UFO ROUNDUP Volume 5 Number 33
Volume 5
Number 33
August 17, 2000
Editor: Joseph Trainor
E-mail: Masinaigan@aol.com
PREHISTORIC STAR MAPS FOUND IN FRANCE AND SPAIN
A German scientist has found star maps within the cave paintings of France and Spain. The paintings were done by prehistoric Cro-Magnon man about 16,500 years ago.
The maps discovered at Lascaux in central France, "which are though to date back 16,500 years, show three bright stars known today as the Summer Triangle."
"A map of the Pleiades star cluster has also been found among the Lascaux frescoes."
""And another cluster of stars, drawn 14,000 years ago, has been identified in a cave in Spain."
"According to German researcher Dr. Michael Rappenglueck of the University of Munich, the maps show that our ancestors were more sophisticated than many believe."
"The Lascaux caves, with their spectacular drawings of bulls, horses and antelopes, were painted 16,500 years ago."
"Discovered in 1940, the walls show the artistic talents of our distant ancestors. But the drawings may also demonstrate their scientific knowledge as well."
"The star map has been found in a region of the Lascaux caves known as the Shaft of the Dead man."
"Painted onto the wall of the shaft is a bull, a strange bird-man and a bird on a stick."
(Editor's Comment: Bird-man, eh? Interesting. The Incas believed that a "bird-man" gave Manco Capac and his sister-wife, Coya Mama Ocllo Huallpa, a golden staff and instructed them to leave their home in Bolivia and found the city that became Cuzco.)
"According to Dr. Rappenglueck, these images form a map of the sky with the eyes of the bull, the bird-man and the bird representing the three present stars Vega, Deneb and Altair. Together these stars are popularly known as the Summer Triangle and are among the brightest stars that can be picked out overhead during the middle months of the northern (hemisphere) summer."
"Around 17,000 years ago this region of the sky would never have been below the horizon and would have been expecially prominent at the start of spring."
"'It is a map of the prehistoric cosmos,' Dr. Rappenglueck told BBC News Online. 'It was their sky, full of animals and spirit guides.'"
"Neareer to the entrance to the Lascaux caves is a magnificent painting of a bull. Hanging over the shoulder is what appears to be a map of the Pleiades, the cluster of stars sometimes known as the Seven Sisters."
"Inside the bull painting there are also indications of spots that may be representations of other stars found in that region of the sky."
"Today this region forms part of the constellation of Taurus the bull, showing that identification of this part of the sky stretches back thousands of years."
(Editor's Comment: This is really mind-blowing. It means that Cro-Magnon man was aware of the Zodiac 17,000 years ago.)
"Dr. Rappenglueck has also identified a star map painted on the walls of a cave in Spain 14,000 years ago. The Cueva del Castillo cave, in the mountains of Pico del Castillo, contains a region known as the Frieze of Hands."
"At the end of this remarkable section can be found a curved pattern of dots."
"'Nobody paid much attention to it,' Dr. Rappenglueck said, 'But it is obviously a drawing of the constellation we know as the Northern Crown (Corona Borealist--J.T.) It is truly remarkable.'" (See BBC Online News for August 9, 2000. Many thanks to Louise Lowry for forwarding the article.)
(Editor's Comment: I am very much intrigued by this Cro-Magnon fascination with the Pleiades. This star cluster figures prominently in the folklore of many of the indigenous peoples here in the Americas.)
CHUPACABRA STRIKES AGAIN IN NORTHERN CHILE
The mysterious predator known as the Chupacabra struck again in northern Chile last week, killing six chickens by draining their bodies of blood.
The attack took place in a backyard chicken coop on the Calle Galvarino (street) in the barrio Norte (section) of Conche, a small town 130 kilometers (78 miles) northeast of Calama and 90 kilometers (54 miles) west of the border with Bolivia.
According to the chickens' owner, Sra. Ana Reyes, "at approximately 9 a.m. yesterday (Tuesday, August 8, 2000--J.T.) she went out as she does every morning to feed her chickens and to check to see if any eggs had been laid."
"'When I got there, I found six of them dead, missing feathers, and with two puncture marks on their spines, aside from being very dry with no blood whatsoever,' she said."
According to the newspaper Cronica, the chickens were "as dry as if all their blood had been drained."
"Upon inspecting the henhouse's perimeter, located behind the woman's house and facing another dwelling occupied by her daughter, she discovered that a rather large animal, to judge by its footprints, had opened a hole on one side of the structure in order to get inside and slay the chickens."
"'The strangest part is that neither my daughter nor I heard anything during the night, nor did the dogs bark very much, except for the morning when we were all awake,' Sra. Reyes said."
"In spite of all this, she doesn't believe that it could have been a dog because the hens were bloodless and did not appear to have been bitten or to have any flesh missing."
"'Had dogs been the culprits, aside from killing them, they would have eaten some of them, and that's not the case here,' she added." (See the Chilean newspaper Cronica for August 9, 2000. Muchas gracias a Scott Corrales, autor de los libros Chupacabras and Other Mysteries y Forbidden Mexico y tambien Gloria Coluchi para eso articulo de diario.)
UFO SIGHTED TWICE NEAR VAIL, COLORADO
A local man sighted a UFO on two occasions last weekend just east of the ski resort town of Vail, Colorado (population 4,000).
On Sunday, August 6, 2000, at 9:35 p.m., Robert Fiske "stepped outside into the parking lot of my condo building in the East Vail area to walk my dog before heading for work. I took a look up into the sky and almost directly overhead I saw what I first thought was a light aircraft flying low over Vail. I was immediately struck by the strange arrangement of lights on the object, and the fact that I should have been able to hear engine noise from it as it seemed to be no more than 500 to 1,000 feet above the valley floor."
"The four white lights I could see on the underside of the craft were symmetrically arranged at equal locations from each other--one forward, one in the rear, one each on the outside. If the craft was circular, it would have lights at each 90 degrees (position)."
"I watched it as it continued eastward at a relatively slow rate of speed. I could hear vehicles on (Interstate Highway) I-70 that runs near my condo building, as well as a jet engine from an airliner which I saw flying west at a much higher altitude, but I could not hear any engine noise from the object. I had it in sight for about two minutes until it faded in the east."
Two days later, Bob had another sighting. This one took place on Tuesday, August 8, 2000, at 8:35 a.m. He was driving home on I-70, having just completed his work shift at a lodge in Vail. He "was driving home from work on I-70 between Exits 176 and 183 going eastbound. My eye caught the sun glinting off an object to the east. As I watched it approach, the sunlight stopped reflecting off it and I could see a dull gray elongated shape which I took for the fuselage of an aircraft. I tried to make out wings or a tail section to make sure it was an aircraft but could not. I pulled quickly over to the side of the interstate and grabbed for my camera, which I've been carrying with me most of the time now, to try to get a picture. I kept glancing at the object as I fumbled with the camera. As I went to take a picture, the object, which had still been approaching from the east, suddenly faded from view before I could snap it I took one anyway of the area where I had last seen it." Unfortunately, nothing showed up in the snapshot's image.
Vail is on Interstate Highway I-70 about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Denver. (Email Form Report)
HOVERING UFO SEEN BY A CAMPER IN SASKATCHEWAN
On Sunday, July 30, 2000, at 10:07 p.m., D.N. was lying on his sleeping bag at a campground near Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Canada when he spotted a UFO.
"I was lying in my tent, looking at a bright star overhead--Vega," D.N. reported, "At 10:07 p.m., I noticed that it appeared that a star near the constellation Hercules suddenly began glowing brighter. Within about three seconds, it had become very bright, as bright as an aircraft landing light and many times brighter than any other star visible overhgead, with a bluish quality (aura--J.T.) to it (like the strobe lights on a communications tower--D.N.) Then it simply winked out."
"I watched the area for several seconds to see if the light might have been an aircraft passing overhead, although the light was much broighter than any aircraft strobe light I've seen at night, then made a note of the time. I watched the sky for another forty minutes, then retired for the evening."
Humboldt is on Provincial Highway 5 located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Saskatook. (Email Form Report)
CONCORDE CRASH: THE MYSTERY DEEPENS
"A fuel leak that led to the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde jet was probably caused by a strip of metal on the runway where the supersonic jet took off, investigators said Thursday," August 10, 2000.
"The 16-inch piece of metal, which was not part of the doomed jet, probably punctured one of the jet's tires, according to" France's Ministry of Transportation. "The damaged tire sent heavy chunks of rubber flying forcefully into the jet fuel tanks."
"The tire chunks--some weighing 9 pounds or more-- damaged one or several fuel reservoirs on the jet's left wing," feeding the Number 1 and Number 2 engines. The fire was in the Number 2 engine. (For more details, see UFO Roundup, volume 5, number 31 for August 3, 2000, "Concored Crash: The UFO Connection," page 1.)
The damage caused "'a very important fuel leak and fire,'" according to the ministry's Accident and Inquiry Office.
"The office's statement, which said the supersonic jet was traveling at 196 miles per hour (212 kilometers per hour) when the tire burst, shed more light on why the Concorde crashed outside Paris" in Gonesse on July 25, 2000. "The jet smashed into a hotel, killing all 109 people aboard and four people on the ground."
"The exact chain of events that brought the aircraft down remains to be determined, the report siad. Experts still must confirm the theory that the stray piece of metal was responsible for the crash. The report also did not say where the metal might have come from."
Meanwhile, a new wrinkle has emerged in the Munchengladbach angle of the Concorde crash. Last week news sources in Europe revealed that the "homemade bomb" which exploded at the commuter rail station in Dusseldorf "injured 10 recent immigrants, six of them Jewish."
(Editor's Note: The original news report made absolutely no mention of this.) (See USA Today for August 11, 2000, "Jet probe: Puncture was cause" and "Germany tries to quash rise in hate crimes," page 11A.)
(Editor's Comment: Great! Now we have an anomalous piece of metal mixed in with the Concorde crash debris. And no explanation as to how it got there. If this keeps up, we're going to have to start a new newsletter--Aviation Conspiracy Digest. And here comes another item for our proposed new e-zine.)
NO AGREEMENT ON CAUSE OF EGYPTAIR 990 CRASH
"The National Transportation Safety Board released the details of its investigation into the crash of Egyptair Flight 990 Friday," August 11, 2000, "but drew no conclusion about the cause, a move that allows the political dispute between the United States and Egypt to continue."
James Hall, chairman of the USA's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released the "1,665 pages of data, including interviews with witnesses, mechanical reports and transcripts from tape recorders in the cockpit."
Flight 990 crashed off the Massachusetts coast on October 31, 1999 following a sudden plunge caused by a failure of the plane's elevators. (For more details, see UFO Roundup, volume 4, number 31 for November 25, 1999, "Mysterious engine failure doomed Egyptair Flight 990," page 1.)
"The new information reignited passions that have simmered since U.S. news organizations reported that U.S. officials believed the crash was an act of suicide by the co-pilot, Gameel el-Batouty."
"Egyptian officials and members of el-Batouty's family strongly deny that he could have intentionally brought down the plane, saying that he was a happy family man and that the accusation is part of an attempt to cover up the real cause."
In November 1999, a German airline pilot claimed that he had seen Flight 990 dive to avoid a small missile rocketing up from the eastern tip of Long island..
"Egyptair officials insisted Friday that the evidence released points to a mechanical failure in the plane's elevators, two small flaps at the rear of the plane which direct the nose of the aircraft and are normally level with each other. During the last few moments of the flight, the two flaps were uneven. Egyptian officials believe this suggests mechanical failure."
On the other hand, "U.S. investigators have said they suspect the malfunction was caused by one pilot trying to pull the plane up while another was trying to push it further down."
All 217 people aboard the Boeing 767 were killed when it crashed in the Atlantic Ocean.
"In an unusual move, the NTSB included testimony from FBI reports that detail allegations that the co-pilot, Gameel el-Batouty, exposed himself and repeatedly propositioned female staffers at a hotel in New York. He even voiced fear that he was 'in trouble' over the allegations, one unidentified witness told investigators."
"They are attacking the dignity of an honored man, who has been honored by the Egyptian government.' said Walid el-Batouty, the co-pilot's nephew. 'And so this hurts the feelings of all the Egyptian people.'"
"'They did not release anything today, 'said Walid el-Batouty, 'All that was issued today has already been leaked by the NTSB, and those leaks only caused damage to my uncle and my family. His wife is not doing well at all. She is very much upset today by the report. That is (character) assassination.'"
The main point of contention between the sides is the two-minute conversation between el-Batouty and the pilot, Captain mahmoud el-Habashy.
"The tape was not released and the (NTSB) translation was disputed by the Arabic-speaking members of the investigative team." (See the Minneapolis, Minn. Star-Tribune for August 12, 2000, "Egyptair crash report leaves cause undetermined," page A8, and USA Today for August 14, 2000, "NTSB sees no mechanical flaw on 990," page 3A.)
(Editor's Comment: And the tape is still classified. So welcome to the biggest coverup since the crash of TWA Flight 800. Forgotten is the German pilot's testimony and the early reports of multiple radar images trakced by Logan Airport in Boston, Mass. All we have is the NTSB version of the cockpit conversation. Did Captain el-Habashy and co-pilot el-Batouty mention a UFO on the tape? With the actual tape locked away, your guess is as good as mine.)
MYSTERIOUS ENGINE FAILURE DOWNS A PLANE IN OREGON
On Thursday, August 10, 2000, pilot Howard Hamer took off from Chilloquin, Oregon in his single-engine home-built Lancer 236.
While he was airborne, the Lancer's engine suddenly and musteriously lost all power. Hamer "decided to attempt an emergency landing on U.S. Highway 97" just north of Klamath Falls, Oregon (population 18,000).
Hamer lined up the plane with the highway, the Lancer's nose heading north, and began his gliding descent.
Meanwhile, an empty logging flatbed truck driven by Filiberto Corona Ambriz of Arbuckle, California, was also heading north on Highway 97. "Without realizing it," Corona "pulled under Hamer's plane...The plane's propellor snagged on the sleeper of the truck, and the tail crashed down onto the empty flatbed trailer."
Neither Hamer, a resident of Nevada City, California, nor Corona were injured. (See the Minneapolis, Minn. Star-Tribune for August 12, 2000, Cleared for landing--on a truck bed," page A6.)
(Editor's Noe: Klamath Falls, Ore. is the most notorious UFO hotspot in Oregon.)
A NEW SAINT NICK
"Ending a decades-long debate, the Russian Orthodox Church decided Monday," August 14, 2000, "to canonize Russia's last czae, Nicholas II."
The church maintains that the last Romanov emperor "died as a martyr to faith when he was executed 82 years ago."
"The Archbishops Council, the church's highest body, also canonized his wife Alexandra, and the couple's four" teenaged "daughters and one son. All were killed by a Bolshevik firing squad."
"Although Nicholas was reviled by many, he and his family deserved sainthood for their 'meekness during imprisonment and acceptance of their martyrs' death,' according to a church statement.
"The vote was unanimous, the Interfax news agency reported."
"Nicholas abdicated as czar on March 15, 1917, as revolutionary fervor swept Russia." The family was arrested by the Cheka on the orders of Communist dictator Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a.a. Lenin "and in April 1918 they were sent to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg."
"On July 17 a firing squad led by Yakov Sverdlov, a Zionist Bolshevik, "lined them up in the basement of a palace there and killed them."
(Editor's Comment: Yet there are stories that two Romanovs, the czarevich Alexei and his sister, Anastasia, were rescued by a traitor in Sverdlov's execution squad and smuggled out of Russia by the White Brotherhood of Orenburg.)
"'In the last Russian Orthodox monarch and his family, we see people who sincerely tried to carry out the commandments of the Gospels in their lives,' the council's statement said."
"Nicholas II was the fourth Russian czar to be canonized; the previous three ruled in the Middle Ages. Many (Russian) believers already considered the last czar holy and have said they were cured of medical ailments after praying to him."
"Miracles have been reported on the anniversary of his abdication and at the site of his death." (See USA Today for August 15, 2000, "Last czar canonized by Russian church," page 14A.)
(Editor's Comment: Wouldn't it be something if Alexei is still alive and hiding out in Villa Margarita, Butch and Sundance's old hideout in Bolivia? He'd be 93 today--same age as Fatima seer Sister Lucia Abobora de Jesus dos Santos. Probably drinking yerba mate and playing shuffleboard with Etta Place. Well, there are worse fates. It's a long way home from the Crab Nebula. Just ask Judge Crater.)
from the UFO Files...
1874: UNFORGETTABLE CHARLES FORT
Yesterday was the one-hundred-and-twenty- sixth anniversary of the birth of this remarkable man, who could truly be called "the Father of Ufology."
Charles Hoy Fort was born in Albany, New York on August 16, 1874, the son of Charles nelson Fort, a wholesale grocer, and Agnes Hoy. Both the Fort and the Hoy families were patroons, descendants of the Nederlander families who had settled along the upper Hudson River in the Seventeenth Century.
(Editor's Note: The original Ganegahaga or Mohawk name for the river was Cohotatea.)
As a child, Fort "was intrigued by science and earnestly collected birds' eggs, insects and rocks." When his Grandpa Hoy, who owned an Albany market, asked him what he intended to be when he grew up, Fort replied, "A naturalist."
He got into more than his share of mischief, though, and was usually at odds with his stern Victorian father, a breach that worsened after the elder Fort allowed Charles's younger brother Clarence to be committed to a mental asylum.
(Editor's Comment: Let me guess, Clarence claimed he had been in contact with aliens from space. It would be interesting to read that particular casefile.)
In 1891, at age 17, Fort "became a reporter for the Albany, N.Y. Democrat and soon began to sell feature articles to the Brooklyn World" in New York City. Grandpa Hoy died in 1891, leaving him a small inheritance. And, in 1892, Fort quit high school, took a train to New York City and became a staff reporter at the World.
About the same time, Fort first became interested in UFOs. He avidly followed the strange case of Morris A. Veeder in Lyons, New York. For several months, a strange light hovered over Lyons during the winter months--a luminous orb seen nowhere else in upstate New York. He later wrote about the case in one of his books.
In 1893, Fort embarked on a trip around the world "in order, as he later wrote, 'to accumulate a knowledge and an experience of life that would fit me to become a writer.' " He traveled extensively through Canada, the UK and South Africa."
(Editor's Note: It appears that Fort was in South Africa during the Capetown "golden globes" UFO case of 1895. Maybe one of our South African readers can provide some more information.)
Returning to New York City in early 1896, Fort "married Anna Filing, a childhood friend from Albany. The couple had no children."
As the Twentieth Century dawned, Fort eked out a shoestring existence as a writer, submitting humorous articles to Tom Watson's Magazine, the Popoular Magazine and Smith's Magazine, which was edited by novelist Theodore Dreiser, with whom he eventually became close friends.
Following a UFO flap on the USA's West Coast in 1904, Fort "devoted much of his time to the pursuit that was to become the focus of his life: the collection of data he considered inexplicable by conventional science."
Fort's was a world "hovering between the two poles of Order and Chaos. He could produce proof that there had been rains of frogs, rains of blood, that people had been mysteriously swished off the planet and that strange people from other planets had visited here in hordes."
Still Fort continued his literary career. He wrote ten comic novels but only one of them, The Outcast Manufacturers, was ever published. It appeared in 1906. The other nine are now lost.
"Around 1912 he write a book called X, which suggested that the Earth was controlled by Martians; and in 1916 followed it with another, titled Y, describing the influence on our civilization of a race living at the South Pole."
(Editor's Comment: Shades of H.P. Lovecraft and his "Kadath of the Cold Waste!")
Dreiser was very much impressed with both books and sought in vain for publishers for them. But there were no takers. Depressed, Fort destroyed 40,000 notes he had compiled on strange phenomena.
In 1919, he tried again with a new work, The Book of the Damned. Again most publishers rejected it, but Dreiser arm-twisted his own publisher, Boni 7 Liveright, into putting Fort's book in print.
Fort stunned the world with his parade of "the damned," evidence of phenomena that scientists often wilfully and deliberately ignored. He presented hundreds of cases of UFOs, strange sky falls, unusual buried prehistoric artifacts, strange disappearances and bizarre happenings, all of it served up with a uniquely American down-home humor.
Fort told how in 1890 people in Loudonville, Ohio had seen a city floating in the daytime sky. Some declared the apparition to be "the New Jerusalem." Others thought it looked like the city of Sandusky.
Fort wrote, "Now it may be that Heaven is exactly like Sandusky. And those of us who have no desire to go to Sandusky should ponder that point."
But not everybody enjoyed Fort's writing. H.L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, wrote to Dreiser, "Is it that Fort seriously maintains that there is an Ultra- Saragossa Sea somewhere in the air, and that all of the meteors, frogs, and other things has dropped out of it? He seems to be enormously ignorant of elementary science, particularly biology."
H.G. Wells, the dean of science fiction authors, was even more harsh, writing, "Fort is one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers and thought they were facts. And he writes like a drunkard."
But Dreiser stuck by his big, shaggy-haired friend, writing, "You--the most fascinating literary figure since (Edgar Allan) Poe. You--who for all I know may be the progenitor of an entirely new world-viewpoint."
Fort, he told Mencken, "is a great thinker and a man of deep and cynical humor...To me he is simply stupendous and someday I believe he will get full credit" for his work.
In 1921, Fort took his wife Anna to London. He did full-time research at the British Museum and spent evenings writing a book entitled New Lands. In it Fort took swipes at astronomers, whome he wrote, "are led by a pillar of rubbish by day and a cloud of bosh by night."
But he also pointed out strange phenomena in outer space seen by the astronomers of Earth and hinted at the existence of what modern science fiction writers call "generation ships"--humungous UFOs that pass through our solar system the same way modern cruise lingers pass by the Stone Age islands off Borneo or New Guinea.
The Forts returned to New York City in 1929 and, two years later, in 1931, Fort published his third and most famous book, Lo! Dreiser and another noovelist, Tiffany Thayer, organized a Fortean Society and invited Fort to join.
But Fort, described as "a shy, bearlike man with a brown walrus moustache and thick glasses," refused to attend the inaugural dinner. He thought science had already become a cult with its dogma and materialist world-view and resolute defenders. He saw the Fortean Society evolving the same way. Eventually the two systems would be at each other's throat, like the rival papacies at Rome and Avignon in the Middle Ages.
By 1931, Fort was being hailed in the American newspapers as "that arch-foe of science" and had become, along with Jennifer Lopez, the most famous resident of New York City's Bronx borough.
He planned a new book, and he broadened the scope of strange phenomena to be studied--Bigfoot, the Yeti, lake monsters, precognition, ESP and psychokinesis. He even coined a new word--teleportation--which was immediately picked up by science fiction writers all over the planet.
In February 1932, Fort began to take notice of the cancer that was slowly taking his life. He wrote, "Without being definitely ill, I can't take walks, can't smoke half as much, have cut down meals one half, am sleeping poorly, have cut down on beer."
Fort hesitated to go to a doctor. He was already planning a fifth book, Medi-Vaudeville, dealing with physicians, hospital horrors, miraculous cures and outlandish biological oddities. But his time was running out.
In April 1932, he submitted Wild Talents to his publisher. Three weeks later, he was rushed from his Bronx apartment to the hospital. And on May 3, 1932, he died at the age of fifty-seven.
The massive UFO wave of 1947 produced a kind of posthumous vindication of the man from Albany. For as onne writer pointed out, "those pesky saucers found their home port in the pages of Charles Fort." (See Charles Fort--Prophet of the Unexplained by Damon Knight. 1976; Dreiser by W. A. Swanberg, 1969, pages 244, 251 and 397; ad the New York Times for May 5, 1932.)
That's it for this week. Join us next time for more UFO and paranormal news from around the planet Earth, brought to you by "the paper that goes home--UFO Roundup. See you then."
UFO ROUNDUP: Copyright 2000 by Masinaigan Productions, all rights reserved. Readers may download news items from UFO Roundup to their websites or to newsgroups provided that they credit the newsletter and its editor by name and list the dateof issue in which the item first appeared.
