This story sounds like a movie — big names, deep secrets, and a hidden network of power.

At first glance, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Jeffrey Epstein, and Nickelodeon seem unrelated. But some believe there’s more to the story.

A growing theory suggests these three are connected in ways that might change how we see the entertainment world. The idea? A secret system of influence and control.

Diddy and Epstein: A Secret Business Deal?

Diddy is a music mogul. Epstein was a wealthy investor with ties to powerful people. Epstein’s crimes are well known, but his full list of connections remains a mystery.

Some say Diddy was part of Epstein’s inner circle — attending events, making deals, and using Epstein’s network to gain influence. While Diddy’s name isn’t in the infamous flight logs, reports suggest he had financial ties to Epstein’s closest associates, like billionaire Leon Black, who sent millions to Epstein.

Epstein wasn’t just rich — he connected powerful people. His ties to business, media, and Hollywood gave him influence. Could he have helped Diddy expand his empire? Some say Epstein played a role in opening doors for Diddy in music, media, and fashion.

Financial records indicate that Epstein often used offshore accounts and secret shell companies to funnel money between his associates.

Some reports suggest that these same financial tools were used by certain figures in the music industry, potentially linking Diddy to Epstein’s web of hidden wealth and influence. While no direct evidence has surfaced, the fact that these transactions remain shrouded in secrecy raises eyebrows.

The Nickelodeon Connection: More Than a Kids’ Network?

Nickelodeon launched childhood stars like Ariana Grande and Drake Bell. But was it also shaping the next generation of Hollywood elites? Some believe the network wasn’t just about entertainment — it was a gateway to power.

Nickelodeon has had its scandals. Dan Schneider, the producer behind many hit shows, was quietly let go in 2018 amid rumors of inappropriate behavior. Some claim that Nickelodeon allowed powerful men to take advantage of young stars.

Epstein had deep Hollywood ties. His friendship with Les Wexner, the billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret, gave him access to top modeling agencies that scouted young talent.

There are whispers that Epstein’s network overlapped with Nickelodeon’s circles. Some young stars who got their breakthrough the network had connections to Epstein’s world. Did Epstein have a hand in picking Hollywood’s rising stars? And if so, what was Diddy’s role?

Adding to the suspicion, leaked emails and whistleblower testimonies have suggested that influential media executives maintained close relationships with Epstein.

Some of these executives had dealings with Viacom, Nickelodeon’s parent company. Could Epstein’s influence have extended into children’s television, subtly shaping the future stars of Hollywood?

A System of Control

Epstein wasn’t just a rich guy — he was a gatekeeper. His influence went beyond finance and into pop culture. Some say he controlled who made it in music, TV, and film.

Diddy also had deep connections. His parties were legendary — attended by top musicians, actors, and business leaders. Some claim these events had a dark side, with rumors of blackmail, secret recordings, and hidden deals.

Investigative journalist Whitney Webb has reported that Epstein used ‘honey traps’ — tricking people into compromising situations to control them. Did he use this tactic in Hollywood too?

Epstein also had business stakes in media. A leaked memo from the early 2000s suggests he had interests in Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon. If true, did he use this power to shape entertainment from behind the scenes?

The deeper one looks, the more connections emerge. Epstein’s legal documents, which contain names of high-profile figures he worked with, remain largely sealed.

If those records were fully released, would they reveal further links to the entertainment world? Would names from Nickelodeon or the music industry be among them?

Who Really Controls Pop Culture?

This isn’t just about three names — it’s about who controls pop culture. The entertainment industry shapes what we watch, listen to, and believe. But what if it also shapes the future leaders of Hollywood and beyond?

Some say Epstein, Diddy, and Nickelodeon weren’t separate forces. They were part of the same system. A network built to create stars, control them, and maintain power.

Is this just a conspiracy? Maybe. But one thing is clear—Hollywood’s biggest stars don’t always rise by luck. And sometimes, the truth is hidden in plain sight.

There’s a saying, ‘You are what you eat’ but do we really know what we are eating these days?

Can you trust the labels on the food products you buy?

Is the nutritional information correct, is the packaging deceptive, are there chemicals in the processing of foods that are not disclosed, or are revealed — minus a warning as to the dangers they pose?

The first thing to remember in today’s market, whether it’s the stock market or the corner market is that business exists to make a profit first.

The food business isn’t the health business, and the reality is, if the corporations feeding us could get away with something — they would, they will, and they do.

There’s another old saying, from Otto Von Bismarck, ‘Laws are like sausages, it’s best not seeing them being made.’ In the making of certain sausages, both the law and consumer trust were violated.

In 2023, Kelly Foods, maker of a rope sausage, ran afoul of the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. They ‘forgot’ to put on the label of the product, that the sausages contained cheese, which of course is made from milk, which is an allergen.

Some 1,455 pounds of the stuff had to be recalled.[1]

One would think that sausages wouldn’t contain cheese, like one would think that meat is not dairy. Also, one would think that beef would not contain the first step in a chicken — an egg. But one would be wrong.

Conagra Brands, a giant in the food industry, ran into a spot of bother in 2022, when its ‘P.F. Chang’s Home Menu Beef and Broccoli’ was found to contain eggs, an allergen to some, which was not disclosed on the label.

A bunch of that product was recalled — 119,581 pounds of it. (Kinda answers the question, ‘Where’s the beef?’ Right next to the eggs?).[2]

Now, maybe you’re the kind of person who likes to eat healthy. And as a dedicated label reader, you look before you leap at a product you are going to put into your body. Good for you, but bad for the companies that mislead you with nonsense in their labels.

You buy your peanut butter perhaps, because the label touts ‘no cholesterol.’ Turns out, unless it’s an animal product, it would never contain cholesterol in the first place.[3] This is tantamount to selling water with a label that says ‘wet.’

Then there’s that old standby, ‘natural.’ That’s meaningless unless there’s another version of the product that’s ‘supernatural.’

Since we are using some ‘old sayings’ in this article, how about this one: ‘that’s a horse of a different color.’ Well, in 2013 in Europe, one could say that about the beef products being sold by some manufacturers. ‘A beef burger from Tesco, a major European supermarket chain, was found to contain 29% horsemeat.’[4]

Here’s a bit of sweetness that will turn you sour on food manufacturers. In a March 24, 2023 article in Forbes, it was revealed that ‘Nearly half of the honey in European markets is fake, according to an EU Investigation.’[5]

We’ve been informed that having fiber in our diets can be a good thing, but sometimes there can be too much of a good thing — like when there’s wood pulp in our parmesan cheese. Now while pepper jack cheese can be quite tasty, lumberjack cheese is an entirely different matter.

Some of the matter in question was the wood pulp found in many brands of parmesan, including products sold in such well-known supermarkets as Walmart and Whole Foods.[6]

So, who can you trust when it comes to food labeling? Apparently, nobody.

Ready for another old saying? How about ‘in vino veritas,’ or in plain English, (unlike our food labels), in wine, truth?

But that isn’t always the case with wine cases. Because ‘French winemaker Vincent Lataste was sentenced to a year in prison for exceeding the allowable limits of sulfur dioxide in his wine.’[7]

Reading the above, you might think that the food industry is ‘going to the dogs,’ and speaking of what is going to the dogs, our furry friends can be victims to food mislabeling too.

A 2014 study by Chapman University which was ‘focused on commercial pet foods marketed for dogs and cats to identify meat species present as well as any instances of mislabeling. Of the 52 products tested, 31 were labeled correctly, 20 were potentially mislabeled, and one contained a non-specific meat ingredient that could not be verified.’[8]

But perhaps we are being too hard on the food industry, and should extend an olive branch to them. Well, even with olives we have to be careful, because in 2016, ‘Italian police seized 85,000 tons of olives from previous years’ harvests covered with a chemical aimed at making them more colorful.’[9]

In that same year, in that same country, it was found that 80 percent of the olive oil sold in markets was fraudulent.[10]

Now, if you knew sushi, like they know sushi in Los Angeles, you’d know that half of the raw fish that you are shelling out big bucks for are fraudulent — there’s something fishy about them, one might say.[11]

Estimates exist that ten percent of all food items are mislabeled.[12]

In 2020, it was determined that from 190,000 to 250,000 tons of seafood sold in the United States each year is mislabeled.[13]

Why You Should Care

If you like seafood, you don’t want to be a victim of bait and switch. (Pun definitely intended).  You don’t want to pay for top shelf when you’re getting the equivalent of oceanic speed rack fish.

You want your olive oil to really be extra virgin, you want your meat to be meat, your chicken not something to be afraid of. And you sure as shootin’ want to know if there are any allergens in a food product which can cause you to be at your own last supper.

Unfortunately, corporations are more interested in what benefits their bottom line and less interested in providing top of the line products for our consumption.

Food can make you healthy, or when ingested based upon false labels, it can kill you.

[1] Kelley Foods Recalls Smoked Baby Rope Sausage Product Due to Misbranding and an Undeclared Allergen 3/23/23 https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/kelley-foods-recalls-smoked-baby-rope-sausage-product-due-misbranding-and-undeclared

[2] Conagra Brands, Inc., Recalls Frozen Beef Products Due to Misbranding and Undeclared Allergens 12/12/22 USDA https://www.fsis.usda.gov/recalls-alerts/conagra-brands-inc--recalls-frozen-beef-products-due-misbranding-and-undeclared

[3] GAPLES INSTITUTE https://www.gaplesinstitute.org/5-misleading-food-labels/?gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhN-X2IWtiwMVj0b_AR3JPiSkEAAYASAAEgJH4vD_BwE

[4] MASHED https://www.mashed.com/1300508/foods-commonly-mislabeled/

[5] FORBES https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2023/03/24/half-of-the-honey-in-european-markets-is-fake-alerts-eu-investigation/?sh=55c3c8ea68b2

[6] MASHED https://www.mashed.com/1300508/foods-commonly-mislabeled/

[7] IBID.

[8] CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY 9/30/14 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/492378

[9] TIME, Worland, 2/4/16 Italian Police Seize 85,000 Tons of Olives Covered in Copper Sulfate To Make Them Greener https://time.com/4207676/italy-olives-copper-sulfate/

[10] FOODBEAST https://www.foodbeast.com/news/common-food-fraud/

[11] IBID.

[12] CBS NEWS TEXAS, 9/22/14 https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/research-10-of-all-food-mislabeled-diluted-or-misrepresented/

[13] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 2/27/20 Kroetz, https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2003741117

You can feel it. The media doesn’t talk about Trump the same way anymore. The smug certainty is gone. The headlines don’t say he’s finished — they say he’s dangerous. A ‘threat to democracy.’ They’re not trying to ignore him anymore. They’re trying to contain him.

And Big Tech? They’re walking on eggshells. In 2020, they pulled the plug on Trump’s social media with zero consequences. This time? If they even think about banning him, he’ll break them apart with an executive order.

They know the game has changed.

So, what’s the new plan?

If they can’t silence conservatives, if they can’t weaponize the DOJ, if they can’t count on legacy media to control the narrative…

They’ll use AI.

How OpenAI Will Rig 2026 Without You Even Noticing

This isn’t like 2020. No ballots need to be stuffed. No votes need to be ‘found’ at 3 AM. Instead, they’ll make sure the election is decided before you even step into the voting booth.

The AI Information War

Imagine waking up in 2026, scrolling through your phone.

Every news story, every trending topic, every political conversation — all perfectly crafted by AI. You won’t even notice it at first. You’ll just see headlines that make you feel like Trump’s presidency is spiraling. You’ll see ‘grassroots’ accounts warning about some new scandal, some crisis he created.

But here’s the trick: none of it is real.

AI will flood the internet with fake outrage, fake polls, fake news — layered so deep that it’ll feel like the whole country has turned against Trump.

Not outright lies, no. Just engineered narratives.

Did gas prices go up? Trump’s fault.

Did a hurricane hit Florida? Trump ignored it.

Did China make a military move? Trump provoked them.

Everywhere you look, the world will seem worse under Trump.

Not because it actually is — but because AI is programming you to believe it.

AI Fact-Checking: The New Ministry of Truth

Here’s the genius part: they don’t even need to ban conservative voices.

They just need to make sure no one believes them.

By 2026, AI won’t just control what you see — it’ll control what’s ‘true’.

Try searching for voter fraud? AI will tell you it never happened.

Try asking about Trump’s policies? AI will ‘correct’ you with official facts.

Try discussing election integrity? AI will nudge the conversation back to ‘safe’ topics.

And if Trump or his allies call out the manipulation? Instant ‘fact-checks’ labeling them liars.

AI-Generated Candidates: The Final Trick

The Deep State doesn’t even need great candidates anymore. They just need puppets.

Picture this: a perfectly scripted Democrat. Always saying the right thing. Never making a mistake. Never caught in a scandal. Because every word they speak, every tweet they send, every ad they run is crafted by AI.

Meanwhile, Trump is up there on stage, human. Making real arguments, taking real questions, responding in real time.

And the AI-generated candidate? Flawless.

Any debate he has with Trump? AI fact-checkers will ‘correct’ his statements in real time.

Any bad press? AI will rewrite the story before you even see it.

Any damaging history? Gone. Scrubbed. Rewritten.

This isn’t just election interference.

This is election engineering.

The Goal: Make You Feel Like Resistance is Hopeless

The plan is simple: make you believe Trump can’t win.

That’s the real game. AI won’t take your vote away — it’ll make you think your vote doesn’t matter.

You’ll see the ‘polls.’ You’ll see the ‘experts.’ You’ll see the endless wave of AI-generated content telling you the same thing over and over:

‘Trump’s base is shrinking.’

‘He’s losing support.’

‘America is tired of the chaos.’

And if enough people believe it? If enough people feel like the fight is already lost?

They won’t even have to rig the election.

How to Fight Back

You can’t fight this with tweets. You can’t fight this by just ‘getting the truth out.’

You need to break the machine.

Step 1: Build Parallel Systems

• Use AI-resistant search engines — don’t rely on Google or OpenAI for information.

• Support independent media — don’t wait for Fox or CNN to tell you what’s happening.

• Move to decentralized platforms — because by 2026, every mainstream network will be compromised.

Step 2: Train Yourself to Spot AI Manipulation

• If a ‘news story’ feels too perfect, it probably is.

• If a scandal seems to explode overnight, it was probably manufactured.

• If it feels like everyone is saying the same thing at the same time, that’s not organic — that’s a script.

Step 3: Show Up No Matter What

• They want you demoralized. Don’t be.

• They want you to think Trump’s chances are dead. They aren’t.

• They want you to feel like it’s all hopeless. It isn’t.

Because here’s the thing: AI can manipulate perception — but it can’t change reality.

The reality is Trump won in 2016 when they said he couldn’t.

The reality is he survived everything they threw at him in 2024.

And the reality is if enough Americans see through the AI illusion in 2026 — he’ll win again.

They can program the internet. They can’t program you.

Seeking the truth!

Earl Lockwood

Anyone who has seen the first day of Trump 2.0 probably witnessed the massive signing of Executive Orders.

It was the second coming of his administration, as he tries to prove that the pen is mightier than the law.

The nerd assisting with the televised signings, the kid in the standard issue blue suit and red tie deferentially handed the folders to the President. It was like he was handing the wine list to a patron at a fancy restaurant. 

Trump greedily accepted them, and displayed his extravagant signature for all to see.

Whether you’re a fan of the Great Trumpkin or not, it’s apparent that by the flourish of a thick black Sharpie pen, Trump is trying to dry up the irrigation ditches that support numerous government programs.

In his desire to isolate America from the rest of the world, and turn off the treats to other countries that he says trick us, he will certainly change the status quo.

But while Executive Orders have been around since Washington was cleaning his wooden teeth, the country has not before seen such an immediate litigation reaction to a President’s proclamations.

Executive Orders are within the capacity of the President to issue. As the CEO of our country, he can direct federal officials and administrative agencies to do things or not do things. But it isn’t an unrestricted right.

The actions of the orders will, or can bump up against the United States Constitution at times. And when it comes to the Trump administration, that will likely be a lot of times. 

The constitutional authority of the president to issue Executive Orders isn’t specifically granted him. Such authority however, is implicit in Section I Article 2 of the Constitution wherein it states, ‘The Executive Power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.’  

However, sections 3 and 4 limit such power where it states, the President shall ‘take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’

Prior executive orders may be rescinded, and the incoming executive can undo many of the social legislation of a previous administration, putting forth his policies — and prejudices.

Now, it isn’t exactly a ‘best kept secret’ that Trump isn’t a fan of illegal aliens. 

If we look at Federal Law, specifically 8 United States Code Section 1182, the President definitely may restrict aliens who are ineligible or inadmissible from entry into the country.

Some of the language contained therein, refers to aliens who ‘have a physical or mental disorder and behavior associated with the disorder that may pose, or has posed, a threat to the property, safety, or welfare of the alien or others.’[1]

Where have we heard rhetoric to that effect from Trump? Just about in every campaign speech where he speaks of invading hordes of aliens from asylums and prisons. Those are the types that definitely can be prevented from entry — or deported if they have entered.

In his executive orders, Trump has specifically stated:

‘Many of these aliens unlawfully within the United States present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.  Others are engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.  Many have abused the generosity of the American people, and their presence in the United States has cost taxpayers billions of dollars at the Federal, State, and local levels.’[2]

In that same order, we find a direction from the President:

‘The Secretary of Homeland Security shall promptly take all appropriate action and allocate all legally available resources or establish contracts to construct, operate, control, or use facilities to detain removable aliens.  The Secretary of Homeland Security, further, shall take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings or their removal from the country, to the extent permitted by law.’[3]

That type of order will likely be found legal, as it is a direction to an administrative agency to do something, which is in the wheelhouse of a Presidential Executive Order.

However, to deny children born in the United States who are the offspring of those who have illegally entered, that’s where an Executive Order can bump up against the Constitution. And give rise to litigation, challenging the authority of that order.

Let’s take a look at the offending directive:

‘Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.’[4]

Trump has made the ‘not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States’ argument in said order to avoid the language of 8 UNITED STATES CODE 1401 (a) which states, ‘a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof; is a citizen.’[5]

It was that bit of tortuous logic that ‘birthright’ citizens (of illegal aliens), weren’t subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and therefore not citizens. That triggered the litigation which came hotly on the heels of his executive order.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration right after the issuance of the aforesaid order.

‘This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans. We will not let this attack on newborns and future generations of Americans go unchallenged. The Trump administration's overreach is so egregious that we are confident we will ultimately prevail,’ said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the ACLU.[6]

This is just one example of the types of litigation we may expect from the flurry of Executive Orders by the Trump administration. While pre-Trump administrations were usually subject to litigation when the administrative agencies carried out the directives in the orders, ‘Trump’s presidency appears to have ushered in a new era of litigation targeted directly at presidential orders.’[7]

Why You Should Care

Most of us probably agree that aliens entering our country should do so legally, and conform to the rules and regulations of such entry. Most of us probably agree that if you’re born in the USA, like Springstein, you can be a ‘cool rocking daddy in the USA.’

An infant has no say over when and where it is born, and who its parents are. Now, while many Americans are tired of letting into our country all of those ‘tired and poor huddled masses yearning to be free,’ hopefully we have not grown weary of our Constitutional rights and the checks and balance system of our Republic. 

Hopefully we are concerned about the inherent dangers of an ‘Imperial Presidency,’ especially from someone who told us prior to winning the election, that (only) on day one would he be a dictator.

The Constitution is — and should be — color blind. So should we when it comes to a situation where a constitutional right is attacked by an executive order exceeding its authority.

[1] 8 USC 1182 (1) (A) (iii) 1 https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title8-section1182#=0&edition=prelim

[2] TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER 1/20/25 THE WHITE HOUSE 1/20/25 https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-american-people-against-invasion/

[3] IBID.

[4] WHITE HOUSE 1/20/25 PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/

[5]  8 USC 1401 (A) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1401

[6] ACLU 1/20/25 https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/immigrants-rights-advocates-sue-trump-administration-over-birthright-citizenship-executive-order

[7] REVIEWING PRESIDENTIAL ORDERS CHICAGO U SCHOOL OF LAW LAW REVIEW https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archive/reviewing-presidential-orders

Ever wonder where your hard-earned tax dollars really go?

If you think they fund schools, roads, or hospitals, think again.

A massive chunk of U.S. taxpayer money is funneled through agencies like USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

It acts as a financial laundromat for the Deep State’s network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), foreign governments, and shadowy special interests.

The Perfect Scam: How USAID Works and Its Impact on You

USAID is sold to the public as a benevolent organization providing foreign aid. But in reality, it operates as a slush fund for globalist elites. Here’s how it works — and what it costs you:

1. Congress Approves Billions in ‘Foreign Aid’

Every year, Congress rubber-stamps tens of billions in foreign aid. All paid for by your tax dollars. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. government allocated approximately $60.4 billion for the Department of State and USAID.

What does this mean for you?

● National Priorities Neglected: While billions are sent abroad, critical domestic issues like infrastructure decay, healthcare affordability, and education funding remain under addressed. Your community’s needs take a backseat to international agendas. 

● Economic Strain: The continuous outflow of funds contributes to the national debt, which can lead to higher taxes and reduced public services. Essentially, you’re paying twice: once through your taxes and again through diminished public resources.

2. USAID Distributes Funds to NGOs and Foreign Entities

USAID doesn’t directly help people. Instead, it operates as a middleman, handing money to politically connected NGOs, think tanks, and foreign governments.

These organizations, often staffed by former intelligence officials and political operatives, use USAID funds to finance activities that would never pass public scrutiny — such as:

● Funding foreign political activists: USAID has been exposed for bankrolling protest movements in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Hong Kong — all under the guise of ‘democracy promotion.’

● Propping up foreign economies while America suffers: While USAID spends billions rebuilding infrastructure in Afghanistan, America’s own bridges, roads, and power grids crumble.

● Subsidizing foreign corruption: A staggering 30% to 50% of USAID funds are estimated to be lost to fraud, waste, and outright theft by corrupt officials abroad.

3. The Money Gets ‘Washed’ — Then Loops Back to the Elites

Once these funds leave U.S. accounts, tracking them is almost impossible. However, here’s the kicker — a lot of it comes back, but not to you.

● Political kickbacks: Many NGOs receiving USAID funds are run by former U.S. government officials who use their connections to secure lucrative contracts.

● Corporate handouts: Huge chunks of USAID money never leave the U.S. but instead get funneled to contractors and firms that donate to political campaigns.

● Military-industrial complex payoffs: Foreign aid is often tied to weapons deals, ensuring that defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon profit while taxpayers foot the bill.

4. No Accountability, No Oversight

USAID operates with zero transparency. Once money is sent abroad, Congress doesn’t track it, and Americans don’t get a say. Even when audits reveal massive fraud, nothing happens.

● Example: In 2019, a government audit found that $1.4 billion in USAID funds for Afghanistan completely disappeared — no records, no accountability.

● Example: USAID spent $150 million in Iraq on a failed solar power project — even though Iraq is a leading oil producer.

● Example: In 2023, USAID continued sending millions to China for ‘environmental programs’ while China increased coal production.

Ridiculous Examples of Wasteful Spending

If you thought that was bad, here are even more ridiculous ways U.S. taxpayer money has been thrown away:

● $10 Million for a ‘Sesame Street’ Spin-off in Pakistan: USAID funded $10 million to produce a Pakistani version of ‘Sesame Street’ that was eventually canceled amid allegations of corruption and misuse of funds.

● Funding for Drag Queen Performances in Ecuador: In 2024, USAID allocated $20,600 to support drag queen performances in Ecuador to promote diversity and inclusion.

● $2 Million to Study Stress in Bolivian Wildlife: USAID granted $2 million to study the effects of stress on Bolivian wildlife.

● $1.5 Million for a Luxury Golf Course in Indonesia: In an attempt to boost tourism, USAID invested $1.5 million in developing a luxury golf course in Indonesia.

● $500,000 on a YouTube Channel for Egyptian Youth: A half-million-dollar grant was provided to create a YouTube channel aimed at Egyptian youth.

Recent Developments: The Plot Thickens

In a bold move, the Trump administration recently froze billions in foreign aid, placing senior USAID officials on administrative leave and terminating numerous contractors. This has caused major disruptions, forcing NGOs to pause operations while awaiting waivers.

Furthermore, the administration is considering placing USAID under the control of the State Department, aiming to ensure aid distribution aligns with America First policies.

However, this move is being fiercely resisted by establishment politicians, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who insists on maintaining current funding levels.

The Bottom Line: Your Money, Their Agenda

USAID isn’t about helping the poor — it’s about maintaining global control under the banner of humanitarian aid. The billions funneled through this agency serve as the financial backbone of the Deep State, fueling a network of influence while leaving you footing the bill.

It’s not just a waste of money. It’s theft.

What Can You Do?

1. Demand transparency — Call your representatives and insist on audits of all USAID spending.

2. Expose the scam — Share this with people who still believe in the ‘humanitarian aid’ fairy tale.

3. Push for cuts — Support candidates who want to reduce or eliminate USAID’s budget.

Do you want to see how your elected officials are voting on foreign aid?

Watch Chuck Schumer’s latest speech defending this corrupt spending machine.

Searching for truth,

Earl Lockwood

For today’s Conspiracy Report, we reprint the most read conspiracy stories that we’ve published so far.

Which is your favorite? Just tell is in the poll at the end of this newsletter.

We hope you enjoy it. Read on below…

Regards,

Earl Lockwood

#1 Honey Traps: Sex, Spies, and Secrets

Probably the two oldest professions in the history of humanity deal with sex and spying. In the world of espionage, among other manipulation techniques, the old standby — sex — can serve more than one purpose. It can bring about the opening of mouths and the spilling of secrets, so that intelligence gathering operations may prove successful. Full details here…

#2 Give and Take: Uncharitable Charities

Many people wish to do good works, and make the world, or at least a part of it, a better place. Organizations exist, ostensibly, to do just that. They are not for profit organizations, and many of these are granted what is called ‘exempt’ status pursuant to the Internal Revenue Code. Full details here…

#3 More Truth About the 2017 UAP Videos

In our last newsletter, we asked three questions about the white Tic Tac objects reported in 2004 near the Nimitz carrier group off the coast of California.[1] And a similar object spotted outrunning commercial airline traffic from Nevada to Oregon in October 2017. Full details here…

#4 A Piece of the Action of the Religious Relic Racket

Religion is great for fooling the faithful, conning people into conversion, and providing them with a bunch of made up props to further the cause, or in other words, relics. In the religious sense, relics are the body parts or belongings of saviors and/or saints, which must be venerated, and can be visited. They provide a profitable tourist trade to the location which houses them. Full details here…

#5 Shot in the Dark: Conflict, Corruption, and COVID

Earth has always been a stew pot of pandering, pandemonium, and every so often, pandemic. Like an iceberg, the greatest danger of this latest pandemic lies not in what is on the surface, but that ninety percent of the truth lies beneath the waves. That’s the part that can get really deadly — and did. Full details here…

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You really have to hand it to the human being.

It is the only animal on the planet, that can lie to itself and believe it.

When it comes to believing in what ain’t necessarily so, ghosts are right there up on the top of humanity’s list.

What is the oldest instinct in any creature? It’s the survival instinct.

What is the only creature that has a new part on its brain (the cerebral cortex), that allows it to have abstract thought, and imagination? It’s the human being.

Put the two of these together and you have a creature with foreknowledge of its own individual extinction. The fear that goes with it, and the abstract thought and imagination to create a lie that there is post mortem survival, when there is absolutely no valid proof of such claim.

May I introduce to you, gentle reader, the world of ghosts.

Now, maybe you don’t believe in ghosts, maybe you do. Maybe you would like to make a ghost out of this author for challenging your belief in the survival of the human being — in some form or another — after death.

Okay, but does anybody believe that textiles have an afterlife?

Does anybody believe that after you throw out the old sweater it travels to a wooly wonderland? Let’s assume not.

Then ask yourself, why is it, in the hundreds of photographs of supposed ghosts, they are always clothed? If anybody assumes double exposure, trick photography — go to the head of the class.

Then ask yourself, how did it come about that so many people were conducting séances and seeking the assistance of mediums to connect to the spirits of the dearly departed in the beginning of the twentieth century — an age of supposed science and industrialism?

It’s not a coincidence, that ‘the rise of spiritualism was in large part a response to the enormous number of young men who were killed in [World War I].’[1]

There’s a good business opportunity in selling spirits to those who have lost loved ones. And as the world never runs out of a war somewhere or another, it doesn’t seem that it’s going to run out of mediums any time soon either.

A bit of history for the believers out there — the Fox sisters.

We’re going back to the mid 19th century for this one, as two sisters gave a big boost to the boogeyman business:

‘Teenager Maggie Fox and her younger sister Kate claimed that there was a spirit communicating with them by making otherworldly raps on the walls and furniture of their house. When their mother asked how many children she’d had, the spirit appeared to rap out the correct number.’[2]

They became famous for their ability, and other mediums got the message and started performing their séances in public.

It was about forty years after the Fox sisters started faking it, that one of the sisters finally came clean and what manifested was, ‘Maggie’s confession to the New York World in 1888 that her and her sister’s communication with the dead had been a hoax — as well as her public demonstration of how she cracked joints to make “rapping” noises — was big news among people interested in spiritualism.’[3]

Now, let’s fast forward into the modern world of people known as ‘paranormal investigators’. They go out in search of ghosts with scientific gadgets that are about as related to the finding of spirits as they are to the determining the price of eggs on any given day in Cambodia.

Television is full of these ghost hunter shows, and the shows are full of something else. 

One of the ‘tools’ of paranormal investigation is the ‘Tri-Meter’ which determines changes in electromagnetism, because, as has been repeatedly proven never, ghosts are electromagnetic.

An article in the Skeptical Inquirer, notes that ‘first, there is the ever-present issue that if ghosts did exist (which is still unconfirmed), we have no idea what physical properties they would possess or how they would interact with the environment. Therefore, we don’t know how to test for such entities.’[4]

Therefore, we can put away the remote sensing thermometer, the infra red cameras, and all of the other ‘scientific’ tools of the paranormal investigator.

Besides our ‘investigators,’ we have our mediums who supposedly communicate with our dearly departed — for a price, or a television show.

‘There are several ways a fraudulent medium can fabricate what seems like an accurate reading. The main two are called hot reading and cold reading.’[5]

Hot reading is when the medium does his or her homework in advance, and researches the sucker — I mean seeker — prior to the reading. That isn’t too difficult to do with this prognosticating tool known as the internet.

Cold reading is when the medium gets the message from answers to questions asked, and reactions observed. For example, if your client has a significant amount of calluses on the hands, it might indicate the type of work they do — and don’t.

If the client is wearing religious or occult jewelry, that can be a clue. A wedding ring, cheap shoes, the manner of dress, the posture — all can be clues for the medium.

And for those who claim, ‘But there’s no way Madam Zelda could have known about my grandfather’s pet octopus, Robespierre,’ there is a paranormal answer, but it isn’t spooks.

Perhaps Madam Zelda is telepathic, and if so, she had access to your knowledge and fed it back to you. We have a lot more ‘proof’ of ESP, than we do of G-H-O-S-T-S.

Let’s go to some sound reasoning, as in the sounds one hears in EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomena. This is where, by various nonsensical means, sounds are recorded which are, according to the paranormal investigators, voice communications from beyond.

The scene is always the same. The investigator plays a recording after telling you what’s on it, and what you would have heard without such instruction, becomes the very words the paranormal investigator primed you to believe were being said.

Allow me to introduce you to two real phenomena, paradoelia and phonemic restoration.

Paradoelia, is ‘a kind of misperception caused by meaningless, ambiguous stimuli perceived with meaning.’[6]

Phonemic restoration ‘refers to the tendency for people to hallucinate a phoneme replaced by a non-speech sound (e.g., a tone) in a word. This illusion can be influenced by preceding sentential context providing information about the likelihood of the missing phoneme.’[7]

Translating that mouthful into English, it’s a hallucination. A word is substituted by the mind, for a sound that isn’t a word.

Put those two words together, paradoelia and phonemic restoration, and you will see, appearing before you the actual reality of EVPs.

Why You Should Care

Can there be anything crueler than to deceive the surviving relative of a lost loved one, (for a price) that the deceased is floating around in the great beyond, and that their Filofax is full of things to do?

Can there be anything more ludicrous than aligning scientific measurement devices with post mortem survival theories that are anything but scientific?

The spirits tell me no.

[1] WORLD WAR I AND THE RISE OF SPIRITUALISM Taylor, The Atheist Scholar, https://atheistscholar.org/lecture/world-war-one-spiritualism/

[2] How a Hoax by Two Sisters Helped Spark the Spiritualism Craze Little, 10/3/23 https://www.history.com/news/ghost-hoax-spiritualism-fox-sisters

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ghost Hunting Gadgets Biddle, Skeptical Inquirer 8/2/21 https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/ghost-hunting-gadgets-the-rem-pod/

[5] Are All Mediums Frauds? Windbridge Research Center, https://www.windbridge.org/are-all-mediums-frauds/

[6] National Library of Medicine 4/24/22 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9103170/

[7] National Library of Medicine 11/18/11 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2963680/

Probably the two oldest professions in the history of humanity deal with sex and spying. 

In the world of espionage, among other manipulation techniques, the old standby — sex — can serve more than one purpose.

It can bring about the opening of mouths and the spilling of secrets, so that intelligence gathering operations may prove successful.

The use of sex as an entrapment and blackmail device can coerce conversation out of an agent. Or it can be an incentive to keep information flowing. That makes it highly effective, but sometimes it can backfire.

So, in the exploration of espionage and ‘sexpionage’ let’s look through the keyhole and see what might be going on.

Most people have heard of Mata Hari, the stage name for a stripper that supposedly spied for Germany in World War I. Whether the accusations against were true or not, she was executed by a firing squad, and her operation backfired, which caused her to be front fired.

Let’s get more recent.

The year is 1986, and our target of a honey trap is an Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu. He decides to go to the Brits, and spill the beans to the Sunday Times about the Israeli nuclear program — a major no-no.

The paper had him under wraps, but Mordechai, who had a romantic interest in a woman he met in London, wanted to pay her a visit in romantic Rome.

But things don’t get all that romantic, because Mossad agents embrace him with a shot of drugs and sneak him out of the country and back to the Promised Land. It seems that his girlfriend wasn’t his friend, but a friend of the state of Israel. More specifically, a girl friend of an Israeli security officer.

Vanunu received an eighteen-year sentence and a lesson in love.[1]

In 2019, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, caught an Indian officer in a honey trap. The Indian army has issued an advisory that ‘Pakistani intelligence agencies are targeting Indian security personnel, especially Indian Army personnel, who are deployed in sensitive areas.’[2]

In an article in the Indian Express in 2019, it was revealed:

‘Pakistan-based agencies operate a large number of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts and also infiltrate social media groups or contact individuals in the name of young girls. Their aim is to actively try and befriend serving and retired officials and subsequently try to nurture, allure, blackmail and coerce them into parting with sensitive information.’[3]

The Pakistani intelligence boys are still at it. In 2024, in an Economic Times article, it revealed some of the techniques used by ISI on social media by Indian authorities:

‘One method is direct, where a talkative and sweet-sounding girl initiates contact, claiming that the connection was accidental, but prolongs the chat with hints of friendship. Indirect contact is where the honey trapper first befriends the target’s friend on a social media platform. After establishing trust through this intermediary friendship over several months, the honey trapper then approaches the target.’[4]

Now, not all honey traps in history involved heterosexual relationships. 

Obviously, in the days when there was zero tolerance in society and especially in spying for homosexuals, setting up a gay man to reveal more than he should — with respect to information — was potentially a powerhouse technique in turning someone into your agent.

Let’s take a look at a homosexual British journalist from the sixties who got his hand caught in the honey jar — Jeremy Wolfenden. He was a star student, a foreign correspondent based in Moscow for The Daily Telegraph, and an asset of the British Secret Intelligence Service, (their version of the CIA).

Besides liking men, Wolfenden liked his booze. The combination of the two was to prove his undoing. It’s no surprise that he was targeted by the KGB and set up in a honey trap with what is called in the business, a Raven, or a male used as a sexual blackmail device — a woman is called a Swallow.

KGB agents had photographed him having sex with another man. Moscow was notorious for having ‘wired’ hotel rooms whereby Boris or Piotr, or Ivan, could set up his target for blackmail.

Wolfenden was torn between the SIS and the KGB, with the Brits trying to double him, and the Russians wanting him to spy for them. Apparently, the pressure got a bit too much for Wolfenden who was found at the age of 31, dead in his bathroom, apparently having slipped and hit his head on the sink.[5]

Yeah, okay.

Okay, let’s go from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, and take a look at what happened to some U.S. Marine guards who got involved in a honey trap.

In 1987, the rather appropriately named Marine, Clayton Lonetree, was serving as a security guard for the U.S. embassy in Moscow. He became involved with ‘Violetta Sanni, a Soviet of Ukrainian ethnicity, who worked in the Embassy’s government services office.’

They became intimate, and in furtherance of the relationship, Violetta introduces Lonetree to her ‘Uncle’ who in reality was not her uncle, but a KGB agent named Alexei Yefimov. He desired a close relationship with Lonetree, but not the kind enjoyed by Violetta.

Over the course of his relationship with the two, Lonetree provided low level classified information, but when he was transferred to the U.S. embassy in Vienna, and transferred over to being managed by another KGB agent, Lonetree turned over a phonebook and a list of U.S. spies in the city.

He was paid $1,800.00 for it, and spent a grand of it getting his girl a new gown.

He also provided photos of three agents, and a floor plan of the embassy.

Now here’s where we could talk about his discovery by some dedicated brilliant U.S. counterintelligence officer, but since this isn’t fiction, we’ll tell what really happened.

Lonetree turned himself in to the Chief of Station at a Christmas party, ensuring that he did not get any presents, other than a thirty-year jail sentence. That was eventually reduced to nine years.

Why You Should Care

Every citizen should be concerned about potential intelligence leaks to foreign intelligence services that don’t exactly wish us a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Because instead of that, they’re doing their level best to destroy the United States internally and, if they ever can, externally.

[1] The History of the Honey Trap Foreign Policy 3/12/10 https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/03/12/the-history-of-the-honey-trap/#cookie_message_anchor

[2] Pakistan Using Honeytrap To Target Indian Army Officers, Says Minister Indo-Asian News Service 12/9/19 https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pakistan-using-honeytrap-to-target-indian-army-officers-says-minister-shripad-naik-2145995

[3] https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2019/Jul/15/100-jawans-honey-trapped-by-pak-spies-army-goes-all-out-against-the-enemies-within-2004407.html

[4] Pakistan's ISI honey traps get hyperactive on Indian social media https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/pakistans-isi-honey-traps-get-hyperactive-on-indian-social-media/articleshow/111063967.cms?from=mdr

[5] Wikipedia article on Jeremy Wolfenden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Wolfenden

One of the most ubiquitous and meaningless phrases is ‘our thoughts and prayers’ are with someone. 

It is a convenient way to show that you care when you don’t. And that you’d like to help when you won’t.

Where this really proves to be valueless is in the realm of illness. People will pray for someone, invoking an entity that might not exist to combat a disease or a disability that definitely exists.

Now, that might offend some true believers. And some non-believers will be shaking their heads in agreement, but let’s get to the studies and the facts contained within them.

Harvard Medical School, (which probably has at least a few people who know something about healing and what treatments may be effective, and which may not), did a 10-year study of the effectiveness of prayer on cardiac bypass patients — over eighteen hundred of them.

What they concluded was, ‘there was no difference in the rate of complications for patients who were prayed for and those who were not. Nothing. Zero.’[1]

About 65% of those patients in the study strongly believed in the power of prayer.[2]

What’s even worse, ‘patients who knew prayers were being said for them had more complications after surgery than those who did not know.’[3]

Even one of the guys on the side of God, pastor Mark Karris, stated in a guest piece in the Patheos website said:

‘We cannot afford to spend our time engaging in immature forms of petitionary prayer and superstitious practices. We cannot engage in spiritual activities that cause us to feel good, thinking we are accomplishing great things, but ultimately do not achieve the good they set out to accomplish.’[4]

In a 2000 piece in the South Medical Journal, regarding prayer with respect to rheumatoid arthritis, it was concluded that, ‘distant intercessory prayer offers no additional benefits.’[5]

Now, some people have come to the conclusion that the Mayo Clinic might know a thing about medicine and studies related thereto. In their 2001 article in Mayo Clinic Proceedings (Volume 76, Issue 12) their conclusion regarding this issue was ‘intercessory prayer had no significant effect on medical outcomes after hospitalization in a coronary care unit.’

This was a two year study of 799 patients.[6]

How many times have we seen videos and/or articles about phony pastors pushing prayer as a cure all for what ails us?

Pastor Mike Signorelli, in an article on his website, poses the question:

‘[From] a rational Perspective, many believers in reformed and other intellectual traditions would contend Genuine faith healing ended with the apostles and the age of miracles. If god still healed so tangibly wouldn’t it be obvious and even scientifically verifiable?’[7]

Yeah, Mike, it would, and it wasn’t.

Your big guy came up short when studies were done by people who are Medical Doctors, and not Doctors of Divinity or some such other meaningless credential.

There are instances where faith healing, whether by remote prayer or hands on by some ‘religious leader,’ is not only ineffective, but it can be downright fatal.

As a paper from the Ohio State University notes:

‘Faith healing can cause tremendous amounts of harm, for example: In Oregon, there was a case where someone died due a congenital condition that was easily treatable, but his church suggested faith healing. In California, a case was reported where a man had a rash and heard about faith healing on the radio, instead of going to a doctor he went to a faith healer and later died, the apparent healer was charged with manslaughter.’[8]

Here’s another example, ‘In one unfortunate case a woman was encouraged to get up out of her wheelchair and discard her braces at church. The faith healer proclaimed her “healed.” Unfortunately her cancer of the spine had weakened her bones, and the activity caused bones in her spine to collapse; she died not long after.”’[9]

In her article in Science Based Medicine, ‘Faith Healing,’ writer Harriet Hall mentions a well-known ironic outcome of faith healing:

‘Many years ago the Journal of the American Medical Association used to have a regular feature where there would be a testimonial on one page describing how a patient was cured of cancer. On the opposite page, they would print the patient’s death certificate showing that he had died of that cancer shortly after providing the testimonial.’[10]

Hall further states, ‘When faith healings have been diligently investigated by qualified doctors, they have found no evidence that the patients were actually helped in any objective sense.’

This of course is backed up by the studies of Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic. Maybe it’s time that religion sticks to its own neighborhood, and gets the Hell out of healing. (Pun definitely intended).

Want another medical opinion from someone who practices medicine?

In his 2009 article on Quackwatch, Stephen Barrett, MD had this to say, ‘A study of the effects of intercessory prayer on 40 recovering alcoholics also found no benefit.’ So, watch out with that communion wine, believers, don’t get carried away.

So how does one evaluate the efficacy (or the opposite) of intercessory prayer? Barrett in his article, offers three criteria, ‘In my opinion, three criteria must be met: (1) the ailment must be one that normally doesn’t recover without treatment; (2) there must not have been any medical treatment that would be expected to influence the ailment; and (3) both diagnosis and recovery must be demonstrable by detailed medical evidence.’[11]

Of course, that kind of analysis hasn’t been performed by the religious crew, and Barrett concludes, ‘Thus, as far as I am concerned, there is no reason to believe that faith healing has ever cured anyone of an organic disease.’

Why You Should Care

When you, or a loved one are ill, you obviously want the best medical care for them, the most efficacious treatments, backed up by science and not mumbo jumbo dressed in a dog collar. You want real healing of real conditions, you don’t want ‘a laying on of hands,’ or an invocation to some god, savior, or saint.

The peddlers of the healing powers of prayer, praising Jesus, (or the non-functional, non-Abrahamic equivalent thereof), have proven not only to be ineffective, but in some cases their faith cures have led to fatalities.

Giving the sick false hopes, phony cures, and prescriptions written on the pulpit pad, is not only dangerous, sometimes deadly, but it is evil.

You do not have to abandon your beliefs to believe in the realities of medicine and science, but if you focus on faith cures, you may be abandoning all hope, ye who enter there.

[1] Strobel & Mittleberg, https://thinke.org/blog/havent-studies-proven-that-prayer-doesnt-make-any-difference-lee-strobel-amp-mark-mittelberg

[2] Largest Study of Prayer to Date Finds It Has No Power to Heal Gellene & Maugh III, 3/31/06 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-mar-31-sci-prayer31-story.html

[3] Ibid.

[4] 4 Reasons Why Prayer Is Ineffective, Harmful, And Makes A Good God Look Really Bad 1/25/18 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/allsetfree/2018/01/4-reasons-prayer-ineffective-harmful-makes-good-god-look-really-bad/

[5] National Library of Medicine https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11142453/

[6] MAYO CLINIC PROCEEDINGS VOL 76 ISSUE 12 https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(11)62794-8/abstract

[7] The Truth About Faith Healing: Exposing What’s Real and What’s Not 2/22/24 https://mikesignorelli.com/the-truth-about-faith-healers-exposing-whats-real-and-whats-not/

[8] THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EXTRAORDINARY BELIEFS, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 3/18/18 https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2018/04/18/faith-healing-2/

[9] SCIENCE BASED MEDICINE, Hall, Harriet “Faith Healing” 1/26/10  https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/faith-healing/

[10] IBID.

[11] SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT FAITH HEALING, BARRETT MD, 121/27/09 https://quackwatch.org/related/faith/

The explosions of bullets, bombs and ballistic missiles serve as the soundtrack to war, and the prelude to death.

But, when the music is ended by defeat or treaty, some discordant notes remain.

As we move from metaphor to reality, we are the unfortunate witnesses to the killing of innocent men, women and children, by the unexploded munitions that remain to litter the former — and present battlefields.

The International Red Cross estimates that ‘Globally, there are millions of explosive remnants of war on the ground today affecting more than 80 countries.’[1]

One of those countries is Ukraine, still under attack from a Russian ‘Special Military Operation,’ that has demonstrated to the world that Russian conventional forces aren’t all that ‘special.’ It has also demonstrated that when it comes to potential international war crimes, the Russians aren’t — shall we say — overly concerned.

‘“Mines are scattered across the territory of Ukraine previously and currently occupied by Russian troops. They are a daily, deadly threat to civilians. Some have been deliberately placed in civilian homes where they maim and kill,” said Patrick Thompson, Ukraine Researcher at Amnesty International.’[2]

In that same Amnesty International article, it was concluded that there were ‘incidents of Russian forces laying anti-personnel mines in residential areas in Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts.’

These were not intended for legitimate military targets in a war, they were intentionally placed in civilian areas to kill civilians — or more accurately put — to murder innocent civilians who were not a threat to Russian military material or personnel.

Let’s change our focus from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.

At the time of the writing of this article, a cease fire has just been instituted in the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. How long that will last is anybody’s guess.

What can easily be guessed at is the fact that a large number of civilian deaths will occur in the area regardless of a cease fire from the unexploded ordinance littering the land.

Patrick McCabe, explosive device operations lead at UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) Palestine, is quoted as saying:

‘“[It] is always heartbreaking when a child, or anyone”, is injured by unexploded ordinance. “But, it's a fact of war and going to happen, and it doesn't happen just to the good guys [or] the bad guys. Nobody is immune to it.”’[3]

On to Africa, where 27 years of civil war has lethally littered Angola with ‘millions’ of pieces of unexploded ordinance, waiting to kill and maim the innocent. These deadly leftovers are from fighting that ended two decades ago, yet they are still waiting to cause more death and destruction.

‘The only national survey into this issue, carried out by the Angolan government in 2014, found that around 88,000 people were living with injuries caused by landmines in the country.’[4]

And that survey was over a decade ago. Yet there are still efforts to clean up the military murderous detritus left behind.

Now in Angola, women known as ‘sapodoras’ are risking their lives to clean up the mines left behind, in order to save lives. The pay is good too, by local standards. These women can earn from $440 to $600 per month. It is women who make up forty percent of the mine clearing personnel in Angola. They work at it about thirty-six hours per week.[5]

Now, we move to the Far East, and the remnant dangers of a war ending even earlier than that of Angola.

Most of us remember the Vietnam War, either from personal experience, or as a lesson in our history courses. The war was officially over in April of 1975, yet the danger still continues in the form of unexploded munitions left in the country from 50 years ago.

From a 2024 report by ReliefWeb it was stated that:

‘Statistics showed that about one fifth of Vietnam’s land-5.6 million hectares-remains contaminated with unexploded s. It is estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 tons of bombs and mines left over from the wars are still hidden underground.’[6]

The report further estimated that ‘some 40,000 Vietnamese people have died and 60,000 are injured in UXO-related cases since 1975.’

These figures must give one pause. During the extent of the Vietnam War, U.S. military deaths were around 58,200.00. Since the war ended, since the country was united and free from active military action, Vietnamese deaths from unexploded ordnance was seventy percent of that figure.

Approximately 300,000 Americans were wounded during the war in Vietnam. After the war was over, the Vietnamese experienced 20% of that figure from left over munitions.

World War II ended eighty years ago, yet in many of the small Pacific islands that were part of the War in the Pacific, there are still unexploded munitions which have the potential to kill and maim those whose parents weren’t even born during that war.

According to a April 4, 2024 article in The Guardian, ‘some estimate the number of bombs – found across the region including in Fiji, Palau and Solomon Islands – could be in the hundreds of thousands.’[7]

Besides the risk to civilians, unexploded ordnance interferes with agriculture and land development. The destructive manufactured ghosts of war can still haunt a country decades after the war has ended — at least for the soldiers.

Why You Should Care

Everyone should care about civilian men women and children who are not only killed and wounded when caught up in the fog of war, but who are killed and maimed after the fog has dispersed, yet they are victims of the leftovers of lethality that litter their country.

From even the point of view of the greedy, construction projects, agricultural projects, tourism and other economic endeavors to commercially develop a country can be seriously impeded by the presence of unexploded ordnance. This increases labor costs, insurance costs, and medical care.

Through Non-Governmental Organizations, international legislation, and the clean-up efforts of the militaries that created the problem in the first place, the horrors of unexploded munitions can be reduced, given sufficient money and time.

[1] Explosive remnants of war International Committee of the Red Cross https://www.icrc.org/en/law-and-policy/explosive-remnants-war[2] Ukraine/Russia: Investigate use of anti-personnel mines left after Russian occupation as possible war crimes 7/26/24 AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/ukraine-russia-investigate-use-of-anti-personnel-mines-left-after-russian-occupation-as-possible-war-crimes/

[3] Unexploded  leaves dark legacy for Gaza, warn mine action experts UNITED NATIONS 5/6/24 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/05/1149391

[4] Angola landmines: The women hunting for explosives left from civil war BBC 4/3/23 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-65163673

[5] ANGOLA LAND MINES op.cit.

[6] Nearly 500,000 hectares of land cleared of UXOs Relief Web 3/5/24 https://reliefweb.int/report/viet-nam/nearly-500000-hectares-land-cleared-uxos#:~:text=Statistics%20showed%20that%20about%20one,wars%20are%20still%20hidden%20underground.

[7] How Hidden WW2 Bombs Across the Pacific are Found and Destroyed The Guardian, 4/4/24 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/05/ww2-hidden-bombs-clearing-disposal-pacific-marshall-islands-unexploded-ordnance-uxo

The United States armed forces believe themselves to be the best equipped, most high-tech forces in the world. And that’s likely true — right now.

But ever since the military-industrial complex got its name from Eisenhower, there have been instances of military contractor overcharges, defective manufacturing, and at times out and out fraud.

That sort of behavior not only costs lives, it can degrade our national security.

Now, expecting shoddy manufacturing, overcharges and fraud is standard operating procedure when the consumer deals with the products of our corporations.

But when it comes to our citizens who put themselves in harm’s way, who risk life and limb to carry out the whims and wishes of the politicians in power — (or if you like, to protect our freedoms), is it too much to expect that the industrial side of the complex will be more careful, more honest, and do like it says it would?

Apparently, it is too much to expect, as we shall see below.

Let’s pay a visit to contractor, Mason Engineering Parts LLC. You may not be familiar with this company, but the Department of Justice is. In May, 2024, on the DOJ pubic site, it was announced, ‘Defense Contractor Pleads Guilty to Fraud, Money Laundering and Unlawful Export of Military Data.’[1]

So, what happened?

The LLC obtained a government contract for parts for:

‘The U.S. Navy Nimitz and Ford Class Aircraft Carriers, U.S. Navy Submarines, U.S. Marine Corps Armored Vehicles, and U.S. Army M-60 Series Tank and Abrahams Battle Tanks, among other weapons systems.’[2]

The company represented itself as a vetted and qualified military contractor. It wasn’t. Instead, Mason had a Turkish contractor manufacture the parts — a contractor that had been barred from dealing with the US government.

The company knowingly supplied the Turkish outfit with sensitive documents in violation of security regulations. Six figures worth of government payments to Mason were then laundered back to Turkey.

The parts did not conform to agreed specifications. In fact, as it was related on the DOJ site, the parts related to ‘“critical application items,” meaning that failure of these components would have potentially rendered the end system inoperable.’

The perpetrators of these acts will find themselves living in a government gated community with excellent security for a long, long time.

In January 2022, a defense contractor, Craig Klund of South Dakota, won himself an all expenses paid visit to federal prison for ten years. That arose out of his defrauding the government, money laundering and aggravated identity theft, according to a posting on the IRS website.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, Klund's fraud scheme included:

1. Use of 15 shell corporations to hide his control of entities bidding on DoD contracts;

2. Use of multiple aliases;

3. Repeated identity theft;

4. Collusive bids submitted by multiple Klund entities on the same contract;

5. Knowingly shipping nonconforming parts and requesting payment for these parts;

6. Signing Federal Acquisition Regulation certificates using fake names;

7. Lying to Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) inspectors by claiming to be someone other than himself;

8. Relocating his business from Wisconsin to South Dakota to evade DCMA inspectors who were questioning his operations in Wisconsin;

9. Concealing receipt of DoD proceeds by not reporting these monies on his federal income tax returns; and

10. Laundering DoD proceeds by moving the funds between accounts.[3]

The site posting revealed, ‘Klund had three previous federal felony convictions, two of which were for defense contracting fraud, making his criminal history a very important factor in the judge's sentencing analysis.’

So, it appears there is such a thing as a bad boy, and sometimes people don’t learn from their mistakes.

Here’s another instance of military contractor misdoings. Envistacom LLC received its fifteen minutes of infamy on the DOJ public affairs site, when it was posted on 3/29/23 that ‘Military Contractors Convicted for $7 Million Procurement Fraud Scheme.’

What did Envistacom do? According to the site:

‘Preparing and procuring sham quotes for government contracts totaling over $7.8 million. Carson, Hayes, and Flores also fraudulently prepared “independent” government cost estimates and other procurement documents for the award of these contracts and made false statements, representations, and material omissions to federal government contracting officials regarding these estimates being legitimate independent cost estimates and the sham quotes being “competitive.”’[4]

How about one more for good luck?

This guy was from Missouri, so the government had to show him. They showed him and in a 2/7/24 posting from the GSA OIG (English-the General Services Administration Office of Inspector General), our man in Missouri admitted illegally obtaining parts for the military overseas, undercutting domestic suppliers.

The contractor, according to the GSA:

‘Received at least nine U.S. government contracts by way of fraudulent misrepresentations, including that he would provide parts from domestic sources. Murar actually provided parts from China and other foreign countries. By doing so, Murar was able to underbid domestic suppliers. Murar broke the law by providing “military critical technical data,” which was restricted and protected information, to foreign individuals and/or entities.’[5]

The individual guilty of the above behavior had better like Federal cooking, because he will be eating it for a long time.

Why You Should Care

A hefty portion of the taxes you pay go to defense. You have not only a financial stake in seeing that those dollars don’t get abused or wasted, you have a personal survival stake in seeing that our military has the equipment it needs.

Not only that, but that the equipment is made to work, made to last, and that the parts for it are up to specifications.

The world is now seeing up close what happens when corruption and neglect enter into military manufacturing, because the Russians are directly experiencing it in the Ukraine.

We the people of the United States of America don’t want that to happen to us when it’s our time to once again step into the battlefield.

[1] DOJ PUBLIC AFFAIRS SITE 5/8/24 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/defense-contractor-pleads-guilty-fraud-money-laundering-and-unlawful-export-military-data

[2] DOJ PUBLIC SITE op.cit.

[3] IRS SITE 1/20/22 https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/former-defense-contractor-sentenced-to-10-years-for-fraud-money-laundering-and-id-theft

[4] DOJ PUBLIC AFFAIRS 3/29/23 https://www.preparing and procuring sham quotes for government contracts totaling over $7.8 million. Carson, Hayes, and Flores also fraudulently prepared “independent” government cost estimates and other procurement documents for the award of these contracts and made false statements, representations, and material omissions to federal government contracting officials regarding these estimates being legitimate independent cost estimates and the sham quotes being “competitive.”justice.gov/opa/pr/military-contractors-convicted-7-million-procurement-fraud-scheme

[5] GSA OIG SITE 2/7/24 https://www.gsaig.gov/news/missouri-based-defense-department-contractor-admits-fraud

The United States is a nation of regulation. A bevy of bureaucrats doing their damn level best to screw up the affairs of American business — large and small.

In their latest endeavor to mess things up, the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, decided in 2024 to launch an attack on an almost ubiquitous provision in any significant employment contract, the non-disclosure clause, or the NDA.

It’s also a clause found in many preliminary contracts precedent to a merger and acquisition, whether on the international corporate level, or the mom and pop sale of a business.

So here’s what happened:

In an April 2024 press release on its website, the FTC announced:

‘Today, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule to promote competition by banning non-competes nationwide, protecting the fundamental freedom of workers to change jobs, increasing innovation, and fostering new business formation.’[1]

Let’s turn our rocket ship to planet reality, and look at what that less than brilliant move really achieved.

For those in the real world of business, (and not the imaginary realm of government employment where you get paid to do very little except screw with the people who do a great deal for this country by providing a tax base and employment opportunities), business procedures, customers, suppliers, and marketing plans are data of significant value and many times are not easily discoverable from public sources.

The business owner would naturally seek to protect that information, and therefore was created the Non-Disclosure Agreement. 

Signing such an agreement is often a sine qua non in obtaining employment with a company. Signing one is also the first real step in the beginning of exploration and negotiation of a possible merger and acquisition.

So, when the FTC KOs the NDA, does that really protect the ‘fundamental right of workers to change jobs’? Or does it instead make it less likely that a worker will be hired in a position that exposes him to important proprietary information of the employer?

Does such interference with a basic protection for the employer bring about ‘increasing innovation’ or does it turn a blind eye to what may become rampant industrial espionage?

Is it a stimulus to ‘fostering new business formation,’ when the world of business has just had taken from it the very contract clause that can protect that business from destruction when all of its proprietary information lies unprotected?

Government genius, FTC Chairperson Lina M. Khan, who never ran even a lemonade stand in her professional life; a life of working as a lawyer (but not for herself), and as an academic, came up with this bit of wit and wisdom in the aforesaid press release:

‘Non-compete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once non-competes are banned.’[2]

Let’s examine that nonsense from this non-compete nincompoop.

First, in low wage jobs, the world of burger flippers, the cab drivers, etc., it’s unlikely that anybody is signing a non-disclosure agreement.

It’s in the higher levels of employment that it’s found, so it doesn’t keep wages low. It doesn’t suppress new ideas, it protects them. As to where she got these 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once there are no more non-compete agreements figure, it was likely pulled out from a location that would be in the realm of expertise of her proctologist.

Since the FTC yanked NDA protection in April 2024, how the hell could she come up with any figure of post NDA startups in the same press release that mentioned the new FTC ban?

In law, there is a saying when a contract is introduced into evidence, ‘the document speaks for itself.’ In the case of this FTC press release that’s especially true. It’s proof positive that bureaucrats, (despite their formal education, when they have zero entrepreneurial ability or the courage to go out on their own), are idiots.

Fortunately, sometimes the courts can come to the rescue of business when the government goofballs get it wrong and irrationally regulate.

Ryan LLC v. Federal Trade Commission was a case brought in the Northern District of the Texas Federal Court which caused an injunction to issue against the establishment and enforcement of the FTC anti-NDA ban.

It determined that the FTC ruling, besides being outside of their power to promulgate, was arbitrary and capricious.

Likewise, in the Florida federal courts, Properties of the Villages Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission a similar injunction was issued.

Of course, since the main function of a bureaucracy is not only to preserve its existence but to increase its powers, the FTC appealed both cases.[3]

On January 2, 2025, the FTC filed its brief in the appeal of the Texas decision, and argued that it does have authority to regulate ‘unfair competition.’

In addressing the ‘arbitrary and capricious’ part of the Texas decision, here is the self-serving nonsense the FTC averred, ‘that it reasonably concluded that non-competes are restrictive and tend to negatively affect competitive conditions.’[4]

Let’s take a look at that logic.

Of course, an NDA is restrictive, that’s the point. It restricts the unauthorized dissemination of proprietary information. 

In evaluating a business for the purpose of an acquisition, its tax returns, its profit and loss statements, its ‘books’ are going to be examined, and these, obviously contain a tremendous amount of confidential financial information.

Shouldn’t these financial documents be restricted in its dissemination to only those parties and their advisors involved in the negotiations of the potential acquisition?

XYZ Corporation hires a representative to market its new technology. In the course of such representation, the hire is going to be privy to significant proprietary information. Should that be able to be randomly communicated? Should the hire be able to jump ship and reveal all to the competition of the previous employer?

The answer to these questions is obvious to any sensible person that does not work for a government regulatory body.

Why You Should Care

Chances are you have either worked for a business, or you have owned one, or both at one time or another. In the course of your ownership there was generated confidential information, the kind you don’t want your competitors to have access to.

With the FTC attempted ban on NDAs you wouldn’t have any protection from that happening.

Or, you are being contemplated as a hire by a corporation that has a reasonable desire to protect its proprietary information. Normally, an NDA could go a long way to your being hired. But if that isn’t allowed to exist, the potential employer now has to consult its crystal ball to see if you can keep your mouth shut about what you learn in the course of your employment.

So, in a choice between contractual restriction, or a wild guess — which would be better both for the business and its potential hires?

We’ve already seen litigation taking place in 2024 wherein the government seeks the right to mandate disclosure of ownership of corporations and LLCs, under severe legal penalties for non-compliance, even though this has not been a requisite for many years, and our economy didn’t collapse.

Now they are fighting to obtain another pointless restriction on business, one which has dangerous ramifications for both owners and future employees. 

We are witness to an accelerated war on business launched from the ivory towers of the bureaucrats who have no real-world experience, and that is something about which we should be deeply concerned.

[1] FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes FTC WEBSITE 4/23/24 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

[2] FTC PRESS RELEASE 4/23/24 op. cit.

[3] FTC APPEALS TEXAS FEDERAL COURTS DECISION 10/22/24 Chin, Perlman, Tan PROSKAUER LAW FIRM https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2024/10/ftc-appeals-texas-federal-courts-decision-halting-its-noncompete-ban-nationally/

[4] FTC FILES OPENING BRIEF IN NON-COMPETE RULE APPEAL, 1/6/25 STEVENS & LEE LAW https://www.stevenslee.com/health-law-observer-blog/ftc-files-opening-brief-in-noncompete-rule-appeal/

Most people are familiar with the term ‘military-industrial complex’. That parasitic union between the war makers and the corporate makers of weapons.

For the former, corpses pile up, for the latter, profits.

But even today, many people are not aware that there was, and is, a military-occult complex. It’s one where the spies and armies of the world use magic — either as a psyop, (psychological operation, or more colloquially, ‘bullshit.’), or as an area of bona fide research and utilization in ‘the field.’

Let’s look at some grade A World War I paranormal propaganda, as an example where it’s not ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ but fiction became truth for the true believers.

The Angels of Mons, started out as a 1914 short work of fiction entitled ‘The Bowmen,’ by Arthur Machen, well known writer of fantasy and horror. In the story ghost archers shot their arrows at the Germans for the protection of retreating British soldiers.

It was published in the Evening News, but not as fiction.

Another author in the same edition turned it into a first-person account, and many of the public took the ghost story as gospel.^[1]

It never ceases to amaze the thinking man, just how gullible and intellectually lazy the public is. But according to that brilliant philosopher, P.T. Barnum, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’

For a more modern example, let’s take a look at Soviet psychic research, as reported by the CIA in 1977.

In an April 1977 declassified document, Soviet and Eastern European Parapsychology Research, it was reported that ‘The Soviets have a parapsychology research program whose existence is classified and whose funding and control reside largely with the Ministry of Defense and possibly the KGB.’^[2]

How much of this was Soviet disinformation to worry the West about a perceived psychic gap, to accompany the concerns about the ‘missile gap,’ between the Big Bad Bear and the Home of the Brave?

The CIA report also noted that in 1969, the Soviets were engaged in research into black magic, to identify practitioners of sorcery and witchcraft, and learn what incantations they were using. But later in the report it recognizes the possibility that the black magic research facility was just Soviet disinformation. (You think?!)

One wonders if this 1977 CIA report on Soviet activities enabled and encouraged the launch of the U.S. military psychic spy program in 1978, entitled GRILL FLAME?

The U.S. ‘remote viewing’ project lasted until 1995 — officially. It supposedly had mixed success and was allegedly responsible for locating new Soviet submarines and captured American diplomats.^[3]

However, research into the possibilities and potentials of remote viewing has not stopped. And where there is research, there is funding. And where there is funding on a subject like this, it isn’t too much of a leap of faith to assume that maybe the military and intelligence agencies ‘kinda sorta’ might be contributing dollars to the doings.

In a 2023 study, Follow‐up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Remote Viewing Experiments, ‘The research focused on emotional intelligence (EI) theory and intuitive information processing as possible hypothetical mechanisms.’^[4]

The results of the study showed ‘significant RV‐related effects corresponding to the positive influence of EI (emotional intelligence).’

But the military-occult complex has a second side to it. One where truth is not being sought, but lies and propaganda are used to seek military advantage.

For example, in counterinsurgency operations in the Congo, in the 1960s, the world of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic was employed to both motivate the rebels, and, to put it politely, de-motivate them.

The Congolese rebels were convinced, (conned) into believing that magical practices would make them bullet proof. (This kind of nonsense was also seen in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, at the turn of the 20^th century, when the believers came in second to the reality of ballistics).

Even though this was nonsense, the morale effect on the rebels made them more likely to bravely engage government troops. This made it more likely that the government troops became not so brave.

In a 1964 report prepared by the United States Army, Supernatural Counterinsurgency in the Congo, it was suggested that in any advisory role to the government of the Congo, the US should have a:

‘Sound understanding of magical concepts, practices, and mannerisms is necessary for defensive purposes should they play any role or importance in an insurgency situation. Knowledge of the specific uses of charms, medicines, bodily scarification, and the like…’

The report concluded, ‘There is little doubt that counter-magic tactics properly conceived and imaginatively executed could be quite effective in achieving short-run victories.’^[5]

The above is somewhat reminiscent of how Moses showed up Pharaoh’s magicians by walking softly and carrying a big serpent stick.

Now, the CIA is apparently a really equal opportunity employer. Because in psyops in the Philippines, in the 1950s, the CIA put vampires to work against the rebel Huks.

Philippine superstitions contain the idea of the aswang, a not-so-nice vampiric entity, a bloodsucker, among other things. It scared the living daylights out of the rebels, so in 1950, the CIA sent Edward Lansdale, under cover as a USAF officer to stir things up and have a couple of yuks at the expense of the Huks.

Lansdale was, prior to his entry into the military in WW2, a successful ad man. What better place for an advertising type than to put him into psychological operations, because the same techniques one uses in advertising, can be used in war — to persuade the enemy to do stuff, or not do stuff.

Lansdale capitalized on the aswang legend, and other supernatural silliness:

‘One of Lansdale's tactics was to fly over Huk-controlled areas in a light aircraft and broadcast "mysterious curses" in Tagalog on any villagers who offered help to the Huk soldiers. The tactic reportedly succeeded in starving some Huk units into surrender.’^[6]

Lansdale also had his psywar buddies in the Philippines spread rumors to the Huks that there were aswangs about. To buttress this, he had an ambush squad sneak up on a Huk Patrol, and they ‘snatched the last man of the patrol…and punctured his neck with two holes, vampire fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood and put the corpse back on the trail.’^[7]

The technique dislodged up to 300 Huk rebels, who became convinced rebellion could be a literal pain in the neck.

Why You Should Care

Religion, which is certainly at least a polite form of magic, and superstition, which is a component of religion is used as a catalyst for conflict.

Muslims kill non-Muslims, Protestants kill Catholics, Jews kill Muslims who kill Jews, Russia is having a ‘special military operation’ against the ‘Nazi’ Ukraine, because Vladmir Putin considers himself to be an Orthodox Christian, (rather strange for an ex-KGB Soviet era type, where religion was ‘a commonly held interpretation of the history of Orthodox Christianity in Russia. According to this view, Russians and Ukrainians are one people who originate from the same Christian kingdom that came into being in the 10th century.’^[8]

Thus, whether we call it religion, magic or superstition, when the military and intelligence agencies get a hold of them, the body count increases, and that is something with which we should all be concerned.

[1] ANGELS OF MONS, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons

[2] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/NSA-RDP96X00790R000100010041-2.pdf

[3] PSYCHIC BATTLEFIELD, Mandelbaum 2000 St. Martin’s Press, 173-174

[4] BRAIN BEHAVIOR, National Library of Medicine 5/3/23 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10275521/

[5] SUPERNATURAL COUNTERINSURGENCY IN THE CONGO 1964 https://kenrahn.com/Marsh/Bay_of_Pigs/congorpt.htm

[6] How the CIA Used 'Vampires' to Fight Communism in the Philippines | HowStuffWorks

[7] How the CIA Used 'Vampires' to Fight Communism in the Philippines, 3/8/23 https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/cia-vampires-communist-rebels-philippines.htm

[8] The Role of Religion in Russia’s War on Ukraine United States Institute for Peace 3/17/22 https://www.usip.org/publications/2022/03/role-religion-russias-war-ukraine

Our previous newsletter covered all the pertinent details of the Roswell event.

But we left out two crucial clues that suggest there was something more going on behind the event than just a simple weather balloon recovery.

First off, there’s been a cascade of different and often contradictory explanations of the Roswell event. At first, the US Army Air Corps, the 1947 predecessor of the Air Force, claimed the debris was a simple weather balloon.

They’ve never explained how so many expertly trained high-level officers from the most advanced air unit in the world, the 509th Composite Bomb Group, could have been so badly mistaken. Yet those same individuals were never reprimanded for their gross error.

Instead, they continued to gain promotions, including Major Jesse Marcel, who was promoted before the end of the year, and lieutenant Colonel Arthur Exon at Dayton, Ohio, who was later promoted to base commander.

The second explanation came in 1994, when the US Air Force issued a report, somewhat optimistically titled ‘The Roswell Report: Case Closed’. It claimed the weather balloon was a top-secret balloon system from Operation Mogul, designed to pick up high-altitude sounds from Soviet-era nuclear explosions.^[1]

This explanation faces the same criticism as the original explanation: how could experienced intelligence officers like Major Marcel and Lt. Col. Arthur Exon, who saw the debris at Dayton, not be able to identify such material?

And why would even a Mogul balloon require such extraordinary cleanup as was seen at Mac Brazel’s ranch. As well as requiring military police to threaten witnesses, as they did to Roswell sheriff George Wilcox and his family, and hold them in custody, as in Brazel’s case for almost a week?

There is also some doubt as to whether a Mogul balloon was even in the air in late June 1947, which is the earliest the crash could have occurred. One Mogul array was launched on June 4th from Alamogordo, New Mexico,^[2] but it couldn’t have remained in the air for ten days until Mac Brazel heard a crash somewhere after June 14^th .

Nor would it have accounted for the loud boom that Brazel said accompanied the crash.^[3] Some reports suggest that Brazel didn’t hear the boom until early July, making the Mogul explanation less likely.^[4]

Then in 1997, the Air Force came out with a third story: that the ‘bodies’ that were claimed to have been seen by dozens of witnesses were actually crash test dummies from a later 1950s-era series of tests.^[5] This ‘explanation’ was in spite of the Air Force’s earlier claims that no bodies of any kind were ever involved in the Roswell incident.

In 2005, a fourth explanation was offered up by author Nick Redfern. In his book ‘Body Snatchers in the Desert,’^[6] he wrote that three unnamed whistleblowers, each one government- or military-connected, told him that the Roswell crash was part of a program using captured Japanese scientists from the infamous Unit 731.^[7]

It was using prisoners of war for experiments on the effects of high-altitude radiation. His sources suggested the ‘alien’ bodies were misidentified Asian victims of the test, which strains credulity to say the least.

A fifth explanation was put forward in 2011 by Annie Jacobsen in her book, ‘Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base.’^[8]

Her theory, not widely accepted, was that the crashed debris belonged to a Soviet propaganda craft, created by a captured Dr. Joseph Mengele. That it was designed to scare Americans into worrying about alien invasions, which would sow panic and confusion throughout the country.

Her claim was that the hieroglyphic writing that Major Marcel and his son Jesse Marcel Jr. saw was, in fact, Russian Cyrillic writing.

Despite these ever-changing stories and theories, there have been two major pieces of evidence that strongly support the underlying truth that something extraordinary really did occur at Roswell.

The first of these involves the famous image of General Ramey viewing the wreckage at the Fort Worth location, beside his Chief of Staff, Colonel Thomas E. DuBose (seen in the picture at the head of this newsletter).

In Ramey’s hand, he holds a teletype message with the text facing the camera. At the time, it would have been impossible to read the faint letters on the page. But in 2015, UFO researcher Kevin Randle led a team that digitized the original negatives of the photo, and used computer image enhancement to decipher the most likely possibility of the message.^[9]

With Martin Dreyer, a dedicated Roswell and UFO researcher living in New Zealand, they expanded on pioneering work begun in 2001 by David Rudia,^[10] and even earlier efforts done by Brad Sparks in the 1980s.^[11]

Though there are some discrepancies in interpretation between the different teams, overall they agreed that the teletype image includes around 74 to 78 legible words, which include the phrases ‘THE VICTIMS OF THE WRECK’ and ‘IN THE 'DISC.’^[12] The message also clearly indicated the words ‘WEATHER BALLOONS’ and ‘AT FORT WORTH TEX.’

This raises a significant question: why would General Ramey expose a top-secret message to possible capture by photographers?

The answer is simple: this isn’t the first time top-level officials accidentally allowed such sensitive material to be accidentally captured by cameras. And with this meeting, there were no reporters and only one cameraman.

It’s entirely possible he simply didn’t think such a message should be out of his sight, and didn’t realize the camera would record anything legible.^[13]

It should be noted that shortly before his death in 1991, Colonel DuBose, who retired as a Brigadier General, stated unequivocally that ‘It was a cover story, the balloon part of it. Anything else, forget it!’^[14]

Brigadier General DuBose remains the highest ranking officer to confirm that the Roswell weather balloon and Mogul cover-up stories are not the truth.

There is one additional piece of evidence that suggests the Roswell crash was something truly unique — or more precisely, a lack of evidence.

In 1993, New Mexico Congressman Steven H. Schiff asked the General Accounting Office for an investigation of all files pertaining to the Roswell incident. That’s what caused the Air Force to issue its previously mentioned 1994 report, ‘Case Closed.’ But something interesting happened when the GAO began digging.

They discovered that all of the incoming and outgoing messages to Roswell Army Air Field from October 1946 through December 1949 had been mysteriously destroyed. In addition, all of the administrative files, which would cover (among other items) the transfer and assignment of base personnel, from March 1945 through December 1949 had also been destroyed.

According to the Air Force’s own report to Rep. Schiff’s GAO request, there was no explanation of who ordered the files’ destruction, nor where or when it was carried out, nor by whom.^[15]

Skepticism about an unauthorized and undocumented destruction of such important files over such a critical point in this country’s history ran high. Even the GAO thought this excuse simply didn’t fly, and that the Air Force was withholding information, or worse, had destroyed vital documentation as part of its decades-long cover up.^[16]

This apparently intentional destruction of government files again suggests something far more serious than simply a misidentified Mogul balloon launch and recovery. Couple this with the Ramey memo which indicates there was an admission of ‘victims’ of a crashed ‘disc,’ and we seem to have the best example yet of a smoking gun.

If the US government ever wants to have its people trust it, especially where it comes to its current UAP and UFO investigations, it needs to start with Roswell. Though the chances of the Pentagon ever admitting they had recovered non-human technology, alien bodies, and possibly even a live alien and covered it all up for 75 years, are extremely slim indeed.

[1] https://www.af.mil/The-Roswell-Report/

[2] https://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/Roswell/USMogulReport.html

[3] https://unsolved.com/gallery/roswell/

[4] https://unsolved.com/gallery/roswell/

[5] https://www.element115.ai/article/roswell-incident

[6] https://books.google.com/books?id=aYic0WQY3DcC

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

[8] https://www.amazon.com/Area-51-Uncensored-Americas-Military/dp/0316132942

[9] https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/09/ramey-memo-update.html

[10] http://www.roswellproof.com/

[11] https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-ramey-memo.html

[12]  https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/09/ramey-memo-update.html

[13] https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/05/general-ramey-and-his-memo.html

[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn7kX0YUEW4&t=230s

[15] https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1995/07/30/documents-on-roswell-ufo-missing/

[16] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1995/06/01/roswell-incident-revisits-air-force/78e8112e- 6edb-4042-b5a7-30e0ae436755/

Many people wish to do good works, and make the world, or at least a part of it, a better place. 

Organizations exist, ostensibly, to do just that.

They are not for profit organizations, and many of these are granted what is called ‘exempt’ status pursuant to the Internal Revenue Code.

Contributions to these exempt organizations may be deductible by the donor, and they are not taxed to the organization as income, provided they stay within IRS rules.

But like the old saying goes all that glistens isn’t gold, and when it comes to the receipt and use of the gold some exempt organizations receive. That is, their disbursal of those receipts may not always glisten.

There is an abundance of organizations whose goals are to make the world a better place for dogs and cats, whales, elephants, veterans, and other categories of intended beneficiaries. Many of them do just that, but some of them at certain times, stray from the proper path. They engage in self-dealing and overcompensation of the chaps who run the charitable organization.

When reading this article, it’s important to recognize that a charity may run afoul of its intended purposes in one or more years. Only to be later set right by the hiring of better people, or by better administration, and returning to the straight path.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Now here’s a horse of a different color. Charity Watch, an organization devoted to doing just that, on its ‘worst’ list. It listed Front Range Equine Rescue, based in Florida as spending only 39% of the expenses it incurred on its programs in 2022.

It stated there could be a sufficiently long lag time between the receipt of funds by the charity, and it’s use — for whatever purpose. (Remember, that was 2022, and may not be the situation with this charity as of the writing of this article.)[1]

Here’s one for the kids. Children’s Cancer Research Fund, based in Minnesota, spent only 47% of its expenses on the programs that were related to its purposes in 2022. It had administrative costs of $45.00 for every $100.00 it raised, as reported by Charity Watch.

Again, this is early 2025, and the situation may have changed for the better — or worse.[2]

How about our veterans. There are a number of charities that were concerned with their benefit, one of which was Wounded Warrior Project. This charity, which apparently at this time is highly rated, had some controversy around eight or nine years ago.

In 2017, the findings of a Senate investigation into the doings of the charity concluded, ‘The Senate Judiciary Committee said the charity “inaccurately” reported the money it spent on veterans’ programs by using “inflated” numbers and “misleading” advertisements. The committee found “excessive amounts of donor contributions that were misused” by WWP’s former leadership.”’[3]

Fortunately, due to replacing the charity leadership after these facts came to light, Wounded Warrior Project enjoys an excellent rating as a charity today. (It goes to show that the government and the press can sometimes actually do good works by accurate investigating and reporting, which is what they’re actually supposed to do all the time.)

St. Jude, besides being the patron saint of impossible cases, is the patron saint of hospitals. St. Jude, the largest charity in the country related to health care, in the past was engaged in certain financial activities that might not have been entirely saintly.

Missouri Medicine, reported at the end of 2022 that:

‘Since 2017, only about half of the $7.3 billion dollars St. Jude has received in contributions went to the hospital’s patient care and research. Of the remainder, 30% was spent on fundraising and 20% to its reserve fund. It should be noted that although St. Jude advertises that care is free for those who cannot afford treatment, much of the cost of treatment is paid by the families’ private insurance or by Medicaid.^’[4]

The charity might not be a bad place to work, because it was also reported that ‘the fundraising and investment arm of St. Jude known as ALSAC has 2,188 employees. More than 400 of its employees are paid over $100,000 annually.’[5]

One of the guidelines to determine if a charity is on the up and up, according to Stephanie Kalivas an analyst at Charity Watch is ‘Charities that are A-rated generally spend at least 75 percent or more on their programs, so more of your money goes to causes you want to support.’[6]

Laurie Stryon, Executive Director of Charity Watch, regarding fund raising by charities said, ‘Charities should honor donors' intentions by keeping their overhead costs reasonable. A charity can legitimately use a for-profit professional fundraising company to supplement its other fundraising efforts or to build up its member base when it's first getting started.’

But she also noted that if over time, more efficient means of fundraising are not engaged in, ‘Donors are essentially just funding more fundraising and nothing else when they make a donation.’[7]

Why You Should Care

Many of us are bombarded by charitable solicitations during the year, and more often in the holiday season. Sorrowful looking puppies, starving kids in some third world country, paraplegic veterans and other sad cases are paraded before our eyes in order to have our hands reach in our pockets to contribute to the worthy cause being promoted.

That’s not a bad thing when most of the money raised from our contributions actually goes to benefit the intended recipients. It’s a very bad thing however, if much of that money is spent on no-bid contracts farmed out to for-profit companies with ties to the directors of the charity, and when officer and director salaries of the charitable organization are far in excess of the norm.

(Their compensation has to be reasonable, a term which is not clearly defined by the IRS, of course, but they do provide factors by which a determination can be made, which is outside the scope of the present article.)

You have heard the slogan many times, ‘Investigate before you invest,’ and this also holds true in situations where you are contemplating giving your money to a charitable organization, to make sure the best of the best are selected.

One item to review is the IRS 990 form of the organization, which is public record and can often be found on the internet, at the IRS site located at https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/.

So be careful when your heart says yes to a charity — use your head first before you donate.

[1] Some of the Worst Charities in America 2024 12/10/24 CHARITY WATCH https://blog.charitywatch.org/some-of-the-worst-charities-in-america-2024/

[2] CHARITY WATCH op.cit.

[3] Senate releases report criticizing Wounded Warrior Project's past spending NEWS4JAX 5/24/2017 https://www.news4jax.com/news/2017/05/25/senate-releases-report-criticizing-wounded-warrior-projects-past-spending/

[4] MISSOURI MEDICINE https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9762212/#:~:text=Since%202017%2C%20only%20about%20half,20%25%20to%20its%20reserve%20fund

[5] MISSOURI MEDICINE op.cit.

[6] Best and Worst Charities for Your Donations CONSUMER REPORTS 11/22/2019 https://www.consumerreports.org/money/charities/best-charities-for-your-donations-a4066579102/

[7] The WORST charities in America?  DAILY MAIL 6/25/2023 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12219603/The-WORST-charities-America-organizations-giving-CEOs-millions-ignoring-causes.html

The current obsession with UFOs will be forever linked to the watershed event that occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, through the last week of June and into early July of 1947.^[1]

Believers claim parts of a non-terrestrial craft crashed on a remote ranch owned by W.W. “Mac” Brazel (also spelled “Mack”) near Corona, NM.

He showed a few pieces to the Roswell sheriff, George Wilcox, who suggested he talk to the military at Roswell Army Air Field, home of the 509th Composite Group. At the time, the world’s only unit tasked with dropping atomic bombs.^[2]

Brazel was accompanied back to his ranch by three members of the 509th: Major Jesse Marcel and Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents Lt. Colonel Sheridan Cavitt and Master Sergeant Lewis Rickett.^[3]

The day after they arrived, Brazel helped load some of the debris into a Jeep and a second Army vehicle, and the three 509th members headed back to the base.

On the way back to the airfield, Major Marcel decided that the debris was strange enough that he wanted to show some of the pieces to his son, ten-year-old Jesse Marcel Jr.

Years later, Jesse Jr. described one of the pieces as ‘a small beam with purple-hued hieroglyphics on it.’^[4] The beams were described as being as light as balsa wood yet would not break or burn.

Some of the metallic pieces were as light and thin as cigarette package foil, yet when crumpled, would return to their original shape as if they had a memory.^[5]

The original collected debris — there was more recovered later — was loaded onto a military plane and flown to the 8th Army Army Air Corps headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas.^[6] There Marcel was ordered to pose with pieces of the wreckage for photographs.

According to Marcel’s later testimony, he stood in a room with pieces of the debris around him, along with General Roger Ramey, commanding officer of the 8th Air Force.

Marcel was led out of the room, then brought back in later for official photographs. The second time, there was different debris scattered on the floor: parts of an ordinary weather balloon that Marcel was quite familiar with, but not at all like the original material he’d first brought in.^[7]

Marcel followed orders and had his picture taken holding up the weather balloon debris, although the skeptical look on his face was very telling.^[8]

Marcel would say much later in life, ‘General Ramey was the one who told the newsmen what it was, and to forget about it, (that) it was nothing more than a weather observation balloon. Of course, we both knew different.’^[9]

One very significant clue occurred during this photo session. More on that later.

Supposedly, the original debris was placed on a special flight to Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, home of the Army Air Material Command. Once there, specialists would study the debris to determine its origin and capabilities.

According to Lt. Col. Arthur Exon (who would in the 1960s become base commander), the characteristics of the material ‘had them pretty puzzled. . . [The] overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.’^[10]

Back in Roswell, news quickly spread around town.

Following a press release from the base itself that they had recovered a crashed ‘flying disc,’ on July 8th, the Roswell Daily Record carried a banner story declaring, ‘RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.’^[11]

The local radio station also carried the news, but the next day, was ordered to halt reporting on the incident or face losing its broadcasting license.^[12] The local morning newspaper also was ordered by the military to rescind its previous statement and printed a retraction, claiming the debris was only parts of a weather balloon.^[13]

Their headline carried the significantly worded headline, ‘Army Debunks Roswell Flying Disk.’

The weather balloon explanation flies in the face of everything we know about the capabilities of the officers and enlisted men of the 509th Bomb Group. They were briefed on the most advanced technology in the world, and kept up to date on whatever flight characteristics they might encounter against their adversaries, especially the then-Soviet Union.

To suggest the highest officers of the 509th didn't recognize balsa wood, rubber, and tin foil is a slap in the face not just of their capabilities, but of the training of the entire U.S. military.

Major Marcel himself was a highly decorated officer with intelligence training. He had assisted in the administration of the 1946 nuclear test Operation Crossroads, and was awarded with two letters of commendation for his handling of that event, including one from Brig. General Roger Ramey, later his C.O. during the Roswell incident.^[14]

Marcel was even promoted after the Roswell incident in December 1947,^[15] so he must have done something right.

Even the FBI believed something, possibly a ‘flying disc,’ fell near Roswell, as they reported in a memo sent on July 8th from the Dallas FBI office to their office in Cincinnati.^[16]

However, in the brief one-page teletype message, the disc was described as ‘hexagonal’ in shape, and was suspended from a balloon twenty feet in diameter.

Interestingly, immediately following the weather balloon description, there’s the additional note that ‘telephonic conversation between their (presumably the Dallas FBI) office and Wright Field had not (two or three words redacted) borne out this belief.’

Following the delivery of the ‘weather balloon’ debris to Dayton, a massive cleanup was ordered by Roswell base commander Colonel William Blanchard,^[17] involving hundreds of soldiers from Roswell AAF as well as other support units.

They combed the Brazel ranch and nearby areas for days, and set up roadblocks to keep everyone, including the local police and other emergency responders, out of the area. Would all this effort be undertaken for just a weather balloon?

Locals also had run-ins with the military. Roswell sheriff George Wilcox and his family were ordered by military police not to talk about what Brazel showed him or, according to his wife’s and granddaughter’s testimony, their bodies would be buried out in the desert where no one would ever find them.^[18]

Brazel himself was held incommunicado by Roswell AAF military personnel for almost a week, until upon his release, he appeared in town driving a brand-new pickup truck.^[19]

When asked about the debris, he said, ‘I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon.’^[20] But after all the harassment the military put him through, he also said, ‘[If] I find anything else besides a bomb, they’re going to have a hard time getting me to say anything about it.’

Again, the type of harassment and intimidation, even possible bribery, visited upon the witnesses seems out of all proportion to the finding of a simple weather balloon.

In our next newsletter, we’ll explore how the Air Force’s explanation about the Roswell incident keeps changing over the years, and we’ll examine the two most interesting pieces of evidence that suggest there really was something extraordinary that crashed at Roswell.

^[1] https://www.seeroswell.com/the-1947-roswell-incident/

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509th_Composite_Group

^[3] https://www.dvidshub.net/news/475677/intelligence-agents-investigate-ufos-roswell-7-jul-1947

^[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/roswell-jesse-marcel-dies

^[5] https://www.sunrisepage.com/roswell/pdf/Summary_of_Witnesses_Claims_for_a_Shape_Memory_ Roswell_Foil.pdf

^[6] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/history-roswell-incident.htm

^[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEro5RedFf8&t=271s

^[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdv3z97lE2E&t=30

^[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdv3z97lE2E&t=124s

^[10] https://science.howstuffworks.com/space/aliens-ufos/history-roswell-incident.htm

^[11] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/3f/ab/f7/3fabf74f486ce3cd20426875e2b1636a.jpg

^[12] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[13] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roswell-ufo-incident-1947-headline-dispatch/

^[14] https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Jesse_Marcel#509th_and_role_in_Operation_Crossroads

^[15] https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Jesse_Marcel#509th_and_role_in_Operation_Crossroads

^[16] https://vault.fbi.gov/Roswell%20UFO

^[17] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[18] https://georgehbalazs.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1994-1996-ROSWELL-UFO-LITERATURE- AND-LETTERS.pdf

^[19] https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/ufo-crash-site-tours-to-begin-soon-on-new-mexico-ranch/

^[20] https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/roswell-ufo-strange-metal-mystery/

In our previous installment on the 2017 UAP videos, we discussed the 2004 Nimitz UAP craft^[1] and the 2017 Nevada-to-Oregon craft.^[2]

Both are described as fast-moving white Tic Tac-shaped objects, and how they might have been advanced U.S. aircraft being tested near U.S. military assets.

In the case of the Nimitz events, this may have been done in order to gauge the ability of recently released U.S. radar technology. That’s the state-of-the-art AN/SPY-1 passive electronically scanned array (PESA) 3D radar system.^[3]

It had just been installed on the Princeton guided missile cruiser, which was assigned as part of the Nimitz battle group.

We also covered that some U.S. government spokespersons, including Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the UAP-investigating All-domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO),^[4] were willing to attribute these sightings to secret CIA craft or even to advanced military test vehicles.^[5]

This position was directly contradicted by a report from a different government UAP investigating body, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program (AAWSAT). It left the public to wonder which government-supported agency was telling the truth.

That leaves us with two questions: have these craft been spotted elsewhere in the U.S.? And if so, does it suggest they may have a common location that they’re operating out of that can further confirm these are U.S. military craft?

As with the previous two questions, the answers here are also yes.

Multiple times since early 2018 — the same time frame during which NORAD released the voice recordings and radar transcripts of the Nevada-to-Oregon object — pilots flying private and commercial aircraft in Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona have reported a very fast white tubular object, spotted flying through commercial airspace in the U.S. southwest.^[6]

The pilots of at least three aircraft — a Phoenix Air Learjet 35, an Airbus A321, and American Airlines Flight 1095 — all reported an incident on February 24th, 2018.

In each instance, the aircrews reported some unknown craft passing over their planes at an altitude they estimated as being 40,000 feet.

In all three instances, no other craft but the reporting aircrews was spotted on radar. Seemingly an identical situation to the Nevada-to-Oregon craft, which was visible to aircrew, but which dropped off radar after turning north upon entering California airspace.

One pilot described the craft as ‘really beaming light or had a big reflection, and several thousand feet above us going in the opposite direction.’^[7]

Just as in the Nevada-to-Oregon Tic Tac incident, this craft did not have a transponder and was not communicating with air traffic control. Such intruding objects should be enough of a concern that the U.S. Air Force and NORAD would have taken a strong interest in determining what the object was. But no such reports have been released.

Such a lack of a response is curious. Since the area where this 2018 incident occurred is the center of a lot of military activity. White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base are just to the east, while to the south lies Davis Monthan AFB, as well as Tuscon International Airport.

Then there’s Luke AFB to the north, and a collection of military test ranges around Yuma MCAS to the west.^[8]

This leads us to ask another question: how likely is it that the U.S. military can fly its top–secret aircraft over the U.S. without being positively identified?

We know that many of the UFO reports from the 1960s and 1970s in the southwest were actually top-secret test flights of various advanced aircraft, from the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, to the F-117 Nighthawk and B-1 Stealth Bomber a few decades later.^[9]

In fact, it was the CIA that launched disinformation campaigns to discredit those sightings, blaming them on UFOs.^[10]

An example of how top-secret craft can be flown in U.S. airspace yet hardly ever acknowledged or even photographed is the aircraft known as ‘RAT 55,’ a converted 737 with long tubular radar domes at both the front and rear of the plane’s fuselage.^[11]

This aircraft has been flying since the late 1970s, and yet has been photographed only a handful of times. The RAT part of its name stands for Radar Aircraft Testbed, and describes the plane’s ability to test other aircrafts’ radar signature in real-world conditions.

It’s not only hard to spot, flying mostly (it’s believed) over the Mojave Desert, but it’s not even clear where the aircraft is based, though speculation includes the Tonopah Test Range and Groom Lake.

So, if we assume the Tic Tac craft is indeed an advanced U.S. craft of some sort, what rationale would the U.S. military have for allowing such a confusing hodgepodge of sightings, and for flying unproven craft both in commercial airspace as well as near combat-enabled military assets?

That the three original 2017-released UAP videos have been continually referred to as ‘unidentified’ is something of a joke to many neutral researchers.

As we discussed in the first three newsletters covering these sightings, the U.S. military had to have known that those videos showed easily explained terrestrial aircraft before the videos were declassified.

That raises the question: why would the U.S. military allow pilots to continue to use these videos to support their claims of non-U.S. aircraft performing ‘impossible’ maneuvers? 

There are two main possibilities:

A) That the Pentagon wants the world, primarily our two current adversaries China and Russia, to believe the U.S. has back engineered non-terrestrial aircraft and that we are confident enough of their reliability that we’re currently test flying them against our own forces and in our own airspace; or

B) That the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies want to sow discord among the UFO community by confusing civilian expectations about the possibility of non-terrestrial craft, a position that’s been the case since the CIA infiltrated the UFO observation group NICAP as far back as 1967.^[12]

It’s also possible that both of these conditions overlap. That the Pentagon wants to muddy the water in UFO investigations, making it more difficult to determine what is a UFO and what’s a current top-secret project, just as the CIA did with the SR-71 and the F-117.

And if the response from Russian president Vladimir Putin on March 1st, 2018 is any indication, at least one of our adversaries considers it highly likely that these are indeed advanced U.S. military aircraft.

To sum this all up, we the public may never know exactly what the white Tic Tac objects are, unless and until the Pentagon discloses their secrets. But a well-educated guess would suggest these are advanced U.S. military craft, possibly unmanned, that are so far ahead of our current technology that our own pilots are astounded at their capabilities.

As Ben Rich, the long-time director of Lockheed’s famous Skunk Works research program that developed top secret craft like the SR-71, was quoted as saying:

‘We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects, and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity.’^[13]

Maybe someday, someone will play God, and show us what’s behind all the mystery.

^[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/09/18/those-ufo-videos-are-real- navy-says-please-stop-saying-ufo/

^[2] https://he.flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/unset/user/65767/FAA_Tapes_From_That_Oregon_ UFO_Incident_That_Sent_F_15s_Scrambling

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-domain_Anomaly_Resolution_Office

^[5] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[6] https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-sighting-new-mexico-arizona-albuquerque-air-traffic-control-american- 861975

^[7] https://www.twz.com/19095/listen-in-as-a-learjet-and-an-airbus-encounter-a-mystery-craft-high-over- arizona

^[8] https://www.twz.com/19095/listen-in-as-a-learjet-and-an-airbus-encounter-a-mystery-craft-high-over-arizona

^[9] https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0611ufo

^[10] https://amuedge.com/beyond-ufos-what-are-navy-pilots-seeing-in-the-skies

^[11] https://www.twz.com/40915/these-are-best-images-ever-of-the-worlds-most-secretive-737

^[12] https://www.theufochronicles.com/2018/06/the-cias-infiltration-of-nicap-national.html

^[13] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7372138-we-already-have-the-means-to-travel-among-the-stars

Religion interfering with governmental administration is nothing new.

Whether we call the government head a Pharaoh, a Divine King, or a President of the United States. Many times, in history, religious leadership was the government.

The United States made the effort since its formation, to combat the encroachment of theocracy on democracy. Initially, with the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. More recently, with the 1954 Johnson Amendment, named after its proponent, Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, since 1954, that prohibits all 501(c) (3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates.

That, of course, would include religious organizations. See: 26 USC 501c (3).

In a Revenue Ruling 2007-41, the IRS stated ‘for their organizations to remain tax exempt under section 501(c)(3), leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official functions of the organization.’

But as has become abundantly evident, it appears that within the last ten years, this prohibition is honored more in the breach.

The pulpit has been found in the middle of U.S. politics, from Christian Nationals openly supporting Donald Trump, to Trump holding an unintentionally upside down bible for a photo op… and then hawking his own rather low rent bible as a fund raising mechanism.

Trump, has proven to be all in when it comes to watering down the Johnson Amendment’s protections against pulpit politics. In 2017, he signed an executive order that limited enforcement of the Johnson Amendment or any other adverse action against any individual or religious organization for speaking about moral or political issues from a religious perspective.[1]

Perhaps emboldened by the obvious support of Trump, (who prior to his entry into politics was about as concerned with religion as he was with the restrictions of Fair Housing Laws), churches have turned to the courts to challenge the remnants of the Johnson Amendment. And to eventually get a pass on political involvement and propaganda promotion.

No Taxation Even With Representation

A variety of church groups, in 2024, including the National Religious Broadcasters, have brought suit to declare the Johnson Amendment unconstitutional. Ironically, they are using the First Amendment right to free speech, to enable them to substantially violate the First Amendment safeguards against the intermingling of church and state.

In reality, it is not freedom of speech they seek, (which they have never been denied), it is freedom of speech while enjoying the freedom from taxation afforded to 501[c] (3) organizations — like churches. They want their wafer and eat it too, so to speak.

The suit was brought in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Tyler Division, naming the IRS and its director as defendants. The complaint alleges, inter alia, that with respect to the Internal Revenue Code, (IRC), ‘The IRC places them automatically within the ambit of 501(c)(3) and thereby silences their speech, while providing no realistic alternative for operating in any other fashion.’

In the suit, the plaintiffs self-identify as ‘religious nonprofit organizations in the business of communicating their views to the public’ that ‘desire to communicate their views about candidates’ positions that are relevant to the issues Plaintiffs care about.’

It is further alleged in the suit that the IRS ‘operates in a manner that disfavors conservative organizations and conservative, religious organizations.’

Not only are they seeking freedom from the Johnson Amendment, they are seeking their legal fees in so doing. In other words, they want the government to fund their legal fight for legal ‘rights’ to which they are not entitled.[2]

The word ‘chutzpah’ comes to mind to this reporter. Although it would not be one in the vocabulary of these plaintiffs.

Is there any ‘good faith’ amongst those who claim to be both good and faithful when they seek tax benefits while expressing political opinions proscribed by the Johnson Amendment? Tax benefits that the average citizen does not receive while expressing his political opinions.

Bogus Religions

Head honcho, Troy Miller of the National Religious Broadcasters had this to say, ‘We believe that all nonprofits should have the constitutional right to freely express their point of view on candidates, elections, and issues on the ballot. Our challenge to the Johnson Amendment is about securing the future of free expression for all Americans, particularly those standing in the pulpit.’[3]

That is of course bogus. They aren’t seeking ‘the right to freely express their point of view,’ they are seeking the right to do it free from taxes, which is an advantage not enjoyed by those who are not under the protection of 501[c](3) status.

And the rank and file Americans are clear on their viewpoint regarding the endorsement of candidates by religious organizations. In a 2017 research poll undertaken by Pew Research, it was found ‘Just 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and 26% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say churches should endorse specific political candidates.’[4]

For a specific reason to worry about this lack of separation of church and state when it comes to pulpit pounders and politicians, it has been revealed that ‘Pete Hegseth, president-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Defense, has close ties to an Idaho-based Christian nationalist church that aims to turn America into a theocracy.’

That church is Christ Church whose pastor, Doug Wilson, ‘has a rigid patriarchal belief system and don’t believe in the separation of church and state.’  On top of that bit of theocratic attack on our freedom, the church also is in favor of  ‘taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community.”

Wilson said, ‘I was grateful for Trump’s win, and believe that it is much more likely that Christians with views similar to mine will receive positions in the new administration.’[5]

Think about this.

Many of the hot spots of war in the world deal with Islamic populations. Besides blowing them up, we likely will need to deal with them diplomatically.

When the individual who may be tasked as Secretary of Defense has ties to such a conservative Christian organization that doesn’t believe in the First Amendment separation of church and state, while it believes in being free from taxation, diplomacy may take a back seat to Crusade.

Why You Should Care

These are powerful groups whose finances are abundant, yet not taxed. They align themselves with those who will be making crucial domestic and foreign policy decisions on behalf of the people of the United States.

For that reason, it’s likely that those who do not have such connections and benefits will be powerless to have their viewpoints adequately represented.

When such groups are ultra-conservative Christians, it is likely that the protections of the First Amendment, and other important safeguards of individual freedom, will be tossed out with the water in the baptismal font.

Non-Christians, non-males, and non-heterosexual citizens will experience what amounts to a political pogrom, deeming them to be, at best second class citizens, and at worst persona non grata.

[1] Trump Signs “Johnson Amendment” Executive Order Limiting Treasury’s Actions Against Religious Organizations Engaged in Political Campaign Activities Proskauer, 5/19/17 https://nonprofitlaw.proskauer.com/2017/05/09/update-president-trump-signs-johnson-amendment-executive-order-limiting-treasurys-actions-against-religious-organizations-engaged-in-political-campaign-activities/

[2] Religious broadcasters, churches file lawsuit against Johnson Amendment Christian Post 8/30/24 https://www.christianpost.com/news/unconstitutional-churches-file-lawsuit-against-johnson-amendment.html

[3] THE TENNESSEAN lawsuit against the IRS aims to allow churches a greater role in politics 9/16/24 Angela Latham https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2024/09/16/texas-religious-groups-file-lawsuit-against-irs-to-blur-line-between-church-and-politics/75089290007/

[4] Most Americans oppose churches choosing sides in elections 2/3/2017 Gregory Smith https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/02/03/most-americans-oppose-churches-choosing-sides-in-elections/

[5] Trump’s Defense secretary nominee has close ties to Idaho Christian nationalists Idaho Capital Sun, Heath Druzin 9/21/2024 https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/11/21/trumps-defense-secretary-nominee-has-close-ties-to-idaho-christian-nationalists/

Religion is great for fooling the faithful, conning people into conversion, and providing them with a bunch of made up props to further the cause, or in other words, relics.

In the religious sense, relics are the body parts or belongings of saviors and/or saints, which must be venerated, and can be visited. They provide a profitable tourist trade to the location which houses them.

The world of relics can reveal more amazing miracles and ‘facts’ than can be found even in the Holy Bible and its functional equivalents. For instance, the observation by John Calvin the OG of the Protestant Reformation, when speaking of religious relics:[1]

‘Every Apostle has more than four bodies, and every Saint two or three.’

The Catholic response has been that a relic serves for a spiritual connection, and if that connection ‘is made through an object which maybe forensically won’t stand up to the test, that’s of secondary importance to the spiritual and emotive power that the object can contain, and does contain.’[2]

That is really fake it ‘til you make it, or perhaps better said, make it so you can fake it.

The Catholics are kind enough to explain to us the three types of relics:

‘First-class relics are items that are directly associated with the events of Christ’s life or the physical remains of a saint; second-class relics are items that were owned or used by a saint; and third-class relics are objects that have come in contact with first- or second-class relics.’[3]

Since many modern scholars cast doubt on the actual existence of Christ, and observe that many ‘saints’ are conversions of pagan gods/goddesses, viewing from that perspective would make all relics fake.

Speaking of saints and phony relics, let’s pay a flying visit to Saint Rosalia and her relics.

Known as the ‘little saint’ she is the patroness of Palermo, Sicily, which is the land of those good people who brought us the Mafia. She lived in a cave in the 12^th century, on Mount Pellegrino. She died in the cave.

In the 17th century, when a plague struck the region, the inhabitants began seeing visions of Rosalia, who rose to the occasion by leading them to the cave she supposedly had inhabited, and wherein, the locals found her bones.

The bones became relics. That ruse worked for about two centuries, even though logic and experience would tell a person that many bones could be found in a cave over the centuries, because many types of creatures might take shelter there.

A goat for instance. Because in 1825, it was determined by a British geologist, William Buckland, that either Saint Rosalia was a goat, (which would probably not strain the credulity of the average devout Catholic), or the bones supposed to be those of the saint, were actually the bones of a goat.[4]

Then we have the OG of relics, the Shroud of Turin. This cloth, ‘discovered’ in the 14^th century, was purported to be a piece of textile that held the image of the crucified Christ. It was put forth as the actual bloodstained shroud which covered his crucified body.

Christianity is certainly a collection of convenient coincidences, whether contrived or not. But in the case of the Shroud of Turin, let’s go with contrived. It was determined in 1978, that the supposed blood stains were painted on, and weren’t blood.[5]

Now, was the story of this relic made out of whole cloth? (Pun definitely intended.)

While a carbon dating in the 1980s found the cloth to be of contemporary origin with its appearance, newer testing methods do date the cloth back to what could have been the time of who could have been Christ. Using something called Wide Angle X-Ray Scattering.[6]

Let’s give the church a hand, and for the sake of argument, agree that the cloth itself could have been of first century C.E. origin. But what of the image?

In 2024 it was demonstrated that the image could not have come from a three-dimensional human underneath it, but was likely from a relief sculpture.[7]

Now, let’s get really familiar with Jesus, and discuss the relic that purports to be that part of him which was removed that symbolized the covenant with God and his people — his foreskin.

This relic, known as The Holy Prepuce, purports to be just that, the foreskin of Christ. Of course, since there were a variety of churches that claimed to possess this relic, one might be justified in casting a jaded eye at the claim.

However, The Holy Prepuce makes a great gift. In 799 King Charlemagne gave it to Pope Leo III. It remained there until 1527, when the church reliquary was, appropriately enough, ‘sacked.’

Thirty years later, it winds up in another church, located outside of Rome where it remained, until it was discovered ‘missing,’ in 1983. Theories of who the thief was, range from the Vatican, to Satanists.

But perhaps that wasn’t the real foreskin, because during the Middle Ages, it was estimated that over thirty churches possessed the ‘real thing’.

Even the church was somewhat upset about this much ado about very little, and in 1900 threatened to excommunicate any believer that wrote about it. (Apparently it was a subject that unlike the object from which the subject was removed, was to be kept under wraps).

Why You Should Care

Most religions require that as one of the faithful, you, as did Alice in Wonderland, believe six impossible things before breakfast. Virgin birth, resurrection from the dead, talking snakes, burning bushes, temporary residence in whales, demolition by trumpets and such are the stuff that faith is made from.

But when it comes to the manufacture of relics to sucker the supplicants, it gets really down and really dirty.

Phony faith-oriented objects designed to put a church or a village on the Pilgrim’s map, to take in from believers what supposedly belonged to Caesar (according to the Bible), but was always actively sought by the Church — coin.

Such sharp practices are an insult to those that believe, and another piece of evidence for the arguments of those who don’t.

[1] BLIND FAITH RELIGIOUS FORGERIES, JUSTINE DAMIANO 2019 https://www.magellantv.com/articles/blind-faith-religious-forgeries-from-the-middle-ages-to-the-age-of-technology

[2] CATHOLIC HERALD 6/2011 https://catholicherald.co.uk/debate-does-it-matter-if-relics-are-fake/

[3] BLIND FAITH, op.cit.

[4] BLIND FAITH op. cit.

[5] THE SHROUD PAINTING EXPLAINED, McCRONE, BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY  https://library.biblicalarchaeology.org/sidebar/the-shroud-painting-explained/

[6] NEW X-RAY TESTS DATE TURIN SHROUD TO THE TIME OF JESUS Laura Gilb 11/1/2024 https://www.patternsofevidence.com/2024/11/01/new-x-ray-tests-date-turin-shroud-to-the-time-of-jesus/

[7] Shroud of Turin was not used to wrap Jesus’ body after crucifixion, bombshell study asserts NY POST 10/30/24 https://nypost.com/2024/10/30/science/shroud-of-turin-was-not-used-to-wrap-jesus-body-after-crucifixion-bombshell-study-asserts/

In our last newsletter, we asked three questions about the white Tic Tac objects reported in 2004 near the Nimitz carrier group off the coast of California.^[1] And a similar object spotted outrunning commercial airline traffic from Nevada to Oregon in October 2017:^[2]

1) Is there any evidence that this Tic Tac object may in fact be a top secret US craft?

2) Does anyone else in the Pentagon say officially that these craft may be US technology?

3) Have there been any other sightings of such Tic Tac-shaped craft in US airspace?

All three questions can be answered with a surprising, ‘Yes.’

First, there is some admittedly debatable evidence that the Tic Tac object in 2017 might be a top-secret US experimental craft. For one, this object was first spotted on radar somewhere over southern or southwestern Nevada.

That’s where the US military maintains many of its most secretive testing facilities.

Most people know about Area 51, part of the Nevada Test and Training Range,^[3] also called Groom Lake. It’s located 83 miles north-northwest of Las Vegas. Not far away is the Tonopah Test Range,^[4] where advanced aircraft like the F-117 Nighthawk were flown.

Tonopah is a mere 70 miles northwest of Groom Lake. There’s also Nellis Air Force base, less than ten miles northeast of Las Vegas, and home to the US Air Force Warfare Center, the largest and most challenging air combat training center in the world.^[5]

Such a concentration of advanced combat and top-secret aircraft testing locations suggests the Tic Tac craft may have been one such craft, though its proximity to such locations alone is not hard proof.

But if this craft were an intruder, it’s hard to explain why the US Air Force never tried to intercept it, nor alerted any other military assets like NORAD of its intrusion. Of course, it’s possible they did alert NORAD, and might even have attempted an intercept.

But in the wake of NORAD itself releasing details (after several FOIA requests) about trying to intercept the craft,^[6] it seems unlikely that any Air Force response in Nevada airspace would have been hidden from prying eyes.

There’s another singular detail in the October event that we referenced earlier: that the craft originally appeared on radar, but then disappeared from radar, though it was still visible to pilots and aircrew. There is an explanation for this, and it directly involves advanced stealth aircraft like the US-built F-22 and F-35.

One problem with stealth aircraft is their invisibility to commercial radar, which makes for a significant flight hazard when flying in commercial airspace. One way to make such planes visible is for the stealth craft to be equipped with Luneberg detectors.^[7]

These are also called Luneburg lenses, small angular metal pieces designed to reflect radar and make them visible to civilian traffic control. When F-22s and F-35s fly in commercial airspace, both in the US and in NATO countries, they carry these reflectors, usually bolted in place by their ground crews.^[8]

But it’s possible for Luneberg lenses to be discarded by a plane in flight, if they’re mounted by a magnetic attachment. All the pilot needs to do is to turn off the magnetic link, and the Luneberg lens would fall away from the craft. Some analysts suggest this could be done by a stealth aircraft if it wanted to approach enemy airspace originally as a commercial airplane, then discard the lens and continue on stealthily.^[9]

China currently has one advanced fighter, the Chengdu J-20 (see the image at the top of this newsletter), which has a retractable Luneberg lens.^[10] The original Chinese version of the lens was designed to make it more difficult for adversaries to determine its true radar cross-section, though it’s unclear if that’s the intended purpose of the retractable version.^[11]

There’s a third trail of evidence that the Tic Tac craft might be an experimental US vehicle, though this path is a little more indirect.

When the Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group detected the first Tic Tac object in November 2004, the group included the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, which was the first Navy ship that detected the objects. It was responsible for vectoring in the F/A-18s that reported their own close-in sightings.

The Princeton, which carries the advanced AEGIS radar detection system, had been outfitted with a newly upgraded AN/SPY-1 passive electronically scanned array (PESA) 3D radar system.^[12]

Some researchers have speculated that this would have been the perfect time to test the new system with whatever secret aircraft the Pentagon had available. This isn’t hard evidence by any means, but it is a possible clue.

Another theory about the Princeton tracking the UAP craft includes the possibility that the objects detected on radar were anomalous readings from the new AN/SPY-1 system that hadn’t been calibrated correctly.

In fact, the ship’s own meteorological officer originally attributed the readings to airborne ice particles.^[13] The Princeton’s crew took that possibility into account: after the initial sightings, they recalibrated the AN/SPY system, which resulted, their systems operators said, in even clearer signals than before.^[14]

There are also reports from crewmen aboard the Nimitz that the ship had its hard drive data recorders, full of data gathered by the F/A-18s involved in the sightings, confiscated by unidentified men who landed in an all-black Blackhawk helicopter.^[15]

These ‘bricks,’ as they’re called, also included information gathered by one of the Nimitz’s E-2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft that had also reportedly recorded the craft on its own equipment.^[16]

Another officer onboard the Princeton had a similar encounter with two unidentified individuals, to whom he was ordered to turn over all the data recordings from the AEGIS AN/SPY-1 system.

One reason for these confiscations might have been to analyze how much data the most advanced US radars had taken of these craft, if they were in fact advanced US aircraft. What’s interesting is that these men who retrieved the data never bothered to debrief the pilots or aircrew that spotted these craft up close, as if their eyewitness accounts didn’t matter.^[17]

There’s also the estimate made by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Research Office (AARO), formed in 2022. He says the Tic Tac craft was perhaps a CIA balloon or some other top secret military craft that were being tested intentionally close to one of the Navy’s most capable combat groups.^[18]

This estimate was contradicted by a report from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications program (AAWSAT), which began in 2002 and later became the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) in 2017.

That report stated that the unidentified craft displayed speed and turning capabilities ‘far greater than anything known to exist, (and) could turn itself invisible both to radar and the human eye,’ which rendered even the best US aircraft’s capabilities ‘ineffective.’^[19]

The Tic Tac craft, if that is indeed what they were, seem to have a very baffling history. Yet they also appear to be of significant interest to the US government, who worked to retrieve all electronic data collected by the Nimitz battle group.

The final question yet to be answered is this: Have any other Tic Tac objects been sighted in US airspace?

As we’ll uncover in the next and final installment, the 2004 Nimitz and 2017 Nevada-to-Oregon Tic Tac craft are far from the only such craft seen in US skies.

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

^[2] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft- over-oregon

^[3] https://now.northropgrumman.com/area-51-aliens-or-just-a-simple-myth-understanding

^[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range

^[5] https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/in-depth-overview/nellis-afb

^[6] https://www.twz.com/tic-tac-uap-incident-included-in-72-newly-released-range-incursion-reports

^[7] https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-stealth-aircraft-visible-on-radar-screens/

^[8] https://theaviationist.com/2022/03/02/f-35-without-reflectors-over-poland/

^[9] https://www.quora.com/Can-an-F35-drop-its-luneburg-lens-The-F35-can-keep-the-luneburg-lens-to-set- up-a-trap-and-then-drop-them-to-become-stealth-and-attack-the-enemy

^[10] https://www.reddit.com/r/WarplanePorn/comments/1gjxqt8/retractable_luneburg_lens_will_this_ become_the/

^[11] https://www.twz.com/22534/high-quality-shots-of-unpainted-chinese-j-20-stealth-fighter-offer-new- capability-insights

^[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SPY-1

^[13] https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/3447233/cutting-the-chaff- overlooked-lessons-of-military-uap-sightings-for-joint-force/

^[14] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[15] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[16] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[17] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a29771548/navy-ufo-witnesses-tell-truth/

^[18] https://www.wane.com/top-stories/inside-one-of-the-most-consequential-ufo-encounters-of-all-time- the-tic-tac-incident/

^[19] https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20 UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf

Let’s sum up the events from 2017 that we’ve covered so far.

Three brief U.S. Navy F/A-18 infra-red videos were released, first in the summer of 2017 by To The Stars Academy.^[1] Then later semi-officially in December coinciding with major media coverage.^[2]

This media frenzy prodded the Pentagon to admit much later (in 2020) that yes, the videos did originate with U.S. military aircraft flown by military pilots, but without any confirmation or denial of the objects themselves.^[3]

Only one pilot out of the half-dozen or so involved with the initial 2004 USS Nimitz sighting has said he spotted a white Tic Tac-shaped object doing what he described as ‘impossible’ maneuvers.^[4]

However, neither his plane nor his wingman’s plane were equipped with weapons or infrared sensor arrays. The F/A-18 that supposedly captured video of the Tic Tac object was a different aircraft that arrived in supposedly the same location an unknown number of hours later.

However, that second aircraft’s video does not record a Tic Tac-shaped object, nor was the object near the water’s surface, and it did not exhibit any anomalous flight characteristics.^[5]

Despite claims that the object was also recorded by other Navy aircraft, as well as at least one surface vessel, none of those recordings have been released.^[6]

In October 2017, before the major media coverage exploded, a New York Times reporter was given a private briefing with what was described as unnamed intelligence officers,^[7] as well as with Lue Elizondo, who has claimed he headed a UFO/UAP investigative office for the Pentagon^[8]. However, the Pentagon denies his claims.^[9]

In the words of ‘The Intercept’ author and reporter Keith Kloor, ‘There is no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one.’

Elizondo has, however, been verified as having worked for the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence service, whose job is specifically to ‘detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit and/or neutralize adversarial, foreign intelligence services.’

Such an agency would not be above creating false stories nor spoofing technology and assets to mislead our adversaries, as has been done continuously since World War II.^[10]

Later in October 2017, there was a major incident in the skies over California and Oregon that received much less media coverage.^[11] In this event, a fast, unidentified, uncommunicative craft without a transponder signal was caught on radar going in excess of Mach-1 out of southwestern Nevada, flying west into northern California airspace.

At that point, it made a hard right-hand turn and began paralleling and outpacing commercial airliner traffic, flying north at 37,000 feet, just above the commercial traffic lanes at around 35,000 feet.

It had appeared on radar initially, but soon after it turned north, it disappeared from radar, though the commercial airliner crews continued to maintain visual contact.^[12] The craft was far enough away that the crews could not make out any specific details or control surfaces.

It should be noted that any large aircraft at two or three miles distance painted white would indeed appear as a white Tic Tac object, similar in appearance to what was reported in the original 2004 Tic Tac incident, though this craft made no ‘impossible’ movements.

In fact, multiple videos of Tic Tac-shaped craft flying near commercial airliner traffic have been made by both passengers and aircrew, when these objects have all been shown to have been known commercial airliners whose details cannot be made out by the cameras recording them.^[13]

In late December, the New York Times reporter broke the story about the three original US Navy IR videos, which created significant media attention.^[14]

In February 2018, following several Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests regarding the October 2017 incident, the U.S. Air Force released the radar tapes of the craft on its flight through three states.

In a highly unusual move, the Air Force also released the recorded conversations between the FAA controllers, the commercial pilots, and the NORAD officers who vectored in armed F-15 fighters with the intention of finding and possibly engaging the mystery craft.^[15]

The fighters never reported seeing the craft, which was lost to visual sighting by the commercial aircrews somewhere north of Portland, Oregon. The recordings paint a very unflattering picture of the FAA’s lack of preparedness in dealing with such an incident. Not to mention their inability to relay what action the commercial air traffic should take to avoid the armed F-15s entering their airspace.

There is one more ensuing event that happened after all this that adds an interesting bit of context to these previous events…

On March 1st, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced with great fanfare in a public speech that his country’s military had perfected several new ‘super weapons’.^[16] This included a nuclear-powered stealth cruise missile that could loiter indefinitely (theoretically) near the U.S. coastline, ready to divert and attack U.S. cities with barely a moment’s warning.

The good news is that this particular weapon, codenamed the RS-28 SARMAT — Russian for ‘Satan’ — is nowhere near being ready for active service: at its latest test launch in September 2024, it appears to have exploded in its silo, leaving a 200-foot-wide crater where the silo used to be.^[17]

Putin’s announcement was accompanied by a video presentation with an oddly specific target: not Washington or New York City, but the state of Florida, home to then-President Donald Trump.^[18] At the time of the presentation, pundits suggested this may have been an intentional warning to Trump to take Putin’s threats seriously.

The question is, why would Putin feel the need to threaten the U.S., since Trump had treated Russia so well during his first term? The reason behind this threat has everything to do with the image at the top of this newsletter: Putin was responding to the Pentagon, more specifically, the Tic Tac-shaped craft that the Pentagon had been so delicately supporting throughout 2017.

The theory goes that Putin was responding to the possibility that the U.S. had back-engineered UFO technology, and was beginning to test it near US assets like the Nimitz carrier group in 2004.

When that revelation was about to become public knowledge in 2017, the Pentagon appears to have tested the same or an advanced version of that same technology over U.S. soil, launching the craft from one of its test ranges in Nevada, home to both Area 51, officially called the Nevada Test and Training Range,^[19] as well as the Tonopah Test Range.^[20]

But is there any evidence that this Tic Tac object may in fact be a US craft?

Have there been any other sightings of such Tic Tac-shaped craft in US airspace?

And does anyone else in the Pentagon say officially that these may be US technology?

Amazingly enough, all three questions can be answered with a surprising, ‘Yes.’ More on this in our next newsletter.

Editor’s Note: Have you ever experienced anything that just didn’t seem right? Reply and tell us and we will use our sources to dig into it and uncover the truth behind the lies.

^[1] https://tothestars.media/blogs/press-and-news/to-the-stars-academy-of-arts-science-acknowledges-the- pentagons-official-release-of-uap-video-footage

^[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/index.html

^[4] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/01/16/this-former-navy-fighter-pilot-who-once-chased-ufo- says-should-take-them-seriously

^[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1di0XIa9RQ

^[6] https://www.twz.com/Tic Tac-uap-incident-included-in-72-newly-released-range-incursion-reports

^[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html

^[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html

^[9] https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history-channel-luis-elizondo-pentagon/

^[10] https://www.army.mil/acic#org-history

^[11] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[12] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[13] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-serious-ufo-uap-security

^[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[15] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[16] https://www.twz.com/18906/heres-the-six-super-weapons-putin-unveiled-during-fiery-address

^[17] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/09/satellite-images-suggest-test-of-russian-super-weapon-failed- spectacularly/

^[18] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43248794

^[19] https://now.northropgrumman.com/area-51-aliens-or-just-a-simple-myth-understanding

^[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonopah_Test_Range

With the rise of the gig economy, and with electronic banking largely replacing personal visits to the brick and mortar institutions, we have seen the rise of computerized money transfers and third-party electronic payors.

Along with these developments has been the rise of fraudsters, seeking to enrich themselves by exploiting security flaws in the payment and receipt of electronic funds. 

But despite the requisites and responsibilities of the banking industry to prevent and remediate fraud, the reality is far different from the theory. Many banks have refused to act in accordance with the law when it comes to reimbursing depositors who have been defrauded.

A quick look at Federal Law shows an adequate description of the problem, at 15 USC §1693, entitled Congressional findings and declaration of purpose:

(a) Rights and liabilities undefined

The Congress finds that the use of electronic systems to transfer funds provides the potential for substantial benefits to consumers. However, due to the unique characteristics of such systems, the application of existing consumer protection legislation is unclear, leaving the rights and liabilities of consumers, financial institutions, and intermediaries in electronic fund transfers undefined.

In subsection (b) we see:

b) Purposes

It is the purpose of this subchapter to provide a basic framework establishing the rights, liabilities, and responsibilities of participants in electronic fund and remittance transfer systems. The primary objective of this subchapter, however, is the provision of individual consumer rights.

In 1693 (c) of the law, it details the notifications a bank must provide a consumer when an account is open. This includes the consumer's liability for unauthorized electronic fund transfers, and the telephone number and address of the person or office to be notified in the event the consumer believes than an unauthorized electronic fund transfer has been or may be effected.

Meanwhile section 1693 (f) requires among other things, that the financial institution shall investigate the alleged error, determine whether an error has occurred, and report or mail the results of such investigation and determination to the consumer within ten business days.

Subsection (e) of 1693 (f) deals with a situation when the bank does not carry out its obligations under the law with respect to the consumer, stating:

(e) Treble damages

If in any action under section 1693m 1 of this title, the court finds that-

(1) the financial institution did not provisionally recredit a consumer's account within the ten-day period specified in subsection (c), and the financial institution (A) did not make a good faith investigation of the alleged error, or (B) did not have a reasonable basis for believing that the consumer's account was not in error; or

(2) the financial institution knowingly and willfully concluded that the consumer's account was not in error when such conclusion could not reasonably have been drawn from the evidence available to the financial institution at the time of its investigation,

The above laws have been provided so that you might have some idea of what bank responsibilities are, and what happens when they are not being met.

They frequently have not been met, ergo, a rash of recent litigation.

It has been estimated that fraud has cost consumers $870 million dollars, due to improper bank procedures with respect to the bank-to-bank payment platform of Zelle.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has in December 2024, announced that it has commenced litigation against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Early Warning Services, and Zelle for their failure to property implement the safeguards mandated to protect bank customers with respect to Zelle.

The Director of the CFPB was quoted regarding the defendant banks as saying, ‘By their failing to put in place proper safeguards, Zelle became a gold mine for fraudsters, while leaving victims to fend for themselves.’

In his prepared remarks on the CFPB website, the Director, Rohit Chopra, stated, ‘The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is suing Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo for their role in enabling systemic fraud and then playing dumb when consumers were exploited.’

He went on to say, ‘In case after case, banks routinely denied requests for help, turning a blind eye even when customers provided clear evidence that criminals had taken over their accounts and that the transactions were unauthorized -- including police reports documenting the crimes.’

With respect to the suit against it by CFPB, Zelle spokesman said, ‘The CFPB’s misguided attacks will embolden criminals, cost consumers more in fees, stifle small businesses and make it harder for thousands of community banks and credit unions to compete.’

It seems that every time a corporation is taken to task for its negligence and/or malfeasance, in its defense it raises the specter of increased consumer costs in order to have the corporation follow the rules it was supposed to follow in the first instance, which would not have necessitated litigation. This is a specious argument.

In the allegations of the complaint against the banking defendants, the CFPB raised the issue that, ‘Despite receiving hundreds of thousands of fraud complaints, the defendant banks have failed to use this information to prevent further fraud.’

The CFPB director adequately summed up the gist of the litigation, ‘This is about financial institutions fulfilling their basic obligations to protect customers' money and help fraud victims recover their losses,’ said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. ‘These banks broke the law by running a payment system that made fraud easy, and then refusing to help the victims.’

Why You Should Care

It’s probably safe to assume that the majority of the readers of this article have used some form of electronic payment services, either to send money or receive it.

As a consumer, you have to rely upon the banks to adequately protect your account, to follow the rules and regulations regarding that protection, and to engage in consumer-friendly practices to provide for the investigation and resolution of cases wherein the consumer has been defrauded.

They haven’t done it, and it isn’t unreasonable to assume, that but for the institution of litigation by the CFPB banks would continue to engage in their negligent and shoddy practices, in violation of the law, and in violation of the trust placed in them by the consumer.

Editor’s Note: Have you ever experienced anything that just didn’t seem right? Reply and tell us and we will use our sources to dig into it and uncover the truth behind the lies.

Resurrection is a major tenet of the New Testament…

The receipt of the Ten Commandments is a major religious and legal event in the Old Testament…

The First Amendment is one of the most important of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution…

These now meet in the crossroads of our society. The outcome of their interaction will affect how we, as Americans, will live in the future.

In 2024 in the United States, we have seen attempts to resurrect the public presence of the Ten Commandments in the schoolroom, creating a challenge to the First Amendment. It marks a dangerous turn in our country — a case of those in support of a would be Theocracy, and by that support, potentially encumbering our Democracy.

Biblical scholarship has cast significant doubt on the actual existence of Moses; he is, by most scholars, regarded as a mythical figure. Yet this myth, and the laws he supposedly received from his god on Mount Sinai is creating a very real clash of faith vs. freedom.

In June of 2024, the legislature of the state of Louisiana decreed that as of 2025, the Ten Commandments were to be displayed in every public classroom. It was the first state to do so.[1] An easy-to-read poster sized image of the commandments was to be displayed from kindergarten classes up to and including the rooms of state funded universities.

Republican Governor Jeff Landry, quoted in an Associated Press article by Sara Cline, stated, ‘If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses who got the commandments from God.’

Two percent of the religious people in Louisiana are not Christians.[2] They enjoy the same constitutional protections as do Christians — in theory, at least.

Not Ethical or Moral Behavior

This act, by the Republican dominated state legislature, of course, didn’t go unchallenged by those who believe more in the Bill of Rights than they might in Moses.

They believe in that First Amendment, which states, inter alia, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’

The legislature reasoned that since the costs of implementing the law was not to be financed by public funds, but by private donations, the requirement should pass constitutional muster.

It should be noted that a significant portion of the Ten Commandments is not the statement of ethical and/or moral behavior. It is religious in its mandate, and not a part of the Hindu, Buddhist or other non-Abrahamic faith canons.

It prohibits the worship of other gods, it prohibits the making of idols, it prohibits the taking of the ‘lord’s’ name in vain, it orders the keeping of a weekly Sabbath.

This type of legislation is symptomatic of the return to political power and influence of the religious right, many calling themselves, ‘Christian Nationals.’ It should be remembered that as of 2020, seventy percent of the population in the United States self-identify as Christian.[3]

Which by extrapolation, means thirty percent of the country do not.

Forty-four years, ago, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Stone v. Graham that such legislation was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and therefore, unconstitutional.

Yet now, the Christian right, emboldened by the results of the 2024 election and the growing power of Republicans in state legislatures, seeks once again, to eviscerate the protections of the First Amendment for the sake of their religion, their beliefs, their way of life.[4]

In November of 2024, a Federal District Court judge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ruled that the law regarding the posting of the Ten Commandments in the classrooms of the state was ‘unconstitutional on its face.’ Unlike the legislators, the Judge recognized that such a law was overtly religious and could not stand.

The Attorney General of Louisiana, disagreed, and vowed to seek an appeal in the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.[5] The status of such appeal is awaited as of this writing.

Not to be undone, the Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick, declared he will seek legislation mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in every Texas classroom in 2025. That’s in spite of the injunction that was preliminarily granted by the Louisiana court against the same legislation.

He was quotes as saying, ‘Texas WOULD have been and SHOULD have been the first state in the nation to put the 10 Commandments back in our schools.’[6]

Unfortunately for Catholics, and Orthodox Christians, the Texas proposed law would use the translation of the Ten Commandments from the King James Bible — a Protestant scripture.

The Texas supporters of such legislation point out that ‘American Society is rooted in Christianity’[7] an observation that not only might not meet with the agreement of the thirty percent of this country that does not identify as Christian. It may clash with the actual viewpoint of the Founding Fathers.

Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Monroe identified as ‘deists,’ which is more of a philosophical belief in the utility of human reason, and one that held that after creation, God was absent from the world.

Not exactly the kind of Christianity these proponents of commandments in the classroom are espousing as being a foundation of our democracy.[8]

While there are supposedly no atheists in foxholes, there are definitely no atheists in politics where such an admission would be political suicide.

In order to pander to their electorate, it appears that legislatures are fully ready, willing and able to ignore the mandate of the First Amendment, and put that old time religion back in the schoolroom.

Why You Should Care

Regardless of your personal religious beliefs, when a government entity in our country seeks to create laws (which if passed, it will enforce), that infringe on the religious beliefs of a significant portion of the citizens of the United States, you should be deeply concerned.

Because one of the reasons the refugees of the world run towards us and not from us, is our Constitution and the rights of our people guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.

We have examples of theocratic governments in our world — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen to name a few.

There, the rights of the individual, at least those who do not bask in the warm sun of petroleum plutocracy, are not protected. The rights of women in those countries are by and large non-existent, and deviation from the state mandated faith can be a death sentence.

As an American, you do not want to have to defend you rights in your living room. You are best protected by rigorously guarding freedom at the constitutional borders where there are powerful groups that would seek to undermine your faith and your freedom to worship as you will.

It is by your being a concerned citizen, an informed citizen; that you can help protect our constitutional democracy from becoming a theocracy, and keep yourself, your family, your community and your country free from the tyranny of those who propose laws that diminish our freedoms.

[1] ASSOCIATED PRESS BY SARA CLINE June 20, 2024.

[2] PEW RESEARCH CENTER https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/state/louisiana/

[3] PRRI Research https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/#:~:text=%2Fcensus%2D2023.-,The%20American%20Religious%20Landscape%20in%202020,identify%20as%20Christian%20of%20color.

[4] FREE SPEECH CENTER TENNESSE UNIVERSITY https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/stone-v-graham/

[5] Federal judge blocks Louisiana law that requires classrooms to display Ten Commandments ASSOCIATED PRESS BY  SARA CLINE AND KEVIN MCGILLUNovember 12, 2024

[6] Patrick vowed to require Ten Commandments in schools. Will lawmakers do it? CBS AUSTIN by Michael Adkison, December 26th 2024 at 6:58 PM

[7] HOUSTON PUBLIC MEIDA Andrew Schneider November 15, 2024 https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2024/11/14/505960/texas-lawmakers-set-to-take-up-fight-over-ten-commandments-in-public-schools/

[8] THE FOUNDING FATHERS RELIGIOUS WISDOM 1/8/2008 https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-founding-fathers-religious-wisdom/

While the five major UFO/UAP stories of 2017 through 2019 are widely known — nicknamed as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST from 2017; and SPLASHDOWN and the TRIANGLES videos from 2019 — there is a less well-known event from 2017 that got much less press coverage.

And yet it provides a more rational explanation of what’s behind these objects.

This event also explains why the Pentagon has been willing to throw nominal support behind the first five videos, despite them being easily recognized examples of standard artifacts from the sensing and recording equipment themselves.

Setting the Scene

In the summer of 2017, mainstream media was buzzing with coverage of the first three UAP videos,^[1] as we covered in our previous newsletters.

Many outlets erroneously reported that these were Pentagon-supported proof of UFOs flying in our skies.^[2] In reality, the only thing the Pentagon would later confirm is that the videos came from US military craft piloted by US military officers.^[3]

At no time did the Pentagon nor the Navy claim these were extraterrestrial craft, even though some of the pilots involved — most notably Navy Commander David Fravor, piloting an F/A-18 from the carrier USS Nimitz — claimed the objects performed maneuvers ‘impossible’ for currently known piloted aircraft.^[4]

Speculation ran high: was this the beginning of Disclosure on the part of the Pentagon, possibly followed by more revelations from the US government?^[5]

Were these objects the beginning of an alien-led contact effort, or worse, imminent alien attacks against US military assets?

As calls for action on the part of Congress began to be raised,^[6] a different and much more serious UAP event was about to occur. One that involved not just military aircraft but commercial airline traffic as well.

This time, almost no one talked about this much more serious event.

From Nevada to California and Oregon

On October 25th, 2017, at around 4:30 PM PST,^[7] the FAA air traffic radar in Oakland, California, picked up an object flying out of the southwestern Nevada. It was heading west towards northern California airspace.

Initially, the craft was visible on radar, but it then made a sharp turn to the north and disappeared off the radar (more about this unique feature later).

Significantly, radar returns indicated the craft was doing in excess of Mach-1 when it made its tight right-hand turn. Very few aircraft can do that, and nearly all of them are military.

The craft was reported to be flying at 862 mph (Mach-1.12), so it was clearly not a commercial aircraft. It was also reported to be flying at around 37,000 feet altitude, 2,000 feet higher than commercial airliners that usually stay close to 35,000 feet, unless landing or taking off.^[8]

The craft began to pace commercial airliners flying towards Oregon and Washington State, so the FAA controllers asked several pilots in the area if they could spot the craft. Several pilots reported seeing something.^[9]

Most of the reports stated there was an indeterminate white object some miles to their east, outpacing the commercial traffic. None of the aircrews could determine what type of craft it was, although one pilot suggested the craft was ‘big.’

Though how he could determine that without knowing the craft’s distance puts his estimate in doubt. One aircrew was able to keep eyes on the craft from first spotting it over northern California until they had to land at their destination in Portland, Oregon.^[10]

Because the craft didn’t respond to repeated attempts to contact it by the FAA controllers, and because it broadcast no transponder signal, the FAA eventually contacted NORAD and requested military assistance.

Some months after the event, the U.S. Air Force released voice recordings between them, the airline crews, and the FAA controllers. Although some small sections of the recordings were blank (most likely due to redacted military callsigns), the story they paint is not a comforting one.

The FAA seemingly had no idea what to tell the airliners when the U.S. Air Force decided to send a pair of armed F-15s into that commercial airspace to try and locate the unidentified craft.

Somewhere between northern Oregon and the Seattle, Washington area, the nearest commercial airliners lost sight of the object. It wasn’t picked up again visually or on radar, and the Air Force claims they never located it.

There was no initial news coverage of this event, until pilots who overheard the FAA commercial traffic reported it on a Reddit thread.^[11] This led to a two-part report on the website The War Zone at TWZ.com.^[12]

Their efforts through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) led to an eventual release of not just the radar data but the actual audio as well, confirming all of the details previously discussed.^[13]

While this October event preceded the massive coverage that occurred following the release of the three first UAP videos in mid-December, 2017, they actually came just a few weeks after a confidential October 4th media briefing between certain unnamed intelligence officials and New York Times reporter Leslie Kean, at a Pentagon City hotel.^[14]

At that meeting, Kean also met Luis Elzondo, a controversial figure in the UFO community after his claim that he ran a Pentagon-based UFO/UAP study group going back several years, but for which he could provide little proof.^[15]

Interestingly, Elizondo could provide proof that he worked for the U.S. Army Counterintelligence service,^[16] which is tasked to ‘detect, identify, assess, counter, exploit and/or neutralize adversarial, foreign intelligence services, international terrorist organizations, and insider threats to the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense (DoD).’

It’s interesting to note that one of the only two other counterintelligence services in the DoD is the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). This has long been thought to be behind the notorious Men in Black episodes that have plagued UFO sightings and witnesses for decades.^[17]

Armed Fighters to Intercept

Strange white craft outpacing commercial airliners, first on radar then off radar, within visual sight of several commercial aircraft, an event so serious that armed fighters are sent aloft to intercept and possibly shoot this object down.

This strange event is sandwiched between unofficially released UAP videos slyly supported by the Pentagon, while behind the scenes, an ex-Pentagon counterintelligence agent sets up the biggest UFO discussion in decades across multiple mainstream media outlets. What does this all mean?

We’ll reveal the most plausible answer in our next newsletter.

^[1] https://tothestars.media/blogs/press-and-news/to-the-stars-academy-of-arts-science-acknowledges-the-pentagons-official-release-of-uap-video-footage

^[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/politics/pentagon-ufo-project/index.html

^[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/15/politics/unidentified-aerial-phenomena-defense-department/index.html

^[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html

^[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-weigh-in-on-pentagon-ufo-report/

^[6] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/16/pentagon-ufo-search-harry-reid-216111/

^[7] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[8] https://aviex.goflexair.com/flight-school-training-faq/commercial-plane-altitudes

^[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/78ktlp/strange_nordo_aircraft_in_the_flight_levels_above/

^[10] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[11] https://www.reddit.com/r/flying/comments/78ktlp/strange_nordo_aircraft_in_the_flight_levels_ above/

^[12] https://www.twz.com/16079/airliners-and-f-15s-involved-in-bizzare-encounter-with-mystery-aircraft-over- oregon

^[13] https://www.twz.com/18473/faa-recordings-deepen-mystery-surrounding-ufo-over-oregon-that-sent- f-15s-scrambling

^[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html

^[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Elizondo

^[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Counterintelligence

^[17] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-original-men-in-black-3849054/

Gordon Gekko, the fictional corporate raider, told us in the movie Wall Street, that ‘Greed is good.’ (Corporations were listening and became dedicated practitioners of the creed.)

The classical Greek philosopher Epicurus told us to seek aponia, or freedom from pain.

Big pharma not only greedily agreed with him, but promoted and profited from the sale of drugs that promised just that — freedom from pain. While at the same time, at least one of those pain relievers was killing children who ignorantly abused it.

Among those pain killing drugs that were sold to the public, (by doctor’s prescription of course), was Oxycontin the trade name for pills containing the narcotic oxycodone hydrochloride.

The pills were designed to be swallowed whole. But when crushed and turned to a powder and ingested, it brought on a euphoric state. That of course, led to abuse of the prescription drug by those in search of a chemical good time.

It was popular among high school children. It has been estimated that four percent of them have abused the drug at least once. Many of them without benefit of a prescription. Some of those, who ‘knew not what they did,’ took too much of the drug and wound up being cured of their dependency on it — permanently.[1]

Promoting Increased Sales of Deadly Drug

Purdue Pharma LP, the manufacturer and legal distributor of the drug, in order to boost sales, initiated an active marketing campaign. It sought to ‘encourage’ primary care physicians, among others to prescribe oxycontin as an initial pain killer.

From 2004–2019 McKinsey & Co. Inc. a management consulting firm, advised Purdue on how to better market oxycontin, among other services McKinsey performed.

McKinsey counseled Purdue as to which health care providers the drug company’s sales force should concentrate on to increase sales of oxycontin. They did so with full knowledge that this drug was not only subject to widespread abuse, but that abuse was growing among users without benefit of a prescription. (Some of the patients with the prescription were selling the pills to those without one.)

Additionally, sales pressure was put on providers to prescribe oxycontin for conditions in which it was not only unnecessary, but medically ineffective.

The consulting company was also aware that Purdue had been criminally sanctioned in 2007 for misbranding the drug, and engaging in deceptive marketing practices — minimizing the actual danger of the drug.

Purdue later manufactured a version of oxycontin that was more difficult to grind into a powder, and supposedly, more difficult to abuse. Eventually, pharmacies and physicians in light of the abuse of the drug, and growing regulations on its dispensation, reduced their promotion of the drug, and lost sales as a result.

McKinsey, to the rescue, implemented marketing methods to counteract lost sales. This included the potential for legal mail order distribution, ‘ride alongs’ with drug sales representatives calling on high volume prescribers of the drug, and orchestrating a sales focus on those providers who proved more amenable to the prescribing of oxycontin on a more frequent basis.[2]

Profiting from Addiction

It was obvious that profits were top of mind in the joint efforts of McKinsey and Purdue to aggressively market the drug that was number one on the abuse list. The drug that was killing American teenagers who abused it.

They sought to aggressively promote oxycontin to high volume prescribing providers, and they knew exactly what the consequences could be. They weren’t concerned with patients… they were concerned with profits, and the high fees that McKinsey was earning for consulting.

As you may imagine, eventually, the government got involved in an attempt to resolve the opioid crisis. It initiated civil and criminal investigations against both McKinsey and Purdue.

The investigations and actions pursuant to them settled last month.

From the DOJ site:

‘This global resolution shows the department’s commitment to holding accountable those who played key roles in fueling the opioid crisis,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “Consulting companies cannot advise their clients to break the law, and then skirt responsibility when their clients do so.’

The site also referenced that:

‘“McKinsey’s management consulting work with Purdue Pharmaceuticals significantly contributed to a devastating public health crisis affecting American families and communities nationwide,” said Inspector General Christi A. Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG).’

As part of the resolution of the actions, ‘McKinsey will pay $650 Million, cease work relating to controlled substances and implement significant new compliance measures,’ according to the headline on the DOJ press release. [3]

Why You Should Care

One of the powers of the Federal government is the regulation of interstate commerce. That is included in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution. It empowers the government to ‘provide for the general welfare’ of the United States.

The FDA is the federal regulatory agency empowered to, among other things, regulate prescription drugs.

When these agencies do their jobs, when they investigate and prosecute those corporations that knowingly engaged in unethical behavior that can cause harm and death to our citizenry, that’s something to care about. Something to acknowledge — that yes, sometimes the government is here to help us. (As rare an event as that might be.)

No doubt that some of the readers of this article have either lost a family member to the abuse of narcotic substances, or know someone that has. The statistics are grim, and from 2011–2021 it has been estimated that 320,000 children across the United States have lost a parent due to a drug overdose.[4]

In 2023, it was estimated that there were more than 81,000 opioid overdose deaths in the United States. [5]

While many of us believe that there is too much government in our lives, that we would be better off with a great deal less of it, when it comes to reeling in the greed of large corporations, that would do almost anything to bring in profits if free of any restrictions, we are fortunate to have legal and regulatory oversight agencies protecting our safety.

As evidence of that statement, the 2023 number of opioid deaths reported above, and perhaps in a sign of progress, it was a decrease from previous years.

[1] NATIONAL DRUG INTELLIGENCE CENTER OXYCONTIN FACTS https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs6/6025/index.htm

[2] AGREED STATEMENT OF FACTS US V. MCKINSEY https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1380371/dl

[3] DOJ OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS PRESS RELEASE 12/13/2024 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys

[4] NPR MAY 8,2024 REPORT https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/08/1249918051/drug-overdose-orphans-opioids-cdc-nida

[5] CDC PRESS RELEASE 5/15/24 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2024/20240515.htm#:~:text=The%20new%20data%20show%20overdose,psychostimulants%20(like%20methamphetamine)%20increased.

Earth has always been a stew pot of pandering, pandemonium, and every so often, pandemic.

Like an iceberg, the greatest danger of this latest pandemic lies not in what is on the surface, but that ninety percent of the truth lies beneath the waves.

That’s the part that can get really deadly — and did.

Towards the end of 2019, the world was ‘blessed’ with the appearance of COVID-19. A disease of disguised origin, a malady that killed millions while making for a select few, millions of dollars.

It birthed masks, moronic quarantine mandates from government, the rushed development of questionable vaccines, and economic devastation for many small businesses.

During the several years that it spread worldwide, it killed (as of 2023), about seven million people.

Not quite the numbers of the 1918 flu epidemic, but still rather ‘impressive’ — especially to those who lost family members who died in isolation in overcrowded hospitals, and others who suffered long term illness.

But it wasn’t only the disease that damaged human immune systems it was the rushed to market vaccines, shoveled out to the public for profits for the privileged.

Conflicts of Interest

In its report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime stated:

‘The fast pace of research and development and the urgent demand for a vaccine may create opportunities for corruption that are likely to impede public health efforts. Conflicts of interest related to the funding of the research and development of a COVID-19 vaccine is such a corruption risk.’

It further noted, ‘With the urgent global demand for vaccines, there is a risk of substandard and falsified vaccines entering a market.’

The report acknowledged the reality that risks were:

‘[Further] compounded if quality assurance measures are absent or bypassed during the emergency response, resulting in adverse health outcomes for the population and an erosion of public trust in the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.’

In 2023, the website for the Attorney General of the state of Texas revealed that:

‘Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Pfizer Inc. for unlawfully misrepresenting the effectiveness of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine, and attempting to censor public discussion of the product.

‘Pfizer engaged in false, deceptive, and misleading acts and practices by making unsupported claims regarding the company’s COVID-19 vaccine in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.’

The antics of big pharmaceutical companies are nothing new, and lawsuits against them are nothing new, including huge settlements paid out, but in this case Pfizer apparently outdid itself because, according to the Texas AG:

‘Pfizer fostered a misleading impression that vaccine protection was durable and withheld from the public information that undermined its claims about the duration of protection. And, despite the fact that its clinical trial failed to measure whether the vaccine protects against transmission, Pfizer embarked on a campaign to intimidate the public into getting the vaccine as a necessary measure to protect their loved ones.’

The author of this article had the misfortune of taking the Pfizer vaccine and booster. He was rewarded with ten months of hives over fifty percent of his body, and daily hour long episodes of shortness of breath.

The ‘Stink’ of Misrepresentation

When I caught COVID-19, in spite of the ‘protection’ of the vaccine, it amounted to 36 hours of a reduced olfactory ability, and then it was over, and the sense of smell was fully restored —sufficient to perceive the stink of the Pfizer misrepresentations of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

I got off easy, because reports stated, ‘evidence of serious neurological harms, including Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myasthenic disorder and stroke’ were effects of the vaccines for some.

These effects were possibly under reported. A German study determined ‘data suggested that there is very significant under-reporting of suspected cases of COVID-19 vaccination side-effects.’  The report concluded, ‘It can therefore be assumed that there are probably about three million suspected cases of vaccine side-effects.’

These were not the rants and ravings of unqualified conspiracy theorists. In fact, ‘Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pushed a false “safe and effective” COVID vaccine narrative by underreporting adverse events.’

While people were getting sick or dying from the vaccines they were told were safe, the National Institute for Health was having its coffers filled during the pandemic. In a FOIA suit to uncover the details:

‘[The] lawsuit turned up records of payments totaling $710 million from private pharmaceutical companies going to the NIH, including royalties to its scientists during the pandemic as treatments were being developed and licensed.’

Why You Should Care

It’s likely that you or someone you know contracted COVID-19. You might have known someone who died from it, or from the vaccine that was supposed to prevent it.

It’s likely that you or someone you know, were vaccinated, and suffered serious side effects. Your government and its public health agencies may have, according to recent revelations, fudged the facts, and put our citizenry at risk, without properly informing them of those risks.

All the while the public suffered, a select few agencies and individuals were raking in the profits from the pharmaceutical companies who quite likely more interested in profits than public health.

In the preamble to the United States Constitution, that document that all of the politicians promise to defend, it is stated:

‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’

In the case of COVID, the more perfect union was between big pharma and big government at the expense of the ‘general welfare’ of the people of this country.

That should make you very angry.

Mark Twain said it best, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

When it comes to the realities of inflation and employment, that quote must be on every politician’s desk.

No surprise here. Since it seems to be a government function to continually lie to its citizens. All in order to short change them on the benefits it pays out… while taxing you more and to make our ‘public servants’ look like they are actually serving the public who voted for them.

Those same voters that gave them the jobs and benefits many everyday people don’t have.

They’re serving us alright, and they’re cooking the books as well as our futures.

The Government Lies About Your Cost of Living

As those who have been looking for jobs for months know, as those who go to the grocery store know, and as those who are trying to pay for medical care know, we’re all getting screwed. Meanwhile the government paints an unrealistically positive picture about just how screwed we really are.

Let’s look at inflation. Specifically, how the government deflates the reality of how much it really costs us to live, and why.

Many government aid programs like social security benefits, disability payments and others have their annual adjustments tied in with what the government tells us is the CPI, the Consumer Price Index.

Obviously, the lower the method of calculation, the lower the payout to the public. Perhaps the BLS, doesn’t stand for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it’s actually the word Bullshit, missing some letters.

In case you don’t know, those are those good people who calculate the Consumer Price Index, or better said, miscalculate it.

The government has this concept of the ‘fixed basket’ of goods to calculate inflation. This fixed basket needs some new handles, because the only thing it can carry is the ‘bill of goods’ the government tries to sell us.

This basket contains statistics concerning groceries — the basic ones — housing costs, clothing, transportation, medical care, recreational expenses and communication expenses. It’s an historical basket, and basically ignores changes in consumer behavior, because that’s the most convenient method of calculation for the government to mislead you.

What it doesn’t consider is how corporations rip off the consumer by, for example, selling a food product for the same price, yet reducing the amount of said product. ‘New and improved’ usually refers in reality, to the profits of the corporations, and not the quality or quantity of the goods they sell.

Also, the method of Consumer Price Index calculation is proportionately weighted — by the government — to mislead consumers on the reality of price increases. The Feds assign percentages to the cost of living. A certain percentage for housing, food, and other expenses.

By playing with the figures, there is a direct effect on government’s monetary policies, what the interest rate should be for example. This can affect the cost of consumer credit, the cost of mortgages, how much we can earn from the banks, and so on.

The Substitution Con

You may have noticed the soaring mortgage rates, increased credit card interest rates, and consumer loan rates.

For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in an analysis of the 2024 interest rates of credit cards has determined that ‘over the last 10 years, average APR on credit cards assessed interest have almost doubled from 12.9 percent in late 2013 to 22.8 percent in 2023 — the highest level recorded since the Federal Reserve began collecting in 1994.’

If we use the rule of 72—the calculation that tells us how many years it will take to double an existing amount, we see an increase of almost 7.2% per annum. It doesn’t take an Einstein to realize, that isn’t exactly what the government tells us the inflation rate is.

So, if you’re paying for the things in the ‘basket of goods’ with a credit card, even if those goods have increased two or three percentage points in a given period, if you carry a balance on the credit card you used, your costs have far exceeded the government inflation figure.

Let’s go back to that ‘basket’ of goods. There is the concept of ‘substitutions’ which means if a consumer uses a lower priced substitution for a grocery item, for example, that isn’t figured in their CPI calculation.

So Jane Doe buys chicken instead of beef, because it’s cheaper and she can’t afford beef — that doesn’t count as far as the government is concerned. Investopedia reveals the effect of substitution neatly, with ‘The change in purchases by consumers in response to price changes, changes the relative weighting of the goods in the basket. The overall result tends to be a lower CPI.’

Now, you need a place to live to put those basket items on your kitchen table. But when it comes to a calculation for housing costs, the government gives us ‘fugazy’ figures once again. They calculate that by using an estimate of the rental cost for living in a house, not the actual price increases in buying the house.

What’s the deal in housing prices in 2024? Well if we want to use some other government agency figures, then we see that the cost of housing increased 4.2% over the previous year—and who knows if this is even accurate.

How does Uncle Sam come up with that rental cost figure? Here we get some more government inspected Grade A bull, and the concept is a beauty. It’s called the OER, or Owner’s Equivalent Rent figure. How do they get that figure? The BLS (Bureau of Lying Statistics), asks consumers what they think the rental value of their homes would be.

Not exactly science.

When it comes to the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculating the CPI, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Let’s look at employment statistics.

Why You Should Care

It’s not a wild assumption, that many of the readers of this article are looking for a decent job, or know someone that is and are having a hell of a time in finding one.

The government, who is ‘here to help us’ doesn’t count those who have given up looking for jobs as unemployed. And they count freelance and part-time jobs as ‘employment.’

How does the good old BLS determine and define unemployment? They require that an unemployed person must be available for work and must have looked for a job in the last four weeks.

Oh, by the way, 40% of the country isn’t even consider in the figures. That includes individuals who are students, retirees, military, stay at home caregivers, and the incarcerated and institutionalized (which is a category in which we should place those government employees who come up with unemployment figures for the rest of us — if we only could).

You are a consumer.

You eat and hopefully live somewhere with a roof over your head. You have to pay for that, and you probably need a job to do that.

However, the reality is, it’s getting much harder to do all of that. And the government’s figures disguise it. If it feels as though things are getting more expensive, and it’s harder to keep pace. The answer is, that’s because it is… whatever the government tries to tell you.

As we discussed in our previous post, there are two sides to the recent drone swarm reported over New Jersey and other East Coast states.

More evidence is coming out that the majority of the reports are normal objects: airplanes, stars and planets, and even Christmas lights displays.

A cloudy night on Sunday, December 15th, 2024, saw a remarkably low number of drone reports. That’s likely because the low-lying clouds, rain and fog prevented people from seeing stars and airplanes, reducing the number of false identifications.

Meanwhile, other mistaken reports, from former Maryland governor Larry Hogan claiming the constellation Orion was a drone swarm to Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano’s falling for a meme of a Star Wars TIE-fighter on a trailer have shown how easy it is even for government officials to make mistakes.

Despite these false reports, there are still many sightings made by trained observers, as well as numerous and continual drone sightings involving military assets and bases. This includes incursions over CIA headquarters in Langley in Virginia, the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, the top-secret air facility at Nevada National Security Site, and U.S. destroyers 100 miles off the coast of California.

We know the U.S. government is taking such incursions over military sites seriously. Two Chinese nationals have been arrested in the past year in separate incidents where they were using drones to violate such locations.

The first incident came in late 2023, soon after the drones spotted over Langley, Virginia in December 2023.

A few weeks after that rash of sightings, a 26-year-old Chinese citizen and U.S. grad student was arrested after taking photos of classified naval installations at Newport Naval Base with a commercially available drone. He had purchased the drone from a Virgina store just days before.

His prosecution was the first under a law dating back to just after World War II that makes it illegal to photograph military sites ‘using aircraft.’

The second incident came more recently, as a 39-year-old Chinese citizen was caught photographing Vandenberg Space Force Base with a drone that he was flying from a public park a few miles away. Both these Chinese nationals were arrested just as they were attempting to board one-way flights back to China, and both nationals have since pleaded guilty to the charges.

But it’s not just military bases and assets that concerns the government. In the summer of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security issued a classified warning to state and local law enforcement that has since been revealed to the public.

In the statement, DHS warned of the growing use of drones for what they considered ‘illicit’ purposes. DHS further recommended that state and local agencies needed to conduct what they called ‘exercises to test and prepare response capabilities.’

The fact that the DHS has advocated for testing exercises using drones can be seen as part of the same federal position of being more prepared, when earlier in 2024 NORAD commander Air Force Lt. Lt. General Guillot testified in the Senate that ‘This emerging capability outstrips the operational framework that we have to address it.’

These statements make it clear that elements of the U.S. government are aware that we are unprepared for a drone incursion on a par with what’s occurred in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where hundreds of drones are being used in massed attacks and Ukraine believes they’ll be able to manufacture 4 million drones a year, beginning in 2025.

The question then becomes, how will the Pentagon convince the American population that we need a better defense against so many drones. In a country that has as much territory as the U.S. to protect. That’s where one possible answer to these drone waves begins to make sense.

During the Vietnam War, a young Marine began to make a name for himself with his bravery, his cunning, and his leadership skills. That Marine was Richard Marcinko, who went on to create the famous unit SEAL Team Six, which he commanded for three years.

Nearing retirement, Marcinko was asked in 1986 by Navy Admiral James Lyons to create a new unit that was tasked with testing base security. This new unit was dubbed Red Cell, named after the enemy aggressor squadron often called the Red Team in Western military combat practices, and was also known by the official designation OP-O6D.

Marcinko selected members from SEAL Team Six and Marine Force Recon, and proceeded to test Navy and Air Force base security in a number of novel ways.

The unit’s purpose was to challenge base security and expose defense vulnerabilities, by infiltrating those locations without detection, while recording their intrusions on video to later share with base personnel in order to improve overall security and readiness.

Those Red Cell goals – to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within military bases and installations by simulating real-world threats through aggressive tactics, and to test security measures and improve overall preparedness against potential enemy actions – sound exactly like what’s been happening with various drone incursions at sensitive military bases over the past five years.

One of the reasons the U.S. military hasn’t admitted that they’re executing the current drone missions is because they may not be: Red Cell was defunded at the end of Marcinko’s tenure. In part, Marcinko claimed, because his unit was ‘too good,’ and exposed lax base security allowed by too many higher-ups.

After Marcinko’s Red Cell was disbanded, it appears that the CIA picked up their portfolio, and began their own, much more secretive version of Red Cell in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Their ability to classify and compartmentalize their activities provides government officials with plausible deniability. While the CIA claims their Red Cell are only analysts, there is no way to prove their involvement doesn’t extend to running the kind of drone incursions that we’ve seen at military facilities across the U.S.

In fact, the CIA is responsible for much of the classified drone attacks that the U.S. government employs overseas, including Predator attacks on enemies in the Middle East.

It’s also relevant that a December 17th joint statement on the drone swarms over the Northeast was underwritten by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA and the Department of Defense, but did not directly contain any statement or denial by the CIA.

While a definitive answer to who’s behind these incursions might never be made known to the public, you can be sure several things will happen in the wake of these drone swarms:

- New laws will be written to allow the military to better protect their bases,

- New funding will be enacted to create better defenses against drones of all types, and

- The CIA and other covert agencies will continue to test America’s defenses without being caught, and without admitting to their actions.

This story still has much longer to run.

Stay tuned for more as we continue to dig into this story!

Are these objects in the skies over the East Coast just drones, or are they something else?

Some suggest they’re a precursor to an alien invasion. Others suggest they’re military controlled sniffers looking for a lost nuclear weapon.

Another theory is that they’re being sent by an Iranian mothership off the U.S. coast.

First off: no, they aren’t aliens. Nor are they military craft looking for a lost nuke. And if they were Iranian or any other hostile country, we’d have stopped them a long time ago.

Heck, our Coast Guard would simply love an opportunity to be the heroes by stopping a hostile ship in home waters.

We do know that most of the reported sightings are actually not drones.

A great example is former Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, who claimed to have seen a drone swarm above his house, only to find out later that he was photographing the constellation Orion.

Another good example of how even our supposedly ‘intelligent’ government officials are falling to drone hysteria was when Pennsylvania state senator (and former Army officer, and gubernatorial candidate) Doug Mastriano saw an online meme of a Star Wars TIE-fighter on a trailer with the joking caption suggesting it was a recently shot-down drone in Orange Beach, New Jersey.

He fell for it hook, line, and sinker, claiming it was proof that the drones are a ‘threat to our nation and our citizens.’

Not Aliens, Iranians, or Any Other -ians, So What Are They?

Meanwhile, cooler heads are trying to prevail. Former congressman and veteran pilot Adam Kinzinger has said in a CNN interview and on social media posts, ‘I’ve spent days looking at every one of these videos. Every video I’ve seen on Twitter and on the Internet are all airplanes… If they are drones, they are apparently complying with FAA lighting requirements.’

So, if they aren’t aliens, Iranians, or any other -ians, what are they?

First: yes, there is reason for some concern. The ability for someone, even civilian pranksters, to fly drones near commercial airfields or over U.S. military bases or through controlled airspaces is concerning.

While the recent drone inclusions in New Jersey and adjoining areas on the East Coast have been a national story for weeks now, what mainstream media isn’t reporting is that these drones are not the only swarms this country has had to deal with.

There have been similar drone swarms in recent years in Colorado in 2019 and 2020. Also at the highly sensitive Nevada National Security Site in 2023, and multiple incursions in California.

As far back as the summer of 2019, several USS Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were swarmed by multiple drones, or as the U.S. Navy called them UAVs, ‘unmanned aerial vehicles.’ As many as six at a time were spotted performing maneuvers extremely close to the ships, less than 100 miles off the California coast.

Just as alarming, for 17 days in December of 2023, drones flew unchallenged over Langley, Virginia, home to the headquarters of the CIA. There have also be incidents adjacent to the largest naval base in the world, Naval Station Norfolk, home to the U.S. Navy's Fleet Forces Command, and not far from the HQ for Seal Team Six.

It wasn’t until March 24, 2024, at a Senate Armed Force hearing that the first official comment about the Langley drone intrusions was officially announced. At that hearing, Lt. General Gregory Guillot, commander of NORAD and NorthCom, admitted not only that Langely and the adjacent areas were inundated by dozens of unknown drone overflights, but that more than 1,000 drone incursions occur over the U.S.’ southern border each month.

Regarding the Langley drone problem, General Guillot testified that ‘This emerging capability outstrips the operational framework that we have to address it.’

This comment from one of the most high-ranking Air Force officers in the country might be a clue. He’s saying under oath that we don’t have the resources to combat this many drones in so many locations.

Should we be worried? The short answer is, yes.

The U.S. Has No Way to Prevent It

Not because these may be aliens or Iranian craft, but because these drones are overflying military installations, and we currently have no way to prevent them. In addition to the drones over Langley in 2023 and the ones harassing the U.S. destroyers in 2019, there have been additional military sites that have been the subject of these drone swarms.

More recently, the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton saw multiple drones over its airspace, which is a federal offense. The Department of Defense has also admitted, as of December 14th, 2024, that drones have been sighted over Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle, both in New Jersey.

Then there are the drones over the Nevada National Security Site, where test flying of top secret aircraft is performed, including the new B-21 Raider.

These overflights of military bases seem to rule out civilian craft, especially as they’re flying with lights on them and clearly following FAA regulations. If someone was trying to spy on or even prank the military, they’d conceal their craft by dousing their lights.

These overflights would also appear to rule out one of the most recent explanations: that the drones are part of a NASA project testing a project called the Advanced Air Mobility Mission, which just happens to be based two miles from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

This close proximity, some researchers are suggesting, explains why there were so many overflights of the Langley area in December of 2023.

But this explanation doesn’t answer a number of questions. For example, what would NASA be doing messing around with destroyers performing active naval duties a hundred miles off the coast of California?

And if the drones in New Jersey were indeed part of this program, why wouldn’t NASA have come forward immediately and admitted they were behind these events?

In fact, as of December 18th, NASA has still made no such admission.

A Deeper and Darker Cause

Another problem is that it’s extremely risky to be testing unproven technology, whether NASA or military, over civilian locations, and in such close proximity to busy airports and active military bases.

Military and foreign affairs commentator Paul at Combat Vet News remarked, ‘None of this is the response that you'd expect from the government if this was a classified program that was being tested,’ which includes the NASA program as well.

These concerns suggest the drones are not part of any NASA or military testing, especially if you’re unsure of the crafts’ success, and you want to be able to recover any debris or failed craft.

There is one more possibility that has not been offered up yet that we’ll cover in our next newsletter. One that does include why these drones would be overflying military bases, why they’re harassing on-duty naval ships, and why these drone swarms seem to move from place to place, perform their actions for weeks on end, then simply stop, pick up their gear, and move on to another location.

And this answer contains a much deeper and darker cause, and explains why no one in the U.S. government wants to admit what’s really going on.

For the last month, Eastern states (predominately), have been fascinated and fearful concerning the (as of yet) unexplained appearance of multiple drones in the sky. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman?

Nobody seems to know.

Our government, which of course, is here to help and protect us, has provided a definite “we don’t know” answer to the public, which of course has calmed things down absolutely nowhere. This is a perfect example of our tax dollars at rest.

We in the United States are proud of our fiercely independent nature, proud of our property ownership, and we are ready to exercise our second amendment rights at the drop of a hat, or, these days, the flight of a drone.

But before anybody brings out the shotgun and tries a little skeet shooting at a those unidentified lit up things in the sky that are buzzing around the barn, you’re going to want to know a little Federal Law.

Specifically that Federal Law that we find at 18 USC 32. (For those who haven’t gone to law school, “USC” stands for United States Code). Here’s the part you want to closely read:

18 USC 32

 a)Whoever willfully—

(1) sets fire to, damages, destroys, disables, or wrecks any aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States or any civil aircraft used, operated, or employed in interstate, overseas, or foreign air commerce;

(2) places or causes to be placed a destructive device or substance in, upon, or in proximity to, or otherwise makes or causes to be made unworkable or unusable or hazardous to work or use, any such aircraft, or any part or other materials used or intended to be used in connection with the operation of such aircraft, if such placing or causing to be placed or such making or causing to be made is likely to endanger the safety of any such aircraft;

(3) sets fire to, damages, destroys, or disables any air navigation facility, or interferes by force or violence with the operation of such facility, if such fire, damaging, destroying, disabling, or interfering is likely to endanger the safety of any such aircraft in flight;

(4) with the intent to damage, destroy, or disable any such aircraft, sets fire to, damages, destroys, or disables or places a destructive device or substance in, upon, or in proximity to, any appliance or structure, ramp, landing area, property, machine, or apparatus, or any facility or other material used, or intended to be used, in connection with the operation, maintenance, loading, unloading or storage of any such aircraft or any cargo carried or intended to be carried on any such aircraft;

(5) interferes with or disables, with intent to endanger the safety of any person or with a reckless disregard for the safety of human life, anyone engaged in the authorized operation of such aircraft or any air navigation facility aiding in the navigation of any such aircraft;

(6) performs an act of violence against or incapacitates any individual on any such aircraft, if such act of violence or incapacitation is likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft;

(7) communicates information, knowing the information to be false and under circumstances in which such information may reasonably be believed, thereby endangering the safety of any such aircraft in flight; or

(8) attempts or conspires to do anything prohibited under paragraphs (1) through (7) of this subsection; shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years or both.

 That’s not even the whole of the law, but it will serve for our purposes. Since that is a ton of close reading to have to do, I’ll make things a little easier.

 Let’s look at paragraph 1. It states you can’t do naughty things to an aircraft, and a drone is an aircraft. It further states that aircraft has to be flying in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States and it would be handy to know what that jargon means.

The special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States in English means, pursuant to another law found at 49 USC 46501 [2] :

"special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States" includes any of the following aircraft in flight:(A) a civil aircraft of the United States.(B) an aircraft of the armed forces of the United States.(C) another aircraft in the United States.”

So, the aircraft has to be in flight. Drones you see in the sky are in flight. Let’s look at C, and that says “another aircraft in the United States.” That would cover a drone. So in other words, if you see a drone flying around overhead, and you are living in the United States, you are in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and going back to 18 USC 32 (1) means you can’t shoot the thing down.

But what if you do?

Then we take a look at paragraph 8 of 18 USC 32, and the stupid prize you can win for playing stupid games is twenty years in prison and/or a fine. How much is the fine? Well, it could be about a week’s pay, if you earn $250,000 per week.

Don’t forget, depending upon which state you live in there are likely to be state laws that can put you in jail or the poorhouse if you shoot at a drone. This is on top of the Federal consequences.

As the author of this article worked as an attorney for over forty years, I can tell you that both the cuisine and the medical care in the US Bureau of Prisons is not going to get a five star rating any time soon. It’s the kind of secured gated community you don’t want to live in.

So my advice is don’t shoot at a drone, even if it is over your property and possibly invading your privacy, and don’t point a laser at it either in case what you think is a drone is actually a small manned aircraft.

That can also be a major legal problem.

Maybe, just maybe, the various alphabet organizations in our country that deal with things like intelligence, security and defense will sooner or later turn off CNN for their information, and tell us just what the Hell is going on.

Until then, watch those itchy trigger fingers gentlemen.

In 2021, two more videos were released to the public and later admitted by the Pentagon to be “official,” at least as both were filmed by U.S. Navy personnel. But neither of these were filmed from F/A-18s, nor were they captured by the craft’s infrared sensors, as the first three videos from 2017 and 2018 were.

Both of the newly released videos were supposedly filmed in July of 2019 on ships at sea off the coast of San Diego, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, a film producer with an interest in UFOs, and who previously made a name for himself by recording a video with Bob Lazar, whose claims about working at Area 51 have been widely disputed.

In July of  2019, the  video known as SPLASHDOWN was reportedly filmed onboard the USS Omaha in its Command Information Center (CIC). This video includes the voices of several off-screen U.S. naval officers discussing multiple objects being visually observed, though only a single object is seen in the video. This object is a blurry circular craft, seemingly flying over the ocean. The video itself is extremely fuzzy, as, according to one report, the video was made by a cell phone recording a display on one of the ship’s monitors. This result provides much less clarity than any of the previous FLIR videos. 

Near the end, one of the offscreen personnel calls a “splashdown” of an object into the water. Science writer and current UFO researcher Mick West shows that this was most likely not a splashdown. He goes on to explain that the video has several flaws in it, besides the very poor resolution. The first problem is that according to the timecode on the monitor, six minutes of footage of the round object descending towards the water’s surface is missing, thus making its descent appear faster than it normally would seem. 

West also explains the apparently rapid left-right movement of the object is due to the camera itself moving left and right. He supports that interpretation by showing how the movement of the waves are comparable to the movement of the object. He further explains if the object fell directly into the water, the object would disappear at once. Intead, what the video shows is a brief series of what appear to be the tops of waves obscuring the bottom half of the object, which is what one would see if a bright object, like the engine exhaust of a distant jet plane, were seen dropping below the horizon of a large body of water. 

West shows later in the same video how the “shrinking” effect of the object dropping below the horizon indicates it’s a hot, flaring heat source, larger than the object itself, and most likely an engine exhaust.

Interestingly, Jeremy Corbell claims to have seen a classified briefing document regarding this event that says there were up to 100 solid objects, each traveling between 46 and 158 mph, surrounding Omaha during the incident. Since this video’s release in 2021, there has been no evidence to support these claims.

At approximately the same date and time as the SPLASHDOWN video was recorded, a fifth video was recorded, since known as the TRIANGLE video.This event was supposed to have been filmed aboard the USS Russell, also in the ocean off the coast of San Diego. This video contains night vision images of dozens of triangular objects in a dark sky. Jeremy Corbell immediately claimed this was “proof” that triangular or pyramidal shapes were flying around our skies, and that their close proximity to U.S. naval ships proved a serious military matter. This warning was shared by oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who said at a 2024 Congressional hearing that our inability to identify such objects "jeopardizes U.S. maritime security, which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean."

However, even a cursory examination of this video shows that it’s merely a recording of regular airplane traffic, including the telltale strobe effect of flashing FAA avoidance lights, as well as normal astronomical objects like stars and the planet Jupiter in the background. 

As with the SPLASHDOWN video, this video appears to have been recorded with a cell phone using an inexpensive “night vision” attachment, and is not made with military-grade night optics. The recording artifact of an object being out of focus and showing instead the triangular arms of the shutter is called “bokeh” (pronounced bo-kay), and can be easily duplicated, as Mick West himself does with both a standard camera lens and one covered by duct tape. It’s also clear that the primary object is flashing standard navigation warning lights, as a normal aircraft would be expected to, surrounded by objects in the night sky like stars and the planet Jupiter.

These two additional videos beg the question: why would the Navy and the Pentagon not be able to discern immediately that these two videos were not “unexplainable,” as the term UAP, for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” would suggest? Indeed, in connection with the SPLASHDOWN video, wouldn’t the experienced naval personnel manning the Command Information Center on the Omaha not be able to tell immediately that there was in fact no “splashdown”? Not only that, why would naval personnel be allowed to record military displays with a private cell phone? And why would a video with six minutes edited from it not carry the disclaimer that it’s been edited, making the apparent movement of the object being filmed appear highly distorted in time?

These questions lead an objective observer to ask the question: is there something going on behind these five videos that suggest the Pentagon is deliberately using these videos to perform some important task, and that the U.S. naval personnel are themselves performing a role in this mission? If highly trained and experienced military personnel are complicit in the release of easily explainable prosaic events, using clipped and edited videos, while not releasing the entire videos, are they all part of a larger plan, one that they believe is important for the national security of the country they’ve sworn to protect?

In the next article in this series, we’ll present an event that happened at the same time as the original three videos, in late 2017, an event that was largely ignored by the national media, but one that goes a long way in explaining what may really be going on behind these events. 

As we covered in our previous article, the first three UAP videos in the 2017-2018 wave, known as FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST, were all eventually admitted by the Pentagon as having been recorded by U.S. navy pilots flying U.S. military planes, in these cases, F/A-18s from U.S. aircraft carriers. 

Despite the Pentagon officially admitting their provenance, however, there has still been plenty of controversy surrounding the videos.These controversies are not just matters of opinion: they suggest that any competent aviator familiar with the system should have known right from the beginning that the objects captured by the sensors were not any kind of anomalous objects, but rather, were easily explained terrestrial objects that the Pentagon could have and should have explained from the very beginning, rather than allowing the situation to fester for years. 

Beginning with the FLIR video, it must be noted that the video itself does not actually represent what the most famous pilot involved in this incident, Commander David Fravor, claims to have seen. His F/A-18 from the USS Nimitz wasn’t the aircraft that recorded the video. That second plane came on the scene around an hour later, and may not have even been in the same location. Even then, the weapons officer who recorded the video, Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, admitted he himself never saw the object with his own eyes, and merely saw what was on the weapons display.

The object being recorded in infra-red was most likely the heat plume surrounding a normal jet aircraft, which will appear to an IR camera to be larger than the object itself, and will somewhat resemble an oval Tic-Tac, except for the fact that it’s extremely hot and very blurry with no discernable outline to its shape.Noted science writer and investigator Mick West showed an example of how such an image looks around a standard aircraft, and also how the “sudden moves” described by many viewers at the end of the video are in fact an artifact of the camera unable to maintain a lock on the object, as the object is heading to the left and the tracking plane is heading to the right.

This event in 2004 cannot have been the first time an F/A-18 with a FLIR camera had recorded such an incident while tracking traditional aircraft. For both the U.S. Navy and the Pentagon to remain silent about what is clearly an easily explainable occurrence suggests that either or both organizations deliberately wanted to maintain confusion about the incident. Even more alarming, it appears this confusion was deliberately sustained in order to appear to support Commander Fravor’s earlier account. 

The second video released, the GIMBAL video, is named for the rotating mount for the infra-red camera below the host aircraft, in this instance, an F/A-18 flying from the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida. Again, Mick West explains that the apparent “turning upside down” movement of the object is from the Gimbal mount itself turning upside down when its plane-host is pointing far enough away from the object that the Gimbal can no longer keep its original observation focus on the object. Note that this makes the object appear to invert while keeping the horizon at its original aspect. West later explained how you can easily duplicate the rotate-non-rotate effect on your own cell phone.

It’s also clear that the “spike” elements that appear to the relative top and bottom of the object are an artifact of the camera receiving more information (heat from the object’s jet engine) than it can process. The same spikey effect happens when a telescope takes in more energy from a nearby star than it can process, thus creating the well-known eight-point star effect. 

Again, these elements have to have been common to any flight officer familiar with the F/A-18 and its Gimbal-mounted FLIR system. It is almost impossible that no one from either the Navy or the Pentagon was aware of these as being simple artifacts of the system. Again, we have to conclude that both the Navy and the Pentagon deliberately pretended they did not know that these were standard elements inherent in the manner in which the system operates. 

The third video, the GOFAST video, is the shortest of the three, and has now been explained with a prosaic explanation even by the Pentagon itself. The apparent speed of the object against the background ocean was caused by parallax. As Pentagon spokesperson Jon Kosloski, director of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), explained it in November, 2024:

“Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis, using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” Kosloski said. “As the platform (with the sensors) is flying and capturing the object, if it is closer to the platform at a higher altitude, a trick of the eye called ‘parallax’ makes it look like the object is moving much faster.”

Since the 2017 and 2018 release of these first three Pentagon UAP videos, several more recordings have been released. Two of these in particular got nearly as much attention as the first three. They’ve been nicknamed the Splashdown video, and the Triangles video. Both were supposedly filmed in July of 2019, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, who has been a filmmaker specializing in UFOs  for many years. 

Despite the interest they generated when they were first released, both of these videos also have easily explained reasons behind their creations, which we’ll explore in our next article.These two, however, are a bit different. While in keeping with the first three released videos, the Pentagon at first would not admit these were official videos, though later they did admit they were filmed by U.S. military personnel. But the manner in which these two later videos were filmed were very different from the first three. 

A March 2024 poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov revealed that 32% of Americans believed that UFOs might be signs of extraterrestrials visiting our planet, while only 32% responded that such UFOs or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomena,” always have terrestrial or astronomical explanations. The number that believe UFOs are visiting aliens has increased from only 20% in 1996, an increase of more than 50%. 

Even more stunning is that the same 2024 poll reported that 63% of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling the public. That comes on the heels of a March 2024 Pentagon report that claimed the government has no knowledge whatsoever of aliens or alien technology.

How can we explain away such a disparity between what the Government says it knows, or in this case “doesn’t know,” and the public being so certain that they do know something, and that they are unwilling to share it? We could go back to the time of Watergate and how the office of the President lied to the American public, beginning an erosion of public trust that has only grown since then. We could go back a decade before that and see that a vast number of Americans have lost trust in the U.S. government, and believe there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination that our government refuses to reveal.

But there are even more recent and concrete examples that display clear evidence that the U.S. government is not only not sharing what it knows about UFOs and UAPs, but is deliberately using such obfuscation to, at its base, spoof America’s military adversaries.

These following events cover multiple years, and will require several articles to completely tell the story in full. But by the end of this series, those with an open mind will probably agree that it appears the U.S. government has been lying to the public in order to both muddy the waters of real UFO investigations, while also using such evidence for a much darker purpose.

Much of the recent interest in UFOs was stoked in 2017, when a pair of UFO/UAP videos were released to the public.These were first given to the UFO-supportive group To The Stars Academy during the summer of 2017, and then reported on by the New York Times on December 16th, 2017. They were known by the nicknames FLIR (for Forward-Looking Infrared Radar, the device used by the pilots to record the phenomena) and GIMBAL (for the gimbal-mounted camera used by a different aircraft). These videos were not officially acknowledged as official at the time, but the Pentagon in 2019 did admit that they were filmed by U.S. military personnel using military equipment.

The FLIR video was reported to have been recorded in 2004 by an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying from the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego. This video was used to bolster the testimony of fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who claimed that he, his weapons officer, and another F/A-18 and its two personnel witnessed a 40-foot-long oval craft below them, hovering above a disturbance in the ocean. His testimony included the claim that the white oval craft spiraled up to meet their two planes, mirrored their plane’s movements, then took off at incredible speed. Because his plane was unarmed, he did not have the necessary equipment onboard to record any sensory data, so no recording of this event exists.

However, about an hour or so later, a second group of fighters from the Nimitz were sent aloft to do further investigations. In that group was weapons systems officer Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, whose F/A-18 was equipped with the FLIR equipment that captured the video. It was Underwood who suggested the object appeared like a “Tic-Tac,” basing the term on a joke from the 1980 film “Airplane.” However, Lt. Cmmdr. Underwood admitted in a 2019 interview that he didn’t see the object with his own eyes, and was focused instead on trying to capture as much information through his FLIR equipment.

There are problems with the chain of custody for this video, since it appears it was first hosted online in 2007 by Visions Unlimited, a video production company, which does not lend credence to the video’s authenticity. 

The GIMBAL video was reported by the Pentagon as having been recorded on January 21st, 2015, by another FA-18 Super Hornet aircraft assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt carrier battle group, operating off the eastern coast of Florida. The GIMBAL video shows an infrared target glowing hot, that appears to rotate left, leaving the pilots in awe. It was night time, however, so again, the aviators didn’t see anything with their own eyes.

 As with the FLIR video, this video first caught the public’s attention when it was posted by To The Stars Academy, who had apparently received both videos from Christopher K. Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who had himself received them (and a third video, discussed next) from an undisclosed source in a Pentagon parking lot, according to Mellon’s own admission in the UFO documentary, “The Phenomena.”

Additionally, the Washington Post reported in March, 2018, on a video of a similar encounter, nicknamed GOFAST, also supposedly filmed on January 21, 2015, again by an F/A-18 aircraft from the Roosevelt carrier battle group, and also having occurred off the coast of Florida. In this video, an object appears to be moving at incredible speeds over the ocean, and the aviators laugh and cheer as they’re finally able to get a lock on the object. As with the other two previous videos, this recording was made by the same FLIR system, and again, this video has a frustratingly short duration.

There has been a storm of controversy over these three videos, as well as a few other videos that were released subsequent to these, which we’ll cover in the next article. 

We’ve discussed why BRICS, the loose coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, now with the addition of new members Egypt, Ethiopia, the U.A.E. and Iran, are hoping to launch a new currency to rival the U.S. dollar as a benchmark currency for the world’s trading partners. But can BRICS really launch such a currency, and keep it stable? What will they use to back it? How will it be traded, and which countries could be enticed to actually trade in it?

The recent devaluation of the Russian ruble has shown that Putin’s trading partners are willing to risk limited sanctions from the West, as long as Russia sells its goods, primarily crude oil, in the currency of the buying nation. That means China and India are forcing Russia to buy their currency in order for those countries to then be able to buy Russian crude. This has caused a massive drop in the value of the ruble, and a follow-on response from the Russian central bank to halt foreign currency buying until some time in early 2025.

These retrenchments to individual government-backed currencies shows the difficulty BRICS countries will face in trying to get its members to agree on a common currency, and to give it precedence over their own currency.

The second problem is getting nine nations to simply agree on a common currency. While the Indian rupee is strong on its own, and the Chinese yuan is based on the world’s second strongest economy (though China’s economy is facing many crises), the other BRICS nations don’t have the kinds of economic policies and histories that would make their fellow BRICSters comfortable. This was another problem India had with admitting too many neighbors too soon: the difficulty in getting multiple nations and their various governments to agree on anything has always been a challenge. 

The third problem the BRICS nations must face is what to back their new currency with. Currently, the US dollar is backed by two things: its ability to generate steady revenue either through taxes or by taking on more debt, and by the U.S.’ ability to demand that its trading partners make transactions using dollars, rather than their own currency. That’s where the BRICS nations hope to make their inroad. 

Following the October 2024 meeting held in Kazan, Russia, it was announced that a new joint currency was being planned, called “the Unit.” There are no definite plans for the currency to be rolled out just yet, but it’s intended to be backed by 40% gold held jointly by the various countries, and 60% backed by a conglomeration of BRICS currencies that would theoretically be convertible into gold. This agreement to include all of the different members’ currencies presents a challenge, as the economies of some member nations might be in a recession while other economies are doing better. This could create a situation where some currencies might appear to be doing the heavy lifting to support other members whose currencies might be struggling.

But the BRICS decision to use gold as part of its support reveals an additional problem: that of limiting their economic freedom. 

Until 1971, the dollar was backed by gold, when President Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard so that the economy could “float.” This move allowed the U.S. government to print as much money as it needed to pay for things like an expanded military budget, which was needed for the Vietnam War. Later during the Reagan administration, such flexibility allowed the U.S. to outspend the Soviet economy with Regan’s two big-ticket items: a planned increase to an 800-ship navy, and his aborted Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed the “Star Wars” program. 

The 800-ship navy fell far short, only reaching approximately 600 ships, But that massive building program combined with the huge planned cost of S.D.I. helped bring a crushing end to the Soviet Union by putting a strain on their already struggling economy during the latter years of the Cold War.

The ability for the U.S. to simply outspend the U.S.S.R. shows the problem modern countries have when relying on gold to back its currency: for one, the lack of enough gold to back all of the currencies means that each BRICS nation may have to limit its economic policies. In addition, the volatile nature of gold, which has climbed from $2,000 an ounce in January 2024, to an all time-high of $2,800 an ounce in October 2024 means pegging any currency to its price comes with a big risk. Some analysts have suggested gold may rise to $3,000 an ounce by the end of 2025, which is the figure the BRICS nations are hoping to reach for their combined holdings of gold to meet its target of 40% of the Unit’s backing. 

But gold has since slipped from its October high down to $2,672 an ounce in December. Such volatility in the value of gold means the BRICS Unit could suffer an equivalent level of volatility. 

Even Vladimir Putin seems to have walked back his previous calls to “de-dollarize” their economics, saying at the October summit: “"We are not refusing, not fighting the dollar, but if they don't let us work with it, what can we do? We then have to look for other alternatives, which is happening." The collective assessment of the post-summit attitude seemed to be that the goal of the BRICS member nations is not to move away from the current SWIFT banking platform, dominated by the dollar, but instead to develop alternative systems for using their countries’ currencies in financial transactions between themselves and their trading partners.

It’s notable that seven of Russia’s largest banks have been banned from using SWIFT, the international banking messaging system, since 2022, following its invasion of Ukraine. This has severely limited how Russia can conduct international trade, especially currency trading. This has led Russia especially to push for alternatives to SWIFT, though the BRICS members have not yet created any meaningful alternative.

Due to these challenges and constraints, the future of a BRICS Unit remains unclear, and its future cloudy. The next year, with threats of tariffs and trade embargoes, will no doubt see a massive change between the U.S. dollar and its rivals around the world, a world in which alternatives to the dollar may seem increasingly valuable to countries that are not so strongly linked to the U.S. 

Money for Nothing

If it’s one thing we’ve learned from both Hollywood and organized religion, imagination and story-telling can provide a big payoff. Is it any different when we journey to the realm of the discussion of extraterrestrials visiting our earth?

There’s profit for the prophets, and the monetary angle of promoting little green—or gray-- men should be examined as it has an effect on the credibility of those who serve us the existence of extra-planetary humanoids on a flying saucer.

Many readers are familiar with the rather wild haired gentleman who offers his “expertise” on a variety of UFO and ET related television programs. They’re out there, and they were here, he says.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos has an unconfirmed estimated net worth of four million dollars, and the majority of his discernible expertise comes from promotion of important bodybuilding contests. He has a degree in communications, and he certainly is an excellent communicator. He’s fun to watch.

But, should we listen to him? As far as can be determined academically speaking, he has no science background, no astronomy background, no astrobiology background—just a communications degree, which isn’t exactly hovering up there in STEM land.

If we wish to listen to him, it should solely be out of politeness.

Dr. Steven Greer, a retired medical doctor, is another well known personage to those who watch “documentaries” about UFOs and ETs. Now the good doctor has a B.S. in Biology, and an MD, (which is exactly hovering up there in STEM land). He is the founder of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI).

His organization claims some 4,000 cases of traces of UFO landings. Maybe the pilots just stopped for gas and then zoomed back up to whatever planet they were from, because there has been no credible confirmation of these landings—at least none that have made main stream media.

In his 2013 documentary, Sirius, it was claimed that a fifteen inch skeleton, the Atacama skeleton was of alien origin. It wasn’t, it was, after genetic testing, human, and just the remains of a deformed individual.

It should be noted that Dr. Greer was able to retire from the practice of medicine and become a full time saucer seeker, so it’s a safe bet that his well-produced (if not well evidenced) documentaries have done rather well from a financial point of view.

The above are just two of the examples of those out there who make a living from promoting and promising the “I want to believe” X-Files types, that yes, they are out there those little green men, and they’ve been visiting us without having left a phone number to contact them.

With regards to electronic evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials, let’s take a quick look at the results of the SETI program, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

A flying visit to their site informs us that this organization which started out with two workers now has about 100. Star search must be good, but how have the SETI fellows done?

Well, according to their site, there has been no evidence of extraterrestrial life found. This organization has been around for forty years, and they have found nothing with respect to ETs. Not even a promising radio signal from out there.

Yet they have been funded for forty years.

What about the recent government investigations into extraterrestrial craft and presumably life?

These were the key takeaways from the hearing:

First, The DoD has failed to provide transparency on the existence and effectiveness of programs related to UAPs not only to Congress, but to the American people. Second, Congress and the American people have fundamental questions on the topic of UAPs and incursions near sensitive military installations. Increased disclosure and transparency are needed to provide security and information.

That’s it. No ETs were harmed—or found—in the making of this hearing. No UAP or UFO or BVD sightings were found to be extra-terrestrial. 

But what of the recently disclosed footage from Navy pilots observing unidentified aerial phenomena buzzing about in the not so friendly skies? Was there any proof adduced that they were extra-terrestrial?

No. However, they exhibited abilities not known to be possible to the pilots. Is that proof of an extraterrestrial origin? No. Pilots are pilots, they are not cleared for the kind of work that DARPA and its equivalents might be doing under wraps and that are financed by a black budget that was, in 2019 according to Trump, eighty six BILLION dollars. That can buy a whole bagful of way out wonder technology.

Advanced technology from right here on good old Gaia is zipping around for years before it’s discovered by John Q. Public. For example, we the people learned of the U-2 in 1960 when the Russians got lucky and bagged one with a missile. That plane had been operational since the mid-fifties, but until the shoot down, nobody knew who didn’t have a need to.

Why You Should Care

Ever since Klaatu came down for a visit in the 1951 The Day The Earth Stood Still, portraying an ET who cared about our welfare, a segment of the public has been seriously awaiting his return, or the factual equivalent thereof.

Fantasy is nice to play at, but when it’s funded by cold hard cash, and when it’s funded by your tax dollars, or charitable contributions, then, we need to look at this fantasy with a wide open skeptical eye.

No doubt, there are those out there who would seek to personally profit from our desire to have confirmed that we are not alone, that in fact, there is a Mr. Spaceman out there who is just waiting to come down and help us out with our math homework, so we can approach light speed in our space explorations and be disintegrated by minute particles in space hitting our craft in the process.

We especially need a peek at a black budget that at least, is seven percent of our military budget to see what kind of woo-woo is being funded and how much it’s costing, because there’s one truth out there that nobody disputes—government spending is out of control, and is often wasted on nonsense. 

THE CURRENT SITUATION REPORT

For over sixty years, there has been a lot more to Cuba then rum and cigars. 

In the past, besides a parking lot for Russian missiles during the US showdown with the Soviets in the early sixties, it was the catalyst and consultant for revolutions in South America and Africa. It also is the communist country that experienced the longest lasting single dictator in the world—Castro, and has engaged in significant hostile intelligence activities within our country. It has an excellent intelligence service, the Dirección de Inteligencia, the DI.

While travel restrictions have now eased somewhat, so that Americans can more easily visit this small impoverished oppressed country to buy cigars and see very old cars, another country has been welcomed with wide open arms—China.

It needs to be remembered that unlike Russia, China and Cuba never strayed from Communism; they were and are, old school.

China is the second largest trading partner with Cuba, and a major investor.

Chinese investment in Cuban infrastructure and development of its energy sector doesn’t come free of course. While the sinking economy and rampant inflation of Cuba does not make it a very attractive economic partner, its proximate location to the United States puts a lot of lipstick on this pig, with respect to Chinese spying efforts.

One of the most important sources of intelligence information is COMINT, or communications intelligence. There’s no risk to agents, no arrests of assets, and it is literally conducted right there out in the open, able to be set up anywhere you can plug something in and put up an antenna--and it is the reception capability of the Cuban location that attracts the Chinese with open wallets and open ears.

There are at least four potential communication intercept sites useful to the Chinese in Cuba, an island just 100 miles away from the US. Further, there is the US prison facility on Guantanamo, on the island itself, that can offer much useful information about US military activities, especially since there are two undersea communication cables that belong to the US and connected to Guantanamo that are on Cuban territory.

There is also the consideration that the Southern United States is brimming with military bases, including a variety of Special Operation facilities. There’s Homestead in Florida, along with Hulbert Field and MacDill Air force Base. There are a variety of Special Forces related bases in Georgia, and Washington D.C. is only a hop, skip, and electromagnetic jump away from Cuba.

  The Fab Four

So what are the four locations in Cuba where Beijing’s finest can listen to America’s “broadcasts”?

First up is Bejucal. It is the largest COMINT site on the island, and it has been around a long time. It has the capability to track and listen in on American satellites, and rocket launches from Florida, which the Chinese are very interested in. They invented rockets about a thousand years ago, and they like to keep up.

Then there is a new facility at El Salao, outside of the Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba, which has intercept capability ranges in the thousands of miles. This location just happens to be near a major infrastructure improvement project of the Chinese, and perhaps some of the construction engineers from China are also “engine ears” at the intercept location.

A third location is Wajay, with a dozen antennas, and they probably aren’t all tuned in to the Yankee game, although they may be listening to Yankee military communications.

The fourth is at Calabazar, and among its diverse capabilities, space communications are likely given its antennae type and array.

  Can You Hear Me Now?

Even though anything militarily or diplomatically important is going to be encrypted and therefore very difficult to understand, and fiber optic communications aren’t as easy as microwave transmissions to break into, the arcane art of traffic analysis by intelligence agencies, or in other words observing and recording the frequency (as in number of times) the location of the originating signal, and the length of the transmission provides, or can provide significant intelligence value.

Obviously, if something naughty or nice may be happening, there will be an uptick in messages and their length, which can be an indication of what that activity may be. Major military exercises, or even the reallocation of military assets as a precursor to an invasion are going to generate a lot of communication traffic.

In times of international crisis, diplomatic communication traffic is going to significantly increase in number and duration.

 Why Should You Care

China, the greatest adversary of the United States is not only upping its technology game, and significantly increasing its blue water navy, it is ramping up its intelligence efforts against our country, not only for obvious reasons such as industrial espionage and every day intelligence gathering against a potentially hostile force, but with an eye towards an upcoming direct military conflict, originating, but not necessarily limited to Taiwan and contested Pacific regions.

Especially with the incoming Trump administration that has vowed to Tariff the hell out of Chinese products, the Chinese have, besides a military interest, a significant diplomatic and economic interest in monitoring all of our communications, and Cuba is the ideal place to do that.

Of even potential greater threat, Cuba has the potential to be a staging area for Chinese military assets, and having Beijing’s bombs and boats a hundred miles from our shores, could give us pause in any negotiations with the Chinese, and in any conflict. The likelihood of this will increase the closer the world gets to a Beijing-Taiwan showdown.

Further, Cuba has been, and with Chinese assistance, can once again be a source of upheaval and regime change throughout South and Central America, via election interference, supporting of various anti-American groups within our own country, and (in an area where they are not exactly inexperienced), increasing the flow of illicit drugs within the United States.

In our previous article, we discussed why BRICS, the loose coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is currently hobbled with two larger members, Russia and China, with failing economies, and two other members, Brazil and South Africa, whose economies don’t measure up to the standards Russia and China are attempting to set.

That leaves only India as a stable, near-Western peer in terms of both an expanding economy and a government that can be trusted to lead BRICS. But why is a trustable government necessary for a leadership role?

Consider China. Its banks are wholly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The Bank of China, for example, is a state-owned Chinese corporation. There are strict regulations that investors must follow in order to withdraw funds, or to divest themselves of stakes in Chinese companies. It's not like an investor could simply call up a bank in Beijing and ask to have their millions in gold transferred to, say, Switzerland. China would forbid it, or at least, hamstring it with hundreds of regulations that any transfer would have to jump through. Currently, anyone considered a “domestic entity” (including foreigners who’ve lived in China for more than a year) are prohibited from removing funds more than $50,000. Even with that limit, these groups are still limited to using those funds for very specific applications, including training, study, travel or family support.

Despite these severe restrictions against withdrawing investments, many Western companies are doing just that. Many U.S. pension funds are already divesting themselves from Chinese companies over worries that such funds could become frozen if tensions between the two countries increase, which seems increasingly likely as the new administration comes onboard.

Then there’s the problem of Russia. It’s currently hammered by Western sanctions, and any country, even one as large and influential as China, risks being sanctioned themselves if they work with them. So despite Russia desperately wanting to be the leader of BRICS, or anything else for that matter, they’re out, too.

So, how does India look as the financial leader of BRICS? 

First of all, India is well aware that they’re walking a diplomatic tight rope between its Western allies and its desire to keep all options open by still dealing with Russia. China and Russia have both become leading buyers of Russian crude oil, as Russia has provided incentives to keep its price low and affordable. But India has angered Putin’s plans by demanding that all oil purchases have to be done in Indian rupees, rather than the Kremlin’s preference of the ruble. 

India has also angered the West by never condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and is still importing weapons made by Russia, despite being a member of QUAD, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue made up of the U.S., Australia, and Japan. But the dismal showing of Russian weapons in Ukraine is making India rethink its weapons purchases. India is taking steps to pivot to the West, specifically the U.S., in its future weapons purchases. India’s percentage of its weapons purchases from Russia has fallen from 76% in 2009 to only 39% in 2023.

These competing alliances have made India’s rise to the top of BRICS problematic. And it hasn’t gotten easier with its opposition to five new members just recently added. 

As of October of 2024, four new nations have been brought under the loose BRICS umbrella:  Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. This expansion was criticized by India, who specifically did not want to see Iran included, as they’re one of the greatest proponents of chaos in the Middle East, and whose backing of Houthi rebels has sparked a volatile situation off the Indian coast. Iran’s inclusion was also one of the reasons Saudi Arabia, who was invited to join in 2023, declined to come onboard. 

Then there’s China’s desire to pull BRICS into a more anti-U.S. position, while India wants to remain a neutral block with options open to counter what it sees as a Western-dominated economic system, including the World Bank, the E.U. and the United Nations.

Then there’s the half-century of direct conflict between India and China. Dating back to the Sino-Indian War of 1962, and continuing up to 2020, when dozens of deaths were reported over a brawl near their joint border high in the Himalayas, both countries have hurled insults and claims of aggression at each other. The 1962 conflict saw 7,000 casualties on the Indian side and a chastening rebuke they have never forgotten. China, on the other hand, feels like an occasional demonstration of their military superiority will cow its neighbors. 

There’s also fierce competition between the two countries in the South China Sea and the bottleneck that is the Strait of Malacca, which is threatened by China’s expansion into the Indian Ocean. India’s 2023 offer to provide helicopters to the Philippines, itself threatened by China’s attempts to expand its influence into Philippine territorial waters, has China wondering if India could be designated as a new “troublemaker” in the area, a term Beijing normally reserves specifically for the U.S. 

These tensions between BRICS’ two largest economies means that there will be no easy path forward for the aligned countries, especially as Both China and India are wary of falling afoul of Western sanctions currently in place against Russia. There is no clear middle ground between China’s desire to make BRICS more anti-U.S., while India has yet to persuade Xi Jinping to accept a more moderate road to economic neutrality.

Assuming for a moment that a miracle does happen, and that India and China do manage to forge a joint destiny for BRICS. What would be their most immediate goal? That point is very clear: they want an official currency to rival the U.S. dollar in international holdings. 

We’ll explore that element in the next installment on this subject. 

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On Sunday November 30th, President-elect Donald Trump said on his social media platform that he was going to slap a 100% tariff on any of the BRICS countries that tried to move away from the U.S. dollar as the World’s standard currency. But what is BRICS, and what chance do they have of creating a rival currency to the dollar? Let’s look deeper into that group, and whether they’d be able to overtake the mighty dollar.

BRICS is an acronym for a group of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Together, these five countries make up more than 40% of the World’s population, and more than 25% of the World’s economy. At first, the term BRIC was just an idea formulated in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, in a study titled "Building Better Global Economic BRICs." It became a useful term to categorize the combined economic, financial, business and media influence of the four major countries of Brazil, Russia, China and India. In 2006, the concept began to be incorporated into the foreign policy of those four nations, and in 2011, on the occasion of the Third Summit, South Africa was installed as its fifth member, which completed the acronym as the current BRICS.

In the past few years, at the urging of both Russia and China, the BRICS countries have pushed to have a greater influence in world markets. Many other nations have expressed interest in joining the current group, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Ethiopia and Bolivia, among others. But there are problems within the founding five nations that need to be ironed out before any new members could be considered.

What are those problems? Well, first off, they’re significant. At the top of the list are the struggling economies of both Russia and China. 

Russia’s economy, after dealing with the sanctions resulting from its invasion of Ukraine, combined with the loss of upwards of 750,000 young men in the war and the emigration of more than a million young people after conscription was introduced, has brought on a labor shortage that has the economy teetering on the brink of collapse. The average Russian today is dealing with a staggering one-two punch of 19% inflation and a 21% prime lending rate, one of the two highest pairings in the world, after the near-freefall economies of Argentina and Turkey. 

There are reports that prices are so high on butter in Russia that they've had to place individual packages in plastic anti-theft boxes. Butter’s price has soared almost 26% in the past year, with prices on other staples like potatoes increasing even faster. And it gets worse. The value of the ruble has fallen so low that the Russian Central bank decided to stop purchasing foreign currency on the internal market until 2025, in an attempt to support the ruble. This move followed a slide in the ruble’s value of 113 to the U.S. dollar, down nearly a quarter since August of this year. 

As bad as Russia’s economy is, China’s is not doing much better. Where Russia can’t find enough workers for its jobs, causing higher wages and driving inflation skyward, China can’t find enough jobs for its workforce. Unemployment reached a sixth-month high in August at 5.3%, while the urban youth unemployment numbers rose to a staggering 17.1%, an increase of thirty percent since June’s 13% figure. 

But China’s economic woes don’t end there. They’re facing a massive problem in their real estate market, which has been propped up for years by investment from the Chinese Central Bank, but which is now either unwilling or unable to staunch the flow of massive real estate failures. Led by the catastrophic demise of the massive Evergrande corporation, China saw an evaporation of more than $300 billion in value in that company alone, much of it invested by the Chinese government, along with the life's savings of millions of average Chinese workers. 

Evergrande, however, was only the tip of the iceberg, as more large real estate corporations began to tumble, causing Goldman Sachs to ask publicly, “Has China’s Property Market Reached the Bottom?” The problem with that question is that no, the Chinese real estate market hasn't hit bottom yet, and seems to be sinking even further. This has driven down many other sectors of China’s economy, as there are more vacant homes in China than could be filled by the country’s 1.4 billion people. 

The problem is that China’s construction and housing markets are a staple of its economy. The real estate sector alone until 2021 accounted for 25 percent of China’s GDP, 20 percent of fiscal revenue, stored 70 percent of household wealth, and took in 25 percent of bank loans. As these sectors stagnate or even vanish almost overnight, as with Evergrande, so too does China’s once-vaunted economy begin to shrink. These reductions lead to the unemployment numbers mentioned above, and China so far has no answer to this growing problem.

Meanwhile, both China and Russia have upside down population pyramids, meaning a larger number of older pensioners being supported by a smaller number of younger wage-earners. In China, the economy is seeing an unprecedented era of ‘growing old before getting rich,’ while its falling birthrate and pension crisis, combined with its ongoing housing crisis, has many older workers and retirees clamoring for the government to rescue them from ever worsening conditions. 

If neither China nor Russia can be the economic leader of BRICS, who will step forward? Not Brazil, nor South Africa. Brazil’s economy is too small, and is based on the extraction of raw materials, not the strength of its economic production. And South Africa is itself dealing with numerous problems, from soaring crime rates to its extreme level of economic inequality. 

That leaves only one country: India. And in our next article, we’ll explore why India will not rise to the leadership that BRICS so desperately needs.