UFO ROUNDUP Volume 8 Number 26
Volume 8
Number 26
July 16, 2003
Editor: Joseph Trainor
E-mail: Masinaigan@aol.com
UFOs SIGHTED IN FRANCE
"On the night of Friday, July 4, 2003," Fabien C., 29, "had a cigarette outside in my garden" in Cherbourg, in the department of Manche in western France, "and I watched a plane passing over, when suddenly, behind the plane, I perceived several lights of weak intensity but moving at a high speed."
"I immediately called my wife, and she called a friend, who was also there, to have a look. The friend arrived, as well as two children, and they immediately saw what I had seen. The lights passed over very quickly and overtook the Airbus jetliner without any difficulty. It was a very clear sky. There were several points of light (about 15 to 20 points of light--F.C.), coloured orange and of a weak luminosity."
On Sunday, June 22, 2003, at 1:07 p.m., Serge S. "saw a UFO at Pic du Midi de Siguer, in the department of Arioge," in southern France. "It was a clear sky with some scattered thick clouds. Serge described the UFO as 'a lengthened gray spot.' The speed and distance of the object were 'impossible to determine.'" (See Le Journal de l'Ufologie for July 7, 2003. Merci beaucoup a Robert Fischer pour ces articles de journal.)
CIGAR-SHAPED UFO TRAILS AN AIRLINER IN ITALY
"An aircraft in flight was allegedly buzzed by a missile-shaped UFO over the city of Benevento," located 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Napoli (Naples).
"This was the report made to Italian authorities by the commander of an Alpi Eagles Fokker 100 which, at around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, June 25, 2003, was about to land in Napoli with 80 passengers...when the commander called the control tower to report having observed a strange and large, elongated 'missile-like' object, coming towards him from the opposite direction and passing very close underneath the plane."
The Fokker's flight had originated in Palermo, on the island of Sicily just south of Italy. The claim was investigated by Italy's National Flight Assistance Agency and the Civil Aviation National Agency.
"In a report filed on Thursday, June 26, 2003, the (Fokker) commander described 'an unidentified flying object' approaching him from an altitude of approximately 8,000 feet (2,400 meters). It was cylindrical in form, 3 to 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) in length, white in color, and reflected the sun's rays."
"The object, observed by both Fokker pilots (aircraft commander and co-pilot--J.T.) was apparently not detected by radar systems. For security reasons, however, the state prosecutor in Napoli opened and investigation and confiscated the radar recordings and (radio) dialogue between the aircraft and the control tower." (See the Italian newspaper Il Giornale of Napoli for June 27, 28 and 29, 2003. Grazie a Edoardo Russo, Renzo Cabassi e Antonio Cuccu di Centro Italiano di Studi Ufologici (CISU) per questo rapporto.)
MYSTERIOUS GLOWING CROSS SEEN OVER THE AZORES
"A strange phenomenon has been observed in the night sky above the village of Povoacao on the island of Sao Miguel in the Azores." The islands, located 1,280 kilometers (800 miles) from Europe in the Atlantic Ocean, belong to Portugal.
"The principal witness, Nidia Fidalgo, is a high school science teacher who immigrated to the Azores from Portugal. An enthusiastic amateur astronomer, she has the custom of observing the stars at night."
Sra. Fidalgo originally sighted the mystery object in late April 2003. "The phenomenon is a white cross, shaped like a + sign, and it is static (stationary) in the night sky. She first saw the phenomenon at 12:30 a.m. The sky was starry with just a few clouds. She said the cross seemed to be under the clouds, but it was much too defined for that."
"'It was a cross painted on the sky,' Sra. Fidalgo said, 'It was two large whitish bands perpendicularly cross, and, in the middle, where the two bands intersected, the colour is more clear.'"
On Saturday, June 14, and Monday, June 16, 2003, "she saw the cross again in the same place" over Povoacao "between 11 p.m. and midnight."
"In June, the cross had a homogenous white colour and, in the middle, it is clearer."
More recently, Sra. Fidalgo "saw the cross on Wednesday, July 2, 2003, at about 1 a.m. The sky had too many clouds, but then she noticed the cross behind the clouds."
On Monday, July 7, 2003, "she noticed that the cross was static (stationary) in the sky and was of an apparent size larger than the full moon. The cross always appears near the zenith point."
The appearances of the cross have generated excitement on the island of Sao Miguel. Witnesses think it might be some kind of portent. Others claim that it's a "new Star of Bethlehem," possibly announcing the rebirth of Jesus Christ in the Azores. Still others refuse to go out and look at the phenomenon, believing it is something to be feared. (Muito obrigado a Filipe Gomes por eso caso.)
OVAL-SHAPED UFO SEEN IN UPSTATE NEW YORK
On Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 8:35 p.m., Craig S. reported, "On Broadfield Road in Manlius, N.Y., my cousin and I observed a wingless oval-shaped object traveling from east to west for approximately 15 to 20 seconds overhead, before it vanished behind the area's trees."
"The angle of observation was from approximately 85 degrees to 50 degrees relative to the horizon. The relative comparative size of the object was equal to an asprin tablet held at arm's length. The object appeared to be metallic and was a dark copper color and appeared to reflect the setting sun's rays and, as a result, it had gold highlighting. The object emitted no sound or contrail. The object's speed was approximately the same as a commercial airliner (450 miles per hour--J.T.) at a medium cruising altitude. The night was clear except for a few cirrus cloud wisps, which the object was visually below."
"After the sighting, we stayed outside for some time hoping we could see the object again, which we did not. However, upon leaving at 10 p.m., we observed a white light traveling at a very high speed from north to south in the western sky, which covered the whole sky in approximately 5 seconds and then disappeared."
Manlius, N.Y. (population 4,819) is on Route 92 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southeast of Syracuse. (Many thanks to John and Jenny Hoppe of UFO Wisconsin for this report.)
DAYLIGHT DISC SPOTTED IN NORTHEASTERN WISCONSIN
On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 4 p.m., the male witness "was putting the cover on my boat" in Eagle River, Wisconsin (population 1,443). "I looked up into the sky and I noticed an extremely shiny (metallic/silver) cigar- shaped object traveling in an east to west direction. The object traveled at a very slow rate of speed" over the evergreen forests of Vilas County, Wisconsin, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Watersmeet, Michigan.
"There was no contrail, no wings, no windows, no lights or anything of a discernible nature that would support that this was an aircraft or a balloon."
"The object seemed to reflect the bright sun off its surface, but then I noticed that a vertical band of light started to appear from the front of the object and traveled slowly to the back of the object. This band of light appeared every 15 seconds or so and traveled over the surface of the object from front to rear. The object did not change speed, hover, or change direction at all."
"I observed the object for about two minutes and tracked it until it went out of sight over the treeline. The weather conditions at the time of the sighting were absolutely clear. My impression is that the object was relatively small, maybe the size of a small plane, and that the altitude of the object was 1,000 feet (300 meters). I am truly blown away at what I saw and can't stop thinking about the event." (Many thanks to John and Jenny Hoppe of UFO Wisconsin for this report.)
UNUSUAL "RING OF SMOKE" SEEN IN SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
"Moisture coming in from the Gulf of Mexico dumped more than an inch (2.5 centimeters) of rain in parts of San Antonio, Texas (population 1,144,646) this morning, causing minor flooding in some areas of the city."
"The National Weather Service in New Braunfels recorded 1.03 inches of rain at the San Antonio International Airport between 9 and 11 a.m." on Tuesday, July 8, 2003.
"In addition to the usual fare that comes with thunderstorms, many on the city's Northeast side (Terrell Hills and Fort Sam Houston--J.T.) witnessed an unusual dark circle in the sky, which turned out to be a 'ring of smoke' that a weather official said emanated from 'an explosion caused by lightning.'"
"Several people reported seeing the ring this morning after a lightning bolt struck an area near North New Braunfels Avenue and Nacogdoches Road."
"'I saw the lightning strike out of the side of my eye, and, when I turned to look, there was a plume of black smoke rising up with a circle of smoke on the top.'" Chris Yanas said in an email to the San Antonio Express- News."
"Chuck Fehlis, 29, an associate appraiser who works for Blair T. Stouffer and Associates at Loop 410 and North New Braunfels, said a co-worker told him about the ring."
"So Fehlis took his Kodak DC5000 digital camera and walked in front of his building to check it out."
"Fehlis took three photos of the dark circle in the sky at 10:44 a.m."
"'The circle got larger and larger until it finally started breaking up,' said Fehlis, who was among seven co- workers looking up at the rainy sky. 'Nobody had ever seen it before.'"
"Fehlis forwarded the photos to the National Weather Service in New Braunfels."
(See the San Antonio Express-News for July 8, 2003, "Inch of rain brings minor flooding to sections of city." Many thanks to Jim Hickman for forwarding this newspaper article.)
TRIANGULAR UFO SEEN BY FOUR IN OKLAHOMA
On Saturday, July 5, 2003, at 12:15 a.m., David, John, Alan and one other male witness were in Mounds, Oklahoma (population 1,143) "facing east, looking north and east" when they saw "three white lights in a triangular pattern moving across the sky at a very high altitude at the same speed, some distance apart the whole sighting."
"A star disappeared when the object moved in front of it, which suggested to us that this was a triangular craft, not three separate lights. The lights disappeared at the same exact time after about 3 to 4 minutes of watching them, heading south."
"We looked around a bit to see if they'd reappear and, sure enough, Alan said, 'Look...there they are!' They were right in the exact spot they disappeared in, only now they were facing in the opposite direction (north--J.T.) but in the same triangular pattern, same distance apart as the first time seen."
"Witnesses included an ex-Navy man, two history buffs who know a little about aircraft and a 4.0 (college) student here visiting his father."
David added, "I have to say this was the most exciting and interesting thing that I've seen in the skies, and I would like to speak to someone while everything is fresh in my mind."
Mounds, Okla. is on Alternate Highway 75 about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Tulsa. (Email Form Report)
GOAT MUTILATION REPORTED IN WILHOIT, ARIZONA
"Authorities are trying to find out why someone beheaded the pet goat of a Yavapai County family and drained the body of all its blood."
"The family reported this in the early morning hours of (Saturday) July 5 (2003); two of the younger children ran into the house and cried that the goat 'had no head,' Lt. James Jarrell of the County Sheriff's Office said. The goat and other livestock had been fed the night before and appeared fine."
"The body of the goat was found in its proper pen, but the head had been cut off cleanly, with a very sharp instrument, Jarrell said. The children's father said there was no blood in the pen or in surrounding areas, or on the body of the goat; he was unable to find the head."
"No other livestock were injured or killed."
"The man said that, other than the head, no other part of the goat had been removed or mutilated. He said he's unaware of anyone who bears grudges against him or his family and has no idea what prompted the killing, authorities said."
"Authorities said that the family has asked that their identity not be released given the bizarre nature of the incident. It occurred in the community of Wilhoit (population 664), about 13 miles (20 kilometers) south of Prescott on Arizona (Route) 89."
"Yavapai County authorities have not received reports of other killings of this nature." (See the Arizona Republic for July 11, 2003, "Family goat beheaded, has blood drained." Many thanks to Mike and Sheri Sedovic for forwarding this newspaper article.)
CHUPACABRA KILLS FIFTEEN ANIMALS IN SOUTHERN CHILE
"Since Thursday (July 3, 2003) residents of Pillanlelbun, a town some 15 kilometers (9 miles) from" Temuco in southern Chile "have been shutting down henhouses, mangers and pigpens under lock and key and using crosses made of palqui (wood) after the news of the mysterious deaths of 15 animals at the Ty Koyam Mini-Zoo became known."
"The victims of the odd event, which remains unexplained, were six sheep imported from Somalia and nine deer which were found dead with tear marks and bruises on their bodies and bites on their necks. They were scattered throughout the location."
"A number of hypotheses were presented at first-- everything from the descent of starving pumas (cougars or mountain lions in the USA--J.T.)" from the Andes "to wild dogs and the Chupacabras--which have been discarded given that the place is completely shut (down) at night, thus making impossible any entry by animals."
"Local residents are concerned. Even those who profess not to believe think that the matter involves Satan."
"Alejandro Fuentes, who owns the preserve, stated yesterday (Thursday, July 3, 2003) that the investigation is in the hands of the (Chile's) Agriculture and Livestock Service (Spanish acronym: SAG) of the Ninth Region as well as the police, since the deaths of the animals represent a loss in excess of 4 million pesos."
"In order to avoid any new attacks, and in view of the fact that llamas, alpacas, iguanas and apes also occupy the premises, Alejandro Fuentes and his associates have placed traps all around the area. However, as of yesterday, the beast did not attack again."
Temuco is located about 400 kilometers (250 miles) south of Santiago de Chile, the national capital. (See the Chilean newspaper La Cuarta for July 4, 2003, "Fifteen animals slain in mini-zoo." Muchas gracias a Scott Corrales y Rodrigo Cuadra Salazar para eso articulo de diario.)
BLACK HELICOPTERS APPEAR AGAIN IN MASSACHUSETTS
On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 11 a.m., people living on Perryville Road in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, located 30 miles (50 kilometers) south of Boston, were startled to see "high-flying silver jets leaving chemtrails across the sky." The thick, smoky trails, which resemble conventional condensation trails or contrails, were said to have persisted "into the early afternoon."
The following day, Saturday, July 5, 2003, "the silver jets" returned, but this time "they were flying quite low and in formation. Their engine noise was very loud."
In nearby South Attleboro, Mass., black helicopters were sighted hovering over Abbott Run (creek) and its suburban neighborhood.
On Sunday, July 6, and Monday, July 7, 2003, "dozens of people living in the Baker's Four Corners area of Seekonk, Mass.," just across the town line from South Attleboro, "saw black helicopters flying in formation. And guess what they had on County Street (in Seekonk)? Black helicopters! All the while, we got more silver jets in Rehoboth."
The following day, a local teacher dropped by her high school and talked "to some of the sports summer students, and this was the lead topic of conversation." A male teacher "called Otis Air Force Base" on Cape Cod (now a Massachusetts Air National Guard base--J.T.) and they told him it was 'practice maneuvers.'"
Curiously, Rehoboth and Seekonk were the site of numerous black helicopter sightings during July and August 2002. (See UFO Roundup for August 6, 2002, "Rehoboth reports flights of black helicopters," page 8. Many thanks to Mary Lou Jones-Drown and others for these reports.)
NEW MOTHMAN TERROR
A near-disaster, which may be linked to Mothman, took place two weeks ago.
Mothman researcher Loren Coleman reported, "According to local newspapers, on Tuesday, June 24, 2003, Bonnie Anderson of Gallipolis, Ohio was driving across the bridge that goes to Point Pleasant, West Virginia," where Mothman was orginally sighted in November 1966, "when her car mysteriously caught fire."
Ms. Anderson "pulled off onto Route 2 (near the Silver Bridge--L.C.) and emergency vehicles responded."
(Editor's Note: The Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River between Gallipolis, Ohio and Point Pleasant, W.V., mysteriously collapsed on December 15, 1967. The event had been predicted by the entity known as Mothman.)
"As you know, June 24 is special," Loren added, "The modern era of 'flying saucers' began on June 24, 1947, and lots of weird things to do with fires have happened on this date," as he mentioned in his book Mothman and Other Curious Encounters, pages 147 to 152. (Many thanks to Loren Coleman.)
WEIRD WEATHER REPORTED ON SATURN
"Astronomers say the winds of Saturn appear to be slowing dramatically just as NASA's Cassini spacecraft approaches the ringed gas planet" two billion miles (3.2 billion kilometers) from Earth.
"Other researchers who study giant planets say the finding is surprising because little change has been detected in the winds of neighboring planets such as Jupiter."
"A comparison of images taken from one of the Voyager missions in the early 1980s and photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope from 1996 to 2002 indicate that winds have slowed by about 40 percent at the equator of Saturn."
"Saturn is the solar system's windiest planet with wind speeds peaking at 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 kilometers per hour). With the sudden change, the peak winds now are whipping around the planet at about 600 miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per hour)."
"By comparison, the highest surface wind ever recorded on Earth was a gust of 231 miles per hour (369 kilometers per hour) clocked on Mount Washington in New Hampshire (USA) on April 12, 1934."
"The researchers who performed the Saturn analysis say they do not know why its winds are slowing, unlike the steady winds on Jupiter."
"'I think most atmospheric scientists would be willing to be a substantial amount of money that a giant planet's winds don't do things like this,' said the study's co-author, Richard French, a Wellesley College professor who has been a Hubble researcher for the past seven years."
"More than a century of recorded observations of Jupiter, including Voyager and Galileo spacecraft surveys, have shown its winds move at a relatively constant speed."
"Recent studies of the other two gas giants in the solar system, Uranus and Neptune, also indicate wind speed is fairly constant, although their winds circulate in the opposite direction of Jupiter and Saturn."
"In the new study published in the journal Nature, French and Agustin Sanchez Lavega of the Universidad del Pais Vasco in Bilbao, Spain, suggest that the unique rings of icy particles encircling Saturn may influence the wind speed by casting shadows on the planet's surface during the 30 Earth years it takes Saturn to make an orbit around the sun."
"Researchers who did not participate in the study agree that shadows could cool the Saturn atmosphere enough to slow the winds."
"'The ring shadow moves from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere and back again during the Saturn seasons,' said Andy Ingersoll, a Caltech astronomer and expert on the atmospheric dynamics of other planets."
"'That's a pretty unusual environment, and it probably has an effect,' Ingersoll said."
"French and Sanchez Lavega estimated the reduction in Saturn's wind speeds by comparing motions at the top of its deep cloud layer, which is 155 miles (248 kilometers) thick."
"They tracked the movement of clouds or prominent storm systems on the Voyager photos of the 1980s, then compared them to the speed of cloud and storm system motion from the Hubble's higher-resolution images taken in 1996-2002." (See the Duluth, Minn. News-Tribune for June 29, 2003, "Saturn winds slacken, puzzling astronomers," page 16A.)
From the UFO Files...
1926: UNEXPECTED WITNESS
UFO sightings by famous politicians are rare, and public reports of them are rarer still. But occasionally they do see the light of day. Such as this one, which appeared in the 1926 diary of one of the Twentieth Century's most notorious political figures.
His name was Joseph-Paul Goebbels, and he was born in Rheydt, in Germany's Rhineland, on October 29, 1897 to a sizable Roman Catholic family. Although frail in body, Goebbels, like H.P. Lovecraft, learned to read at age four and went on to excel all through school. Graduating in 1917, at the height of World War I, Goebbels top-scoring academic average made him the school valedictorian. But his graduation speech left a little to be desired.
As he left the podium, the gymnasium (German high school--J.T.) headmaster clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Good speech, Goebbels, very good speech! The content was excellent, even. But...my boy, you will never make a good orator."
Herr Professor's words came back to haunt him...with a vengeance.
Most 19-year-old boys would have taken the summer off. Not Goebbels! He enrolled in the University of Bonn's summer semester. It was the start of a spectacular academic career that took him through the universities of Bonn, Freiburg, Wurzburg and Munich.
June 1921 found Goebbels in Heidelberg, majoring in German literature and striving for his Ph. D. He wrote a 215-page thesis--a book, actually--on the Nineteenth Century German playwright Wilhelm Schutz. It was so crammed with footnotes on the playwright's life that one of the four dissertation committee judges, Dr. Paum, commented that "it was as if Schutz himself had returned from the grave."
However, Dr. Max von Waldberg, the chairman of the department, was not so easily impressed. He put together a review team that would cut this Rhinelander down to size. "On 16 November 1921 Joseph Goebbels received his summons to the oral examination, scheduled for 18 November."
The highly nervous grad student wrote, "To Heidelberg...Called on the examiners. In top hat. Crammed all night. A cup of strong mocha (coffee). And then to the exam."
There he was, a lone grad student arrayed against four Heidelberg professors. The oral examination went on for hours. "The most harrowing experience of my life," Goebbels later called it, as he fielded questions from von Waldberg, Paum, Oncken and Neumann. But when the ordeal was over, Goebbels "received a provisional doctoral diploma on the spot and felt proud--as he later noted-- when Waldberg called him 'Herr Doktor' for the first time."
"Goebbels," Waldberg told him, unwilling to let this star of academia get away. "We have to see about getting you a professorship."
Ah, but there are some things the department chairman cannot do. And one of them is change the course of history.
The year 1922 brought the collapse of Germany's currency. When the German Weimar Republic announced its inability to meet Allied reparations payments, France invaded and occupied the Saar. Riots broke out in all of the major cities, and the unemployment rate shot over 50 percent. Goebbels found himself a Ph. D. without a job and with no chance of getting one.
While the Weimar government reeled under attacks from the Left and Right, Goebbels drifted into Anton Drexler's Nazionalsozialistiche Deutchesarbeiterspartei (NSDAP or National Socialist German Workers Party--J.T.), founded four years earlier. He became attracted to Gregor Strasser and, like Strasser, admired Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin, the leader of Russia's Bolshevik Revolution and dictator of the newly-founded Soviet Union.
Goebbels, Strasser and the other atheist "National Bolshevists" wanted a uniquely "German Socialism." As opposed to Georgi Plekhanov and the other luminaries of the Second International, Lenin was actually making revolution, calling Lloyd George and Winston S. Churchill "assholes" and badmouthing Wall Street night and day.
Because of his literary background, Goebbels finally landed a job at the NSDAP headquarters in Elberfeld, editing the party publication Nazionalsozialistische Briefe (German for National Socialist Letters--J.T.). Goebbels' fire-breathing revolutionary style soon earned him the nickname "Robespierre" among the magazine staff.
However, his sojourn in Elberfeld soon brought him into contact with the volkische or mystical branch of the NSDAP. Elberfeld had long been the capital of German mysticism.
On July 22, 1884, the German wing of Elena Petrovna von Hahn Blavatsky's Theosophical Society was founded in Elberfeld by Madame Blavatsky herself and the city's resident sorceress, Marie L'estrange Gebhard (1832-1892). Frau Gebhard had been a disciple of Eliphas Levi (birth name: Alphonse Constant), the foremost occultist of the middle Nineteenth Century. A few years later, Dr. Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden (1846-1916) became president of the German Theosophical Society and founded their long-running magazine Die Sphinx.
Also living in Elberfeld for a while were Dr. Franz Hartmann (1838-1912), a prolific author and occultist, just back from his worldwide tour (which included a stint in Colorado with the American outlaw group, the Wild Bunch--J.T.) and his chela (disciple) Hugo Vollrath, who founded Prana, the Theosophical magazine. Vollrath's best friend and a frequent visitor to Elberfeld was Johannes Baltzli, who helped the mystic Rudolf von Sebottendorff (birth name: Adam Glauer) create the Germanenorden dem Walvater und den Graal (Translated: German Order of the All-Father and the Grail--J.T.), better known to history as the Thule Society.
Goebbels' star was rising in the NSDAP. He took on new responsibilities as the editor of the party newspaper Volkische Freiheit. He also went on a whirlwind speaking tour throughout northern Germany. This went on for a whole year, with Goebbels giving a major speech literally every other day. How that old headmaster, who said he would "never make a good orator," must have gasped when he picked up the prestigious newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung and saw his former student commanding Page One headlines as "the Robespierre of the Rhine."
But the main arena of NSDAP action was in the south, in Bayern (Bavaria) where party members had staged an abortive coup. The "Beer Hall putsch" had made their fiery orator, Adolf Hitler, a national figure. Already he was "the German Messiah" to the mystic faction of the NSDAP. When Hitler's book, Mein Kampf (German for My Struggle--J.T.) appeared in October 1925, one of the Thule group in Elberfeld gave Goebbels a copy.
"Reading the book to the end 'with gripping tension,'" Goebbels confided to his diary, "'Who is this man? Half plebeian, half god! The real Christ, or only John?'"
Goebbels decided to find out. On November 6, 1925, he traveled to Braunschweig for a meeting with Hitler. The effect on Goebbels was nothing short of extraordinary. Goebbels wrote, "At once he (Hitler) jumps up, stands there before us. Presses my hand. Like an old friend. And those big blue eyes. Like stars. He's glad to see me. I'm filled with happiness...This man has everything it takes to be a king. The born tribune of the people. The coming dictator."
"Numerous diary passages written in the summer of 1926 show how far Goebbels' imagination could carry him; he not only transfigured Hitler into the new Messiah but also linked him with miracles and wonderful happenings in nature...At the end of July (1926) Goebbels spent time at Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof on the Obersalzberg (mountain) above Berchtesgaden."
And that's where it happened. But we'll let Goebbels tell the story himself.
"I stand shaken before him (Hitler). This is how he is: like a child, dear, good, compassionate. Sly like a cat, clever and skillful, magnificently roaring and gigantic like a lion. A fine fellow, a real man."
"He speaks of the state. In the afternoon, of winning the state and of the meaning of political revolution. Thoughts I may already have had myself but not expressed."
"After supper we sit for a long time in the garden of the Seamen's Retirement Home, and he holds forth on the new state and how we will achieve it. It has the ring of prophecy."
"Above us in the sky a white cloud forms a swastika. A shimmering light that can't be a star (my emphasis-- J.T.). A sign from fate? We go home late!"
"Far in the distance Salzburg shimmers. I am something like happy. This life is certainly worth living. 'My head won't roll in the dust until my mission is fulfilled.' That was his last word. That's how he is! Yes, that's how he is!"
Goebbels' defection doomed the Strasser wing of the NSDAP. Although his one-time friends, Gregor and Otto Strasser, fulminated against Hitler and openly jeered at "Goebbels' Damascus!" (A reference to the conversion of St. Paul in the Bible's Acts of the Apostles--J.T.), the "National Bolshevism" idea fell by the wayside, and Hitler led the NSDAP down the mystical path.
Goebbels' faith in his new-found "Messiah" never wavered. Two decades later, during those last days in the Berlin Fuhrerbunker, he was telling everyone present "to die bravely so that audiences will cheer when they see the actor portraying you on color television in the year 1999."
If there was ever a UFO that changed the course of history, it was the one that appeared over Berchtesgaden in July 1926. (See the books Goebbels by Ralf Georg Ruth, Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, N.Y., 1993, pages 66, 67, 74 and 75; Goebbels by Victor Reimann, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1976, pages 38 and 39; and Unholy Alliance by Peter Levenda, Continuum Publishing, New York, N.Y., 1995, pages 42 to 47.)
(Editor's Comment: I don't know about you people, but, when those "daisy cutters" come whistling down, the absolute last thing on your editor's mind is what might be in TV Guide a half-century hence.)
Well, that's it for this week. Join us in seven days for more UFO, Fortean and paranormal news from around the planet Earth, brought to you by "the paper that goes home- -UFO Roundup." See you next time!
