SOTT Focus:


Meteor

SOTT Focus: Reading Celestial Intentions Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: Missiles, UFOs and the Cold War


Comment: Updated 21 July 2012

Two corrections:

I have been sent a link to the original source article from RIA Novosti quoting the Defense Ministry in Moscow. Published at 22.15 on Thursday 7 June, this would appear to clarify the Jerusalem Post's citation of the Russian Defense Ministry - the Jerusalem Post was referring to the Russian language RIA Novosti article published 40 minutes after the missile's launch, while I mistakenly believed the JP was referring to this English language RIA Novosti article published the next day on 8th June 2012. There seems to have been a minor oversight at RIA Novosti offices in Moscow where someone forgot to inform colleagues working on the 'UFO over Israel' case on the English language section of their website that there was no need for them to cite the Huffington Post as saying that the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that they launched a missile at 21.39 on 7th June... because it was RIA Novosti themselves who first procured the statement from the Russian Defense Ministry.

In addition, as first brought to my attention by Sott.net readers, voices speaking in Russian can be heard in the video I described in the article as being filmed from Israel ('No UFO!! Russia test-fires intercontinental ballistic missile... Seen in Israel'), meaning that it was probably filmed from southern Russia. Israeli Ynet have since updated their article dated 8th June with another video filmed from Israel:




So it seems that the Russians did launch a missile from Kasputin Yar in Southern Russia eastwards to Kazakhstan on the night of 7th June 2012. But it is extremely unlikely that it was the same object that was seen 2,000 km to the southwest in Lebanon and Israel due to the distance between the launch site and the Middle East countries involved.


Image
The trail left by an object of unknown origin traversing the night sky on Thursday 7 June 2012 was witnessed by thousands of people from across the Middle East and Central Asia.
May you live in interesting times

~ Ancient Chinese proverb
There were widespread reports from the Middle East to central Asia of a strange phenomenon in the late evening sky on June 7th. Emergency phone lines lit up as excited eyewitnesses reported a spectacular light display. Judging by the distribution of media coverage that followed, people in Israel and Lebanon were particularly excited about the event, reporting the extraordinary sighting of "multiple airborne objects". It was apparently unmissable across a vast area because there were also multiple reports in Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Jordan and several countries in the Caucasus. The earliest reports came from Lebanon where the daily L'Orient Le Jour reported that "meteorites were clearly visible" and LBCI News reported that "luminous objects and meteor bursts appeared over north Lebanon", before quoting Lebanese astronomers as saying they were the result of a large meteorite that exploded and left "visible trails of dust." Another Lebanese publication, Naharnet, described the phenomenon as a "meteoric downpour", while the state-run National News Agency reported that the objects were "clearly visible."

It's at this point that the story changed from being one of multiple 'meteoric' sightings to just a single fiery object that was "probably" a Russian missile.

The next day, Friday 8 June, the Jerusalem Post reported that Russia had carried out a successful rocket launch of an inter-continental ballistic missile the previous evening, Thursday June 7th. The Post went on to quote a spokesperson for the Israeli Astronomical Association as saying "the object reached an altitude of 80 kilometres." Sure enough, Russian news agency Interfax carried a report that cited the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN) as saying they had successfully launched an RS-12M Topol ICBM from the Kapustin Yar range in the country's southern Astrakhan region missile at 21.39 local time on Thursday evening. The Russian Defence Ministry's spokesman for RVSN, Col. Vadim Koval, told Interfax that "the missile hit the simulated target at the Sary-Shagan range in Kazakhstan with projected accuracy." The RVSN's own website was updated to account for this missile launch.

That would appear to have settled the issue for most. I'm not convinced though.

Alarm Clock

SOTT Focus: Reign of Fire: Meteorites, Wildfires, Planetary Chaos and the Sixth Extinction

Image
© Reuters'Damn you al-qaeda!' An American flag waves in front of a house leveled by the Waldo Canyon fire in the Mountain Shadows community in Colorado Springs, Colorado, 2 July 2012
Over the past 18 months, we've been growing increasingly concerned for the future of all life on planet earth. Sure, the signs that things have been going 'south' have been there for some time, but our concern began in earnest at the very beginning of 2011, when masses of birds began to fall dead from the sky around the world. The phenomenon continued for several months, and birds around the world are still dying for officially unknown reasons. None of the dead birds showed any sign of disease, but in several incidents birds were found to have 'external injuries' like they had been "hit by some kind of blunt instrument". All sorts of explanations for the deaths were offered (like fireworks or birds colliding with each other) including the predictable attempts by 'science experts' to downplay any significance to the bizarre deaths. But among the flurry of speculation, one report stood out.

NewsChannel5 Chief Meteorologist Mark Johnson decided to take a look at the the Doppler radar images from Beebe, Arkansas from the night when many red-winged blackbirds had fallen dead to the ground, and he discovered something interesting.
"There it was. This huge plume of turbulence over the Beebe birds just as they began their frenzied flight," Johnson said.

The turbulence appears above the birds between about 7,000 and 12,000 feet. Johnson realized there are only a few possible explanations for this phenomena.
Having homed in on the probable cause, Johnson then introduced some nonsense:
"Birds don't fly that high, and he quickly ruled out military action, a sonic boom, meteor shower or alien invasion."
While we can understand why Johnson ruled out military action or a sonic boom (there were no flights over the area at the time), Johnson never explained why he ruled out a "meteor shower", although we can understand the inclusion of "alien invasion" - to ridicule by association the idea of a "meteor shower" or other meteorite-related phenomenon.

Johnson then went on to say:
"Something in the atmosphere, something mysterious, occurred over Beebe, Arkansas that night... And I believe it was part of what caused those birds to fly and then die."
Indeed, but with the answer staring him in the face, Johnson lost the plot completely:
Johnson's research captured an unseen temperature reversal just above the birds' roosting area at about 1,500 feet above the ground. This temperature "inversion" acted like a megaphone, amplifying all the noises that occurred in Beebe at that time. As the fireworks exploded, the sound was amplified by the inversion and became much louder than normal. This appears to have startled the birds so much that they burst into flight, running into each other, and nearby buildings. Thousands of the now-disoriented birds then crashed to the ground, dying from blunt force trauma.
Image
The Doppler radar image used by Johnson to explain the bird deaths. We have added the blue-green arrow to illustrate the trajectory of a meteor reaching that altitude before exploding in the lower atmosphere.
Temperature reversal? At 1,500 feet? But previously Johnson stated that the 'turbulence' occurred between 7,000 and 12,000 feet. He even produced a graph of the Doppler radar images that shows this. While temperature inversion does occur and can amplify sound, when birds are startled by noise they don't generally fly into each other and buildings in large numbers. What's most likely, is that the bird deaths of January 2011 (and later) were caused by an overhead meteorite or comet fragment (MoCF) explosion, with either the actual shock wave killing the birds (through blunt force trauma) or associated electrical effects 'frying' their 'circuits'.

This electrical effect can also explain the massive fish die-offs around the same time. Consider this report, just in today, about two children being mysteriously electrocuted to death as they swam in a lake in Missouri on 4th July. The thousands of dead fish found upstream from Beebe on New Year's Eve 2010 could well have had their circuits fried because of significant electrical discharge that accompanied the overhead MoCF airburst. Now check out this Tunguska blast simulation by Sandia lab. An incoming bolide exploding overhead would knock the wind out of anything within a radius relative to the extent of its blast. It would probably knock airplanes out of the sky too - more on that below.

Grey Alien

SOTT Focus: UFOs, Aliens and the Question of Contact

Image
The Baptism of Christ by Aert de Gelder (1710)
The UFO phenomena is quite an elusive topic. Despite many years of documented encounters, there is still no confirmation from any "official" authorities, be it mainstream science or government, that there may be something "otherworldly" going on. On the contrary, there is often ridicule and avoidance whenever this subject comes up. Yet most of the general public believes that extraterrestrial UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) exist and that the government is hiding information from us. Many people had UFO sightings themselves. However, most people also don't give it much attention or thought, believing that it doesn't really affect us anyway and that we'll deal with it once official "contact" has been made.

But what if the UFO phenomena is not what we thought it is, but has influenced humanity and the world at large for thousands of years? What would be the implications?

Our views on life and existence, science and religion, spirituality and evolution, consciousness and psychology as well as reality as we know it would take on a whole new understanding when looking deeper into the UFO phenomena and the possibility of a higher alien intelligence affecting our world. Perhaps we're not the "main show" here on earth and maybe not even on "top of the food chain"? Let's not forget, not too long ago we believed that the earth is flat. What else will we discover?

Better Earth

SOTT Focus: Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

Tunguska
How the Tunguska object may have appeared.
One hundred and four years ago today, on the night of 30 June and 1 July, one of the most extraordinary events in modern history occurred.
The first reports of a strange glow in the sky came from across Europe. Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1908, Londoners were intrigued to see a pink phosphorescent night sky over the capital. People who had retired awoke confused as the strange pink glow shone into their bedrooms. The same ruddy luminescence was reported over Belgium. The skies over Germany were curiously said to be bright green, while the heavens over Scotland were of an incredible intense whiteness which tricked the wildlife into believing it was dawn. Birdsong started and cocks crowed - at two o'clock in the morning. The skies over Moscow were so bright, photographs were taken of the streets without using a magnesium flash. A captain on a ship on the River Volga said he could see vessels on the river two miles away by the uncanny astral light. One golf game in England almost went on until four in the morning under the nocturnal glow, and in the following week The Times of London was inundated with letters from readers from all over the United Kingdom to report the curious 'false dawn'. A woman in Huntingdon wrote that she had been able to read a book in her bedroom solely by the peculiar rosy light. There were hundreds of letters from people reporting identical lighting conditions that went on for weeks... (Tom Slemen)
None of the people witnessing this strange phenomenon had any idea that, in the central Siberian plateau, just after 7:15 a.m. local time, the planet had been hit by a cometary impactor that exploded - as most such impactors do - in the atmosphere just above the Earth's surface.

Better Earth

Flashback SOTT Focus: Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution



Gervase of Canterbury - Lunar Impact
©Peter Grego
Impression of the 1178 lunar event


Last time I said I was going to talk about how much your "glorious leaders" really hate and despise you and how they are plotting your deaths while most of you are so screwed up that you not only do not see this, you actually dance blithely toward disaster for yourselves and your children. Well, I'm going to get there, but first, I want to tie up a few loose ends and reiterate a couple of points.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this topic, the Discovery Channel special Super Comet - After the Impact, places the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs in a modern setting, using the same type of cometary body assumed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, the same size, same impact location, and utilized all the computer modeling they have done on this past event to try to show what might happen (and to show what they think happened then).

Studies of the history of the Earth via various scientific methods show us that there are relatively long periods of "evolution" punctuated by rapid, overwhelming changes we call catastrophes. Many scientists have noted the periodicity of these punctuational events. What no one seems to know for sure is the mechanism that induces these definitely periodic catastrophes.

It is suggested that the periodicity of these events relates to galactic cycles and there is good evidence for this view presented by Victor Clube in his book The Cosmic Winter. (You can really forget the nonsense going around about "Planet Nibiru" and "Project Camelot"). He suggests that galactic tides induct giant comets into our Solar system and it is their disintegration products which interact strongly and directly with the Earth with variable results at different (and very frequent!) periods which results in the variations in the geological record. Clube demonstrates that the breaking up of a giant comet produces a wide range of debris from objects 10 km across, to hundreds or thousands of 1 km sized bodies, to multiple swarms of sub-kilometer sized bodies. Many of these bodies have sooty, black surfaces making them almost impossible to see and many of them are in an orbit very similar to the Taurid meteor streams, though a few may be in an orbit rotated about 90 degrees. Clube posits that many (if not most or all) of the asteroids in the Solar system split from a giant comet (or many of them) thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and it is the streams of debris that pose the most serious and immediate threats to our planet.

Comment: Continue to Part Eight: Letters From the Edge

See also: Mass Extinctions - Interruptions in the Orderly Process of Evolution for some great graphics!

Dinosaur Extinction Page
Crater Morphology; Some Major Impact Structures


Question

SOTT Focus: Le Monde Hit Piece on Sott.net's Analysis of the Merah Case and 'Conspiracy Theorists'

The following article appeared in the French Le Monde newspaper on the 19th June 2012. We are running it, with commentary, because it stands as a perfect example of the 'yellow journalism' so favored by the mainstream media in their efforts to dupe the public. Yellow journalism is defined as "journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers." In this case however, the specific aim of Le Monde is to discredit and ridicule rational deductive reasoning around the actions of alleged 'Muslim terorrist' Mohamed Merah.
Image
Authoritarian Followers stick their necks out for the government
The Merah Case: A Trip to ConspiracyLand

Soren Seelow
Le Monde

Grey areas, contradictory statements, media hype, political hijacking, shades of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, police forces blunders, shady role of the Intelligence services... the Mohamed Merah case, where a young man was accused of murdering seven people last March in Toulouse and Montauban, has all the ingredients to feed conspiracy theories. Since the beginning of the case, suspicions of political manipulations have emerged, strengthened by the case's inconsistencies, and have spread around, giving rise to alternative theses running in parallel with the official version. Let's take a plunge into this shady world of conspiracy, and let's take a look at its reflexes, techniques and ideological agendas.

V

SOTT Focus: The Cs Hit List 08: Of Oracles and Conspiracies: TWA 800, 9/11, H1N1, and VISA

Image
Evelyn de Morgan - Ariadne in Naxos (1877)
So far in this series, I've focused a lot on history and science, albeit some of it of a particularly paranormal persuasion. To jog the reader's memory, the first installment began with a discussion of prophecy and prediction and asked some questions such as: Can prophecies be true? If so, are they all true? All fake? How can we weed out the cons from the clairvoyants, and can a good source give a bad prediction? How come? Well, today I want to veer in a slightly different direction - no climate science, companion stars, catastrophic comets, or non-coding DNA. No, I want to ground this one in something a little more SOTT-ish: politics and conspiracies.

Over the course of the Hit List series, some readers may have wondered what place so-called 'paranormal' research has on an alternative news website. And others may, as I did just under a decade ago, wonder what on earth political conspiracies have to do with so-called 'spirituality'. I hope the answer to the former question is at least partially clearer by now, after seven installments. In a world as controlled as our own, where lies can be glibly passed off as indisputable fact, with media, corporations, academia, and government acting as shapers of public opinion on every subject, an individual finds him or herself in a situation not dissimilar to that of Theseus in the Minotaur's labyrinth. At every turn we are confronted by lies, even (and perhaps especially) when it comes to our most basic views about the nature of reality. And we would be lost if not for the thread of Ariadne.

While I'm on a Greek bent, let me share something a forum member recently pointed out from Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages:
It is generally admitted that the effect of the Delphian oracle upon Greek culture was profoundly constructive. James Gardner sums up its influence in the following words: "Its responses revealed many a tyrant and foretold his fate. Through its means many an unhappy being was saved from destruction and many a perplexed mortal guided in the right way. It encouraged useful institutions, and promoted the progress of useful discoveries. Its moral influence was on the side of virtue, and its political influence in favor of the advancement of civil liberty."
In other words, there's our answer to the second question: a good oracle (or spiritual source) doesn't shy away from politics. Like a Greek cynic, or the proverbial Cassandra, the prime role of an oracle is to present a vision of the world as it is, no matter how painful or unpopular the view, and provide the only alternative fit for a lie: the truth. So, yes, we track 'high strangeness', and our worldview is quite at odds with the materialistic dictum peddled and enforced by PhD's and media pundits the world over. Everything you 'know' is a lie, and that includes all your metaphysical assumptions about the way the 'reality' really works. Luckily there's a way out of the labyrinth, and (please excuse me for going Biblical here!) the truth will set you free.

Sun

SOTT Focus: Is Solar and Cosmic Radiation Playing Havoc With Life on Planet Earth?

Image
Rudy Eugene and Ronald Poppo
While millions of English intellectual and emotional zombies shuffled along to the beat of the English Queen's recent 'Jubilee' celebrations, a real zombie apocalypse (of the flesh-eating kind) was taking place in the USA.

Over the course of the past two months, there have been no less (and probably more) than 18 cases of people eating, or otherwise misusing, their own flesh or that of others. Most of these bizarre events have, for some reason, taken place in the USA. The most prominent case was that of Rudy Eugene and Ronald Poppo in Miami, Florida. The basics of that case, which took place on May 26th, as described by a witness, were:
"He [Eugene] was ripping into his [Poppo's] face with his teeth," said a witness to the ghoulish attack.

"He was ripping his skin, his neck. He had him held down. The guy couldn't move really, and he was just tearing into his flesh," Vega told WSVN TV in Miami.

The witness flagged down a police officer, who repeatedly ordered the assailant to stop and move away.

"The guy just stood his head up like that, with a piece of flesh in his mouth, and growled."

When Eugene did not comply with the officer's demands, he shot him once. Eugene, however, appeared unfazed, at which point the officer shot him four more times.

Book

SOTT Focus: Book Review: The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities, and the Process of Alien Abduction

High Strangeness 2nd Ed Cover
Editor's note: This review is of the revised second edition of Laura Knight-Jadczyk's High Strangeness. It is available from QFGPublishing.com, RedPillPress.com, RedPillPress.co.uk, Amazon and finer bookstores everywhere!

It's sad but true that most people don't like inconvenient realities to upset their pleasant illusions and prejudices. I see this all the time in my own daily interactions with people. Once someone reaches a point in his or her life when they feel they "understand" the world well enough - often around the age of thirty - they spend the rest of their life filling in the blanks of what they think they already know. It's a tendency that usually becomes more extreme over time. Ideas and worldviews seem to harden in tandem with the arteries.

The friends people make, television shows they watch, the internet sites they visit - the very world they create for themselves - all of these usually support the circumscribed worldview they themselves have adopted.

Obviously, it's the same with books. It's a rare book that has the ability to truly change one's mind about the world. Rarest of all are those gems with the ability to change one's life.

Laura Knight-Jadczyk's The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities, and the Process of Alien Abduction is such a book.

Eye 1

SOTT Focus: NATO's 'Civil War' Machine Rolls Into Syria

Image
Death Squad: Free Syrian Army recruits proudly display the black flag of al-Qaeda, the database of Western mercenaries/terrorists
It was only a matter of time before NATO's hired killers were tasked with carrying out a massacre in Syria that NATO stooges at the UN could then attempt to blame on the Syrian government. This time however, the con job isn't going quite according to plan.

On Monday 28th May 2012 ('Memorial Day' in the US, for those who enjoy irony) the world's public received a full frontal propaganda attack by the Western and other duplicitous media outlets parroting NATO and UN Security Council condemnations of a "massacre by Syrian troops" in the Syrian village of Houla on Friday 25th May.

Although the Houla victims were Assad supporters, the media has been primed to unleash a torrent of abuse against the Syrian government in the hope that it will carry enough weight to justify precision-strike democratization in the very near future.