Aliens take over Fort Myers museum
Far from the New Mexico desert - by airplane at least - an exhibit on the Roswell incident draws big crowds of believers and naysayers to a normally quiet history museum.
By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
Published March 20, 2005
[Photos courtesy of International Museum Institute of Texas]
An article in the Feb. 25, 1942, Los Angeles Times reported a large object, targeted by spotlights in this photograph, that hovered over the city for five hours and appeared undamaged by antiaircraft fire.
On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record reported that the military had recovered a flying saucer from the crash site. On July 9, it reported that the object was a weather balloon.
Ranch foreman Mack Brazel reported finding a debris site the size of a football field.
Lt. Walter Haut wrote the news release stating that the military had recovered a "flying disk."
This model of an "extraterrestrial biological entity" awaiting autopsy is based on descriptions by witnesses to the incident near Roswell, N.M., in 1947.
Mortician Glenn Dennis said the base asked him for small coffins that could be sealed.
Maj. Jesse Marcel, one of the first officers at the site, later said this weather balloon was not part of the debris he found, but was substituted by the military for this photograph taken days after the incident.
Madonna and Child With the Infant St. John, painted in Italy in the 15th century, depicts a man and dog in the upper right corner looking up at a hovering, boatlike object in the sky.
FORT MYERS - The building wasn't designed for spaceships.
The graceful stucco structure that houses the Southwest Florida Museum of History was built for another kind of transportation. When it went up in 1923, it was the Fort Myers depot for the Atlantic Coast Line railroad.
Since renovation in 1982, it has housed the museum's collection of artifacts from Florida's past: dugout canoes and giant shark jaws, memorabilia from wars and railroads, old photos of families with names that match those on the city's street signs.
But since January, the biggest draw in the place - the biggest draw in its history - pulls visitors to the museum's back corner. The sign at the door says, "Area 51. Warning: Restricted Area. No trespassing beyond this point."
Above it, the title is superimposed over a photo of an empty patch of New Mexico brittlebush and sage: "The Roswell Exhibit."
This exhibit has nothing at all to do with Florida. Matt Johnson, who has been the museum's general manager for four years, says he was reluctant at first to bring in the traveling exhibit, which was produced by the International Museum Institute of Texas.
"Once I got a look at the exhibit, I was more comfortable with it," Johnson says. "It's really a scholarly look at the Roswell incident. It shows both sides.
"There's no question that something happened there. What's happened since is the history: how this event has become a part of American popular culture."
* * *
To UFO enthusiasts, and they are legion, Roswell is the grail.
Whatever happened near that little New Mexico town in July 1947, it has burgeoned into a contemporary myth, a cornerstone of the belief that alien spacecraft have visited our planet. And that is a belief that, depending on which poll you look at, is shared by somewhere between one-third and three-quarters of Americans.
And more than 2,000 of them have visited "The Roswell Exhibit" in its Fort Myers debut. The museum's first traveling exhibit, "Tutankhamun," drew 910 adults during its first month, March 2003. "Roswell" got 820 adults in its first nine days in January, more than 1,000 in February and is on track for a record-breaking March, says Helena Suter, the museum's public relations-marketing manager. Museum office manager Carole Thompson is working the front desk on a wet, chilly Wednesday afternoon, selling tickets and keeping an eye on the gift shop, where the faithful can buy tiny vials of sand from Roswell for $2. "Do not open; possible unknown biohazard," the label warns.
"We expected more strangeness," Thompson says.
"We did get this one teenage boy with homemade headgear, made out of aluminum foil, you know, with antennas and everything."
She shakes her head. "I could tell he wanted me to say something, but hey, I was busy."
No aluminum foil is in evidence this day. The drenched parking lot is full and the exhibit has plenty of visitors, but they look entirely ordinary in slickers, shorts and sneakers.
Jim Greenfield of South Dakota, an executive for a financial services company, says he's here "just out of curiosity. I guess I would like to believe there are other civilizations in the universe."
He has seen some of the television shows about Roswell, he says, and most of the material in the exhibit is familiar.
Greenfield's wife, Lisa, says, "He's been into this for a while. I never paid much attention, but I thought this is a way to fill in the story.
"I hadn't really realized there were all those witnesses," she says, gazing at dozens of vintage portrait photos.
The Greenfields' son, Matt, is peering at a slide show of depictions of alien beings and spaceships through history, from cave paintings to photographs.
Did he like the exhibit? The lanky 15-year-old flips his hands in the universal teenage code for noncommittal response. "It's pretty cool, I guess. It's interesting they have all this stuff."
Jim Greenfield finishes a cell phone call from a friend. "He asked me if I recognized any of the aliens," he tells his wife. She grins.
Then he waves a hand at the exhibit. "I would think it's possible," he says. "It's not like we haven't had coverups before."
* * *
"The Roswell Exhibit" is not a matter of bells and whistles. The most interactive element is the stack of comment cards at the exit. The presentation style is mostly traditional: blowups of newspaper pages and photographs of key figures accompanied by blocks of text.
A 1947 ABC radio broadcast about a flying saucer crash in the New Mexico desert plays in a loop on a reproduction '40s-style radio. A reproduction of a 15th century painting, Madonna and Child With the Infant St. John, from the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy, is accompanied by blown-up details of a shepherd in the background pointing up at a boatlike object hovering in the sky over the Virgin's left shoulder.
The dioramas are a little unusual. A military uniform hangs on a coatrack next to a gurney with a glass cover, like a giant butter dish. Inside lies a small body with long, webbed hands and feet, an oversized head and deep black almond-shaped eyes. Its feet and knees are a little burned, as if it had stumbled into a campfire. A tray of medical instruments rests near its head.
There are no authentic artifacts, no scraps of weather balloon or tapes of the radio interview with ranch foreman Mack Brazel, who discovered something odd in the desert outside Roswell sometime in July 1947 and started telling folks about it - then stopped.
Of course there is no firsthand evidence. The coverup is as important a part of the mythos of Roswell as the crash.
The exhibit places the events in Roswell in their historical context, in a profoundly nervous nation that went straight from World War II to the Cold War.
Among the first photos is one of the phenomenon called "foo fighters" by WWII pilots. The small, glowing spheres would sometimes track military planes at close range, mimicking their maneuvers, and at other times fly at tremendous speeds.
Allied pilots assumed they were a secret weapon developed by the Germans. After the war, they discovered German pilots saw them, too, and assumed they were an American secret weapon.
Next is a blowup of a front page story from the Los Angeles Times of Feb. 25, 1942, reporting a large aerial object that hovered over the city for five hours. An emergency blackout was ordered, and the military poured 1,400 rounds of antiaircraft fire at the object. Five people died on the ground, and several buildings were destroyed - from friendly fire.
The object flew away, apparently undamaged. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox termed the whole thing a false alarm, blaming it on "war nerves."
In June 1947, when a pilot flying near Mount Rainier in Washington reported seeing nine shining objects flying at speeds above 1,000 mph and described them as looking like saucers, the comparison stuck. Over the next few weeks, the national press reported more than 800 sightings of "flying saucers."
On July 3, 1947, several residents of Roswell saw a glowing or burning object pass over the town. The next day, Brazel and a neighbor's son were out herding sheep when they came upon a debris field that Brazel later described as being about the size of a football field, littered with pieces of metallic foil and metal bars.
Brazel picked some of the material up and showed it to neighbors, who encouraged him to report it. So he took his findings to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox on July 6. Wilcox called in the military from the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field. The commander, Col. William Blanchard, sent two intelligence officers to inspect the site, Maj. Jesse Marcel and Capt. Sheridan Cavitt.
Marcel brought back more material from the site, showing it to his wife and son before taking it to Blanchard. On July 8, Lt. Walter Haut issued a press release dictated by Blanchard, saying that a "flying disk" had been recovered.
Within a day, Blanchard's superior issued a new release, saying the object found on the sheep ranch was a weather balloon. And so the myth was born.
"The Roswell Exhibit" tracks the events of the succeeding days, with statements from witnesses saying they saw one, two or more crashed spacecraft, the bodies of aliens, even a survivor. A Roswell mortician, Glenn Dennis, said the military inquired about child-sized coffins that could be hermetically sealed; the daughters of a firefighter said their family was threatened with death by military police if their father ever described what he saw at the site.
The radio announcer who interviewed Brazel right after he reported his find said Brazel came back two days later, accompanied by military police, and retracted his statement. The officers took the interview tapes.
But in 1947, very little of that made news. After the initial reports and the military's weather balloon explanation, Roswell fell off the radar.
Ron and Donna Nichols are winter residents of Fort Myers; the rest of the year they live in Ohio. They came to the exhibit, they say, because they have a son with a long interest in what has come to be called ufology.
"And it's a rainy day," Ron says.
Donna says, "It's so interesting to see the whole thing. I really don't remember too much about it when it happened." At 63, she would have been about 5 years old in 1947. And it would be about 30 years before Roswell became famous again.
* * *
"The Roswell Exhibit" focuses mostly on the events of 1947, with a smattering of followup about Area 51; the so-called Majestic 12 documents, purported to show that President Harry Truman was implicated in the coverup; and reports of alien abductions.
But flying saucer sightings and the like subsided as a cultural phenomenon in the 1950s and '60s, popping up mainly as the subject of B movies and television spoofs like My Favorite Martian.
By the mid '70s, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the notion of government coverups seemed perfectly plausible. In 1977, Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film Close Encounters of the Third Kind brought spaceships and mysterious aliens and government secrecy about them roaring back into the national consciousness, and Roswell blossomed into a phenomenon.
It has never gone away. There is an entire industry of authors, speakers and investigators on both sides of the controversy. UFO aficionados hold conventions all over the world, and, of course, the Internet is a hotbed of UFO theory and countertheory. Google "Roswell UFO" or "Roswell alien," and you'll get about half a million hits.
Walter Haut, the author of that original press release, and Glenn Dennis, the Roswell mortician, founded the International UFO Museum and Research Center in 1991. It has become a top tourist destination in New Mexico, with more than 100,000 visitors annually.
As for UFOs in popular culture, Roswell has inspired a namesake film and TV series and been a major influence on everything from The X-Files to Men in Black.
The exhibit includes a display of toy aliens of various kinds, gravely noting that some UFO theorists see the toys as an alien propaganda campaign to accustom humans to their presence.
Suter, the museum marketing manager, says the image of an alien's face was all it took to advertise "The Roswell Exhibit."
"We ran the ad with just the face and "Landing soon' and the phone number. It generated hundreds of calls. It was just incredible."
Suter says when she scheduled a seminar April 9 with UFO researcher and author Stanton Friedman, all the seats were booked before she even announced it. "People heard he was coming and called up saying they wanted seats for 30 people, 50 people. We had to schedule a second seminar."
The exhibit, Suter says, lets people make up their own minds about what happened at Roswell and afterward. "I think it comes at a good time. The country is going through some hard times, and it's just something people can enjoy. It has that element of a good mystery."
In the gift shop, office manager Thompson says, the "I want to believe" T-shirts and books about Roswell are flying off the shelves. "We can't keep them in stock."
Thompson says she has talked to many of the visitors who have seen the exhibit. "Some of them don't believe it. They say, "Do you have any little green men?' And I say, "No, we have little gray men.' "
But many of them are believers, she says. "Most of the response is that they have an experience they want to share. I haven't talked to anyone who said they had been abducted, but a lot of them have seen something, or they know someone who has.
"I never had an opinion about it before. But then I saw the exhibit and I thought, "Somebody's covering up something.' "
Johnson, the museum's manager, says he has never seen anything like a UFO, and neither has his father, a retired Air Force pilot.
"I don't know if he's still toeing the military line," Johnson says. "But he enjoyed the exhibit, and he said he didn't believe a word of it."
If you go
"The Roswell Exhibit" continues through June at the Southwest Florida Museum of History, 2300 Peck St., Fort Myers. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $9.50, $8.50 for seniors, $4 for children 12 and younger. 239 332-5955 or www.cityftmyers.com/attractions/historical.aspx
[Last modified March 17, 2005, 09:53:04]
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UFOs Spotted On Google Maps
5/13/05
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Square-shaped flying disk spotted in Shanghai
2005/12/06
Last Wednesday, November 30, 2005 approximately between 4:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., when the majority of Chinese ended their working day they could observe alien spaceships soaring over the city of Shanghai. A man named Hu was the first to notice an UFO. He said he could observe the UFO within about five minutes close to the ring road in Shanghai's industrial district of Xinzhuang.
Just in half an hour, about 5:00 p.m., another Chinese man named Luo saw a shining oval object following to the West in the sky over one of Shanghai's old districts. Unfortunately, an attempt to take pictures of the extraterrestrial ships with a digital camera failed. At the same time, another Chinese man named Zhao saw a spaceship of a very strange shape drifting westwards.
Chinese Yang saw the most unforgettable sight, a huge orange finger hovering over the road. It happened 15 minutes before Luo and Zhao also spotted UFOs. Soon, the object slowly and majestically drifted eastwards.
A 65-year-old patient in a local hospital said he was looking out of the window in his ward on the 13th storey when noticed a huge bright red dish. It stopped right in front of the window at 4:55 p.m., hovered for five minutes in a manner typical of UFOs and then moved away.
When it got dark the aliens had to put the lights on and immediately revealed themselves. Liu was the last Chinese who observed the UFO. The man said he saw a square-shaped UFO for the first time in his life . At first he saw a glimmering gold star in the sky; then the object quickly drew closer and turned into a cube lit with bright lights. The object hovered about five minutes over the man and then whizzed to south-east.
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KGB's secret UFO files finally made public
12/22/2005 12:05
KGB agents were making records of UFO observations in special Blue Folder
Files comprising the famous Blue Folder have been declassified a while ago. The prominent Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich got the folder from the KGB in 1991. These days Mr. Popovich holds the position of honorary president of the Academy of Informational and Applied Ufology. The folder contains numerous descriptions of UFO flights and reports on some (mostly failed) attempts taken by the military in order to catch the aliens.
Aliens acknowledged back in 1968
In 1968, 13 leading aircraft designers and engineers of a brand-new aircraft section of the Soviet Committee on Space Technology and Exploration forwarded a letter to the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin. Actually, it was a request to set up a special organization for the study of UFOs. A reply to the letter was signed by Academician Shchukin. It is an amazing document per se:
"A number of competent organizations of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Chief Directorate of Meteorological Service, Defense Ministry and a few other agencies considered the issue of nature of the so-called flying objects. The organizations involved in the study of the atmosphere and space have been instructed to register and do research on any cases of UFOs for identification purposes. The USSR Academy of Sciences is charged with general monitoring of the phenomena, and therefore a special organization for the study of UFOs is not required."
"It was a real breakthrough," says Vladimir Azhazha, president of the above academy and keeper of the Blue Folder. "The authorities not only acknowledged the existence of UFOs for the first time, they also showed their great interest in the issue," adds he.
"We got hold of the Blue Folder only in 1991," says Mr. Azhazha. "Pavel Popovich was given the folder after requesting reports on the cases of UFOs. I received the folder from Popovich, it was a 124-page compilation of reports about the encounters with UFOs. The reports filed by authorities, military units COs and eyewitnesses. It took us a long time to get rid of some doubts before making the folder public," says he.
Mr. Popovich saw an UFO only once while flying in a passenger plane from Washington to Moscow. According to him, the object looked like a shining triangle that popped up out of nowhere, for awhile it flew near the plane at about 1,000 km per hour before vanishing without a trace.
Despite the cover letter that effectively denied any special program by the KGB for monitoring the UFO activities, the contents of the folder indicated the opposite. It is quite obvious that the Soviet secret police launched thoughtful investigations in several cases e.g. an anomaly observed near the village of Burkhala of the Magadan region on October 21, 1989. The report on the incident says: "The eyewitnesses claim to have watched a red shining sphere circulating above the village for half an hour." The northern lights are reported to have shone extremely brightly all night long following the incident.
The flying disks vanished in thin air after the explosion
KGB agents looked high and low trying to figure out what happened at the airport of the city of Mineralnye Vody on December 15, 1987. According to the airport dispatchers, at 23.15 the flight No 65798 reported an incoming "object resembling an aircraft with its headlights on." The radars showed no aircraft whatsoever. Three minutes later the UFO was gone as reported by the flight No 65789.
The crew of another plane also observed the UFO flying in that area. The clock read approximately 23.20. According to crewmembers, the UFO left a fiery trail in the air. The crews of the both planes reported that the UFO had disappeared after the flash resembling an explosion. A villager reported a burning plane flying over his village at 23.30. The eyewitness said the plane then disappeared. The eyewitness found no wreckage or other evidence of a plane crash.
No manholes found in the "Martian" spacecraft
From time to time the military made attempts to deal with UFOs independently. In August 1987, servicemen of an antiaircraft unit based on the Tiksi Peninsula tried to "get to know better" an unidentified flying object that appeared on a radar screen. The report from Colonel Lobanov, a duty officer of the military unit No 45038, said: "An unidentified target detected by the radar station of the commandant"s office of the antiaircraft unit at 05.45 Moscow time." The target moved at a speed varying from 0 to 400 km per hour. At 06.55 a helicopter MI-8 took off for a closer examination of the object. Suddenly, the object became invisible. Another aircraft, the AN-12 was flying in the vicinity at the time. At 3600 m the crew reported an emerald cloud with a few traces of purple and dark spots visible in the middle. Two inverse trails were reported behind the cloud.
An incident occurred in the Leningrad Military Region in early August of 1987. Five officers were dispatched to the northern part of Karelia to accompany an object of unknown origin that had been located near the city of Vyborg. The object was said to be 14 m long, 4 meters wide and 2.5 m high. The military failed to open the "extraterrestrial can." Eventually, the object disappeared from the hangar late September.
On July 28, 1989, the arrival of an UFO spread panic among the personnel of a military unit stationed in the vicinity of Kapustin Yar, in the Astrakhan region. Corporal Valery Voloshin was on duty in the communications center at the time. He filed the first report on the case.
Researchers believe the Blue Folder is an invaluable source of information. According to Mr. Azhazha, all reports and evidence on record indicate that intelligent life forms control the objects that mean no harm to human beings. At least no case of an attack by UFO against man was found in the folder.
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KGB ran secret laboratories to study extraterrestrial civilizations
2/3/06
Russian TV stations recently aired two documentaries about UFO's, a real treat for the Russian ufologists, a community of enthusiasts studying unidentified flying objects.
The films are particularly notable for the UFO accounts by high-raking Soviet and Russian Navy and Air Force officers.
Information relating to UFO's was strictly classified in the USSR. Some of the enthusiasts who spread samizdat booklets with articles on the subject compiled from the foreign media were at times taken to the KGB for questioning.
The funniest thing is that the KGB has allegedly had a special unit designed to gather and monitor all pieces of information regarding mystical and unexplained phenomena reported inside and outside the Soviet Union. An article published some time ago by a Madrid magazine Mas Alla probably indicates that the above allegations hold water. The magazine also published several stills from a film by U.S. TV station TNT affiliated with CNN.
Both the magazine and film say that in 1968 the KGB supposedly took possession of an UFO, which had either crashed or been shot down by the Soviet air defense. The Soviet secret police were alleged to have obtained the body of a humanoid in the thingypit. The body was thoroughly examined in an anatomy department of the Semashko Medical Institute in Moscow. The TV station claims that the film was based on a footage of the incident provided by one Pavel Klimchenkov, a former KGB officer. According to TNT officials, the documents are a deliberate "leak" to the media.
Klimcheko flashed his allegedly genuine ID on camera as though he was proving that he really was a retired KGB officer. He did not elaborate on the "leak" and said nothing as to its purposes. Therefore, the mystical story should draw comments on the official level, according to the magazine. There has been no response from the Russian authorities so far.
British actor Roger Moor, one of the two most famous Bonds, was hired by TNT to spike the film with a flavor of sensationalism. He presented the story based on the events that took place near the town of Berezniki in the Urals in 1968.
An eyewitness account printed by Vecherny Sverdlovsk on November 29, 1968 , kick-started an inquiry into the longstanding rumors about some flying object that supposedly fell the earth earlier that year. The eyewitnesses claimed to have seen a "shining object in the shape of a disk" landing or falling onto a steep showy slope. The film shows Soviet soldiers aboard the all-terrain vehicles and APC's arriving to the scene. The soldiers are seen to be combing the area. Then a general and two plainclothesmen (designated by TNT as KGB agents for some reasons) are seen to be giving orders to personnel in army uniform. The film shows a silvery shining object, a convex disk lying on its side in the show. The landing of an object did not melt any snow in the nearby area, no trees were damaged.
According to military experts interviewed by TNT, these days it would be rather preposterous for the KGB to make public a supposedly fake "intimidation propaganda" film designed for disinformation purposes in the Cold War era some 30 years ago. Pavel Klimchenkov, the owner of the original footage, claims that the KGB operation for the search and apprehension of an UFO was codenamed Mif ('myth' in Russia ). The viewer can see numerous KGB documents marked "top secret" saying that the operation was successfully completed.
The weirdiest part of the film shows an autopsy of the humanoid. The body of the extraterrestrial looks small and has grayish skin. His torso is very thin and his head resembles that of a monkey with eyes set deeply in the sockets. Anatomists are confident that the above characteristics are not typical for humans of any race or age.
A photocopy of the order by the Soviet defense minister looks authentic too. Pursuant to the order, General A. G. Ponomarnko, head commander of the Urals military district, was to ensure that KGB agents be involved in the work pertaining to the UFO at all stages. The agents' reports were promptly forwarded to Colonel A. I. Grigoriev, chief of the KGB scientific department. It is noteworthy that Kamyshev, Savitski, and Gordienko the coroners who performed a postmortem all passed away on the same day, on March 24, 1969, one week after completing the examination of the humanoid's body. The cause of their death is still unknown.
In September 1995, the U.S. media spread a similar story about the UFO allegedly captured by the authorities. The media accused the CIA of concealing the story for many years. The U.S. government officials denied the allegations by calling the whole story a hoax staged by ufologists. The pictures published in U.S. papers show a humanoid looking suspiciously very much like the Soviet creature from outer space.
Some scientists are pretty skeptical about the story told by the TNT film. At the same time, those scientists admit that the story contains too many pieces of information that look plausible. A clearer picture will be available after conducting a complex analysis of the original UFO footage and the KGB documents relevant to the case. Results of a medical inquiry into the cause of death of the coroners should be also taken into consideration.
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U.S. scientist says scores of UFOs fly around the Sun
23.02.2006
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina caused terrible havoc to the Gulf Coast in August 2005, U.S. meteorologist Scott Stevens declared that the natural catastrophe had been generated by Russian scientists. This time around, he accused NASA of concealing data relayed to Earth by SOHO, an orbital solar telescope.
SOHO is a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency. It is currently at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. The orbital telescope takes pictures of the solar flares and prominences as well as comets that fly past the Sun.
Several thousand photographs have been already taken. Some are posted on the NASA website. However, a larger part of them are still unprocessed by specialists due to an immense amount of data coming from SOHO. This is hardly surprising since researchers still have not had time to study thousands of photographs of the Moon, Mars and Venus taken by the U.S. and Soviet probes.
Rumors about UFO's being photographed by SOHO have been circulating for a long while. NASA would not comment on those rumors or blame irregularities during the transmission of digital images to Earth.
Scott Stevens maintains he has analyzed all photographs available in the SOHO archives. He claims to have found several perfectly identical objects on the photographs taken during a number of years. Therefore, the researcher says, it would be only logical to point out that UFOs would have never been the objects of the same size and form if stardust or residual solar plasma had really caused those "irregularities."
"I am confident that UFOs are flying in the vicinity of our star," says Stevens. "I am talking about a fleet of UFOs operating near the Sun. I believe that both NASA and the U.S. government are aware of the existence of a certain civilization whose spacecraft are capable of resisting extremely high temperatures. The powers that be are simply afraid to admit the fact. They haven't yet decided on the tactics," says Stevens.
Another Stevens's theory has to do with extraterrestrial activity involving UFOs near the Sun. According to the theory, UFOs are usually photographed by SOHO prior to large solar flares caused by some experiments conducted by aliens.
"The statements about UFO's causing solar flares are absolutely groundless," says Sergei Yazev, chief researcher at the Institute of Solar and Terrestrial Physics under the Russian Academy of Sciences. "We might as well assume that an increase in the flux of high-energy particles before a flare will cause that interference looking like UFOs on those pictures. Due to design characteristics of the SOHO photographic equipment, the telescope will always produce a picture of some winged object in case of a photo session involving some bright spot, be it a comet of a planet. The "wings" will be horizontal in any case. Should SOHO photographs a spacecraft, a picture will have the image of "wings" always pointing at different angles," adds Yazev.
In the meantime, Earth is in for a global cooling as opposed to a global warming. And the Sun is to blame, according to Habibullo Abdusamatov, researcher at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory near St. Petersburg.
The scientist believes that there is a 100-year cycle of solar activity apart from the well-known 11-year cycle.
"The solar radiation flux should decrease sharply by the mid-twenty first century, says Abdusamatov. "Earth will receive less heat than before. A similar global cooling already occurred in Europe, North America, and Greenland in 1645 1705. The astronomers maintain there were virtually no solar flares during the above period," says the scientist.
The historical records indicate that the Vikings left their settlements in Greenland , and the rivers in Europe were ice-clad almost every winter due to extremely low temperatures, which dropped to 40 degrees Celsius.
Abdusamatov reckons that Earth's global cooling could begin in 2012 2013. The solar luminosity should reach its minimum in 2035 2045. The global cooling will follow after a delay of 15 20 years. The global cooling will probably last about 70 years just like the last one in the Middle Ages. However, a decrease in the intensity of solar radiation is a usual natural phenomenon. It has nothing to do with the activity of "little green men."
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