SINGLE-WITNESS SIGHTING

The man was in Harrogate as a delegate at the Town and House Planning conference, and he also got to see a UFO.

On October 30, 1995, he had taken Kings Road to get to his hotel. Just prior to 8:30 p.m. he had sighted a cigar-shaped thing traversing the sky. According to the account he gave the police, it was surrounded by a great many small lights. He was sure it was not fireworks.

An RAF Leeming spokesperson claimed that nothing out-of-the-ordinary had shown up on their radar that night.

The news item printed in the November 3, 1995 Harrogate Advertiser out of Yorkshire, England, revealed that Harrogate CID's DC Chris Nunns disclosed that the man's report was the only one of this particular UFO.

BRITISH "UFO BUSTER" DECLARES BELIEF IN ALIENS

Nick Page, a 29-year-old civil servant from the Ministry of Defence, has written a book entitled Open Skies, Closed Minds, scheduled to be published this summer in Britain by Simon and Schuster.

Previously skeptical, some hard-to-explain British sightings had convinced him to believe in UFO aliens.

Page, as part of his ministry job, had been privy to very sensitive information on the subject, and was an important part of UFO investigations for four years.

According to London's Sunday People (September 10, 1995), his superiors at the ministry are said to be infuriated at his turnabout.

NOT A BIRD, NOT A PLANE, IT'S---

On February 2, 1996, the Times recounted that, according to an official report made public the previous night, a British Airways passenger jet, with 60 people aboard, had a near miss with a UFO. In the study, the Civilian Aviation Authority investigators of the occurrence recommended commendation of the jet's pilots for their courage at coming out with their information.

The incident involved occurred the previous year, on January 6, 1995, at 6:48 p.m. when the Boeing 737 was overtaken by a wedge-shaped aircraft. Captain Roger Wills and co-pilot First Officer Mark Stuart encountered the thing at an altitude of 4,000 feet as they were descending towards Manchester airport. They were sure that what they sighted was not a balloon, a model, or a Stealth aircraft (which the Captain would have been able to identify).

Captain Wills described how the UFO silently sped so near the right side of the jet that Stuart ducked. Wills also described the thing as having little white lights and perhaps a black stripe on its side.

The pilots filed their "airmiss" report last year, and this year's aforementioned official follow-up did not offer any explanation for it.

Source: The Times, 2/2/96

PENTAGON NETTING MUFON

Uncle Sam, not Big Brother, is watching you!

On the Defense Department's behalf, Charles Swett recently put together a report, released summer 1995, analyzing the Internet's value to U.S. intelligence efforts. Swett, a policy assistant at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, in his report, advised that Defense might encounter "early warning of impending significant developments."

The Mutual UFO Network was one of the observed organizations, because of its Internet dissemination of accounts of military operations and its surveillance of sites tied in with claimed UFO coverups.

While apparently the Defense Department's surveillance interests have tended more to organizations on the left than to "fringe groups" and MUFON, Swett's contention that the Internet could be used for propaganda including psychological operations campaigns and for "unconventional warfare objectives," should give pause.

A copy of Swett's report was (and may still be) available on the Federation of American Scientists Web site on government secrecy (at http://www.fas.org/pub/gen/fas/sgp/).

Source: David Corn, "Pentagon Trolls the Net," The Nation, Volume 262, Number 9 (March 4, 1996).

SAME TIME NEXT YEAR?

The Northeast Aviation Centre of the Civil Aviation Administration, according to the News Report paper, told how a certain phenomenon of 1994 had re-occurred at approximately the same calendar date in 1995.

According to Associated Press, Beijing, on December 4, 1995, four airplanes travelling over northeast China at about the same time observed at least one Unidentified Flying Object. A white UFO of oval shape moved about 900 kilometers per hour near the flight of a Northern Airlines plane at 5:45 p.m., according to its captain's account. A radio message from the captain of another aircraft revealed a viewing of the same object.

Sunday Post (Bangkok, Thailand), 12/31/95

ROCKEFELLER AND ROSWELL

Eight-five-year-old wealthy philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller provided the funds for a study of the Roswell Incident. The 150-page result, entitled "The Best Available Evidence," was to be sent in December 1995 to every U.S. senator and congressperson--as well as John Gibbons, the Science Advisor at the White House. It reportedly contains testimonies from astronauts and former officials of the U.S. military that are in contradiction with the many denials by the Air Force, according to the head of the New York Center for UFO Research, Michael Luckman.

The report could well have found an interested reader in President Clinton, who, when asked about Roswell during November 1995, said, "...If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it either, and I want to know."

Source: Daily News (New York), 12/18/95

SPYING SPACEMEN OF THE SIXTIES

Sherry Keene, who worked for the Colorado Daily during the 1960s, occasionally got hints of what her father, Jack Keene, was up to during that decade. Once she and her dad were on an automobile trip through California when a radio report told of a UFO sighting in New Mexico. He told her, "We must have launched last night."

She was curious about the extent of his travels, his employment in various major aerospace companies, and about his recurring bouts with tropical diseases. His lack of health led him to retire early and settle in Denver.

Sherry once inquired whether his secretive work had caused a particular nasty illness. Her father told of the time during the '60s when he spent more than a day taking out black boxes from a space capsule wrecked in a tropical locale, while two lifeless astronauts hung over him (an event the official histories somehow missed).

Sherry's husband was around when Jack Keene and a loose-lipped former colleague got drunk and the latter said "at least we kept Project Gambit secret" to the former's great irritation.

This led Sherry to get in touch with Senator Gary Hart, whose office found out for her that the project still existed and was still classified--and supposedly not linked to her father's sicknesses.

Columnist and Boulder County commissioner Paul Danish, writing opinion in the Colorado Daily during December 1995, told of collaborating on journalistic investigations with Sherry Keene for that paper. However, during the 15 years following Sherry's sharing of the story with Danish during the late 1970s, both reporters were unable to find anything about Gambit or the astronaut deaths ("training accidents"?).

Occasional mentions of Project Gambit in Aviation Week and Space Technology proved to Paul Danish that Gambit actually existed. And in March 1995, the present administration gave permission for the CIA to release to the public 800,000 spy satellite photos taken between 1960 and 1972. Subsequently a conference publicly mentioned Project Gambit.

The Aviation Week and Space Technology issue of June 18, 1995 featured a report, written by Philip Klass, on the two-day conference that made known details on Project Gambit. It mentioned the "close-look" photos from Project Gambit which were not declassified, and the powerful rockets necessary to lift the "satellites" into orbit.

Paul Danish believes the Gemini docking maneuvers--not followed up by the Apollo missions--and rocket choices hint at methods for maneuvering satellites so as to avoid predictable repetition. He posits that there were at least a few clandestine spy missions in space making use of NASA personnel and technology if not NASA involvement--and that (at least) one may have had fatal consequences.

Sources: Colorado Daily, 12/6/95 and 12-8-10/95

UFOS AS A FUNDRAISING TOOL

A UFO Watch had been organized in order to obtain needed funds for the Cowling Junior Football Club. When 70 participants actually saw a UFO, the formation of the Sutton UFO Watchers' Group resulted.

During the fundraiser, at 2:00 a.m. on a late October night in 1995, 10 adult helpers, 10 St. John ambulance members, and 50 boys had seen the zig-zagging bright light that was bigger than a star. Its movements, observed by the shocked group for a quarter of an hour, covered a very large area of sky.

The Sutton group intends to meet on a regular basis at Crag Delph Nook, West Lane, in Sutton.

Source: Keighley News (Yorkshire, England), 10/27/95

EXCUSE FOR UFO ALIEN ABSENCES

A half-hour after the scheduled time for the UFOs to show up, the awaiting crowd was told by mediums that area warplanes were frightening the extraterrestrials off. According to the BTA news agency, an hour after the expected arrivals at the northern Bulgarian airfield, the crowd of 1500 was informed that, since President Zhelyu Zhelev wasn't going to meet the aliens, the beings were definitely a no-show.

The resulting anger did not end in mob violence.

According to police Major Stoyan Marinov, eight extraterrestrial spaceships had been expected at 11:00 a.m. to make their appearance. State television described how the three responsible mediums, Radka Trifonova, Ekaterina Nikiforova and Zdravka Krumova, had promised that the UFO occupants would assist Bulgaria to pay its foreign debt of $12.9 billion.

Source: Chillicothe Gazette (from Associated Press, Sofia, Bulgaria, 9/12/95)

LUCKY UFOs

Alan Beazley put his town's three UFO sightings to good use. The 28- year-old taxicab driver, a resident of Tilehurst, used the times of these sightings as numbers to bet on the lottery.

As of August 18, 1995, the cabby felt he had high hopes of winning.

This optimism was the result of the flaming orange sphere which reportedly had sped through the sky only a few hundred feet from Beazley's taxicab, which he took to be a good omen.

Beazley was not the only cabby to see it in mid-August 1996; another, named Chris, saw it some five miles away only a few seconds before Beazley had. And a Kebab van owner had also spotted the orange object.

The times of their sightings had variously been 12:30 pm and 12:36 pm, so Alan gathered from these the numbers 2, 8, 12, 24, 30, and 36, with which to place his wager on Britain's National Lottery.

Source: Evening Post (Reading, England), 8/18/95

Alien Skies appears regularly in STRANGE MAGAZINE. Most of these clips do not appear in Strange, appearing only on the Strange Magazine Web site.