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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 13 No 1 (Jan 2019)
Earth’s armed forces have more or less continuously engaged intruders from outer space since 1916 to the present day. Although losses of equipment and even lives have occurred on both sides, humans are still at a distinct technological disadvantage.
Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials (Bear and Company, 2018) chronicles this unfinished, undeclared, unofficial, mostly unknown conflict from the UFO destruction of munitions factories across the United States, just before that country’s participation in World War One, to the current struggle for Syria, where rebel army commanders tell of alien craft “hunting down and systematically targeting innocent locals, using unknown, weaponised technology not of this Earth, or anything our fighters have ever seen.”1
How and why did this covert, if real, War of the Worlds come about? Prior to the early 20th century, sightings of off-world vehicles were sometimes documented in official records or depicted in visual artwork preceding the Bronze Age and Classical Epoch, throughout the Medieval Period and Renaissance, into the Industrial Era. It was only after early heavier-than-air technology developed sufficiently to drop high explosives from altitude that a perceptible shift in humanity’s relationship with extraterrestrials occurred. If they had been content to monitor our cultural growth during the millennia leading up to that lethal innovation, its actual deployment as a killing machine convinced them that intervention was necessary.
The first, purpose-built aircraft of its type – a spindly Bristol T.B.8, powered by a single, 60 kW radial engine to 105 km/h, carrying a dozen 4.5 kg bombs over 470 kilometers – made for a crude beginning. But its appearance in the first weeks of World War One was enough for anyone with an objectively broad perspective of human progress to extrapolate today’s ‘stealth’ bomber, armed with thermonuclear warheads, from the operational debut of its biplane forerunner, after little more than one hundred years, a mere blink of the eye in human history.
The next, self-evident step – creation of a “United States Space Force” – was taken just last year. Given the accelerating pace of scientific advancement, another hundred years will extend human reach beyond the solar system, with proportionate improvements in fire-power. Alien intelligence might view with indifference whether or not we continue to effectively kill each other in ever more destructive wars, confined as we are to a single planet. However, the inevitable expansion of our bellicose species’ potential for the conquest of outer space cannot be welcome news for non-humans elsewhere. Quite the contrary, it can only be regarded by them as nothing less than an armed invasion. Hence, extraterrestrial interest in and even interference with Earth’s military affairs.
Inter-Planetary Hostilities in 2018
Because Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials went into production some eleven months ago, its history necessarily ends in late 2017. The inter-planetary hostilities it documents, however, are on-going, and spilled over into 2018. Accordingly, it was filled with the kind of armed forces’ engagements that characterised this continuous conflict since its inception, throughout the last one hundred and three years.
2018’s first sighting of its kind was caught on video during the late afternoon of February 26. The footage clearly shows a pair of white, luminous spheres hovering low (circa thirty meters) over the Royal Navy base at Plymouth, England. One of them in the foreground gradually vanishes, then shortly thereafter rematerialises, as though phasing in and out of another dimension or time.2
That same night, at 19:45 hours, on the other side of the Northern Hemisphere, a trio of United States Air Force fighter jets repeatedly circled the American town of De Soto, near the east bank of the Mississippi River, in southwestern Wisconsin, before flying off in a northerly direction. Immediately following their disappearance, blue, star-like lights were observed moving “very fast across the sky with absolutely no sound.”3
A few days later, two USAF fighters engaged a smaller, triangular object in apparent combat over Lincoln County, Nevada, a desert area that includes the notorious Area 51, a semi-secret US Air Force base located less than one hundred thirty kilometres from Las Vegas, and allegedly involved in reverse engineering crashed alien spacecraft. According to observer Tim Doyle, “it definitely looked as though the three crafts were interacting with each other.” He “believed the trio were involved in a plane dogfight.”4
On March 3, two USAF A-10 jets were sighted in low-level close pursuit of a “darker and smaller object” over the Indiana town of LaGrange, two hundred twenty-five kilometres east of Chicago.5 The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II carries a single, 30 mm GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon with 1,174 rounds, plus a couple of AIM-9 Sidewinder, air-to-air missiles.
On the night of the 21st, military helicopter gunships chased an unspecified number of “bright lights” over Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the US Army’s Fort Bragg, the largest military installation in the world (by population) with more than fifty thousand active duty personnel.6 Some of them are veterans of the fighting for Afghanistan, where UFOs have been sighted since American involvement began in 2001. During late March, three luminous objects were video recorded in stationary position over a US Army base near Surobi.7
At 03:43, in the early morning of April 23rd, an observer was “looking northeast to Nellis Air Force Base, which is about nine kilometres from my location [North Las Vegas, Nevada]. A singular white light appears heading in my direction,” he reported to the National UFO Reporting Center, in Davenport, Washington. “The light was as bright as Jupiter, as if I was staring at a plane with headlights turned on. Then the light dimmed and starting moving southeast; the dimmed light didn’t look like any flight-related lights I’ve seen, and it didn’t have a pattern in its blinking; it looked as if it was twinkling due to it being a heat source, or due to the atmosphere, but it was definitely not a pattern typical of airplanes. There also was no sound of any kind that I would have heard in a quiet night. A helicopter sound would have been a dead giveaway, and I also checked on my smart-phone for nearby planes to see what it was, and nothing showed up for that portion of the sky… The appearance and behaviour of this object tells me it was unknown.”8
Just ten days later, Nellis Air Force Base was again the location for another altogether different sighting by multiple eyewitnesses who reported seeing the military installation being surveilled by a diamond-shaped craft “with six to nine oval objects around it. The diamond was very large, and looked like it was on fire, like vapor around it.” The diamond shape and its accompanying orbs “hovered for twenty to thirty minutes. No airplanes in sky, and that is not common here.”9
During the early evening of May 8, a serviceman at Holloman Air Force Base, in New Mexico, was “driving home from work on base, and casually glanced to my right (south) and noticed two, orange-yellow lights floating and casting a lot of light on the ground between two and eleven kilometres away. I pulled over to look closer, and as I was recording with my phone, when a third appeared in a triangle formation with the other two. They did not appear to move or fall. I heard no audible noise. I know they were not flares from anything, because they were stationary, and the only thing in the direction where I was looking was open desert. Nor were they aircraft. After I observed for around five minutes, they all just disappeared within quick succession.”10
On the afternoon of May 29, Lucas Budel video documented a highly unusual, unidentified flying object alternately diving and climbing over High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, northwest of London. The pale, white craft streamed wisps of cloud-like vapours in its strange undulations across the sky of his home town, which is not only the present location for Headquarters Air Command, but site of a former RAF base “which used to investigate UFO sightings.”11
Around 22:12, June 7, two low-flying helicopters were seen closely pursuing a brightly illuminated orange sphere over Rye, New Hampshire. Another military chopper was observed hard on the heels of a smaller, metallic object above Harford County, Maryland on June 13.12
Reporting for the Mutual UFO Network, Roger Marsh told how a man and his wife “were setting up a telescope in a local park on a full moon at 11:15 p.m.” on the night of June 28, in Buckeye, Arizona. “Before the telescope was fully set up,” the husband testified, “a vertically-aligned, donut-ringed object with yellow-orange light/surface appeared below the moon, travelling from southeast to northwest at extremely high velocity and low altitude, roughly one hundred fifty to three hundred meters AGL [above ground level]. The object made absolutely no sound, but at closest approach was within one kilometre of our vantage point/location. The witness is a United States Air Force veteran and Special Operations intelligence analyst who previously held a top-secret with caveats clearance.”13
On June 29, a “cigar-like shape with no wings” was observed from Belmar, on the New Jersey coast, around 15:00, “moving north-northeast over the ocean at high altitude. A couple minutes later, two fighter jets came from the west and circled back out over ocean.”14 Another cigar-shaped object, bright and silvery, was spotted “moving across the sky from west to east,” according to one eyewitness, around 08:00, July 2, over Bennett Springs, Missouri. “Approximately fifteen minutes later, four stealth bombers flew in the same direction” from Whiteman Air Force Base, located 150 kilometres north, outside the town of Knob Noster, where the 509th Bomb Wing operates Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.15
On July 11, several helicopters were observed from the town of Warrington, eleven kilometres north, pursuing a large exceptionally bright object hovering near the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The UFO changed it shape from oval to triangle, before vanishing after 22:00, reappearing in the same position about four hours later.16 July 15, an eyewitness sitting in his Virginia Beach, Virginia patio, around 16:00, “saw a large, brownish, rectangular object flying nonchalantly by… for about two to three minutes”, before it “went straight off into a southeasterly direction.”17 Virginia Beach is home to both the Naval Air Station Oceana and Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility.
Nuclear Blast over Thule Air Base
The premiere extraterrestrial event of not only 2018, but of the last five years, took place when a nuclear blast detonated over one of America’s most important military installations. Early warning radar at Greenland’s Thule Air Base detected an in-coming meteor of substantial size, but commanders there were not afforded even enough time to sound a general alarm, given the object’s Mach 74 rate of descent. That’s 24.4 kilometres per second, or 86,905-kph. It exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force, equal to 2,100 tons of TNT, sufficient to have obliterated the Thule Air Base with a direct hit or at an altitude lower than the 43.3-kilometre air burst of July 25, just five minutes before midnight. It was the largest since a 400-kiloton superbolide blew up over Chelyabinsk, in 2013.
While that Russian event seems to have been an entirely natural affair, the same could not be said for last year’s Greenland incident.Thule Air Base is the United States Air Force’s northernmost base, located 1,207 km north of the Arctic Circle and 1,524 km from the North Pole. It is home to the 21st Space Wing’s global network of sensors providing missile warning, space surveillance and space control to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Air Force Space Command. The base hosts the 12th Space Warning Squadron, which operates a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, designed to detect and track ICBMs launched against North America.
Thule is also host to Detachment 1 of the 23rd Space Operations Squadron, part of the 50th Space Wing’s global satellite control network. As such, it is the ideal target for a preemptive strike aimed at crippling America’s nuclear-armed missile capabilities, or alternatively, a cautionary message. “Was it a UFO-directed meteor strike fired as warning shot across the bows of the USAF base,” asked Miami Herald reporter, John Bennett, “urging humans to disarm their nuclear weapons?”
If so, it would not have been the first time such a dramatic exhortation arrived on Earth, as documented in Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials. US Air Force reaction itself lends some credibility to such a conclusion. One might imagine that a thermonuclear blast narrowly missing one of the foremost military installations in the world would have merited abundant cause for international publicity. Yet, commanders at the Thule Air Base kept classified the story until it was first reported by Australian news media, five days later. Even then, and since, the event has received scant attention. One wonders why? “An answer may lie in another question,” Bennett writes: “Were there any reported UFO sightings before, after or in any conjunction with the recent Greenland event?”
That question is more easily answered by numerous, visual encounters documented in the United States alone on July 25. Simultaneous, widely separated sightings occurred at 01:00 in Snohomish, Washington, where a triangular UFO with three lights at its corners was spotted, and, 2,630 kilometres away, two unusual lights, one of them brightly blinking, hovered over Isle, Minnesota. A silvery disk trailing a “long flame, travelling from west to southeast” over Tarzana, California was observed at 05:05.
Multiple witnesses in different areas of Florida’s St. George Island told how, at 21:30, “a circular, red object appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and held its position for approximately twenty to thirty seconds, then faded out of sight completely. It was an opaque red, with an orangeish halo effect… About ten minutes later, two separate ones appeared with one about fifteen to twenty degrees off the horizon… One red light appeared, while the other two appeared in approximately the same area and degree of the first sighting. But what made this even more fascinating was that this last one actually started with one red light, then added another red light, and then another. For a total of three red lights seeming to be on one object, slightly angled. And then all five lights in the sky vanished.” Half an hour later, “several strange yellow orbs hovered over the Puget Sound,” near Gig Harbor, Washington.18
As some ten persons attending an August 14 party at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina watched half a dozen jets flying overhead, they noticed a circular, metallic object – “smooth, with no other design” – moving in the opposite direction from the fighters. As one of them turned toward the UFO, it flew “away at an incredible speed”19 The state’s Air National Guard is headquartered one hundred airline-miles to the west, in Columbia.
A father and his son photographing a drill site in Perrysville, Ohio, encountered an unusual UFO on September 3. “It looked just like a sting ray, and was all black. My dad is a private pilot and former Army, and I am retired from the Marine Corps, and we both have never seen a delta-shaped craft like this. We also did not hear a jet engine or anything to indicate a craft was nearby. My dad has reached out to other pilots to help identify, without any help.”20 Flying slowly at five hundred feet altitude or less, the triangular object ran front-to-back down its centre line with a slender, pointed fuselage. A pair of bulbous features protruded from the wing’s trailing edge, surmounted by two, vertical struts, the right one bent about fifteen degrees inward. The object “was heading towards the Mansfield Lahm Air National Guard Base, in the nearby city of Mansfield, where the 179th Airlift Wing (179 AW) unit is stationed.”21
September 19, at 06:19, a woman “went to the kitchen, and from my patio doors saw two, pulsating, strobe-like lights in the eastern sky. The lights flashed red and white, and were above the tree line. The lights came closer, growing in size, and hovered side by side. The one on the left moved away from the other light, and the lights of both objects pulsed faster and brighter. Then the light on the right went to the East, and [I] watched until it was out of sight. The other light went south, and was observed to move fast across the sky until it was out of sight. Neither one diverted from its path; in other words, they moved straight in a path.” The lights “were too large and too bright to be airplane lights, and moved much faster.”22 The sighting took place at the Illinois town of Belleville, home of Scott Air Force Base, one of America’s most important military installations, where a Unified Combatant Command coordinates transportation for all US services.
Several persons in Newberry, Arkansas witnessed “a large metallic cylinder” travelling at sixty meters altitude, between 130 and 190 kmh, on September 23. About ten minutes after the UFO disappeared, seven fighter jets flew in its direction in two-to-three-minute intervals.23 Newberry is located between Little Rock Air Force Base to the south, the Ebbing Air National Guard Base, 188th Wing, in the west, and Blytheville Air Force Base, to the north.
At 22:05, October 2, a crewman on the flight deck of USS Tripoli (LHA-7) observed a UFO while his 45,693-ton amphibious assault ship was berthed at the Pascagoula, Mississippi shipyard. The object “clearly was in the shape of a triangle with two, distinct, red lights at the bottom… It was flying too fast, as if it were breaking the sound barrier, without sound… As it got closer, you could clearly see the underbody of the craft. It had white lines going across the bottom connected to the red lights that I had seen.”24 The USS Tripoli specialises in electronic warfare at sea.
When a formation of “military helicopters chasing an unidentified flying object” passed over Surrey Park, Phoenix, Arizona, lower than one hundred fifty meters, “windows shook, doors rattled,” during the early morning hours of November 13. “Felt like an earthquake.”25 Headquartered in Phoenix, the Arizona Air National Guard is equipped with Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
A pair of RAF Typhoon interceptors “were scrambled in response to unidentified aircraft approaching the United Kingdom… the fighter jets took off from Losimos on Monday [December 10] under a quick response alert mission that was undertaken as a precautionary measure to an unknown aircraft or aircraft [plural] approaching UK airspace. No intercept took place, and the jets later returned to base in Moray, northeastern Scotland.” The Eurofighter Typhoon is a twin-engine, canard–delta wing, multi-role fighter, with a maximum speed of Mach 2, or 2,495 km/h, at a service ceiling of 19,812 meters. Despite these impressive performance statistics, the interceptors were apparently out-run by the “unknown aircraft or aircraft.”26
UFO Delays Rocket Launch: Another Cover-up
On December 19, the CBS Sacramento website headlined, “Mysterious Light Appears In The Sky After Rocket Launch Canceled At Vandenberg Air Force Base.” The article refers to an incident seven days earlier when “the scheduled 5:44 p.m. launch of the Delta IV Heavy Rocket in Southern California was scrubbed, or cancelled, leaving many wondering what was in the sky. A representative from Vandenberg Air Force Base had no information about the sight in the sky. Travis Air Force Base also did not have information on the light, but the National Weather Service believed it may have been a meteor. There has not been an official confirmation of what caused the light, but multiple National Weather Service accounts have speculated that it was from a meteor or meteorite. The National Weather Service Bay Area is calling this a Noctilucent cloud, a cloud that can be formed from a meteor or space debris entering the upper atmosphere.”27
These academic presumptions are contradicted, however, by numerous photographs and videos of the phenomenon which defined a perfect circle in the evening sky, unlike meteors or falling space junk which trace more or less straight lines in their descent.28 Was the appearance of this uniquely “Mysterious Light” and scrubbing the Vandenberg lift-off entirely coincidental? What are the odds for that?
Given numerous instances over the decades of missile launches aborted and even destroyed by UFOs, the Delta IV Heavy Rocket launch appears to have been cancelled by something more significant than a “Noctilucent cloud.”
Frank Joseph’s Military Encounters with Extraterrestrials is the first, comprehensive military history of armed confrontations between humans and extraterrestrials. It can be ordered from all good bookstores and online sellers.
Footnotes
1. Ken Oz, www.altheadlines.com/syria-large-ufo-sighting-8-28-13-13250773
2. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/ufo-naval-base-plymouth-uk-february-2018.html
3. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201802.html
4. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/us-fighter-jets-ufo-apparently-dogfight-lincoln-county-nevada.html
5. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201803.html
6. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201802.html
7. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/03/strange-lights-filmed-over-afghanistan.html
8. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201804.html
9. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201805.html
10. www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/2018/05/amazing-triangle-ufo-sighting-over-holloman-air-force-base-new-mexico-8-may-2018.html
11. Shocking moment ‘UFO’ spotted hovering near High Wycombe RAF base, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frk1HzYRHJA
12. UFO Seen in Maryland, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsvkpGNqb9I
13. www.mufon.com/ufo-news, Case 93454
14. www.nuforc.org/webreports/142/S142227.html
15. www.nuforc.org/webreports/142/S142049.html
16. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxp180713.html
17. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201807.html
18. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201807.html
19. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201808.html
20. www.ufostalker.com/sighting/95977
21. www.mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/10/triangular-ufo-spotted-near-site-of-famous-military-ufo-chase-in-ohio
22. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201809.html
23. www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxe201809.html
24. www.nuforc.org/webreports/143/S143350.html
25. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w2rYbT-gV0
26. Jets Scrambled to Intercept “Unknown Craft” Over UK, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCOps9VwIfE
27. sacramento.cbslocal.com/2018/12/19/did-you-see-the-bright-light-in-the-sky
28. Mysterious Cloud Trail Over California Was A Meteor Trail, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiNPYwtUYMo
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