Info-ParaNet Newsletters Volume I Number 514
Info-ParaNet Newsletters Volume I Number 514
Friday, December 20th 1991
Today's Topics:
Jerry Clark/Jacques Vallee/Revelations
Clark/Vallee/Revelations - Part 2
Vallee Responds
300,000 year-old human remains in Brazil: a caution
Re: Mutilated Cattle 1/
Ray Stanford's Address
Missing Mystery Object 1991VG
This 'UFO' magazine that you are all discussing ...
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Moderator's Note: This will be the last issue until the first week in Jan. 92
I don't want to fill any mailboxes up this year.
Ohmahkah hoehyahpe haydonhon Wah Shoongtokcha, Noopah Mahtohs hayhon
ohwahs'eenah ohyahteh k'chee Alpha C. D. Corp.
Season Greating from Snow Wolf, Two Bears and all the people with
Alpha C. D. Corp.
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From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin)
Subject: Jerry Clark/Jacques Vallee/Revelations
Date: 15 Dec 91 17:48:00 GMT
Recently, Jacques Vallee published his latest book, Revelations. Sure to
create a stir within the ufological community, Jerry Clark, editor of the IUR,
reviewed Jacques' book. Below, we have reprinted the article Jerry wrote, and
following this, we have reprinted a rebuttal which Jacques has provided.
Editorial
SOMEBODY MUST BE BEHIND IT
Reprinted with permission of the IUR to ParaNet Information
Service. (C) 1991 by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies,
2457 West Peterson Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60659. All Rights
Reserved.
From September/October 1991, Volume 16, Number 5.
On September 7 and 8, at a conference in Sydney, Australia, I
delivered a two-part lecture which dealt in part with conspiracy
theories in historical and current ufology. After the first
lecture a woman approached me to say that she would have to
listen to the second before deciding whether or not I am a CIA
agent. In the middle of that final lecture, as I was making light
of Milton William Cooper's leave-your-brains-at-the-door-and-
believe yarns about a secret government and its alliance with
malevolent extraterrestrials, a man in the audience began
shouting and demanding that I shut up.
Another lecturer, our old friend Bill Chalker, was asked
during the question-and-answer session if it was true that he
works for the CIA. I thought this was pretty funny, but Chalker
was not amused. He told me later that the charge was being made,
indeed had even been published, by Australia's Cooperists; what
concerned him was the possibility that witnesses in future UFO
cases might hear of it and refuse to speak with him--certainly a
legitimate concern.
Conspiracy delirium has afflicted Australia, though the
illness seems to have been contracted by exposure, I am sorry to
say, to my own country. It's not just that the writings of Cooper
and John Lear circulate widely within the New Age community, but
an expatriate American who claims to be an "escapee from the CIA"
(as someone described him to me) feeds the paranoia with his own
stories, for which as always no supporting evidence is
forthcoming. In our time it is secret documents one has seen,
rather than Space Brothers one has met, that comprise the stuff
of fantasies and hoaxes.
Not, of course, that conspiracy obsessions are ufodom's alone.
Not by a long shot. As a news junkie I wake up every morning and
switch on cable television's C-Span, which hosts a show on which
politicians, officials, pundits, and journalists take calls from
viewers. The subject, of course, is never UFOs, but on some days
as many as one caller in three seems to subscribe to some variety
of conspiracy theory. Now that Communism, happily, is fading from
the world scene and so, incidentally, from a leading role in
conspiratorial scenarios, the principal suspects have become the
CIA (the focus of all evil in the solar system, as we all know),
"the media" (believed to be a monolithic entity with, in one
caller's words, a "definite agenda"-which is to promote the
interests of, depending on who's on the phone, the right or the
left end of the political spectrum), and the Israelis (or, as
some callers unsubtly express it, thereby tipping us off to their
real views, "the Jews").
I happened to remark on the peculiar proliferation of
conspiracy beliefs in a conversation with Barry Williams and Tim
Mendham, two genial representatives of Australian Skeptics, down
under's equivalent of CSICOP. Affecting a darkly conspiratorial
expression, Mendham declared, "Somebody must be behind it!"
Mendham's wisecrack came back to me as I was reading Jacques
Vallee's new Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception
(Ballantine Books), the ultimate conspiracy book. Vallee's thesis
can be summed up thus: Conspirators are inventing conspiracy
theories to mask the real conspiracy.
Revelations is a sequel to Vallee's 1979 book Messengers of
Deception, which proposed that a shadowy group of intelligence
operatives is manipulating UFO beliefs and creating phony UFO
encounters in an effort to direct societal consciousness. An
early, less elaborate version of this notion was circulated in
the 1950s and 1960s by a former government scientist, Leon
Davidson. Davidson thought that CIA psychological-warfare
specialists posing as space people had fooled George Adamski and
other contactees. In Messengers Vallee advances essentially the
same idea, though without crediting Davidson; also, unlike
Davidson, he believes that a real UFO phenomenon, supernatural,
perhaps unknowable, but certainly not extraterrestrial, exists
beyond the manipulation.
In common with his other works of the last two decades,
Revelations is an interesting book even if it is not a good one.
Vallee is no profound thinker, but no one would deny that he is a
first-rate storyteller. Anyone who enjoys tales from the fringes-
and who doesn't?-will have great fun with the chapters on UMMO
and on Franck Fontaine's bogus abduction. Vallee's deadpan
account of his dinner with Bill Cooper is hilarious. And he shows
admirable good sense when he takes after paranoid ufologists'
traditional anxieties about tapped phones and CIA assassinations
of those who know too much about flying saucers.
What he himself believes, alas, is hardly less crazy. Much of
his problem is that he has a hard time entirely disbelieving
anybody. To Vallee even those whom others have had no trouble
identifying as crude charlatans are "sincere." To those who do
not see a conspiracy everywhere, it is quite easy to accept that
somebody might peddle tales of man-eating aliens--or of Space
Brothers or of ETs in our midst-simply to fatten the bank
account, to gratify the ego, to fool the gullible, or to feed any
other unworthy but recognizable human impulse. There is no
reason, logically or evidentially, to suspect these hoaxers are
some other hoaxer's victims. But if one wishes, with Vallee, to
indulge in conspiratorial musings, then the contactees and the
Cooperists really had an experience (with actors in alien
outfits) or really saw a secret document (contrived for
disinformation purposes), even if to get there one has to ignore
clear and specific evidence that the claimants are lying through
their teeth.
<<Continued in next message..>>
--
Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422
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From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin)
Subject: Clark/Vallee/Revelations - Part 2
Date: 15 Dec 91 17:49:00 GMT
<<..Continued from previous message>>
Vallee drags the Cergy-Pontoise tale--a confessed hoax yet-
into the conspiracy. In this instance, he writes, the agents were
"beings of flesh and blood within the French military and
technological establishment." How does Vallee know this? He has
it from a nameless source who claims to have spoken with an
anonymous bureaucrat in the French Ministry of Defense.
This, by the way, is the same Vallee who complains (on page
76) of Len Stringfield's habit of citing anonymous sources. Yet
anonymous sources, making claims in some ways as incredible as
those who tell Stringfield of crashed saucers and
extraterrestrial autopsies, abound in Revelation's pages. Some
instances: (l) "[A]ntiterrorist exercises in which the attackers
disguised their craft as a flying saucer have actually been run
more than once," which explains cases cited by "amateur groups"
as "proof that extraterrestrials are surveying our strategic
assets." Source: "men who were trained in the penetration of
nuclear plants and missile bases," none named. (2) There is
evidence that the "UMMO group" is linked with the "LaRouche
extremist movement in France." Source: "French investigators,"
none named. (3) During Desert One, the failed April 1980 attempt
to rescue American hostages in Iran, a "disk resembling a UFO"
was seen. "It was said to be a platform for nonlethal weapons,
intended to paralyze or otherwise disable the Iranian guards."
The "code word for that part of the operation, of which Richard
Secord and Oliver North had been among the planners, was none
other than Snowbird," a name that appears in recent UFO-
conspiracy lore. Source: "some witnesses," none named.
Even as he complains of "eager believers [who] have
fabricated fanciful explanations out of whole cloth," he
breathlessly spins theories out of what appears to be the same
material. He enlists UMMO in the conspiracy, even as he mentions
in passing the more prosaic findings of two Spanish investigators
(actually named) who have uncovered evidence suggesting the
supposedly extraterrestrial writings were forged by individuals
(also named) associated with a Spanish contactee group. Poor Carl
Meredith Allen (aka Carlos Miguel Allende) is resurrected from
the Saucerian boneyard, and we are to believe that Morris K.
Jessup's suicide was in some way-here as elsewhere in the text
Vallee is vague on details connected with the conspiracy. In
fact, from every available indication Jessup's suicide, like
James McDonald's, had nothing to do with his UFO interests and
everything to do with his personal problems. As for Allen, if
Vallee had read Robert A. Goerman's article in the October 1980
issue of Fate--evidently he has never heard of it-we would have
been spared this further exploitation of this sad character.
Vallee is brought to Norton Air Force Base to learn UFO
"secrets" from two men whom even he recognizes as no more than
naive saucer buffs. Yet when one tells of a desert meeting with a
landed UFO some years earlier, Vallee cannot resist speculating
that the occupants were American agents of the conspiracy- He
does not think to ask why the U.S. government would go to the
considerable trouble and expense of building an advanced aircraft
and training pilots to act like space people simply to dazzle one
obscure individual who would never publicize the experience.
I suppose that something like this would happen, but if we
are to believe it did, Vallee will have to produce the relevant
evidence. But evidence is the one element most conspicuously
missing here--as, one might add, in all UFO-conspiracy
literature. In the end, though he is sincerer and saner than most
other current conspiracy theorists, he gives us no more reason to
believe him than they do. Vallee has little to offer beyond
unnamed informants and a ufological revisionism which offers us
speculation and imagination in place of reason and substance.
There is nothing remotely like the documentation a true
investigative journalist would have nailed down before he wrote a
book as loaded with bizarre and implausible allegations as
Vallee's.
According to Vallee, UFO beliefs are so spiritually charged
that they are actually changing society, and that is why the
conspirators use them to manipulate us to some end or other about
which Vallee is characteristically obscure. In fact, UFOs were
trivialized and marginalized long ago, and outside ufology, which
Vallee apparently has mistaken for the real world, they are
visible, and even there not consistently so, mostly in popular
culture, along with rap music, soap operas, supermarket tabloids,
miniskirts, and other ephemera. As a vehicle for social
transformation UFOs are just about the last thing any sane
conspirator would choose.
A more interesting question is why and how a phenomenon
potentially so significant has come to appear to most people to
be of no consequence whatever. Maybe that's where we'll uncover
the conspiratorial machinations, if we are determined to find
them. Other, less sinister explanations come to mind, however,
and some can be found in less exciting but more intellectually
fulfilling books and papers by sociologists of science.
Of course, if we were to follow the logic of Vallee's
argument, why confine the conspiracy to the UFO era? If we don't
let a dearth of evidence for a conspiracy stop us, there is no
stopping us. What is to keep us from concluding, for example,
that Richard Shaver was not a nut, as generally assumed, but the
victim of a mind-control experiment which led him to believe he
met alien creatures underneath the earth in the 1930s and 1940s?
And what about 19th-Century Spiritualist mediums? Were they, too,
victims of the conspiracy? After all, Spiritualism had a far more
marked effect on Victorian culture than flying saucers have had
on our own. A medium is even said to have encouraged President
Lincoln to emancipate the slaves.
But if one has no compelling desire to drop into a black hole
of unreason, one can but reflect that hoaxes, delusions, visions,
and strange occurrences have always been a part of human
experience, and since the UFO era has been lived by human beings,
why should we expect it to be different? Why should not weird
tales circulate in our time? In the absence of evidence,
conspiracy theories of the sort Vallee proposes simply are
unnecessary.
And yet, from time to time, Vallee touches on real issues. The
Holloman Air Force Base affair, which concerns an apparently real
film of what is supposed to be a meeting between government
scientists and aliens, is a puzzle. So are the Bennewitz episode,
the MJ-12 briefing document, and related matters. Vallee is
surely correct, though he is hardly the first so to argue, that
these amount to evidence both of a strange psychological warfare
experiment and (at least where Bennewitz is concerned) of
egregious official misconduct. But to extrapolate a massive
conspiracy from these small elements is simply to excuse oneself
from the ranks of those who have a serious claim on our
attention.
Throughout the text Vallee vents his spleen, as he did in his
previous book Confrontations, on those ufologists who perversely
insist on thinking for themselves even in the face of his
repeated offers to do it for them. His books could as well be
subtitled "Me Jacques; You Dumb." As always he displays minimal
understanding of ufologists and their concerns. Sooner or later
the alert reader will notice that hardly any of those unnamed
"believers" and "amateurs" ever actually get quoted. Vallee
prefers to set up and knock down straw arguments, always easier
to do than to address the concerns of ufology's serious (as
opposed to naive or cracked) researchers and theorists.
From all indications he still has not read Thomas E. Bullard
on the patterns in abduction reports or Michael D. Swords on the
scientific soundness of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. No one
familiar with UFO Crash at Roswell or The Roswell Report will
feel Vallee has contributed anything to rational discourse on
that subject. Vallee continues to ignore the many nontrivial
criticisms of his approach I outlined in "The Thickets of
Magonia" (IUR, January/February 1990). He has simply cranked up
the volume as he declaims yet again what is less a scientific
reading of the phenomenon than an occult one. Let us not forget
that Magonia, the word Vallee made famous, translates as
"Magicland."
Errors large and small litter the pages of Revelations,
evincing Vallee's ignorance of any ufology but his own. Donald
Keyhoe did not write The UFO Conspiracy, nor is Timothy Good the
author of something called Beyond Top Secret. Benton Jamison is
not "Benton Majison," and Detlev Bronk's first name was not
"Detley." (For that matter, Leo Tolstoy's was not "Leon.") And
whatever else page 216 would have you believe, CUFOS left
Evanston, Illinois, years ago. Vallee's coverage of the crashed
disc question is a disaster. He has the Ubatuba incident
occurring in 1933 or 1934 when it is supposed to have taken place
in 1951. He places the Spitzbergen event in May 1941-contemporary
published accounts put it in the early 1950s, though it is almost
certainly a hoax-and Dorothy Kilgallen is incorrectly identified
as the source of the rumor. The celebrated Texas/Mexico incident
is set in a year and location different from those its proponents
have assigned it.
One assumes, however, that no error lies behind Vallee's
pretense that the Journal of Scientific Exploration is the "only
refereed publication in the field" of ufology. First, JSE is not
a ufological periodical, though it publishes occasional papers on
the subject, and second, as Vallee is well aware as a former
JUFOS board member, CUFOS' Journal of UFO Studies is ufology's
only "refereed publication." This is Vallee's way of responding
to his critics.
There is more to be said, but enough is enough. Let us close
with Vallee's own words:
"Mysteries that linger without solution for such a long time
are a powerful irritant to the mind; they tend to trigger wild
speculation. When the very existence of the enigma is flatly
denied by arrogant scientists who have not even taken the time to
look at the data, when the government destroys or covers up the
fact that its own employees have actually witnessed some of the
best documented sightings, it is natural for speculations to turn
into paranoia, and for research to become derailed by fantastic
delusions.
"It is at this point that the very people who could help us
in our investigations, namely the UFO researchers themselves,
become caught up in their own need to believe in the most bizarre
theories, for which not a shred of real proof exists."
Sadly, Vallee has no idea that he has just described himself.-
Jerome Clark
PARANET FILE NAME: VALLEE.REB
--
Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422
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From: Michael.Corbin@p0.f428.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Michael Corbin)
Subject: Vallee Responds
Date: 15 Dec 91 17:50:00 GMT
Author, Jacques Vallee, has sent a letter to ParaNet which is posted here for
your information. Please note, it is (C) 1991 by Jacques Vallee.
A LETTER TO READERS OF 'REVELATIONS'
by Jacques Vallee
In the Sept/Oct. 91 issue of its magazine, known as IUR (the "International UFO
Reporter"), the Center for UFO Studies has published a review of 'Revelations'
signed by Jerome Clark. It claims that (1) the book contains errors in names
and citations, (2) its summary of alleged crashes is "a disaster" because
several dates are wrong, (3) it pays too much attention to claims that should
be summarily dismissed as fraudulent, (4) it does not reveal the names of all
sources and (5) it fails to quote ufologists with differing views.
These claims, except for the very first one, are false.
(1) I have relied too much on memory and I have occasionally fallen victim to
typos. For instance, CUFOS has indeed moved to Chicago rather than staying a
few miles away in Evanston. Dr. Bronk's first name should be spelled Detlev,
not Detley (it is spelled correctly in the index). Two letters got inverted in
Jamison's name and I did not catch it. And it is undoubtedly true that JUFOS
(Journal of UFO Studies) is a refereed journal.
(2) Crash data are notoriously unreliable, as IUR itself has often pointed
out. However my "1933 or 1934" date for Ubatuba was not a typo. Similarly,
from the data I have I must stand by the quoted material of May 1947 for the
Spitzbergen crash.
(3) It is true that I did not castigate the claims of John Lear, Bill Cooper
and Bob Lazar as outright frauds. I believe that these men are wrong but I
cannot conclude that they lie. Somebody is using Lazar. Somebody invented the
MJ-12 documents. Somebody typed the papers that Richard Doty gave Linda Howe.
I did not hesitate, on the other hand, to denounce the Meier case and the Ed
Walters claims.
(4) I am being taken to task for suggesting that Len Stringfield should have
revealed his source's names, then neglecting to publish my own. This is
another bad faith argument. I have never implied that Mr. Stringfield should
violate the trust of his informants by making their names public in a book, and
I certainly will not be guilty of such a violation myself. In fact the very
same issue of IUR prints an interesting article by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, hinting
at unnamed informants. My argument with Mr. Stringfield's sources is that bona
fides independent scientists have not been able to talk to them on a
confidential basis. How do we know that we are simply dealing with another
"Aviary?"
(5) As for the claim that the book fails to mention contrasting views, I
believe it is equally unfounded. Many such researchers were cited verbatim. On
page 216, I even quoted Jerome Clark's interview with the Hartford Courant,
where he summarily dismissed the Voronezh case, one of the most important UFO
events of the last ten years.
Signed
Jacques Vallee
--
Michael Corbin - via FidoNet node 1:104/422
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From: oxy.edu!yokatta
Subject: 300,000 year-old human remains in Brazil: a caution
Date: 16 Dec 91 08:13:01 GMT
From: yokatta@oxy.edu (Scott Littleton)
Re the purported discovery in Brazil of 300,000 year-old human remains, I
would take it with a very large grain of salt. Although the earliest
human migrations to this hemisphere probably began earlier than most
archaeologists have heretofore suspected--that is, perhaps as early as
30,000 years ago--there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the New
World played host to any pre-sapiens hominids. The Mojave site in
question is most likely the one at Calico, near Barstow, at which the
late Louis Leaky, of Olduvai Gorge fame, was convinced he'd unearthed
crude tools dating from approximately 250,000 B.P. But he was unable to
convince his peers that they were in fact artifacts. Indeed, after more
than two decades of assiduous digging by a handful of dedicated true
believers, led by Ruth Simpson, NO human remains of any kind have come to
light.
Re theromluminescence, it's a thoroughly legitimate geophysical dating
technique that has been used successfully to date some extremely ancient
African fossils, human and otherwise. If in fact this technique were to
yield a date in the 300,000 year range for human remains found in Brazil,
we anthropologists would all be back at the old drawing board bright and
early tomorrow morning. But I suspect that if this were the case, it
would long since have been announced in NATURE. There would be no reason
to suppress such a discovery. Of course, if it were associated in some
way with the UFO phenomenon, the powers that be might well decide to
cover it up, although I gather from the post that that is not the case.
Of more interest to Paranet might be the mounting evidence, based on
mitochondrial DNA sequences from all over the planet, that ALL
anatomically modern human beings (i.e., Homo sapiens sapiens) descend
from a SINGLE female who lived in what is now the Kalahari desert around
150,000 years ago. Could our ubiquitous 'visitors,' as Strieber labels
them, have had a hand in that? I have my doubts, as the bulk of the
evidence (primarily mythological) I've collected so far points to an
initial arrival shortly before the end of the Pleistocene (ca. 11-12,000
years ago)--long after Homo sapiens sapiens had managed to penetrate
every major region of the Planet save for Antarctica. But it's something
to think about.
Cheers,
Scott Littleton
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From: John.Hrusovszky@f300.n238.z1.FIDONET.ORG (John Hrusovszky)
Subject: Re: Mutilated Cattle 1/
Date: 17 Dec 91 02:48:42 GMT
MC> Lake Villa Police Chief Al Copenharver said persons who killed the fir
MC> cow, a Black Angus beifer, left only its head behind. The rest of the
MC> carcases seemed to have been butchered by persons wanting meat,
MC> Copenhaver said.
MC> He said the second cow, a Holstein Beifer, looked as if it had been
MC> beaten to death. The animal's left ear had been severed and was not
MC> found, he said.
MC> "It was about that time that the story broke about some 20 persons
MC> disappearing in Oregon to await time to leave Earth on a spaceship," h
MC> said.
MC> They wanted the cheapest camping
MC> spots and seemed strapped for money. They were evasive and kept to
MC> themselves. My patrolmen said some of them used Biblical names."
Sounds like some sort of Religious cult who worship supposed aliens.
I'll bet there is some "leader" who is making a fortune on them in one
way or another.
--
John Hrusovszky - via FidoNet node 1:104/422
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From: hpvclmd.vcd.hp.com!miked
Subject: Ray Stanford's Address
Date: 17 Dec 91 22:32:07 GMT
From: Mike Dobbs <miked@hpvclmd.vcd.hp.com>
Bill Chalker...
My father used to correspond with Ray quite regularly. I believe his address
is still:
Ray Stanford
P.O. Box 599
College Park, Maryland 20740 USA
Best Regards,
--------
Mike Dobbs / Internet: miked@vcd.hp.com
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From: shemtaia.weeg.uiowa.edu!jrblack
Subject: Missing Mystery Object 1991VG
Date: 18 Dec 91 02:41:57 GMT
From: James Roger Black <jrblack@shemtaia.weeg.uiowa.edu>
Mystery object '1991VG' is still missing.
For those who haven't been following it, 1991VG is an interplanetary
object first thought to be an asteroid but later identified as 'an
artificial object rotating about more than one axis.' It was tracked
for several weeks as it approached the earth, finally passing beneath
the south pole on 5 December 1991 at a distance of about a quarter-
million miles.
Now it can't be found. According to news reports, it didn't show up at
all on photographs taken just after its closest approach to the earth.
And an attempt on December 12 by the Goldstone facility to locate it
with radar was also unsuccessful. Another attempt will be made on
December 20 using the big radar dish at Arecibo.
The following is reposted from Usenet News. Margins have been
reformatted for clarity, and some extraneous material near the
end has been edited out to save space.
***************
+ Article: 13504 of sci.astro
+ From: dfi@specklea.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Daniel Fischer)
+ Newsgroups: sci.astro,sci.space,alt.alien.visitors
+ Subject: The famous Dr. Steel on 1991 VG [Forwarded]
+ Message-ID: <1991Dec17.173915.29359@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de>
+ Date: 17 Dec 91 17:39:15 GMT
+ Organization: Max Planck Institut fuer Radioastronomie
+ From DIS@aaocbn.oz.au Tue Dec 17 05:49:11 1991 ...
+ ... did I get the following paper which he asked me to post to the net:
==========================================================================
A ROCK OR A ROCKET?
On November 6th astronomers operating the Spacewatch telescope at Kitt
Peak in Arizona found what was at first assumed to be a small rocky
asteroid. It was given the code-name 1991 VG. More recent
observations from Chile have indicated that this body, which raised a
flurry in the world's media when it flew close (on an astronomical
scale) by the Earth on December 5th, may in fact be an old rocket body
returning to our planet's vicinity.
Spacewatch, operated by Tom Gehrels, Jim Scotti and David Rabinowitz
(University of Arizona) is a relatively small (91 cm aperture)
telescope which has been fitted with a large CCD array and programmed
to search for objects such as asteroids and comets which approach the
Earth. They do this by letting the sidereal rotation of the Earth
cause the instrument to scan across the sky, with the same area being
returned to later, and again once more as a check. Any objects which
have moved between scans are picked up by the software, and the
operator may then make a visual inspection of the data and calculate a
preliminary orbit for the new-found object. Especially for the fainter
detections many of the orbits turn out to be geocentric, a piece of
man-made debris being indicated. However some very small asteroids
have been discovered in this way: 1991 BA last January (the
closest-ever observed miss of our planet, at 170,000 km) and 1991 TU in
October (at 750,000 km). 1991 VG is the second-closest observed
fly-by, at 450,000 km, or just further away than the Moon. All three
of these objects were estimated to be about 5--10 metres in size, and
are therefore the smallest and intrinsically-faintest items ever
observed telescopically above the atmosphere.
However, 1991 VG was soon realized to be in an unusual orbit for an
asteroid: its path is very similar to that of the Earth, being almost
circular (eccentricity 0.08), the size of its orbit just 5\% larger
than that of the Earth (so that it takes just a few weeks longer than a
year to circuit the Sun), and, critically, an extremely small
inclination to the ecliptic, the plane of the Earth's orbit. The
latter parameter has a value (about a quarter of a degree only) which
is consistent with a man-made spacecraft. Initial computations by
Brian Marsden (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) indicated
that it might be an upper stage from the U.S. Centaur rocket which put
the German Helios 1 satellite into a heliocentric orbit in December
1974, since tracing the orbit of 1991 VG back in time showed a close
approach about then. A Soviet craft was also a possibility. However,
as better astrometric data for 1991 VG came in it was possible for its
orbit to be improved, and Marsden found that he could not identify a
close approach to the Earth since the beginning of the space age, and
so the `rocket' option was discounted. Since there are about a billion
asteroids of this size or larger believed to orbit in the inner solar
system, the chances are that some of them will have orbits very similar
to the Earth, and in fact these are much more likely to be detected by
telescopes like Spacewatch. From the opposite point of view a
calculation of the probability of a collision by such an object with
our planet indicates that its lifetime against such an event is only
about 250,000 years, which means that it must have arrived in its
present orbit in the astronomically-recent past. Marsden suggested
that it might be an object which had spent most of its life in a
so-called `Trojan' orbit, having exactly the same orbital period as the
Earth but keeping 60 degrees ahead or behind of the planet at all
times, until it recently slipped that mooring. Many Trojan asteroids
are seen in association with Jupiter, and in 1990 a Mars Trojan was
discovered.
However, close to the fly-by of 1991 VG Richard West (European Southern
Observatory) collected time-resolved images of the object using the
Danish 1.54 m telescope in Chile: the path taken at that time was over
the South Pole and therefore out of the reach of most northern
telescopes. He found that the brightness of 1991 VG varies rapidly and
has a period of about 7--8 minutes, with several extremely bright
flashes being detected. These are as expected for a rotating, shiny
spacecraft which occasionally renders a specular reflection in the
direction of the viewer. Such a short period also seems inconsistent
with a natural rocky asteroid, since it is unlikely that such an object
of 5--10 m diameter could have a spin period of less that one hour
without flying apart: its cohesive strength would be too low. In
addition the relative brightnesses in different regions of the visible
spectrum were essentially solar, warranting for a colourless object
rather than a reddish asteroidal reflection spectrum. West concludes
that 1991 VG is most likely an artificial object rotating about more
than one axis.
This being the case it opens up a problem for dynamicists: if 1991 VG
is indeed the Centaur rocket body launched in 1974 then how has its
orbit been perturbed so as to bring it back to our vicinity now? One
possibility is that excess fuel has escaped and therefore had a
rocket-effect without being ignited. It also seems inevitable that it
will also soon be claimed as being an alien spacecraft left by
extraterrestrial visitors, even though science will undoubtedly be able
to provide a plausible solution. If it is a rocket then 1991 VG also
provides an example of mankind's ability to pollute not only his own
planet and immediate space environment, but interplanetary space as
well: the prevention of such pollution was the subject of a resolution
of the International Astronomical Union at its General Assembly in
Buenos Aires last August.
So is 1991 VG a rock or a rocket? An answer to this may be gained over
the next week when Steve Ostro (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) attempts to
get radar echoes from it using the giant radar at Arecibo (Puerto
Rico). An attempt from Goldstone (California) on December 12th was
unsuccessful. The radio reflection properties of metal are very
different to those of rock, so that a spacecraft would give a much
stronger echo; its structure would also affect the returned
polarization. Even then the answer may not be definitive since it is
known that many asteroids, like meteorites, are made of nickel-iron.
Is it so unlikely that a spacecraft would come back to Earth? In fact,
using the orbit of 1991 VG prior to the recent encounter (a = 1.05 AU,
e = 0.075, i = 0.22 deg) the chance of this object hitting the Earth
converts to a lifetime of only 250,000 years (other Earth-crossing
asteroids have lifetimes more like 100 million years). Increasing the
cross-section to that having a radius equal to the miss distance of
450,000 km implies that an object in such an orbit would fly-by the
Earth by that distance or less once per 20 years or so: pretty
frequent.
[Other material edited out for length.]
Dr Duncan Steel,
Anglo-Australian Observatory,
Private Bag,
Coonabarabran, NSW 2357,
Australia.
'dis@aaocbn.oz.au' or "dis@aaocbn.anu.edu.au" or "PSI%AAOCBN.OZ.AU::DIS"
Telephone: +61 (0)68 426 314 (AEST is 10 hours ahead of GMT/UT)
+61 (0)68 426 220 (home)
Fax: +61 (0)68 842 298
=====================================================================
[End of Usenet News posting]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
From: logdis1.sm.aflc.af.mil!davisl
Subject: This 'UFO' magazine that you are all discussing ...
Date: 18 Dec 91 02:43:03 GMT
From: davisl@logdis1.sm.aflc.af.mil ((AKA MrWizard) W. LeRoy Davis;SM-ALC/HRUC)
Could some kind soul please inform me of the details of how to subscribe to
this magazine and the rate?
advTHANKSance,
W. LeRoy Davis
davisl@sm-logdis1-aflc.af.mil
------------------------------
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