- FOUR UFOs CAUSE CITYWIDE BLACKOUT
IN ARGENTINA
-
- Eyewitnesses spotted four UFOs over Bariloche,
a city in southern Argentina, immediately prior and during two citywide
electrical blackouts. Bariloche is a popular ski resort in the Andes, on
the south shore of Lago (Lake) Nahuel Huapi, located 1,040 kilometers (650
miles) southwest of Buenos Aires. The first blackout took place at 7:45
p.m. on Sunday, April 12, 1998 and lasted until 10:11 p.m. "Spokesmen
for Cooperativa Electricidade Bariloche (CEB) said the origin of the electrical
blackout that darkened a great part of the city has no explanation. No
cause exists to explain the occurrence." CEB linemen traced the source
of the power shutdown to transmission lines leading to the Cipresales transformer
substation. Power was briefly restored for four minutes. But at 10:15 p.m.,
Bariloche's lights went off again, and the city remained without power
until 1:30 a.m. Monday, April 13. According to the newspaper Diario Rio
Negro, "Gustavo and Beatriz Riveros saw strange lights hovering above
Cerro Carbon (hill) in the eastern section of the city Beatriz saw two
of the lights 'fuse together' over the Lions (a land feature on the hillside--J.T.)
just as the lights went out. Other witnesses reported strange illuminations
over Lago Nahuel Huapi." "In the barrio San Francisco, a woman
saw 'a ball of red light' descending in a zigzag pattern toward the large
pedestrian stairway at Tiscornia." A "luminous disc" was
also seen near the intersection of Calle Fernando Beschtete and Calle La
Paz. In the barrio Nicolas Lavalle, eyewitnesses saw four luminous UFOs
hovering overhead. One witness, Sara Salizar, said, "They are a large
spacecraft and three smaller ones that attached themselves to the larger
one over and over again." Andrea Capararo told the Argentine news
agency TOLAM that she and her sisters, Natalia and Carolina, "at 11:30
(p.m.) we observed in the sky a kind of large plate with twinkling red,
yellow, green and blue lights, and another object a little bit longer with
red and yellow lights. The luminous objects seemed permanently supported
in the air for several minutes, then moved away towards the lake."
Natalia and Carolina Capararo described the saucer as resembling "a
tomato bigger than an airplane" and flying toward Cerro Carbon, east
of the barrio. "Various inhabitants of the upper (highland) region
of the city, for their part, told radio and TV reporters that they had
first seen a formation of stars moving across the sky with twinkling lights
colored red, yellow and green and with a brilliant white radiance, between
10:30 and 11:45 p.m. Sunday night." "The moving lights appeared
to be attached to an elongated form and another form resembling a small
bottle, the inhabitants said. The union of the two objects produced 'a
great star,' like a great electrical discharge, and the lights of the city
went out." Bariloche is the site of two of Argentina's most famous
incidents, the Dr. Tarda case in December 1968 and the jetliner pilot case
in June 1995. (See the Argentinian newspapers Diario Popular of Buenos
Aires and Diario Rio Negro for April 14, 1998. Muchas gracias a Carlos
Iurchuk, Luis Pacheco y ALFANET para esas noticias.)
-
- NEON GREEN UFO SEEN IN NORTHERN
VIRGINIA
-
- On Friday, April 3, 1998, at 6:30 p.m.,
a UFO described as "a small, neon green, egg-shaped object" flew
over downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia (population 19,027). Several local
residents, plus four officers of the Fredericksburg police, witnessed the
UFO's overflight. Eyewitness Robert Tolen of Spotsylvania County spotted
the UFO while he was at a pay phone at Eubank's Amoco station on Princess
Anne Street. "I believe it was a UFO," Tolen was quoted as saying
in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star, "I don't care what anyone says."
Michael Todaro of Stafford County "was at a baseball field at Falmouth
Elementary School" when he spied the UFO, saying, "It was one
of the weirdest things I've ever seen." "If someone else hadn't
seen it, I never would have told anyone about it. Never. Never,"
Todaro told the Free-Lance Star. According to the newspaper, the four officers
"were in the parking lot behind police headquarters" when they
sighted the object. The newspaper checked with the Wallops Island missile
test range near Chincoteague to determine if the witnesses had actually
witnesses a rocket test. But a spokesman for Wallops Island told them
that there "were no tests on Friday." Fredericksburg is just
south of Route 3, about 57 miles (91 kilometers) north of Richmond, the
state capital. The Free-Lance Star also reported a UFO incident near the
Patuxent Naval Air Test Center in Lexington Park, Maryland (population
9,743). "Witnesses saw a blue UFO that same evening" near the
center on Highway 235, and "It hovered for a few minutes, then sped
away." (See the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star for April 7, 1998.
Many thanks to Kenneth Young, public relations director for Tri-States
Advocates for Scientific Knowledge, T.A.S.K., for forwarding the article.)
-
- SPHERICAL BLACK UFO SEEN NEAR
DALLAS, TEXAS
-
- On Sunday, April 12, 1998, at 11 a.m.,
a U.S. Air Force veteran, Mike H., and his family were driving north on
Interstate Highway 35 northwest of Dallas, Texas. As he drove through the
suburb of Farmers Branch (population 24,250), Mike reported, "I spotted
a black round-shaped UFO flying very fast and just below the clouds. The
object looked quite small to me, less than the size of a pencil held at
arm's length. But due to the height, even a large object would look small."
At first Mike said nothing to his family, wondering if the object might
be a bird, but then he realized that "it was flying much too fast"
to be a bird. The motorists kept the UFO in view as they drove past Royal
Lane and L.B. Houston Park, heading for Interstate Highway 635, aka the
Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway. "The object was moving faster than we were,"
Mike reported. "Our vehicle was moving approximately 65 miles per
hour, and the object moved past us in the same direction and within ten
seconds was out of sight." (Email Interview) (Editor's Comment: Ten
seconds to the horizon would mean an estimated speed of 1,440 miles per
hour.)
-
-
- NEW CYDONIA PHOTO ADDS TO
MARS MYSTERIES
-
- The Mars Global Surveyor snapped a second
high-resolution photo of the Cydonia region on Mars this week, this time
encompassing an area known as "The City." On its 239th orbit,
Surveyor once again aimed its Mars Orbiting Camera (MOC) at the desert
lowlands at latitude 40.8 degrees north and longitude 9.6 degrees west.
And, just like last week, the photo's appearance on the Internet raised
a ruckus. On Thursday, April 16, 1998, a memo from a person identifying
himself as "Fred Kurros" appeared on a website, alleging that
Surveyor's images showed artificial structures. "Apparently, yesterday
(Wednesday, April 15) at the Denver Lockheed-Martin location was really
a party-like atmosphere, people running around and saying, 'There was life
on Mars half a billion years ago!'" Kurros wrote, "...and NASA
is prepared to announce it in the next three days." "The new
image that clearly (shows) at least one pyramid structure...with right
angles on at least three of the sides...and it is a perfect right angle.
Plus, many of us have been comparing it to photos of the Giza pyramid,
and the likeness is stunning." At 2:54 p.m. on Thursday, in an interview
with Rob McConnell, spokesperson Frank O'Donnell, Manager of Media Services
for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, denied the "Kurros"
story. O'Donnell stated that "stories being circulated on the Internet
pertaining to an alleged statement that NASA will be releasing as to alleged
'artificial structures' on Mars as captured by MGS (Mars Global Surveyor)
are unfounded--and were denied." O'Donnell added that "the (second
Cydonia) photo received at JPL, after careful examination, shows no proof
of any artificial structure(s)," and pointed out to McConnell that
"people will see in them what they want to see." The new Cydonia
photo has also stirred renewed debate among professional geologists. In
a new paper entitled "A Geological and Geomorphic Investigative Approach
to Some of the Enigmatic Cydonia Landforms," geologist James L. Erjavel
disputed NASA's conclusion that the Face and other landforms in Cydonia
were caused by "differential erosion." NASA's 1989 McGill survey
concluded that Cydonia was once covered by one kilometer (1,000 meters)
of "erodible sediment" that was blown away by strong Martian
winds "leaving a knobby terrain that is a combination of exhumed remnants
of cratered terrain, igneous intrusives and cratered plateau material."
Erjavel pointed out that the Cydonia photos show only a "slight modest
erosion" of the region. Erodible material was present to a depth
of only 200 meters in prehistoric times, not 1,000 meters. As proof of
his assertion, Erjavel offered a comparison of Cydonia with the cratered
area immediately to the east. Both regions show clearly-defined impact
craters of a diameter of one kilometer or greater. However, while the
eastern region has "a significantly greater number of smaller craters
less than one kilometer" in diameter, Cydonia has none. "On the
most basic level," Erjavel wrote, "this dimophism suggests there
is a distinct difference between the cratered and knobby terrains that
cannot be accounted for if exhumation by erosive forces has been the primary
factor in the area's morphological development." (Many thanks to
Steve Wilson Sr. for these news stories.) (Editor's Comment: Seeing the
second new Cydonia photo, I was excited to find the remnants of an 'igneous
intrusive,' aka a volcanic dike, in the lower portion of the picture.
The dike is similar to the one at Shiprock, New Mexico and is proof that
a stratovolcano like California's Mount Shasta or Washington state's Mount
Rainier existed in Cydonia about ten to fifteen million years ago. Interestingly,
these dikes, which are caused by molten magma seeping up into cracks in
the existing bedrock, are usually found in sedimentary rocks. I still
say the underlying formation that created Cydonia's plain is sandstone,
not basalt.)
-
- SHUTTLE "SPACE ARK"
TAKES OFF ON NEUROLAB MISSION
-
- On Friday, April 17, 1998, the space
shuttle Columbia took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on its twenty-fifth
mission--a two-week Neurolab experiment designed to study the effects of
space travel on the brains of living creatures. The launch had been scheduled
for Thursday, April 16, but a malfuntion in the main comlink data processor
ended the countdowm. "But tens of thousands of spectators packed
around the Kennedy Space Center yesterday to watch the ship soar into a
clear afternoon sky and glitter for five minutes before vanishing from
sight. The shuttle could easily be called Altman's Ark because, riding
along with pilot Scott Altman, mission commander Rick Searloss and crew,
are 1,514 crickets in the larval stage, 18 pregnant mice, 152 rats, 60
snails, 75 snail eggs and 233 swordtail fish. "Scientists know from
37 years of human space flight what happens to the body during weightlessness.
The goal of the current mission, called Neurolab, is to understand why."
"By knowing how the nervous system adjusts to the lack of gravity,
the space agency will be in a better position to send astronauts to Mars
and establish moon colonies." On Saturday, April 19, Columbia's doctors,
Dave Williams and Jay Buckey Jr. conducted complex animal dissections,
"removing the brains of four rats so scientists can see how the nervous
system changes in weightlessness. Scientists say the only way to know precisely
how the nervous system adapts and develops without gravity is to remove
and preserve body parts in orbit." (See the New York Post for April
18, 1998, "Shuttle roars off into space with a cast of thousands"
and for April 19, 1998, "Shuttle crew looks to brainless rats for
help.") (Editor's Comment: One can only hope that some star- hopping
species unfamiliar with Earth does not select the next 15 days to visit
our solar system. Their curiosity piqued by that strange vehicle orbiting
the blue planet, they might focus the old tractor beam, reel in Columbia
and schedule everything aboard for what the Post euphemistically calls
"post-landing dissection.")
-
-
- 1928: KARJAT TO POONA VIA
HYPERSPACE
-
- A strange case of apparent teleportation
took place in Poona, India back in April 1928. A nine- year-old boy, Damodar
Ketkar, had been plagued by a type of teleportation phenomena since the
previous year. Coins, toys and other small objects miraculously popped
into view above his bed--inside a mosquito net--and dropped onto the sheet.
The phenomena were meticulously recorded by Miss Kohn, his British governess.
But, seventy years ago, on April 23, 1928, Damodar made the jump into hyperspace
himself. Miss Kohn writes, "At 9:45 a.m. on April 23rd, the elder
boy (Damodar) suddenly materialized in front of me in your doorway like
a rubber ball. He looked bright but amazed, and said, 'I have just come
from Karjat.' He didn't come through any door." "My sister describes
the posture of the boy as having been most remarkable. When she looked
up from her letter-writing, she saw him bending downward: both his hands
were hanging away from his sides, and the hands hanging limp--his feet
were not touching the floor, as she saw a distinct space between his feet
and the threshold. It was precisely the posture of a person who has been
gripped around the waist and carried, and therefore makes no effort but
is gently dropped at his location." Suddenly, as if released by an
invisible agency, Damodar tumbled to the carpet, shaken but unhurt. The
phenomenal manifestations in the Ketkar household at Poona, 200 kilometers
(120 miles) southeast of Bombay, continued until 1930 and then mysteriously
ended. (See POLTERGEISTS by Alan Gauld and A.C. Cornell, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London, 1979, page 114)
-
- UFO ROUNDUP: Copyright 1998 by Masinaigan
Productions, all rights reserved. Readers may post news items from UFO
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