Mostly Cloudy | Ukiah | 2025 Arrives | Cobb Quake | 2024 Deaths | Spyrock Snow | Sheriff's Message | Cargo Container | Egg Cartons | Another Year | Sako Radio | Tanoak | Ed Notes | Hot Potato | Meteor Shower | Long Plan | Poor Newspaper | Old Philo | Yesterday's Catch | Kamp Estate | Crumb's Mentor | Big Cat | Crying Shame | New Laws | Apache Woman | Lead Stories | Great Question | Medical Advice | Vaccine Controversy | JFK Case | Babe 1934 | Nobel Prize | Distraction | Weird Things | Orleans Portrait
LIGHT TO MODERATE RAIN continues today, primarily north of Cape Mendocino. Rain intensity is forecast to increase late tonight into Friday, resulting in a slight risk for minor urban flooding for Del Norte and northern Humboldt. Periods of light rain are expected over the weekend, before a longer stretch of drier weather develops next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cloudy 51F with .33" rainfall this Thursday morning on the coast. Maybe a shower today then rain Friday. Dry skies are forecast starting Saturday & going into next weekend as the weather flow shifts to the eastern part of the country.
2025 ARRIVES IN BOONVILLE
One medical aid “lift assist” call came in just after midnight the night before New Year’s Eve. No info was available on why that person needed “lift assist” at 1am Tuesday. But given the Valley’s demographics, we suspect it was an elderly person living alone who had suffered an accidental fall. Later, as New Year’s eve approached, we counted a few (“practice”) gun shots between 8-9pm leading up to midnight. Those sounded like dull “booms” from the area of Northern Boonville. As midnight arrived there were more gun shots, going off sporadically for about 15 minutes. We counted about 20 of the dull “booms” and about 20 smaller pistol shots in bursts of 3-5 shots. All of them seemed to be coming from the same area of Northern Boonville as the earlier shots, down around the intersection of Highway 128 and Mountain View Road. A couple of dogs barked. No voices were heard. No music. It was kinda dark, kinda chilly. It was 2025 in Boonville.
4.7 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE RATTLES LAKE COUNTY on New Year’s Day
The quake struck just after 6:30 p.m. south of Clearlake
A 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck Lake County just after 6:30 p.m. on New Year’s Day, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
According to the U. S. Geological Survey, the epicenter of the temblor was about 2.5 miles northwest of the community of Cobb, which is south of Clearlake.
The quake originated at a depth of a little more than half a mile, according to USGS.
The temblor was initially rated at 4.5 magnitude, then revised to 4.7 roughly a half hour later.
Magnitude measures the energy released at the source of the earthquake, the U.S. Geological Survey says. It replaces the old Richter scale.
Quakes between 2.5 and 5.4 magnitude are often felt but rarely cause much damage, according to Michigan Tech. Quakes below 2.5 magnitude are seldom felt by most people.
Earthquakes’ sudden, rapid shaking can cause fires, tsunamis, landslides or avalanches.
The National Weather Service issued an alert saying no tsunami was expected as a result of Wednesday’s shaker.
Earthquakes are not uncommon in the region. On Dec. 11, a 3.9 magnitude quake struck in the same area, rattling windows as far south as San Jose.
(pressdemocrat.com)
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, 2024
Tyler Neil, Yorkville
John Mark, Yorkville
Larry Carr, Yorkville
Angelo Pronsolino, Yorkville
Carolyn Wellington, Boonville
Carolyn Eigenman, Boonville
Steve Rubin, Boonville
Pete Benville, Boonville
Ricky Adams, Boonville
Eva Johnson, Boonville
Scott Fraser, Philo
Gene Herr, Philo
Tom English, Navarro
Randy Bloyd, Navarro
.
Linda D. Barton (Henke), Stephanie Marcum's mom
Patti Guarachi, Des Moines, sister of Cyndi Hollinger of Boonville
Lou Fortin, former Boonville Principal
Bill Chambers, formerly of Boonville
Dennis Miller, formerly of Boonville
Martin Hafley, formerly of Boonville
Jim Johnson, Elk, former Boonville Superintendent
.
Elizabeth Weaver, Comptche
Larry Fuente, Comptche
Dan Borghi, Navarro Ridge
.
Bill Bradd, Ten Mile
James K. Larsen, Fort Bragg
John Shandel, Albion
Max Schlienger, Ukiah
Jim Martin, formerly of Fort Bragg
Tony Craver
Eleanor Adams, Mendocino
David Nelson, Ukiah
Jason Cox, Ukiah
‘Marchie’ Summit, Ukiah
John Perrill, Mendocino
Jim Larson, Ukiah
Bob Ayres, Albion
John Knoebber, Mendocino
Kathleen Kirkpatrick, Willits
John Mayfield Jr., Ukiah
Eddie Vedolla Jr., Redwood Valley
Priscilla Hunter, Coyote Valley
Alfred Bolton, Elk
Margie Handley, Willits
Lisa Walters, Gualala
Fred Sternkopf, Caspar
.
Irv Sutley, Glen Ellen
Kate Coleman, Oakland
Larry Bensky, Berkeley
Michael Weist, Berkeley
Ed Denson (Humboldt County)
SHERIFF KENDALL: 2025
As we come into 2025 the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to work on several issues which continue to affect our communities. I think we are coming into a very exciting time and I truly believe we will see some drastic improvements for public safety in Mendocino County.
Violence, Addiction, Homelessness, and property crimes are the largest problems which we continue to face. Addictions are not victimless crimes, they are and have been the root cause of many crimes including our type 1 felonies. We see horrific events coming from addictions including murder, child abuse and neglect, not to mention violence such as robbery and burglaries driven by the influence or need for narcotics. Without a new model of education and accountability in equal doses we will never get in front of these issues. We are currently working towards the new model in our state and I think it is high time.
Rural areas of California are often forgotten because many times state representatives are looking for numbers in voting and can easily dismiss rural counties which have small populations. Many times communities have completely different needs and one size will never fit all counties or communities.
This year California voters in all 58 counties overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36, the tough-on-crime ballot measure that will reform parts of Proposition 47 which had hamstrung law enforcement and our courts for an entire decade. This was a clear message our victims of crime have had enough. Benjamin Franklin was once quoted saying, “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”
The recent vote on Prop 36 clearly shows we have reached that point. Law enforcement leaders and District Attorneys across the state are working to apply these new laws. I am certain that we will see better outcomes than we have seen over the past decade. Let’s be very clear there is a portion of the population which will not comply with the law until they are forced to do so.
We are continuing to hire Deputy Sheriffs and Corrections Deputies. Recent legislative changes in California allowed us to hire immigrants recognized under DACA who can legally work in California. These young men and women have been a valuable addition to our ranks and are community members who mostly came here as children and were raised in our communities.
There is a new discussion we are hearing from our Nation’s Capitol. This discussion is regarding the H1B visa program for migrants working in specialty fields. This may be a pathway for these deputies and a road to their United States Citizenship. I have began discussions with our federal partners in hopes that peace officers in the State of California can be recognized and considered for this visa program. These folks are providing a valuable service to our communities, and they should be recognized for this service.
The construction of the behavioral health wing of the Mendocino County Jail is on track and will help with many of the state mandates for services which have become legislated for jail populations. This will improve outcomes and partnerships that will also create positive outcomes for our residents.
As we move forward into 2025 I hope we can all work together to create safe and productive communities. I hope we can look out for our families friends and neighbors. I am always impressed with our communities during times of need because we all see how similar we are. Many folks try to divide us based on our differences; it’s time for that to stop.
Our strength will always come from the sense of community we share here in Mendocino County.
As always, thank you for the constant support you show to our men and women serving at the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff Matt Kendall
Ukiah
A SAFE AND HEALTHY CONTAINERIZED NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE
Our collaboration with the Arena Unified School District - thank you Warren and Patrick and all of the staff that support them - and Redwood Coast Fire District - thank you Casie Smith - has come to fruition! And a thank you to the Community Foundation of Mendocino County for funding the grant proposal.
Respite center cargo container located at Arena High School across from the maintenance shop.
What a supreme New Years present!
Now all we need is an inauguration party - how about our next meeting? Wednesday, February 5th, time and location tbd. and a lock box?, shelves?, ventilation? dehumidifier? Whatever else you think that would make the container most useful. Come to the meeting and/or reply to the email with your ideas.
Stay dry. Stay safe. Stay off of flooded roads. Keep your radios charged.
Jennifer Smallwood, firesafepointarena@gmail.com
BOB YOUNG (Coast Chat Line): Howdy neighbors, I was told that Down Home Foods needs egg cartons. Don’t throw them in the recycling, take them to Down Home Foods, and check out the amazing produce while you are there.
HEROES AND PATRIOTS THIS MORNING
Luigi Mangione is facing a second-degree murder charge in New York City in connection with the fatal sidewalk shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The murder highlights the need for single-payer healthcare.
Our guest is David U. Himmelstein, MD.
Dr. Himmelstein is an American academic physician specializing in internal medicine. He is a distinguished professor of public health and health policy in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, an adjunct clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
He is the co-founder, with Steffie Woolhandler, of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), an organization advocating for single-payer healthcare in the United States
The second half of our show will focus on a local topic that is now making national news.
More than 500 federal taxpayers across 10 Northern California counties, including our own co-host John Sakowicz, have filed an unprecedented class action lawsuit against their congressional representatives, Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson, charging that they illegally abused their tax-and-spend authority when voting to allocate $26.38 billion in military aid to Israel on April 20, 2024. By doing so, the lawsuit alleges, they violated the U.S. Constitution, the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and U.S. federal laws.
In the lawsuit, filed Thursday, Dec. 26, in federal district court in San Francisco, the plaintiffs say that Huffman and Thompson supported the military aid despite overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military was carrying out genocide in Gaza with U.S.-provided weapons and munitions.
The plaintiffs are represented by Szeto-Wong Law.
Our guest is one of the lawsuit's lead plaintiff and key organizer, Seth Donnelly, a former high school teacher.
KMUD
Our show, "Heroes and Patriots Radio", airs live on KMUD, on the first and fifth Thursdays of every month, at 9 AM, Pacific Time.
We simulcast our programming on two full power FM stations: KMUE 88.1 in Eureka and KLAI 90.3 in Laytonville. It also maintains a translator at 99.5 FM in Shelter Cove, California.
We also stream live from the web at https://kmud.org/
Speak with our guests live and on-the-air at: KMUD Studio (707) 923-3911. Please call in.
We post our shows to our own website and Youtube channels. Shows may be excerpted in other media outlets.
Wherever you live, KMUD is your community radio station. We are a true community of informed and progressive people. Please join us by becoming a member or underwriter.
ED NOTES
MY FRIEND JUDY VALADAO WRITES:
OK, here it goes. I don’t usually talk about health issues on here [Facebook] but I’m finding myself lost on heart healthy diets. Yes, I had a heart attack on the 14th, (and by the way) the ER here in Fort Bragg was great in getting me stable and transferred to Santa Rosa. A stent was placed in an artery and I’m now on blood thinners and a handful of other medications and I’m doing great. My problem is, what kind of diet to be on? I’m finding one site will say one thing and the next site I check out says something totally different. I have made an appointment with the dietician at the clinic, but in the meantime, does anyone have any idea where to look for the best diet and recipes that are heart healthy? I bought an air fryer and tried it for the first time tonight.
FIRST OFF, I’m hugely relieved Ms. V is on the living side of her heart attack, as is everyone else who knows her as one of Fort Bragg’s most crucial citizens.
AS AN ANCIENT PERSON stayin’ alive in ‘25, I know that life is an every day gamble, that I’ve survived some rolls of life’s dice that I was very lucky to survive, but…
BUT despite my too many wilfully stupid gambles, overall, and without elaborating on my vast indebtedness to my wife of 60 years, I can attribute my longevity to the simple basics of diet and exercise, basics about which knowledge was still in the dark ages during my youth. But I was fortunate to grow up in pre-sedentary times. I walked everywhere as a kid. We all did. 70 years later kids, tiny ones, too, zip past me on electric bicycles.
ONE of the only lessons I can remember from high school was a biology teacher telling us that the heart was a muscle that will “wither and die” if it isn’t exercised. I can’t remember the teacher but I remember that stark phrase, “wither and die.”
SO, I’ve walked all my life and, at the beginning of the running fad, I ran, completing five marathons, wondering every step why I was doing it, finally concluding that walking was as aerobically productive as running and I could see the sights at the same time.
“WITHER and die” seems to have lodged itself in my fragged consciousness. But the other half of physical longevity circa 1950 — food — consisted only of the advice to eat from the five major food groups, in my case maybe four on a consistent basis — milk, fruit, some meat, corn flakes heaped with sugar, tons of peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread, the latter combo called “chokers” and probably lacking in basic healthy nutrition. The junk food prevalent today was not prevalent in 1950.
AS A GEEZER twice in and out of the final white tunnel, I eat a giant bowl of granola and fruit every morning, specifically plain granola from the Ukiah Co-Op, a banana, an apple, a sprinkling of olive oil, blueberries, plain walnuts, and a scoop of low fat yogurt. Half in the a.m., the other half at noon. Dinner? Whatever, but gluttonous portions seldom. Walk at least two miles every morning, then another mile late afternoon. A buncha push-ups before slumber. That’s it, which I’m hoping will get me to the other end of ‘25. I’ve done it this way for so many years I feel off if I miss a day.
2025 QUADRANTID METEOR SHOWER TO PEAK JANUARY 3
The Quadrantid meteor shower is one of a few each year with a narrow peak, in this case lasting only about 6 hours.
2025 Quadrantid meteor shower
When to watch: The best time to watch for the 2025 Quadrantids is the hours before dawn on January 3. (The predicted peak is 19 UTC on January 3).
Nearest moon phase: A first quarter moon will come at 23:56 UTC on January 6, 2025 (5:56 p.m. CST) so the moon will be a waxing crescent and set a few hours after sunset on January 2 and not interfere with the Quadrantid meteors.
Radiant: Rises in the north-northeast after midnight and is highest up before dawn. The radiant point for the Quadrantids is in a now-obsolete constellation, Quadrans Muralis the Mural Quadrant. Nowadays, we see the radiant near the famous Big Dipper asterism. Because the Quadrantid radiant is far to the north on the sky’s dome, this is mostly a far-northern shower, not as good for the Southern Hemisphere.
Expected meteors at peak, under ideal conditions: Under a dark sky with no moon, when the radiant is high in the sky, the Quadrantids can (briefly) produce over 100 meteors per hour.
Duration of shower: The Quadrantid meteor shower runs from mid-November through mid-January each year, according to this 2017 article in the journal Icarus. You might see a Quadrantid streak by any time during that interval. But most activity is centered on the peak. This time period is when we’re passing through the meteor stream in space!
Note: The Quadrantid shower is one of four major meteor showers each year with a sharp peak (the other three are the Lyrids, Leonids and Ursids).…
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/everything-you-need-to-know-quadrantid-meteor-shower/
A FEW YEARS AGO, before they severely restricted their on line comments, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, in an ill-considered effort to get their readers to pat them on their head, ran an on-line forum section entitled: “The Santa Rosa Press Democrat is a very poor newspaper.” Talk about asking for it. Anonymous posters gleefully piled on. “Every time I sit down to read it I can’t help but think what a crappy newspaper it is. Literally no good content at all. Journalism? Forget it! From top to bottom, first page to last this newspaper blows. How can they stay in business? Can someone provide a link to even one story in the last month that would qualify as actual journalism? I’m not counting Lowell Cohn.” Anonymous Comment 2: “What was your first clue? It’s been crappy for years, and since it is owned [it was at the time] by the NY Times which is tanking due to unethical ‘journalistic’ practices (lies and slander) the PD can only print what the NY Times says is ok to feed you. That means regurgitated/censored and pablum style articles that will only slant toward one political agenda. YOU decide which one.” Anonymous Comment 3: “That was GOOD!” Anonymous Comment 4: “I canceled my subscription when they hired an out of town contractor to build their (now empty) palace in Rohnert Park. They actually paid some poor person to call me & ask why!” Anonymous Comment 5: “If that was you… sorry! lol.” Anonymous Comment 6: “I know I’m supporting them just by logging on here but I like to see what the community is up to– and I NEVER click on the ads.” Anonymous Comment 7: “Still no check! But I have ‘HOPE’!!! and ‘Change’!!! LOTS of change.” Anonymous Comment 8: “I don’t see how we can be ‘supporting’ the PD by logging on to the website. Unless you click on the ads (which you nor I never do), then they make NOTHING off us.” Anonymous Comment 9: “They do a pretty good job reporting on any awards they win.” Anonymous Comment 10: “You geniuses are waiting for the day when there are NO newspapers and you can feed your brain with blogs. I suggest you take your meds and suggest an alternative, and then PAY for it.” Anonymous Comment 11: “One thing to keep in mind is: yes, it’s a lousy newspaper, but it never was a good newspaper.” Anonymous Comment 12: “Why should we want newspapers that don’t inform? If your idea of a quality news source is Pravda, then the PD is for you.” Anonymous Comment 14: “For your edification, I do not visit, read, nor write on blogs. Perhaps YOU do, I DON’T. Your PD is STILL a RAG.” Anonymous Comment 15: “Then why are you all here if you think it sucks so much?” Anonymous Comment 16: “For laughs.” Anonymous Comment 17: “Hey, wait, I need the PD! Bottom of the bird cage. Wrapper for dead fish. Kitchen floor for the puppy to pee on.” Anonymous Comment 18: “Here is a partial list of its symptoms: Owned by the NY Times, Biased, Irrelevant, Staffed by 20 year old kids who can’t write, No investigations or research, No content on Monday! Ads are too expensive. Oh my. Why aren’t they out of business? It’s a matter to time. All newspapers are going down the tubes – see the above list. I used to enjoy the morning paper (many, many years ago). It kept me informed and in the loop. I rarely missed a day. But now I usually don’t bother. Oh, I buy a copy every now and then just to see how fast the industry is dying. Sad, really. There was an entire sub-culture built around the newspaper, from the delivery boy down the street to popular writers like Herb Caen. People would ask, ‘Did you see that in the paper today?’ just to start a conversation with their friends. All gone. What will take the place of the daily newspaper? Nothing. The culture will be gone soon, along with the drive-in movie, and within a generation no one will remember what a byline or a soda jerk was.”
(Mark Scaramella)
MENDOCINO COUNTY WAY BACK WHEN (Ron Parker)
I wonder if this redwood is still there? The photographer is standing on the bridge that Ron posted a picture of earlier. Long before the current straightline road cut that Hwy 128 takes now, the road used to come into Philo further east and would have crossed Indian Creek here and then up into what is now Philo School Road.
Ray’s Resort neat Philo
Indian Creek School, Philo
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, January 1, 2024
NATHAN DEGURSE, 26, Willits. Under influence, paraphernalia, county parole violation.
LUKE DERAMO, 28, Cloverdale/Ukiah. Arson of property.
VICTOR FERNANDEZ, 30, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI.
DONALD GONZALEZ JR., 58, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Domestic abuse, damaging communications line, domestic violence court order violation.
CHRISTOPHER MCCOMB, 47, Ukiah. Domestic battery, domestic violence court order violation.
SAMANTHA MENDEZ, 26, Ukiah. Domestic abuse, probation revocation, resisting.
SAVANNAH RAY, 20, Hoopa/Ukiah. Disturbing the peace with loud noise, resisting.
SEAN SANCHEZ, 28, Upper Lake/Ukiah. DUI.
JASON TIDD, 46, Redwood Valley. DUI.
JESUS ZAMORA-MARTINEZ, 28, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.
BILL KIMBERLIN:
They were just starting to tear down many of the old mansions in Marin when we moved to Kentfield from a big old house in San Francisco. Since the late 1800’s families that could afford it had not only owned a big house in the City, but also an even bigger house in Marin where they went to escape the summer fog in San Francisco.
You can still see an assortment of palm trees in old town Larkspur, San Rafael, Ross, San Anselmo, and Kentfield that mark where an old mansion often once stood. They were teardowns because they were on large parcels of land that could be developed and because they had become difficult to maintain and heat or cool after servants were no longer affordable for most families.
One of these places that did not get torn down was just up the street from me. It was called “Quisisana” originally, but by my day it was simply known as the Kamp Estate.
The Kamp Mansion was a Queen Anne Victorian home called the Grand Queen, and was rebuilt in 1906 after a fire destroyed the original home, which dated back to 1892.
I used to play with the boy my age who lived there. It was amazing. It was on 13 acres of land and had a bunch of apple orchards as well as an old growth redwood forest and some kind of field of Ivy that we rolled around and played in.
The house was 16,000 square feet over four stories. But the thing that was most amazing to me was that it had an elevator. It was pretty funky and had an elaborate system of pulleys to make it work, but we did ride it as often as we could. I remember Mrs. Kamp telling my mother that the house was so large that it became almost unmanageable so she closed off the fourth floor entirely.
Dr. Kamp bought the property in 1946 and was a very successful optometrist. He and his wife Eva lived there until 1985.
In 1954, the original thirteen acres was subdivided, leaving the house on a remaining four-acre parcel. The parcels were bisected by Quisisana Drive and developed into multiple single-family homes. The house has been restored several times, but it is still there.
Today, the house on Laurel Grove sits on about two acres, it’s about 16,000 square feet, now includes ten bathrooms, eight bedrooms, two kitchens, two living rooms, a parlor, dining room, study, spa, butler’s pantry and a six-car carport. On April 6, 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama visited the estate in a fundraiser. I toured it about a dozen years ago when it was on a Marin Garden Tour.
A MOUNTAIN LION ATTACKED MY NEPHEWS. WHAT COULD HAVE STOPPED IT?
As dangerous encounters in California continue to rise, local residents and wildlife experts are trying to figure out how humans and big cats can coexist.
by Malcolm Brooks
Taylen, 21, and Wyatt, 18, grew up fully immersed in the outdoors, in a largely rural part of El Dorado County’s Sierra foothills, hunting deer and turkeys, quail and ducks, and fishing for bass and trout. On the afternoon of the attack, they had gone out in pursuit of shed deer antlers, a springtime ritual that resulted over the years in mountains of prongs and tines in the boys’ bedroom, garage and shed, each specimen meticulously labeled with the date and location of the find.
It was Wyatt who glimpsed the movement first, out of the corner of his eye. He was walking on the uphill side of the road, no more than five minutes out of the car, scanning the slope for the telltale jut of a fallen antler. When his head ratcheted around to take in the scene, a young male lion came into view no more than 10 yards away, walking almost casually in their direction.
Taylen, just behind his brother and off to the side, was scanning the lower slope for antlers and still unaware of the cat’s presence. Wyatt said his brother’s name, and both boys immediately followed the standard procedure for lion encounters: arms above their heads to appear larger, shouting and yelling while backing slowly away.
The lion kept coming, eyes locked and pads gaining ground. When the distance closed to a matter of feet, Wyatt hurled his backpack, grazing the cat’s face. The lion never paused, never seemed to react.
Then Wyatt tripped on a stick and fell backward. The cat launched, pouncing on him as he hit the ground. The upper fangs sank into Wyatt’s left cheek, just below his eye socket, the lower into his top lip and right nostril, flaying his face in four separate places.
Later, in the hospital, Wyatt told his father, my brother, that the cat appeared “huge.” In reality, it was half-grown at around 90 pounds — large enough to present a deadly threat, but not so big as to prevent my nephew from flipping it on its back and pulling its head away from his own, both hands clutching the lion’s throat. The cat went berserk, grabbing with its front claws and raking with its rear, in the way all felines use their haunches to eviscerate prey.
Wyatt had no choice but to spin away. The instant he did, the cat went for his brother. From Wyatt’s perspective, Taylen’s face disappeared behind the cat’s head as its jaws locked around his brother’s neck. He saw that Taylen’s hands were underneath the lion’s head, as if trying to grasp its throat the way Wyatt had. Wyatt then jumped onto the cat’s back. “I grabbed it by the neck again and tried to pull it off, but I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, it just wouldn’t let go.”
Even in his own frenzied panic, Wyatt realized Taylen’s arms had gone limp, and that the situation could only get worse. As he backed away, two thoughts flashed in his mind: Call for help and go for the car, on the off chance he could somehow use it to scare the animal away. He reached for his phone, found it was no longer in his pocket, then spotted it in the dirt. By the time he picked it up, the lion was dragging Taylen over the edge of the road, back into the brush from which it emerged.
Wyatt tried to dial 911 but couldn’t, his hands slick with blood on the phone screen. When he finally succeeded, the responder had no idea what to tell him, other than to stay in the car. With the dispatcher still on the line, Wyatt drove to the scene of the attack, marked now only by the backpack he’d flung moments earlier.
Fifteen minutes later a pair of deputies roared up, followed by an ambulance. The deputies spotted the drag trail through the brush and followed it to the cat, still crouched over Taylen’s body.
They shot at the ground to scare the lion away. Instead it rushed the deputies, who again tried another warning barrage. It flinched, then attempted another charge. The deputies shot into the ground yet again, and the lion finally vanished into the brush.
El Dorado County lies at the heart of California Gold Rush country, in the Sierra foothills just east of Sacramento. Growing up there in the ‘80s, my brother and I, much like my nephews, hunted deer and quail and doves. Once wild turkeys began to proliferate, we expanded what had been an autumn passion into the green of springtime, the traditional season for gobbler hunting.
Everybody knew the mountain lions were around, but back then daytime sightings were rare. We would sometimes hear a lion scream in the dusk, a bloodcurdling sound, in the canyon behind our house. Occasionally somebody would glimpse one in their headlights on some winding mountain road. But we never went into the woods with any thought that we might be in danger ourselves, because at the time, as far as typical lion behavior went, we weren’t.
For most of the 20th century, the only known human deaths from a lion in California occurred in 1909, when a rabid animal attacked two people. (They survived the actual encounter but died later from rabies.) In that era, apex predators were largely viewed as having no ecological benefit, and California paid a bounty for lions, employing up to five state-funded professional hunters. That system continued until 1963, when the species was classified as vermin, except there were no longer cash rewards and also no limit to the number of lions that could be killed. No records were kept on how many actually were.
By the end of the decade, however, concerns grew that lions might be nearing extinction. The decline had been noted not just by animal-welfare advocates but by recreational hunters. At the time, the latter used dogs to trail lions by scent, and in response, the lions would climb trees to escape. Often, the dogs would be pulled away, an exercise referred to as “tree and free.” In 1969, in an effort to preserve the population, lions came under the protection of the California Department of Fish and Game, and in 1971, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a kill moratorium. Pursuit permits would still be issued to allow hound-handlers to tree the big cats, in part as a form of data collection to establish a population count.
In 1985, the number of livestock killed by lions, or what stock producers call depredations — a figure that had remained in the single- or double-digits for decades — increased to nearly 150. A similar number was recorded the following year, as well as the first attacks on humans in nearly eight decades: Two children, ages 5 and 6, were mauled months apart in the same wilderness park in Orange County. In response, the state lifted the kill moratorium, with the intention of establishing a quota-based hunting season.
But in 1990 — the year I turned 20 — voters passed Proposition 117 by ballot measure, designating the mountain lion a “specially protected mammal.” Lions would be shielded from lethal hunting, and for the first time in California history, turning a hound onto a cat’s trail became a criminal offense. Grizzlies and wolves had long been eradicated, leaving only hound-assisted humans as the mountain lion’s singular, top-of-the-food-chain competitor. With this final external pressure essentially eliminated (exceptions were made for scientific study and livestock kills), those of us in the rural foothills began to notice changes.
Depredations climbed. Our longtime neighbor, a man whose ranch had been in his family for generations, lost a couple of sheep in his pasture — a first. More strikingly, people all over the county were actually seeing mountain lions, not only in their high beams at night but in broad daylight, with increasing regularity: crossing the road, loafing at the edge of a fenced field, skirting a campground. My brother experienced the shock of having one run into the side of his pickup one afternoon, deflect away, and bound off into the brush.
The shift in lion behavior wasn’t unique to El Dorado County. In 1992, a 9-year-old boy on a bike ride near Santa Barbara was mauled by a young lion, resulting in more than 600 stitches. In ‘93, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park near San Diego closed for several weeks after multiple visitors had too-close-for-comfort encounters. The weekend after reopening, a lion walked into a campground and bit a 10-year-old girl before being driven off by the family dog, which was also mauled. Park rangers shot and killed the lion.
Then, in April 1994, Barbara Schoener disappeared while jogging in El Dorado County, 10 miles from where Taylen and Wyatt were attacked. Her partially consumed body was discovered the next day — neck bitten and skull crushed — in a mound of debris. Schoener became the first lion fatality in California since 1909. Eight months later, another woman was killed in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, where the 10-year-old camper was attacked. In the interim, three other lions were also euthanized in Cuyamaca, after showing aggressive behavior toward humans.
With livestock attacks also steadily increasing, the Department of Fish and Game began to issue more depredation permits. Between 1995 and 2019, well over 100 lions on average were killed annually. Then, in 2020, a statewide directive changed the equation again. The new policy generally allowed multiple attacks by a lion on any given parcel of land before a lethal permit would be issued.
Whether by coincidence or as a direct result, six attacks on humans occurred between 2020 and 2022, all nonfatal and all but one targeting small children. Certain regions of the state, meanwhile, became hot zones of lion activity — out of 31 lethal depredation permits approved statewide in 2023, twelve were in my home county. Three hours west in San Mateo County, a 5-year-old survived an attack on a hiking trail. Soon, the incident with Taylen and Wyatt would mark the first death in two decades.
I graduated in the same high-school class as a kid named John Chandler. We didn’t know each other well then and had no way of predicting how fate would one day connect us. Like me, Chandler grew up hunting and fishing in the heart of California Gold Rush Country. He turned that passion for the outdoors into a career as the El Dorado County Wildlife Specialist, or county trapper. Any time an agricultural producer or horse owner or home gardener has a persistent issue with dangerous or destructive animals — skunks denning under a shed, raccoons raiding a chicken coop, bears gorging in a vineyard — Chandler can assist, either with advice or, if necessary, direct intervention. Over the past few years, more and more cases have involved mountain lions.
“I was skiing when the first call came through,” Chandler told me, about the day my nephews were attacked. It wasn’t a typical weekend contact from a dispatcher or general citizen — this was a call from Jeff Leikauf, the El Dorado County Sheriff, stating that a lion attack had just been reported, that he didn’t have all the details but needed Chandler to get down the hill from Tahoe.
A little later, he received a call from the state department of fish and wildlife: confirmed human fatality. He drove down the mountain at breakneck speed, crated his trio of hounds and sped on, arriving roughly two hours after he was summoned. Wyatt was already at the hospital. The coroner’s van was just leaving with Taylen.
By now a storm front had blown in, the late afternoon sky dumping rain. The deputies and a pair of state game wardens led him to the recovery site where Taylen’s crushed ball cap remained. Chandler turned his hounds loose, down into thicker timber. Within minutes, the dogs were barking, indicating that they had run a lion up a tree, less than a hundred yards from where Taylen’s body was recovered. After consultation with the wardens, Chandler killed the animal with a single shot.
Ten days later, Chandler was called to a livestock kill just outside the city limits of Placerville, the quaint town where we went to high school. He tracked the lion to a paved walking path, practically within rock-chucking distance of an elementary school, a senior living center and the Walmart parking lot.
After his dogs ran it up a tree, several hours of deliberation between Fish and Wildlife and local law enforcement ensued about how to proceed. Eventually, the cat jumped down and went after the dogs, and Chandler had no choice but to shoot.
Ten days after that he was called out again, after another lion came onto the same property and killed the landowner’s dog. Chandler’s hounds treed this cat about a hundred yards from where he treed the first. Both were big, healthy, mature males at the upper end of the weight spectrum, nearly double the size of the cat that attacked Taylen and Wyatt.
Lions attacking a pair of adult men, head-on. Lions jumping into a fenced suburban yard to snatch the family dog in broad daylight. Lions coming out of a tree to engage the hounds that chased it there. Lions hazed away by gunfire, then turning around and charging back for more.
“This is the weirdest year,” Chandler said. “Over 25 years, I’ve had calls for maybe a couple of horses that got attacked. This year, we’re already up to five.”
As Wyatt was being prepped for reconstructive surgery, his only concern was knowing what had become of Taylen. His father told him the news. Wyatt put his swollen head back against the pillow, looked up at that hospital ceiling, and said one word. “Seriously?”
A plastic surgeon worked through the night. The long pair of scimitar-like scars along his left eye will never go away, but the ragged flaps that had been his right nostril and the sliced-open cleft of his upper lip are now barely detectable. I’m not sure what that surgeon did, or how it’s even possible at all, but he made Wyatt look like himself.
“Can I hug you?” I asked, the first time I saw him a week later, not sure of his pain level. He put his arms around me, and the words that came out of my mouth are the absolute truth — I told him he was beautiful.
I was with his father and stepmother, Aaron and Stacy, the first time they entered Taylen’s bedroom, two weeks after the attack, to gather some of his things to send off with him when his body was cremated. Turkey feathers, fishing lures, guitar picks. Tokens he saved from his one young romance. We’re all haunted now by two things — the loss of possibility for what should have been Taylen’s life and whatever it was he had to endure in those violent seconds at the end of his life.
As for Wyatt, he summoned the resolve to head back into the field just a few days after his release from the hospital, on the general opener of turkey season. Not deep into the woods and not to hunt himself, just onto a friend’s property to tag along and try to call in a bird for his buddy. He has always been all-in for the outdoors, with relentless patience in a deer stand or turkey blind, and always the last one off the trout stream. But to go back out like this, so soon after an experience that could have justifiably made him turn away from the wild forever? I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that it’s what he has always done and, despite everything that happened, will always do.
What we love about this region can never be separated from the ways that it will remain largely untamed, with its plunging river canyons and sheer rock pitches, dense thickets of chaparral and manzanita. It’s perfect habitat for creatures that will also never be tamed, and that’s part of the beauty, too, and part of the reason people like my family choose to make a home and a life in such a place.
So the question becomes, how do we coexist going forward? There will most likely never be a perfect, harmonious balance between contemporary humans with modern lives and the wild, apex predators that have occupied the landscape for time immemorial. But as it happens, the practice that was outlawed decades ago in California — nonlethal tree-and-free hound pursuit — has lately become better understood as a means of reinforcing the mountain lion’s historic tendency to avoid humans altogether.
A growing body of work conducted by wildlife biologists in several states seems increasingly to bear this out. Bart George, a biologist employed by the Kalispel Tribe of Indians in northeastern Washington, recently concluded a four-year study that pinpointed collared lions by satellite coordinates, often in gulp-inducing proximity to walking trails and residential housing. He would approach, sometimes with hounds, sometimes without. His observation: The lions were scared off by the dogs but not by humans alone.
A second study, published in August 2024 in the science journal Ecology and Evolution, echoes that finding. Researchers contrasted lion behavior in California and Nevada, the latter of which allows both nonlethal hound pursuit and a legal, limited harvest season. The results indicate that the Nevada lions are considerably more inclined to avoid areas where humans live.
Still more recently, in the wake of human encounters culminating in the attack on my nephews, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has emphasized the necessity of “adaptive” management — the notion that circumstances in different regions require different strategies. Starting this month, the department will partner with researchers from Utah State University to test the efficacy of various hazing strategies, primary among them the use of hounds. The project will focus on the current hot zone of El Dorado County, plus the adjacent Sierra foothills counties. For the first time since 1990 and the passage of Prop. 117, tree-and-free is not only part of the discussion in California but will actually be studied as a management tool.
As my family can now tell you, tragedy happens. And as we’re all finding, life still has to continue, even on different terms. My brother is no longer comfortable camping in a tent, or even rolling the trash can down his driveway without a 12-gauge in hand. Wyatt no longer takes his afternoon run down the same rural roads he used to. People I’ve known for years have begun to carry pepper spray to walk to the mailbox.
But nobody is packing up and heading for the city. They still have lives they enjoy, in rural places they love, near the wild regions that call to them.
CALIFORNIA LAWS THAT GO INTO EFFECT ON JAN. 1
Lawmakers passed hundreds of bills in 2024, addressing issues including shoplifting, marijuana and artificial intelligence. Here are some of the key measures that begin New Year’s Day.
by Katie Selig
Harsher penalties for serial shoplifters. A framework for Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes. New safeguards against artificial intelligence deepfakes.
The California Legislature passed hundreds of bills in 2024, many of which go into effect on Jan. 1 and touch nearly every aspect of life in the Golden State.
Here’s a look at some of the most prominent laws taking hold New Year’s Day.
A Crack Down On Shoplifting
The state passed a series of laws targeting retail crime and property theft, including shoplifting, car break-ins and smash-and-grab robberies.
The legislation increases penalties for repeat offenders, creates additional ways to prosecute crimes as felonies and allows the police to arrest people suspected of retail theft with probable cause, even if officers did not witness the crime.
One significant change allows prosecutors to add up the value of property stolen from multiple victims, making it easier to reach the $950 threshold necessary to charge a suspect with a felony.
The changes come as California voters have shifted to the right on crime. While overall crime rates in California are among the lowest ever recorded, certain crimes, such as vehicle thefts and shoplifting, have risen in recent years.
In November, voters passed Proposition 36, a ballot measure that imposed harsher penalties for shoplifting and drug possession. That went into effect in mid-December.
A Pathway For Amsterdam-Style Cannabis Cafes
Marijuana dispensaries in California are now allowed to sell food and nonalcoholic beverages and host live events, paving the way for Amsterdam-like cannabis cafes.
Marijuana businesses in the state, home to the nation’s largest number of cannabis consumers, rallied for the law.
A separate law lets local governments create “entertainment zones,” where restaurants and bars can sell alcoholic drinks to go, and outdoor drinking will be permitted.
Protections Against Sexually Explicit Deepfakes
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed several A.I.-related protections. One bill makes it illegal to create and distribute lifelike depictions of real people in images that cause serious emotional distress, targeting A.I.-generated deepfakes that are sexually explicit. Another bill requires social media platforms to provide users with a way to report sexually explicit deepfakes of themselves.
Mr. Newsom did however veto a sweeping A.I. safety bill that was aimed at limiting the growth of the technology, directing legislators to revise it in the next session.
A Ban On ‘Forced Outing’ Of L.G.B.T.Q. Youths By Schools
School districts can no longer require teachers or staff members to disclose a student’s gender identity or sexual orientation to their parents.
The legislation, the first of its kind in the country, responds to policies in some school districts that required employees to notify parents if a student began using different pronouns or identified as a gender not reflected in school records.
“Teachers can still talk to parents,” Mr. Newsom said at a news conference in December. “What they can’t do under the law is fire a teacher for not being a snitch. I just don’t think teachers should be gender police.”
Several school districts have sued the state over the legislation, and the case is pending in federal court.
Reparations Measures For Black Residents
Multiple laws modeled after recommendations from the state’s Reparations Task Force are taking effect, including a measure that broadens protections against discrimination based on hair texture and hairstyles such as braids, locs and twists that protect hair from damage and are often worn by Black people.
Another such law requires companies to give advance notice to employees and county officials before closing a grocery store or a pharmacy. That measure is aimed at preventing neighborhoods from losing their main source of food or prescriptions, which disproportionately affects areas that are predominantly Black.
Of the 14 reparations bills prioritized by the California Legislative Black Caucus, six were signed into law. Some failed to pass the Legislature, and two were vetoed by Mr. Newsom. The package did not include the direct cash payments recommended by the task force.
A Measure Blocking Medical Debt From Affecting Credit Scores
Health providers and debt collectors are now prohibited from reporting most medical debt to credit agencies, preventing it from having a negative impact on credit reports. These reports, which are the basis for credit scores, can affect a person’s ability to secure a loan, mortgage or even a job.
Millions of Californians have unpaid medical bills, including more than half of low-income residents, according to the California Health Care Foundation.
Restrictions On Toxic Chemicals In Cosmetics And Clothing
Several laws that ban certain toxic chemicals from clothing and cosmetics take effect on Jan. 1.
One bill targets 24 chemicals in cosmetics, including mercury and formaldehyde. Other bills ban the sale of cosmetic products, clothing and outdoor gear containing PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” a group of thousands of chemicals that persist in the environment and accumulate in the body.
Exposure to PFAS has been linked to severe health risks, though experts are still researching to fully understand their effects. These chemicals are widespread in the blood of Americans and difficult to get rid of, as they can be found in items ranging from pizza boxes to dental floss.
The Legislature passed the laws before 2024 but gave companies additional time to comply.
Safeguards For Money Made By Child Content Creators
Two pieces of legislation enhance financial protections for child content creators, including child influencers and minors featured on YouTube, Instagram and other online platforms that generate revenue.
One bill extends the state’s Coogan Law, which protects child performers, to minors employed as content creators on online platforms. Employers will be required to deposit at least 15 percent of their earnings into a trust account.
The other measure mandates compensation for minors featured in online content that makes money, requiring parents or guardians to set aside a portion of their earnings in a trust account.
A Proactive Ban On Octopus Farming
California is banning octopus farming and the sale of farmed octopuses, citing concerns about animal welfare and environmental impacts. Although currently there are no large-scale octopus farming operations in the state, the legislation aims to prevent them from opening in the future.
The law describes octopuses as “highly intelligent, curious, problem-solving animals” that are “conscious, sentient beings.”
California is the second state to prohibit octopus farming and the first to ban the sale of farmed octopuses.
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
In New Orleans, Celebration Is Followed by Terror in the French Quarter
Investigators Look Into Whether New Orleans Attacker Acted Alone
Officials Trying to Determine if Suspect Had Ties to Terrorist Groups
Suspect in Attack Is Identified as a U.S. Citizen From Texas
Who Were the People Killed in the New Orleans Attack on New Year’s?
New Orleans Attacker’s Military Record Includes Deployment to Afghanistan
New Orleans Attack ‘Inspired by ISIS’, a Cybertruck Explosion in Las Vegas, and More
Are Russian Sanctions Working? Debate Takes New Urgency With Trump.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I think an early favorite quote of the year I’ve read is: “Darwin loves medical advice on the internet.” I’m sure in 365 days that will have not changed.
VACCINE CONTROVERSY
Editor:
Many of your readers, along with many in the media, are claiming that Donald Trump wants to ban polio vaccines, despite the fact that Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have both protested that they don’t want to ban any vaccines. Since background coverage in the media has been scant, let me present some facts.
Aaron Siri, a legal adviser to Kennedy, filed three petitions with the Food and Drug Administration before Kennedy was a client (“Lawyer files petition to revoke polio vaccine,” Dec. 14). The petition dealing with polio vaccine was concerning IPOL, one of the six polio vaccines approved by the FDA. The other five vaccines were not affected. Siri’s petition, one of thousands filed with the FDA every year, said the trial period for IPOL was faulty, with no control group and only three days of safety review after injection. The petition asks that IPOL be recertified with a trial period more appropriate for a drug administered to children.
Kennedy has made a healthy America his raison d’être as secretary of health and human services, but no one, except the media, is talking about banning polio vaccines.
Joe Gaffney
Rohnert Park
JFK CASE: STILL NOT CLOSED
From JFK Facts:
What we learned in 2024 was that the “lone gunman” theory persists in the mainstream media and Wikipedia despite continuing revelations from the new JFK files that undermine the official story and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence chatbots that offer a more nuanced understanding of November 22.
We saw Robert F. Kennedy make the JFK files a central part of his independent bid for President. We saw Donald Trump narrowly avoid assassination and, when RFK Jr. joined his campaign, we heard his promise to release all the JFK files.
With Trump’s victory, we saw new possibilities (and perils) to the cause of full JFK disclosure.
All told, JFK Facts published 309 posts in 2024 about all aspects of the JFK story, enlarging readers’ understanding of November 22, 1963 and its relevance today.
Case closed?
Not at the CIA. In 2024, we learned that the CIA itself did not believe the lone gunman theory. After President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, top officials at the CIA station in Miami investigated Cuban exiles known to the agency—not Oswald, not Fidel Castro, not the KGB—for orchestrating the ambush in Dealey Plaza.
The results of this internal investigation of JFK’s murder have never been made public.
Stephen Jaffe, a former investigator for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, told the JFK Facts podcast that French president Charles De Gaulle didn’t believe the official story and instructed his intelligence service to assist Garrison’s investigation.
“There’s no new evidence…”
In fact, JFK files released in 2024 shows that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission when two top officials testified under oath the Agency had only “minimal” information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, before JFK was killed.
JFK Facts revealed that, on the day JFK was killed, the CIA already had a 181 page dossier on his supposed assassin.
Either top CIA officers were extraordinarily negligent when it came to Kennedy’s killer or they were running an operation to transform Oswald into what he said he was: a “patsy” for others who committed the crime for which he was blamed.
“Somebody would have talked…”
More than one somebody did. James Sibert, the veteran FBI agent who attended JFK’s autopsy, told a friend it was obvious the president been killed by a gunshot from the front…
“There’s no JFK whistleblower…”
In fact, a former CIA contract employee told JFK Facts that the Agency maintained a secret archive of JFK assassination records in a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in a CIA office building in Herndon, Virginia. The whistleblower spoke out, he said, because he “saw something that disturbed him.”
Asked to comment on the JFK Facts report, the CIA did not deny it…
“Mainstream news organizations couldn’t all be wrong about JFK…”
Yet JFK Facts pointed out that the BBC’s coverage amounted to “journalistic malpractice.” The New York Times solicited and then rejected David Talbot’s cogent case against the official theory. And the Times and the Washington Post proved incapable of understanding the late Donald Sutherland and his scene-stealing role in Oliver Stone’s JFK.
“The government was just doing CYA (Cover Your Ass).”
In fact, Chad Nagle’s revelatory series showed that JFK’s assassination was followed by a trail of destruction of relevant evidence by a wide variety of actors atop the federal government.
Only the willfully naive will regard such a pattern of misconduct as exculpatory.
Common sense suggests it is incriminating. After all, if the evidence supported the official theory of a motiveless “lone gunman” why would anyone have destroyed it?
See also French President Charles de Gaulle on the JFK Assassination.
(via District5Diary)
BABE RUTH during a game in Japan, circa December, 1934 with one hand occupied by a parasol.
Sure, Ruth and his team which included 15 big league stars - including Lou Gehrig, Charlie Gehringer, Earl Averill, and Jimmie Foxx - won all 18 games of a 12-city tour against Japanese star players, outscoring them 189-39 overall, running up scores in double digits nine times, including 23-5 and 21-4 routs. Ruth alone hit 13 home runs with 33 RBI in the 18 games.
JIMMY CARTER AND THE USES OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
Of the four US presidents who’ve been handed a Nobel Peace Prize–Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama–the one who’d shown the cleanest pair of heels when it comes to escaping the world’s guffaws for the absurdity of the award is Jimmy Carter, who on his second day in office amnestied Vietnam War resisters and draft dodgers.
Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The rationale was Wilson’s effort to establish a League of Nations, but his substantive achievement was to have refined the language of liberal interventionism. Between TR and Wilson, it’s hard to say who was the more fervent racist. Probably Wilson. As governor of New Jersey he was a fanatical proponent of the confinement and sterilization of “imbeciles,” a eugenic crusade that culminated in the US Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Jews, Chinese and other suspect genetic material from entering the United States. Much against their will many of these excluded Jews made their way to Palestine. Others involuntarily stayed in Russia and eastern Europe and were murdered by the Nazis. Above all, Wilson at Versailles was the sponsor of ethnic nationalism, the motive force for the Final Solution. And they say Obama’s award has brought the Peace Prize into disrepute!
The peace laureate president who preceded him was TR, who got the prize in 1906 ostensibly for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War, but really as a reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar’s famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt’s eligibility for the Peace Prize:
“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture. “
TR was given the peace prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St Louis World Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of Man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly dispatched the Great White Fleet (sixteen U.S. Navy ships of the Atlantic Fleet including four battleships) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials, anticipating by scarce more than a century, Obama’s award, as he prepares to impose Pax Americana on the Hindu Kush and portions of Pakistan.
What the committee of those worth Norwegians was really saying was that when it comes to giving a US president the peace prize, the bar has to be set terribly low.
Carter got his Nobel in 2002 as a reward for conspicuous good works. But there again, the message of the Nobel committee was: Take the rough with the smooth. As with Obama, the election of Carter in 1977 was also a season of hope that a new era was dawning, particularly in the arena of foreign policy and the Cold War. During his successful drive for the presidency, the Georgia governor and peanut farmer told a group of Democrats that “Without endangering the national defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce the present defense expenditures by about five to seven billion annually. Exotic weapons which serve no function do not contribute to the national defense of this country. The Pentagon bureaucracy is bloated and wasteful.”
“If, after the inauguration,” Carter’s campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, told the press, “you find Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.”
Once in the White House, such stern talk from Carter quickly gave way to a more dispassionate deportment. Carter named Harold Brown–who had served as Secretary of the Air Force in the LBJ admininstration and once worked as a government scientists on nuclear weapons development, as his Defense Secretary. Carter wanted George Ball as secretary of state, but in the backstage maneuverings of the real election, the Israel lobby vetoed Ball. Carter was forced to pick Vance as Secretary of State and the Cold War fanatic Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Jordan did not quit. Such non-resignations are symbolically important because they indicate the real election is recognized and loyally accepted by all.
Carter soon cited all of the usual grave threats the Soviet Union posed to US national security. For 1978, the first fiscal year under his budgetary supervision, he requested $118 billion in defense spending. A pittance by today’s standards, but 25% more than the amount Carter had pledged as a candidate. By December of 1978, Carter was publically boasting that under his leadership, defense spending had “gone up in real dollars. We have compensated for the inflation rate and then added on top of that.”
Carter, the former nuclear scientist, and nearly all of the major media swallowed the demented notion of US nuclear “vulnerability” to a pre-emptive strike by the Soviet Union. Early in 1978, ‘Time’ was asking: “Can the US Defend Itself?” The nation’s leading defense experts, the magazine reported, were in broad agreement on a number of key matters: “The Soviet Unio’s continuing nuclear and conventional military buildup is increasingly ominous and may jeopardize the delicate balance of power that has deterred nuclear war…Disarmament negotiations like the SALT may not be capable, by themselves, of preserving the US-USSR balance.”
Carter crumbled, and the MX missile, the lovechild of Harold Brown, won the day.
By the 1980 presidential campaign, Carter and Reagan were dueling each other for who could promise the most federal largesse to the military, exactly like the Roman legions of old selling off the throne to the highest bidder. In fact, Carter’s pledges for future arms spending were actually greater than what Reagan proposed and won in the ongoing weapons boom of the 1980s.
It was Carter, after all, who amped up the new Cold War, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras, and, above all, dragged the United States into Afghanistan. It was in 1978 that a progressive secular government seized power in Afghanistan, decreeing universal education for women and banning child marriage. By early 1979, Carter was hatching plans with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and China to arm the Mujahideen and tribal warlords in Afghanistan to overthrow the government and attempt to lure the Soviet Union into combat. In December 1979, after repeated requests from the government in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sent forces to fight the rebellion by fundamentalists. The CIA launched the most expensive operation in its history to train and equip these fundamentalists and warlords.
(Nixon drank heavily and so did Ford. Jimmy Carter, the prig, brought jogging into the international politics. In the old days, the high and mighty stood at banquets sluicing down tumblers of firewater. These days they run about in their underwear. Who says there’s progress in human affairs?)
People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men, albeit Norwegian. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.
One shouldn’t take these prizes too seriously. Awards to liberal figures like Carter and Obama are gifts from the battlements of capital, signifying to doubters that the empire is in a safe pair of hands.
(Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s books include: Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, Al Gore: a User’s Manual, Five Days that Shook the World, Imperial Crusades and An Orgy of Thieves. CounterPunch.org.)
WEIRD THINGS IN THE SKY
by Edmund Gordon
There are approximately 20 billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean 50 sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realized that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ridiculously small; the chances of it having developed on another planet are that much smaller. The chances that another planet is currently home to a civilization more advanced than our own (but sufficiently similar in biological, cultural and technological terms that our two species could meaningfully interact with each other) must be smaller still. And the idea that an alien civilization is making regular visits to our planet and that our governments are systematically covering up the evidence – Occam’s razor makes pretty short work of it.
A growing number of people can’t see the problem. According to the latest YouGov polling, 34% of Americans and 22% of Britons believe that extra-terrestrial beings have visited Earth. Not all of them are obvious cranks. Greg Eghigian’s fascinating history of the phenomenon shows that a weakness for UFOs has affected an extraordinary range of people and penetrated to just about every corner of society.
Take Prince Philip. A longtime reader of ‘Flying Saucer Review’ (very much the prestige publication in the field), he would request reports on the latest sightings from RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read ‘The Halt Perspective’ (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the ‘Sun’ contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that “any sensible person” would be interested in a phenomenon “that has baffled mankind for millennia.”
The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to debate, but as a UFO buff who was on familiar terms with world leaders he was well placed to be an interplanetary ambassador, and it must have been frustrating that aliens never made contact with him.
For one reason or another, they’ve preferred to deal with people like George Adamski, a Polish-American handyman and “minor figure on the California occult scene.” Adamski claimed to have first spotted a UFO in 1946, having acquired a 15-inch telescope for the purpose. Six years later, after reporting nearly 200 other sightings, he described tracking one down to the Colorado desert, where he was approached by a member of the crew, a young man of “Nordic” appearance, wearing what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was on Earth to warn mankind that the testing and use of atomic bombs was putting the entire galaxy in danger. “The beauty of his form surpassed anything I had ever seen,” Adamski wrote of the encounter. “The pleasantness of his face freed me of all thought of my personal self. I felt like a child in the presence of one with great wisdom and much love, and I became very humble within myself … from him was radiating a feeling of infinite understanding and kindness, with supreme humility.’
Huge if true. By way of evidence, Adamski provided photos of the Venusian spaceship. Not everyone was convinced – Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the pictures bore an “uncanny resemblance to electric light fittings with table-tennis balls fixed underneath” – but thousands were, and Adamski became an international sensation. His book ‘Flying Saucers Have Landed’ (1953), co-authored with the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Spitfire pilot Desmond Leslie, went through eleven printings in two years, and he was soon a regular presence on radio and TV. In 1959, he embarked on a lecture tour across five continents, and was granted an audience with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. At a press conference in The Hague, he declared that the British royal family were keen to meet him too and that “Prince Philip so far has been the most interested.” When it came to the crunch, however, Adamski was too much for Philip, who scrawled “Not on your Nellie!” across a letter from Leslie offering to make an introduction.
“To those who held themselves up to be ‘serious UFO investigators’,” Eghigian writes, Adamski was “an outright embarrassment.” But his story has much in common with other, less blatantly bogus accounts. As Eghigian points out, aliens – whether or not they come in peace – are always “identified with superior knowledge evident in their technological achievements and mastery of languages.” Again and again, they’re reported as saying that humanity’s rampant warmongering and use of nuclear weaponry is what has drawn their attention to Earth.
It’s an idea with appeal: our delinquent species could benefit from external supervision. The same year that Adamski made his world tour, Carl Jung’s ‘Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky’ appeared in English, setting out his “psychosocial” analysis of the UFO phenomenon. He saw them as objects of quasi-religious longing, “technological angels” offering hope of spiritual redemption in a secular, science-stunned age. In recent decades they’ve often been described in more menacing terms, but that hasn’t invalidated Jung’s central point: the way a society talks about UFOs provides insights into its deepest fantasies.
People have been seeing weird things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but popular fascination with the phenomenon – what Eghigian calls “the UFO era” – didn’t begin until after the Second World War. In other words, it emerged in the context of an unprecedented expansion of military and civil aviation: there were more things up there to see. One of the earliest modern witnesses was Kenneth Arnold, a businessman and amateur pilot from Chehalis, Washington. On 24 June 1947, he reported seeing nine bright objects flying alongside his plane in “chain-like” formation. Describing the incident to the ‘East Oregonian’ shortly afterwards, he said that the objects were “flat like a pie pan and somewhat bat-shaped,” and that they moved “like a saucer would if you skipped it across water.” In a report published the following day, a writer for the Associated Press used the phrase “flying saucer.”
The story was picked up everywhere, prompting a torrent of other witnesses to come forward. “By the end of the first week of July,” Eghigian writes, “almost every US state had at least one report of a flying saucer sighting.” The phenomenon soon spread abroad, though with important local variations. In Brazil, there were “flying platters”; in France, “flying crêpes.”
A second wave of saucers made headlines in 1950. If we reject the idea that a sudden influx of low-flying spaceships was responsible, it doesn’t mean all the witnesses were lying. Perhaps they saw shooting stars, comets or lenticular clouds. At the beginning of the UFO era, the idea that flying saucers were from other planets was confined to a negligible minority. A survey conducted by George Gallup in 1947 didn’t even raise the extra-terrestrial hypothesis as a possibility: if anyone believed in it, they were lost among the 9% of respondents who plumped for “other” explanations. Four years later, ‘Popular Science’ magazine polled the witnesses themselves, and found that only 4% believed they had seen a “visitor from afar.” Many of them – including Kenneth Arnold – suspected that the US Air Force was responsible.
Eghigian suggests that the popularity of science fiction in the 1950s – magazines such as ‘Amazing Stories,’ films like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (1951) and ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (1956) – played a role in connecting the happenings to little green men. There were also influential works of non-fiction, such as a widely read article in ‘Life,’ “Have We Visitors from Space?,” which appeared in April 1952. That summer, the number of reported sightings “skyrocketed.” It wasn’t long before people like Adamski were corroborating the most outlandish speculation with eyewitness accounts. By the mid-1960s, it’s estimated that there had been 2,000 and 5,000 reported contacts between humans and aliens.
Given the variety of life-forms that evolution has produced on our own planet, you might expect an even bigger range of types elsewhere in the universe – but the vast majority of witnesses claim otherwise. A 1970 study of 333 reports from around the world suggested that 96% of aliens were “basically human in form.” The interplanetary visitors of the 1950s and 1960s wore cartoonish sci-fi clothes (helmets, jumpsuits, capes) and had cartoonish astro-kitsch names (Aetherium, LeLando, A-Lan). Female aliens were “pleasant-appearing” and “well-proportioned,” while the darker the visitors’ skin, the more hostile they were likely to be. It’s no surprise that the majority of witnesses were “white American and English men.”
What ultimately did it for Adamski-style encounters, however, wasn’t their narrative shortcomings so much as their scientific ones. The Mariner space probes of 1962 and 1964 revealed that Mars and Venus – the two planets most often cited as the homes of alien visitors and said to be teeming with futuristic cities – were desolate environments blighted by extreme temperatures. Further advances in space exploration dashed hopes of discovering life elsewhere in our solar system.
Venusian hippies went the way of fairies and elves, but a more troubling sort of contact narrative survived. One of the earliest examples had come to light in 1957, when Antônio Villas Boas, a 23-year-old Brazilian farmhand, approached a journalist at ‘O Cruzeiro’ to report a harrowing encounter. He had been out on his tractor at around 1 a.m., he explained, when a glowing egg-shaped machine with three metal supports suddenly descended from the sky. A group of tiny men speaking “an unintelligible language that sounded like the barking of a dog” emerged and dragged him inside. After they had stripped him naked and sponged him down, a beautiful woman entered the room and proceeded to have sex with him. Before leaving, “she turned to me, pointed to her belly and then pointed towards me and with a smile (or something like it), she finally pointed towards the sky.” He had no doubt that this gesture meant the same to a barking alien as it meant to him, concluding that “she was going to return to take me away with her to wherever she lived.”
His account caught the attention of the ufologist Coral Lorenzen, head of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, who found it basically credible. The reason the aliens thought it better to seduce a man is “obvious,” she wrote to a colleague. “An Earth woman … would be rendered useless at the moment of kidnapping, because she would probably lose her mind from the shock.” It must have been nice for Villas Boas, who worried that he was just “a good stallion to improve their stock,” to have heard that the aliens also valued him for his mind.
The most famous case of alien abduction is said to have taken place in 1961, though it didn’t receive widespread attention until the mid-1970s. Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple (at a time when that made them conspicuous) from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were returning late at night from their honeymoon at Niagara Falls when they noticed strange lights in the sky. They arrived home, two hours later than expected, in a state of extreme confusion and anxiety, their clothes unaccountably scuffed and torn, with odd fragments of memory: a large cigar-shaped craft with extended wings following their car down the highway; a glimpse of humanoid figures with shiny dark uniforms. Over the weeks that followed, Betty was tormented by dreams in which she and Barney were taken onboard the ship and subjected to a variety of medical tests.
Eventually, with the help of investigators from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which Eghigian describes as “the most prominent UFO organization in the United States,” the Hills consulted Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist trained in hypnotic regression, who conducted sessions with them over the course of six months. The audio recordings of their conversations, available online, are disturbing. Describing the abduction, Barney in particular seems overwhelmed with fear. He alternates between an eerie, zonked-out monotone and blood-curdling howls and whimpers. There’s no doubting the authenticity of his distress. Dr. Simon viewed the case as a classic folie à deux: he argued that Barney must have assimilated Betty’s nightmares into his memory of the incident. “The fact that they proved it under hypnosis does not prove it was a reality. It only proves that they believed it.” His distinction has been lost on some UFO enthusiasts, who regard the tapes as clinching evidence of the Hills’ reliability.
‘The UFO Incident,’ a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported missing. When he reappeared five days later, he said that he had been held captive on a spacecraft by short, bald, dome-headed beings. The ‘National Enquirer’ arranged a polygraph test, which he spectacularly flunked, the examiner remarking that he was a “grossly deceptive” witness. The ‘Enquirer’ ran the story anyway, and why not? Everyone knows that polygraph tests are unreliable.
By the early 1980s, hundreds of alien abduction cases had been reported, most involving memories recovered under hypnosis and closely conforming to the scenario presented by the Hills: a late-night journey along a lonely road; a glimpse of something following the car; physically invasive experiments and examinations. The leading practitioners of abduction-hypnosis were the artist Budd Hopkins, who had started receiving letters from witnesses after writing about UFOs for the ‘Village Voice,’ and David Jacobs, a historian at Temple University who had written the first academic monograph on the subject. Believing that abductions were now at epidemic level, part of a sinister intergalactic breeding program, Hopkins and Jacobs treated their subjects as victims of abuse, going so far as to arrange support groups. Their approach made them superstars in the field, but not all ufologists were happy. The horror novelist Whitley Strieber, whose bestselling ‘Communion: A True Story’ (1987) recounted his own experiences with paranormal phenomena, was especially hostile: “It is beginning to seem more and more that the whole alien abduction/alien rape scenario may be a fantasy that started in the minds of the “abduction” researchers themselves.” Even Hopkins’s wife, the filmmaker Carol Rainey, queried the ethics of an artist and a historian with zero clinical training putting vulnerable people in hypnotic trances.
Abduction-hypnosis acquired a new sheen of respectability in the 1990s thanks to John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard and the author of ‘A Prince of Our Disorder’ (1976), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of T.E. Lawrence. Mack’s decision to use hypnosis with patients reporting strange dreams and memories wasn’t unusual for a mental health professional with an interest in trauma; what did raise a few eyebrows were the conclusions he reached. In 1992 he told a conference at MIT that “the people with whom I have been working, as far as I can tell, are telling the truth.” In April 1994 he published ‘Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens’, which discussed the experiences of 13 abductees and gave tacit support to the Hopkins-Jacobs theory of an intergalactic breeding program (it was dedicated “to Budd Hopkins, who led the way”). That same month, ‘Time’ ran a takedown of his work, including allegations that he provided his subjects with UFO literature to read in advance of their sessions, asked leading questions, and edited their responses to support his conclusions. Most damning of all, the article revealed that Donna Bassett, one of Mack’s “experiencers,” had actually been “an undercover debunker.” She’d cooked up a story that culminated in her meeting JFK and Khrushchev onboard a spaceship during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mack appeared to lap it up. “I’ve never seen a UFO in my life,” Bassett afterwards confirmed to ‘Time,’ “and I certainly haven’t been inside one.” The article compared Mack’s practice to the moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse, which had shown how easily false memories could be implanted under hypnosis. None of this seems to have damaged his reputation: his book became a ‘New York Times’ bestseller.
The original and most influential debunker was Donald Menzel, director of the Harvard Observatory from 1952 to 1966, who proposed three reasons that “so many civilized people” had “chosen to adopt an uncivilized attitude toward flying saucers”:
First, flying saucers are unusual. All of us are used to regularity. We naturally attribute mystery to the unusual.
Second, we are all nervous. We live in a world that has suddenly become hostile. We have unleashed forces we cannot control; many persons fear we are heading toward a war that will end in the destruction of civilization.
Third, people enjoy being frightened a little. They go to Boris Karloff double features.
These remarks went somewhat beyond Menzel’s area of expertise (theoretical astrophysics, with particular emphasis on the chemical composition of stars), but that didn’t hold him back. He compared himself to Sherlock Holmes as he doggedly traced UFO sightings back to tricks of the light produced by such mundane phenomena as water droplets, ice crystals and dust. Many ufologists concluded that he was being sponsored by the CIA.
There are in fact often good reasons for doubting the official line on UFOs. Faced with speculation that a flying saucer had crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, the US government flat-out lied, claiming that the debris had been caused by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance program, in which balloons had been equipped with listening devices to monitor Soviet atomic tests. There’s also evidence that the first major government-sponsored investigation into UFOs was conducted in bad faith. The committee, which began work in October 1966, was led by Edward Condon – a scientist who had flounced out of Los Alamos after a few weeks on the Manhattan Project – and headquartered at the University of Colorado. It took pains to appear open-minded, employing a panel of consultant ufologists from NICAP. They soon became disheartened, feeling that the “overbalance of psychologists” on the committee showed that Condon was treating witnesses as essentially delusional. Things came to a head in July 1967, when the ufologists uncovered a memo in which Condon’s right-hand man, Robert Low, argued that the study should be staffed “almost exclusively by non-believers’:
although they couldn’t possibly prove a negative result, [they] could and probably would add an impressive body of evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer. One way to do this would be to stress investigation, not of the physical phenomena, but rather of the people who do the observing – the psychology and sociology of persons and groups who report seeing UFOs.
It never looks good to be framing your research in terms of an underlying “trick’. By the time the Condon Committee’s report was published in January 1969, its conclusion that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified” surprised no one.
The debunkers are, in some respects, richer subjects for psychological study than the true believers. If you think there’s a realistic chance that aliens are visiting Earth, you’re going to want to make your case as noisily as possible. But if you think it’s all a bit far-fetched, why bother getting involved? Eghigian sees figures such as Menzel as public moralists, intellectual descendants of the early modern sceptics of witchcraft, but that doesn’t explain why they think rational arguments are the best tool for combating beliefs that don’t have a rational basis. You start to suspect that many debunkers are contending with their own latent wish to believe. That would explain the trajectory of the astrophysicist Allen Hynek, whose classification system for witness accounts, from minor (seeing lights in the sky) to major (actual contact with aliens), was made famous by Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977). Hynek started out as a debunker – in the 1940s and 1950s he was employed by the US Air Force to call out the cranks – but later became openly agnostic about the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
A not dissimilar narrative arc drove ‘The X-Files,’ the show that introduced people of my generation to the tenets of UFO lore. Its conspiracy-minded hero, FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), constantly had his belief in paranormal activity challenged by his skeptical, scientifically minded partner, Dr. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Almost all of the episodes began with a motto blazoned across the screen: “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.” Viewers were left in little doubt that the truth in question was Mulder’s version, and as the series progressed (it ran for nine seasons, from 1993 to 2002), Scully was reluctantly won over. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, whose interest in the paranormal was first piqued when he read John Mack, said he wanted to reverse gender stereotypes – to have the male protagonist instinct-driven and emotional, the female more rational and cool-headed – and was widely praised for it. If the trade-off was that Mulder and Scully inhabited a world in which instinct and emotion always came out on top, then nobody seems to have minded.
UFOs have been back in the news in recent years. In 2017, the US Department of Defense revealed that between 2007 and 2012 it had run a secret investigation into what are officially referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (or UAPs), with a budget of $22 million. Three years later, following a leak by the ufologist group To the Stars (headed by Tom DeLonge, a member of the pop-punk band Blink-182), the Pentagon declassified three videos of UAPs, and on the face of it they’re not easy to explain away. In the most compelling sequence – known as GIMBAL and filmed in 2004 from a US Navy Super Hornet fighter jet – a vaguely saucer-shaped object can be seen moving rapidly, in a smooth trajectory, above a bank of clouds. The voices of the Super Hornet’s pilots can be heard. “There’s a whole fleet of ’em,” one says. “My gosh,” the other replies. “They’re all going against the wind! The wind is 120 knots to the west!” Before the video ends, the object seems to rotate ninety degrees. A gasp comes from one of the pilots: “Look at that thing!”
It does send a little shiver down the spine, but the debunker Mick West has argued on his YouTube channel that the object in GIMBAL is probably just another plane, whose apparent speed and direction of travel result from the parallax effect (the optical illusion that makes nearby objects appear to move more quickly when viewed against a distant background), and that what’s rotating is the camera rather than the UFO itself. The “unprecedented velocity” ufologists have attributed to the object at the center of another video, GOFAST, may be a product of the camera changing its zoom level, making the object seem to accelerate suddenly to the left, when in reality its position relative to the viewer hasn’t changed.
If there is a case for taking such incidents seriously, then it hasn’t been materially helped by David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, who last year went public with claims that the federal government had for decades been running a top-secret UFO retrieval program and was in possession of not only numerous alien spacecraft but also the corpses of their pilots. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee arranged a hearing, at which Grusch repeated many of his allegations, but failed (at least in the open sessions) to provide any supporting evidence. That didn’t faze some members of the committee. The Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett, who co-chaired the hearing, told reporters that the government was clearly engaged in a massive cover-up, and that the “technology” seen in the declassified Pentagon videos “defies all of our laws of physics.” He demonstrated his grasp of those laws when he explained why he thought Grusch’s claims about alien bodies being recovered from UFOs were credible: “I don’t want to oversimplify things, but how are you going to fly one? You got to have somebody in it. That seems to be pretty simple.” It’s a strange cast of mind that credits aliens with the power of intergalactic travel but not the wherewithal to manufacture drones.
(London Review of Books)
Judy V
I am also glad Judy is still with us. She embodies what is right and important in our community. She was the one who encouraged me to run for council in 2016. So, whatever your opinion is about my politics—whether good or bad, you can blame Judy
The psychology of those writing anti UFO hit pieces animating 1953 Robertson Panel policy to engineer an atmosphere of ridicule and denial is perfectly understandable. With ridiculous UFO cases like the Adamski contactee cult of the 1950s (which I could see thru as a kid then) and the hilarious work from Menzel and Condon of the past and Mick West today in debunking efforts, there is solace for those not psychologically ready to face an aspect of our existence here.
I could easily debunk the lazy characterizations made here in the reposted MCT text. I’ll just deal with David Grusch. From 2019 to 2021 Jay Stratton, head then of the Pentagon UAP Task Force, borrowed Grusch from the NRO to work one difficult area of research: were there Special Access Programs related to UAP that were “waived” and “unacknowledged” efforts? Eventually Grusch interviewed over 40 participants in programs that were examining recovered alien tech and “biologics”. Testimony was reportedly backed up with documentation. This material was shared with the Inspector Generals of the DOD and IC and deemed “credible” and “urgent” and also testimony from whistleblowers was given to key Senate staff and members (which led Schumer and Sen Rounds to introduce twice the UAP Disclosure Act, referencing non human intelligence tech and biologics 22 times).
The guvamint, along with nutty “civilians”, can dream up anything, including “proof” of what isn’t there…they’ll do anything to control us gullible ones who pay their salaries.
By the way, where’s that report on trade talks between ET and our wonderful rulers?
The true believer and debunker camps both undermine a much needed wider examination by academics, scientists, journalists, etc. In the 1980s, the gullible true believer camp was infused with lots of disinformation (like the disinfo op from Kirtland AFB targeting nearby physicist Paul Bennewitz) which to this day adds to the giggle factor. That Air Force Office of Special Investigations used, and expanded upon, less-than-credible UFO lore created by paranoid and grandiose imaginings to protect sensitive signal transmissions that Bennewitz was fixating on as alien activity. So, the govt has made up stuff in this way, but not to shed light on UFO activity.
Insofar as the debunking piece reposted in today’s MCT, that’s pretty much based on what Mick West (profiled in article as an active debunker) admitted more than once: the thought of covertly present ET scared him as a kid. Mick is a very polite-appearing gentleman on X who gets too much un-called for negativity from some advocates.
LOL. You folks never give up your dream world. You have an excuse or rationalization for every assertion that deviates from your ET religion…
The modern cell phone has been around now about 20 years. It has photo and video capability. There are about 8.5 billion cell phones on the planet earth. They are all over the world, in every country. But we have no credible photos or videos of any alien anything. How could that be? Also, when the Pentagon Papers were released and when the Wiki leaks papers were released we saw huge dumps of government and Pentagon files and emails made public. Thousands of secret documents and emails. Yet, not one word in any of it about secret alien bodies or space craft or anything. How could that be if we are being fooled by the government?
As Albert Einstein once said, ” Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence Where is yours?
To be fair, pretty much every navy fighter pilot has reported seeing nonhuman flying objects that defy the laws of physics.
There’s quite a large body of video and pics available for reviewing. Many cases posted at nuforc.org have clips accompanying the written report. Many investigators, like with MUFON, use forensic apps. There are other forms of physical evidence seen in large public databases, like landing traces and documented physical or medical impacts.
Certain GPS apps on phones have even provided signs of abduction.
While cutting firewood with my father one afternoon the ET conversation came up. I asked him his thoughts on the topic. Dad told me that he believed we the human race would be the most arrogant creation ever if we believed that we were all that was created out of our vast universe.
I asked his thoughts on religion vs science. He simply said, whether we believe our existence is by the hand of the all mighty or we believe its due to a cosmic accident. Believing we are the only intelligent life on basically one dust particle amongst our universe is arrogance plain and simple.
His thought process sounded pretty solid to me.
Sheriff, there’s a body of data developed from investigations of close encounters of the third kind that gives us a possible, and partial, picture of multiple types of ET allegedly present:
https://www.et-cultures.com/post/a-briefing-glimpses-of-uap-related-non-human-intelligences-and-their-activities
The word, “allegedly”, is key, here. Dream on, little space-man wannabe.
Dream on. Even if they did exist, and maybe they do in some places in the vast universe (as I have stated repeatedly), why would any intelligent ET want to bother with this gutted planet and ignorant humans who have yet to venture beyond their own puny solar system? Enjoy your dream world religion, but I aint buyin’ it. Maybe you could discuss it with Orson Welles, if he was still alive (or Superman). Humans have great imaginations and a powerful drive to rationalize what they see but don’t recognize.
I can tell you one thing for certain. If they have television and were monitoring our behavior over the past decade. They will likely roll up the windows and sit low in their space ships hoping to pass earth with no one noticing.
Speculation 40 years ago over the significant volume of UFO sighting in the Geysers geothermal area in Lake County, California, was that the craft were recharging from the power grid.
Also speculated at the monthly meetings of observers I attended in nearby Middletown, lead by supposedly retired US Military Intelligence Officer, was that there was correlation in other geographical areas, with the hypothesis, in that the UFOs were disturbed by the advent of nuclear power generation, which in its form then, was akin to opening Pandora’s box, and the beginning of the end of life as we know it, all jokes aside.
There’s one important element re post heart attack diet to consider. I noticed with two of my post heart attack meds that they raise potassium levels so I have to watch that. Limiting potatoes etc, banning bananas.
The AVA editor’s breakfast choice is a perfect one for those of us carrying stents in coronary arteries. OATS!
Dan Borghi, Gone but never forgotten, Navarro Ridge
JIMMY CARTER HAD GUTS
Here’s a small part of the fascinating coverage of Carter’s death, a story I’d not known before (or maybe forgotten). It takes one back to a different times in our politics. Carter had his flaws, but he deeply cared about our nation and human rights:
“A Sharp Rebuke to Georgia’s Elites”
“Governor Carter and his supporters were mulling a presidential run as early as 1972. But they could not have foreseen the crucial boost he got in May 1974, when he was a third-tier speaker at the University of Georgia’s annual Law Day ceremonies. Mr. Carter’s prepared text turned out to be similar to the keynote address delivered by Senator Ted Kennedy, so he abandoned it in favor of largely extemporaneous remarks: an unsparing takedown of Georgia’s privileged class, corrupt officials and ossified Southern legal customs, especially those deployed against African Americans. The speech stunned his audience of lawyers and judges. Much of his criticism was aimed squarely at them.
‘The powerful and the influential have carved out for themselves, or have inherited, a privileged position in society,’ in a sense locking in an unjust status quo, he said. He went on to assail literacy tests ‘used with a great deal of smirking’ to prevent Black people from voting; schemes by corrupt judges and lawyers to cheat African Americans out of money and land; and rampant sentencing disparities. After upsetting a social order rigged solely to benefit white people, the governor pointedly noted, ‘the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was perhaps despised by many in this room.’
Also in the room: the journalist Hunter S. Thompson, possibly the lone reporter to show up. He was not, he wrote later, especially interested in what the governor had to say. But when Mr. Carter remarked that his ideas had been influenced by a close personal friend, ‘a great poet named Bob Dylan,’ Mr. Thompson wrote, he was roused from a whiskey-induced fog.
He spent the next two years extolling the Law Day speech and playing recordings of it… ‘It was a king hell bastard of a speech,’ Mr. Thompson wrote, adding that it was ‘the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.’ ”
NYT, 1/2/25
After watching what President Carter did after he left politics, I came to the conclusion that President Carter was a better Man than he was politician…Rest in peace, Sir.
Laz
True that, for sure.
Hear, hear.
Regarding heart health, while his work is not without controversy, I credit Dr. Ornish (professor of medicine at UCSF and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito) and his heart health program with saving my life. Medicare covers his current program.
Even if they do release the remaining JFK files, is there any reason to believe they are legitimate? They’ve had five decades to create whatever they want on those unreleased pages. The powers behind his brother’s assassination seem obvious to me, given the ethnicity of the patsy and the newspaper article found in his pocket. RFK Jr. has stated openly that Sirhan Sirhan was not his father’s assassin, and at the same time he’s adopted wildly out-of-place Likudnik sensibilities. I would not be surprised if the same powers were behind the killing of JFK.
Agree. They even have the technology to age the paper and ink…
Unfortunately Wes Smoot should also be included in the 2024 deaths. He passed away on 12/19/24.