SIGHTINGS



NASA Quite Curious
About Firmage's Private
Top-Level Meeting
By Matt Beer
San Francisco Examiner
Scripps Howard News Service
10-11-99
 
 
SAN FRANCISCO - An upcoming private meeting between Silicon Valley high-tech executives, NASA scientists and a high-profile UFO enthusiast has sparked an investigation by a government agency.
 
Special Agent Keith Tate, an investigator with the Long Beach, Calif., branch of NASA's Office of Inspector General, has been calling Silicon Valley sources, including The Examiner, seeking information about a planned Tuesday meeting between research scientists and Silicon Valley high-tech executives.
 
At that meeting, first reported by The Examiner, attendees, including scientists from the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., will discuss propulsion technologies.
 
"We're trying to determine if any proprietary information will be talked about at that meeting," said Tate. "We're very concerned about this."
 
Staging the meeting will be the International Space Sciences Organization. Its founder is Joe Firmage, a 28 year old, high-tech executive who made headlines late last year when he published a Web site and book in which he recounted his beliefs in space aliens. On the ISSO site, he claims to have been visited in his bedroom one night by such an alien.
 
Firmage also has stated that some of the high technology of today was obtained from the legendary alien space craft crash at Roswell, N.M., in 1947. Firmage stepped down from his post as CEO of the giant Santa Clara, Calif.-based USWeb Internet consulting firm following his revelations, due to shareholder concerns about his extraterrestrial pursuits.
 
ISSO spokesman Tony Young had no comment on the NASA probe.
 
Over the last several years, NASA has been researching an array of exotic propulsion technologies through a small program dubbed Breakthrough Propulsion Physics.
 
Some of these techniques thumb their noses at Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which postulates that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light - 186,00 miles per second. These include using technologies familiar to science fiction fans: worm holes and warp drives.
 
Firmage, according to his Web site, believes "there is stunningly good evidence that UFOs are real starships."
 
He writes that "whatever did or did not happen at Roswell in 1947will ultimately prove to be a rounding error when the implications of this phenomenon become widely known."
 
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)





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