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INDEX

Confusion, Disinformation, Communication.
Published during 1976/77, "HOW REAL IS REAL?", by Paul Watzlawick, would reveal many of the structures and patterns of ritualistic imprinted and modeled reactive behaviour, assumptions of rationalistic thinking, expectations of fear-based superstitions, and spurious conclusion trends of anxiety dominated experience which humans constantly utilize as a basis for decisionmaking, motivation, and belief.

While one example of public and popular disinformation, "Alternative 3" would soon be published, this year would neither be a threshold, starting point of end to the use of disinformation within and by societies for the purpose of control and manipulation of the individuals who aggregrate to form the masses. Whether such lies, prejudices, assumptions or inuendo originated in 500 B.C. or 1996 A.D., the spiritually deadening and mental enslavement (brainwashing) influence would be substantial in preventing the spiritual growth of humanity and in denying the spiritual growth of the individual.

Like a cancer permeating most politically structured human groupings - from tribes to nations to multinationals - disinformation weakens the ability of the peoples so dominated to constructively cope with current, recurrent, and prophetic disasters. The major reason for the death of most civilizations and empires in the history of humanity is the development of rigid, irrelevant and destructive forms of coping.

Some extracts from Watzlawick include these:

" This book ( How Real is Real? ) is about the way in which communication creates what we call reality. ... And the most dangerous delusion of all is that there is only one reality.

And here is a final paradox. All those who have tried to express the experience of the pure Now have found language to be woefully inadequate."

While most of the references to "Alternative 3", the story from the book and not the concept itself - have been extracted from the history files (They were included in an early version to show what ONE disinformation project, even well intended, could influence) and collected in the Appendix, Z30-ALT3.CON, a number have been left in this 1977-78 file. Before looking at the appendix, see if you can easily determine which entries in this file are based on fact and which are a record of an effective and attempted mass delusion - the result of fantasy.

Imagination enables humans to "play" with the facts of personal experience and test for similarities, correlations, patterns and apparent randomness of relationship between individual events. Fantasy constructs a reality which has only a fleeting similarity to the reality of experience. Humans who are dependent upon fantasy to bring "life" into their experience betray the weakness of their spirit, a diminished lack of self-esteem, and a basic avoidance of participation in the reality surrounding them. Their dependence upon fantasy is a reflection of their low level of awareness - of themselves and their surroundings.

Like an autistic child, the fantasy dominated have chosen to create a fiction reality within their minds to replace the true reality for which they lack constructive coping skills. This is the true destructive quality of fantasy: it can become an addiction of mental masturbation in which the individual takes increasing delight and satisfaction is being able to create an artificial experience which appears to safeguard the sensitive ego from the potential risks of pain, and joy, which are part of the experience of interrelating with other living and non-living entities. Disinformation promotes the development of cultural fantasy; fantasy dulls the awareness of the individual and increases the susceptibility of the individual to deception and manipulation by a control-motivated entity. The result is individual and cultural schizophrenia.

Memory Stimulators.
1977 - HIGHLIGHTS:

Movies:

Black Sunday; Star Wars; Red Alert; Annie Hall; An Enemy of the People; Semi-Tough, Telefon; A Bridge Too Far; The Deep; New York, New York; Slap Shot; The Pink Panther Strikes Again; A Star is Born; Exorcist II; Black Sunday; The Spy Who Loved Me; Smokey and the Bandit; The Eagle Has Landed; Equus; Ruby; Close Encounters of the Third Kind; The White Buffalo; The Turning Point; Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown; Oh God!; World's Greatest Lover; Why Shoot the Teacher?; Twilight of Love; The Choirboys

NEWS:

Consumer Price index: 181.5

   Examples of American Cost of Living 
   ====================================
 One-Family Home:                    $54,400
 Annual College Costs - Harvard       $7,060
 Intermediate sized car:              $4,887
 Monthly Electric Bill:         $26.00
 Haircut:                        $3.00
 Gasoline per Gallon:            $0.64
 Daily Newspaper:                $0.20
 First Class Postage stamp:      $0.13
 Production Worker Gross Earnings:   $11,740; 
   after tax earnings as a % of Gross: 86

Sometime during 1976/77,
A Biosafety Level 2 agent later known as the AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) viral complex began spreading to humans out of the Congo-Zaire rainforest in central west Africa. Infected humans travelled along the Kinshasa Highway toward the Atlantic coast. Highly lethal but not very infective, it is communicated between persons, not through the air but by the interchange of bodily fluids. AIDS would come to be most frequently transfered through rough, forced, or anal sexual intercourse; the communal use of hypodermic needles by drug addicts and abusers; blood transfusions; and in some cases by kissing.

1977 - By this year,
"The Perimeter Acquisition Radar Characterisation System" (PARCS), a phased array radar system, was in operation to support the USA Safeguard ABM system in North Dakota. It would remain one of the most capable sensors in the Space Surveillance Network of the USA, making covert launches by private concerns in the USSR and the USA and UFO movements more difficult to go unnoticed.

1977 - By January,
The Monetarist theory of economics has gained political acceptance.
Most notably Milton Friedman and his followers, maintain that recessions are caused by declines in the rate of expansion of the money supply. The monetarist school of economic thought teaches the principle of setting annual targets for growth in the money supply, say 3%-4% annually, as the best means to achieve stable growth in the economy and control inflation. Government spending and taxation, and bank credit and reserve protection are not considered as important considerations.

The monetary policy focuses on controlling government monetary measurements and may achieve one objective at the expense of others. A lower inflation rate may precipitate extreme volatility in interest rates and an economic recession. Also, there is no inclusive definition of the money supply itself nor is there any dependable statistic from which to gauge its level. This is partially because of the increasing amount of capital which remains hidden to consideration by economists and politicians: black market and underworld banking, private banks, barter, unrecorded income.

The Monetarist theory acknowledges that a capitalistic economy MUST have continual expansion of the money supply in order to have continual profit. Without continual economic expansion the system begins to implode on itself. Rather than consider the problem as a failure to be able to maintain a balance, the political and academic leadership involved remain obsessed with justifying ways to continue doing what has been done in the past.

1977 - On January 3,
Louise Zinsstag wrote about Eduard Albert Meier to Timothy Good, a British UFO researcher:

"... I can't get rid of the idea that this (space)woman Semjase does him no good ... I am sure that within a rather short time she will let him drop, because it is out of the question for him to fulfill her wishes .... What he misses is a name, a good one, and he will never get that because he was in prison as a youngster. And most of all he misses a real education, although I must say his technical knowledge is absolutely astonishing. He seems to have gotten a certain pre-education in his early twenties while he travelled in Syria and Jordon, which serves him well for understanding the difficult things Semjase talks through with him ..."

Zinsstag, an educated cultured woman in the 1970's still wondered, like some of her associates, if Meier was a witch under the magic spell of one! So-called modern human societies harbour the same iniquities which have plagued human societies since humans gained conscious rational abilities: a distrust for anything simple on the basis that the more complex and sophisticated something or someone is, the more "intelligent" and worthy they should be. The key word is "should", often treated as "must"; in reality, the key phrase is "seldom are". Such is humanity that truth is judged not on the spiritual level of relevance and reality; truth is judged on the image-ineering level of social acceptance, political power, financial wealth, physical attractiveness, and spiritual inertness. What greater indication can a culture have of inevitable failure?

During his 4th and 7th contact with Semjase, Meier was told of the Pleiadian propulsion system that allowed the beamships to transcend distance and time. She said:

"For travelling through cosmic space a drive is necessary which surpasses the speed of light many times over. But this propulsion can come into action only when the speed of light is already attained. This means that the beamship needs at least two drives - a normal drive which provides acceleration up to the speed of light, and a second hyper-drive, as you would call it. With this we are able to paralyse time and space simultaneously. They collapse into null time and null space. And only when time and space have ceased to exist are we capable of travelling through distances of light years in a tiny particle of a second. This is done so quickly that living forms are not aware of it.

The reason we need 7 hours to reach Earth is because first we must fly far into space before we can convert to hyper-speed. We then come back out of the hyper-space condition far outside of your solar system, and fly to here once more in normal drive.

... your advanced scientific circles are already working on systems known as light-emitting drives and 'tachyon' drives. The elemental principles are already known to them. The light-emitting drive serves as the normal propulsion system to move the ships to the limits of space and time. Once there, the tachyon drive is brought into action. This is the hyper-propulsion system, which is able to force space and time into hyper-space. We use other names, but the principles are exactly the same."

Tom Welch would not hear of this information for more than a year.
When he did, he would find that specialists either connected with NASA or with companies like "General Dynamics" had been quietly working on such a propulsion system. Yet Meier had written notes on the system from a formal education equivalent to the 5th or 6th grade. He did not live near major libraries or major scientific centres. Meier had no immediate contacts with persons working in those fields. At the time, most physicists did not know what the word "tachyon" meant, and, to further apply the concept to space propulsion was a huge step to make.

Shinichi Seike of the "G Research Lab" at Uwajima City, Ehime, Japan would include a chapter on the Properties of Tachyon in his book "The Principles of Ultra Relativity".

1977 - On January 6,
In Montreal, Quebec - Mrs. Florida Malboeuf, of Casgain Street on looking out of her window at 1:00 A.M. saw a strange looking object drifting above the rooftop of the house across the street. It was dome-shaped, and resembled a flattened oyster with a chain of bright lights around its rim which almost blinded her. She estimated the object to be about 20 feet wide. After seeing 2 humanoids for several minutes that apparently came from and went back to the craft, she saw it leave. Three other persons saw it above the local Rosemont subway station.

1977 - The Winter 1976/77
Results in so much snowfall in the northeastern U.S.A., including 44 consecutive days of snowfall in Buffalo, New York state, that it is declared the worst of the century. This increases concern over the possibility of an imminent new ice age as snowbound cities leave persons freezing to death in their cars. A half million American workers are laid off for lack of energy supplies and an energy crisis is expected.

The television series "In Search Of" presents an episode later in the year titled "The Coming Ice Age".
It is mentioned that signs of a dramatic freezing period are found indicated in ice samples judged to be 89,000 years ago and indications suggest that some event had resulted in considerable clouding of the atmosphere: volcanic, meteoric, or something else undetermined. New York, U.S.A. is gauged at having been under a mile thick of ice 18,000 years ago. Other indications suggest that the climate, on average, has been gradually getting colder over the past 3000 years with this warm spell lasting 10,000 years to the present. Suggestions are made by scientists to use nuclear detonations to raise the global climate temperatures or the spreading of soot on polar ice. If the polar ice was melted it would rise sea levels by 180 feet.

1977 - On January 23,
"Roots", a 12-hour serialization of Alex Hailey's semi-fictional history tracing Haley's ancestry from Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka African youth captured by slave traders in 1767, began on American television. Haley agreed to the TV broadcast favoured over his original preference of a movie because he could see more of his book in a serialization on TV, and television was believed to be the medium able to reach the greatest number of people. The series would produce a rebellion of American black culture in which black Americans would feel a kinship to Haley's description of his family's history. In turn, because little of Haley's history is positive, reaction against white Americans and the dominant white American institutions would develop. A sentimental portrayal, Roots, encourages the viewer to feelings of judgementalism, anger, rage, and self-obsession - non of which are spiritual in context.

It is not that the story is untrue but rather that it is not relevant to the origins of most African Americans: it was a half-truth. Most were sold by their tribes to the British merchants as slaves not even during a period of African environmental hardship. Slaving had long past been part of the tribal African culture before the Europeans arrived. Once in Europe, not all slaves were abused and mistreated as Haley suggests. Blacks were frequently made the slave supervisors on the plantations and larger commercial ventures, and it was Blacks who mistreated and disciplined other Blacks as often as it was a White. Particularly at the farm level, it was not unusual for the family of the white landowner to work in the fields beside the Black slave.

American slaveowners were completely unaware of the long present slave customs in many other parts of the world; hence, customs granting freedom to the slave under certain circumstances were not adopted in America. Also, unlike much of the rest of global human commerce in slaves, the purchaser, in America, was more often poor and uneducated than wealthy and educated. The worst of human factors led to the worst abuse of an institution indicative of the weaknesses of a state-dependent, or, materially-oriented society.

The use of the mass media in this instance again promoted unspiritual values in the culture from a position of drama and incitement rather than from a focus of understanding, forgiveness, and prevention. The American drug trade would largely be concentrated in Black neighbourhoods to the end of the century. It would represent Black American enslaving Black American with the owner-dealers making a living by making others dependent upon them. Roots did not enable them to become spiritually free of a possible abusive past; it prompted rebellion so that some Black Americans could have the material benefits had by some White Americans: abuse, manipulation, deception - all justified by the crude human feelings of anger, pride, greed, envy, vice.

1977 - The January 24 issue of "Maclean's"
Prints "The god that failed", an article by Walter Stewart, describes the failure of overdependency on the state.
The modern welfare state, in countries like Sweden, Canada, Britain, Austria, Denmark, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other states - has failed to provide efficient desired necessary services to the people it is to serve. Rather than individuals taking responsibility for some of the usual risks of industrialized mass culture by voluntary self-sacrifice and planning, they have increasingly left the burden to bureaucrats. The difficulty has been that bureaucratic systems do not respond to individual needs, require extensive and costly reporting systems, must intellectually justify each activity, and, are often redundant when their programs are activated because of the lengthy development time required. Noting from the article:

"... a Swedish civil servant complains that 'nobody wants to do anything for himself anymore; it's all up to the state.' ... generous pensions, its health plan, free education, unemployment benefits, income supplements ....

At the ministry of social welfare in Vienna, Dr. Elizabeth Weiser complains that 'Austria is really on the way to George Orwell's 1984. For everything there is protection, but we have to pay for it all with taxes. ... Officially, I am a fervid socialist and turn up for the parade on May 1 with a placard, but personally I abhor it all.' ...

(In Scotland) Along the debris-strewn streets, row upon row of grimy tenements stand, with crumbling facades, broken sidewalks and boarded-up windows. The people who live here are poor. They are neat, well-dressed and cheerful. But their surroundings are old, crowded, sagging and dilapidated. Jill Bradbury, a researcher with Scotland's volunteer housing program, Shelter, explains that 'there are about 15,000 people on the waiting list for housing in this area, yet you see these places boarded up. There is no money to rehabilitate them. Something just isn't working.' ...

In Denmark, there are complaints about a gleaming new hospital with nine empty floors; in West Germany, groaning taxpayers have seen the cost of medical insurance triple in five years; in France, the social security budget is running a 2-billion-dollar deficit; in the Netherlands, social spending has doubled over the past 13 years; in Britain, concern over the swollen cost of health and social security - now running at about $27 billion a year - is matched by complaints about run-down facilities, waste and stupidity. ...

Canada's welfare bill soared from 2.6 billion in 1965 to $14.3 billion a decade later, and there is no end in sight. Government spending, of which welfare is a major part, now totals more than 40% of Canada's Gross National Product; that is higher than the burden on beleaguered Britain ... something happened on the road to Nirvana; the gap between rich and poor has not been eliminated, nor even greatly narrowed; health standards have improved, but numerous deficiencies remain; and as for opportunities, well, the right school tie, the correct church, the proper parents or an advantageous marriage are often still as useful aids to advancement as brains and diligence. ...

In Britain, welfare accounts for one third of all public spending in a nation close to bankruptcy - and still the benefits are meagre. ... Austria spends 18% of its GNP for 'social purposes'...

In fact, in many countries, benefits discriminate in favour of the affluent.
... The regulations are frequently so complex that the bureaucrats themselves can't find their way through the undergrowth. ... hospital staff behaved with callous stupidity.

In Britain's welfare state, the poverty cycle has not been broken, nor even badly bent. Sociologist J.C. Kincaid of Leeds University, in a study of "Poverty And Equality In Britain", contends that 'during the period 1960-72 it would appear that there has been almost a doubling of the numbers below, or just above [the poverty line]. ... less and less egalitarian, self-defeating and increasingly irrational.' ... Arthur Seldon, an economist with the "Institute of Economic Affairs" in London ... notes that 'the original idea was to take from the rich and give everyone a minimum floor of services, and that was fine. But now we are taxing people so much that those with below average incomes are paying for the benefits. ... the welfare state has encouraged tyranny in bureaucrats and crookedness in private citizens, who apply for benefits they don't need because, after all, they paid for them. 'There is a certain amount of arrogance and bullying on one side, and a certain amount of opportunism on the other. It becomes a war of all against all.'...

The way of the United States has been to adopt some bits and pieces of the welfare state and reject others. ... The resulting mishmash is neither cheap nor effective ... U.S. spending on social welfare rose from $50 billion in 1960 to $171 billion in 1971. If the increase alone - $121 billion - had been divided among the nations 25 million poor, every family of four would rejoice in an annual income of $19,200. Poverty would disappear. But most of the money vanishes on its way through the system; today, the United States has just as many poor as it had in 1960. It also has more bureaucrats and higher bills. ...

The U.S. approach tends to be both more demeaning and less fair than the European one. ... The failures of the European welfare state are written in red ink; the failures of the U.S. system are often written in uglier materials, such as blood. In Britain, they complain about the insolence of office; in the United States, about rats eating babies. ... In Sweden, the disadvantaged complain of the high cost of decent food; in the United States the poor often eat dog food. A Senate committee on nutrition reported in 1974 that 'one third of the pet food purchased in slums is eaten by humans,' and a more recent study suggested that 'pet foods constitute a significant part of the diet of at least 225,000 households, affecting some one million persons. ...

Arthur Seldon ... believes that most of the welfare system could be scrapped and replaced by a negative income tax; those who need help would get it automatically, in the form of cash .... Scotland's Trevor Davies: 'We think if you put the planning into local hands, into voluntary agencies, self-help groups, and so forth, instead of trying to run everything through a centralized bureaucracy, you would save money and provide better service.' ...."

Increasingly, mass humanity is facing problems of mass proportions in an unstable industrial economy in which the dependency of the individual on the state and on other members of the society is high relative to that of agricultural economies, or hunting and gathering societies. With humanity's large numbers, the latter two types of social organization are impossible now because there simply isn't enough land. And the raised material level of the industrial lifestyle is unlikely to be voluntarily abandoned by the privileged human.

The half-truth left out of the equation by the politicians, known since the time of classic Greece, and necessary for a view of reality - is that industrial-base economies have only prospered in human Earth societies when they were expansive: increasing their domination or control over other societies, usually attended by military production subsidized by the state infusing massive amounts of capital into the economic system.

1977 - On February 8,
"The Enterprise", a U.S.A. North American Rockwell space shuttle craft is attached to a 747 and tested at Edwards Air Force Base. It is a result of X-15 and lifting body technologies which have proven to be unsuitable for operation both in space and in the atmosphere.

1977 - On February 14,
Lawrence McCool was driving along Highway 90 and was near the intersection of 90 and Route K, near Pineville, Missouri, trying to find the strange orange light that others had reported during the previous few nights. Reaching the crest of a hill, he suddenly saw a domed disc, not more than 75 feet above the ground, hovering over the trees, shining brightly and in the midst of a bright orange glow. His CB radio wouldn't work, his truck slowed, the lights went out, and the engine stalled. The weather was sleeting. McCool noticed a slight dome on top of the disc shape and he thought the outer edge and the centre were brighter than the rest. He estimated its size at 18 feet in diameter and between 4 and 6 feet thick. It hovered for several minutes and then faded from sight, and the radio, lights and engine came back to normal.

1977 - On February 27,
"The Chemistry of Smoking", the title of an article, was published in "Time" magazine.
The views of Columbia psychologist Stanley Schachter were expressed:

"Almost any smoker can convince you and himself that he smokes for psychological reasons or that smoking does something positive for him ... We smoke because we're physically addicted to nicotine. Period. ... withdrawal symptoms: increased eating, irritability and poorer concentration. ... Smoking doesn't reduce anxiety or calm the nerves. Not smoking increases anxiety by throwing the smoker into withdrawal. ... stress depletes body nicotine, and the smoker has to puff more to keep at his usual nicotine level. The key is the acidity of urine. One result of anxiety and stress is a high acid content in the urine. Highly acidic urine flushes away more body nicotine than normal urine does. ... smokers who were administered mild acids (vitamin C and Acidulin) in heavy doses smoked more over a period of days than comparable smokers who took bicarbonates to make their urine more alkaline."

His tests also show that bicarbonates reduce smoking under stress.
One experiment indicates that partygoing increases the acidity of the urine for smokers and non-smokers alike.

"It follows that the concerned smoker should take the Alka-Seltzer before - not after - the party. ... the smoker's mind is the bladder. ... it's probably a good guess that the low-tar brands are hooking millions of teen-agers. ... Now so many brands are so weak that the kids don't get sick enough to stop right away. They just get hooked. ... It's possible to control and restrict smoking, but the price appears to be a chronic state of withdrawal."

While billions of dollars were spent on military expenses during a period of undeclared war, and hundreds of millions of dollars went to advertise and politically lobby in favour of smoking, research into the causes, possible remedial and cure programs and prevention programs received minimal support. Obviously, the leaders of both Communist, Capitalist and Socialist industrial based nations believed that an addicted citizen is easier to manipulate and deceive than a clear headed person with a greater degree of awareness and self-control.

1977 -
Ron Cargile, in Feb/Mar, near Pinewood, Missouri, had heard of the sightings locally on his CB radio but was sceptical.
He decided he would take a look, so he went E. on Route K, crossed E, and stopped on the local high point. Just after 10:00 P.M., the CB was buzzing with static. Off to the left he saw an orange glow rise from the woods and begin drifting towards the large tree in front of him. The object was very bright and Cargile thought it was no more than 5 or 10 feet in diameter. He could see that it was disc-shaped with a dome on top and a band of colored metal that ran around the center of it. The object seemed to come toward him, suddenly veering away from him and passing behind the closest tree. The radio interference faded, Cargile started his truck and headed home.

1977 - During the year,
Near Valensole, France, a friend of Maurice Masse had an unusual experience.
It was broad daylight in fine weather and he was driving his John Deere Diesel tractor when the engine died. His transistor radio, powered by batteries, also stopped. He then became aware of a sort of whirlwind or atmospheric vortex to his right. Although he could not see any object, there was a definite phenomenon that moved away from him and ascended along a ridge, twisting the tops of the pine trees violently as it moved up, scattering the leaves from other tall trees. Parallels with crop circle phenomenon were drawn by some investigators.

When the phenomenon had passed, the tractor started normally.
One of the radio batteries was found completely dry a few days after the sighting.

1977 - During 1977,
A series of events took place on Crab Island, near Sao Luis, Brazil, in which one man died and two were severely burned by light rays shone on them from hovering craft at night.

1977 -
Third Country Bankers Acceptances become an additional norm for international trade and finance.
It is drawn on a bank in a country other than the country of the importer or exporter, and paid in the national currency of the accepting bank. Also called "refinance bills", they become favoured by exporters to obtain bank financing at competitive rates. Since the mid-1970s, Japanese and South Koreans have financed a large portion of their exports, including exports to European countries, through bankers' acceptances denominated in US dollars, which accounts for much of the growth of these acceptances through the 1980s.

1977 - During April,
Eduard Albert Meier and his family were moved from Hinwil, Switzerland to Schmidruti.
The farm was described by some who saw it as "an abandoned 50 acres of weeds, mud, and outbuildings falling down. It had no electricity and no running water. Beneath the 3-foot flood in the cellar lay 2 feet of mud. Old and diseased trees on the land bore little or no fruit, and underbrush grew thick in the surrounding forest. Water that could have been used for irrigation flowed at will, eroding the land in some places while leaving other sections dry." With the help of his friends, Meier began immediately to renovate the place.

Electricity and plumbing would come later.
First they removed the mud (from the basement of the house) by shovel and replaced it with dry gravel and poured concrete. Then, they put in vegetable gardens, damned and directed the water, filled ponds with irrigation, shored sagging walls on the barns and farmhouse until they could be rebuilt, and reshingled the roofs. Meier taught everyone how to do the work and it was done at every hour and day possible. Remember that he only had one arm.

His abductions and visitations continued throughout this period with his frequent disappearance in the middle of the day followed by his working in his office from midnight to three or four in the morning, when it was quiet. One day while some of the volunteers were up on a carriage house roof preparing to shingle it, Billy (Meier) came up the ladder behind one of the workers, and, suddenly, disappeared. Five or six people were always working around the building at the time; no one saw him leave, nor return. Four hours later, Meier suddenly reappeared, sitting on a cement slab by the barn, smoking a cigarette and appearing peaceful as he always did when he returned from a contact.

On another occasion, Billy had gone off into the woods to one of his visitations and had been gone some hours when, after momentarily having looked away, Engelbert looked back at a large nearby meadow to see Meier standing in the middle with no trees nearby to have concealed his arrival. He appeared to have arrived out of nothing. Herbert Runkel stayed with the Meiers for 6 months, through to the Fall, and while he constantly looked for anything that would reveal Meier to be a fraud he found nothing.

1977 - On May 1,
Dr. Carl Otto Aly, M.D., administrator of a 90-bed clinic in Sweden, in a lecture given at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City, New York, noted that

"Constipation is something of a beginning for cancer."

1977 - On May 2,
Mildred Andrews, head of the organ department of the faculty of music, University of Oklahoma, she stated that:

a) The human voice "is probably the greatest musical instrument we have";
b) Society must guard against using music so much that it is cheapened;
c) Today we "seem to be afraid of silence";
d) "I feel that music can so envelop us that the art can be cheapened"; and,
e) Music should not be "used in the church to escape silence, 
                                            but as a real aid to worship."

1977 - In May,
The British Parliament voted two to one to process radioactive wastes into solid glass at Windscale, Cumbria, for above-ground storage. This will permit ease of monitoring and repair. Secondly, some use may be found for the fission products.

1977 - During May,
"Stress blamed for passive men, wild wives", a newspaper article, appeared in the "Manchester Guardian" and was reprinted in numerous other North American papers. Dr. Pierre Mornell of Mill Valley, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California's medical school and author of a book on sexual relations, was reported to have discovered a "marital syndrome" he termed "passive men and wild, wild women."

Statistics now give a one in three marriage to divorce chance in the United States, and one in two chance of divorce in California. This is how he describes an evening at home with a passive man:

"He arrives around 7 p.m. exhausted from a day at the office. He has usually spent his day dealing with people and their problems and he' had it up to his eyeballs. He wants to hide, withdraw, retreat from everyone - including (or especially) his family. He has a drink or two, reads the newspaper, wolfs down his dinner paying only token attention to his wife, maybe a little more to the kids, and withdraws behind the television's Monday night football game or Tuesday night's movie. Remaining glued to the set through the 11 p.m. news, he usually comes to bed with his wife (who is) already asleep."

As home life deteriorates he may not arrive until 11 p.m.
He is probably having an affair. Or, ... (he) has three stiff drinks before dinner, a bottle of wine with it, and nods off on the couch - a cosy convenience he uses in order not to risk the demands of the marital bed.

This kind of retreat causes his wife to make greater demands for ... "something he is not giving her." This causes him to retreat further. "She feels more pressured, becomes abusive. He retreats further. She becomes hysterical, bitchy." And then, the "wild, wild woman .... The relationship deteriorates as the husband lapses into total silence and the wife "loses control." ... (frequency of sexual relations diminishes to once or twice a month and) increased causes of impotence and premature ejaculation (occur). He says wives often focus their frustration on the man's lack of help in the house.

"Dirty clothes lying around or unwashed dishes (when its his turn) often lead to tremendous power struggles and unmitigated rages. These in turn lead to the psychiatrist's couch - or divorce. ... I think she keeps goading her husband because unconsciously she is threatened by the power she is developing over him."

More profoundly, (Mornell) blames male passivity on modern industrial society in which pressures of work have produced the absentee father, thus removing a son's chance of following a "necessary" masculine model. And while the modern middle-class father follows goals outside the home ... he becomes more critical of male efforts inside. Thus the passive father begets the passive son - a man who approaches his marriage in a negative manner.

Mornell dislikes America's reliance on an increasingly passive culture, dependant on pills and alcohol, which reaches its nemesis in television - "The epitome of passivity in society where an average American home has the (television) set on for more than seven hours a day. The female victims of passive men describe their men ... as "weak, immature, absent, ineffectual, indifferent, uninvolved, inactive, uncaring - or another child needing care." The doctor has only one prescription: Work on a marriage as you would work on a job.

This "syndrome" expanded throughout industrialized societies.
The "educated" intellectualizing, material-centred spouses strove for material goals which subverted the spiritual goals they had volunteered to follow at the alter. Society often demanded unreasonable commitment to one's career as the price for participation and advancement. Most such societies promote and educated their citizens to follow authoritarian relationship communication patterns including rigid role definition and familial expectations.

Mass media advertising and entertainment reinforced this imprinting and conditioning. While short-term focus on one's profession is not unreasonable, long-term primary commitment to one's job can only lead to feelings of abandonment and betrayal in the spouse. Lack of communication and emotional distance, brought on by chronic tiredness, encourages miscommunication, victimization, abuse, anger and vengeance. At the root of much of the problem is the structure of the society: authoritarian passive-aggressive relationships rather than assertive empowered ones.

Working in a society in which the individuals have been educated and prepared to cope with reality by the use of positive coping skills does not unnecessarily burden one with the emotional and communication problems of others. Such positive coping skills include positive self-esteem, positive self-direction, positive expectation and planning, assertiveness communication, positive self-responsibility, positive relaxation, expression of reverence, and others. This choice has been offered to North American and other technically advanced societies over the last 3 decades with little acknowledgement by societal leaders and virtually no interest shown by the individual participants. The resulting degradation, anarchy and dissolution of relationships amongst the participants has produced a continually weakening society.

1977 - On May 30,
Luis "Boyet" Mijares told his mother that he had received a phone call saying his father was alive and inviting the boy to come and see him. He insisted upon going. "Tibo" Mijares had been a Philippine newspaper columnist. He knew that under a dictatorship and martial law, the best way to survive was to flatter who could pay you. He had written a favourable column in the government-controlled "Daily Express" and was welcome into Marcos office almost any time without appointment. He had served as "Media Advisory Council" for the regime. A lawyer by training and married to a judge, Mijares was also president of the "National Press Club." A highly intelligent man of practical morals, he left a trail of misappropriated funds, bad debts, rubber checks, and petty extortions. When Imelda turned against him, it was time to leave.

Late in 1974, Mijares had rashly accused Kokoy Romualdez of cheating the Lopez family.
Kokoy warned him, "You will see what will happen to you. I will tell this to my sister."

On February 20, 1975, Mijares issued a statement declaring his severance of relationship with the Malacanang Palace, morally and as an employee. Ferdinand first tried to discredit Mijares. For awhile, Mijares catered to both sides, feeding information to both about the other. Beginning in May, 1975, Mijares began receiving offers of bribes from the Marcos regime. On June 16, he received a phone call from Ferdinand. He was offered a bribe of $50,000 not to testify. It would be war if he refused.

Mijares testified and requested political asylum.
Ferdinand had offered Mijares $100,000 to recant his testimony and retire to Australia.
On April 27, 1976, "Conjugal Dictatorship" by Luis Mijares was published to the great embarrassment of the Marcoses.

By February, 1977, Mijares himself had disappeared.
Mihares phoned his wife, Manila Judge Priscilla Mijares, saying he was taking a Pan American flight to Guam. He left in the company of Querube Makalintal, a Marcos intelligence officer posing as a revenue attache at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco. Fabian Ver also boarded the same flight. They changed to a Philippines Air Lines flight to Manila in Guam. NISA agents met the trio at the airport in Manila and took Mijares to Ver's headquarters at Fort Bonifacio, where he was put in a dungeon.

On May 30, Mijares 16-year-old son had gone to see his father.
His body was later found dumped outside Manila. His eyeballs were protruding, his hands, feet and genitals mangled, his head bashed in, and his chest perforated with multiple stab wounds. The mutilation was typical of incidents where, to extract information from an uncooperative prisoner, another member of the family was grotesquely tortured in front of the other. That had not been the case here. The vengeance of the Marcoses had been to have the father forced to see and hear the torture and mutilation of his son.

1977 - By June 6,
The oculometer, a device developed by the Honeywell Radiation Center in Lexington, Massachusetts, had been in use by advertisers for some months. Originally developed to monitor unobtrusively the eye movements of astronauts, the infra-red beam of the device is directed at the eye of the subject and the portion reflected by the cornea is detected by a sensor. The angle of the reflected light is determined electronically and the result is that the operator knows where the focus of the subject's eye is directed.

Following a study of housewives looking at advertisements, the following was determined:

    1. A person in a commercial commanded instant visual attention;
    2. Products and slogans are noticed after the persons depicted;
    3. Attention spans of the viewers were short: 4 seconds or less.

While many possible civilian benefits have been suggested, it is noteworthy that psychologist James Porterfield, at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has used the oculometer to study whether the eyes could control military weapons normally operated by hand. Within a year, weapons would be manufactured designed for such operation; they would be used in war within 11 years.

1977 - During the last week of June,
William S. English, a Data Analyst for the USAF Security Services Command stationed in England at RAF Chicksands, viewed what would become termed the "Grudge/Blue Book Report #13". It detailed abduction and mutilation of humans by spacebeings, observation of UFOs, military encounters, and a variety of technical and engineering concepts tremendously advanced beyond the sophistication of modern humans. By the second week of July, English was met on check-in by an Air Security policeman and instructed to see the base Commander immediately.

He was escorted by 2 officers to the Headquarters's Building where a Colonel Robert Black informed him that he was being discharged and sent back to the USA. Although a civilian employee, English was given no further explanation and was not allowed to contact his wife or family to notify them of the changes. He was immediately escorted to RAF Lakenheath under armed guard and flown to the USA.

After arriving in the USA, English tried repeatedly to contact his wife and family yet on each occasion he found that his wife's phone was answered by a man who promptly hung up. Neither could he send messages by way of friends. After several months of trying to make contact by phone and through the services of friends, English found out what the military whom he had worked for had effected. She and his family had been transferred to another base shortly after his forced departure. She had been told that he had quit his job and deserted her and his family. For the next while Bill English would find his movements closely watched by USA Intelligence.

Several months later, while working as a security guard at a college he took the opportunity to attend a speech by Stanton Friedman with whom he conversed afterward about Grudge/Blue Book #13. Friedman, Allen Benz and Jim Lorenzen then took him back to the offices of the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO) - a largely UFO debunking organization - where they recorded his statement.

1977 -
The "Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications" (SWIFT) is organized by a group of European bankers who wanted a more efficient method than telegraph wire (telex) or mail to send payment instructions to correspondent banks. A nonprofit, cooperative organization, it facilitates the exchange of payment messages between financial institutions around the world. Among its hundreds of members are USA money centres and regional banks, and major banks in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. SWIFT provides the framework for an international communication system between financial institutions, using common terminals and standard communications protocols.

By itself, SWIFT is not a payment system; a SWIFT message is merely an advice, an instruction to transfer funds to a specified account at another bank. The exchange of funds between banks takes place on domestic funds clearing systems. In the USA, interbank transfers of funds are handles by the Federal Reserve System's Federal Wire Network (used by the Federal Reserve Banks and the Treasury for very large currency transactions) or by the "Clearing House Interbank Payments System" (CHIPS) - which would be modified in 1981 to effect settlement at the end of the day.

1977 - On July 17,
Near Happy Valley, northern California, U.S.A., Pat, a woman in her forties, was puzzled by events which accompanied sightings in the area. One night she heard heavy footsteps on the roof of her home. Another night she observed a huge bird flying low in the glow of a streetlight. On this date, the 17th, she saw a sphere of light near her bed and in the morning she discovered that all the doors in the house were open.

1977 - On July 26,
The 1977 World Population Report, published by "Population Concern" was summarized in the "London Times":

"The report points out that if the present rate of population growth had existed since the birth of Christ there would now be 900 people for every square yard of the Earth. Half the fuel ever used by man has been burnt in the past 50 years. The world's population is now more than 4.000 million and increasing by 200,000 every day.

Two hundred thousand extra people on this crowded planet every single day! That is 73,000,000 a year. And that will result, in only 3 years, in more additional people than the entire present population of America!"

1977 - On July 27,
Report of a "Suppression" Bill being rushed through the U.S.A. legislature to become law by September, was published in the London "Evening Standard":

"It prohibits the publishing of an official report without permission, arguing that this obstructs the Government's control of its own information. That was precisely the charge brought against Daniel Ellsberg for giving the Pentagon papers to the "New York Times".

Most ominous of all, the Bill would make it a crime for any present or former civil servant to tell the Press or Government of wrong-doing or pass on any news based on information "submitted to the Government in private".

1977 - By August,
The budget of American advertisers had topped $33 billion a year.
Their purpose was to shape the consuming habits of Americans.
The cost: nearly $600 for each family in the land.
Here was an unsolicited "educational" program designed to misinform the average American.

Misinformation is used to motivate, deceive, manipulate, confuse people.
Typically, good misinformation, like acts of fraud, are 80% true and accurate data associated with 20% garbage. American advertising was telling the consumer that certain products were available. It also encouraged the average consumer to follow the portrayed majority in its habits, choices and successes. It projected the "average" person as happy, carefree, generous, sensual, relaxed, beautiful, of high moderate income, with gross material benefits, a great job and a contented family with obedient children and passionate spouses.

The advertising medium did not permit discussion nor encourage criticism.
Turn on your TV; there was no one listening to, or concerned for, you, yet there was an image reflected back at you. Read your newspaper or magazine or listen to your radio: they told you what reality was. The deception was that the average American was depressed, anxious, concerned about finances (or should have been), did not feel comfortable with their physical bodies, were too self-centred to be sensual, were compulsive in habit, not proportioned according to the social ideal, had low to moderate incomes, were always short of possessing some material gadget, were not all that enthusiastic about their job, had a family that inter-communicated poorly, children that acted out and spouses who were either obsessive about physical sexuality or too tired, frustrated or distracted to be passionate. American advertising told the consumer that they were not average; they were worse than average. It had a solution: you could relate to and become an average consumer by buying .... The deception was the image.

The manipulation was the promise.
The confusion was the suggestion that if you did something simply to be more "average", how could it be extravagant, improper or wrong? The reality was that no matter how much you bought to LOOK like that ideal average, those purchases would not change what you were, for the better, spiritually.

1977 - During the year,
"CIA Improvised Sabotage Devices" was published by "Desert Publications" of Phoenix, Arizona, and made fully and freely available to any member of the public. There was no means or needs test involved, no registration of ownership, no government orprivate concern for the public welfare. In "The Introduction" it was noted:

"... why spend time on improvising field expedients to do the job (of sabotage)?

for one thing shelf items will just not be available for certain operations for security or logical reasons. In these cases the operator will have to rely on materials he can buy in a drug or paint store, find in a junk pile, or scrounge from military stocks.

Secondly, many of the ingredients and materials used in fabricating homemade items are so commonplace or innocuous they can be carried without arousing suspicion. The completed item itself often is more easily concealed or camouflaged.

In addition, the field expedient item can be tailored for the intended target, thereby providing an advantage over the standard item in flexibility and versatility.

While most of the pertinent information on sabotage shelf items is available in catalogues and other publications, much of the improvisation know-how has remained in the minds or files of a few individuals.

It is the intent of this manual to consolidate and bring up to date a selected body of this information for wider use (by whom and for what purpose?)."

The manual then continues with sections describing standard explosives; standard firing systems; improvised firing systems including electric pressure switches, water-drop electric delays, expansion electric delays, pocket watch electric delays, electric pull-release, mousetrap electric release, acid and rubber chemical delay, fuse lighter non-electric pull, fuse lighter nonelectric pressure; improvised detonators including rifles and grenade fuses; steel cutting techniques; standard charge preparations; derailment techniques; improvised cratering explosive; cone shaped charges; platter charges; counterforce charges; diamond charges; cable cutting charges; ambush or antipersonnel charges; disassembly of the USA 3.5" high explosive antitank rocket; improvised incendiaries including igniters, time fuse fire starters, homemade napalm, incendiaries; dust and vapor explosions; storage tank charges.

The manual provides detailed descriptions on methods for destroying property and endangering lives; there is no other purpose. And most human governments show no leadership in protecting their citizens from possible acts by mentally disoriented and confused persons who wish to enact vengeance against faceless and largely innocent and ignorant citizens for the wrongs which he or she feels have been committed by the authorities representing the culture.

1977 - During the year,
The last case of Smallpox would be treated in Somalia.
It had led to the deaths of as many as 600,000 people per year in Europe during the Black Death, even though it was not the major fatal illness of the period.

1977 - During August,
The BLONDS developed a particular animosity toward the GRAYS for reasons of survival.
It became known to the BLONDS that the GRAYS intended to destabilize human political systems with a limited nuclear war which would kill massive humanity and result in the remainder being easily corralled into slavery. Nuclear radiation influences the GRAYS very little; it influences BLONDS to the extent that humans receive adverse and fatal effects. BLONDS rejected the nuclear war solution as dangerous to themselves.

Their strategy was one of working on the use of biological contamination as a means to destroy or decimate human populations. The AIDS virus was an initial effort. Other biological "bombs" are expected by 1995. Their development program began in 1975 and progresses slowly due to the strength of human immunodefenses plus the deceptions required to maintain the programs and tests in absolute secrecy.

BLONDS hope they can succeed with their biological bomb before the GRAYS and humanity succeed with a nuclear war. Requiring a planet base for expansion of their numbers to an optimum size before attempting to find a further planetary base, the BLONDS believe they can cope with any earthly geological upheavals, if humanity can be decimated or destroyed. They are confident that the GRAYS will forego nuclear war as an option if the numbers of humanity can be reduced by other means. BLONDS have provided technical improvements in the areas of : antimissile missiles, human sensors for security, pollution control, political peace diplomacy. Their apparent idealism and efforts are targeted at preventing degradation of earth's environment below a survival level for them before they can decimate human populations.

1977 - On the evening of Tuesday, August 30,
Over Healdsburg, northern California, an entire family of five, the Crays, saw 3 round objects in the sky including one which was estimated to be 50 feet long. They landed, flashed and zoomed. One hovered over their car; it had no windows. The location is 90 minutes by car north of San Francisco. The Air National Guard had been conducting maneuvers that evening over the ocean, well off the coast of Bodega Bay, forty miles from Healdsburg. Bright coloured lights attended the craft and were also seen by an unnamed couple in a car, a woman living in Alexander Valley, and a man named Melville who watched the object depart with the Crays.

Large round lights, pulsating and blinking, rose one after the other into the sky from the coastal hills south of Fitch Mountain, located east of the town. There was a large cream-coloured object and six smaller ones around it - green, red, and blue. They were driving home at the time and pulled off the road so as not to block traffic and to stop and watch the lights and objects. They were driving down a hill to Highway 101 and when they reached the intersection with Old Redwood Highway, one object apparently left the group and zoomed to within 40 feet of the road. They continued south on Old Redwood Highway until suddenly the road was flooded with light which was "much brighter than the high beams of a car at the same distance, it was like the light was in my head."

Mrs. Cray estimated its diameter at 50 feet and said it had several windows and 2 beams of light.
The older daughter drew an oval object with a bright glow and added that a face looked back at them behind the windows, a silhouette like a frogs head. Several aspects of the experience confused them: it appeared as if they could touch it although it was at least 10 or 20 feet away, its direction of movement relative to the car seemed wrong, the time progression of the experience seemed to be in slow motion, and their destination seemed further away than it really was.

Mrs. Cray, Cathy and Jeff felt nauseated; Jeff vomited upon arriving at Mr. Melville's place.
Cathy and her mother developed headaches and nausea that night and were upset for two days. They were unable to sleep normally for several days. Jeff felt fine the next day but did not eat normally until the day after. Mr. Melville noted that the luminous object had been seen over a local winery. At the time of the sighting, visibility was 30 miles, temperature 87 degrees F. with a dew point of 49.

The Air National Guard routinely fly helicopters for training in rescue missions from Hayward over Richmond, south of Novato and south of Petaluma, not taking them close to Healdsburg. The helicopters fly at an altitude of 3,000 to 3,500 feet during these missions.

1977 - By the Fall,
A 200-Ton Shipload of Natural Uranium was discovered.
It had been stolen 10 years earlier while enroute in the Mediterranean Sea.
An average 500:1 ratio yields uranium metal from average uranium ore.
Variations of the ratio can be quite extreme. We have no record of the purity of this shipment.
On an average basis, the 200 tons could have yielded 800 pounds of uranium metal.
As little as 8 pounds, or as much as 80 pounds, of U-235, the reactive isotope, could have been refined from that.

The supercritical mass for Uranium-235 is defined as 110 pounds (50 kgs) so the above amounts would not have been sufficient to make a modern nuclear weapon by themselves. Mixed with as little as 22 pounds (10 kgs) of Plutonium, the possibility would have been much greater for success. Obviously, the hijackers could not find someone with a large nuclear power reactor (over 2 megawatt) capable of producing the plutonium, or someone with another shipload of ore, or someone with a combination of the larger reactor and some additional ore - so it sat waiting for a buyer for 10 years.

1977 - In the Fall,
Two people on Benjamin Creek Road, near Happy Camp in northern California, saw a Douglas fir tree snapped in two while an unknown force dragged their pickup truck in reverse around a bend for 50 feet. The top 80 feet of the tree was thrown about 60 feet away, while a glowing white sphere moved over the area.

1977 - On September 6,
Lorraine, in the company of her daughter, near Happy Camp, in northern California, U.S.A., saw a disk-shaped craft which was "lit all the way around."

1977 - In September,
A cluster of lethal events began to be reported in the Belem area of Brazil through the health unit on the island of Colares. At first Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira, discounted the reports from the patients about the "chupas" as popular myth or local sorcery. When every day started bringing a new patient, she conducted a more thorough study of the lesions exhibited by the victims, notably burns that resembled radiation injuries.

These lesions, according to Dr. Oliveira began with intense reddening of the skin in the affected area. Later, the hair would fall out and the skin would turn black. There was no pain, only a slight warmth. One also noticed small puncture marks in the skin. The victims were men and women of varying ages, without any apparent pattern.

One day, a woman arrived early in the morning very agitated saying she had been hit by a chupa.
There was extreme reddening of the skin on her left breast and two puncture marks elsewhere. She could barely raise a glass of water to her lips. She had trouble breathing and was dizzy and felt weak. They were later defined as characteristic symptoms of the "attacks", along with headaches, a decrease in the number of red blood cells. Three hours later, the doctor was urgently called to the woman's house. She was in a deep coma, the body was totally rigid, gasping for breath. She had no fever and did not want to vomit. The patient was sent to Belem in a car of the Prefecture. Hours later, a death certificate came back noting heart failure as the cause of death.

The official diagnosis completely disregarded the data that Dr. Carvalho had supplied and she became suspicious. The authorities remained silent about the whole situation and she stopped sending statements about such cases. In fear and frustration, she destroyed a 30-page document she had prepared about her clinical observations.

A few weeks after the events had started, a Brazilian Air Force team had arrived on the island.
They arrived in two vehicles, two officers and a dozen men, engineers, geologists, and a biologist.
They erected two shelters and asked witnesses to keep quiet about what they had seen.
At night they set up telescopes and cameras to photograph the chupas. The mission lasted 90 days and 300 night photographs plus several motion-picture reels and a 500 page report were compiled, accompanied by a catalogue of sightings, maps, and interview transcripts. Copies were sent to Armed Forces Headquarters in Brasilia, and the originals went to Barreiro do Inferno (the Gate of Hell) in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.

By the time the sightings subsided in November, 1977, Dr. Carvalho had seen over 35 patients; all suffered from lesions to the face or thoracic area, claimed to have been inflicted by the chupas. Due to the nature of the injury, the consistency of the placement of the lesions, and no report of same on other animals, the "attacks" appear to have been carried out by an "intelligent" being in that they were not random nor done for the purposes of killing for food.

The Belem headquarters of the 1st Regional Air Command (COMAR), covering an area four times as large as France, maintained a UFO field investigation team from 1974 to 1982. The unit accepted that UFOs existed and sought to investigate them scientifically with no information being made public.

1977 - During September,
William S. English becomes the subject of an assassination attempt while riding his motorcycle between Tucson and Sierra Vista, Arizona. Currently starting a small custom leather shop in Tucson and going to visit his father who had a Real Estate office in Sierra Vista, English was followed by a black, 1978 Lincoln Continental car. Eventually, it tried intentionally to run over or run English off the road. Having missed him, it screeched to a stop, swung around and headed back at him again. English escaped by taking his own path over the desert on his motorcycle. This was the first of over 14 attempts that would be made against his life. A short time earlier he had relayed what he knew about the Grudge/Blue Book #13 to Stanton Friedman and representatives of APRO.

1977 - On September 30,
The Houston Control Center was closed by NASA.
It had been the Earth-based command center for Project Apollo.
The total cost including the development and production of all the hardware, facilities, tracking networks and launch costs, was estimated by NASA to be $24.5 billion ($118 billion at 1991 currency valuation). The last mission, Apollo 17 was concluded in December, 1972. Thereafter, human scrutiny and concern for the heavens diminished markedly making clandestine flights easier. Simple math means EACH Apollo mission, including the failures, cost almost $7 billion (1991). The General Accounting Office suggests that NASA USUALLY provided underestimates, by up to 30%.

A total of 358 kg of lunar soil and rock samples had been returned to Earth for analysis and by the end of Apollo 14, scientists had already established that oxygen could be produced from lunar soil in sufficient quantities to make shipment of liquid oxygen into orbit as a propellant economically viable. Humans had landed and walked on the surface and determined that there was a light atmosphere and whispy cloud presence plus atmospheric circulation. They had also been advised telepathically by spacepersons already present not to return and to quit leaving their junk on the Moon. What cost is human pride worth? Or, is it intellectual vanity?

1977 - During the year,
The degree of computerization of information about individuals was criticized in the British press.
Teachers in public and other schools protested the "intrusive details" they were required to supply on their pupils' "confidential record cards" - details about the children's home-life, about the behaviour and personalities of the parents. At many schools for very young children, the students were being encouraged to keep weekly diaries about their home-life and had to write essays entitled "My Mother" or "My Father". Teachers were told that it was imperative that all possible details be supplied regularly to the local authorities.

Many other forms are required by law to be completed for reasons of taxation, banking, investment, import/export, charges under the law, medical history including strength and dose of medications, credit sources used together with the frequency of use, the timeliness of the payments, the size of the balance and an itemization of the purchases. A large minority of the work force in larger technically advanced nations resides in the civil service. Job applications, resumes, interview notes, personnel evaluation, test results, and personal habits are likely to be entered into some computer on them.

The amalgamation of all pertinent systems into one, or several, "Big Brothers" in the modern age is entirely possible. Reports on millions of people in the U.S.A. were gathered on individuals, innocent or guilty, by the FBI. In more recent times masses of those files have been computerized.

The disturbing fact about a quantity of this "personalized" information is that it promotes spurious analysis from subjectively prejudiced descriptions of what and who individuals are and what their actions and affiliations mean.

1977 -
"A Testable Theory for UFO Abduction Reports: The Birth Memories Hypothesis", is produced during the year by Alvin H. Lawson, Professor of English at California State University, assisted by physician, W.C. McCall. Described as a result of research conducted over the previous decade at an Anaheim, California hospital, the author believes that it is "one of the few scientifically testable hypotheses yet proposed about abduction cases and other aspects of the UFO enigma." The theory presented is derived from:

"The imaginary abductee study induced imaginary abductions in 16 volunteers who had demonstrated no significant knowledge of UFOs. Eight situational questions comprising the major components of a typical abduction account were asked of each subject. Expected major dissimilarities, an averaged comparison of data from four imaginary and four putatively real abduction narratives showed no substantive differences. ... asked to imagine a scenario under hypnosis and described a convincing story where no abduction had been reported."

This study would be quoted by anti-UFO adherents and disinformation purveyors as late as 1996 in support of their intellectualized denial, intentional attempts to deceive the public, or, status quo dissassociation with reality and psuedo-idolatry of science. IF the theory was as authoritative as it is self-described, none of the following could be presented as concerns.

Only 16 subjects are tested over a period of 10 years.
That is, 16 subjects out of a population of over 250 million are tested over a period of 5200 weeks and their responses are said to provide scientific proof of the responses of the remaining millions. If this were true, almost ANY theory devised on ANY subject of human perception and experience could be "proven". The numerical significance relative to either the time duration or the small number of subjects totally disqualifies ANY conclusions and observations.

It raises the possibility, real or imaginary, that the author tested 250 subjects over a period of ten years (about one every 20 weeks), found that only 16 fulfilled the expectations of the theory, discarded the reaminder, and reported the subset as the only participants - all of whom coincidentally totally reinforced the theory. If such were the reality a ratio of 16 out of 250 subjects is irrelevant.

If there really were only 16 subjects, the time duration of 5200 weeks would only enable the study to be relevant if it were conducted with subjects taken from an institutional detention environment in which mass media contact was absent and social contact was restrictive - special penetentiary, high risk mental illness ward, concentration camp, forest fire remote spotter without radio or TV, lighthouse keeper without mass media, .... Anyone else chosen from the North American population during the period 1967 - 1977 would have had a high likelihood of direct or indirect exposure to some form of reference to UFO phenomenon.

Of the 16 subjects chosen, nothing is specified regarding the nature of their selection beyond that of "had demonstrated no significant knowledge of UFOs." This is NOT a scientific selection. Who decides what is "significant" and what exactly was regarded as "significant." To one person, "significant" could mean believing that one has experienced an abduction themselves; to another, "significant" could be a conscious acknowledgement of reports of UFOs. There is a dramatic perceptual and experiential difference. Thus, selection of volunteers may have predisposed a particular conclusion. Inadequate characterization and choice of subjects is a major flaw in any so-called scientific study.

It is noted that the subjects are hypnotized and questioned and that the resulting answers form the bulk of the evidence supporting the theory. There is no indication given, and, in the field of hypnosis such is difficult, as to the qualifications of or expertise of the inductionist - who is presumably the physician. Over the next 30 years, and already obvious to the well known (ie. Milton H. Erickson, Ernest and Shiela Rossi, William S. Kroeger, and others) - hypnosis is an art, NOT a technical skill. Some subjects are impossible to hypnotize; some are very easy to hypnotize; a great variation exists between the two. The suggestion that any hypnotist could take any 16 subjects and successfully and fully hypnotize all 100% is ludicrous to any knowledgeable person.

An excellent hypnotist is ethical, empathetic, compassionate, self-directed, assertive, sensitive, reflective, innovative, experienced, well-informed, humble, and analytical. Few practitioners, be they academics, artists, lay therapists, physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, ... meet this criteria. Competent hypnotists, like those competent in many other professioanl fields - tend to be the minority of those who actually practise. In a scientific study, if the inductions used as verification are not taped and available for review, they don't deserve mention. Human authority structures frequently replace the relevance of ability with the irrelevance of title. We have little knowledge here, either by example or by reference, that any of the inductions were carried out in a truly scientific or professioanl manner.

Technically, a subject in a hypnotic trance can be subtly manipulated and coerced into fabricating and believing a new reality sought by the inductionist. This fact would produce countless injustices in the area of child abuse prosecution, religious leader abuse of support staff, sexual abuse of patients by psychiatrists, and others over the next 15+ years. A true scientific study includes a copy of the inductive and questioning script in the study and varies little from it in the execution of each induction. This was not evident here.

Questionnaire construction continues to be a changing and improving field.
It is one of those activities frequently dominated by academic intellectuals who seem to lack the experience, empathy and humility to recognize the weaknesses of their creations. Most researchers who devise questionnaires do so without a substantial analysis of previous styles of structure and findings. Many people re-invent a bent wheel which they proudly display as an original. Academic institutions add credibility to both the structure and the findings by publishing thousands of such studies each year - usually with little relevance, practicality, or, thoughtful development. Most authors are seeking field acceptance and academic accreditation by the technical completion of an activity. True, long questionnaires frequently drain the energy and strain the attention span of the respondent.

Questionnaires which are shorter than 10 questions are often so focused on the theoretical statement being tested that anyone with an IQ of 80 can often perceive the orientation and expectation of the administrator. If questions are asked which must be answered with either a "yes" or "no", there is frequently a skewing of the answers apart from the reality because the reality requires such additional options as "sometimes," "don't know," and "not applicable." Coerced into an either/or statement, some questionnaires produce results which are grossly deceptive by their expressed authority of results. Similarly, questionnaires which tend to have all positively or negatively expressed questions can often encourage a pattern of answers. In a series of 8 questions, one can hardly vary question delivery, variability of answer options, introduction of non topic variety, inclusion of open-ended opinion eliciting requests, ... - and, remain focused enough to provide enough relevant detail to support any but the simplest of thesis.

Volunteers frequently seek to please the questionnaire provider as a factor of ego-fulfillment for the priviledge of participating or out of subconscious obligation for whatever benefit has been offered by the provider: attention, academic credit, social distinction, payment, sandwich, gift, .... More impartial subjects are often those chosen at random from the population and willing to participate for no other reward than that of facilitating the collection of accurate and relevant data.

The use of the word "substantive" presents the same difficulties as the use of the word "significant."
To a full-time academic or a professional intellectual the use of these terms is often dissociated from reality. Rather than define a "scientific" study, they frequently portray a subjective orientation of either status quo or reactionary attitudes cloaked in such bywords as "objective" because many readers are conditioned to assume that what they take to be the meaning is what the experimenter intended. Closer study often reveals this to be false. In this way, students, uninformed public, and status quo professionals contribute to the deception which may be injected into a study by the use of normative (popular) wordings through their lack of awareness of the potential variation in meaning and their willingness to accept as truth whatever is structured in the basic structures of rationalization which have been imprinted on them by their culture. To that extent, a good debater (rationalizer) can often persuade such an audience to accept and believe almost any suggestion as both the truth and reality.

The above represents the most obvious and glaring examples of misinformation that can be present in any questionnaire-based study. The final caution which will be noted here is that any study which is self-described as "scientific" usually is not. A scientific study does not need to tell you what is obvious by its structure, content, and expression of conclusions.

1977 - On October 18, shortly after 1.30 A.M.,
Two people were returning from a visit to Amos, California to southern California.
They saw a bright light approaching from the south. They stopped their truck but could hear no sound, even with the engine turned off. The object flew to the right as the passenger readied a camera, then experiencing a thought that to film it would be a waste of time. Instead, he looked at it through the binoculars: he saw four square lights on what appeared to be a fuselage, without wings or tail. The light was bluish-green. The passenger regrets not having taken pictures of this atypical sighting.

A number of experiences have suggested over the decades that some space beings are capable of projecting thoughts and controlling the mind of the target(s). This may range from hypnosis-like induced images of what the ships and beings appear like to induced experiences and conversations and post-hypnotic suggestions either to forget the real or faked experience or to hold it aside until a later date. This makes ALL sightings and experiences suspect as to what is real and what has been "planted" and what is the rationale being the deception. Is it to protect us from a reality that would threaten our sanity because it conflicts with our strongly held assumptions about reality, or a means to prepare us to be future "programmed" replicants capable of devastating humanity, or a way of preparing us/the space beings for a future Walk-in, or ....

1977 - On October 18 and 19,
Charles Kowal, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) rediscovered the planet "Chiron" in photographs taken through the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory. Chiron was classifed as an 18th-magnitude object comparable to the largest asteroids and many times larger than the typical nucleus of a comet. It was defined as "asteroid 2060", later to be changed to "Chiron" on November 1, 1977, and declared a planet.

1977 - Over the next 10 years,
"Limited Partnership Units" become a popular from of investment and tax shelter.
Individual investors participate in the business as a minority partner receiving a share of the profits made and being responsible for a share of the losses, if any. The limited partner does not have any operational responsibilities regarding the business invested in and only limited liability. Many real estate developments, often of a resort nature, as well as other ventures were invested in by North Americans and Europeans. The ventures could be located either within the country of the investor or elsewhere.

Typically, high operational expenses in the early years contributed to additional expenses to the investor, which were treated as losses and written off against the investor's regular income. If the investor was in a high tax bracket, all of the "losses" could be written off and an equal amount of income tax could be saved. In this manner, large amounts of tax from high income earners could be deferred to private investments which held no tax consequence. This presented the situation where for the government to collect the amount of taxes which it had budgeted for, it would have to raise the tax assessed against lower income earners, or, be left with a higher deficit and with fewer funds to provide a central bank reserve.

1977 - During November,
The Cobra Dane Radar (1175-1375 MHz) on Shemya Island at the western edge of the Aleutian Islands would begin to be a major source of data to NORAD on the USSR ICBM/SLBM tests impacting near Kamchatka Peninsula, eastern Soviet Union. By 1984, it would become the first US radar to track Soviet space launches. It is one thing to be able to detect a launch and track it; yet another to know what the purpose of it is.

1977 - By December,
Eduard Meier had shown a series of photographs to Herbert Runkel which he said had resulted from time travel with the Pleiadian Semjase. They showed the rubble of San Francisco following a massive earthquake that would occur sometime in the future. Later, a friend of Herbert's discovered an article in GEO magazine that showed an artist's conception of what the long-predicted catastrophe might do to the city, and Meier's photographs obviously had been taken, so it was believed, of this lifelike painting. Meier was seldom away from his property to any great distance and is never know to have seen this painting directly. Also, good photo analysis could have demonstrated whether Meier's photo was of a painting or of an actual scene. Regardless, with all the beautiful photographs that no one seemed able to duplicate or explain, Herbert was unable to understand why Meier would resort to such an obvious fabrication.

Meier said that the Pleiadians simply placed in the artist's mind an accurate picture of the real future, the same one Meier had photographed. Eduard only had the truth and his rational suggestions to account for the occurrences. Herbert had an educated distrust of anything unknown or beyond conventional simplistic, human-centred description. Herbert, a supposed friend, was called upon to choose a position: one which would deny Eduard, please the loud sceptics and gain him respect in conventional society; or, one which would support Meier on the basis of the trust he had earned in the past, lower the sceptics upon him as an observer and further segregate him into the fringe elements of society. Herbert chose the former, and so would most of you. Gossip had won again: innuendo, suggestion, prejudice, lack of fact.

1977 - During December,
VISA (formerly National BankAmericard Inc.) became a member-owned association, based in San Mateo, California, that licensed Visa service marks to financial institutions issuing VISA Credit and Debit cards. It provides net settlement services for its members through its transaction settlement networks. Visa manages a global electronic communications network, called VisaNet, connecting financial institutions, merchant authorization terminals, and automatic teller machines.

The Visa International Services Association, Mastercard International, and numerous other credit cards entered the market with the intent of expanding market sales through convenience. Cheque cashing was becoming increasingly difficult and time consuming for it often required multiple verification of identification. Theft and robbery were increasing with the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse: carrying large amounts of cash was proving hazardous. The credit card required minimal verification and was difficult for thieves to use.

The aspect of the card which became more used by the cardholder was the line of credit associated with it.
Increasingly, because of convenience, more purchases were made on a spontaneous basis than under careful consideration. When unemployment increased, those now with a reduced or no income resorted to the use of the credit on the card with the expectation that their period of unemployment would be short; too often it was not. Increasingly, largely inexperienced persons with minimum savings, were persuaded by promises of higher incomes and independent businesses, to purchase educational or training courses on card credit as well as the startup materials and supplies. Real estate investment seminars advocated the credit limit on multiple cards to make a down payment on property.

All of this credit was costly, as much as 40% more costly than a personal bankloan.
The major difference was that credit card advances could be obtained without a job history, asset list, interview, or ability to repay assessment. Within 10 years, numerous consumers would have 12,000 credit on their credit cards. The problem for bankers was that the increased interest charges paid by their depositors on the credit card balances were draining away bank deposits to the card companies and the competition was fragmenting their personal loan business which added to their profits. The trend threatened to diminish bank profits and raise the cost of their reserves.

For the consumer, the capitalism myth of an ever more prospering society never returned for long and the consumer's hope of bailing out of debt was seldom met.

1977 - On Saturday, December 17, at 7.45 P.M.,
A red luminous airborne object was observed by 2 residents of Council Bluffs, Iowa.
This object crashed to earth in the vicinity of a dike at Big Lake Park, on the northern city limits.
A bright flash was seen, followed by flames 8 to 10 feet high. When the witnesses reached the dike they found a large area covered with a mass of molten metal that glowed red-orange, igniting the grass nearby.

Police and firefighters arrived quickly.
One officer described it as "running, boiling down the edges of the levee" over an area about 4 feet by 6 feet. There were 11 known witnesses and two had seen a hovering red object with lights blinking in sequence around the periphery beforehand.

Inquiries at nearby Eppley Air Field and Offutt Air Force Base confirmed that there was no aircraft operation in the area. Analysis of the metal indicated that it was chiefly iron with small amounts of alloying metals such as nickel and chromium, which excludes meteoric material. The microstructure indicated that it was a carbon steel that was cast, reheated to about 1,000 degrees F. and then cooled. Two similar falls in the same region were reported in July 1978.

1977 - In a December 26 "Maclean's" issue Interview,
Dr. Gregory Fouts, an associate professor at the University of Calgary, Alberta, specializing in developmental psychology, addressed the subject of television depiction of violence:

"TV producers and especially sponsors of television have emphasized the entertainment value of the TV and have not paid attention to what the viewers need. They usually produce the cheapest kinds of entertainment, meaning production costs. It is cheaper, for example, to produce a crime show than a good drama. And as long as you're in the profit motivation, you're going to produce those programs that realize the largest profit. ...

Pro-social contents are those that are specifically designed to help a viewer ... For example, if you have a home environment in which the parents encourage solutions to personal problems, then the child is getting pro-social modeling in the home, and when he sees violent contents he may go to his parents and say, "I saw such and such violence on TV.' And the parents sit down and talk to the child, then he can use that model on TV as a point to diverge from rather than to imitate. ...

Generally what we found was that the more TV programs are discouraged by parents, the happier the child, the less aggressive he is in the home, the better the relationship with the parents, the more use of books for example. We also found that parents who buy children TV sets for their bedrooms, for example, those kids generally are unhappier. They are more aggressive in the home.

... those kids who watch TV to avoid homework, to avoid social interaction, and in fact do not have the social skills, I suspect are more susceptible to TV violence because they are less able to evaluate what's going on.

... it is true that these are victim-like behaviours we acquire by watching media ... some people pretend that they're victims when they're not really victims. But they learn these behaviours via TV. ... He may be sensitized to a possibility of being victimized. That is, we found that the more TV violence children watch the more likely they believe that there may be a crime. That they have to watch out for it in their neighbourhood. ... I would never advocate encouraging your child to see violence. But if they do happen to see violence then you have to put it in the right context for them and talk to them; and yet the problem is that most parents do not talk to their kids in any constant way about what they see.

Violence is defined as some kind of pain that is done intentionally. ... psychological forms of violence. And those are usually in situation comedies where you have sarcasm, name-calling, verbal aggression, even passive aggression like the silent treatment. ... whatever kinds of violence a child prefers on TV is what he'll show in the home. ... if you have children who are watching TV and you call them to dinner and they say "no", that's an indication of addiction.

... the thing is, you have to make the home environment attractive. ... In fact, we found that the more you eat while watching TV, the more you're influenced by it. It's as simple as that. ... Don't actively stare at the TV. If you're going to watch the TV, put it in a situation where there are more distractions where the child can play. Where there is noise around him so he doesn't become or isn't glued to that TV set. ... you have to be consistent.

1977 - During the year,
Deng Xiaoping, a powerful Chinese leader, told the Chinese people that "to be rich is glorious."
The new direction would result in thousands of the former conservative communist supporters being executed and a trend towards capitalism. Extremes often promote the development of reactionism rather than rebellion. The former seeks to acknowledge individuality of effort and reward; rebellion seeks to equate existence with reward.

1977 -
Persons reported Missing in Canada during the year totalled 25,731 adults and 62,587 young people and children. Canada's population is just over 21 million. That is over 240 people reported "daily" including 170 young people and children. Reports are usually not accepted until the person had been unacounted for over a 48-hour period. Of those reported, 24,477 of the missing adults and 61,338 of the juveniles were found or accounted for. Still, 2503 people - 1,254 adults and 1,249 juveniles - remained unaccounted for at the end of the year.

Many of the missing juveniles are runaways and unless they require medical attention under medicare, or, become involved in activities which attract the attention of the police, a teenager's apparent disappearance may remain unsolved. Life on the street, on the run, or as a drifter is challenging and difficult for many and exposes the individual to many dangers. Hence, for the reasons noted, many are "discovered" and their whereabout made known.

There are also unloved adults and juveniles whose absence is desired and whose unexpected departure from a community goes unreported. Still other disappearances go unreported as a consequence of the individual's habits which may include any of, or combination of, shyness, secretiveness, aloofness, depression, negativity. Juveniles who go missing from a family where the parents have separated and/or divorced are usually kidnapped by the parent which has limited or no visiting rights, or, by the parent who has been forced by the courts to provide private visiting rights to a spouse who has become highly suspect of sexual, physical, or spiritual abusive behaviour toward the son or daughter. A relative few disappearances are resolved as murders, suicides, and accidents.

Most murders do not result in the reporting of a missing person because most arise out of poor communication skills and imprinted destructive behaviours. That is, the vast number of murders are committed by spouses or persons of close relationship, are unplanned - though they are often predictable, and are the climax to an acting out of intense emotion - often originating from long-term feelings of rage (anger, pride, frustration, revenge), insecurity (identity, anxiety, addiction), and possessiveness (co-dependency, sloth, gluttony). The fact that the individual's emotional state has become intense is a signal that they are not coping constructively and that the origin of such inefficient coping is a trauma induced energy block - either from a personal experience, or, "inherited" from a past relative.

Since the public regard such crimes as verging on the sphere of private relations and since an elected government is often only concerned with those issues highlighted by a sensationalistic-seeking media, human governments have a long and persistent record of attempting to understand and provide remedies which would protect the health and lives of their citizens. Consequently, the percentage of murders attributed to these causes remains high and relatively constant relative to population totals. A much lower number of murders are the outcome of the commission of illegal activities such as robberies, kidnappings for extortion, sexual assaults (rapes). Fewer still are arranged, that is, pre-planned murders which may result in persons being reported missing.

An increasing number of juvenile disappearances are arising from the breakdown of reality within the culture, trust between parent and child, and, increasing alienation between family members. A continuing development of a provision of rights before they have been earned and the restriction of expectations without awareness and discussion promotes this trend. With the increasing urbanization of the population, children and teenagers are withdrawn from livelihood participation as would have been explicit in hunting and gathering bands, nomadic and hunting tribes, and agricultural nations.

Industrialization and urbanization have largely enabled parents and nations to first exploit child labour and then to abandon the child. The modern child and teenager is provided with time, capital allowances and freedom which children in previous generations would have had to "earn" by helping to produce each of the benefits. Bereft of constructive activity and only to relate to the work activities of their parents as some form of rationale for abandonment, these children are encouraged to feel unwanted, unloved, materially spoiled, and, encouraged to be ego-centred, act out in rebellion or to attract attention, and search for sensual experience through an increasing reliance of peer-based activities which hold forth the possibility for acceptance, recognition, emotional support, and ego-flattery. This peer environment, devoid of adult norms, models and expectations provides very little in terms of constructive coping skill development and self-responsibility. The result is the widening of a "generation gap" of attitudes, expectations, and realities.

Trust between family members is encouraged to diminish as parents find that work or social obligations demand more of their time for adult activities exclusive from those of the family. This leaves less opportunity for family units to intercommunicate and to share experiences. In addition personalized one-on-one periods of relaxed communication and parental-to-child emotional support are being reduced. Culturally and otherwise encouraged increasing sexual desire in parents, and adults-in-general, is being frustrated by spouses which find it increasingly difficult to appreciate their sexuality in other-than-utilitarian behaviours. Lack of both individual personal spousal private periods of unregimented time are encourging repressed emotional expression, miscommunication and alienation between parents.

Transference of co-dependency to addictive behaviours continues to increase adult reliance on legal (prescription) and illegal (narcotic) drug use, tobacco abuse, alcohol abuse, sugar abuse, nutritional abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and, sexual abuse. ALL of these addictive behaviours either steal time directly from the family unit, or, more deceptively, they require the expenditure of monies which necessitate longer hours of work or a lower, and more socially frustrating, standard of living.

Sexual abuse within the family ranges from performance expectation of the male (verbal emasculation and humiliation), to performance demand of the female (spousal rape), to participation by the child (incest). When either or a combination of these factors are present physical, emotional and spiritual health destructive behaviours are modelled. As the behaviour becomes more personalized and coercive to the child, or adult, distrust is heightened and departure from the family unit becomes an expression of identity survival. Unfortunately, human cultures are showing little recognition of the magnitude of the destructiveness of such factors - so, they continue to grow.

As family relationships become more structured, less flexible, more functional, less sensual (spending longer periods of relaxed or shared activity time together), more cost dependent, more compromised and less supportive of trust-building - each family member is encouraged to form an independent "un-related" identity. Such is a definition of a non-family from which departure, to the unrealistic and inexperienced juvenile mind - seems a logical and preferential direction. For these betrayed youth, no family is better than a pain-inducing family. Yet the need for social interaction and sensual experience together with their naiviety will usually result in their recognition of their capital co-dependency to their parents, their lack of spiritual strength, and, their return to the family unit. Again, either the usual lack of governmental or religious "support", or, the coercive interference of such institutions - will tend to aggravate the health of the individuals and of the society.

BACK to PEAR
INDEX

Memory Stimulators.
1978 - HIGHLIGHTS:

Movies:

Capricorn One; The Deer Hunter; Gray Lady Down; Jaws 2; Halloween; The Day That Shook The World; True Grit; Coma; Heaven Can Wait; Speedtrap; King of the Gypsies; California Suite; A Question of Guilt; Pretty Baby; Blackout; Who'll Stop the Rain; Hanging on a Star; La Cage aux Folles; Two Solitudes

General News:

Consumer Price Index: 195.3

Mt. Etna, Italy, has a major volcanic eruption for more than the 70th time in 2000 years.

1978 -
American Military Expenditures this year will represent 5% of the GNP, that is $109,247 million.

1978 - By this year,
The Philippine 5th CSU (Constabulary Security Unit), inside one of the buildings of Camp Crame, was well into the business of creating martyrs of real and suspected opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. These officers were the creation of USA special instructors Colonel Lansdale and Frank Walton and the training schools in the USA and Taiwan, fully supported by numerous changes in the White House. They were the officers who stuffed dead rats into peoples mouths, electric cattle prods into vaginas, mashed testicles, forced prisoners to eat their own ears and other parts of their anatomy.

Then they had favorite techniques as well: The "submarine" had the victim's head submerged in a toilet or a bucket of water; the "zap-zap", where the victim had electric shocks applied to their genitals or nipples; the "water-cure", where gallons of water were poured up one's nose until they almost drowned; the "baggy", where a plastic bag was placed over your head until you nearly suffocated; the "buttstroking", where you were jabbed in the back with a rifle butt; the "telephone", where your eardrums were burst by someone clapping your ears with the palms of their hands from behind; "Saigon roulette", where the torturer loaded all but one round in a revolver and fired at your legs; the "San Juanico Bridge", where you were forced to lie suspended between two beds or supports with your head on one and your feet on the other - whenever you sagged, you were beaten or kicked. Of course any of these could result in your death; eventually some combination would.

In July, 1977, Vilma Riopay, a 21-year-old catechist at the Magballo church, had been picked up and tormented until she became a physical and mental invalid. Later, in 1977, Colonel Aure had directed the torture, rape and murder of Purificacion Pedro, a 20-year-old graduate of the University of the Philippines arrested "on suspicion" of being a member of the tiny NPA. She was shot in the shoulder during her arrest and then beaten with rifle butts. Then she was taken to a Bataan hospital where she was gang-raped and hung by her neck with her brassiere - a slow strangulation.

The head of 5th CSU was Colonel Ishmael Rodrigo, an Ilocano from the Marcos hometown of Batac. He had served during the Korean War, became one of Lansdale's top Huk killers, and worked for the CIA in Manila and Saigon. Eventually, he was transferred to the US Army Green Berets as an intelligence officer with the rank of colonel. In Vietnam, he became friends with William Colby, a top CIA officer, following which he was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After the declaration of martial law, the CIA sent Rodrigo back to Manila. There General Ramos gave him the job of running the 5th CSU.

Constabulary chief General Fidel Ramos particularly enjoyed having sex with the wives, sisters and daughters of the prisoners. The reputed top torturer of the 5th CSU was Captain Rodolfo Aguinaldo. His talents left any who survived permanently disabled or mentally crippled. Aguinaldo, a fellow Ilocano from Laong, was Marcos favorite. He received special training from American Army and CIA instructors during the late 60s in the brutal art of extracting information whether any existed or not. After proving himself to be unusually persuasive, he was sent to the CIA/KMT Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Taiwan where his skills in torture were raised to new heights. Colonel Miguel Aure and Major Cesar Garcia helped Captain Aguinaldo's men conduct the physical abuse. Both were fanatical anti-Communists.

While President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were in office, the USA did nothing to assist Philippine political prisoners: they were too busy sanctioning Marcos dictatorship so that the American media could be fed stories of how a WWII Allied war hero had wiped corruption, crime and the Communists out of the Philippines, and, backed the USA efforts in Southeast Asia.

1978 - Before this year,
Wallace Groves, millionaire ex-convict, had gained ownership of Grand Bahama Island through an elaborate conspiracy with the Nassau Bat Street Boys. His Casinos in Nassau and Freeport, Grand Bahama, had been run for him by people who were associated with the Mafia's Meyer Lansky, and Groves himself laundered millions of dollars for the CIA through banks and casinos in the Bahamas.

1978 - During January,
Frederick Von Mierers, of New York became an EXAMPLE of a WALK-IN from BOOTES Constellation, Arcturus star system:

"Frederick walked into his body a few years ago, coming directly from that star (Arcturus) where he knew John. Frederick is a remarkable soul who has experienced every type of life on earth and on numerous planetary systems. ... 'Yes, it occurred in January of 1978. I came directly from Arcturus and am a totally different entity from the one that I replaced.'

The 'old' Frederick was born on Christmas day in 1946, was four years old when his parent died in an automobile accident. ... career in architecture and design ... male model ...

... during the mid-seventies ... a drunken driver in a stolen car (struck his godmother and close companion) ... who suffered a debilitating stroke ... rest home ... he contracted a severe .. infection ... remained deeply depressed ... bewildering substitution of egos (in January 1978) ... recollected several previous lives ... 3 beings materialized in his room.

"I knew that I had come from Arcturus, where I had lived in a hydrogen-light body, and I knew why I had come back. ... saw the coming wars, the destruction of New York City, .... He shut himself away from everyone for six months. Then he sold all ... and dedicated himself to a life of service to humanity."

(149) Frederick ... sold his valuable possessions to finance his lecture tours and video tapes (spent 700,000 dollars on them) ... does charge for astrological life readings, which he will do only for Walk-ins and serious seekers who want to turn their lives into more fruitful channels. ... readings "cover past lives, complete psychological makeup, why we are as we are, our future, complete diet, and gem prescriptions, the major emphasis being on how we can change ourselves by becoming conscious of our unconscious minds."

... stresses the importance of wearing certain gem stones next to the skin, calling gems the chakra centre of the earth, or the "condensed light of God's own thoughts" which neutralize the "power of the dark side" to interfere with our spiritual development. "... better not to indulge in sex, but rather to redirect that drive into spiritual growth, ... Living and androgynous life leads to higher evolvement of the mind." Both Frederick and John are vegetarians, and regular partakers of herbs ... does not discourage ... eating chicken and fish "during the 17 year period while their bodies are adjusting to the changeover" from being meat-eaters.

1978 - On January 18,
An alien was shot and killed at the Fort Dix Army Base next to McGuire AFB, N.J.
On September 16, 1980, a Sgt. J.M. of the PACAF who was stationed at McGuire at the time of the incident would write a description to Len Stringfield.

1978 - On January 21,
"What made Mark kill himself at 20?", an article by Christie Blatchford, Star staff writer, appeared in the "Toronto Star", a Canadian national newspaper. It described an ever growing incident happening throughout North America.

"... a bright young man ... with everything to live for, left his parent's ... home, walked to a nearby ravine, and hanged himself from a tree. ... He left a note, baffling in its coolness .... A growing number of doctors believe that even children as young as 5 try, that they have a wish to die, if not an understanding of what it means. ...

In the United States this year, 700 adolescents will succeed.
In Metro Toronto, said a report this week, another 3,500 between the ages of 14 and 19 will try - almost 10 every day. ... Even more will think about it. ... Almost three-quarters of the students (in a high school survey) had experienced thoughts on suicide. They saw it many ways - as "fashionable," as "the greatest kick of them all," as "one hell of an answer to the immediate problem."

... a growing number of Canadian teenagers not only consider suicide, bit consider it an option, and a reasonable one. ... "They get a kind of tunnel vision," Bill Hughes, a board member and volunteer with the Toronto Distress Centre, says. "They see no hope, and they get to the point where they can see nothing but more of the same." ... suicide is not a choice or a right, but the end of choosing, the end of rights. ... he used to spend hours in his room reading or studying or writing, ... Nine out of ten adolescents who attempt suicide are depressed. ... Mark, who had returned in the fall from a year-long stay in the Far East and Asia where he mastered at least one foreign language within two months, was depressed. He found Canadian culture, with its waste and emphasis on material wealth, repugnant after months of eating rice and sleeping on the floor and living with simple people.

"He tries ... tried, very hard to live simply," says his mother, ... He mastered most things he tried. ... "Everything he does, he does intensely, and usually well," his father adds. Returning to Canada, he wanted to change things here, make people realize "we don't need much to live. We took him out to dinner on his birthday," Alan says, "and you could see he was uncomfortable. 'We have so much here, Mum,' he said."

His parents think that because he couldn't "save the world overnight", he may have considered himself a failure. He talked of going back, and helping. "Being a doctor was one of his latest ideas, but medicine takes so long." "A lot of kids who try suicide think they're unique," Bill Hughes says, "They can't possibly imagine that someone else feels as lousy as they do. They don't know that feeling rotten is part of being human, that sometimes almost the total population will feel that way."

If the reality of the individual is framed within superficial mass media, manipulated by advertising and "norm" selected detail, educated with highly selective "political" ideas and histories which serve to promote current authority structures, and, socially, other norms suggest what you must believe, say and do - in order to be accepted - perhaps you are dead already. Within such a framework, an individual, who becomes aware, is shocked by the weight of unreality which must be dispensed with in order to "live" in reality. If such a picture (largely imaginary) appears hopeless, the individual may believe that the act of suicide is no more significant than the dream reality they feel trapped inside. Such is one result of a society which has no true spiritual basis. It is not that it has lied about reality - it has forgotten where it put it.

1978 - By February,
William S. English had been the subject of another assassination attempt.
He had established his leather business in Tucson by now and did much of his work out of his apartment. One night on the spur of the moment, he was invited to spend the night with friends for whom he had been rebuilding a saddle. On returning to his apartment the next morning he found that it had been fire-bombed and everything he had was destroyed in the fire including a favoured pet hamster. The previous year he had seen a copy of the Grudge/Blue Book #13, been discharged from USAF Intelligence, separated from his family and had experienced an assassination attempt.

1978 -
The USA "Electronic Funds Transfer Act" provided the legal framework for "electronic funds transfer" (EFT) into, or out of, a consumer's bank account. Written receipt of such transactions were required, the consumer was limited in liability for unauthorized transfers and procedures for error resolution had to be developed by the institutions concerned. Such transfers could originate from a telephone, electronic terminal, computer, or magnetic tape. Wire transfers such as Fed Wire and CHIPS were one category of EFT. The second category included automatic teller machine networks, retail merchant point-of-sale debit card systems, and telephone bill payment systems.

Many technical problems arose in the mechanization of teller services and for a time MOST consumers were adverse to the use of automatic teller machines because of their breakdowns and errors. The banks persisted in coercing the consumer to use the machines by cutting staff and reducing business open hours. For some people, if you wanted to do your banking and not wait in long slow lineups for personal service, you made use of the machine.

1978 - On March 11,
At the Baskatong Reservoir, northern Que. - a luminous flattened-bell-shaped object is photographed.

1978 - By March,
S.C. Gwynne, a 25-year-old American bank officer arrived in Manila to take a loan application.
Because he spoke French, he had been promoted in less than a year in this first job after college, to loan officer for North Africa. Six months and 28 countries later, the confident and naive analyst arrived in the Philippines to negotiate a $10 million loan for Rudolfo Cuenca, Marcos associate and head of the "Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines" (CDCP). The stated purpose of the loan was to buy earth-moving equipment from another customer of the USA bank where Gwynne worked.

Gwynne was met at Manila International Airport by a genial CDCP "expediter" and driven in a red Jaguar, complete with a pretty hostess who informed him that she and the car were at his disposal for the balance of his stay. He was checked into a 5-star hotel, wined and dined by Cuenca at a premier restaurant, where the finance minister of the Philippines "just happened" to drop by the table. He let Gwynne know that Cuenca was a good friend. Gwynne was then invited to fly off in the company plane to Baguio where a very nice time had been prepared for him courtesy of the brothels.

But where were the estimate, business plan, contracts, and other details which ANY bank officer would have poured over in detail? Gwynne began to have severe reservations about authorizing the loan. Returning to headquarters, he found the wheels of business, or greed, were in high gear. The earth-moving manufacturer had called to make sure that Gwynne was taking a "hard look" at the loan. The president of the bank called to add encouragement. The heads of both the bank and the construction company somehow shared political connections. The loan was approved. Gwynne, wisely, moved to another California bank within 18 months.

Cuenca's interest payments stopped.
Rudi had started off in business in the Marcos fashion.
A college dropout, he had entered the construction business with a loan from his father, the highway commissioner at the time. The money had actually been "borrowed" or embezzled from postwar reconstruction funds provide by the USA for the Philippines. In 3 years he went bankrupt but managed to keep one truck. In 1965 he had been a fundraiser for Ferdinand Marcos. When the government ran out of money to finish an expressway, Cuenca offered to finished the highway in return for the authority to collect tolls.

Cuenca set up his Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines, a suitably government institution sounding name. Cuenca then began receiving lucrative government contracts. He had not been forgotten. In 5 years, road-building costs for the government escalated by 1000% Some of these projects were financed by the World Bank. Cuenca got a $1 billion contract to reclaim 500 hectares of Manila Bay. With the assistance of Marcos associates in the Middle East, CDCP also won more than $1 billion in Arab contracts, including $350 million to build a cross-Iraq highway. When the project was due to be 70% complete, less than 4% of the work had been done.

While Ferdinand Marcos had begun his political career as a 10% kickback and bribe "negotiator", as President he demanded from each participant in the government contracts - supplier, subcontractor, general contractor - adding up to .. as much as 80% of the total cost. Many businessmen who were not Marcos buddies turned over shares in their companies in return for selection privileges for contracts. A business is worthless without business. Other promising businesses learned the "legal" facts of life: the Marcos control of the armed forces and Constabulary could result in your business being seized for all manner of supposed infractions - if you refused to share your shares. Such takeovers were gradually melded together to form agglomerate monopolies which stifled competition. This happened in all of the primary industries: sugar, bananas, coconuts, tobacco, and others.

Martial law assisted patronage in providing the power and the means to break big business and free enterprise.

1978 -
"Capricorn One", an American movie, is released.
It depicts powerful business and bureaucratic sources attempting to fool the public with sophisticated manipulation of the media into believing in the success of a doomed manned space mission to Mars and back. Desperation of the forces depicted extends to murder of witnesses and concealment of information for the purpose of protecting careers, profits and fraud.

Open airing of the concept probably prevented such an incident from happening.
The downside was that it justified the end of publicised space probes both to those who engineered them and to the public which had become numb to their novelty in the face of other mass media distractions. Overtaxed citizens, depressed by the implied responsibility conveyed on them by increasing burdens of mass media reports of international problems encouraged the average person to seek comfort and satisfaction in material pleasures: career advancement, money, larger houses, more appliances and cars, drugs, sexuality, religion. As a possible disinformation project, it successfully justified cutting back the space program, which astronauts had been warned to discontinue by aliens from the earliest flights. The existence of a real covert second U.S.A. space program was not revealed until the late 1980s, when it was "discontinued". Perhaps U.S. $2 billion was spent on it; no results were made public.

1978 -
It was proposed by 2 policemen, that some cattle were taken up into the air, mutilated while in the air, then dropped to the ground. Carcasses had been found in seemingly impossible places, sometimes with broken bones as if dropped from above. It was also suggested that the animals had been marked in some way previous to the mutilation incident. Testing revealed that patches of hide on mutilated animals fluoresced under black light, such that it could be a marking mechanism.

1978 - At the beginning of April,
Eduard (Billy) Meier met with Wendell Stevens, Lee and Brit Elders.
Over the previous 3 years, Meier had met over 100 times with Semjase, his spacewoman guide, and they had talked about interstellar travel, life on Erra, universal law, advanced physics, archaeology, astronomy, Creation, the fate of other human races, the destiny of the planet Earth, and spiritual societies obscuring even the Pleiadians. Meier described his feelings of his trips:

"If I go there, if I talk to them, if I am in the ship together with them, I never like to return to the earth. Every time I have trouble coming back. You see, if I am shouting there, really shouting, pounding my fist on the table, it's something else than if I am shouting here on earth. I'm shouting there in peace and in love. Sometimes I have to make myself very, very angry to come back home.

It's so peaceful and restful and loving there, speaking together with them.
You see what can happen, and everything in the world is okay.
There I am much more clear in my head, in my thinking and feeling, than here.
Then I have to return to a world which is full of turmoil and shouting and everything.
There is fighting, day after day, hour after hour, second after second.
With them it is not so. If you are shouting there, it is with peace and love, too."

According to Meier, the Pleiadians' desire to reveal their presence slowly and without ceremony arose from the events that occurred long ago, when early earth humans believed that visitors from elsewhere in the universe were gods or the angels of God. He explained:

"The Pleiadians distance themselves every time from such things.
There is one way around this problem. To tell the people, to tell them again, again, again, what's really happening, what the Pleiadians are really, that they are humans like the humans from earth, that they are no more. What I have to do practically every day, I have to shout. I have to beat my fist on the table to tell the people what is real. And they have the same problem. But there is one way of teaching. Tell the people day after day, hour after hour, they are really not gods. ... Impossible to connect them. It's exactly the same thing if you have a motor that works with regular gasoline, and you go and put pitch into the gasoline, it blows up. ... (their) vibrations, the waves and everything, that's much higher."

Meier informed his visitors that the Pleiadians were also interested in earth humans because they were an earlier form of their society. He explained the feeling during dematerialization as being "a condition of being well-balanced"; "as if you would find yourself in eternity." That condition does not end when you are re-materialized. Depending on your emotions and state of mind, you are not aware of it until the body touches some other material thing. "When I leave the ship, I jump into the hole, and into the hole, what we call, "arrange" the material." You can't see them when they come out of the ship until they touch the ground. They have 32% oxygen (on their planet). It is better and lighter breathing (than on the earth). Meier talked about civilizations that lived in harmony in the universe and travelled faster than life, about life on Erra and the androids and the spiritual leaders there. Not once did he contradict himself.

At this meeting, Meier brought out pieces of metal which he had kept for at least 3 years.
They had been given to him as samples of the metal of which the beamships were made. "They told me that the metal is in four states." According to his notes, one of the samples represented the next-to-final stage in a 7-step process the Pleiadians used to make the metal. It appeared to be an alloy containing silver and gold. Meier made no attempt to sell his story or attract attention by bringing out articles: if you asked him specifically about something which he could answer, you got an answer; otherwise, you did not. Meier had also shared a recording of the spacecraft's sounds with the investigation group. They had been very sceptical; now, they were overloaded with stories, signed witness statement, photographs, material evidence. Stevens remarked "It just got to a point where one man couldn't have done so much so well to fool so many people for so long."

A witness, Herbert Runkel, told the group what the difference was between those who quickly discounted Meier's observations and experiences as a hoax and those who saw something deeper: "These thoughts always come from people who know nothing about the case. They hear about the case, or they see only one or two pictures. They never go to the place where the pictures were taken. Because people who have seen the places always say, 'That is not possible'." When the group went to the site of perhaps 1/3 of Meier's photographs, and where he had taken a film of the beamship, they agreed. At one point he had stood 52 yards from the position of the beamship as it moved in front of a tree. Directly behind the tree, there was a drop straight down. The weather at the site was always cold and windy.

1978 -
Erwin Chargaff, is quoted in the book, "Bio-Revolution: DNA and the Ethics of Man-made Life", by Richard Hutton, as follows:

"This world is given to us on loan .... My generation, or perhaps the one preceding mine, has been the first to engage under the leadership of the exact sciences, in destructive colonial warfare against nature. The future will curse us for it."

1978 -
An expedition organized by Ari Marshall, a Greek industrialist interested in the legend of Atlantis, went in search of a huge underwater pyramid reported to be the southwest of Cay Sal Bank, near the Bahamas. Closed circuit television footage of a pyramidal mound off the Cay Sal Bank at a depth of 750 feet unfortunately had a limited field of view and it left inconclusive a determination of whether the mound was stone or not. Large holes were shown in the side through which glowing and possibly electrically charged particles were passing. Marshall recalls:

"The first thing we noticed when we got near the area was that all the compasses
were going beserk.  We spent eight hours making tapes, stating at 700 feet to 1500
feet deep.  We would go about a mile, then make a 90 degree turn and go back again.
Finally I saw it coming up on the sonar screen.  I told the captain to stop and then to
proceed slowly.  We were right over the pyramid.  The top seemed to be about 150
feet from the surface, with the total depth about 650 feet.  We lowered the camera
and high intensity lights down the side of the mass and suddenly came to an opening. 
Light flashes or shining white objects were being swept into the opening by
turbulence.  They may have been gas or some sort of energy crystals.  Further down
the same thing happened in reverse.  They were coming out again at a lower level.  It
was surprising that the water in this deep area was green instead of black near the
pyramid, even at night."

Light penetrates water to the degree that it is clear.
Murky waters can block out all surface light in as little depth as 1 foot (.3 metres).
In clear water, the diffusion influence of the water begins to limit the transmission of colour significantly by a depth of 33 feet (10 metres). Before a depth of 400 feet (1202 metres) has been reached, all surface light has been filtered out and the darkness is so impenetrable, in crystal clear water, that a person cannot see anything. Most, if not all of the pictures and film taken here would have only had the artificial lighting supplied by the camera equipment.

With the level of technology at this time, deep underwater pictures tended to be defined by how far the lights illumined and that was dependant upon water turbidity. Small objects passing close to the lens could appear brighter and larger than in reality. The most significant aspects of what was observed here is that there were holes in the side of a pyramid-shaped mound in the middle of the seafloor with apparent water currents flowing in some and out others. Geologically formed mounds never have holes in the sides unless they have been made by some lifeform. Geologically formed underwater pyramidal mounds had never been found before which had water circulating in at one level and out at another. Highly magnetic mounds have been discovered and can be meteorites. Underwater efflorescence is usually extremely localized and has never been recorded before around a large object.

Other surveyed locations which have structures which could be seamounts, pyramids, inactive volcanoes, or weather induced swirls have been found at

   23 degrees 26' N and 79 degrees 43' W  (1500 feet depth),

   23 degrees 34' N and 80 degrees W      (1800 feet depth).

A strong tornado which touches down without further advancement in any direction over a shallow depth of not more than 33 feet (10 metres) and where the bottom has a considerable depth of very fine and loose sand could result in the water being sucked up into the waterspout and while creating such a whirlwind current as to both agitate the sand and leave it swirled into a pyramid-shaped mound. These depths are not reflected at these sites in the modern era.

1978 - On May 15,
Mrs. Victor, (see August 10 and September 15, 1975) of Gilroy, California, was in the home of one of her patients, an elderly woman, when she suddenly fell on the floor as if someone had thrown her down violently; over the next several minutes she was severely beaten by an invisible entity. The older lady reported that she saw Mrs. Victor turning and spinning on the floor, hitting obstacles in her path. She suffered multiple bruises, a sliver of wood punctured a vein, and she broke her leg. She had to spend 6 days in the hospital.

1978 - On June 19,
Near Arcahon, France, a UFO was sighted over the town of Gujan-Mestras.
There were independent witnesses near Creon and La Reole also. Frank Pavia and Jean-Marc Guitard, knocked on the door of baker Mr. Varisse, who was preparing the next day's bread at 1.30 A.M. The teenagers had stopped at the side of the road to repair a turn signal on their car when all the lights of the town suddenly went out.

At the same time a powerful rumble like an earthquake occurred and they saw an object they described as oval, red, surrounded with white "flames", flying towards them at an altitude of 11,000 feet. Jean-Marc felt unable to breathe and fainted. The object changed directions and flew away. The brightness of the UFO had triggered the photocells that control the lights for the whole town.

Mr. Bachere, a 35-year old restaurant manager, and his wife, at about the same time, saw "a bright orange ball, very bright" that hovered over La Reole at about 1,000 feet before disappearing. It reappeared at the same spot one minute later.

1978 - On June 23,
Jacques Vallee, a ufologist and several friends who had gone to Happy Valley, in northern California to investigate some sightings had driven out to one of the sites beyond the Saddle, up to the highest point at the end of a trail. At about 11.15 P.M., they saw a very bright light, white with a tinge of red, straight ahead of them, several miles away across the valley, on the slope of China Peak. The sighting lasted no more than 10 seconds.

1978 - On June 23,
"Ekran II", A Soviet satellite, blew apart in space when its battery exploded.
The mishap was not admitted by the USSR until 1992.
Then incident had happened while the satellite was being observed by a ground-based telescope.

1978 - On July 5,
A similar shower of metal from the sky to that which occurred on December 17, 1977 near Council Bluffs, Iowa, happened about 1 mile southwest of the first incident.

1978 - On July 10,
A similar shower of metal from the sky to that which occurred on December 17, 1977, and on July 5, 1978, near Council Bluffs, Iowa.

1978 - By July,
APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, founded by Jim and Coral Lorenzen in 1952, was invited to join the investigation of Eduard Meier being carried out by Lee and Brit Elders, Tom Welch, Wendelle Stevens, Jim Dilettoso and Gary Kinder. Jim discounted Meier's photos from the beginning, perceiving them as being nothing more than "art". Lorenzen misunderstood the invitation to be a request for him to supervise the investigation so that the APRO stamp of approval would make the efforts of Stevens and Intercep "beyond question". Jim assumed that he would have "control of the investigation" and that he "would decide which tests would be done and what scientists and labs to use." Several times he remarked to Stevens, "There seems to be an awful lot here for one party to fake. Either it's a big group with a big scam, or something is going on."

Lorenzen talked at length with producer John Stefanelli; he travelled to San Francisco to speak with Marcel Vogel, the scientist which Dilettoso found at IBM; he met with representatives of a computer company that manufactured image processing equipment for analyzing photographs. Lorenzen asked Stevens for the transparencies and photos he had of Meier's, not recognizing the past difficulties which had transpired with the Meier originals. Frequently Meier had lent his photos to interested parties for them to make copies and return the originals. Too often, the originals had been kept and the copies returned, or, nothing was returned. Stevens did not wish to be a party to further extending the process, so, if the photos or transparencies were to be studied, they would be, while remaining in his possession. This hurt the pride of Lorenzen who now believed that his reputation should be authority enough for others to turn over everything to him. Dilettoso was now building contacts in the science community and APRO was not so depended on for such assistance. As time progressed, less and less detail was passed to Lorenzen by Stevens, who himself wanted to maintain control of the project.

Lorenzen, through his association with other UFO interest groups located in Europe began to hear back rumours about Meier. These suggested that every time a group of Americans left Meier's, the Meier's group would laugh at them behind their backs at how easily they had been fooled. Lorenzen also heard that affidavits from alleged witnesses actually refuted Meier's claims. Proud and increasingly paranoid, Lorenzen, like so many humans, took the easy emotionally reactive position of simply assuming that Meier had "used models", and, that "he threw away those pictures that didn't turn out." Lorenzen confidently castigated the other researchers for not having checked the developing and printing options which Meier had used, all the while praising himself as one who would have checked those avenues first. A year into the investigation with the Intercep team, Lorenzen would ask the team to pay his way to visit Meier in Europe. As they had been using their private monies throughout, piggybacking their visits onto business trips, and travelling on the super cheap - they said no. Lorenzen took offence at the denial and demanded that the team turn over all of their evidence to APRO for investigation. The team said no, again. APRO was hurt, mainly by their own pride and ignorance.

1978 - During the summer,
Jim Dilettoso, working with the Intercep team, set out to find equipment sources and the services of scientists which could be used to further test the legitimacy of Eduard Meier's claims and evidence. He would spend a year writing and phoning them. Scientists needed to open-minded as well as knowledgeable about services or equipment. The lack of a budget to work with made the approach that much more difficult. Then, a scientist's career and income is often tied to their credibility, and many, if not most, believed that their credibility would be seriously threatened if they were known to be associated with the study of UFOs. Further, of those who agreed to assist, most declined to allow their reputations as employees of noted organizations or their employment designation to be used as any indication of the authority of their conclusions. Finding a true scientist, with strength of character was near impossible.

1978 - During July,
Pope Paul VI entered his 15th year as pontiff.
He was the spiritual leader over 18.1% of the Earth's human population: 740 million baptized Catholics.
The Church supported 3,700 bishops, 130 cardinals, 42,839 priests and 986,686 nuns.
He had almost doubled the number of cardinals in the Church. He had guided the results of Vatican II, for which some priests and archbishops were calling him a heretic. Early in his reign, 1964, he had established the Secretariat for Non-Christians, a vigorous, optimistic and liberalizing agency.

1978 - In July,
Anwar Husein, a photographer, was taking pictures in the Spanish Pyrenees on what he remembered to be a very bright quiet morning when he unawarely photographed a UFO. After his film was developed, back in London, the developing lab drew his attention to the object in the picture, which on further investigation provide to be authentic "objects".

1978 -
While picking apples one day in Arkansas, a middle-aged lady fell from the ladder and deeply cut her leg. She also received a severe blow on her head that so stunned her that she was unable to move or cry out. While lying on the ground, 2 humanoids approached. One was tall and thin, the other quite short. They began to give her abundantly bleeding leg medical treatment, with an instrument they had with them. Within a short time, all bleeding and pain stopped and there was only a small scar where the wound had been. They gave her a piece of metal with markings engraved on it depicting pyramids and six-pointed stars. She invited them to her house for a meal, but they replied that the only nourishment they took was juice. Next, the lady offered them some fruit juice, but the response was that the juice they used was different from that consumed by humans. Their voices seemed to come from their abdomens.

About 6 weeks later, the lady's dog did not return home as usual, so she walked deep into the forest to look for it. Coming to the edge of a clearing, she saw a horse lying on its side with 2 men dressed in white at work on it. There were 2 USAF helicopters landed in the clearing; present were 2 men in USAF uniforms and the 2 humanoids who had come to her aid earlier. She felt that she had stumbled on something secretive and began to retreat. The group noticed her presence, she began to run; they ran after her, she managed to evade them. Then, overtaken by a helicopter, a blue beam of light was flashed on her, which severely burned her right breast and clothing. She went to the hospital, was treated, and told the staff of the incident. The sheriff insisted on taking her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her as sane. Harassed at all hours, afterwards, by strangers who insisted on questioning her, she and her husband moved to another state. Then the harassment began all over again.

1978 - On August 2,
In Vallenoncello, Italy, a bright oval object descended while illuminating the ground.
After the object's departure, the witness found an irregularly shaped burned area in the grass, about 2 metres in diameter. The grass had changed to a reddish colour and was covered by a dark jellylike substance. The witness collected some of the substance but eventually threw it away, not knowing what to do with it.

Vegetation only began to grow two years later.
The burned area was still noticeable in 1981, and it was covered with moss and small cactus-like plants that were not typical of the area. An analysis by the regional centre of agriculture research found an abnormal level of calcium at the site.

1978 - During the year,
Luis Silvera, while walking through the Interior in the Parnarama region of Brazil, saw a light shining on him from the sky. He ran back to the house where he collapsed, drained of strength. He had a high fever for two days, but no marks on his body. He described the beam of light as having several colours in it and said that it made him feel strange and nervous. He had a headache that passed rapidly.

1978 - By August,
Dr. Robert Nathan, of NASA's "Jet Propulsion Laboratory" (JPL) in Pasadena, California, had been approached by Jim Dilettoso, who was investigating the authenticity of Eduard Meier's photographs. Dr. Nathan had conceived image processing in the 1960s and developed it for nearly 20 years. The procedure he used now was more advanced, more costly and more time consuming than earlier approaches. Nathan's job was to detect and analyze objects in space, whatever their nature. He agreed to look at the photos as an individual, not as a scientist at JPL, and that any opinion he might render would be his own and not that of the NASA facility.

Nathan had made copies of the transparencies in Wendelle Steven's possession, at the JPL lab and then taken those to Bob Post. Post who was head of the photo lab where every JPL photo of planets, stars, asteroids, and comets was processed and printed, had worked there for 22 years. The photos he had usually been shown of suspected UFOs had been poor in definition and detail. These were good. He had commented that "From a photography standpoint, you couldn't see anything that was fake about them. That's what struck me. They looked like legitimate photographs. I thought, God, if this is real, this is going to be really something."

1978 - By August,
Eduardo Cojuangco, Jr., of the wealthiest Chinese family in the Philippines, and one of only 2 civilians in the Marcos "Rolex 12", was now the second richest man in the Philippines.

Eduardo's great-grandfather, Jose I, had been a forceful, proud Chinese immigrant from the Chinese province of Fukien who had come to the Philippines to escape poverty and oppression in 1861. He started in Manila as a building contractor. With his profits he invested in rice and sugar lands in Tarlac. Agricultural tenants soon gave him an opportunity to become a moneylender. His combined profits from rents and financial services allowed him to expand his landholdings rapidly through foreclosure. Poverty had taught him to be stringent in personal material pleasures and ruthless in business. He had no compassion for farmers who failed to work as obsessively as he, failed to plan for coping with potential problems, and freely enjoyed the moment as it passed. Their human impulsiveness, sloth, natural misfortune, lack of caution and inability to emotionally detach themselves from the concerns of others - would be his benefit.

With persistence, the family fortunes grew.
It acquired 16,000 hectares of prime sugar-land, a 6500-hectare tobacco plantation, and a sugar mill. They would come to own the Philippine Bank of Commerce, the First United Bank, and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company. As American political and business influence grew in the Philippines, the Cojuangcos weaved their way into the backrooms of decision-making. After WWII, their Hacienda Luisita became a base for the CIA, a guarantee of preferential treatment.

The clan had split into jealous and intolerant factions when Ninoy Aquino, from a rival clan, married Cory Cojuangco and campaigned for the post of Tarlac province (their area) governor in 1960. Jose Cojuangco Jr. and Senior underwrote his campaign, which aroused the thwarted pride of Eduardo and his father for it seemed that the clan were supporting a rival. The animosity between Eduardo and Ninoy increased when each found that they could not change the opposing principles of the other. Martial law reversed the political authority of the two with Ninoy ending in jail and Eduardo contributing to the state decision-making from the secret Rolex-12 "cabinet".

Although 20 years younger than Ferdinand, Eduardo could offer a fascist-like ruthless business, money-dominated dimension to the underworld and government bureaucratic power of the increasingly politically powerful Marcos. Eduardo acquired a seat in the new Congress, became the ruling party's chairman for Tarlac province, international socialite and business executive for the Philippine image, head of the huge horse-racing and basketball sports and gambling franchises, director of the Manila Hilton hotel, owner of Filsov Shipping, director of First Philippine Holdings, and owner of over 140 companies taken over during martial law. He would eventually become chairman of San Miguel, the Philippines' largest corporation. With a little help from Ferdinand Marcos and Juan Ponce Enrile, he took over the entire coconut industry. Together they created a monopoly by controlling funding, processing, marketing, and development.

They attempted to manipulate the American market for coconut oil by buying Philippine oil cheap, shipping it to America, and warehousing it there until prices rose. A sudden increase in interest rates and the Soviet grain embargo (which flooded the American market with the competing product - soybean oil) caused coconut oil prices to drop, and, Marcos and Cojuangco had to sell their aging supply at a $10 million loss or watch it go rancid. With the sudden dump of huge quantities of oil on the market, the U.S. Justice Department filed a suit charging that the two had conspired to create an artificial shortage; several USA firms lodged anti-trust actions - money and political negotiations saw the Justice Department issue Marcos and Cohuangco with a caution "not to do it again".

1978 - By September,
Colman Von Keviczky of "Inter-Continental UFO Network" (ICUFON) had sent out a flyer to his membership claiming that UFO models had been found hanging in Meier's barn, and that a picture Meier claimed to be of an extraterrestrial named Asket was actually Meier's wife in a blond wig. Proclaiming the case a hoax, however, did not deter VonKeviczky from advertising at the bottom of the flyer's front page: 11 slides of original Meier photos for only $33; and, for an additional price, copies of Meier's contact notes.

1978 - During the year,
James A. Baldwin would publish his report on the Gogodala.
A culture similar to that of ancient human band societies, the Gogodala of Papua, New Guinea have no history of warfare, few accidental deaths, very little infanticide, malnutrition is rare, and calories consumed per day is higher than in many other human groupings.

The average Gogodala diet supplies 3571 calories per person per day.
Fish supply 80% of the protein and 7% of the calories. Alternatively, the sago palm supplies almost 80% of the calories in the diet. Lotus seeds make up 15% of the diet protein and about 5% of the calories. Part of the reason for the high caloric intake without either obesity or long hours of hard labour is the incidence of parasite infections, the introduction of infectious diseases, and the hyperendemic presence (almost 100% exposure) of malaria. Predation by wild animals including crocodiles and poisonous snakes is low. One third of the children born die from malaria before they reach the age of 3. Infectious diseases, brought by the Europeans since 1900, now include venereal diseases, tuberculosis, measles, influenza, and leprosy. Each take their toll of life.

With the tropical climate, absence of footwear, marsh and lagoon fishing, and sinply designed housing - many people acquire parasitic infestation. Common problems include skin diseases, lice, scabies, filariasis (from mosquitoes), and hookworm. They tend to induce big appetites, weakness, and stupor in the victims. The Gogodala respond by demonstrating compassion and empathy for one another by comforting and assisting.

The use of DDT would kill the mosquitoes (and reduce the presence of malaria), the chemical would also lead to an increase in a type of moth known to kill sago palms - a major food resource. When given the option of accepting foreign aid in the form of DDT and vaccines, the Gogodala rejected it. To accept the aid would result in the destruction of a great number of the food supplying sago palm trees and result in a dependency upon external aid. Freedom was preferred.

1978 - Within a three week period in September,
4 sightings/contacts took place. All were in Venado Tuerto, a small town 3 hours south of Rosario, Argentina.

In the first, a young carpenter, Alberto saw seven objects and two beings on the ground.

In the second case, a boy named Oscar saw three objects and went inside one of them, communicating with a very tall man and a small robot. It is described in detail after this summary.

The third case involved a 16-year-old baker named Francisco who felt intense heat from a luminous object during a blackout of the local transformer.

The fourth involved a fifty-three-year-old man who was driving at night and found himself "teleported" over four miles and had to be admitted to a local clinic for chest pains. Venado Tuerto is a rural area of very flat land with some modern estancias, many swamps, andlagoons.

1978 - On September 6,
Oscar was sent to gather a herd of horses in the morning, near Venado Tuerto, Argentina. Riding his horse Cometa through the fog, he felt something fly overhead and saw an object arrive from the south, another from the west, a third from the east. They started dancing, emitting powerful lights of changing colour. They changed rapidly: green, red, yellow. His eyes "started getting cloudy."

The boy lost control of his horse which bolted and ran toward the wire fence, where Oscar managed to stop it. Returning, his father scolded him for not bringing back the horses to which he responded that he had found a big round thing in the field. The father was impatient and unbelieving and sent the boy back into the fog. Back at the spot, Oscar found the objects on the ground. Cometa became nervous again and the herd ran in all directions.

The object was about 30 feet in diameter, 15 feet high, ending in a half-sphere dome with several round windows. A door opened and a ladder unfolded to the ground. A being appeared in the opening. It was 7 feet tall and was wearing long gloves and a cylindrical helmet. It seemed to be tethered to a breathing apparatus linking it to the object; it invited Oscar into the object. The boy tied the reins of his horse to the ladder, climbed up, and stood next to the "giant". From this position he was able to describe the ship's interior, which had a panel of buttons, tables, and a small "robot" which was occupied with cutting into pieces the large bones of some animals similar to horses or cattle.

Impressed and scared, the boy rushed back out and down the ladder.
The tall being joined him, and Oscar asked him for one of his gloves as proof of the experience.
When the giant complied, the boy observed that his hand was green with the middle finger shorter than the others, the nails like conical dark blue metallic claws. With one of these claws the bing pricked Oscar's right arm near the shoulder; it felt like a mosquito bite.

While Oscar was carrying the huge, heavy glove, riding towards the estancia, two flying craft caught up with him and emitted a small slab and a sphere that joined together in the air, brushing against the horse and pulling off the glove like a magnet.

Oscar's family showed little interest in his excited description of events although his father, Don Felipe admitted to having heard a "strange humming sound, like the flame of a torch moving rapidly through the air." The parents also reported that during the following days the boy had no appetite and frequently woke up at night screaming. He said, "I dreamed I was inside the saucer and they took me and did things to me."

At the spot on Oscar's arm where the giant had pricked him, a small line developed, two inches long. It started itching that night, and he washed it with water and soap. Two or three days later the ends healed, and he was left with a small depression in his skin. In addition to this mark he experienced a series of spots resembling psoriasis, which were thought to be "of nervous origin".

Six days prior to the sighting, Oscar's father had found a dead cow on the property; the hindquarter and the ribs were missing. This was very puzzling to him as he expected that if thieves were responsible, they would have taken the hide. The family is descended from a race of white Indians who go back to the Incas and they are one of the last families in the area to wear the traditional garb of the gauchos.

After the incident, the horse had become very shortsighted and eventually died.
During the event the horse had tried to kick the spaceship ladder and had injured the back left leg.

The entire area has a kind of quiet, tragic beauty and an uncertain future: every year the lakes and the lagoons are gaining on the land. Nobody seems to know where the water is coming from. Entire villages have already been submerged, and in places the road to Rosario is a mere levee with wide lakes on both sides. Here and there one can see the top floors of old houses and formerly proud hotels emerging from the gray waters.

The family live on a 40-hectare farm that was given to them by the previous owner of the estancia in his will. They grow corn, wheat and soya. The family members are very close and obviously happy together. They did not have a television at the time of the sighting.

Oscar's schoolteacher and a clinical psychologist described Oscar as having the logical-concrete type of intelligence with great difficulties to pass on to the logical-formal period, possibly due to the limited stimulus he has had in the local rural environment. He pays little attention in school but is well behaved. He is very honest and tells the truth. He likes to talk of life outside the school: the real - when he is out in the fields, the everyday, what happens at home. He loves horseback riding and nature. He is described as not an imaginative child with no expression of fantasies.

1978 - During the year,
The U.S.S.R. "Cosmos 954" nuclear-powered satellite spread radioactive debris over part of Canada when it fell out of orbit.

1978 - During October,
"Project Ivy Bells" was begun by the USA Navy when they tapped an underwater communications cable between Petropavlovsk and the mainland of the USSR. Until 1981, a recording device was attached to the cable and would be periodically emptied of its surveillance information by USA nuclear-propelled submarines.

USSR Admiral Gorshkov shifted his newer longer-range submarines to the Northern (Arctic) and Pacific fleets to have them avoid the constrictions of NATO surveillance in the Baltic and Black Seas. In wartime, the Northern fleet would have had to traverse the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gaps to reach Allied shipping lanes or strategic launch positions. In the Far East, submarines operating out of Vladivostok would have to pass through straits bordering Japan, an Allied nation.

The naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula provided an alternative and was developed as a major submarine facility. However, Kamchatka could only be supplied by ship and aircraft for there were no railroads or vehicle roads between the peninsula and other populated areas. Until satellite communications developed further, most communication between the distant post and the rest of the Soviet Union was transmitted through the cable which ran across the Sea of Okhotsk seabed.

1978 - On the evening of October 3,
Mr. Hideichi Amano, while using his mobile unit ham radio and driving up a mountain near Sayama City, and in the company of his 2-year old daughter, Juri, experienced a strange encounter. After completing several calls from a high location, the interior of the car became very bright as the fluorescent tube he had fitted in the car became 10 times brighter than normal. None of the light seemed to pass through the windows to the outside. The child, moments before standing on the passenger seat beside him, was now lying on the seat, and foaming at the mouth. He noticed a round patch of orange light beamed through the window onto his stomach coming from a point in the sky. Alarm became terror as he sensed something metallic being pressed against his right temple.

Amano glanced sideways to see a humanoid standing with a device in its mouth which was being pressed against his head. From this tube came an incessant babble, as though a tape recording being played to fast. The being seemed to have a round face, but no neck, 2 sharply pointed ears, 2 small motionless eyes that glowed bluish-white, and a triangular depression on its forehead. The mouth was clamped around the pipe-like object and no nose could be seen. While the babble continued, he felt it difficult to move, and his mind became "vague". The car refused to respond to his efforts to start it and the lights also would not work. After 4 or 5 minutes, the being began to dim out and then vanished. The orange light disappeared, the interior lighting returned to normal, and the other equipment that had been switched on now began to function.

In a confused and frightened state, Amano drove quickly down the mountain, only then remembering little Juri's earlier state. Stopping, he found her now standing and asking for a drink of water. He reported the incident to the police who poked fun at him. Amano had a severe headache afterwards. A television program heard of the encounter and arranged for him to be interviewed under hypnosis. During the programme, information came out that in addition to his memories, Amano had been instructed to return to the site at a future specific time. This may have been additional information provided by Amano's brain in defence against the hypnotist's insistence on gaining more information.

1978 - On October 21,
Frederick Valentich of Avondale Heights, Melbourne, Australia, was flying a Cessna 182 light aircraft to King Island, midway between Cape Otway, Victoria and Tasmania, at 4500 feet altitude on an evening flight. Shortly after flying over the lighthouse at Cape Otway, Valentich contacted ground control at Melbourne and spoke with them for 6 minutes about a craft which approached him from the side, had a green light and a sort of metallic light on the outside, was large and travelling at a speed he could not estimate. It seemed to be playing some sort of game with him, Valentich reported. Suddenly, it seemed as if both had become stationary with the plane orbiting and the UFO orbiting above it. Transmission ceased and nothing was ever found of the plane or pilot. The episode is well detailed in the book Melbourne Episode by Dr. Richard Haines.

1978 -
Steven Spielberg's first movie, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (and presumably his later one "E.T.") are rumoured to have been financed at the appropriate time to foster acceptance of friendly aliens and pleasant UFO experiences. "Close Encounters" cost US$27 million to make.

Whether with awareness or with naivety, Spielberg received encouragement, technical facilities and the production support of Julia and Michael Phillips to present a collage story of supposed meetings between spaceperson cultures and humanity. By this time the senior decisionmakers in the USA intelligence community, armed forces and other advisors to the White House have "negotiated" an arrangement with the GRAYs whereby the GRAYs will ostensibly trade access to their much superior technology for the sanction to abduct and place implants into American citizens, ostensibly for research and monitoring purposes. The fact that the GRAYs have been responsible for ALL of the cattle and human mutilations which have mysteriously occurred is suppressed by the psychological human defenses of denial and intellectualization. The true intent of the GRAYs is not yet acknowledged at this point.

In too often typical human political response, the American citizenry are treated like children by their senior decisionmakers. Afraid that the common American could not emotionally and intellectually cope with the open acknowledgement of the GRAY's and other spaceperson' cultures, the public have been "protected" from this reality - as if the "problem" would go away. By deceiving and manipulating the public, the likelihood of real anarchy in the open acceptance of the GRAYs, under such a program of disinformation, becomes highly possible.

To prevent this anarchy, these decisionmakers, by now, had begun a conditioning preparation of the population in expectation of an orderly introduction of the GRAY's presence. The simplistic and unrealistic portrayals presented in the movie, disadvantage the viewer from being prepared to cope with different spaceperson cultures having widely differentiated intentions regarding humans.

In particular, the psuedo-spiritual theme of open-armed acceptance to any being which is technologically superior is a replication quite simply of human political authority structures - most of which have consistent histories of abuse to humanity and the environment. It stands as homage to a new god of representative technological power: the extraterrestrial. A truly spiritual approach would have been a humbling acknowledgement of "God", of the positive decisionmaking power of prayer and meditation, of the capacity for forgiveness, compassion, empathy, teamwork, individual self-esteem and assertiveness: NONE of which have been promoted at this point (1996) by the cultural leadership.

1978 -
Governor Scott Matheson, of Utah, expresses anger at the finding that the AEC has been guilty of a massive public relations campaign and cover-up of blatant malfeasances for over 25 years including:

"Funding has been cut off, studies have been discredited and their results discounted ... Some scientific papers on this issue (health safety relative to radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests in Utah) have found their only place of prominence at the bottom of some federal agency file."

Citizens in Utah or Nevada who received a dose of 1000 millirems per hour after a single blast in 1953 were compared to those near the Three Mile Island site who received a dose 400 to 500 times smaller !

Later, congressional subcommittees would condemn the AEC for

1) knowing the hazards, and failing to warn the sheep herders; 2) knowingly disregarding and suppressing evidence connecting radiation to deaths; 3) wrongly denying compensation to sheep ranchers for their losses; 4) acknowledging that the government must promptly compensate the victims for its mistakes. "the only victims of the U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been its own people."

1978 -
According to the MUFON (Mutual UFO Network, Seguin, Texas) over 1,600 different entity incidents were compiled in their Humanoid Study Group (HSG) report, as of 1976. Of this number 166 were reports of on-board experiences. According to Study Group co-chairman, physicist David Webb, some of the recurring features of these kidnappings include:

"On-board medical examination, induced amnesia, intelligible communication, paralysis of the witness and such physical characteristics of the humanoids as slanted eyes, small stature, small noses and ears and a mouth slit."

In geographic terms, over half of the documented abductions have occurred in the United States, followed by strong concentrations in Brazil (20%), and Argentina (6%). It is to be expected that such reports would not be as easily made in countries in which literacy and education standards are low, where mass media is virtually absent, where socio-political institutions are openly authoritarian and the public take refuge in the uncompromising standards of such religious, social or political memberships. UFO abductions, or the reporting of them, has increased dramatically since 1965. Most such experiences go unreported because many contactees simply do not remember the experience. Usually, they are consciously left only with an awareness of time loss and the sight of a UFO.

1978 -
In the November issue of "Der Spiegel", the huge international magazine, an 11-page cover story on UFOs: "apparition or Reality? The UFOs Come." was printed.

The magazine cover was a dramatic Meier photograph - a beamship accompanied by a remote-controlled craft, the latter just below the horizon. Now people from all over the world would visit Meier, in Switzerland. A few would sign his guest book as coming from Tahiti, Japan, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Belgium and the U.S.A.

Popi (Mrs. Meier) would remain disgusted with the visitors.
"I was fed up many times," she said later, "but we didn't have a choice.
They would come into my house and say, 'Okay Billy, let's go.' Not a word to me.
I got aggressive, I could not see why people couldn't understand when I told them that Billy was busy right now. They came here with their problems and Billy had to be here no matter what. He didn't care about his health, and the people didn't see that he needed time to relax, to take care of himself, and to be my husband. Nobody ever asked Billy, 'So, you have a problem? Can we help you with anything?'"

Brit Elder later remarked:

"At the very beginning, Billy sincerely questioned his sanity. .... Then he got to where it became fun. All of these people he'd never met before, coming to talk to him. Then the photographs hit the magazines, and all of a sudden he was swamped with people. They started lining up outside. Literally lining up. And that he didn't enjoy. People would say, 'Give me this photograph,' or 'Let me have that photograph.' Then they would disappear and he would never see them again. Here I think all of the fun left it, because half of everything got stolen. The kids were being harassed at school. His wife was unhappy, and he wasn't real happy. Because there was a constant flow of human bodies.

Always..... Popi was very jealous of the contacts anyway, not just the fact it was a female space traveler, but also that Billy was doing something she couldn't be part of, and that she, deep down inside, didn't want to be part of. She didn't want anything to do with the contacts. She didn't want to talk to the people who were invading her privacy. I've seen her take on everyone in the kitchen, tell them to get out, leave, leave the house, go away, she never wants to see them again. Because they were making demands on her husband, and in her mind that was separating her husband from her. She finally got to a point where she didn't care. She didn't care if anybody showed up, she didn't care if her house was a mess. She didn't care what happened to her kids, herself, or her husband. Everything around her was overrun with strangers."

1978 - In November,
Jacques Vallee, mathematician and ufologist, while in Mexico, heard of a fall of metallic residue in the mountains near Puebla.
The object was chiefly composed of iron, with 1.1% of silicium and traces of manganese, chromium, and carbon.

1978 - As of November 28,
The Chicago-based "Center for UFO Studies", headed by astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, has compiled UFOCAT, a catalogue generally regarded to contain the most complete listing of computerized world-wide sightings. Over 63,000 cases from 133 countries are compiled with, relative to population size, the United States being in the lead with the number of sightings, closely followed by Canada, Great Britain, Australia and France.

If we were to project Dr. Hynek's estimate that only 1 in 12 sightings is reported, we would be faced with a figure upward of 3/4 of a million potential UFO occurrences.

1978 - By December,
The Last Titanium Pigment Plant is built in the USA for the next 12 years.
Capacity for the paint industry had been established, there were few enforced regulations against the use of lead pigment, and use in plastics and papers was still minimal due to perceived cost and the continuing quality expectations re; a disposable-based product income. Plastics which discoloured as they reacted to the chemicals in a polluted air environment and as the plastics outgased and "decayed" were not yet considered a problem.

Also, the construction of plants in other countries with lower real estate costs, lower taxes and lower cost supplies of energy proved to be more attractive to business leaders.

1978 -
Over New Zealand's South Island, in late December, swarms of oval, luminous UFO's were observed by hundreds of witnesses including pilots and a television crew. At least 10 were recorded in a group by the latter observers.

1978 - On December 30,
Near Christchurch, New Zealand, Captain Bill Startup, the crew and television reporter passengers photographed and observed a round bright object which grew in size from a point to the size of a large balloon filled with glowing light. On a return flight 2 more objects were seen, one a sphere with lateral lines around it and which seemed to focus itself for them. The sphere appeared to be spinning. All were picked up on radar which showed the objects in formation with the plane and varying in its size.