The British government has been releasing newly declassified government records relating to UFOs in batches for a few months now. The most recent batch dropped yesterday, and even mainstream news sources have been making a lot of a Winston Churchill cover-up claim made in one set of correspondence. For example, the BBC headlined their coverage, “Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show.”

I can already see the UFO believers going insane over this one. That particular slice of the UFO community that believes that the US government has been covering up some sort of ongoing relationship with aliens (c.f. Majestic 12) are going to love that the documents revealed yesterday say that Churchill was consulting with Dwight Eisenhower when he made the cover-up decision.

But what do the documents really say? Are the cover-up claims at all credible?

First of all, the letters released are from 1999, and they concern a third hand story. The letter writer is apparently a scientist of some sort (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 284), and he’s looking for information on a “foo fighter” incident his grandfather once told his mother about. The grandfather was supposedly one of Winston Churchill’s bodyguards during WWII, and was present when Churchill discussed a mysterious object that was seen and photographed following a British bomber. The object was metallic, and was far faster than any known aircraft. After discussing the object’s ramifications the whole incident was supposedly classified for 50 years on Churchill’s personal order.

There are many clues throughout the letters that the story the letter writer’s mother told him had been hopelessly contaminated with decades of later pop culture influences. The most obvious is this passage in an addendum the letter writer included with all his mother’s recollections of what her father told her (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 276).

Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared that the matter should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status be reviewed by a future Prime Minister.

This is impossible, because the term “unidentified flying object” didn’t exist during WWII. The terms was first used in US Air Force documents in the early 1950s. Even the term “flying saucer” was not coined until 1947. In short, there was no real term for “possible alien spacecraft” in the time period the meeting supposedly took place, so if someone there was trying to hint that they thought something was an alien spacecraft there was no euphemism to hide behind. They would have had to come right out and say it, and I imagine that would be very memorable to everyone in the room.

Churchill’s reason for the cover-up is also a bit ridiculous, considering the context. According to the letter writer (DEFE 24/2013/1, pg. 279),

Mr. Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following:

“This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general public and destroy one’s belief in the Church.”

The letter writer specifies that this meeting took place in the “bunkers,” so I assume that means during the Blitz. Nazi Germany was bombing the hell out of London on a nightly basis, and had ballistic missiles with a range of 200 miles, but Churchill was worried a single object that hadn’t hurt anyone was going to cause a panic? That hardly seems likely. The “mass panic” explanation for the UFO cover-up is a creation of pop culture, and as I argue here it doesn’t make much sense as a government policy.

In summation, this third hand story with absolutely no corroboration. Nothing more is known about the “foo fighter” incident that sent Churchill into such a panic, or if it ever happened. Moreover, the whole incident directly contradicts what British UFO believers have previously claimed to be the “holy grail” proving Churchill’s interest in flying saucers. Going forward it will be interesting to see how deeply ingrained this new, unconvincing “proof” of a British UFO cover-up will get in the UFO myth.

Well if that wasn’t really a dimensional portal over Norway, and if that wasn’t really the satellite discovery of the ancient ruins of Atlantis, this is definitely footage of a giant* pyramid hovering over the Kremlin, threatening to rain extraterrestrial death from the skies:

I mean come on! Who could dispute it? For god’s sake, it happened on the same night as the Norway spiral! Wake up, sheeple! So, whatever it is, it’s definitely, definitely . . . something. Some possibilities:

Extraterrestrial civilizations causing both the giant UFO pyramid over the Kremlin and the failure of the Russian Bulava missile (which led to the Norway light spiral), as a context communication message to the Russian military establishment to cease its development of intercontinental missiles.

Sure. Sounds plausible. I know if I had mastered the secrets of interstellar flight, I would base my initial vague communications on flying spirals and pyramids. Right after I got finished drawing in the wheat.

HAARP, the space-based weapon of mass destruction, caused the electromagnetic plasma light effects visible over Norway on Nov. 9, on the eve of Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize speech either as a warning to Barack Obama, or as a possible Project Blue Beam mass psychological conditioner assuming Obama is an agent of a corporate new world order.  The Kremlin pyramid UFO could be a Project Blue Beam artificial electromagnetic or plasma artifact under this hypothesis.

Yup. No unreasonable speculation there. Especially not about the research station blasting short wave with the same output power as . . . dun dun DUN! Three or four large AM radio stations! Scary. And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything that looks as inherently credible as that Project Blue Beam page.

[I]t could be a wormhole opening up, while others linked the event to the recent high-energy experiments undertaken at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Uh huh. A machine decapitated by bread effects a miles-wide spiral a thousand miles away two weeks after being turned on. Of course, that was probably planned by the New World Order to lull us into a false sense of security.

A sign that the aliens have been here for millennia, like the pyramids.

I always love that these New-Age fuckwits can’t tell the difference between a square pyramid and a tetrahedron. Like the extraterrestrials are going to fly a quintillion miles here and either send inconsistent messages or screw up their geometry. “We’ve been here for millennia! But we can’t count sides.”

Whatever this slowly floating, gently wafting, wobbling object is, it is definitely not a simple balloon of some sort. Or a Photoshop job. No, it must be geometric reptillian geopolitical interpretive dance mimes. Clearly.

*The pyramid is “a mile wide,” which is impressively deduced from a video with no perspective.

Last night a failed Russian missile test created a truly bizarre display in the sky over Norway, and as you might expect, there are about a zillion videos of it. What’s great about this is that it shows how  something as mundane as a missile can be completely unidentifiable unless you know exactly what you’re looking at. I think I can say with a high degree of confidence that similar missile mishaps are responsible for some of the most famous UFO cases that have come out of Russia. Take for example this sighting at Kasputin Yar:

Though the page I linked to identifies Kasputin Yar as a nuclear test site, that’s incorrect. Kasputin Yar is where the Soviet Union tested rockets for the military and for its space program. This UFO, glowing green with a bright “beam” extending to the ground, was probably similar to the phenomenon seen in Norway last night.

[Note: After I posted this entry the site I linked to, ufoevidence.org, has gone dead. Here's a cached version of the page.]

Today would have been Carl Sagan‘s 75th birthday. Among his many interests, Sagan was an outspoken advocate for skeptical inquiry, critical thinking, and the scientific method.

Carl Sagan with a full-scale mock-up of one of the Viking landers.

In the fall of 1980, I was 14.  I had had a deep interest in science for literally as long as I could remember.  But that fall I was one of millions treated to a voyage of scientific discovery on PBS through Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.  While Cosmos is largely the story of the history of science and how it leads to our understanding of our place in the universe and the world around us, it is also a collection of lessons on critical thinking and the scientific method.

Over the course of the series, Sagan clearly and concisely demonstrated the logical and verifiable flaws in creationism, astrology, and tales of alien abduction and UFOs.

He also discussed the suppression of knowledge, by ancient Greek philosophers, by the early Christian church through its brutal murder of the mathematician Hypatia of the Library of Alexandria, and by the Inquisition against astronomer Galileo Galilei. In our present society, suppression of scientific knowledge for religio-political purposes remains an antagonistic issue.

Years later, in 1995, I had the good fortune to see Carl Sagan speak in person at the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).  The talk was part of a session honoring the late James Pollack, an astrophysicist and former student of Sagan’s.  The talk was to be on the work Sagan and Pollack had done together on the potential for terraforming Mars, but Sagan spent the time telling stories about his former student, colleague, and friend.  It was a kind and generous tribute.

Through his work and his clear elucidation of the wonder of understanding the world through science, he gave us all an immeasurable gift of enlightenment.

Thank you, Carl.

In the sky, apparently.

Argentina recently had a spate of reports of a flying cow (well, two people reported it – that’s a spate, right?). And if there’s anyone I trust to recognize a flying cow when they see one, it’s the Argentinians. I assume they were a pair of roving gauchos, wandering the pampas in their boleros and panchos, hunting the elusive llama with their bolas.

Tacos.

And this wasn’t just any flying cow – this was a flying cow being abducted by a UFO! I assume the cow was just gliding along, minding its own boustrophedonous business, maybe looking for his friends the flying pigs and monkeys, maybe just throwing himself at the ground and missing, when WHAM! No, not George Michael – aliens!

OK, you’re skeptical. I can tell.

Well, be skeptical no longer! UFOlogists have analyzed the photos, and have found incontrovertible proof of . . . hooves!

Yes, they jacked up the contrast and found areas of high contrast . . . er, I mean hooves. Among the purported proofs are:

• 3) In non-destructive super-resolution processes applied to the image, the animal turned out to be a bovine with its right side toward the camera, its head hanging to the left.

Wow – non-destructive, super-resolution processes?

• 6) The 3d analysis is self-evident.

Well, there you go, then.

But I’d be more worried about where they studied their anatomy – their claimed front right leg appears to be coming out of the critter’s right rib cage, and the head appears to be protruding from the wrong side of the left shoulder. The thing looks to me like a splayed right hand with middle finger pointed right at the camera – not a normal configuration for any quadruped that I’m aware of.

Finally, what were the witnesses doing at the time?

We went to have some mate with the kids . . .

Wow. I knew I didn’t trust those damn Argentinians.

From a Reuters news story posted on September 7, 2009:

Japan’s next prime minister might be nicknamed “the alien,” but it’s his wife who claims to have had a close encounter with another world.

“While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus,” Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.

“It was a very beautiful place and it was really green.”

Now it’s fortunate for Ms. Hatoyama that it was only her “soul” that traveled to Venus.  The planet is rather inhospitable for corporeal beings from Earth.  And it’s not green.

In 1982, the Soviet probes Venera 13 and Venera 14 returned the only color images ever taken on the surface of Venus and they do not support Ms. Hatoyama’s claim.  It is clearly not green. As for aesthetics, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But could the greenery of Ms. Hatoyama’s vision exist elsewhere on the surface of Venus? Thanks to Soviet, NASA, and European Space Agency (ESA) Venus flyby missions, orbiters, atmospheric probes, and landers, we also know a good deal more about the surface environment of that planet. While I am not familiar with any scientific studies on the environmental extremes which the human soul can tolerate, we do know that, for terrestrial life-forms such as humans or green plants, surviving the ~93 bar atmospheric pressure, or the ~460°C (~860°F) temperature would be, shall we say, problematic.  So would breathing the air, which is over 96% carbon dioxide, and lacks even detectable trace amounts of molecular oxygen.  Oh, and there’s the atmospheric sulfuric acid with which to contend as well.

This information is all readily available to anyone who chooses to look it up online (for example, see Wikipedia’s page on the planet Venus). It would seem Ms. Hatoyama has yet to do so.

When she awoke, Japan’s next first lady wrote, she told her now ex-husband that she had just been to Venus. He advised her that it was probably just a dream.

“My current husband has a different way of thinking,” she wrote. “He would surely say ‘Oh, that’s great’.”

So the reasoned conclusions we can draw from Ms. Hatoyama’s story:

1. it is unlikely that she has been to Venus
2. she is apparently not a fan of critical thinking

It’s unfortunate that Ms. Hatoyama’s alien abductors did not choose to bring her body along for the ride.  No, I’m not wishing the harm on her that an actual visit to the surface of Venus would have inflicted.  Rather, I merely lament the missed opportunity that such a corporeal visit would have conferred upon her.

As Neill de Grasse Tyson said during a lecture last year here in St. Petersburg, if you happen to be abducted by aliens, while you’re aboard the alien vessel “grab an ashtray.”  What did he mean? Grab something. Grab anything, made with or from alien technology, surreptitiously stick it in your pocket, pants, or privates, and bring it back. Just one little piece of proof would lend some credence to your claim.