British To Release UFO Files

Sean Stidman writes "Looks like the Brits are planning to release their secret files on many UFO sightings, including the famous Rendlesham Forest incident. These files should be ready for download by the end of this week, which I guess means by tomorrow. Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?"

Comments

Just in time for Spielberg's "Taken"

[trentfoley]

I'd like to see just how much money Universal / USA Network / SciFi Channel have put in to promoting Mr. Spielberg's upcoming 20 hour mini-series. So far I've seen:
1. Bombardment of ads for the show.
2. Ads for freedomofinfo.org (checkout the whois)
3. The Abduction Diaries ???
4. A Geraldo style show about Roswell
5. And now, paying off the Brits to unleash their hype^H^H^H^Hinfo.

It all seems pretty expensive to me.

Analysis of the /. effect

[jki]

Are their servers going to be able to handle the load?

Finally this is NOT not off-topic :) Here's an analysis of the slashdot effect. In the UFO files case, I believe the effect will be tens of times powerful in terms of distinct visitors than the case I analyzed and hundreds of times stronger in sense of data transferred, as they are probably going to serve fat media. I believe they will go down.

Re:This will never go through

[JamesCronus]

sorry to break this to you, but as a british citizen, until the recent human rights act, i didnt have ANY rights, at all. and not only that, i have no constitution either.

in britain, the queen owns my ass. though in practice because of our civil war (yes we had one, and guess what its was before yours too!) she cant actually do very much with it.

brain wave modifiers? hello?

We dont actually need these docs

[Beautyon]

Because we already have everything we need out in the open:

NUFORC has many reports of high strangeness and high quality.

UFOSkeptic a must read for all "science types", written by Dr. Bernard Haisch.

Science Logic and the UFO debate. Once you read this, you will have no doubts left.

And finally, all the arguments of the skeptics were completely demolised single handedly by a man called Brian Zeiler on USENET circa 1996. Essential reading, if you have the patience.

Essentially, the arguments about this subject are over. The interesting discussion is centered around what is to be done about this problem... if anything.

Bored? Alien invasion in your own home town!

[TrevorB]

Bored on a sunny day? Get a huge tank of helium, and about a thousand oblong silver balloons.

Then drive around following them, pointing "What's THAT?!!".

Great fun.

Hessdalen

[Openadvocate]

You should check out http://www.hessdalen.org/ where they have an automatic measurement station. There have been many sightings of lights. So they have a Sun box controlling some cameras, taking pictures etc,,,, well look for yourself.
Even if you are not info spooky lights, it is still an interesting project from a technical perspective.

Rendlesham ain't your father's UFO

[Wraithlyn]

Have you read this transcript and report? This is a military report, drawn from multiple eye witnesses, and includes scientific measurements of depressions, abrasions, and radiation levels.. this is not some hick in a trailer park trying for 15 minutes of fame.

Furthermore, I think it's a bit dismissive in this case to call it "just some object in the air", like it could be a weather balloon or swamp gas or something. This is an object that moves and behaves like no known terrestrial phenomenon.

What do you think it could be? Ball lightning? Its movements seem too deliberate. Secret American or Russian aircraft with magnetic/gravitic propulsion and stealth tech? About as hard to swallow as aliens.

I'm not saying OMG! Aliens! ... But, I think this is pretty damn interesting.

Re:This will never go through

[Malc]

I don't see that this is different. In the US they have one document to refer to. In the UK they have many many documents, etc to refer to. So? That doesn't make it any less a constitution, although it differs considerably in implementation and philosophy to the American one. That doesn't mean either is better or worse.

I believe the final say in these matters are actually made by the Law Lords. Of course, knowing the British constitution is a much harder task than knowing the American one. The constitution is considerably more flexible than the American one, meaning it is able to evolve more easily with time and be more representative of the day. Of course, with this flexibility comes the increased risk of abuse.

What about the one listed in...

[fuzza]

... the documentary book entitled The Philadelphia Experiment?

No, I'm not talking about the movie (well I guess I am sort of), but this was a documentary on possible US Navy research into invisibility, just as in the movie.

Most of the book is about that (I think; I haven't read it all yet), but in line with the "government conspiracy" angle there was a very interesting UFO sighting and subsequent follow-on (or is that redundant?) .

I might post it here tonight when I get back home if anyone's interested; it's about 2 pages, which from a typical novel is probably little enough for fair use.

(Then again, maybe it's online somewhere...)

Re:What about the one listed in...

[fuzza]

Well, I guess "Score 4, Interesting" means that someone's interested... just save some mod points for this post, OK? ;)

This is taken from "The Philadelphia Experiment", Charles Berlitz and William Moore, pp173-7. The story is told in the book as being one- and two-levels removed, so there are a lot of extra names in here which I'm snipping. The gist of the actual UFO story is as follows...

(It looks like this is reported elsewhere online, but not in this level of detail.)

Late in the evening on Tuesday October 7, 1975, Robert Suffern, a twenty-seven-year-old carpenter from rural Bracebridge, Ontario, received a call from his sister, who lives down the road, asking him to investigate a strange glow that seemed to be coming from a nearby barn. Suffern drove to the barn, took a quick look around, and not seeing anything out of the ordinary, was proceeding to his sister's house when he was startled to see a darkened saucer-shaped object about 12 to 14 feet in diameter squatting on the gravelled road directly ahead of him.

`I was scared,' he later recounted to a Toronto Sun reporter. `It was right there in front of me with no lights and no signs of life.' His car hadn't quite come to a full stop, he said, when the object `went straight up in the air and out of sight.'

According to Suffern's story, he had no sooner managed to turn his car around and head for home when a strange, 4-foot-tall humanlike creature with `very wide shoulders which were out of proportion to his body' and wearing a silver-grey suit and a globe-type helmet walked out into the road right in front of his car. Suffern slammed on the brakes, skidding on the loose gravel, and came within inches of colliding with the creature, who promptly dodged out of the way, ran to the side of the road, jumped a fence, and disappeared into a field. According to the account Suffern gave to the Sun reporter, when the figure `got to the fence, he put his hands on a post and went over it with no effort at all. It was like he was weightless.'

Badly shaken by this encounter, Suffern finally succeeded in driving home, only to discover when he looked out the window of his house that the UFO had returned, this time flying slowly close over the road. At that moment, it flew around an electric pole and again disappeared, seemingly going straight up into the night sky.

Neither relatives, close friends, nor the reporters, investigators, and plain curious who descended on his farmhouse over the next several weeks could dislodge him from his story.

`I know what I saw,' he said. `But I don't care if I ever see that creature again.'

Of course, if the story ended at this point, it would be nothing more than another addition to an every growing list of mysterious and difficult-to-verify close-encounter cases in recent years. But there was more...

On December 12, 1975, after the Sufferns were beginning to feel some semblance of order again (their farm was literally swamped for weeks by roving bands of curiosity seekers) three men were delivered to their home in an Ontario Provincial Police cruiser. The appointment had been pre-arranged in November. These officials arrived in full uniform, bearing impressive credentials and representing themselves as the TOP BRASS from the Canadian Forces in Ottawa, the United States Air Force, Pentagon, and from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Suffern, previously perturbed about the nature of his UFO encounter, claimed that ALL his questions were answered POINT BLANK and with NO HESITATIONS by these three helpful gentlemen. They `opened the books' to him and gave him the answers to the WHERE FROM, the What and the Why. They implied that the U.S. and Canadian governments have known all about UFOs since 1943 and have in fact been cooperating with the ALIENS in some unknown capacity since then!

As if this wasn't enough to swallow in one gulp, the military `know-it-alls' threw us yet another curve when they made a formal APOLOGY [to Suffern] for the unfortunate incident of Oct. 7. They claimed it was a MISTAKE!! To which Suffern immediately thought out loud that it must have been a supersecret military craft. No, they claimed. It was a malfunction in the saucer that brought the craft down, complete with aliens, on his property. Mrs Suffern found all this quite impossible to accept, but when she quizzed them, the officers actually came up with the exact time of the landing - to the minute - a small detail that only the Sufferns knew and had not conveyed to anyone. They have had three different UFO sightings over their property, only the last of which they reported, and again the times and dates were duly related to them by the knowledgeable trio. The enlightened agents, carrying a battery of books and data (complete with gun camera photos of UFO), again emphasized that the landing was an ACCIDENT and should not have occurred...

... Further along we learned that the military still refer to UFO occupants as `humanoids'. Contact was apparently made in 1943 (reputedly through an accident which occurred during a U.S. Naval experiment regarding radar invisibility) and now our forces are aware of the aliens' movements on this planet...

... Suffern adamantly insisted that all his questions about the craft and the occupant were answered `to his satisfaction' despite the fact that (many) civilian investigators have visited him and offered alternate hypotheses to clear up the mystery for him. Many came close but none answered him with the same `degree of accuracy'...

The critical key to Suffern's encounter is the fact that he had a `near miss' car situation with a physical entity, dressed in a one-piece silver suit and short in stature. If contact indeed had taken place then there could have been serious repercussions, had he actually run the being down. This could account for the military's intervention and unusual frankness...

The Sufferns remained firm in their statement that all three military personnel answered all their questions with uncanny precision and immediately. Suffern himself claims that he knows the identities of these three men and can prove that they were not imposters. He also denies he is bound by the Canadian Secrets Act and claims that his only motive for keeping the details secret is for the `moral reason' of simply wanting to keep his part of the bargain by complying with the `government's wishes' in this matter.

So, folks, what do you make of that?