Fighter jets scrambled after UFO follows plane over Athens

By Matthew Moore
Telegraph

The object was spotted by the pilot of Olympic Airways flight 266 from Athens, and the sighting was corroborated by staff at Athens Airport and a nearby Greek air force base. Pilots of two other passenger jets also reported seeing the body.

The eyewitnesses described it as looking like a large star, although it was moving erratically and constantly changing shape.

Two fighter jets were sent to investigate the sighting over the Greek capital in November 2007 but the object shot up into the sky and vanished before they could get a clear view.

The incident was kept secret by the Greek authorities for more than a year, but is now generating huge interest after official documents and recordings of the conversation between the pilot and control tower were released.

An Olympic Airlines spokeswoman said: "I can confirm the incident. It is the first of its kind involving our pilots."

Greek officials say that the object, which was not detected on any radar, was probably a mistaken sighting of the planet Venus in the Autumn night sky.

This is not the first time that a passenger jet has had a close encounter with a UFO. Documents released by the Ministry of Defence last year disclosed that an Alitalia flight had a near miss while landing at Heathrow in 1991, with the pilot describing an object "similar to a missile – light brown or fawn – about three metres in length but without any exhaust flame".

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Remains of Fiery Meteor Found in Western Canada

LLOYDMINSTER, Alberta — Scientists said Friday they had found remains of a meteor that illuminated the sky before falling to earth in western Canada earlier this month.
University of Calgary scientist Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley found several meteor fragments near the Battle River along the rural Alberta-Saskatchewan border, near the city of Lloydminster late Thursday.
They said there could be thousands of meteorite pieces strewn over a 7-square-mile area of mostly flat, barren land, with few inhabitants.
Residents in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have been buzzing about the huge fireball that lit up the night sky over the three provinces on Nov. 20. Witnesses reported hearing sonic boom rumblings and said the fiery flash was as bright as the sun.
Hildebrand, who also coordinates meteor sightings with the Canadian Space Agency, estimated the meteor could have been seen from as far as 434 miles away, into the northern United States.
Widely broadcast video images of the meteor showed what appeared to be a speeding fireball that became larger and brighter before disappearing as it neared the ground.

The meteor contained about one-tenth of a kiloton of energy when it entered the earth's atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of 100 tons of the chemical explosive TNT.
"It would be something like a billion-watt light bulb," said Hildebrand.
The meteor has captured the imagination of sky watchers around the world.
Robert Haag, a space rock collector from Arizona, offered up to $9,700 for the first one-kilogram chunk of the meteor that is found.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,458984,00.html

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Apporition caught on Ashville NC high school cc camera

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UFO spotted by News10 over Sacramento

SACRAMENTO, CA - News10 often receives calls from those who spotted something unusual in the night skies. It's not nearly as common for those calls to be backed up by our own Air10.
While shooting Friday Night Football highlights over Sacramento, Air10 pilot Ed Georges and FNF correspondent Angel Cardenas spotted a strange set of lights flying over their helicopter.
"I know what aircraft lighting looks like and this was definitely something different," Georges said. "It looked almost like a scrolling message on a blimp to the naked eye. I was at 1,200 feet and it was considerably higher."

Georges said he and Cardenas manuevered the helicopter to get a better look at the lights through Air10's Power Zoom camera.

"(Angel and I) were both amazed at the odd lights and movement. I started flying toward it, but it began to fade away and disappeared to the southeast," Georges said. "Not knowing the size of the object, I couldn't determine how far away we were, but I believe it was some distance away as the image was fuzzy even through the PowerZoom camera."

Not long after their sighting, several callers phoned the News10 newsroom to report seeing the same phenomenon.

When contacted, Federal Aviation Adminstration and Sacramento International Airport spokespeople said they hadn't heard anything about the object and had no idea what the craft could be. A Travis Air Force Base representative said the base had no aircrafts that could be confused with a UFO.

So what is it? Take a look at the video to the right and weigh in with your own verdict.

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Museum recordings provide haunting evidence

Recordings of disembodied voices and a number of eerie personal experiences are enough for the Mason Dixon Paranormal Society to conclude that the Schifferstadt Architectural Museum is haunted.

After conducting a two-night paranormal investigation nearly three weeks ago, the society met with the museum's staff Monday to reveal its findings.
During the investigation, which was open to the public for a fee to benefit the museum, the society collected about 70 hours of digital video recordings, more than two hours of thermal imaging video, and 180 hours of audio. After days of close watching and listening, the group came away with 35 electronic voice phenomena -- believed to be recordings of ghostly voices.
"It's a very low frequency tone that you cannot hear with the human ear," said Stewart Cornelius, co-founder of Gettysburg, Pa.,-based society. "But for some reason mechanical devices can pick it up."
Some EVPs from the Schifferstadt investigation feature clear answers to questions posed by the investigators -- "yes" or "no" from unidentifiable voices.
Twice, society recorded a child's voice saying what sounds like "mommy."
Other recordings seem to be in German -- fitting because Schifferstadt was originally home to German settlers. Even a few longer phrases were captured, such as a deep, raspy voice saying, "On the wall over there."
Although the EVPs were chilling, they are not enough to scare away the Schifferstadt's staff.
"It doesn't really change things for me, but I already knew what was going on," said Greg Glewwe, who helps with the museum's Spirit Tours. "Even if you do get a little bit of a creepy feeling, there's never been anything negative happen. In the end, there's some stuff that you can't come up with an explanation for."
Liz Lipke, Schifferstadt's former director and a self-proclaimed skeptic, thinks the ghostly evidence is more reassuring than anything.
"I have heard footsteps here myself and I can't explain where they come from. I think that the investigation is a way to capture evidence of what the unexplained is -- maybe make me feel as if other people have heard what I heard, and it's not just my imagination."
But to anyone unfamiliar with the paranormal and the strange happenings at Schifferstadt, the society findings may seem outlandish.
"People come up to me and they say I don't believe it, and that's fine," said Darryl Keller, society co-founder. "You might not believe it and then you can be shown evidence, and that evidence could be taken to the most qualified video expert, and he can say, 'Yes, I can tell you that this film is not tampered with.' And still people won't believe it until it happens to them."
Whether someone believes in ghosts, there nothing paranormal about the society's willingness to boost the museum's fundraising efforts by doing the investigation.
Christina Murphy is the museum's head gardener.
"I want to thank the MDPS," she said, "for their generosity to help support the Schifferstadt."

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Water vapor and ice paticles are spewing from Enceladus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Huge plumes of water vapor and ice particles are spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus at supersonic speeds in a way that strongly suggests they come from liquid water down below the icy surface, scientists said.
The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, offers new evidence that the moon may harbor an underground ocean of water, meaning conditions might exist that could support life, even if only microbial organisms.

"We think liquid water is necessary for life," Candice Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.
"This is more evidence that there is liquid water there. You also need energy, you need nutrients, you need organics. It looks like the pieces are there. Whether or not there's actually life, of course, we can't say," Hansen said.
The Cassini spacecraft in 2005 discovered humongous geysers erupting from fissures near the south pole of Enceladus into space -- reminiscent of the famed Old Faithful at Yellowstone National Park in the United States but on a grand scale.
Since then, scientists have debated whether this meant that Enceladus (pronounced en-SELL-ah-dus), with a diameter of only 310 miles, was hiding a reservoir of liquid water. It is one of about 60 moons of the dramatic ringed planet Saturn.
Based on data collected last year by Cassini's Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument, the researchers said the behavior of the plumes supports a mathematical model in which the cracks that extend below the surface act as nozzles that channel water vapor from an underground liquid water reservoir.
The geysers continuously shoot plumes into space at more than 1,300 mph, the researchers said.
By using the instrument to observe the flickering light of a distant star as the geyser blocked its starlight, the researchers determined that the water vapor comes from narrow jets as it blasts into space.
"We're saying we detected these jets within the plumes and the gas moving at supersonic velocities. And we're saying that this is consistent with the previously developed model that has liquid water at depth" under the surface, Hansen said.
The Cassini spacecraft, operated in a joint U.S.-European mission, flew close over the surface of Enceladus in March and actually through a plume, collecting samples of ice and gas.
"There are only three places in the solar system we know or suspect to have liquid water near the surface -- Earth, Jupiter's moon Europa and now Saturn's Enceladus," Joshua Colwell of the University of Central Florida, another of the researchers, said in a statement.
"Water is a basic ingredient for life, and there are certainly implications there. If we find that the tidal heating that we believe causes these geysers is a common planetary systems phenomenon, then it gets really interesting," Colwell added.
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE4AP8VW20081126

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“In my life there have been some things I have known, and I don’t know why,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times.

From The Sunday Times
November 16, 2008

I saw it coming, says minister of sixth sense Lord Drayson

Isabel Oakeshott, Deputy Political Editor

Lord Drayson, the government minister in charge of science, believes he has an uncanny ability “like a sixth sense” to know and predict some events instinctively.
The multi-millionaire businessman and Labour donor says he believes humans have strange abilities that are not widely understood. “In my life there have been some things I have known, and I don’t know why,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “I think there is a lot we don’t understand about human capability.”

Drayson, who returned to government last month to become the first science minister with a seat in cabinet, also said he believed in God and saw no conflict between faith and science. “I think faith is a very strange thing,” he said. “You don’t necessarily believe in something just because you have the evidence to prove it.”
The scientific view is that theories and beliefs should be based on evidence and proven by experiment.
Drayson, who is not claiming paranormal powers for himself, cites Blink, the bestselling American book about human instinct, by Malcolm Gladwell. The book identifies cases of individuals with the apparent power to foretell events, an ability Drayson believes he may share.
He said: “It’s a really fascinating book. He gives lots of examples of people who have demonstrated very clearly that they have good instinct in their lives. One particular fireman in America had this amazing instinct . . . This guy [knew] when something bad was going to happen, when you need to leave the building.
“Gladwell’s book is about the ability of the human being to know something, but not to know why they know it. This struck a chord with me, because in my life there have been some things that I’ve known and I don’t know why.”
Drayson described the ability as “like a sixth sense” and said it could be linked to the way humans have evolved.
Critics once accused him of almost supernatural timing when he made a donation to Labour: the pharmaceutical company he ran at the time subsequently won a £32m government contract with seemingly uncanny ease. An inquiry found no impropriety.
And though the government might be grateful for any help in these difficult times from any quarter, Drayson and Gladwell are not talking about “extra-sensory perception”.
Instead Gladwell’s book is about “the power of thinking without thinking”, and argues that gut feelings can be as accurate as considered judgments. The author argues that very brief encounters can give a person’s “adaptive unconscious” enough information to make a sound judgment.
Drayson said: “Gladwell talks about this guy who knew when someone was going to double fault, playing tennis, and you try to figure out, how does he know?”
Dr Matthew Smith, associate professor of psychology at Liverpool Hope University, said: “It might feel like a sixth sense but it could be based on evidence gathered from our surroundings feeding into a snap judgment.”

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