Post by uforn on Dec 7, 2010 11:37:12 GMT 1
USAF’s top secret X-37B Mission
Last Friday, the USAF’s top secret X-37B unmanned spacecraft completed an eight-month orbital mission with a successful landing at Vandenberg AFB. At one-fifth the size of the civilian space shuttle, the robotic drone’s configuration looks like a pretty good knockoff of the original.
Most of the details are still classified, but it’d be helpful to get a look at its underbelly in flight, day or night. It’s unlikely that a small spacecraft directed into low-Earth orbit would swing close enough to be seen or photographed from the ground, but it’s a pretty good bet the usual suspects will rally ‘round the military’s latest adventure in flying machines to argue how it fooled gullible UFO eyewitnesses, same as the CIA claims its spyplanes accounted for a ton of UFO reports in the Fifties and Sixties.
That’s why it’s easy to recommend Wonders In the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects From Antiquity to Modern Times by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck. Among the most circumspect and thoughtful researchers in the field, Vallee has assembled, using primary historical sources, a 500-incident timeline of apparent UFO sightings, from 1460 B.C. in ancient Lebanon to Oct. 10, 1879, in Dubuque, Iowa. The authors picked 1880 as the demarcation point, just before manned flight began to clutter the skies in the latest phase of the Industrial Revolution.
From Asia to Europe, Vallee and Aubeck go to meticulous lengths to eliminate meteorological and celestial explanations from eyewitness reports that, in many cases, sound as contemporary as 21st-century encounters. Even better, Salon.com actually ran an interview with Vallee, who issued something of a challenge to the progressive online magazine.
“Especially in journalism, the typical reaction is ridicule,” he stated. “It’s a human reaction to ambiguity, because it’s a big challenge [to explain] and what people describe is, in many cases, terrifying. Given that you don’t have an explanation and there aren’t people doing really good research, humor is one way to react. The other way is to jump to some conclusion and become a believer. Or a skeptic, which is another form of irrational belief.”
And to its credit, Salon, which doesn’t investigate UFOs, gave Vallee the last word, stepped aside, and shut up.
Source:
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/11421/playing-it-straight-at-salon/