang-shaped object in the sky over the town, gliding toward the mountains. "It just did a 90-degree turn and went straight up and just disappeared," she recalls. "It was unlike anything I'd ever seen."

Rutkowski says that UFO sightings in Canada are more common than we think. "There are about 1,000 UFO reports filed in Canada every year, and the number remains high."

Ufology Research, an organization Rutkowski belongs to, has collected and analyzed Canadian UFO report data since 1989. Their 2017 survey showed that a total of 1,101 sightings were reported across the country, at a rate of roughly three per day - the fifth highest number since the group began collecting data in 1989.

The survey also showed that there was an average of two witnesses per UFO sighting and that the sightings lasted about 15 minutes each. Many witnesses were police officers, pilots and other people with keen observational skills.

Most sighting reports in 2017 came from Quebec (518) and Ontario (241), with B.C. coming in third (128). Out of the major metropolitan areas the country, Montreal and Toronto topped the list.

In its final report, Ufology Research broke down cases by the number of witnesses, the level of "strangeness" (an alien encounter being more unusual than flashing lights, for example), the reliability of the sighting and its duration. They also compared the shape of the objects.

The report notes that while an increasing number of cellphones, dashcams and traffic cameras means that reported sightings are more frequently accompanied by a photo or video, these visuals are often of poor quality and less useful to researchers. What's more, the majority of sightings can be explained as aircraft and other astronomical objects.

Still, about eight per cent of all UFO reports in 2017 remain unexplained - but this doesn't mean that they are proof of alien visitation.

"There's no incontrovertible evidence that aliens are visiting us, although it's a wonderful theory," Rutkowski told The Canadian Press, but adds that "there is a real phenomenon [that] I think is worth scientific study."

Here are a few of Canada's most famous UFO sightings:

Falcon Lake, Manitoba

In May 1967, Stefan Michalak reported seeing two flying saucers near Falcon Lake. He claimed that one of the aircraft hovered only 45 metres away from him, landed and, as he approached, emitted a beam of light that knocked him to the ground as it lifted off.

Michalak said that he became ill in the following weeks, and a photograph of his chest eight months later showed burn marks in a pattern of dots. The incident was commemorated by a glow-in-the-dark coin released by the Canadian Mint in 2018.

Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia

During the same year as the Falcon Lake sighting, people reported that the night skies over Shag Harbour were glowing with four lights that flashed off and on before crashing into the harbour. Eyewitnesses claimed they watched as a large, orange-glowing object sank into the water.

The RCMP, thinking a plane had crashed, organized a rescue effort, but were unable to recover an object. Divers searched the sea floor but also came up empty. Since no planes were reported missing, the case was classified as a UFO sighting. To this day, Shag Harbour holds an annual festival dedicated to the strange incident.

Marieville, Quebec

In 1989, several people in Sainte-Marie-de-Monnoir reported being awakened in the middle of the night by a noise that sounded similar to an electric generator. Witnesses also reported seeing an intense blue light shining outside their windows.

Two days later, a perfect circle, about 20 metres in diameter, was found outside of the home of one of the witnesses. The RCMP were called to investigate, but the source of the lights and strange markings remains unknown.

If you've spotted a UFO, here's how to report it a sighting to Ufology Research.

Watch on CBC Docs POV.

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Canadians report seeing UFOs in the sky at a rate of 3 times a day

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Acclaimed Canadian ufologist Christopher Rutkowski can be best described as Canada's Fox Mulder. He recently travelled to Duncan, B.C., a small town on Vancouver Island that was home to Granger Taylor, whose story is told in CBC Docs POV documentary, .

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By: By Aidan Doucette, Cole Pancer & Gabriella Hall-Ufford

Topic: UFO's

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 Post #1 - Pentagon releases UFO videos that was taken by a military aircraft. 

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 Post #1 - Pentagon releases UFO videos that was taken by a military aircraft. 

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Definition: This article talks about how two navy aircraft's that spotted what believes to be a UFO hovering over the water about 100 miles out in the pacific ocean. The Department of Defense over wanted to release the videos to clear up any misconceptions that are being made by the public.

Connection: The red flag in this article is believed to be connected to Confirmation Bias because this is the only "evidence" that people are going to believe in since it was released by government officials themselves. But since it was publicly released, this is the only evidence that shows there is intelligent life forms on our planet and now the government is trying to show us after years of hiding information from the public which goes on to my next red flag: Suppression by Authority.
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The US Department of Defense has released three declassified videos of "unexplained aerial phenomena".

The Pentagon said it wanted to "clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real".

The videos had already been leaked in 2007 and 2017.

Two were published by the New York Times, while the third was leaked by an organisation co-founded by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge.

After they were first leaked, some people claimed the videos showed alien unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

What's in the videos?

According to the New York Times, a clip from 2004 was filmed by two navy fighter pilots and shows a round object hovering above the water, about 100 miles (160 km) out into the Pacific Ocean.

Two other videos filmed in 2015 show objects moving through the air, one of which is spinning. In one, a pilot is heard saying: "Look at that thing, dude! It's rotating!"

In its statement, the Pentagon said: "After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorised release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.

"DOD [Department of Defense] is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified'."

The fascination with the unexplained never goes away. And the UFO phenomenon is perhaps one of the most potent of these stories, linking uncertainty about worlds beyond our own to conspiracy theories about government and especially the US government.

Down the centuries people have looked to the sky and tried to explain mysterious lights and objects. But the modern UFO story took root in 1947 when a farmer discovered debris at Roswell, New Mexico, initially described as a flying disc, but now thought to be part of a secretive balloon programme to monitor the Soviet Union.

Subsequently the testing base for advanced aircraft, known as Area 51 in Nevada, became the alleged centre for UFO research. For the conspiracy theorists this was where the US government sought to harness advanced alien technology.

Over the years many of the most outlandish theories have been debunked. But in 2017, the Pentagon did finally admit that it had a long-standing programme, now terminated, investigating alleged UFOs.

Today, the US Navy prefers to call these unexplained sightings "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena". But that's not going to supplant an acronym which has entered into our collective sub-conscious, prompting that fundamental question: are we really alone in the universe?

Tweeting about the release, DeLonge thanked shareholders in his organisation, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, and said he was hoping to fund further research into the objects.

"With today's events and articles on my and @TTSAcademy's efforts to get the US Gov to start the grand conversation, I want to thank every share holder at To The Stars for believing in us," he said.

"Next, we plan on pursuing the technology, finding more answers and telling the stories."

The musician co-founded the academy in 2017 in order to study UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

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Pentagon releases UFO videos for the record

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The US Department of Defense has released three declassified videos of "unexplained aerial phenomena". The Pentagon said it wanted to "clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real". The videos had already been leaked in 2007 and 2017.

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Post #2 - B.C.‘s Granger Taylor left a note saying he was boarding an alien spaceship — then he disappeared

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Post #2 - B.C.‘s Granger Taylor left a note saying he was boarding an alien spaceship — then he disappeared

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Definition: This article talks about a man by the name of Granger Taylor who left his parents a letter, telling them he was leaving everything to them, because he was going to join aliens on their spacecraft for a 42 month space voyage, and after that day, he was never seen from again.

Connection:  The red flag connected with this article is' Agenticity', because the man Granger Tayler believed he was a 'chosen' to  be apart of the aliens travels through the galaxy. Taylor believed there was something more out there, and he wanted to find it.

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I first found out about Granger Taylor while scrolling through a blog about aliens and UFOs back in the summer of 2015.

Initially, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Here's a guy who was, by all accounts, a mechanical genius; he hauled an old train out of the forest to restore it, rebuilt a World War II aircraft and even made his own spaceship. To top it off, he supposedly believed he could communicate with aliens.

Then I learned that one night, at the age of 32, Taylor had mysteriously vanished from the face of the Earth.

I was hooked. Over the next four years, I made it my mission to find out as much as I could about Taylor's life and the circumstances of his strange disappearance.

Granger Taylor's disappearance

On the stormy night of November 29, 1980, Granger Taylor left a note for his parents to find. It said that he had gone to board an alien spaceship after recurring dreams had told him he was going to embark on a 42-month, interstellar journey.

That night, Taylor vanished. Both his family and the police spent months searching for him, but no one could uncover any leads on where Taylor could be.

In March 1986, local forestry workers found a blown-out vehicle somewhere near B.C.'s Mount Prevost, not far from the Taylor family home. Taylor was familiar with dynamite and some had gone missing from his parents' property the night he disappeared.

The police were called, and they were able to confirm that the vehicle identification number on the wreckage matched that of Taylor's Datsun pickup. Bone fragments and a piece of Taylor's shirt were also found at the scene.

When my story about Taylor came out in the summer of 2016, I still wasn't sure what had really happened.

Was he abducted by aliens and taken to space? Did delusions cause Taylor to blow himself up that night? Was it all an elaborate hoax that Taylor created so he could disappear and start a new life? Was he recruited by a secret spy agency? Or, did he die by suicide, masking his intentions with a suspicious note to ease the burden on his family?

Now, after years of researching Taylor and working on the CBC Docs POV documentary , I have my theories.

I do want to preface them, however, by reiterating that I never met Taylor. Any ideas I have about his mindset and motivations are based solely on my own research, and interviews with his family and friends.

Taylor was a loner searching for purpose

It's my belief that Taylor struggled to fit into his small Vancouver Island community. He was shy and eccentric, which isn't an ideal combination when living in a rural, working-class town.

I imagine Taylor spent so much time working on machines because it was his only true way of expressing himself; his creations made him feel like there was a purpose to life. (Maybe that's why some of us are so attracted to Taylor's story: he's the epitome of an outsider just trying to find his place. And aren't we all striving to find purpose in what we do?)

I think, at some point, he got tired of being different and searching for meaning - on Earth, at least. At the time of Taylor's disappearance, pop culture was alive with the idea that something was out there in space, and Taylor became obsessed with interstellar travel.

Soon, he was building a spaceship and imagining starting life anew somewhere else.

Taylor believed he was 'chosen'

It's unclear what fuelled Taylor's belief that he could communicate with aliens. There's some evidence to suggest Taylor used psychedelic drugs (and it's well documented that he smoked quite a bit of cannabis). He also may have been prone to depression and bouts of mania, which could have played a role in some way.

Whatever the reasons, I believe Taylor was convinced extraterrestrials had chosen him to fulfil a greater universal purpose - something that far exceeded anything he could accomplish on our planet.

My gut tells me that this was Taylor's thinking the night he disappeared and that he perished on that mountainside in a fiery explosion.

But often, on a clear evening, I find myself looking up at the night sky thinking about him. The idea that there may be something out there - extraterrestrials, another universe or galaxy filled with life - is overwhelming.

Then, I'll catch a glimpse of a shooting star or a meteor passing through the Earth's atmosphere and smile: if anyone could find a way to travel to another world beyond the cosmos, it would have been Granger Taylor.

After all, when he put his mind to something, he did it.

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B.C.'s Granger Taylor left a note saying he was boarding an alien spaceship - then he disappeared

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I first found out about Granger Taylor while scrolling through a blog about aliens and UFOs back in the summer of 2015. Initially, I couldn't believe what I was reading. Here's a guy who was, by all accounts, a mechanical genius; he hauled an old train out of the forest to restore it, rebuilt a World War II aircraft and even made his own spaceship.

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Post #5 - Pilot reports unknown flying ‘object’ in airline audio of close encounter

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Post #5 - Pilot reports unknown flying ‘object’ in airline audio of close encounter

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Definition: In this article,  an American Airlines pilot said while flying on to Phoenix, something mysterious flew above them. He recalls seeing a thin cylinder type object fly above his airplane at super speeds. The pilot knew it wouldn't be military, because of it being a Sunday and that was their 'day off' , but he asked to be sure if they had any targets in the sky that he wasn't aware of, but there wasn't. Although,  White Sands Missile Range, which works in that area failed to comment from a request from Fox News when inquiring about it.

Connection: The red flag connected with this I believe would be Red herring, because it diverts us from knowing what is really going on. That pilot said he saw something that was shaped like a missile, but most military bases say nothing was fired that day, but how can we be so sure? So then, its being called a 'unknown flying saucer', which is funny, because a saucer means round, like a plate. Not a cylinder, shaped like a missile. And I think there's a second one in here for Reason For Belief.  Agenticity: for the pilot, who doesn't believe what  he saw was something military, but in fact something terrestrial.

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Post #7 - US intelligence agencies have 180 days to share what they know about UFOs, thanks to the Covid-19 relief and spending bill. 

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Post #7 - US intelligence agencies have 180 days to share what they know about UFOs, thanks to the Covid-19 relief and spending bill. 

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Definition: In this article, it explains that when the government passed the $1.9 trillion relief bill. A part of this relief had a report that mentioned the Intelligence Authorization Act. While including the Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI. Which all finally comes down to all of them having classified information about the UFO sightings, now the days are numbered for the officials to come out and release any info on UFO's.

Connection: The red flag related to this article is Ideological Support because there is known officials who believe other government intelligence agencies have reports that relate to the sightings of UFO's. There is no need for scientific evidence if the government is behind covering up all known sightings as "false or fake". Which is why ever since there has been enough evidence increasing, the government agencies now have to share what they know or face serious backlash.

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ufo report: an unclassified report on ufos must be released in 180 days

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thanks to the covid-19 relief and spending bill - cnn

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US intelligence agencies have 180 days to share what they know about UFOs, thanks to the Covid-19 relief and spending bill

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When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.

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Post #8  The First Documented Sighting of a UFO

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Post #8  The First Documented Sighting of a UFO

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Definition: This article discusses the first UFO sighting made by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. Kenneth reported seeing nine objects that glinted in the sun as they travelled past him at the same altitude. These UFOs were about 45 to 50 feet wide, and he said that they were three times faster than any manned aircraft of the era. However, it seemed that the flying objects dipped and swerved around obstacles in the terrain. People believed that they might have come from Mars or Venus as they thought that either planet might have a habitable surface at that time.

Connection: The red flag that is connected to this article is related to Confirmation bias because the only evidence of this event is from the pilot himself and he was the only one who saw the supposed UFOs moving around obstacles. This shows that people don't think about other events that could've caused this and instead only wanted to believe that it was aliens that did this.

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(Image credit: Colonial Productions) On June 24, 1947, an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he saw something extraordinarily strange. Directly to his left, about 20 to 25 miles north of him and at the same altitude, a chain of nine objects shot across the sky, glinting in the sun as they traveled.

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Definition: On a night in November of 1989 in Belgium, witnesses reported a bright light in the sky witnesses described it as lights on a giant football field. A couple of police officers also said that they saw an object in the sky. By the time that the evening was over, at least 30 groups and three separate pairs of police officers were alleged to have seen this flying object. and between November 1989 and April 1990 there were over 2000 sightings that had taken place. The Belgium military had made a plan to catch these unknown aircraft. On March 30th, 1990, they launched two F-16 aircraft to intercept this unidentified aircraft. Still, they were only able to see it over radar because they reported that as they got close to the aircraft, it would jump considerable distances in seconds and accelerate beyond human capacity. As such, the pilots were never able to catch the unknown aircraft.

Connection: The red flag for this event is Confusion of Causation and Correlation because when the Belgium military sent two F-16 aircrafts to intercept the UFO which then the UFO was jumping at such distances and accelerating at speeds that seem impossible to humans. Which in this case the UFO doing these things had an effect on these two military officials because it is something that they never seen before.

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At first, the witnesses claimed, all you noticed were the lights.

They were so bright you could read by them, so brilliant that a policeman described them as "like lights on a huge football field." Only gradually did you notice the object they emitted from - a hulking triangular shape, with three enormous spotlights pointed toward the ground, and a red, flashing light at its center. "The whole thing," recalled the policeman, as if barely able to believe it himself, "was floating in the air."

It was a clear November night in 1989, near the town of Eupen, Belgium, which sits some seven miles from the German border. Heinrich Nicoll, the policeman, and his partner, Hubert Von Montigny, called their dispatcher to report the object they'd stumbled on while on a routine patrol. "Suddenly, they told me they were seeing a strange object in the sky," Albert Creutz, who was on the receiving end, told Unsolved Mysteries in a 1992 episode. "It made no noise. We joked about it and said it might be Santa Claus trying to land."

But by the time the evening was over, at least 30 different groups and three separate pairs of police officers would allege to have seen the unidentified flying object. And they wouldn't be the last. Belgium's months-long "UFO wave" culminated 30 years ago today - on March 30, 1990 - in a physics-defying chase through the skies over Europe as two Belgian Air Force F-16s pursued mysterious objects on their radars that they couldn't even see.

But, okay okay, did aliens really visit Belgium? It certainly seems deeply, deeply unlikely. Yet three decades later, it's still hard to entirely dismiss the 2,000-odd sightings that took place in the country between November 1989 and April 1990. As Patrick Ferryn, the president of the Belgian committee for the study of space phenomena, SOBEPS, told The Telegraph, "You must know that most of these sightings will have the most banal explanation but there is a residue, which we simply can't explain. And of those, there may be two or three where we may have questions over where they came from."

Lots can be ruled out, though. For example, a classic photograph of the triangle-shaped aircraft, known as the " Petit-Rechain picture," is without a doubt a hoax - the forger admitted as much when he came forward in 2011. "We made the model with polystyrene, we painted it, and then we started sticking things to it, then we suspended it in the air ... then we took the photo," the prankster confessed to Reuters. Brian Dunning, the writer and producer of the podcast Skeptoid, also refutes a number of the sightings, arguing that the November apparitions were in fact a helicopter, and that the police officers were interviewed by a biased ufologist. Conflicting information, published by Reuters, claims instead that the lights over Eupen were from " a Soviet satellite breaking up."

Regardless, where things really start to get strange is in March 1990. At that point, there had been months of sporadic sightings throughout Belgium, including by an army colonel, André Amond, who claimed to have seen the lights while driving in his car with his wife in December. The Belgian military, needless to say, was well aware of the descriptions pouring in from across the country, and it had little in the way of answers.

Then-Chief of Operations of the Air Staff, General Wilfried De Brouwer - who offered his account to investigative reporter Leslie Kean for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record - said that his initial belief was that the American military must have been testing some sort of experimental aircraft over his country. He went as far as to file inquiries with the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, prompting the Americans to create a memo, dryly titled "Belgium and the UFO Issue," which confirmed that "no USAF stealth aircrafts were operating in the... area during the periods in question."

The reports were credible enough, though, that Belgium's Air Force, federal aviation authorities, and police devised a plan to try to catch one of the unidentified intruders in action by preparing F-16s to quickly take off if a sighting was ever reported by both the police and a radar station at the same time. Sure enough, as De Brouwer recounts in UFOs, that night came on March 30, when "several policemen" and "two military radar stations" spotted an unknown object. "Once aloft, the [Belgian] pilots tried to intercept the alleged crafts, and at one point recorded targets on their radar with unusual behavior, such as jumping huge distances in seconds and accelerating beyond human capacity," De Brouwer writes.

But frustratingly, the pilots never managed to see the object they were pursuing. After analysis of the aircraft's readings, "the Air Force's decision was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that there were real crafts in the air on that occasion," De Brouwer reports. Still, throughout 1990, the Air Force was asked - and could never specifically account for - the sightings, which, all told, numbered in the thousands by the time they quietly started going away again in April.

Three decades later, explanations are still in short supply, although some scientists now consider the event to be an example of mass hysteria. Dunning, quoting UFO skeptic Philip Klass, writes, "Once news coverage leads the public to believe that UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement, which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs."

But De Brouwer still believes otherwise. "I can conclude with confidence that the observations during what is now known as the Belgian wave were not caused by mass hysteria," he says in UFOs. "The witnesses interviewed by investigators were sincere and honest. They did not previously know each other. Many were surprised by what they saw and today ... they are still prepared to confirm their unusual experience."

What we do know for certain is that there is a lot we don't yet understand about our universe. Even the U.S. Army has multiple stories of chasing strange, impossible objects through the sky. While the Belgian UFO wave likely wasn't a visitation by little green men, it remains without a satisfying answer even all these decades and technological advances later. "Today there is not yet any explanation!" Amond, the colonel who saw the lights with his wife, told Kean. "That is a pity, because I want to know before dying. Give me a correct explanation of my sighting; that is all I can ask."
Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.

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30 years later, we still don't know what really happened during the Belgian UFO wave

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At first, the witnesses claimed, all you noticed were the lights. They were so bright you could read by them, so brilliant that a policeman described them as "like lights on a huge football field."

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Post #6  - Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program

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Post #6  - Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program

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Definition: This article goes on to explain how funding of almost $22 million out of the $600 billion was to expand the Advance Aerospace Threat Identification program which has been reporting UFO sightings. In 2012 the program was shut down due to the program never being acknowledge or known to The Defense Department. But even still the program remains in existence still as of today which has others wondering why the military was funded to sent UFO reports to Pentagon after being ordered to shut down by The Department of Defense.

Connection: The red flag "Suppression by Authority" is related to this article because the public does not want to know about the program they have had even though it has been shut down for years, has now come back into the public eye. Therefore, the Pentagon was known for releasing the evidence against the military's wishes after years of investigative reports being sent out to the Pentagon. So it is no surprise that government officials and the military were trying to cover this program up before the Pentagon and The Department of Defense decided that it was about time the public knew what was going on behind the scenes.

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A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Credit Credit... U.S. Department of Defense

WASHINGTON - In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon's C Ring, deep within the building's maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program - parts of it remain classified - began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid's, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS's "60 Minutes" in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was "absolutely convinced" that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

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Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, has had a longtime interest in space phenomena. Credit... Al Drago/The New York Times

Working with Mr. Bigelow's Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft - including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. "I'm not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going," Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. "I think it's one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I've done something that no one has done before."

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee - Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat - also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. "When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it's worth investigating seriously," she said. But, she added, "what people sometimes don't get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained."

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A video shows a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Credit Credit... U.S Department of Defense

James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. "There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories," Mr. Oberg said. "Lots of people are active in the air and don't want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage."

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. "There could well be a pearl there," he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

"It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change," a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort's government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

"Why aren't we spending more time and effort on this issue?" Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Pentagon officials say the program ended in 2012, five years after it was created, but the official who led it said that only the government funding had ended then. Credit... Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it "no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science."

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow's ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

"I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before," Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.

Luis Elizondo, who led the Pentagon effort to investigate U.F.O.s until October. He resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the program. Credit... Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

The sightings were not often reported up the military's chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, "was one of the easiest meetings I ever had."

He added, "Ted Stevens said, 'I've been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.'" (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army's air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. "This was so-called black money," he said. "Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that's how we wanted it." Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.

Robert Bigelow, a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid, received most of the money allocated for the Pentagon program. On CBS's "60 Minutes" in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was "absolutely convinced" that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth. Credit... Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.

The funding went to Mr. Bigelow's company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.

Under Mr. Bigelow's direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.

"We're sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener," said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. "First of all, he'd try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn't know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function."

The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. "There's a whole fleet of them," one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.

"Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue," Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. "Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo."

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. "Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings," Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a "restricted special access program" limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that "what was considered science fiction is now science fact," and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid's request for the special designation was denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to "the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities." He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that "there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation."

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. "That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people," he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. "If anyone says they have the answers now, they're fooling themselves," he said. "We do not know."

But, he said, "we have to start someplace."

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Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program (Published 2017)

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WASHINGTON - In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find. Which was how the Pentagon wanted it. For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times.

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Post # 3 - Bob Lazar Says the FBI raided him to seize Area 51 Alien's Fuel.

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Post # 3 - Bob Lazar Says the FBI raided him to seize Area 51 Alien's Fuel.

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Definition: Bob Lazar is a known conspiracy theorists who worked on alien technology at a base called S-4 which was a test site just a few miles from Area 51. After coming out and exposing what kind of work he was doing, the FBI got involved and raided his business called "United Nuclear" to see if he was developing anything strange after Bob himself exposed that the government was using element 115 to mess around with this alien technology.

Connection: The red flag that is connected to this article is related to Suppression by Authority because after Bob's recent conflict with the government after exposing them of hiding and using UFO's at a secret test site called S-4. The government secretly removed any documentation of Bob Lazar ever attending college and also removed his work history to make him not so known in the public eye.

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Image: Bob Lazar via Jeremy Corbell

New documents obtained by Motherboard show why the FBI raided the Area 51 insider's scientific supply company.

On May 24, 1989, in a live interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on KLAS-Las Vegas, Robert "Bob" Lazar took the first steps toward becoming one of the most influential (and controversial) figures in all of UFO lore.

Concealing his identity and using the pseudonym "Dennis," Lazar said that deep within an unconfirmed section of Area 51 called "S4," he'd once worked on recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft for the US government.

Months later, no longer concealing his identity, Lazar claimed the US government was now waging an all out covert war against him. He said it shot out one of his tires and erased all of his educational records from CalTech and MIT. Lazar eventually claimed that, while at Area 51, his job was to reverse-engineer an alien material called "element 115" that he claimed was used to power an alien spacecraft. Lazar has repeatedly hinted that he took a piece of element 115 from Area 51, and that this element is of great interest to the federal government.

In the years after his initial appearance, Lazar largely returned to private life. He eventually opened a business called United Nuclear Scientific, a scientific supplies and equipment store based in New Mexico, and then Michigan (earlier this month, the company announced it's moving to Oregon). From radioactive ore to ammonium nitrate, a quick check of Lazar's scientific supply company's website reveals the business caters towards the exotic and potentially dangerous side of science. A whimsically Strangelovian GIF on the site's home page says, "Looking for some URANIUM? CLICK HERE."

But now, 30 years after initially talking about Area 51, Lazar and United Nuclear Scientific have become part of a new and unusual situation that conspiracy theorists claim is tied to element 115. (It's worth noting that Lazar's element 115 is not muscovium, an element that was first synthesized in 2003 and added to the Periodic Table in 2015.)

Right in the middle of the production of a documentary about Lazar's life, United Nuclear Scientific was raided by the FBI and local police. Lazar and his followers have found this to be very suspicious, and have theorized that the FBI was attempting to recover samples of element 115 that Lazar took from Area 51. Conspiracy theorists suggest that Lazar was under government surveillance, and that this is the latest in a decades-long harassment campaign against Lazar by the feds.

What actually happened on that raid, uncovered in documents obtained by Motherboard using public information requests, doesn't seem to have anything to do with element 115, but the real story is almost as bizarre.

*

While Lazar was seemingly content spending decades as a small business owner, the police raid wasn't the only thing that brought Lazar back into the limelight. In late 2018, he was the subject of a documentary made by filmmaker Jeremy Kenyon Locklear Corbell called Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers.

A self-proclaimed protege of George Knapp, Corbell said it took considerable convincing on his part to get Lazar to return to the public eye. Corbell, who also stars in the film, has made a name for himself in the paranormal genre, previously releasing the documentaries Hunt for the Skinwalker and Patient Seventeen. Under the title "Sensei," he has also sold instructional videos for an "MMA style that involves sport, street, and art" that Corbel calls "Quantum Jujitsu."

Though Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers is largely a contemporary retelling of Lazar's original story, the police raid on United Nuclear Scientific is central to the film.

In the beginning moments of the documentary, viewers find Corbell huddled in a neon-lit bathroom, fretfully pouring over a series of text messages saying Lazar is currently being raided by the "feds." In an ensuing scene, Knapp, a co-producer of the film says, "I had a feeling something like this might happen." The climax of the film lays out what they think the raid is really about: An attempt to recover the supposed alien energy source, element 115.

No evidence of the existence of Lazar's element 115 has ever surfaced. However, according to Lazar, this alien artifact is a highly radioactive element that allows alien spacecraft to traverse the cosmos, impervious to gravity's effects. Lazar has said for years that he worked on the material at Area 51, and that it can be used to power spacecraft.

"It's a superheavy element," Lazar once told Larry King. "It's a unique element. When it's exposed to radiation, it produces its own gravitational field-its own antigravitational field, and it's what's used to lift and propel the craft."

Conspiracy theorists and Lazar himself have suggested that Lazar stole a piece of Element-115 from Area 51, and that he has it to this day. The only presently known form of Moscovium has a half-life of 0.65 seconds and would thus have decayed very quickly. Nevertheless, the thinking is that the government wants it back, which is why law enforcement raided Lazar's business.

Since Corbell's documentary was released late last year, Lazar's supporters have become more militant about the accusation that the FBI improperly raided United Nuclear to recover element 115. Even the Daily Beast asked, " Why did the FBI raid the home of the biggest alien truther? "

According to months worth of incident reports obtained by Motherboard, the 2016 raid on United Nuclear was part of an ongoing and extensive murder investigation that includes state, local, and federal authorities. The documents make no mention of element 115.

According to reports written by Michigan State Police Sergeant Detective Thomas Rajala, the events leading up to the search of United Nuclear began in late 2015 with the mysterious death of 31-year-old Janel Struzl. Rajala says doctors concluded Struzl was poisoned and died of "thallium toxicity." Colorless, odorless, and tasteless, thallium sulfate has been described as " the poisoner's poison" due to the substance's high toxicity and difficulty to detect.

Thallium is most often used in the manufacture of electronics, as well as in glass manufacturing and the pharmaceutical industry. When isolated, it looks like tin. Thallium is a regular topic of conversation among elements collectors, who try to obtain samples of as many elements in the periodic table as possible.

According to the Michigan State Police reports and United Nuclear Scientific's website, Lazar's company sells thallium, and the police search was intended to learn more about who he'd sold the material to. Lazar is not specifically listed as a suspect in the murder in the police documents.

According to the report, Lazar said sometime in March 2017 a woman provided him with her deceased brother's "element collection," which Lazar agreed to sell through his website. According to the report and Lazar, thallium was indeed one of the elements in this collection. "Thallium is something we never carried before and was just recently donated to us by the family of an element collector that died-so we now had a collection of some unusual materials we've never had before," Lazar said in an interview.

Because the case is still an active investigation, some names and details are redacted from reports. MSP reports suggest that police believe one of their suspects may have purchased materials used in Sturzl's murder from Lazar. The documents note that investigators obtained search warrants for a suspect's Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results, and seized computers and other data from a suspect. Shortly after obtaining information about those internet searches, investigators decided they wanted to question Lazar.

The MSP report indicates that local and state police traveled to several areas in Michigan to conduct interviews. During this same time frame it's noted, "efforts will be made to contact/interview Bob Lazar (United Nuclear) in person regarding any Thallium sales; specifically, to [an unnamed individual]." Rajala goes on to say in his report that a police officer "had recently discovered United Nuclear advertises Thallium (for sale) on its website."

A check of the business's website shows, indeed, United Nuclear sells custom made "safety sealed" epoxy disk of thallium. According to the site's description, the thallium discs United Nuclear offers "do not require any sort of special handling or storage, and they can be discarded with normal trash if no longer needed."

A local police report released to me in April by the Laingsburg, Michigan Police Department first hinted there might be more to the story than an unsubstantiated theft of an unproven alien element. This first report was sparse on details, but noted "this investigation started in Houghton, MI in regard to a homicide investigation." In May, Corbell told British outlet Express, "we believe that the 'official' intent of the raid was a cover story-and that they were looking for a piece of the fuel source for the extraterrestrial craft Lazar once worked on for the United States government at Area 51."

Lazar and Corbell have publicly said Lazar's company was raided as part of a sustained surveillance campaign against a man who's been called a "reluctant UFO messiah." In the documentary, Lazar and Corbell discreetly discuss the possibility of Lazar having taken a piece of the mysterious element. The police search of United Nuclear came the very next morning after this cloak and dagger discussion, according to Lazar and Corbell. In an interview with Larry King, Corbell and Lazar claimed during the search that "FBI agents were able to repeat back verbatim" a portion of their previous day's private conversation. At the annual UFO festival in McMinnville, Oregon, Lazar told a crowd that the FBI had played an audio recording of he and Corbell's element 115 discussion." According to the MSP reports, police had already obtained search warrants a day prior to Corbell and Lazar's conversation.

When I spoke with Lazar, he told me he didn't believe everyone involved in the raid was aware of his work on alien spacecraft or element 115. However, Lazar was explicit in saying at least two mysterious individuals at the raid were absolutely concerned with his past, and knew of he and Corbell's conversation.

"They asked to go upstairs with me and commented on the location of the 115 and Jeremy," said Lazar in an interview.

Lazar and his supporters have been steadfast in saying it was the FBI who spearheaded the search of United Nuclear. Indeed, the MSP reports confirm the FBI was present and involved with the search. But according to Sgt. Rajala's notes, the FBI had been involved with the case since January of 2016, when it was determined Michigan State Police forensic lab was "not equipped to handle examinations related to thallium." It was the chief of the local police department who asked the FBI's Marquette Field Office for assistance with the search of Lazar's business.

In addition to having a search warrant for United Nuclear for "records related to thallium sales," police had also secured warrants to search Lazar's residence. When I told Lazar this, he said he was previously unaware they had a warrant to search his home. No search was ever done at his home, however.

"They absolutely knew 100% of the business was at the commercial address in Laingsburg, why would there be a raid planned for my home also?" Lazar asked.

When I spoke with Lazar, he said "people in the raid indicated they were looking for some information related to a thallium purchase years ago." The MSP report said Lazar cooperated: Lazar, "immediately stated he understood and would cooperate/provide any information requested."

The MSP report says Lazar provided officers with 15 pages of documents, including receipts for all thallium sales, copies of emails between him and an unnamed person, and all records of past orders placed by a separate unnamed individual. In his closing remarks, Rajala says, "as a result of the information obtained from Lazar, and his cooperation, the search warrants were not served." (This means that Lazar cooperated with the search, not that his business wasn't searched at all.)

Both Lazar and Corbell maintain that the search had nothing to do with a thallium poisoning, and insist that this is merely a cover story. The FBI was interested in element 115, they say.

"None of the agents [or] offices were the least bit interested in the thallium," Lazar said.

Lazar says that two law enforcement officials questioned him on element 115 and a conversation he had with Corbell. "Did these two initiate the raid, or were they just ride-alongs with an existing raid? That I don't know. But it was clear they knew much more than the rest of the crew downstairs," Lazar said.

Lazar said officials seemed to be primarily concerned with gaining access to United Nuclear's computers. "They indicated they had 'computer experts' there who wanted access to all the computers, which I freely gave them."

Corbell told Motherboard that the raid was actually related to the element: "If what Lazar has been telling us for 30 years is true, then a cover-story to distract from the actual intent of the raid is plausible," said Corbell.

Lazar and Corbell's statements are contradicted, however, by someone claiming to be an employee of United Nuclear who posted on Reddit the day after the raid. That person, under the pseudonym "PseudoSmarts," said that "before the rumor mill gets out of control we wanted to set the record straight" in a thread titled "Bob Lazar's business, United Nuclear, was just raided by the FBI."

"We had a customer a few years ago that murdered his wife. FBI, local law enforcement came with a warrant to get our records on him. We provided them the documents and all the info we had on him," they wrote.

To verify the authenticity of their claim, "Pseduosmarts" included a link to an Imgur photo showing Bob Lazar standing in United Nuclear while holding a sign that read, "Hello Reddit, 7/20/17." When asked about the Reddit post, Lazar declined to comment.

Because it's part of an ongoing investigation, a spokesperson for Michigan State Police declined to comment on the search. Houghton Police Chief John Donnelly confirmed his department is the primary agency responsible for the investigation of Janel Sturzl's death, however, he declined to comment further Donnelly did however acknowledge he was previously unaware of who Bob Lazar was. In follow-up email, Donnelly said that, under the advice of Houghton's city attorney, he was unable to provide any comments to what Lazar told me occurred during the search.

Chief Dan DeKorte of the Laingsburg Police Department-who assisted and was present during the search of United Nuclear-said based on the information he was provided, "the search was related to a homicide investigation," and he had "no information on Bob, his film, or Area 51."

"Maybe if I run into some one day and find myself in a larger and more well-equipped facility that will come to fruition"

Oddly enough, this isn't the first time Bob Lazar and the sale of deadly toxins have come up. In 2006, several news outlets accused Lazar of " peddling poison" after he was found to be selling the same radioactive poison used to kill former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko. Located in Albuquerque, N.M. at the time, United Nuclear Scientific's website assured customers they would "run no risk of being tipped off to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security," Newsweek reported.

And 2017 wasn't the first time Lazar and United Nuclear have been raided by law enforcement. In 2003, after he unwittingly sold federal agents banned chemicals used in the manufacture of illegal fireworks, Lazar's home was raided by the Consumer Product and Safety Commission. Lazar told me that, during that raid, he'd "heard some members of the SWAT team say 'this is total bullshit-it's nothing like they told us in the briefing.'" According to federal court records, in 2006 Lazar pleaded guilty to violating the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and was sentenced to a $7,500 fine and three years federal probation.

*

To date, there's never been any tangible evidence proving Lazar ever set foot inside Area 51, much less worked on alien spaceships or obtained any mysterious elements.

For some ufologists, Lazar is a black eye on a field they desperately hope to see achieve mainstream legitimacy. Others see him as a truth teller. Either way, he is one of ufology's biggest names and celebrities.

On United Nuclear Scientific's website, along with five-gallon buckets of Aerogel, customers can buy prints of Lazar's sketches of flying saucers or custom element 115 "Lazarium" coffee mugs.

When asked, Lazar, told me he wouldn't directly comment on whether or not he has a piece of element 115.

"After 30 years, I'm a bit tired of constantly defending myself and have no intention to continue it." Finally, when pushed on whether he might one-day reveal a sample of element 115, thereby proving his claims beyond reproach, Lazar told me, "if I had some, would I reveal it to confirm my accounts? Absolutely not."

He then suggested that maybe one day he would try to make it from scratch: "I can think of something much better to do with it that would go much further in supporting my story. Maybe if I run into some one day and find myself in a larger and more well-equipped facility that will come to fruition."

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Bob Lazar Says the FBI Raided Him to Seize Alien Fuel. The Truth Is Weirder

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Image: Bob Lazar via Jeremy Corbell New documents obtained by Motherboard show why the FBI raided the Area 51 insider's scientific supply company. On May 24, 1989, in a live interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on KLAS-Las Vegas, Robert "Bob" Lazar took the first steps toward becoming one of the most influential (and controversial) figures in all of UFO lore.

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Definition: Though the history of unidentifiable flying objects goes back to when ancient civilizations like the Romans and the Greeks existed, they believed that gods and monsters flew through the sky. Though these flying objects have existed for a long time, UFOs' interest only really began in 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw what seemed to be nine objects flying through the sky in a V formation maneuvering around objects in their path. The first belief was that it was a new type of military aircraft, but other people said they sighted nine flying objects in other parts of the country. The interest in UFOs has only evolved over the years. Because of these events, many theories are going around regarding the government and their hiding of alien aircraft. After this event, UFOs started being spotted more frequently. Some examples were the Lubbock Lights UFO spotting in 1951, Levelland UFO spotting in 1957, Tehran UFO spotting in 1976, The Rendlesham Forest spotting in 1980 and the Belgium Wave UFO, which was spotted many times between 1989 and 1990.

Connection: The red flag for this article would be Proof by Verbosity because with the appearance and sightings of all these "UFOs," people believe that if all these sightings have been recorded and are believed to be accurate, they are real.

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UFOs aren't new. Indeed, humans have been describing unidentified flying objects for millennia, with depictions of disk-like objects and unusual atmospheric objects found in the art and literature of ancient civilizations from the Sumerians and the Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans.

But the modern era of UFOs took off in the middle of the 20th century, right around the time rockets and high-tech aircraft were being devised, often in secret. Coincidence? Paranoia? Perhaps. In any event, these seven UFO sightings gained a lot of attention-and raised a lot of eyebrows.
READ MORE: Interactive Map: UFO Sightings Taken Seriously by the U.S. Government
1. Kenneth Arnold, 1947

The origin of today's fascination can be traced back to civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold. While flying his small aircraft near Washington's Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold claimed to have seen nine blue, glowing objects flying fast-at an estimated 1,700 m.p.h.-in a "V" formation.

He first believed the objects to be some sort of new military aircraft-this was, after all, just two years after WWII and the first year of the Cold War -but the military confirmed there were no tests being conducted near Mount Rainier that day. When Arnold described the crafts' motion as similar to "a saucer if you skip it across water," the media coined the now-ubiquitous phrase "flying saucer."

Soon, other reports of a group of nine UFOs cropped up across the region, including sightings by a prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial flight in Idaho. The government never offered a credible explanation for the sightings. It simply claimed Arnold had seen a mirage or was hallucinating. But UFO mania had set in, and just a few weeks later, the infamous Roswell sighting would perpetuate the obsession.
VIDEO: UFO Sightings: Kenneth Arnold
2. Roswell, 1947

It's the mother of all UFO sightings, but no object was actually observed flying in the Roswell incident. In the summer of 1947, rancher William "Mac" Brazel discovered mysterious debris in one of his New Mexico pastures, including metallic rods, chunks of plastic and unusual, papery scraps. After Brazel reported the wreckage, soldiers from nearby Roswell Army Air Force Base came to retrieve the materials. News headlines claimed that a "flying saucer" crashed in Roswell, but military officials said it was only a downed weather balloon.

Ever since, conspiracy theorists have been hard at work trying to prove the wreckage was extraterrestrial, with one man, Ray Santilli, going so far as to release a video in 1995 of an alien "dissection" purported to have taken place after the incident. (Santilli would admit in 2006 that it was a staged film, but he maintained that it was based on actual footage.)

As it turns out, the government was indeed covering something up-but it wasn't aliens. The crashed weather balloon was, in fact, part of a top-secret military endeavor called Project Mogul, which launched high-altitude balloons carrying equipment used to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Air Force provided plenty of proof in a 231-page report released in 1997 called " Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash." Though the mystery has been thoroughly debunked, interest in the case has only grown, and Roswell's tourism is heavily based around its famous so-called UFO sighting. The town is home to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, a spaceship-shaped McDonald's and an annual UFO festival, held each summer.
VIDEO: UFO Sightings: Roswell
3. Lubbock Lights, 1951

On the evening of August 25, 1951, three science professors from Texas Tech were enjoying an evening outdoors in Lubbock, when they looked up and saw a semicircle of lights flying above them at a high speed. Over the next few days, dozens of reports flooded in from across town-Texas Tech freshman Carl Hart Jr., even snapped photos of the so-called Lubbock Lights phenomenon, which were published in newspapers across the country and LIFE magazine.

Project Blue Book, which led the Air Force inquiries into UFOs, investigated the events, and its official conclusion was that the lights were birds reflecting the luminescence from Lubbock's new street lamps. Many people who saw the lights, however, refuse to accept this explanation, arguing that the lights were flying too fast.
READ MORE: The Unsolved Mystery of the Lubbock Lights UFO Sightings
4. Levelland, 1957

Carl Iwasaki/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

In the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, there's a famous scene where a UFO makes the electronics in a car go haywire. The real-life inspiration for that scene came from an incident in 1957, when dozens of citizens of Levelland, Texas, individually reported seeing a rocket or strange lights that interfered with their vehicles: Engines died, lights cut out.

Though the police initially thought the reports were a hoax, they, too, saw the mysterious lights, as they investigated the situation. Project Blue Book was assigned to investigate the case. Their findings? It was an electrical storm and ball lightning that caused the lights and the mechanical malfunctions-despite the fact that there were no reported thunderstorms in the area that night.
READ MORE: This Scoutmaster Had a Run-in with a UFO. The Kids Saw it Too.
5. Tehran, 1976

The September 19, 1976, incident in Tehran, Iran, started much like many others, with phone calls from concerned citizens reporting a bright light in the sky.

An F-4 fighter jet was sent out to investigate, but as it neared the object, its instruments blacked out, forcing the pilot to return to base. A second F-4 took its place, and as it neared the unusual light, it achieved radar lock. But according to the pilot, the UFO released a glowing object-which the pilot assumed to be some sort of missile headed straight for him. As he prepared to fight back, the pilot experienced malfunctions with his instruments and he witnessed another bright object released from the UFO that headed straight toward the ground. He safely returned to base, despite the faulty equipment.

After the incident, Iran contacted the United States to aid them in an investigation. An unclassified memo by U.S. Air Force section chief Lieutenant Colonel Olin Mooy detailed the events of the night: There are explanations for nearly all of them.

First, the bright light seen by civilians (and possibly the pilots) might have been Jupiter, which was visible in the sky that night. Second, as author Brian Dunning notes in his podcast "Skeptiod," the second F-4 jet had a long history of electrical problems, meaning the instrumentation might have failed regardless of possible UFO interference. It also could explain the radar lock-it might simply have been a malfunction. The first F-4, reports Dunning, was never turned in for maintenance following the incident, so there's no official indication that its instrumentation failed. And finally, as for the "alien missiles," there was a meteor shower that night, which could easily account for the sightings.
READ MORE: Mysterious UFOs Seen by WWII Airmen Still Unexplained
6. Rendlesham Forest, 1980

In December 1980, U.S. Air Force members stationed at two British Royal Air Force bases, Woodbridge and Bentwaters, reported seeing strange, colorful lights above Rendlesham Forest, about 100 miles northeast of London. One man who entered the forest to investigate claimed to have discovered some sort of spacecraft there, and the next day, others confirmed damage to nearby trees and a higher-than-normal level of radiation at the site.

Several days later, more sightings were reported.

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt recorded his observations on an audio tape as he watched the lights, and while not definitive proof, theorists consider this the strongest evidence of the events. But the UK's Ministry of Defence, which oversaw reports of UFO incidents until the early 2000s, didn't find any credible threat to the nation, and didn't pursue investigations further. As at Roswell, UFO tourism is prevalent in Rendlesham Forest, and there's even an official Rendlesham UFO trail that visitors can hike, off of which sits a model of the reported spacecraft.

7. The Belgium Wave, 1989-90

At the end of November 1989, citizens of Belgium reported seeing a large, triangular UFO hovering in the sky. But beyond the visual sightings, no evidence was found of any UFO's existence.

A few months later, in March 1990, new sightings of multiple objects were reported, confirmed by two military ground radar stations. Two F-16 fighter jets were sent out to investigate the anomalies, and though the pilots could not see anything visually, they were able to lock onto their targets with radar. But the UFOs moved so fast that the pilots ended up losing them.
READ MORE: Why Mysterious Green Fireballs Worried the Government in 1948
Some 13,500 people are estimated to have witnessed the incident, making it one of the most widely experienced UFO sightings of the modern era. The Belgian Air Force had no logical explanation for the activity, but it acknowledged that an unknown activity had taken place in the air. The Belgians reached out to the UK's Ministry of Defence to investigate further, but once they determined that the incident was not a hostile or aggressive one, they stopped the investigation.

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UFOs aren't new. Indeed, humans have been describing unidentified flying objects for millennia, with depictions of disk-like objects and unusual atmospheric objects found in the art and literature of ancient civilizations from the Sumerians and the Egyptians to the Greeks and Romans.

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1. What surprised me the most is the UFO stories that people tell, it actually makes us believe that there is some form of intelligent life out there.

2. The Bob Lazar story is a real life example of what interests me because he was probably the first person to come out and expose the government of what UFO's they were keeping hidden from the public which still makes me believe that the government is of course involved with using alien technology.

3. The research that was most interesting was exploring how the government is now coming out about the UFO video released by the pentagon.

4. I am most likely to remember the government cover up stories and the legendary Bob Lazar story that still to this day interests me.

5.  The most harmful is Confirmation Bias as the evidence out there about aliens and the theories that surround them, people will tend to believe in what they believe in. Even if they do not exist. But the least harmful is Proof by Verbosity is because there is no little evidence that says aliens do not exists when we well know the government has the evidence they just do not want to tell us.

6. The most important thing to pass on is by sharing the critical thinking process to them so there can be questions passed on and what they would believe in to answer those questions.