94 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
94 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
SUBJECT: UFO BUFFS ELABORATE GOVERNMENT CHARADE FILE: UFO3200
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This article was taken from the OMNI service on America On-Line. I
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thought it was interesting.
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Antimatter
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(Vol. 15, No. 11, September 1993, p. 75)
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UFO UPDATE: UFO buffs may be unwitting pawns in an elaborate government
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charade
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For decades, UFO buffs have delighted themselves with tales of
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crashed saucers and government cover-ups of recovered aliens and
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ships. They have dedicated themselves to "digging out the truth" and
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"exposing the government's deceptions." Now, in a delicious irony, a
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famous UFO case may actually involve a real U. S. government cover-up,
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but UFO buffs are on the wrong side. Instead of exposing the truth,
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they may be unwitting pawns in the deception.
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The case in question involves the alleged crash of the
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so-called ``Kecksburg UFO,'' recently featured in magazines and even
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reenacted on TV. The acorn- shaped object supposedly fell to the ground
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in western Pennsylvania on December 9, 1965. As the story goes, Air
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Force search teams cordoned off the wooded area and hauled a large
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object away. It was later reportedly seen at the Wright-Patterson Air
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Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
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One suggested identity for the mystery intruder was the Soviet
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Kosmos-96 satellite, which actually did fall back into the atmosphere
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that day. but according to Air Force spokesmen, that craft had
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plummeted 12 hours earlier over another part of the planet.
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It was a shame, of course, because Kosmos-96, a failed Venus
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probe whose booster had blown up in parking orbit, would have been a
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wonderful UFO. The reentry capsule, incorporating the latest Soviet
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missile warhead technology, was shaped like a squashed spheroid with a
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sliced-off top--in other words, like an acorn.
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That's why in May of 1991, the Pittsburgh Press decided to verify the
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Air Force claims on its own. Toward that end, reporters obtained
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official space-tracking data from the archives of the North American
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Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountains, Colorado. The decades-old data
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finally arrived in the form of eight "snapshots" of the satellite's
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orbital position. The last snapshot, when projected forward in space
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and time by a leading amateur satellite watcher who doesn't want his
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name revealed, seemed to confirm the official Air Force account.
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But going on a hunch and tapping my own expertise in space operation
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and satellite sleuthing, I decided to check the data myself. The
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released tracking data couldn't be positively identified with specific
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pieces of the failed probe. It could have been the jettisoned rocket
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stage or a large piece of space junk. The probe itself could have been
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headed off toward Kecksburg.
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But why in the world would our government lie? In the 1960s, U.S.
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military intelligence agencies interested in enemy technology were
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eagerly collecting all the Soviet missile and space debris they could
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find. International law required that debris be returned to the country
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of origin. But hardware from Kosmos-96, with its special
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missile-warhead shielding, would have been too valuable to give back.
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Hard-line skeptics still doubt that anything at all landed in
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Pennsylvania. Robert Young, an investigator from Harrisburg, keeps
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finding new holes in the claims of alleged witnesses. "I'm now more
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convinced than ever that nothing came down in Kecksburg," he says. And
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arch skeptic Philip J. Klass attributes the poor NORAD data "to
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foul-ups, not cover-ups."
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But those of us who've studied the relationship between U.S. military
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intelligence and the former Soviet Union still wonder. After all, what
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better camouflage than to let people think the fallen object was not a
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Soviet probe but rather a flying saucer? The Russians would never
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suspect, and the Air Force laboratories could examine the specimen at
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leisure. And if suspicion lingered, why UFO buffs could be counted on
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to maintain the phony cover story, protecting the real truth.--James
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Oberg
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Editor's note: James Oberg, a veteran space-secrets sleuth, is author
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of UNCOVERING SOVIET DISASTERS.
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(p. 76)
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*********************************************************************
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* -------->>> THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo <<<------- *
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