A Secret to Long Life: UFOs?

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Ralph Gardner – … I met Alexander Imich at a party where he was the oldest person in the room. That may not sound like a big deal—more and more frequently these days I attend events where I am the oldest person. But the party where I met Dr. Imich was for people over the age of 100, and there were a couple dozen of them.

Dr. Imich, a chemist born in 1903, and I had a brief conversation at the Queens event. I vowed to see him again, and not because he was ancient, or at least not just because he was ancient. My grandmother lived to almost 105, but she was just a shadow of herself after 100. Dr. Imich, on the other hand, remains a dynamo. But it was his interests that most intrigued me. At the party, he regaled me with tales of paranormal events he claimed he’d witnessed—at his West End Avenue apartment, no less.

I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs, another of the centenarian’s interests, but I was impressed with his passion on the subject and his claim to have published dozens of scholarly papers in several languages. So I asked Arthur Solomon, the gentleman who had invited me to the party back in October, whether he could reconnect me with Dr. Imich (the honorific from a Ph.D. he earned in zoology in 1929).

Mr. Solomon checked and reported that unfortunately Dr. Imich had entered the hospital with some unspecified ailment. A couple of months later, Mr. Solomon contacted me. “I bet you never expected to hear from me again,” his email began. “But here I am with news about Dr. Imich. I was told he is feeling better and would like to do the interview.”

So on Monday afternoon I visited him at his apartment at the Esplanade, a senior-citizens residence on West End Avenue. He has lived there 50 years, actually since before it became a senior residence and was a hotel, according to Robin Kaufman, his social worker.

If there were any doubts about Dr. Imich’s mental acuity, he dispelled them within seconds of our arrival at his cluttered one-bedroom apartment with excellent views of the Hudson River. He complimented Natalie Keyssar, our photographer (“You’re beautiful,” he said); commented that he wasn’t aware that The Wall Street Journal ran photographs; and then patiently spelled out the name of the Polish city where he was born, Czestochowa, launching into its history. …

Occasionally Dr. Imich would lapse into silence—only for a few seconds—and I’d wonder whether it was a sign of senility, or at least flagging stamina. But that wasn’t it, because his next recollection, or retrieval of a name or date from the distant past, was just as confident, his voice just as robust, as anything that he’d said previously  ….

But on to the paranormal, though Dr. Imich doesn’t claim to possess such powers himself. He produced bottles filled with objects such as bottle caps and plastic utensils that couldn’t have fit through their holes. He also told the story of the time he heard an explosion in his apartment and discovered a visitor, whose arrival he’d been awaiting at his front door, seated on the floor behind him. He also believes in UFOs and has a photograph on his desk of friends he says were abducted by aliens. Finally, he believes that humans can survive largely without food, and attributes his longevity, at least in part, to how little he eats.

Whether he’s right about any or all these things scarcely matters. “I’ve never seen Alex tired,” said Ms. Kaufman, who works for Selfhelp, a support organization for Holocaust survivors. “All that stuff he was talking about keeps him going.”

via A Secret to Long Life: UFOs – WSJ.com.

Awesome. But it would be nice to hear what Dr. Imich actually said about UFOs.  I don’t understand how someone can get to the point where he is writing for the WSJ, and yet is able to get away with saying he does not believe that some flying objects are unidentified.

“I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs”.

Why, then, write an article titled “A Secret to Long Life: UFOs”?

Saying you “don’t believe in UFOs” is a bone headed statement.  So, do you believe in … “objects”? Do you believe some objects fly, float, reflect, or otherwise appear to be in the sky? Okay, last question: Do you believe some objects that appear to be in the sky are unidentified?  If you answered YES to all three, then you DO believe in UFOs, so stop lying. If you do not believe some flying objects are unidentified, then kindly explain exactly what was picked up by forward looking infrared radar by the Mexican military, for starters.

And, Ralph, parapsychology is a field of study. It really exists! Do you understand what I’m saying? The field of study, parapsychology, exists. I think you intended to say that you believe people are mistaken who believe in ghosts, life after death, telekinesis, telepathy, regression memories, out of body experiences, and anything else parapsychologists research.  I guess your way of saying it is shorter.

>University Prof Bill Wickersham Calls for Congressional UFO Hearing

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Congress has a full plate of hearings coming up. Everything from medical liability reform, creating and promoting jobs and investigating Internet child pornography to assessing China’s behavior and making immigration work for American minorities.

Do you think the House or Senate will have any extra time to discuss UFOs? While it sometimes might seem as though our lawmakers are from outer space, this hasn’t stopped one college professor from urging Congress to take a serious look at unidentified flying objects.

Citing findings from a 12-year-old groundbreaking French UFO study, University of Missouri-Columbia psychologist and adjunct professor of peace studies Bill Wickersham has issued a call for congressional leaders to boldly go where their predecessors wouldn’t.In 1999, a special 13-member committee in France, made up of retired generals, scientists and space experts, created the COMETA Report, a study of 500 worldwide UFO sightings. The investigation narrowed down the reports to those that included radar and visual cases and previously undisclosed accounts from commercial and military pilots.

In a letter written in the Columbia Missourian, a news organization staffed by the Missouri School of Journalism, Wickersham cited the fact that the COMETA Report considered some UFO cases as possibly having an otherworldly source.

Even 12 years after that report, Wickersham, co-author of “Confronting Nuclear War: The Role of Education, Religion and the Community” (CreateSpace), feels it’s important enough to warrant Congress’ opening new, secrecy-free hearings into UFOs. …

… does Wickersham think there’s a real chance that a new congressional hearing on UFOs might actually come to pass in the current political climate?

“Not right now,” he said. “And what’s more, look at what happened to [2008 Ohio Democratic presidential candidate] Dennis Kucinich. The giggle factor, the ridicule, the ignorance, the apathy, denial — all these things that surround this issue. It takes a lot of guts for a politician [to speak out on UFOs]. Most politicians run from it.” …

via University Prof Bill Wickersham Calls for Congressional UFO Hearing.

>The JFK-UFO Connection?

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… While researching materials for his new book, “A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier” (Wasteland Press), Atlanta, Ga., history teacher William Lester used the Freedom of Information Act to get some previously classified documents.

Two of them were written by Kennedy on the same date, Nov. 12, 1963 — 10 days before his assassination. One was to the CIA director, asking for UFO files; the other was to the NASA administrator, with Kennedy expressing a desire for cooperation with the former Soviet Union on mutual outer space activities.”One of his concerns was that a lot of these UFOs were being seen over the Soviet Union and he was very concerned that the Soviets might misinterpret these UFOs as U.S. aggression, believing that it was some of our technology,” Lester told AOL News.

“I think this is one of the reasons why he wanted to get his hands on this information and get it away from the jurisdiction of NASA so he could say to the Soviets, ‘Look, that’s not us, we’re not doing it, we’re not being provocative. In fact, just to show you that it’s not us, what do you think about us working together on the exploration of space?'” Lester added.

Also in his book, Lester reprints an intriguing letter written by Maxwell W. Hunter of the National Aeronautics and Space Council (from the executive office of the president) to Robert F. Packard of the Office of International Scientific Affairs. …

via The JFK-UFO Connection: Bogus Documents or Unanswered Questions?.

Found on Rense:

“Citizens of this Earth, we are not alone.”

With those dramatic words, President John F. Kennedy intended to inform the American public and the world at large that the U.S. government had made contact with aliens from deep space.

But before he could deliver the speech on November 22, 1963, the beloved leader was cut down by an assassin’s bullets.

That is the astonishing claim of JFK researcher Professor Lawrence Merrick, author of an upcoming blockbuster book Killing the Messenger: The Death of JFK.

No telling what we was going to reveal, or if it was the reason he was killed on November 22, 1963, or if his revealing something to Marilyn Monroe (who sang him happy birthday on May 19, 1962) got her killed on August 5, 1962. 

>Triangular UFOs: Close Encounters With Unidentified Dorito-Shaped Objects

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This illustration shows a triangular UFO seen over North Carolina in 1975, witnessed by AOL News writer Lee Speigel and several law enforcement officers.

… are the mysterious flying, silent, hovering triangles the product of a top-secret military project reportedly called the Tactical Reconnaissance TR-3B aircraft, code-named Astra, as many people have speculated all over the Internet?

Whatever these things are, they’ve been seen, photographed and videotaped by lots of people around the world, so it doesn’t seem likely that everybody’s lying or confusing these crafts with the planet Venus or meteors streaking in the sky.

I called on retired Army Col. John Alexander to give some much-needed insight into all of this. For six decades, he’s been involved in national security affairs, holding key positions in special operations, intelligence, and research and development.

“A few of these sightings can be attributed to development of secret aircraft, such as stealth vehicles, including Have Blue — which was the prototype for the F-117 Nighthawk,” Alexander told me.

“While there continue to be rumors of more modern experimental craft, they would certainly not display the characteristics reported by observers.

“Specifically, many of these UFOs are illuminated and appear in highly visible venues. Unlike any secret aircraft, they do not make any attempt to remain hidden,” said Alexander…

Whenever I either see a new picture or video or read a report about one of these triangular UFOs, it transports me back to 1975 when I had a close encounter with one of these objects. And it was the kind of experience that solidified my interest in this subject, because it was so personal.

I was producing a documentary record album, “UFOs: The Credibility Factor,” for CBS Inc. when I got a call from my friend, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the former scientific adviser on UFOs to the U.S. Air Force and the man who coined the expression “close encounters of the first, second and third kinds.”

Hynek asked me to go to Lumberton, N.C., and investigate reports he’d received from several law enforcement agencies about a strange triangular-shaped craft that people had seen a few nights in a row.

Within hours of my arrival in the county sheriff’s office, calls started coming in about the return of the UFO. A short time later, I, along with sheriff’s deputies and police officers, converged at the side of a big field. It was a starry, moonless evening, and across the far side of the field, moving slowly above a line of trees from our left to right, was an object giving off a red-white appearance.

As we watched, the object stopped moving to the right and instead began to cross the field in our direction. When it got to the point where it was directly above us, we all noticed the same things (and not in any particular order of importance, since it all happened so fast):

• It was about the size of two police cars.
• It made absolutely no sound.
• It was V-shaped or triangular-shaped.
• It had a row of red lights up one side and white lights up the other side, with a larger, single white light at the apex. (See my illustration.)

At one point, the singular white light suddenly became very bright and shined down directly where we were all standing. It was so intense we had to cover our eyes and not look directly at it. After a few seconds of this, the light instantly turned off, the entire object turned a reddish color and, as it began pulsating in this red hue, it started slowly moving off in another direction away from us.

Staying in touch with one another on the car radios, we tracked the thing through a few counties, stopping along the way to talk to other law enforcement officers who told us of their own encounters with the object.

Subsequent calls to Pope Air Force Base in nearby Fayetteville yielded no explanation for what we had all experienced that night.

And ever since then, I’ve noticed an upswing in the number of worldwide reports of triangle UFOs. …via Triangular UFOs: Close Encounters With Unidentified Dorito-Shaped Objects.

>FBI file that shows how police and army officers saw a UFO explode over Utah

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A secret FBI memo detailing how police and army officers witnessed a UFO exploding over Utah has been unearthed.

On April 4 1949 special agents sent a cable marked ‘urgent’ to the bureau director, Edgar Hoover.

The top secret document reveals how an army guard, a policeman and a highway patrol, who were all miles apart, each saw a UFO, which they said exploded over mountains near Logan, north of Salt Lake City.

The memo is one of thousands of previously unreleased classified files that the bureau has made public in a new online resource called The Vault.

Under the title ‘Flying Discs’, the document about the sightings in Utah said the three men each ‘saw a silver coloured object high up approaching the mountains at Sardine Canyon’ that ‘appeared to explode in a rash of fire.’

It added: ‘Several residents [reported] seeing what appeared to be two aerial explosions, followed by falling object.’

Documents show that an earlier UFO sighting had been investigated in Logan in September 1947.

It said numerous witnesses told the FBI they saw ‘flying discs’ in formation that were ‘circling the city at a high rate of speed’.

Also among the files, released for the first time, is a memo from Guy Hottel, the special agent in charge of the Washington field office in 1950, which appears to prove that aliens landed at Roswell, New Mexico.

In the memo, whose subject line is ‘Flying Saucers’, Agent Hottel reveals that an Air Force investigator had stated that ‘three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico’.

The investigator gave the information to a special agent, he said. The FBI has censored both the agent and the investigator’s identity.

Agent Hottel went on to write: ‘They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.

‘Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall,’ he stated.

The bodies were ‘dressed in a metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.’

He said that the informant, whose identity was censored in the memo, claimed the saucers had been found in New Mexico ‘due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with teh controlling mechanism of the saucers’.

He then stated that the special agent did not attempt to investigate further.

The release of the secret memo is likely to fuel conspiracy theorists’ claims of a government cover-up.

The town of Roswell in New Mexico became infamous after reports that a flying saucer had crashed in the desert near a military base there on or around July 2, 1947.

The bodies of aliens were said to have been recovered and autopsied by the U.S. military, but American authorities allegedly covered the incident up …

via FBI file that shows how police and army officers saw a UFO explode over Utah | Mail Online.

>J. Edgar Hoover’s Saucer Crash Secrets

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It is said that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover could find out “anything about everything.” His deep and unrelenting investigation of the secret activities of politicians, military, celebrities and foreign leaders is legendary. When determined to do so, he could learn the facts about any event or subject of interest. His compulsion to find out about such hidden things was insatiable and often even bordered on the perverse. But did Hoover’s interest in “things concealed” extend to ET? Did Hoover indeed discover the truth about the retrieval of crashed craft from another world? New information -and a fresh examination of a body of relevant FBI documents from decades ago – says “Yes.” …

via The UFO Iconoclast(s): J. EDGAR HOOVER’S SAUCER CRASH SECRETS by Anthony Bragalia.

Anthony finds that Hoover was suspicious of what we did learn and likely dug deeper until he found the truth. He is filing a FOIA request  to obtain the Roswell crash analysis that Hoover was promised in another document.

>FBI opens searchable ‘vault’ of files including Unexplained Phenomenon

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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has unveiled a searchable, online repository of 2,000 agency files on hot topics that had been previously publicly released in piecemeal in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. The newly indexed files include a melting pot of information including internal security inquiries on cabinet members, investigations about ESP and details on undercover operations against subversive groups. Among the highlights:

Guy Hottel – Guy Hottel was a Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The information concerning Hottel is in regard to a March 22, 1950, memo he sent to the Director concerning flying saucers.

Notorious B.I.G. – The FBI opened a civil rights/color of law investigation into the murder of rap musician Notorious B.I.G. This release consists of FBI files between 1997 and 2005.

Lady Bird Johnson – This release consists of files concerning threats against the former First Lady. Other files in the release concern security arrangements regarding her travels.

Animal Mutilation – Hundreds of pages of FBI notes involving alleged cattle mutilation by non-terrestrial life are contained in five separate files. …

via parapolitical • The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has….

Cool. The Roswell report is interesting. A hexagonal disk suspended from a balloon was recovered.

 

>Proof that Montana obtained special immunity to UFOs on 3/13/2010

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Here’s an interesting visualisation of data from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC): the National UFO Sighting Mapping, Analysis, and Tracking Integration Cybersite maps reported UFO sightings on a map of the United States and the border provinces of Canada. This video is a collection of 14-day “density” plots for 12 months from March 2010 to March 2011 (red indicates a lot of sightings, through to purple for few sightings).

via Daily Grail Frontpage | TDG – Science, Magick, Myth and History.

>Retired Air Force Major Predicts UFO Sightings at Royal Wedding

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The upcoming royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton is expected to be viewed by more than a billion people worldwide — and possibly a few extraterrestrials, according to at least one former military officer.

George Filer, a retired Air Force major, runs the National UFO Center and says it’s common to see UFOs around important events.

“The craft seem to have an interest in anything important,” Filer told AOL News. “They’ve been sighted recently over Libya and near the Japanese tsunami.”Filer says his center averages more than 1,000 sightings a month, and he expects to get a few UFO reports from the area surrounding Westminster Abbey, the site of the April 29 wedding.

There are two reasons behind Filer’s prediction: In the last few weeks, he’s been getting reports from British Royal Air Force pilots who reported seeing UFOs over the English Channel, and, more importantly, he says the royal family is very interested in the UFO phenomenon.

Filer knows this personally because he once had a conversation about UFOs with William’s grandfather, Prince Philip.”It was around 1961 or ’62, when I was a navigator in a tanker,” Filer said. “He met with a group of us after a dinner because he wanted to talk about UFOs. He told us that the RAF had stopped sending fighters after UFOs because some of them didn’t come back.

“They decided to send tankers, which were nearly as fast as the fighters but could hold 15 hours of fuel, compared to two for the fighters.”

Filer says the prince also revealed that his interest in UFOs was more than just concerns of national security — it was personal.”I asked him why he was so interested in UFOs and he explained that his uncle, the Earl Mountbatten, had seen them up close,” Filer said.

Even though the meeting took place during the Cold War, Filer discounts the underlying possibility that the UFOs seen during the period were actually Soviet craft.

“That was always a possibility, but it seemed unlikely since these craft were bigger than expected — it’s like an aircraft carrier in space,” he said. “However, the Soviets did try to penetrate the airspace of the United Kingdom and the United States quite regularly.” …

via Retired Air Force Major Predicts UFO Sightings at Royal Wedding.

>Saturn’s UFO moons: Bizarrely-shaped Pan and Atlas baffle scientists

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They look more like flying-saucers than icy moons, but Pan and Atlas are two of Saturn’s strangest satellites.

Scientists have long been puzzled by how the oddly-shaped moons, which are only 20miles across, came to be.

Researchers based at the European Space Agency now think they have some answers after studying several years worth of cosmic images.

They realised that 14 of Saturn’s small moons had a very low density – about half that of water ice – and shapes that suggested they had grown out of the rings themselves.

However, they would have needed a jump start as it is not gravitationally possible for small particles to fuse together within the rings.

Therefore, each moon would have started with a massive core that was a leftover from the original collisions that caused the rings. …

via Saturn’s UFO moons: Bizarrely-shaped Pan and Atlas baffle scientists | Mail Online.