Date: 11th December 1995 - Members = 228
In this mail:-
Agent Mulder told Agent Scully....
Request for interview techniques.
Puerto Rico hysteria over rumoured blood-sucking beast.
Star Trek pays tribute to Roswell 1947.
European Space Agency's latest venture into space.
"From: ISCNI*Flash
On the November 24 episode of FOX-TV's "X-Files," Agent Mulder told Agent Scully that the "Alien Autopsy" film footage, also shown on
FOX, was fraudulent. Whew. That should settle it!
"From: Jonathan Hobson
Date sent: 6 Dec 95
Recently a ufo was spotted in South Lincolnshire. As I live in
Surrey I have not seen the various news reports. When I return home for Xmas I will find the reports and type them in for this list. I am also going to try to speak to the person involved and would
appreciate it if anyone had any info on interviewing ufo witnesses, ie: interview techniques, questionnaires to get at the truth. Not
sure if this is the correct type of message for this mailing list?
Yours Hopefully - Jon
"PUERTO RICO HYSTERIA OVER RUMORED BLOOD-SUCKING BEAST
Copyright 1995 by Reuters
Nov 19, 1995
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Reuter) -- This Caribbean island is in an
uproar over reports of a mysterious blood-sucking beast, which is
said to rip the organs from its animal victims and is terrorizing
rural residents.
But the government of this U.S. territory of 3.6 million people
insists the animals died of natural causes and is urging residents
not to fall into mass hysteria over local media reports.
The beast, known in Spanish as "Chupacabras" or Goat Sucker, is
blamed in the deaths of dozens of turkeys, rabbits, goats, cats, dogs and even horses and cows, according to police.
"People here are frightened," said Mayor Jose Soto of Canovanas, a
city of 40,000 people near San Juan. "It sucks the blood from dogs, cats and horses. It opens the skin of rabbits and goats and steals
their organs."
Goat Sucker attacks are reported daily on morning news radio reports and in El Vocero, the island's largest circulation newspaper, which is known for its gruesome crime photos, blood-red headlines and tales of UFO landings.
In the latest report of a Goat Sucker attack, the beast was said to rip open the bedroom window of a house in the north-central city of Caguas, destroy a stuffed teddy bear, and leave a puddle of slime
and a piece of rancid white meat on the window sill.
The home owner, Santa Ramos Reyes, told police the Goat Sucker had
hairy arms and huge red eyes. According to El Vocero, Caguas police dusted the window sill for prints but could not get an impression.
In another attack in Caguas, the Goat Sucker purportedly swooped
into a junkyard early one morning and killed five sheep, four geese and a turkey. "It came about seven o'clock in the morning," Junker
Correa employee Carlos de Jesus told Reuters. "It just showed up and
-- poof -- it vanished."
In Canovanas, the Goat Sucker has struck 35 times in the past three months, Mayor Soto claimed. Every Sunday afternoon, the mayor dons
military-style fatigues and leads a patrol of Canovanas residents on a hunt for the Goat Sucker. "This is a very serious problem," the
mayor said. "We must catch this beast."
Police have declined to participate in the hunt, but do investigate each reported animal slaying. "As soon as the beast attacks a
person, we will get involved," said a Canovanas police spokeswoman.
Skeptics blame the attacks on wild monkeys. A colony of aggressive
monkeys has been attacking livestock and raiding crops for years in Puerto Rico. But Mayor Soto doesn't buy that explanation. "Monkeys
don't suck blood. They don't steal organs," Soto said.
The Puerto Rico Agriculture Department dispatched a veterinarian to investigate, then announced that the animals had all died under
normal circumstances. Further, none of the animals had been bled dry, agriculture department officials said in a statement released to the media.
"Citizens are urged to not fall into collective hysteria... about
the alleged Goat Sucker," the statement said.
Canovanas resident Jose Resto said he saw the Goat Sucker one
afternoon in his back yard when it came out of the brush and
attacked and bit the family dog. "I think it belongs to the monkey
family, but it isn't a monkey exactly," Resto said. "It ran like a
monkey and was about four feet tall, but it didn't have a tail."
Interest in the purported sightings of the beast is so high that a
major San Juan television station, WKAQ-TV, planned to broadcast an hour-long news program about the Goat Sucker.
"From: rec.arts.startrek.info
Little Green Men
PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS
STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE: "Little Green Men" -- A Mishap sends
Quark, Rom, and Nog back in time to Earth of 1947 in Roswell, New
Mexico, where military forces mistake them for alien invaders.
TV GUIDE AD
THE MARTIANS ARE COMING?
The year... 1947
The place... Roswell, New Mexico
The alien menace... Quark?!
TV LOG LISTING
Quark captured at Roswell/STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE.
Armin Shimerman (Quark) was one of the guests on the Ron Sedgie
(sic?) nationwide radio show on Saturday November 4th. Among the
more interesting things he said:
*He had always thought the he would remain a stage actor and not do TV or movies.
*A lady from St. Clair, Minnesota had seen the TV guide issue with
his character Quark on the cover, and irately wrote to the
producers. "I think it's horrible that you're using deformed people to promote this TV show!" They called her, and explained that it was all due to the makeup. "Well, that makeup didn't help, did it?" was her response.
*His makeup as Quark takes 2 hours to put on and 50 minutes to
remove. The Ferengi teeth are quite painful, and in fact are doing
serious damage to his jaw. While his makeup is being put on/off, he often practices/reworks his lines/scenes, often with other actors.
*He discussed the upcoming episode, "Little Green Men. We travel
back in time to the 1940's on Earth. It's an homage to the Roswell, New Mexico spaceship sightings."
Tom Gill, Lubbock, Texas
"From: The Times newspaper Interface section.
Date: November 8th, 1995.
THE MAN WHO WOULD MASTER THE UNIVERSE
The next few days will be the most nerve-wracking of Martin
Kessler's life. As Project Scientist for the European Space Agency's latest venture into space, he has spent the last ten years of his
life as part of a team devising and perfecting one of the most
extensive and finely timed scientific explorations or our age.
On Friday at 11pm local time, Kessler, 41, will watch in the
stifling heat of French Guiana as an Ariane rocket blasts off from
the Kourou space centre. Tucked into the fairing of its third stage is what Kesslerdescribes as the "Swiss Army Knife" of satellites -
the Infra-red Space Observatory. Packed with instruments capable of peering into the darkest, coldest depths of space, it will execute
thousands of tasks, fulfilling the dreams of hundreds of scientists from Europe, America and Japan.
Back home, the tension will be shared by his wife Marie - one of the many astronomers who have designed projects for ISO - and their son Christopher, 6. "He is excited," says Kessler. "He spends all his
time drawing rockets. But his only comment is 'Daddy, be home early tonight'!"
Not much chance of that for some time. After the launch, Kessler
will return to the agency's ground station at Villafranca, west of
Madrid, where he will spend at least the next 18 months monitoring
the satellite's progress - particularly the data and images that will show space in a new light.
"People are used to seeing the universe in visable light," said
Kessler. "ISO will be working at longer wavelengths, looking at cool objects - the dark, hidden universe."
Somewhere in the stream of information eagerly awaited by the
scientific world may be found evidence to support or destroy entire theories about the creation of stars, planets and galaxies. In his
wildest dreams, Kessler hopes even to find definitive evidence of
other solar systems.
Astronomers have queued around the block to take advantage of ISO's unique capabilities: more than 1,000 put forward 60,000 separate
observations to be carried out during the mission - four times more than could be accommodated. ISO's lifespan is limited to between 18 months and two years by the very technology that will open our eyes for the first time to some of the deeper mysteries of space -
cryogenic cooling by evaporation of 2,000 litres of liquid helium.
>From Earth, there is a limit to what can be seen by even the most
powerful telescopes - only a very narrow range of wavelengths gets
through the atmosphere. Another problem on Earth is sensitivity:
infra-red telescopes are looking for cold objects, and the heat
emitted by equipment is enough to ruin the picture. That's why ISO's telescope has to be kept cool.
"It's basically a giant Thermos flask," said Kessler. "We use it for keeping things cold, but if you were to fill ISO's helium tank with piping hot coffee it would take five or six years to to cool to
drinkable temperature."
He has another analogy to describe the hopelessness of peering into space from Earth in the infra-red spectrum: "It's similar to forcing an optical astronomer to work in broad daylight, using a luminous
telescope filled with disco lighting."
The 700 million pound ISO mission is building on the work carried
out ten years ago by the IRAS satellite, a joint US, Dutch and
British venture. Whereas that had a lifespan of only ten months and captured primarily a general view of space in the infra-red spectrum.
ISO could last as long as two years and has a long list of specific targets. Each day's programme will be finalised three or four days in advance and computers will execute it, using guide stars to make sure ISO is pointing in the right direction. For around 20 hours a day,
information will stream down to one of two ground stations -
Villafranca and Goldstone in California. The information will, for
the first time in such research, be pressed into unique CD-roms, each containing an individual scientist's data. The legacy of IRAS is an infra-red map of the entire sky that left astronomers hungry for
more knowledge. "Most people are familiar with the constellation
Orion. If you look at that, in between the stars it is just black. On the IRAS map there are huge explosions and implosions going on,
triggering a new generation of stars."
ISO will peer into unexplored regions of the universe, examining
cold objects in great detail - be they very old or very young stars, distant galaxies, or even planets. "The sensitivity of the telescope is always difficult to understand. If you take a one-inch ice cube
from the fridge, ISO would easily detect its heat radiation from a
distance of more than 100km."
This sensitivity will be used to test various theories about how the planets were formed. One of the key indicators is thought to be the proportions of hydrogen (which must come first) and heavy hydrogen - deuterium. ISO will focus on the atmospheres of the giant planets - Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. "For the first time we will be able to
measure the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in such detail that it
will enable us to rule out some of the possibilities."
Another subject of ISO's gaze will be Titan, one of the larger moons of Saturn. Its methane-based atmosphere is thought to have
similarities to the Earth's before the evolution of life.
Further out, ISO will examine the secrets of the comet belts,
thought to be material left over from the formation of the solar
system, to learn more about the formation of that system. ISO will
also probe the stellar nurseries concealed in the dense clouds of gas and dust, to learn more about how stars form.
The search for other solar systems is one of the main preoccupations of the mission, which has scheduled about 200 hours for this purpose alone. "Theories of how our solar system formed would easily allow
for there to be many others in the galaxy. It is one of our major
goals; from IRAS onwards there has been increasing evidence of other solar systems. With ISO we hope to find the smoking gun," says
Kessler.
Far, far away from home, ISO will be taking a peek into the hearts
of other galaxies, and the perculiar objects, the so-called
ultra-luminous galaxies, that appear to have huge amounts of energy in the infra-red region - possibly huge black holes gobling up stars.
Looking backwards in time, ISO will be making deep surveys to search for young galaxies in the process of forming. Man has surveyed space pretty thoroughly, but the picture at infra-red wavelengths remains sketchy. ISO will fill in the details: "To understand what is
happening in the universe, you need to look at it with the widest
possible range of wavelengths and the most sensitivity. ISO will
bring us a multitude of new information on the formation and
evolution of planets, stars and galaxies, but one of the most
exciting things about ISO is what it is going to bring us that we
can't anticipate. We just hope for surprises."
On Friday, Kessler will watch as the fruits of the past ten years of his life shudder heavenwards at the top of the tried and tested
Ariane 4 rocket. "It will be extremely nerve-wracking," says Kessler.
I think the worst time will be the minutes after liftoff, when it is climbing through the atmosphere, and ten days later when the cryostat cover is removed and the telescope opens its eyes for the first time.
We have done many predictions and tests, but the proof of the pudding will be up there in space."
[The progress of the mission can be followed on the Internet, via
one of ESA's home pages http://www.estec.esa.nl]
"Dave.
UNITED KINGDOM UFO MAILING LIST
ufo@holodeck.demon.co.uk
The groups WWW page has now closed.
I am hoping to have a new up to date
WWW site starting within the next
couple of months.
