Tuberculosis #2

Mooooooonths ago I made a little note about how I think I might like to march off to Jamaica or the slums of Bangalore and save, if I could, even one life from tuberculosis.  This notion, this dream, this novelty still lives in my cerebral cortex. Most of the weeks since that April post 4 months ago I have spent a couple of hours or more studying TB and the people who fight it.  They're called TB controllers, but mostly it's lack of control.  TB infects about 25% of the human race.

It's a germ that gets inside immune system cells (alveolar macrophages in the lungs, to start) and would normally just plain be consumed by them.  Yet this particular bacterium sends out chemicals or lightening or Flash Gordon rays that stop the lysosome in the cell from releasing the poisons that will kill the germ.  There's a standoff.  Many people have "latent" or idle or inactive tuberculosis.  They were exposed, it got a foothold, usually in their lungs, and now it's hiding in there with a bunch of guards that can't kill it but can contain it.  Unless it breaks out and multiplies, never hurts you or maims you or makes you lose 30 pounds or ends your life.

About 4,000 people die a day around the world from TB.  A day.  The weaker the health care and general prosperity system is, the better the TB.  In the US/developed world, it's out on the fringes infecting the homeless, the AIDS patient, those taking drugs that suppress the immune system, those on street drugs.  Also diabetics.  In Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, it can be anybody.  In one recent year close to half of all TB deaths were in India.  And it's a fairly treatable disease in many cases.  You have to take the drugs for months, though. 

TB has new life because of the AIDS epidemic.  To an extent, we had it on the run, but not now.  The "current outbreak' dates to the 1980s when HIV infection became widespread, hampering larger numbers of immune systems than the status quo in, say, 1975.  I think about 1 AIDS patient in three dies of TB or with TB.

The Widest-spread Infectious Disease?

I was wondering where and how I could do a health care service stint in a place without the kind of health care I'm used to.  The first MD to answer my queries was in the Sierra Madre/Copper Canyon area of northern Mexico and he said, upon hearing I was a respiratory therapist, "We've been thinking about doing a tuberculosis prevention and control program."

That got me back to the forgotten fact that tuberculosis--I'll call it TB--kills more people than about any other disease that can be passed from one person to another, and almost all of them are in not-so-developed places.  It's a disease of the very poor.  I'm poor--have been buying gas about four gallons at a time until the next check comes, can't afford to fill the tank.  But I do have a tank, and nice clothes, or decent ones, though many I bought at thrift stores.  I got a great cotton shirt today for $4.

Where TB flourishes, lots of people live on something like $4 a month.

I don't know why anyone would even want to read this, but it feels like I need to write it to take TB more seriously.

Cold To Any Form of Truth We Didn't Discover First? What Of The Truth That Something Was Gone In The Blink Of An Eye?

Through a woo-woo medium I hired, two Latter-day Saint friends who had gone on to the next world came and said hello to me.  The catch was that I thought they were both still alive because I hadn't been in touch.  That night I found their obituaries on the Net.  One friend I hadn't talked to for four years and the other for 40 years.

I wasn't sure how to pass the Hello along to their families, since LDS (Mormons) usually see mediums as working on the Dark Side of the Force with Darth Vader.  It's my experience that Latter-day Saints tend to be cold to any form of truth they didn't discover first.

That's too bad since India had a 5,000-year head start on discovering truth before the Father and the Son appeared to Joseph Smith the first Mormon near Lake Ontario in 1820.

This "cold to any form of truth I or my people didn't come up with ourselves" is not unique to Mormondom, though they have it down to a fine art.  I'm often guilty of it myself, and I'm reminded of a tall, competent emergency room doctor I used to work with almost on the Mexican border.  She wouldn't order anything for a patient she didn't think of first.  If my patient was puffing and short of breath, the last thing to do was walk up to this ER lady doc and ask, "How about some oxygen for Jolene Schmoe in room 1?"

If anybody else said the word "oxygen" or "breathing treatment" to the doc before she said it to us, ole Jolene was going to have to breathe on her own recognizance for the foreseeable future.

Might this kind of principle help explain why, say, Carl Sagan, would turn a blind eye to the vast circumstantial evidence of vessels flying around our skies with technology that is Just Beyond?  Including the "gone in the blink of an eye" technology.  We could compile a list of 1000 sober persons claiming to have seen something or someone clearly, only to have it/them not fly away real fast, but Flat Disappear in one second or less.  We could probably make 500 of them be cops and militaries. 

Lots of these accounts would turn out to be problematic, but some would be unexplainable by what we know.  There's a pattern here.  Science progresses by first detecting patterns and then by studying and understanding them.  Yet most card-carrying scientists in the US are avoiding giving attention to this common pattern.

Military Policeman's Sketch Of UFO, Except It Landed, Wasn't Flying

Jim Penniston was a US Air Force security cop at a base in England, about 60 miles northeast of London, and the same distance straight north of Dover, maybe 2 miles inland from the English Channel.  Sgt. Penniston led a security detail of three soldiers to investigate bright lights on Xmas night, 1980, from a downed aircraft next to his base.  When they got close, they saw it wasn't "downed," but landed, sitting still on the ground in an opening in the forest.  He first felt fear but as time passed with no hostile behavior, he calmed down.

Penniston and fellow soldier John Burroughs stood near and walked around the craft for about 45 minutes.  Penniston used up the film in his camera and then made a sketch in his MP cop's notebook.    "I put my hand on the craft and it was warm to the touch.  The surface was smooth like glass . . ."  His drawing shows two views, front and side of a three-cornered craft sitting on 3 landing legs.  

Nick Pope comments that, with a plain sketch like this, "There's not a lot of middle ground with something like that.  It's not swamp gas.
                                  It's not the planet Venus.
                                  It's not the light from a nearby lighthouse shining through the trees."

I would add:  It's not a weather balloon.  It's not even a Project Mogul balloon, which is a basic weather balloon with neoprene and more complex things hooked onto the balloon.  Nor is Penniston's sketch of a flare, which was used to explain away the steady, nonflaring images of the 1990s "Phoenix lights."
                       It's not a helicopter.
                       It's not an F-16.
You have both of the close witnesses, trained military observers, agreeing it was a triangular craft sitting still on the forest floor next to them for a fair period of time..  Some time back I heard a scientist asked, "What do you think accounts for the UFO reports [in general]?"  "I think it's probably Venus," he opined confidently.

Ah, the lure of the plausible.

Penniston adds that, after about 45 minutes, the craft lifted up through the trees (would Venus do that?) and shot off at unbelievable speed--gone in the "blink of an eye," he said.  This movement was captured by air traffic control radar not as the usual blips of slower craft, but as a streak across the scope.  I don't believe Venus makes either a blip or a streak on radar scopes.

The scientist is voting for Venus.  What about Penniston?  He wrote, "When it took off, I felt alone, knowing now what John [Burroughs] and I knew.  . . . I realized it was  100% certain that we are part of a larger community beyond the confines of our planet."

A Journalist On The Flying Machines Story The News Establishment Can't Take Seriously

Leslie Kean, an investigative journalist, was about 1990 working for public radio in California when a contact in Paris sent her an English copy of the Cometa report by former French generals and others about "solid . . . unexplained objects in the sky."   They analyzed lots of sights and decided about 5% could not "easily be attributed to earthly sources."  These sober fellows wrote that the "extraterrestrial hypothesis" was the most logical explanation.

Leslie acquired a problem as she read the report, because it was a subject most of her fellow journalists thought "ridiculous, or titallating at best," yet she started looking soberly at it in some depth.  She started to feel like she was covering up something "shameful and forbidden, like the use of an illegal drug."  The story was journalistically elusive, contaminated by conspiracy theories, disinformation.  She came to see the "aggregate data" on sightings as fully "compelling" and "mystifying."

She broke the news of the Cometa report in the Boston Globe and the story was picked up by many outlets.  She figured it would make a news buzz and other journalists would go after the story.  She was wrong. "Amazingly, nothing happened.  It was as if everyone was pretending [unidentified aerial sightings] didn't exist."

As Luis Elizondo said in 2017, "the phenomena are real," and there's enough data to make that clear to anyone who studies it.  And as Tucker Carlson said, "I don't see why this isn't more interesting than Vladimir Putin."  Yet I doubt that Carlson ran a single follow-up story--because he's concerned that it would hurt his journalistic reputation.

All above is from Kean's book UFOs, 2010, Three Rivers Press, pp. 1-6.

Explain: NYTimes UFO Story Had More Readers Than Any Story, But None Of My Friends Heard A Word

Nine days before Xmas past in 2017, three big news sources ran a UFO story.  NY Times put it on the front page and reporter Blumenthal said it had more audience interest than any story in a long time.  Yet I didn't hear about it until a month later and nobody I know has heard it yet. 

My son Eric would explain this quickly:  You and your friends are losers!   For instance, how many of you have bought your own RAM online and installed it yourselves?   Real mystery.

My sister, a sharp 67-year-old who would tell us RAM refers to male sheep instead of Random Access Memory, might say it was lost in the Christmas rush.  I in fact was hustling to put packages in the mail about then, a week before Saint Nick, and go to holiday music programs.

The mystery deepens when we see that the story had Plenty of followup on TV news--Fox, CNN, MSNBC.  Even my friends have heard of these. 

Quite a few of my people are Mormons, and I kind of doubt that presumably non-Mormon aliens fit real well into the LDS world-view.  One Mormon prophet in the early 20th century said firmly he was sure the Lord did not have it in his plan for humans to go land on other worlds.  Another cluster of friends are Spiritualists, and they would be thrilled to their toenails to be abducted by aliens, or have their cows abducted by them, because it's so weird it must be related to the unseen "Other Side" Spiritualists are always hearing from.  Eric would say these two points just back up his "losers" theory.

Has Pres Trump Had Sex With Any Aliens? ET Discussion Now Worthy of 'Mainstream Media" Attention?

When a well-placed intelligence official admits to studying "aerial threats" for 10 years, talks about findings of substances not clearly from Earth, says "We found a lot" but 99% of it is classified, and sums up by saying, "We may not be alone," are we in a new period of taking UFO nut stuff as less nutty?  More worthy of sober review?  I and fellow Nut Grant Cameron think so, saying the December revelations amount to blood dripping in the water for all to see.  Horse out of the barn--it's now a live topic at a new level.  Maybe so, but I noticed the White House press corps was giggling at it and press secretary Sanders dodged answer the Alien question.  Has Trump had sex with any aliens--errr, before he was president, I mean?  There are claims of human-looking aliens who--I swear I heard the claim--"look a lot better than we do."  Prettier 'cause they don't face rigor of lovely life on Earth.  Beauties right up Trump's alley, then, and mine for that matter.  Oh, I forgot.  He hasn't had sex with any of those 29 women who say he did it.  It's fake sex.

Let's try a back-and-forth on UFOs and recent news.
Cautious Thinker/Skeptic:  Those two films from F-18s aren't that clear, aren't that big of a deal.
UFO nut/student/raa-raa enthusiast:  NY Times sources said there were many more such films.  Journalist G Knapp (Vegas TV station guy) says his sources have confirmed 24 films in this particular cache or study.  The sober-headed pilot leading the planes who took the San Diego film is sure what his group chased did not come from Earth.
Thinker:  The perceived acceleration on camera can be misleading due to movement of the F-18.
Nut:  We're relying on the description of acceleration by the pilots, which did not rely on the camera but their own views.
Thinker (astronomer on Boston TV station)  Spent $22 a year for five years.  Got 2 films for $110 million?  Are you crazy you want to spend more?
Harry Reid:  It was $22 million over the five years.
Nut Grant Cameron:  Not unusual that the "reserved scientific critics" haven't studied the details of these topics and make uninformed statements.

Thinker:  This is a fringe wacko zealot topic.
Nut Alan:  Except when the NY Times puts it as the headline and writes a long involved article confirming years of gov study including warehouses with alleged esoteric materials.  And Politico and Wash Post run similar stories. 
Cautious:  There's no hard data to suppose nonterrestrial anything.  People want to believe.  That keeps it alive.
Nut:  The Times said, along with odd physical materials under study, there was a 400-page report.  Vegas reporter Knapp's source says there are 37 more reports and 36 other "technical" reports.  Maybe I want to believe, but what I really want to do is read.
Cautious:  These are just rumors, a dime a dozen.
Nut:  The rumor says the reports and materials are held by Bigelow Aerospace in properties outside Vegas.  Reid confirms Bigelow won the contract to do these studies.  That's a decently specific "rumor."
When, say, 100 separate military and civilian witnesses all describe craft either accelerating at "impossible" speed or basically disappearing, a pattern occurs.  Yes, there is the tendency to see what you've heard others say they saw, but I don't think Pilot Fravor did that here.  No matter how implausible the stories, the accumulation of them warrants sustained study and much more public release of current government holdings.  

Draft: UFOs overhyped or seen as ridiculous, so public can't be bothered with serious recent stuff

Here's what I heard in December from the NY Times, Luis Elizondo, and others.  I'm gonna number them just to try to sound organized.  I, Tucker Carlson, and Elizondo think this is "hell-for-impressive."   I guess we're the only three who do.  Also Nick Pope, ex-Brit UFO study director.

    1.  We covered up spending $22 million to study apparent possible threats from things that can outfly US aircraft.  I guess none actually acted threateningly.  Good start.
    2.   Sightings of such things--to me they're nonsaucers--by US military personnel number in the dozens.    Probably hundreds.  The off-San Diego episode in 2004 was described by naval personnel as "a whole fleet of them."  Lots of sightings go unreported because they're bad for your career.  There's a pattern and the public isn't being told the details of what we observe in the pattern. 
    3.  The guy running the study just quit because, he says, he was being blocked from giving good reports to those at the top.   In other words, his experience says we can't trust the Joint Chiefs and the President to be well informed about this.  We The Citizenry are grossly ill-informed and our leaders may be, too.
    4.  He also said religious (read "conservative Christian") objections are part of the opposition to studying this harder and telling the people more.  Since I grew up in a conservative Christian religion that will lie all it needs to, to make its checkered history look good, this struck a nerve in me.
    5.  He, ex-study-director L. Elizondo, said, "We may not be alone."  He admitted he couldn't talk about still-classified info, and the public has only been told about two cases out of maybe half a hundred.  So 94% or 99.4% of the pertinent info is denied us, and he still concedes "We may not be alone."  Sounds to me like he knows damn well we're not.
    6.  He thinks the real potential threat is from hiding what he and others "inside" know from the general public.  People have to receive critical info for a democracy to function.
      He further admitted knowledge of
    7.  Some of the theory of how these things fly.  If they don't really exist, how are we figuring out their science?
    8.  "Metamaterials" put down in layers composed of isotopes in combinations not found on Earth
How do you analyze substances that you don't possess, since they don't exist?  Elizondo wouldn't admit Bigelow was storing some of these substances in Vegas.  How do you learn their isotopic combinations if you don't have them stored anywhere?  You find something lying on the desert in some western state and do your test, but leave the stuff lying there?
    9.  At least one retired F-18 pilot came away utterly convinced the things he chased came from somewhere besides Earth.
    10.  Last and maybe least, Elizondo says someone from the Pentagon called him and said something like "maybe your life should be threatened because you're flapping your big mouth."
     This is suggestive evidence, not strong evidence, not conclusive.  But the grand importance of the possible topic it suggests--intelligent life elsewhere besides Earth--says to me we should be spending $22 billion on this, not $22 million.
     There are something like 35 other types of suggestive evidence of ET visiting Earth, from Travis Walton to impossible surgery done in cattle mutilations to Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr to Montana sheriffs' reports to Phillip Corso to the sightings at Phoenix and Stephenville and Rendelshem Forest an d Minot nuclear base. 
   

Studying ET Like A Cool-Headed Brit?

Why didn't more "Regular Joes or Janes" pay lingering attention to a Pentagon intelligence analyst, ten days before Xmas,  halfway revealing suggestive evidence of alien intelligences visiting Earth?

 Has the UFO subject been both so overhyped and so ridiculed that Jane Q Public tuned out a long time ago?

Let's ask a sober head, a Brit, a calm, sensible type--Nick Pope, who ran UFO investigations for Britain in the 1990s.  Just to hear his cautious, proper, cerebral comments lowers the blood pressure all by itself, but he's not yawning.

"These revelations starting on Dec 16 have been absolutely extraordinary. . .  For far too long, this is a subject that has been either ignored or ridiculed by the mainstream media.   After many years of US government denial that there was an official interest in the subject of UFOs [they've opened up.] . . .

"In terms of verifiable claims, it doesn't get much better than this. . . . Military was chasing the [objects] . . . The job that I did in the UK back in the 90s was virtually identical to [Luis Elizondo's role].  Most of British media called me to get my perspective on [these extraordinary December revelations]. . . It's a big story, but it's a complex one.  Go back to the sources--what Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean have written.  Back to Luis Elizondo and the F-18 pilots.  [Avoid jumping to conclusions.]   Harry Reid was instrumental in setting this up. . . . [Further it was treated almost as a throwaway reference] that there are materials from some of these sightings that have been studied . . . recovered materials that have been analyzed.  It is not hard to determine whether a material has even been in space.  Such tests will have been done.  Results are out there sitting somewhere.  [Debunkers say] of course the gov doesn't have anything like this.  According to the NY Times, maybe they do.

"It has been a watershed moment, this stratospherically impactful story."  Nick Pope interviewed on Youtube program Portal to Ascension, Jan 2, 2018.  He goes on.  "This is not the sort of story the Times usually runs, so, I'm now a journalist [and I have] written for the NY Times.  Their fact-checking is triple-checking, almost brutal.    The Pentagon is incensed by this story and was caught on the back foot. . . . The Pentagon reluctantly conceded the program existed and was a UFO project. . . . I heard report of the Secretary being pulled out of a meeting in the week before Xmas, Sir they've got this.  What do we do? . . . I understand that [these revelations] have been causing huge ruckus inside US government . . .  . Why didn't I know we really do this when we always say we don't?  Why wasn't I told?"  Why did we lie?  Rand Paul is said to have sent a "we didn't talk about this" tweet to Reid.  "Despite this being compartmentalized and carefully hidden, a lot of smart people will have been looking at this.  [Yes, we're in] interesting times."  Pope smiles and ends off.
        Why did Americans stop being as sensible as Brits?  They're just such grownups.  I have to ask after listening to this well-informed, calm voice.  It all sounds more calming when spoken in a British accent.  Let's have an Englishman make the Big Disclosure To Mankind:  Judi Dench and Sean Connery step together to the lectern behind Donald Trump and Theresa May.  May says, "Mr. Trump is going to go first, and I'll have a bit to say after."

Trump:  "We have a big announcement today, believe me.  It's huuuuuuge.  It's so huge we decided to have some calm you know kind of snobby British voices tell you what it is.  They're TV and movie stars like me.  But for once this is the kind of announcement that even a big ego like mine--well, we're gonna downplay it.  This is too huge.  Here they are, two of my favorite spies, Sean Connery and Judi Dench."
 
One speaks a sentence, then the other.
         Connery:  "We're slowing this down by taking turns.  You will see.  Please, Ms Dench."
         He hands the microphone to her, she takes it with a courteous nod, clears her throat.  "We are making a coordinated announcement authorized by Ms Prime Minister and Mr President and the heads of 182 other nations."
         Connery:  "It turns out, I must say in all candor, there are in fact some other folk--"he pauses.
        Dench:  "Folk, you see, not from here, not like us, although some turn out to be very much like us, but folk--let me say this deliberately FOLK NOT FROM EARTH."
        Connery:  "The point being our governments have lately proven quite carefully"--he stops to swallow--"good thing I'm an actor.  This is a daunting line to deliver.  Have proven these other folk to in fact exist."   
         Dench:  "I'll call them NonEarthers.  I find it the tidiest way of referring to them.  Some of them may be joining in later press conferences, you see.  Oh, you Will See."
         Trump grabs the mike, waves it at Connery:  "Damn Brits take so long to say any little thing.  Hey, go ahead, tell them about the different groups."  Trump steps back to again join May.
         Connery nods like a good Navy captain:  "Oddly, as the President implies, there is more than one bunch of these, shall I say, NonEarthers.  Multiple races, you understand."  (Gasps from the audience)  Yes, yes, I know.  Take a deep breath.  There's more." 
         Connery:  "Clearly some of the races are cooperative with humanity, while with others we have, as a politician might say it, yet to ascertain their intentions.  But not to worry; our governments have it in hand."
         Dench:  "Quite right.  Don't miss your afternoon tea over this, ladies and gentlemen.  We will indeed sort it all out.  More announcements coming soon."
         Connery:  "As you might suppose, we are in for a bit of a surprise here and there."
         Dench:  "Still, there's very much no need to rush out and dive headfirst into the Thames (pronounced "Tems") because we now know they have better ships than we have.  Avoid that sort of thing.  They should have better ships, since came to visit us, after all.  We haven't knocked on their doors just yet."
         Connery:  "Personally, it's a bit of a blow to know that they're so far ahead of us in technology.  I'd hope they have some wisdom to impart as well.  That said, please bear in mind the Galaxy is such a big place I'm sure we will presently find plenty of elbow room in it for both humanity and our visitors."
       Dench, smiling for the first time, no longer draped in sober spirit:  "It's actually a rawwwthur glorious day, a day like this.  We shall indeed, putting our heads together here on Earth, learn to be Galactic citizens, even if we have to muddle our way through a bit now and then.  Now a word from the Prime Minister."
       May steps up as they move aside, runs a hand across her hair:   "It's a lot to take in.  I know--we know it's a lot to take in.  This is the day officials worldwide finally look you our public, our citizens, square in the eye and say, We are not alone.  I will add that we haven't been for a while.  There could be one thousand things to say at a time like this, but for a bit of perspective I'm putting up a slide from an American chap named Carl Sagan.  Many of you will have heard of him--astronomer fellow, superb mind, very clever.  He put this photo of Earth and added this comment, which I find touchingly appropos.  'The Home Planet of an emerging technical civilization, struggling to avoid self-destruction.'
        "Even on the day we give this knowledge to the world, we assert that humanity's biggest threat is from itself, from nuclear weapons, from war, from worldwide pollution, from the things that divide us.  There is some reason to believe these Other Races may be able to lend a hand with such problems, but it will take us all working together."  She looks for a long time into the camera, reaches back and takes Trump's hand as he steps forward and the two of them wave at the crowd.  "Thank you," they say in unison, "thank you."

Possibly Last Letter My Uncle Garth Rasmussen Wrote

In 1983 I lived in Palo Alto, Calif, where I and my wife Sherry had just had our first and only child, Eric, in June.  I wrote a letter that fall or winter to my Uncle Garth about my son and also told him several strong reasons why he, Garth, should come back to God and the LDS Church.  During the holidays, Uncle Garth took a break from Christmas shopping, sat down and typed me a response.  It may have been the last letter he ever wrote.  Many years later I  went to visit his son Steve and told him I'd written his father a "missionary" letter.  Steve said, "I wrote him one of those two after I came home from my mission, but he never gave me an answer!  I wanna see that letter."  "So he was too polite to brush me off, but not to brush you off as his son," I laughed.  Steve said that to me about 2010, I think.  Now he finally gets something to satisfy his curiosity.  I have in front of me, this pleasant March 3 day in Tucson, Arizona, a zerox copy of Garth's letter, the original apparently having gone the way of all the world. One of the first lines is, "Young children are such a joy that there will be times when you lose sight of all the trouble they can cause."

I'll type in the rest of the letter and comments by March 8, the 41st anniversary of Garth's brother Paul's death.  Probably by Mar 5.

Hon, Wanna Eat Sauteed Grey Alien For Dinner? I Thawed It Out

Medium-high Official Says "We May Not Be Alone" & He's Tip-toeing Around 'Cause 97% Of It Is Classified

In December, 2017 the more-or-less impossible happened and my friends didn't notice:  Someone from the Pentagon,  NY Times reporters, and a retired Navy fighter pilot joined forces, so to speak,
to semi-seriously imply we humans are not alone.   Tucker Carlson of Fox said:  This feels like a huge story to me.  I don't see why Vladimir Putin is more interesting.  Commander Fravor, you seem sober and believable.

The "someone" from the Pentagon is Luis Elizondo, who said, "We may not be alone," on at least one interview.  His facts about program details and cases don't seem to have been contradicted by those inside the Pentagon or other branches of gov.  Elizondo ran a study of Aerial Threats for about 9 years and left last October.  I think it is safe to say this was the first time in US history anyone from the Gov in a position to know ever said to the public, "We may not be alone."  


The "Eastern Establishment Press," starting with NY Times writer Leslie Kean, plus online news source Politico, got wind of a story with these pieces:
        1) Harry Makes A Program.  About 10 years ago Harry Reid of Nevada led the way in putting $22 million over a few years into a quiet multi-disciplinary investigation called Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, AATIP.  Reid confirmed the funding and said he is proud of doing it.  Nobody else did this, but I did, he said.  Wonder if he's proud that most of the money went to a company in his own state owned by a UFO believer named Mr Bigelow?  All competitively bid, of course.   
       2) Luis Elizondo.  The Advanced Aerial Threat study was led by Luis Elizondo, ex-Army intelligence guy turned civilian contractor who until October worked in an office "deep in the C-ring of Pentagon," whatever that is.  Had his office been on the edge of the building, it would be less impressive.
       3)  We Found A Lot.  To CNN reporter Burnett asking what they found, Elizondo said a lot.  Many, many sightings in many places of things--call them aircraft--that don't have any obvious flight surfaces, no obvious propulsion systems, plus maneuverability beyond what human body could withstand in changing speeds and directions.  Lots of The Things are shaped like cigars or Tic-Tacs.  Elizondo said "we avoided the rabbit hole of who's behind the wheel and what are their intentions" and looked at what is it and how does it work.  He said they had made serious progress in figuring out the technology, but how they did that when they can't catch Things and what they learned is Classified.   He added, maybe to Glenn Beck, no white Tic-Tacs have been hostile.  Good to know.

       4)  San Diego & Florida Tic-Tacs.  Footage was released from cameras on F-18 planes following 40-foot objects that looked like"flying Tic-Tacs" doing impossible maneuvers with pilots gasping and raving at how the objects seemed to not only be surpassing known aircraft performance but apparently defying the laws of physics for inertia and acceleration.  The Nimitz aircraft carrier group cancelled a practice exercise to send planes out to check on Things, first asking if the fighters had weapons ready.  No, they were carrying dummies.  The carrier told the pilots they had been tracking a small fleet of Things for a week or three.  Luis Elizondo said about 8 pilots got somewhere near the Tic-Tacs.  Pilot Fravor said this group was convinced Things were from space.  Guess you had to be there.

        5)    Stars & Encinitas.  Elizondo recently left Department of Defense (DOD) to join up with a rock star forming a group to study and build some of ET's technologies.  This bunch is based in Encinitas, Cal, near Yogananda's Hindu meditation retreat.  Maybe that's where they will go to kick back and relax, or have hush-hush meetings with Tic-Tac drivers. Maybe you can drive a Tic-Tac after you meditate real deep.

        6)   More Interesting Than Putin.  Tucker Carlson on Fox interviewed F-18 pilot Fravor and  said,  "This feels like a really big story to me.  It's not clear why Vladimir Putin is more interesting than this.  Commander, you seem sober and believable."  Yet the next day I think we can assume Carlson was reporting more on Putin than on the "high strangeness" of poorly explained Things.  Why?  Because you have to be a nutcase, it is commonly known, to think nonEarth tech or beings aren't just crap.  Too bad for pilot Fravor.
        7)  Opposition In Gov To Telling Public Includes Religious Reasons
Elizondo told the Post, "The program had multiple enemies at senior levels of the department, from [those] either skeptical or ideologically opposed to AATIP’s mission."  In an interview with MSNBC TV, Senior Luis went on, "The bureaucracy really limited our ability to keep leadership informed of what we were seeing."  He compared religious objections to studying all this to the Catholic Church naming Galileo a heretic when he got a telescope strong enough to see four moons around Jupiter.  Now we know of over 60 such moons.

         8)    Details of Chasing a Tic-Tac.   David Fraver told Tucker Carlson:  In 2004 we were sent out about 100 miles over the Pacific off San Diego/Ensenada, Mexico.  There were two planes, each manned by two aviators.  Saw a forty-foot-long white Tic-Tac-shaped object hovering above the water, no wings, no rotor wash, nothing.  It was 2000 feet below us.  We fly around clockwise and observe.  It starts to mirror us so it's in a clockwise flow on the opposite side of the circle from us.  We continue this; it's in a climb; we're in a descent.  The whole thing takes about five minutes.  I decide I'm gonna go and see what it is.  As I cut across the circle and get within about half a mile of it, it rapidly accelerates to the south and in about two seconds disappears.  Carlson asks, "What would you estimate the speed?"  "Like a bullet out of a gun, it took off. . . .  Our infrared video showed no exhaust, no visible method of propulsion.  This thing came from just over the water to climb up to 12,000 feet, to gone.  You're talking 50 miles of visibility.  You can easily see an object that size up to ten miles and it just disappeared in seconds."
    If we said ten miles in ten seconds, that's a mile a second.  With 3600 seconds in an hour, that would be 3600 miles an hour.  Satellites orbit the Earth at 17,000 miles an hour, but they don't go from 0 to 3600 in three seconds.
    Carlson asks, "So what do you think this was?"  Fraver says, "I believe, as do the others that were visually on this flight, that it was something not from this world."  "What did your superiors say when you told them that?"  Short answer is they thought we were full of it.  "We caught a lot of grief getting back to the boat and it got passed off as an event no one could explain.  They had been tracking these for two weeks, and this was the first time manned airplanes had been airborne when the objects appeared."

         9)  Exotic materials.   NYTimes wrote of exotic metal alloys Elizondo's program had access to.  He said:  I can't say we've been storing Things in Vegas at the contractor's company, but I'll correct reports of metal alloys to metamaterials with isotopic ratios not found here on Earth.  Elizondo went on to say something uncertain about materials scientists.  Maybe they got part of the $22 mill.  Seems to know fair amount about materials that aren't stored anywhere and were never recovered.
NY Times:  A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.



Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”    Elizondo refers to large amounts of data not disclosed.
Well, hon, if you don't want sauteed, how about braised grey alien for dinner?  I'll turn on the barbeque.

1491: A Pre-Columbian Literary Tradition That Only Produced One Book? Book of Mormon stuff

I've been in or around Mormonism my whole life.  Mormons have so much to offer the world.  My dear friend Bob Langston, with whom I share a friendship of 45 years, is a really nice guy, a really sensible guy and a really Mormon guy.  "If the church were proven false, I would live my life by these principles anyway," Bob told me.   There you go!

About 2007 I went to some summer classes at BYU in Provo, Utah.  I was walking off of campus, saw a sign for the department of archaeology, and walked in on impulse.  At the desk I found three bright-looking, good-looking people under 35 who told me they were graduate students of that department.  It was a late afternoon in August, so no secretaries, no profs, just three bright young minds of the next generation. “What,” I asked them, “can we say about the Book of Mormon and archaeology?” They glanced at each other and the one in the middle said, “We haven't found archaeological evidence of the Book of Mormon peoples.”

“Wow,” I said, pausing to look at him and the other two. They nodded agreement.

It's that simple, they said.  None.  Well, archaeology is always finding new things and it just hasn't found the B of M yet.

One day I was doing that dangerous thing--thinking--and thought, "Book of Mormon author/compiler Moroni is translated by Joseph Smith as saying: This is a record--a book--running hundreds of pages, from ancient America.  If that's really where it came from, why aren't there any others?" 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know of any other book-like text from ancient America.   Well, the Popol Vuh might qualify, but later for that.  If it qualifies, then we have the question, how can a civilization produce only two books?  That's about the same as one, at least found so far?  Aren't the chances of that zero?  You got a people that could write well for more than 1000 years, and we've only found one or two of their books?  So B of M is an American Beowulf?  I also suspect we can prove by quick looking that the B of Mormon and the Popol Vuh are from different peoples.

Joseph Smith said he possessed, on loan from the non-winged angel Moroni, many other metallic-plate engravings--many other books--that chronicled the civilization and its belief, or lack of it, in God, and the wonders God had worked among them.  But these "golden plates" were taken back by Moroni and haven't been found, either.  Now note that before he gave them back, he showed them to a dozen other men who wrote an affidavit that they had seen and handled them.  Pretty sobering list of witnesses, but from only about three families.  Not the ideal range of witnesses to an implausible thing.

Mark Twain in Roughing It gives a literary man's 19th-century reaction to the B of M: he calls it chloroform in print.  He's interested in different things than I am, for I find it endlessly fascinating from various angles.

The Book of Mormon declares itself to be an ancient sacred history of peoples migrated from the Old World, in at least three separate crossings and settlings, starting over 2000 years before Christ. It tells us of 2600 years of continuous occupation by people who had scholars and writers and prophets. This is a longer period of literary history than the one stretching from Christ and Cesear to the present, and so far it's only cranked out the two books?.

Joseph found the plates in the Finger Lake district of Upstate New York.  What if any evidence of writing and manuscripts before Columbus do we have within, oh, 1000 miles of the Hill Cumorah in upstate NY?  I'll have to check but I'll snitch to you ahead of time that it's a short list.  The Book of Mormon peoples had writing and manuscripts from about 4000 years ago to 1600 years ago; Joseph and a dozen others saw piles of metallic records. The B. of M. ancients also had a copy of what would have amounted to the Old Testament as it existed around 600 BC, and they brought that copy to the Americas. Anybody fish out any fragments of Exodus or Isaiah in Meso-American digging?  Not even one?  Hmmmm.

Wouldn't this grand literary tradition have shown us hundreds of evidences of writing by now? Instead we have evidences of many people who do not have writing from this period in the Americas--tribe after tribe after tribe, and a few people who had a type of writing unrelated to that of Moroni and his sacred book.

Then you have the issue that the horse, cow, elephant, and sheep were with these Boof--that was a typo, but I like the sound of "Boof of Mormon"--Book of Mormon peoples.  Once again, no evidence of these animals in the Americas between 3000 BC and arrival of Columbus.

Final Thought:  If one ancient Native American can write a book, where is the evidence of that level of literacy over the centuries?   A Mormon prophet has called the Book of Mormon, something like "the most accurate book ever written?"  Marilyn Arnold, an ex-BYU English professor, a sensitive and refined thinker, says it has given her educated mind and believing heart more than any other book possibly could.    Why can't research produce any other similar text from the same cultural sources?

I think this is a question Mormons have to answer to keep any credibility for their sacred Book as arising from ancient America.  I have to say on this--put up or shut up.  They won't, but it's a solid point.

How to Travel to Mexico from Wyoming and Not Get There

I was going to title this "how people do new things and stay the same" or how the ugly American stays ugly or . . .
I just watched a YouTube video about a family, the Batemans, that takes a cruise from Long Beach to Santa Catalina Island to Ensenada.  The couple of about age 40, looking pretty intelligent and energetic, take their four kids on a cruise.  I wanted to learn about Ensenada because I'm going there, I think.

Where to start?   They started in Long Beach.  I learned that a) Long Beach is an 18-hour drive from Wyoming but nobody showed any scenic mountains or formations along the way, although there are plenty of them b) It has a harbor c) where you catch the Carnaval ship and can tour the retired Queen Mary ship that was forced out of transAtlantic business by air travel decades ago.  You can sleep on the Q Mary and it's haunted, and then you stand in lots of lines before you get onto the ship.
At Santa Catalina the ship is too big for the harbor, so you ride a tender boat in.  That, like the business death of the Q Mary, was informative.  The kids dipped their toes, no more, in the Pacific and wished they had brought their swim suits.  Oddly the last day they all seem to have suits?  Why would you bring suits on a California sea cruise?  We see some good footage of the island, a one-second glimpse of the mainland in the mist, learn there's a big nature preserve taking up a lot of the island, rent a golf cart and get some good views.  We don't talk to anyone else on the cruise or anyone else on the island.  We don't study sea life or kelp or whale migration.  Mainly we eat and try on hats at shops.

There are no views of San Diego or Encinitas or Tijuana's coastline.  Just like there was no talk about California, there's no talk about Mexico--we all know all we need to about Mexico and California already.  No explanation of the lovely climate or the intriguing sometimes ruined missions or even the Gold Rush or the Donner Party or Nixon and Reagan hopping from Calif to the presidency.   Doesn't seem like anyone along is interested in history or geography, either.  I pick those two because my sister came from that part of the world (northern Utah near Wyoming) and majored in history and geography.  

When we get to Ensenada nobody says if it's a big city or a little one, and nobody on the video bothers to ask to find out.  If it's in a pretty part of the country or has a desert climate, it's kept a secret.  No shots of the land around the city.  No real shots of the city beyond the pier.  The family walks into the center of town, looks at food, does some eating, does a lot of snooping around in shops and buying things, and is fast-talked into taking a horse-drawn carriage back to the boat.  Presumably this last thing involved actual contact with a Mexican, and we are shown the Mexican horse all right.  The son says he talked to several people in Spanish, but not more than a couple of "Espanoles" show up in the video.

The family does do some dancing and hand-clapping on board, but the main entertainment is food, which aboard ship was really great.  Clearly there are no fitness nuts in this all-American white family.  Nobody wears anything sharp-looking except when they dress up at night.  Their clothing is so regular and completely covering that I don't recall any of it 15 minutes after seeing it.   I know kids--theirs range from about 16 to 5--are notoriously hard to get interested in the world when you travel, especially after about age 11, but it doesn't seem like these parents are more than passingly interested in it, either.  None of the crowded streets of Mexico, none of the dirt, none of the expansive neighborhoods of Catalina Island merit the time of this videographer dad, who to his credit is ambitious enough to narrate the whole thing.  It's kinda like Wyoming is their whole world.  Reminds me of when I went to the University of Utah and we made fun of BYU.  My girlfriend, new at BYU, wrote that people were friendly and it was all sorta like a junior college.  We were glad she was, at an institution devoted to truth, willing to admit the truth.  When I got to BYU years later there was a big sign at the front, "The world is our campus."  Fellow students assured me "The campus is our world" more the story.

The closest our tourists got to sea life was a hungry unafraid pair of sea gulls.  They got great footage of them squawking. Also collected some small pretty sea shells.  The last day at sea the pace picks up with swimming, even by dad, water slides, and carioke in the evening with dad romping it with La Bamba--good show!  Also, they headed straight to Disneyland after getting off the cruise ship, which mom admits will probably be the best day of the trip.  Also, one of the small girls cries when the cruise ends, so she has learned to have plenty of fun along the way.  This is touching.

Why isn't anything else touching?  There's a plant going in, in Ensenada, to convert sea water to drinking water, enough to serve 90,000 homes.  Wanna give me the lowdown on that?  There's a big US retiree community and areas where lots of English is spoken.  Would those people make good tour guides if you worked ahead and searched them out?  On this video we only spoke English to ourselves.  There are two rather big islands in the bay off Ensenada where waves are big enough they have surfing contests, but nobody in this video seems interested in waves, islands or surfing.  There's some great scenery nearby outside of town but we don't take a taxi out to see the country.  Yawn . . . .  Neighborhoods, people, surprises, architecture--where's the next souvenir shop?

I had two friends from Tucson who took this three-day cruise a few years ago.  They showed me their nice photos but I don't think they learned a single thing in the three days either, except how to relax and gain weight sitting in the sun.  I knew nothing about Ensenada from talking to them about that trip, except the shops in the center of town.

Complaining and criticizing are not good for the soul.  I feel fairly crappy right now.  I guess I better go read Wikipedia on Ensenada.  I just opened the page and instantly saw three interesting views of the place, more than in 15 minutes of Wyoming video.  How to travel to Mexico and have it be less appealing than Disneyland, even if you're the adult in the group.

I don't know how to fit this in, but from their very covered up dress and their never swearing or even having a beer, I suspect these Wyomingites are from the Mormon side of the state.

The Wizards of Gene-Chopping

Now are we going to manage evolution ourselves?

In a period when we discovered the Waves of Gravity and confirmed the existence of the legendary particle called the Higgs Boson, I tend to think the scientific story of our day is CRISPR.  This will be true both because of how much good it may do, how many diseases may be treated by it, for instance, as well as how much potential it has to do very severe, wide-ranging, trouble-making things as well.

The short story is that we stumbled onto this natural virus-based method of editing genes, just chopping out targeted pieces of them with precision, and it can either heal half of all human disease or create a Brave New World with genetic troubles beyond imagination.