PRINCE ALBERT - The skies were alive over Prince Albert Saturday afternoon.

Gord Harding isn't sure what he saw; he thinks it might have been five or six meteorites. He believes they were travelling too fast to have been aircraft.

Harding was at Birch Hills, about 40 kilometres southeast of Prince Albert, when a loud noise overhead caught his attention.

"First I thought it was a plane", says Harding. "And then I looked and there were five, and they were all just roaring when they went over top."

Harding took photographs of the objects as they streaked northwestward, toward Prince Albert. One of the photographs actually shows six trails of smoke or vapour in the sky.

After taking the photos, Harding called his wife in Prince Albert, and she looked out and watched as they passed over the city.

Meanwhile, police in Prince Albert say they did not received any calls from people wondering what was in the skies overhead.

To the naked eye, Tommy Woodard's digital photograph appears to be nothing more than a pretty picture of trees in Provo Canyon.

But zoom in, he says, and the purple glow of a saucer hovering at an angle above the tree line starts to take shape.

Woodard, 22, a photo librarian with the Utah Film Commission, took the photo that he believes represents an unidentified flying object.

He was in the canyon Tuesday shooting still pictures for a possible film location, and began taking pictures for himself on his way out.

At the time, he didn't see anything out of the ordinary in his photograph. But later, after noticing a black speck in the frame, he zoomed in and "the closer I got, the more impressed I got by it," he said Thursday.

"I was kind of skeptical but it's pretty obvious when you zoom in," said the self-described "sci-fi" fan, whose friends and colleagues are similarly impressed.

[...] Another skeptical reaction to the digital photograph came from a representative of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle -- he said thought the sphere looked like a bird.

"A bird?" asked Woodard in disbelief. "Come on -- I don't know how he could think it's a bird!"

Lisbon - The Portuguese airforce has been on alert since late on Tuesday, when several authorities and witnesses reported seeing a luminous unidentified flying object, the national press reported.

"Military radar surveillance has been increased and F16 planes are ready for take-off," reported the tabloid daily, Correio da Manha, on Thursday.

It said the Portuguese civil protection service had received scores of calls from people who reported briefly seeing a silent, luminous object in the sky on Tuesday night, giving off white smoke.

Colonel Carlos Barbosa of the air force confirmed to Lusa news agency that military radars had detected "a target... that was not identified as a plane" for two or three minutes.

The national air traffic control authority, Navegacao Aerea de Portugal (NAV), also confirmed a UFO had been spotted in the north and south of the country just before midnight on Tuesday.

Not a meteorite, says researcher

"The control tower in Oporto (north) detected a flying object which had been observed 25 minutes earlier in Montijo and Beja (south)," said NAV's Paulo Lagarto.

The authorities were unable to say what the mysterious object was.

But José Fernando Monteiro, a geology researcher at Lisbon's science university, said he had consulted United States air defence officials and the UFO could not have been a meteorite.

If it had been a meteorite, it would have travelled much faster and made a lot of noise, he told Correio da Manha and Lusa.

The European Space Agency said the UFO was not a falling satellite either and the Portuguese weather service said there was no meteorological explanation for the phenomenon.

The only person to come up with a possible explanation was astronomist José Matos, who said the UFO might have been an Iridium telecommunications satellite.

"These satellites orbit at a height of about 780km. They each have three antennae, which are polished like mirrors and reflect the light of the sun," he told the media.

THE SLOVAK National Museum in Bratislava recently opened an exhibition entitled Crop Circles displaying the pictograms and agro-symbols that unidentified flying objects have left on Slovak territory.

According to the exhibition's organisers, witnesses have seen round, disk-shaped UFO objects at the site of 85 percent of crop circles here, as well as abroad.

The exhibition displays all the pictograms from Slovakia that have been registered by the Trnava UFO club. "There might have been more, but we have no information on those," said Miroslav Karlík, the club's chairman.

The Trnava club has registered nine locations where crop circles appear, and 178 reports on UFO observations in the Trnava region between 1992 and 2003. Captured on a videocassette and in pictures by amateurs, the display also features photographs from the Bratislava region.

Another part of the exhibition presents the cases of pictograms found in England in the areas of Stonehenge, Crabwood, and Chilbolton. The country is famous for its large number of these formations. At the beginning of the 1990s, around 300 pictograms were found there annually. [...]

(CBS 5 News)---It was a power surge that left up to 65-thousand Arizonans in the dark one week ago.

Now, some are pointing to strange lights in the skies as a possible link to that massive outage. The disturbance was large enough to shut-down all 3 units at the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant. About the same time as this massive power outage some people in the West Valley spotted something strange hovering in the sky. [see video at linked website] [...]

Astronomer, Steve Kates, known throughout the Valley as "Dr.Sky" sayshe believes the video is legit. Kates says he has seen a lot over the years but THIS sighting is special and similar to the "Phoenix Lights" sighting back in 1997. [...] But Dr. Sky says regardless of *WHAT* this is...the timing of this showing up.... so close to the Palo Verde Outage is interesting.

Some people are reporting a mysterious sighting of a string of lights in Valley skies last week.

A NewsChannel 3 photographer spotted them, turned on his camera and captured on film the so-called "Estrella lights."

"We watched them for about 2-1/2 hours," said Sheila Jones-Vega, who said the lights moved back and forth.

She and her husband, Frank, said they could hardly believe their eyes while on a drive to the Estrella Mountains where they're building a home.

The Goodyear couple considered the possibility that pilots from nearby Luke Air Force Base were dropping flares.

"I would think a flare would kind of burn and then fizzle out. These things turned back on," she said.

Jones-Vega was right about the flare activity, says Jim Dilettoso, a professional film analyst. But his analysis came with a word of caution.

"But I don't jump to conclusions. I don't hold a vial of lab blood up to the window and say, 'Well looks OK to me.' You know, there's testing that has to be done, extract the data, compare it to normals. Well now, I have found that it is not flares that I am familiar with in my database," he said.

A spokeswoman at Luke Air Force Base said U.S. pilots there drop flares almost every night of the week, but said the Estrella lights did not originate from the base.

After their impressive view June 14, Jones-Vega and her husband said they spent the next night watching the skies from their second-story bedroom window. They said they saw the fighter jets and the Estrella lights not only on the 15th, but again this week."We saw jets come up from the airport, numerous jets come up, and it seemed as though the jets would approach the lights. The lights would turn off," she said. "It wasn't as though the jet was dropping something and the light turned on. The lights were already there and the jets came up near them and the lights turned off. I'm a little embarrassed that people will think I'm crazy, but I know what I saw."

Watching the lights blink out one by one, the couple is pretty sure they'll be back.

The couple said they will be watching and wondering if the truth is out there. After all, their new home is out there too.

"Like I said, I don't want to be living on a landing pad out there for something," she said.

Many people are comparing the Estrella sighting to the Phoenix lights of 1997. Dilettoso said there are similarities but also significant differences.

Luke Air Force Base said pilots reported nothing unusual over the past two weeks. And there were no other reports of other military or private organizations admitting to flying in that area.

TWO men working high up a radio mast in Co Monaghan believe they have spied a top-secret inter-planetary craft flying toward Belfast.

Miles Johnston, of the Irish UFO Research Centre, and Dublin-based rigger Terry Malone claim the delta-winged craft traversed the sky at ultrasonic speed, taking just a few seconds to reach the horizon.

"I am convinced it was a man-made advanced space craft - we had a good long look at it in a clear blue sky," Mr Johnston said.

Mr Malone confirmed the object was "absolutely enormous".

"It was huge, high, and travelling at some speed," he said.

"I've seen B52s going over and you can hear them buzzing, but there was not a sound from this thing. And it was gone in an instant."

A professor from the University of KwaZulu-Natal has quashed reports that there were sightings of an unidentified flying object in Phoenix last week.

Arthur Hughes, professor of physics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, who viewed the video footage, said the object on film was not an unidentified flying object.

"It couldn't have been a fireball as they don't usually last that long. It also could not have been a satellite as they pass over quite quickly. Satellites go around the earth in 90 minutes," he said.

When questioned about whether the university had received any other calls about unusual sightings last Sunday, Hughes said that he had received no other calls.

"I have also heard of no other reports of unusual sightings for that period.

"It was the planet Venus. Venus is visible in the early parts of the morning," he said.

But the woman who saw the object, Roshnie Naidu, says that she knows what she saw and it was definitely not Venus.

"Initially I was very sceptical about UFOs and alien sightings but after I experienced what I experienced for hours on Sunday morning, I am more open-minded," she said.

Naidu's husband, Shrirama, who also saw the huge light, said they had expected people to be sceptical when they discussed what they had seen with each other.

"We expected this reaction. But we both could not have been mistaken," he said.

As might be guessed by his name, Laurence Rockefeller has a lot of money. He's the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the dynasty, and brother of John D. III, Nelson, Winthrop, and David Rockefeller. Now 86 years old, Laurance Rockefeller has long listened to his own personal, internal drummer.

After being a venture capitalist in his thirties, he embraced environmental causes in the 1950s and 60s, long before they were fashionable -- at the same time brother Nelson was conquering the Amazon jungles with his CIA friends. He's also been interested in UFOs for a long time, and often puts his money where his mind is. For example:

--For two years (1993-95) Laurance Rockefeller supported Dr. John Mack's Center for Psychology and Social Change in Cambridge, Mass., to the tune of $250,000 a year. Dr. Mack, of course, is the controversial psychiatrist who investigates alleged UFO abductions.

--Rockefeller paid for at least two meeting sessions of the Starlight Coalition, a group said to be made up of former intelligence officers and military men interested in UFOs.

--At one time Rockefeller funded a plan to establish contact with aliens, not using the SETI method (by radio telescope), but by signaling them with banks of powerful halogen lamps.

--Rockefeller once held a UFO conference at his ranch in Wyoming.

Just last year, Laurence Rockefeller ponied up an estimated $30,000 for a special UFO project created by Marie "Bootsie" Galbraith, wife of investment banker Evan Galbraith and one-time U.S. ambassador to France. Mrs. Galbraith wanted to compile a report containing the most reliable evidence for the paranormal nature of UFOs. This report would be sent to VIPs only -- politicians, heads of corporations, heads of state -- to convince them of the necessity of taking UFOs seriously.

To that end, Mrs. Galbraith arranged for the three most influential civilian UFO groups in America to unite under the temporary banner of the UFO Research Coalition: CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies), FUFOR (Fund for UFO Research) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). Drawing on these organizations' data resources, a 169-page special report, "Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence," was compiled.

The bulk of the actual writing was done by Don Berliner, best known for his work with Dr. Stanton Friedman on the Roswell Incident. J. Antonio Huneeus, UFO columnist for FATE magazine, also contributed, along with Mrs. Galbraith herself. The report was printed in large format (8 1/2 x 11 inches), perfect bound with a light blue cover. Inside there is a letter of endorsement from the heads of the three UFO organizations mentioned above: Mark Rodeghier of CUFOS, Richard Hall of FUFOR, and Walter Andrus of MUFON.

Fraser Seitel, spokesman for Laurance Rockefeller, told the Observer of New York that Rockefeller did not personally endorse the report's conclusions. Said Seitel, "He [Rockefeller] is interested in learning what the Government has on file." [...]

"The Federal government does not have any information about extraterrestrial life to conceal, and there are no secret projects for me to investigate." (July 7, 2004)

In April 2004, Senator Hatch's DC office received two visitors with an unusual request.

Sterling Allan, a constituent from Utah, and his associate, Harry Dschaak, from Idaho, a few weeks earlier had a covertly-arranged, in-person visit with Area 51 microbiologist, Dr. Dan Burisch.

Burisch had told Allan and Dschaak that he wished to have a congressional hearing in which he might testify about some of the black op projects in which he had been involved, including the creation of designer viruses in which he had inserted an identifying signature sequence to prove the laboratory origin of the virus. Burisch also has laboratory ties to the Gulf War Syndrome which has turned out to be a friendly-fire weapon of mass destruction.

The testimony would include Burisch disclosing his experience for nearly a year of working on a daily basis with an extraterrestrial at Area 51, taking tissue samples, and communicating telepathically with the being.

Included with the briefing material that the pair left with Hatch's office was a book by the well-respected research and field specialist, Dr. Steven Greer, called Disclosure. The book contains "over five dozen top-secret military, government, intelligence and corporate witnesses to secret projects tell their true stories which disclose the greatest covert program in world history. This explosive testimony by actual government insiders proves that UFOs are real, that some are of extraterrestrial origin."

Within a few days, Hatch's office responded that there would never be any congressional hearings on the subject of ETs or UFOs.

Allan then composed an open letter to Senator Hatch, itemizing a number of relevant questions, and requesting that the Sentator put his response in writing for public record.

Finally, on July 7, the Senator mailed a reply in which he said: "As you, I find the possibility of intelligent life on other planets intriguing; however, there is not sufficient evidence to determine whether such life exists. I have reviewed the information you recommended to me, and I can assure you that your concerns are unnecessary. The Federal government does not have any information about extraterrestrial life to conceal, and there are no secret projects for me to investigate."

The full text of the letter is posted for review by the public.

According to the Sept. 2002 scientifically conducted Roper poll, roughly seven in ten adults in the U.S. think that the government does not tell everything it knows about extraterrestrial life and UFOs. One in seven adults in the U.S. say they have had a close encounter of some kind with Unidentified Flying Objects.

Extrapolated to the U.S population in general that amounts to tens of millions of people who will have a hard time believing the Senator's statement, based on their first-hand experience.

An unidentified flying object (UFO) resembling a huge star hanged over the Azeri capital Baku early Monday, witnesses said.

The object appeared at about a quarter passed six, and it stayed there until the sunrise. Witnesses said the UFO was so bright that one could hardly observe it via bare eyes.

The UFO could be easily seen particularly in Baku's outlying Akhmadli and Bakikhanov settlements.

In the world of academia, Northern Kentucky University philosophy professor Dr. Robert Trundle realizes his beliefs are not exactly widely embraced. "Shunned" is the word he sometimes uses.

The title of his forthcoming book is, in part at least, in response to what he calls "the cowardice and vanity of a sizeable percentage of American professors." Scheduled for release early next year, it's called "Is ET Here? No Politically, but Yes Scientifically and Theologically" (EcceNova Editions, Victoria, British Columbia).

Dr. Trundle, 60, occupies an almost monastic office on the second floor of NKU's Landrum Hall. It's a room about 10 by 10, and every available square foot is piled high with texts of one sort or another. I was careful not to touch off an avalanche when I sat among the stacks the other day and asked him to boil his book down to its basics.

So what does he mean by that title? Do beings from places other than this planet walk among us?

"Yes, I believe contact was made 50 years ago -- and I believe beings from other planets are here now, mainly to study us," Dr. Trundle said.

"Does ET exist from a political perspective? No, because the government is afraid of the culture shock and public panic. For the government to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrials here would be to admit it can't protect us from them.

"Scientifically, I argue that thousands of well-regarded witness accounts cannot simply be dismissed. I'm talking about pilots who have come forward even though it's meant they've had to undergo psychiatric exams as a direct result."

At the very least, he said, we can't use current science as the standard for excluding the possibility of a more advanced science:

"For example, science says it's impossible to travel at the speed of light. If it were possible, it would take four years of traveling at the speed of light to get to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

"Given our current technology, it would probably take us 50,000 years to get there, plus or minus. Based on that, the scientific establishment somewhat blithely dismisses the existence of extraterrestrials.

"It's like saying if we can't do it, they can't do it either."

Dr. Trundle's book is not an easy read, but it's an intriguing sampler of UFO lore, sightings and documents, including this Freedom of Information Act version of a March 22, 1950, FBI memo stating in part:

"An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico -- circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each -- occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall."

It's a subject Dr. Trundle has been chasing for years. His grandfather, president of the now-defunct Trundle Engineering Co. in Cleveland, was fascinated with extraterrestrials and, when he died in 1954, left Robert a small collection of books about UFOs. His first article to the effect that ETs are here, entitled "Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Challenge to Theology, Physics and Metaphysics," was published in 1994. His second book, "Illustrated News of the Unbelievable," was co-authored with George Filer, a retired Air Force intelligence officer.

Dr. Trundle paints a virtual "Men in Black" picture of the ET scene in which several species are visiting the earth, most in a human form. But why?

"There are benign scenarios in which they might be seen as anthropologists coming here out of curiosity," he said.

"Then there is a more threatening scenario, which is that they're studying to see if the earth is habitable. An even more worrisome possibility is that they have a hybrid program of sexually mating with humans to strengthen their species."

No doubt about it. Dr. Trundle would have an easier go of it if he stuck to Socrates.

"But I'm trying to apply the truth in the way Socrates called for it to be applied to everyday life," he said.

He's convinced he's right. All he's lacking is cold, hard proof.

"If I had that, it would be the most astonishing event since the resurrection of Christ."

This question may come in just that form from persons with essentially no knowledge of UFO history. From others who do know that there have been "a few" pilot-sightings, it comes in some altered form, such as, "Why don't airline and military pilots see UFOs all the time if they are in our atmosphere?" By way of partial answer, consider the following cases. (To facilitate internal reference, I shall number sequentially all cases here after treated in detail.) [...]

July 21, 2004 - Researchers at Harvard University called on aliens from outer space to help them solve a problem that surfaces frequently in everything from therapeutic sessions to criminal trials, or even just chatting with a friend.

How do you know if someone is telling the truth when he or she recalls memories of childhood abuse, or being raped by satanic cults, or some other traumatic insult?

One clue that many of us rely on is the emotional reaction of the person telling the story. If the victim breaks out in sweat and becomes extremely emotional while recalling those memories, it's more difficult to dismiss them as false.

But all that really means is the person truly believes his or her memories are true, not that they really are, according to the researchers.

"The person really believes something happened," says Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard, lead author of a study in the July issue of Psychological Science. "But that doesn't necessarily mean it did."

True or False?

Deciding which memories are true, and which are false, is a real tough problem for therapists and law enforcement officials, and sometimes friends. That's especially true when long-buried memories suddenly surface involving traumatic events that may have occurred years ago. McNally has struggled with the problem for years, moving from combat traumas to memories of childhood sexual abuse.

He says that even a seasoned therapist can be influenced by the emotional state of the person recalling the memories.

"A therapist is more inclined to credit the account as authentic if it's accompanied by really intense emotion," he says. "The therapist thinks 'my goodness, something must have happened.' "

Years of research have convinced him that even false memories can stimulate a lot of emotion, but how do you prove that in the lab? That's where the aliens from space come in.

If someone claims to have been sexually abused years ago, it's almost impossible to prove those memories false. What the researchers needed was a group of people who sincerely believed memories of something that clearly never happened.

So they put an ad in newspapers asking for people who had been abducted by aliens from space.

Emotions Cloud Truth

They got a lot of weird phone calls, including some from people claiming to be aliens, but in time they had their subjects, six women and four men who believed they had been abducted by alien beings. Their average age was 47. Seven women and five men who had not been abducted also participated in the study.

The "abductees," as they came to be known, were interviewed and recorded as they told brief stories about their abduction, as well as other stressful, happy and neutral tales. All of the participants were wired so the researchers could monitor for heart rate, sweat production, and facial muscle tension, three strong indicators of emotional stress.

The emotional reaction among the abductees soared while listening to the stories of stress and abductions. But it was much weaker while listening to happy or neutral narratives.

The 12 participants who had never been abducted barely responded to any of the stories.

The verdict was clear, McNally says. The emotional reaction, which can be so convincing, had nothing to do with the veracity of the memories of the folks who believed they had been abducted.

Why did they believe so strongly in something that is so implausible? In answers to a questionnaire, the abductees scored high on personality traits that make them a bit different. For example, just because an idea seems magical doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true.

People with those traits tend to have "a rich fantasy life, and to endorse unconventional beliefs," the researchers say in their report.

ALIEN life will be discovered within 20 years or not at all, according to scientists who are scanning the skies for signs of intelligent life.

Experts in California said yesterday they would need another two decades to finish analysing radio signals from 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.

Their efforts were applauded yesterday by Wales' foremost astronomer, Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University, who accused critics of being impatient for results.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) has already spent four decades checking radio waves for patterns that would betray the influence of intelligence.

But despite finding nothing, the group has not lost heart.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, said signs of intelligent life - if any existed - would be found within 20 years.

His claim was based on accepted assumptions about the chances of alien civilisations existing and on projected increases in computing power on Earth.

WEST CHESTER -- The attorney representing the man accused of shooting two sheriff's deputies began to lay the groundwork for an insanity defense for his client.

Walter J. Rosengarth, 64, allegedly wounded the officers who had arrived at his home on the 400 block of Pierre Drive in East Marlborough on July 24, 2003, to serve him with an eviction notice. After the shooting, Rosengarth barricaded himself into his residence during a three-and-a-half-hour standoff with state police.

On Friday, his attorney, Christian J. Hoey, filed a motion at the Chester County Courthouse to determine Rosengarth's criminal responsibility.

Next, Common Pleas Court Judge Howard F. Riley Jr. will decide whether the defendant will get a hearing to determine if he was criminally insane at the time of the shooting.

If he is found to be insane, Rosengarth will be acquitted of criminal responsibility. He would be committed to a mental hospital and the case would not go to trial.

If Riley denies the hearing request or the hearing takes place and determines the defendant was criminally liable, the case will go to trial. Rosengarth could still enter an insanity plea at that time.

Hoey's motion included three written evaluations supporting his claim that Rosengarth was insane at the time of the shooting -- two from psychologist Gerald Cooke and two from psychiatrist Dr. Robert L. Sadoff.

Cooke described Rosengarth as experiencing "paranoid schizophrenic psychotic delusions" during the incident.

"He did not appear to be hallucinating," Cooke wrote in a letter to Hoey on Jan. 12, "but was acting under the belief that he was the victim of a conspiracy ..(I)t is my opinion that because of his paranoid delusion, he did not know what he was doing was wrong."

Sadoff reached a similar conclusion.

"Although he appears to be competent to proceed (to trial) in that he does know the nature and consequences of his legal situation and can work with counsel in preparing his defense," Sadoff wrote in a Feb. 9 letter, "it is my opinion that he would be in a stronger position had he the benefit of treatment and improvement in his psychotic condition."

Rosengarth told both analysts stories about being poisoned by a neighbor, suffering from cancer though he never had been diagnosed and seeing a UFO hovering near Kennett Square.

"He looked up, saw the UFO and said a prayer that the UFO would reverse itself and come back and, sure enough, it did," Sadoff wrote. "He said when it did, he froze and stopped. But then, he said he saw a message in the sky and he heard God talking to him ..the message in the sky was written in large capital letters, ‘Satan is real.'"

Hoey also filed a second motion on Friday to suppress videotaped statements Rosengarth made to police after his arrest. During the questioning, the defendant admitted to shooting at state police officers.

"And when you shot those guns, did you shoot at police or sheriffs?" interrogators asked.

"At them, no ..No, it wasn't directly at them ..It was ... to get them the hell out of here," Rosengarth replied, according to a transcript of the interrogation. "I asked them to leave several times."

"But you realized that where you were firing, there were officers nearby?" police asked.

"Yes," Rosengarth replied.

The defendant also told police he would have shot officers had they attempted to enter his home with their guns drawn.

Riley has placed a gag order on the case, preventing Hoey and Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert L. Miller from discussing it with the media.

The standoff at Rosengarth's home began around 11:30 a.m. when four sheriff's deputies arrived to serve the man with an eviction order. The bank had foreclosed on the property for nonpayment of real estate taxes and had sold it at a sheriff's sale for $96,000 in December 2001, according to court records.

A judge ordered Rosengarth evicted from the home in June 2003.

At first, Rosengarth refused to open the front door for the deputies. Rosengarth then allegedly opened fire on the officers from inside of the residence, first hitting Deputy Joseph Smida in the face. Deputy James Boyd drew his department-issued Glock .40-caliber handgun to return fire and was shot in the hand.

Smida had to be airlifted to Temple University Hospital and Boyd was taken by ambulance to Jennersville Regional Hospital.

Shortly after 3 p.m. the defendant ended the standoffby waving a white flag and walking peacefully from his home.

Police recovered a cache of weapons from Rosengarth's home, including an M-1 rifle, a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol and an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

Rosengarth has been charged with multiple counts of attempted homicide, aggravated assault and related offenses.

Talk about a wasted effort: I drive all the way to Chapel Hill last week to make fun of a UFO nut only to find out she's not a nut at all.

Boy, I hate when that happens.

Her name is Brenda Denzler and she's a member of the Mutual UFO Network of North Carolina, a group of 200 or so people who gather a few times a year to compare notes on UFO sightings and alien abductions. The organization considers itself a safe haven for people who have encountered unexplained aircraft and want to talk about it without fear of being ridiculed by -- well, Denzler is too polite to say it, but she means people like me.

I'll cop to the charge. You start telling me about how you were beamed up to an alien spaceship and had probes inserted into your trailing parts, a certain look of disdain and disbelief will be apparent on my face. I might even suggest that you don't need Freud to help you figure out that some hidden desire is pounding on the door of your consciousness, demanding to be let in. So, yeah, I can see why UFO people prefer a friendly audience.

But Denzler is not one of those kind of UFO partisans. "I've never had a sighting, and I've never been abducted," she says.

Frankly, I was surprised to learn that people even pay attention to UFOs anymore. The whole thing is so 20th century. There was a moment in the early 1970s when UFOs and alien visitation were a hot topic. We read the best-selling books, we marveled at ancient cave paintings that seemed to show spaceships, we debated whether the Pyramids were some kind of beacon for aliens, and we speculated on why aliens found Earth so interesting. Furthermore, everyone had a tale, however tenuous, of their own sighting of a UFO -- because who wanted to be left out?

Eventually, though, we moved on to other important things, like disco.

Or most of us did. Others, like Denzler, found a permanent fascination in the topic. In 1992, as she neared the end of her graduate work in religious studies at Duke University, Denzler read a book written by a fellow who claimed to have been the victim of an alien abduction. The hook was set. Today, Denzler has nearly 500 books on UFOs at home, and she serves as historian for the Mutual UFO Network.

She brings an academic's precision to the topic. Denzler is careful to separate reports of UFOs from accounts of alien abduction; there's a big credibility gap between those two things. Strictly defined, UFOs are merely things in the sky that can't be identified or explained. Reports of them often come from reliable sources, like airline pilots, and Denzler takes them at face value: Somebody saw something strange. But tales of abduction tend to ratchet up the credibility problem dramatically. It's a "two eyebrow" situation, Denzler says - - as in, the number of eyebrows a listener raises in disbelief.

I'm a two-eyebrow guy. UFO sightings? Delusions, hallucinations, mass hysteria, hoaxes, mirages, take your pick. Not only do I scoff at the whole idea of alien visitation, but sometimes -- just to start an argument -- I'll assert that there's probably no other advanced life anywhere in the universe, that we exist only due to a complicated chain of coincidences that will never be repeated.

Denzler has heard all this, and she's too smart to dismiss it out of hand. A careful researcher doesn't automatically dismiss a theory, she says. Only close- minded people do that.

Again, she was too polite to say exactly whom she had in mind.

Some people in the UFO field have an idea that the government is planning open disclosure ever so slowly, ever so gradually, and that a key method for doing this is through the media. One hears this quite a lot.

According to this belief, movies by Steven Spielberg, or television shows like The X-Files are part of the plan to accustom us to the idea that aliens are among us.

I find this unpersuasive for several reasons, not least of which has to do with my own assessment of what the media itself actually is.

What we call the media is essentially a sophisticated technology under centralized control that sells information and entertainment to the public. The public, as everyone knows, is diverse culturally and stratified economically. Thus, to be effective, The Media must show a different face, depending on whomever it is trying to reach  that is, whatever market segment being targeted by its advertisers.

With that in mind, let's look at America today. A complete, comprehensive sociological breakdown is rather beyond my capabilities this afternoon, so let's just look at the money.

No matter how you slice and dice the data, the inescapable conclusion is that American society is incredibly stratified (of course, the same applies to most of the world, but that's another story for another day). You can look at income patterns, or you can look at net worth, and either way the unavoidable conclusion is that America is a society broken into distinct economic classes.

Look at income. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of national income going to the top fifth of wage earners rose from 44% in 1973 to 50% in 2000. The share going to the top 1% rose to 15% in 1998. This is the highest it has been since World War Two. [1] [...]

Income is important, but wealth even more so. After all, if your living expenses match your income, you won't be saving and investing very much, and you won't generate wealth. It is wealth, not income, that matters when it comes to wielding power and influence.

Looking at patterns of wealth ownership, America's classes are shockingly easy to see. Essentially, we have four classes in our society. I call them the:

Owners,
Managers,
Worker Bees, and
Expendables.

You can think of America as a room. In this room are 100 people who collectively own $100. If this were a communist utopia, each person would have one dollar, and they would all be holding hands, singing Kumbaya.

But in our little room, one person owns 33 of those dollars. Some analysts put this figure at $38, and they may be right, but let's just say $33. Either way, it's quite a lot.

The next 19 wealthiest people get to share 51 more of those precious dollars. That's $2.68 each. It doesn't seem like much compared to our fellow at the top, but it's quite good compared with the remaining 80 people.

That is because there's now only $16 left. In fact, 18 of these people get nothing at all. The other 62 people get to keep some small change, averaging about twenty-five cents each.

Aside from the issue of whether such a breakdown is fair  you can leave that to your private ethical ruminations  remember that this room has many interesting things that make it go. For instance, it has a legal system, an economy, a political system, and so on.

We may ask, who is in the best position to manipulate these things for his own benefit? The question answers itself: that person with the $33, whom we may with full justice label as the practical owner of the society.

The owner likes his position, but can't run things entirely by himself, so he enlists allies. These are in the top quintile. They are the managers. They supervise the great many people who have a few pennies to their name - the worker bees.

At the bottom are those 18 with nothing  absolutely no net worth at all. These are the expendables. As far as the guy at the top are concerned, they could drop dead and he wouldn't care, except that their presence helps to keep the worker bees nervously occupied and distracted from that most fundamental of all social and political questions: Who Owns What.

Actually, if you look at the numbers more precisely, you can break down the social groups more accurately. The expendables remain at the bottom, of course. Then, up to around the 60th percentile of the population, you have essentially the lower half of the worker bee population. Then, from the 60th to approximately the 90th percentile, you still have worker bees, but they're better off. Many would call this the American middle class. So in fact, the American management class comprises not the top 20 percent, but more like the top 10 percent of the population. This also conforms more closely with the observed reality of most workplaces.

Things become interesting starting at around the 90th percentile. A dramatic expansion of wealth begins at this point, and you can discern roughly two stratifications within the 90th to 99th percentiles. Of course the Fat Guy at the top percent still sits happily above the rest. (And to go even further, if you were to break down that top 1% of wealth owners you would find the same continued levels of stratification continuing within it). [2]

With economic stratification comes cultural stratification, which takes us back to the media, which is an important part of our little American room. Leading executives know this far better than I do, but it's pretty obvious that certain types of news and entertainment are designed for people in different economic classes. Indeed, since media organizations make their money through advertising revenues, the right demographic analysis can affect billions of dollars, and you can be sure that media executives have among the most sophisticated demographic data in the world.

While it isn't true that all people of a certain class will slavishly follow their cultural expectations, it's generally true that, say, someone of the upper management class will be more likely to sit down to watch Tom Brokaw and read the Wall Street Journal than the watch his local FOX affiliate and read the New York Post.

That's because NBC News and the Journal are designed for the management class, or at least management class trainees and wannabees. If you doubt this, then look at the commercials and ads, most of which are geared toward conspicuous consumption of the affluent kind.

And while I don't have demographic information pertaining to the Wall Street Journal newspaper, I do have information pertaining to the Journal's website, WSJ.com, as well as for some other pillars of the cyber-establishment, NYTimes.com and CNN.com. At WSJ.com, the average household income for its readers is $215,600, placing it easily within the top 5 percent of income earners in the U.S. The NYTimes.com readers fared not quite as well, with a mean income of only $86,150 (still placing most of its readers in the top quintile). The same applies to CNN.com, whose readers have an average household income exceeding $80,000. [3]

It's not all that complicated. There are certain very obvious outlets of the media that cater to the management class and above, which makes perfect sense since that's where the money is.

Regarding the belief in UFO disclosure through the media, my point is this: when you look at the obvious management and above media outlets, you find nothing of a serious nature relating to UFOs. This is because management classes historically have relatively narrow ranges of acceptable beliefs. The first requisite of a successful ruling elite is that it share important foundational assumptions about its society and interests.

If you are born into the American Management Class, for instance, certain assumptions become second-nature, like believing in the corporate American style of capitalism as the best solution to humanity's problems, or in the inherent goodness of American intentions around the world. Members of this class must share its belief structure, else they become marginalized from real power.

As far as UFOs are concerned, all you have to do is study the management-oriented media to understand that believing in the existence of unexplained, highly advanced technology traversing the skies and oceans of this world is simply not acceptable. Not if you are a member of the management class.

To say the least, this is an idea that could be unsettling to the stability of those who rule. How to admit that UFOs are real after almost 60 years of incessant denial, without compromising the very political system upon which you've relied to keep things moving smoothly and profitably? Especially if (speaking hypothetically, here) certain of your members reap incredible profits from ground-floor investments in technologies that were adapted from sources that aren't supposed to exist?

On the other hand, from the perspective of power, it doesn't really matter what the bottom 80 or even 90 percent think. If they want to believe in aliens, or bigfoot, or conspiracy notions pertaining to the Kennedy assassination (another verboten topic for our management class), then by all means they can. Better yet, turn all that stuff into cheesy entertainment, keeping the rabble happily distracted while at the same time you disable these topics from entering the realm of serious discussion.

Of course, some of the media coverage discussing UFOs is rational and intelligent. After all, there are many rational and intelligent people in the bottom 90 percent. And no doubt there are management-types who enjoy slumming it, and who will catch the occasional UFO documentary. Perhaps such people enjoy a naughty and illicit feeling that comes with such a secret pleasure.

But the sampling of pro-UFO information that makes it to the Worker Bee culture doesn't mean very much as long as the management-oriented media refuses to take the subject seriously.

When we hear Tom Brokaw talking seriously about UFOs as real, then we'll all know something is afoot. Until then, don't hold your breath waiting for disclosure.

Notes:

[1] see The Economist Fisks Paul Krugman at http://ambit.typepad.com/ambit/2003/09/the_economist_f.html]

[2] See Inequality Matters, at http://inequality.org/facts.html. Source from data is Edward N. Wolff, Changes in Household Wealth in the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., Jerome Levy Economics Institute, May, 2004.

[3] See Good News for Marketers, Thursday, June 10, 2004, By Cheryl Pruett, iMedia Connection, http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/3618.asp]

Richard Dolan is Senior Editor for Phenomena Magazine, and author of UFOs and the National Security State. Visit his webpage at http://keyholepublishing.com.

ISTANBUL - An undentified flying object was sighted and filmed for the second time in ten days in the Turkish province of Mersin, reported a spokesperson for the local police via the Anatolia press agency.

According to Suleyman Ekizer, director of security in Mersin, the UFO made its first appearance over an industrial zone for an hour and 20 minutes during the night of July 19/20.

This morning it reappeared at 3:30 local time near a refinery in the same region, and flew over the zone for two hours before disappearing in the sky. The police official confirmed that the UFO has now been filmed twice.

Our agents have announced that a dark red colored UFO with yellow-green tones, of circular form that emitted lights and moved continuously appeared in the sky for two hours" Ekizer declared, according to Anatolia. These appearances have been forwarded to the Turkish centers of space exploration, added the agency.

There's something fishy going on in Manitoba's skies. Unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings in the Keystone Province are nearing an all-time high, according to an independent group that investigates and records reported sightings across Canada.

More than 50 have already been counted so far this year, double the 25 sightings recorded in 2003, said Winnipegger Chris Rutkowski, co-ordinator of Ufology Research of Manitoba. The most sightings in one year in Manitoba was 74 in 1993.

The reason for the increase is just as puzzling as details of some of the sightings, Rutkowski said. In July, two people driving along Highway 6 near Ponton, south of Thompson, saw two bright, orange-coloured lights zoom across the early morning sky.

"The first one rose up out of the bush beside the road and flew in front of them, a second ball of light came across the road and then both flew away," Rutkowski said. "A woman (in the car) said they were very frightened."

Winnipeggers have reported seeing "round patches of light" chasing each other in the sky above the northeast corner of the city, Rutkowski said.

"I suspect it's some sort of (spotlight) advertising mechanism," he said.

That sighting is one of more than 400 that have been reported by Canadians up until the end of last month, a large jump compared with last year's total of 300 during the same period, Rutkowski said.

One of his favourite sightings is from Caraquet, N.B., where odd pairs of lights were spotted in January above a highway.

"One person reported seeing something with two or three lights and some sort of structure attached to it," Rutkowski said. "That area seemed to be quite a UFO hot spot this winter."

Canada is on pace to top last year's total of 670 sightings, the most recorded in one year, he said. Most UFO sightings can be attributed to natural phenomena or human activity.

"There's a small percentage that we simply don't have explanations for. We can't say they're alien spacecrafts because we don't have that proof," Rutkowski said.

"There's probably life out there somewhere but whether it can come all the way here is the big question."

OTTAWA (CP) - From a translucent, saucer-shaped object in British Columbia to mysterious lights buzzing motorists in New Brunswick, Canadians are on their way to reporting a record-high number of UFO sightings this year.

More than 400 stories of curious encounters were filed through the end of July, compared with just over 300 by this time last year, says Ufology Research of Manitoba, a group that tracks reports of unidentified flying objects. At this rate, the total for 2004 will surpass the current record of 673 sightings reported last year, said Chris Rutkowski, research co-ordinator for the Winnipeg-based organization.

The group receives reports directly by telephone and e-mail, from sister agencies that follow the phenomenon, and via federal departments such as Transport and National Defence.

Rutkowski isn't sure why the numbers are rising, but suspects it might be linked to public awareness of recent exploratory missions to intriguing planets such as Mars and Saturn.

"I think there is a resurgence of interest in space," he said Thursday in an interview.

Dazzling mid-air manoeuvres were a feature of some of the more dramatic otherworldly episodes.

At a military base in Beaverbank, N.S., on April 23, three people spotted several lights in the east, including a slow-moving red one bobbing up and down.

Suddenly, a second red light swooped in, prompting the first one to climb upwards and fly over it.

In a July 5 incident, a Rosemont, Que., couple saw a very bright red light moving slowly westward. Travelling much too low to be an airplane or helicopter, the object plunged to the ground and disappeared after about a minute.

Two people sitting on a hill in an Edmonton park on June 23 watched four distinct lights hover above them.

"At first they thought it was some sort of satellite," Rutkowski said.

"But then the lights gathered together, close in the sky, and spread out again. They would travel in one direction for a while and then curve back in a very sharp turn in another direction. And they watched it for 90 minutes."

The Prairies seem to be a hotbed of unexplained activity.

REGINA - UFO sightings are up across the country and according to a Winnipeg-based research group, the same trend is happening in Saskatchewan.

Saskatoon's Gayle Martiniuk is one of a number of people in the province who have reported an unidentified flying object this year.

Her close encounter was simple. She went out to her porch and up in the sky she saw something she couldn't explain.

"It was larger than a commercial aircraft and it had very large lights on it and it was silent," she says. "There was no after sound or anything."

Chris Rutkowski has been collecting the reports from sources such as Transport Canada and the military for 15 years. He says so far this year, there have been 19 sightings in Saskatchewan, compared to 13 last year.

And across Canada people are reporting UFOs in record numbers.

He's not sure what causing the increase, but he won't rule anything out.

"We are not prepared to say that these are the aliens that are ready to invade Lloydminster. What we are prepared to say is that these are simply unusual objects reported in Canada - and we're not entirely sure what these are."

Rutkowski says the high numbers could be a result of growing numbers of satellites in the sky or increased flight traffic.

And he says people might be becoming more open minded to the possibility of other life forms as humans themselves continue to reach into space.

As for Gayle Martiniuk and her own close encounter, she says she's glad she's not alone.

"The thing that makes me feel more comforted is that more people are seeing [them]."

Freedom will always be a concept that is impossible to encapsulate cleanly. Like a house with many sides, there are many ways to look at freedom, and some of these ways are entirely subjective. You may not have much say in how your greater society is managed, but then again, if you don't care, you can feel quite free. If you're allowed to pursue your personal interests, follow your favorite television show or sports team, why would you feel oppressed?

Much of our recent history has involved such a dumbing down of our political desires. You can decide for yourself if this is part of a grand scheme by our rulers, or simply the result of market forces in a post-modern age. Either way, what we have today is a country - excuse me, a world, more or less - filled with people who, when they're not as work feeding the machine, generally sit on their asses watching T.V. or surfing the net in the endless quest for entertainment.

"We the People" have long since ceased to rule in any meaningful sense. Who elects our supposed "representatives" in Congress and the White House, those citizens whom we expect to act in the name of the people? Who rules? Do you rule?

Americans like to call themselves free. In fact, they have joined the ranks of the unfree. I am still trying to trace this processes historically - I have little doubt that it is related to the poisonous Armor of Empire being worn on the body of this old republic. But the main thing is that it's happened, and that neither our alleged leaders, nor our alleged public watchdog media, ever acknowledge this publicly.

The basic problem of any kind of representative democratic system is that, to succeed, it must have an informed citizenry. The founders of the American republic understood this problem well - read the Federalist papers to get an idea. But despite our so-called Information Age, I would submit that the typical American citizen is less informed of the world around us than our great-grandparents were one hundred years ago.

This is entirely in line with what our media leaders want. Consider the attitude of the late Katharine Graham, long-time publisher of the Washington Post. In 1988 she stated matters quite clearly: "there are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

Well, Ms. Graham can rest easy in her eternal slumber knowing that what the general public doesn't know grows by reams and reams every year.

America's classified world is removed almost entirely from public control. In the early 1990s, Herbert Foerstel, Head of Branch Libraries at University of Maryland and board member of the National Security Archive, reported that the Pentagon alone had about 10,000 classification compartments, often called Special Access Programs (SAP) and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). More recently, author James Bamford (Body of Secrets) likened the classified system to "an endless spiral, [with] secret classification systems within secret classification systems." We number our classified documents by the trillion, and the number continues to grow.

An unknown, but surely significant, part of that secrecy is concerned with the topic of exotic aerial phenomena. We know this from the history of FOIA documents we have received, a small sampling of which I discussed in the previous article of this series. Plus, every now and then, a mainstream publication actually tells us something useful.

The 3/18/96 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology, for instance, stated that the U.S. Air Defense Operations Center at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado - an integral part of the North American Air Defense system (NORAD) - tracks and identifies thousands of "vehicles" in near and deep space.

The article stated that "these regions monitored about seven thousand aircraft tracts per day in 1994, and labeled approximately 880 of them as 'unknowns' within the allotted two minutes required for identification....Others (unidentified contacts) warranted intercepts by fighters scrambled from airfields around the continent's periphery."

In other words, American pilots continue to chase UFOs. What do these pilots see when they get close enough to one? In some cases, it's drug traffickers. Of the 880 unknowns for 1994, for instance, "about 90" were correlated with suspected drug activities, according to Brigadier General Raymond P. Huot, commander of the Cheyenne Mountain complex. That still leaves a lot of unidentifieds flying into the U.S. Against which nation is America defending itself when it scrambles all these interceptors? What country, in 1994 or today, has an air force that is constantly harassing us in this way?

We don't know the answers because NORAD is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The now-deceased Imperator Ronald Reagan had a few things to do with our current difficulties in obtaining information from the government.

Reagan helped to get pesky citizens off government's back when he emasculated the Freedom of Information Act. This was Executive Order #12356 in April 1982. A year later, he authorized a National Security Decision Directive that extended the use of secrecy contracts among federal employees and enacted lifetime censorship over them.

As a result, a president can now lie about something - oh, let's say, an important foreign policy matter - and a Senator who knows the President is lying is not allowed to contradict him using classified information.

But I digress, and besides, Reagan doesn't deserve all the blame anyway. He didn't start this mess, and since his time we've gone far deeper into the woods. Just a few years ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens.

"When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part," Ashcroft told them, "you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records." Can you imagine such a statement being made during the Carter Presidency?

The FOIA isn't dead. It is still somewhat amenable to the public. A few interesting UFO reports continue to come out, such as an interesting report from January 1994, from the U.S. Embassy at Dushanbe, Tajikistan. This was sent to the Secretary of State, CIA, DIA, as well as U.S. embassies in Moscow, Beijing, and elsewhere. A pilots and his crew reported an object traveling at a great rate of speed and at a much higher altitude than their own aircraft. They watched the object for some forty minutes as it maneuvered in circles, corkscrews and made 90-degree turns at rapid rates of speed and under very high g's. The captain took several photographs. The report stated, "on the basis of its speed and maneuverability, [Captain] Rhodes expressed the opinion, which his crew seemed to support, that the object was extraterrestrial ! and under intelligent control."

Interesting as this report is, we should not deceive ourselves that the FOIA will provide the single smoking gun proving ET is here. It is my belief that we are permitted to see only the tiniest portion of an enormous body of information. In all likelihood, most of this data will remain deeply classified.

Precisely because ordinary citizens are unable to examine this significant part of our reality, we need honest and strong journalists to fight for us. But apart from a noble few, the journalistic profession and industry is busy in service to the State.

Back in 1977, journalist Carl Bernstein revealed that the CIA had used more than 400 journalists to carry out assignments over the past quarter of a century. This included but was not limited to planting disinformation and propaganda. These were covert, paid arrangements which helped many a journalistic career. Today, the CIA blandly says, in effect, "we don't do that anymore." To which the appropriate response is "B.S." Not only does the CIA have cozy working relationships with journalists around the world (and certainly the Internet), but why would one think the rest of the American national security establishment doesn't? Can anyone seriously believe otherwise?

How many commentators in television, radio, print, and Internet media have a Top Secret clearance unknown to most of us? I personally know of such cases, and have little doubt this is a major area warranting further investigation.

Within such a culture of denial, it is easy for the powers-that-be to say whatever they want. They know full well they will get away with it. Curious Senators and Members of Congress are given the same old song and dance, that "no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security." The public is given official reports on UFOs by officers who are experts in disinformation, as was the author of the 1994 Report on Roswell, Col. Richard Weaver (little known fact: Weaver taught courses on the uses of disinformation for Air Force personnel). And the CIA can state in 1997 that it has "paid only limited and peripheral attention to the [UFO] phenomena."

America's national security apparatus is beyond public control. Its pervasiveness has corrupted our society. It is permeated with an arrogance that only the very powerful can possess.

And it is precisely this culture that dominates information pertaining to the UFO phenomenon. The sooner you disabuse yourself of the notion that your government is responsive to your interests in this matter - or even telling you the truth - the better.

A Guide to the Federal UFO/Mind Control Initiative

On April 29, 1945 the 363rd Medical Battalion entered Experimentation Block Five at Dachau, the setting of pitiless terminal experiments on prisoners.

Inside, the medics were met by the stench of human putrescence and the shock of bloody body parts strewn from one end of the block to the other. The