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Health – Debate Rekindled in Homosexual Brain Research
By Steven Reinberg / HealthDay Reporter
[img]http://www.northernwave.org/images/brain.jpg[/img]TUESDAY, May 10 (HealthDayNews) — The latest research indicating that at
least some aspects of homosexuality may be “hard-wired” into the brain has
once again fanned the flames of debate.

Swedish scientists claim that chemicals called pheromones that affect our
sense of smell are different for gay men and straight men, providing another
biologic basis for different sexual orientation. Adding fuel to the fire is
the finding that gay men’s brain reactions to the chemicals were similar to
women’s reactions.

All the researchers say is, “These findings show that our brain reacts
differently to the two putative pheromones compared with common odors, and
suggest a link between sexual orientation and hypothalamic neuronal
processes.”

Pheromones are chemicals that send sexual messages as often undetectable
odors to individuals of the same species. In their study, the researchers
found that a pheromone in the perspiration of homosexual men causes a
similar reaction in other gay men and heterosexual women.

According to the report in the May 10 issue of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, the research team looked at compounds that
include a testosterone derivative called 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND), and
the estrogen-like steroid estra-1,3-5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol (EST).

The researchers found that AND activated the hypothalamus in homosexual men
and heterosexual women, but not heterosexual men. Additionally, EST
activated the hypothalamus only in heterosexual men.

“The regions of the brain involved have been found to be involved in sexual
behavior, based on animal studies,” said Brian Mustanski, from the
department of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Some
previous studies also found differences between gay and straight men in
these brain regions,” he added.

Mustanski noted that this study suggests a link between sexual orientation
and brain processes, specifically in the hypothalamus. “Another study, to
soon be published in Psychological Science, found differences in the odors
of gay and heterosexual men,” he said.

Taken together, these studies suggest that sexual orientation has a
biological component related to body odor and possible pheromones, Mustanski
said. “It also helps to demonstrate that sexual orientation is not a simple
choice — how could such a choice influence the production of and response
to body odors?

“These studies converge with previous research using family studies, twin
studies, and molecular genetic studies to show that sexual orientation is at
least partly determined by biology,” he said.

But other experts see it differently.

“This study says nothing about homosexuality being innate,” said Dr. Jeffrey
Satinover, a psychoanalyst who has written about homosexuality and lectured
on its social consequences. “There is an automatic knee-jerk assumption that
if there is a difference in the brain, that difference has to be innate,” he
added.

Changes in the hypothalamus could be caused by repetitive sexual behavior,
Satinover said. “The brain is extremely plastic, like a muscle,” he said.

“There have been dozens and dozens of studies attempting to show a genetic
or biological basis for homosexuality,” Satinover said. “Not one has ever
succeeded in doing so.”

Warren Throckmorton, an associate professor of psychology at Grove City
College, a Christian-based college in Pennsylvania, finds the study
intriguing. “It does show that there is some involuntary reaction on the
part of the brain to a stimulus that is imperceptible to the person,” he said.

But like Satinover, Throckmorton believes that the sense of smell is
partially learned. “The brains of the participants may have acquired a
sexual response to these chemicals as a result of past sexual experiences,”
he said. “So, learning could be implicated here in a way the subjects
wouldn’t have been aware of.”

From a political perspective, whether homosexuality is innate or learned
misses the point, according to Winnie Stachelberg, a vice president at the
Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an umbrella organization for gay and
bisexual causes. “How we treat people should be based on principles of basic
fairness and not on scientific evidence,” she said

“This study adds to the scientific evidence around sexual orientation. It
points to the need for continued research in this area,” Stachelberg added.
“In addition, studies like this help people understand each other and
alleviate fear.”

More information

The Council for Responsible Genetics can tell you more about genes and
sexual orientation.

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Back to the saucers
Thursday May 12, 2005 / The Guardian
[img]http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/site_furniture/2003/04/02/FarOut_128.gif[/img] [img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:FB1p2uh7XD4J:www.okultura.cz/ezimagecatalogue/catalogue/variations/190-400×500.jpg[/img]In February 2004, a team of Russian and American physicists discovered two
new elements, glimpsed for split seconds at the Joint Institute of Nuclear
Research in Dubna, Russia, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California.

Led by Russian Yuri Oganessian, the physicists made their announcement in
the journal Physical Review C. While their findings have yet to be repeated,
they are considered highly reliable. The two new “superheavy” elements, 113
and 115, provisionally named ununtrium and ununpentium, excite physicists
who think they are generated by exploding stars, and could provide clues to
the origins of the universe.

But this was not the first time Element 115 had made the headlines.
According to another group of perhaps less reputable researchers, it might
be the key that ultimately brings the stars to us.

In 1989, a Las Vegas TV station broadcast an interview with self-professed
scientist Bob Lazar. He claimed to have worked at a top secret facility
called S-4, just south of Nevada’s infamous airbase Area 51, and caused a
sensation when he described seeing nine extraterrestrial flying saucers
stored at S-4.

Lazar, who claims to have studied at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, states that his job
at S-4 was to “back-engineer” the reactor of one of the flying discs and
find out how it worked. While there, he was briefed on the history of ET
interaction with humankind, and watched a short test flight of the single
operational craft.

According to Lazar, the saucer flies using “gravity amplifiers” to create
“an intense gravitational field” that could “distort space/time”, “bringing
the destination to the source and allowing you to cross many light years of
space in little time”. The power to do this is generated in the craft’s
reactor, which is fuelled by … Element 115.

Whether or not he’s telling the truth, Lazar has stood by his claims and
left the UFO scene behind. As well as running a lab equipment repair
company, he is currently developing a hydrogen fuel generator for home use
and is involved in an ambitious plan to terraform a Martian environment in
an underground nuclear missile silo.

And, if Element 115’s existence is confirmed, perhaps one day it will be
called lazarium.

Mark Pilkington

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‘Oddball rodent’ in Laos takes scientists by surprise
By John Noble Wilford The New York Times
THURSDAY, MAY 12, 2005

They live in the forests and limestone outcrops of Laos. With long whiskers,
stubby legs and a long, furry tail, they are rodents but unlike any seen
before by wildlife scientists.

They are definitely not rats or squirrels, only vaguely like a guinea pig or
a chinchilla. And they often show up in Laotian outdoor markets being sold
for food. There, visiting scientists came upon the animals and determined
that they represented a rare find: an entire new family of wildlife.

The discovery was announced Wednesday by the Wildlife Conservation Society
and described in a report in the journal Systematics and Biodiversity.

The new species in this previously unknown family is called kha-nyou
(pronounced ga-nyou) by local people.

Scientists found that differences in the skull and bone structure and in the
animal’s DNA revealed this to be a member of a distinct family that diverged
from others of the rodent order millions of years ago.

“To find something so distinct in this day and age is just extraordinary,”
said Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the
discoverers. “For all we know, this could be the last remaining mammal
family left to be discovered.”

Naturalists had trouble recalling when a new family of mammals was last
identified. It may have been when, in the 1970s, a new family of bats was
found in Thailand. The most active period of finding and classifying new
species and families was in the 19th century, when explorers and settlers
moved into remote interiors of the continents.

Timmins said in an interview that he first came on the animals laid out on
market tables. Local farmers and hunters trapped or snared the animals,
slaughtered them and rushed them to market. As far as he knew, Timmins said,
no Western scientists have ever seen a kha-nyou alive.

The encounter occurred in the late 1990s, about the same time that another
scientist, Mark Robinson, independently collected several of the carcasses
as specimens. The adults have bodies about a foot long, or 30 centimeters
with a tail that is not as bushy as a squirrel’s. They knew immediately that
this was, as Timmins said, “an oddball rodent.”

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Students get sick while watching video
ADAM LYNN; The News Tribune / LUI KIT WONG/THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Three Rogers High students had to go to the hospital Monday in Puyallup.
[img]http://www.thenewstribune.com/images/unisys-images/20050510-images/NWS0510_ROGERS_P-thumb.JPG[/img]School will not be back in session today at Rogers High, a day after
officials sent everyone home early when three students came down with a
mysterious illness while watching a science video.

Officials still don?t know what caused the illness and want another day to
continue testing for clues, said Karen Hansen, Puyallup School District
spokeswoman.

Neither a fire district hazardous materials crew nor a private environmental
firm hired by the district could find anything wrong in a science classroom
where three students took ill Monday morning.

?That?s why we?re taking another day to investigate,? Hansen said. ?We?re
going to continue to test and hope school will be open Wednesday.?

Teachers, however, will report to school today. ?We will be working with
them outside of the affected area,? Hansen said.

The three juniors were in the same room when they got woozy, said Matt Holm,
assistant chief at Central Pierce Fire & Rescue.

The first student reported feeling ill about 10 a.m. and received permission
to step outside, Holm said. She later fainted, Holm said.

A few minutes later, another student reported feeling light-headed. Soon
after, a third.

Authorities don?t think the trio was in cahoots to avoid class, Holm said.

?Their teacher got concerned and notified the school administration, which
called the sheriff?s office,? he said.

The three students were taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup as a
precaution, he said.

The scare first prompted school officials to evacuate all students to the
gymnasium then to send all students home for the day, Hansen said.

?We decided to err on the side of caution,? she said.

A Central Pierce hazardous materials crews inspected the room but found
nothing amiss, Holm said.

The district then hired a private environmental firm to test air quality in
the school, Hansen said.

Adam Lynn: 253-597-8644
adam.lynn@thenewstribune.com

Staff writer Daniel Thigpen contributed to this report.

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What exactly was the ‘Dover Demon?’
By Mr. Know-It-All / Sunday, May 8, 2005

Dear Mr. Know-It-All, friends were recently telling me about the ghost
stories at John Stone’s Inn in Ashland, but wasn’t there a report of a UFO
in this area a while back? T.W., Westborough

Methinks you’re referring to the mysterious Dover Demon, T.W.

Let’s set the stage. The year is 1977. Jimmy Carter is in the White
House. “Stars Wars” makes its debut. Elvis permanently leaves the building.
The Yankees win another World Series. And an alien visits the tony town of
Dover. Maybe.

To describe what allegedly transpired, we turn to the book “Creatures
of the Outer Edge,” penned by cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark.

The bizarre tale begins at 10:30 p.m. on April 21 as three
17-year-olds, Bill Bartlett, Mike Mazzocca and Andy Brodie, are driving
north on Farm Street. Bartlett, who’s behind the wheel of a Volkswagen,
spots something creeping along a low wall of loose stones on the left side
of the road. At first he thinks the image is a dog or a cat until his
headlights shine on it and he realizes it’s nothing he’s ever seen before.

The figure slowly turns its head and stares into the light, its two
large, round, glassy, lidless eyes shining brightly “like two orange marbles.”

Its watermelon-shaped head, resting at the top of a thin neck, is the
size of the rest of its body. Except for its oversized head, the creature is
thin, with long spindly arms and legs, and large hands and feet. The skin is
hairless and peach-colored and appears to have a rough ure. “Like wet
sandpaper,” Bartlett subsequently tells Coleman.

Standing no more than 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall, the figure is shaped like
“a baby’s body with long arms and legs.” It had been making its way along
the wall, its long fingers curling around the rocks, when the car lights
surprised it.

Unfortunately, neither of Bartlett’s companions sees the creature. The
sighting lasts only a few seconds and, before Bartlett can speak, the car
leaves the scene.

“I really flew after I saw it,” Bartlett recalls. “I took that corner
at 45, which is pretty fast. I said to my friends, ‘Did you see that?’ And
they said, ‘Nah, describe it.’ I did and they said, ‘Go back. Go back!’ And
I said, ‘No way. No way.’ When you see something like that, you don’t want
to stand around and see what it’s going to do.

“They finally got me to go back and Mike was leaning out of the window
yelling, ‘Come on, creature!’ And I was saying, ‘Will you cut that out!’
Andy was yelling, ‘I want to see you!'”

But the creature is gone. Bartlett drops his friends off and goes to
his Walpole Street home. Visibly upset, he walks through the door and his
father asks him what’s wrong. Bartlett relates the story and later sketches
what he’s seen.

The creature then makes another appearance.

Around midnight, 15-year-old John Baxter leaves his girlfriend Cathy
Cronin’s house at the south end of Millers High Road (we assume the authors
mean Miller Hill Road). Anyway, Baxter starts walking up the street on his
way home. Half an hour later, after he has walked about a mile, he observes
someone approaching him. Because the figure is short, Baxter assumes it’s an
acquaintance of his, M.G. Bouchard, who lives on the street.

John calls out, “M.G., is that you?”

No response.

But Baxter and the figure continue to approach each other until finally
the latter stops. Baxter then halts as well and asks, “Who is that?” The sky
is dark and overcast and he can only see a shadowy form.

Trying to get a better look, Baxter takes one step forward and the
figure scurries off to the left, running down a shallow wooded gully and up
the opposite bank. As the figure runs, Baxter hears its footsteps on the dry
leaves.

He follows the figure down the slope, then stops and looks across the
gully. There, he sees the creature, standing in silhouette about 30 feet
away, its feet “molded” around the top of a rock several feet from a tree.

The creature’s body reminds Baxter of a monkey’s, except for its dark
“figure-eight”-shaped head. Its eyes, two lighter spots in the middle of the
head, are looking straight at Baxter, who after a few minutes begins to feel
uneasy. Realizing he has never seen such a creature before and fearing what
it might do next, he backs carefully up the slope, his heart pounding. He
then “walks very fast” down the road to the intersection at Farm Street.

There, a couple passing in a car pick him up and drive him home.

The next day, Bartlett tells his close friend Will Taintor, 18, about
his sighting.

Can you guess what happens next?

Around midnight, Taintor is driving Abby Brabham, 15, home when an
encounter with the creature takes place. As they pass along Springdale
Avenue, Brabham spots something in the headlights on the left side of the
road. The “something” is a creature crouched on all fours and facing the
car. Its body is thin and monkeylike but its head is large and oblong, with
no nose, ears or mouth.

The creature is hairless and its skin tan or beige in color. The facial
area around the eyes is lighter and the eyes glow green. Brabham insists
this is the case, even after investigators tell her that Bartlett had said
the eyes were orange.

Taintor sees the creature only momentarily and has the impression of
something with a large head and a tan body. He doesn’t know what it is but
he does know that it’s not a dog.

Frightened, Brabham urges Taintor to speed up so they can get away.
Taintor claims that only after they leave the scene does he recall Baxter’s
sighting. His own had been so brief and unspectacular that he probably would
have thought little of it if Brabham had not been with him.

He asks her to describe the figure, deliberately phrasing misleading
questions about aspects of the creature’s appearance he knew not to be true
in order to check her story against Bartlett’s, which he did not mention to
her. Abby sticks to her story.

On April 28, Coleman, then living in neighboring Needham, visits the
Dover Country Store where a store employee, Melody Fryer, tells him about
Bartlett’s sighting and sketch. She promises to get him a copy and two days
later provides him with two drawings. The next day Coleman interviews
Bartlett. On May 3 he questions Baxter and Brabham and on the 5th talks with
Taintor.

Two weeks later, Coleman asks Walter Webb of the Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization, Joseph Nyman of the Mutual UFO Network and Ed Fogg of
the New England UFO Study Group to join the investigation. Although none of
the witnesses had reported seeing a UFO in connection with the Dover Demon,
the ufologists are struck by the creature’s apparent resemblance to humanoid
beings sometimes associated with UFOs.

So is the Dover Demon a hoax? The investigators conclude that’s
possible, but express doubts. There’s nothing in the witnesses’ backgrounds
to suggest they might be pranksters and much to suggest they were honest,
upright individuals.

As Webb observes, “None of the four was on drugs or drinking at the
time of his or her sighting so far as we were able to determine…. None of
the principals in this affair made any attempt to go To The Newspapers or
police to publicize their claims. Instead, the sightings gradually leaked
out. Finally, the teenagers’ own parents, the high school principal, the
science instructor and other adults in Dover whose comments were solicited
didn’t believe the Dover Demon was a fabrication, implying the youths did
indeed see ‘something.’

“As for the idea the witnesses were victims of somebody else’s stunt,
this seems most unlikely, chiefly due to the virtual impossibility of
creating an animated, lifelike ‘demon’ of the sort described.”

But if the Demon was real, what was it? A UFO being? Perhaps, but then
nothing precisely similar has ever been reported before, according to Ted
Bloecher, who has collected more than 1,500 UFO accounts for the Center for
UFO Studies.

On the other hand, maybe the Demon is a member of a curious race known
to the Cree Indians of eastern Canada as the Mannegishi, the authors write.
The Mannegishi, naturalist Sigurd Olson says in his book “Listening Post,”
are supposed to be “little people with round heads and no noses who live
with only one purpose: to play jokes on travelers. The little creatures have
long spidery legs, arms with six-fingered hands, and live between rocks in
the rapids….”

This report comes via the BookRags.com Web site.

The Unexplained Mysteries Web site, meanwhile, opines that “like many
sightings of this nature, it seems unlikely that this is some form of
undiscovered natural species, but more of a genetic mutation or hybrid of
some sort. There is also the possibility that what these people saw was some
kind of alien being, as the case bares striking resemblance to many reports
of such creatures at the sites of UFO activity. Unfortunately, there is
really no way of finding out for sure.”

The Eye’s Behind Web site notes that Martin Kottmeyer, an expert on UFO
stories, claims that the Dover Demon witnesses simply saw a baby moose and
misidentified it. “While misperception may have played a role in what they
saw, it is hard to imagine mistaking a moose for the creature that they
described,” the site states.

According to Coleman, 1977 was an unusually eventful year for strange
occurrences. UFO and creature sightings were abnormally frequent and often
seemed to be connected; they often occurred in closely related times and
places. Many of the creature sightings involved mysterious monsters with
human-like forms. People wondered if some of these creatures were from outer
space.

In a 1996 article in the Needham Chronicle, John Horrigan, a debunker
of the paranormal, said that while some people took the teen’s reports
seriously, later investigation threw strong doubt on their credibility.

By the way, a local newspaper dubbed the creature the “Dover Demon.”

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Scientists learn the secret of ageing
Indo-Asian News Service / London, May 7, 2005
[img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:kDFZweaYvSMJ:home.earthlink.net/~gordonmd/altmed/images/Aging.jpg[/img] [img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:58LnQdy6xwMJ:community-2.webtv.net/DENNISOHAYS/MIGHTYMOUSE/scrapbookFiles/importD40.jpg[/img]Scientists have managed to stave off the ageing process in mice, a discovery
that might pave the way to longer, healthier living in humans too.

Experiments at the US-based Washington University School of Medicine showed
that protecting the body of mice against highly reactive chemicals called
free radicals – long suspected as a cause of ageing – gave them longer
lives, reports the Scottish daily Scotsman.

Mice given higher levels of an enzyme that breaks down free radicals had
about a 20 percent increase in their average and maximum lifespan, about
four and a half months.

They also had healthier hearts than other mice.

The experiments suggest that people could live longer and be free from many
age-related diseases if they were protected from free radicals.

“This study is very supportive of the free radical theory of ageing. It
shows the significance of free radicals and of reactive oxygen species in
particular in the ageing process,” said lead researcher Peter Rabinovitch.

“People used to only focus on specific age-related diseases because it was
believed that the ageing process itself could not be affected. What
we’rerealising now is that by intervening in the underlying ageing process,
we may be able to produce very significant increases in ‘health-span’, or
healthy life-span.”

Rabinovitch and his colleagues studied the enzyme catalase, which helps
breakdown hydrogen peroxide – a waste product of the body’s metabolic
process – into water and oxygen.

Hydrogen peroxide can be a precursor of free radicals.

The damage they cause can, in turn, lead to further flaws in cells’ chemical
processes, which lead to more free radicals being produced.

Free radicals can create unnecessary chemical reactions, which damage
cells,including DNA. Some scientists believe they are major factors in heart
disease, cancer and other serious conditions.

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[img]http://www.sfbg.com/39/31/cover_tonopahCLOSEup.jpg[/img]Tonopah Test Range as seen through Paglen’s telescope. Tonopah photo by
Trevor Paglen.

Spying on the government: A UC Berkeley geographer maps the secret military
bases of the American West ? where billions of dollars disappear into creepy
clandestine projects.
By A.C. Thompson

IT STARTED WITH an e-mail inviting me to join an expedition to Area 51, the
secret military site in the Nevada backcountry.

“Let me be clear about this,” wrote Trevor Paglen, the 30-year-old
geographer leading the trek. “The trip will not be easy. It might not even
be that fun, depending on your attitude, how well-prepared you are, and what
you consider fun. The weather is unpredictable ? it could be really hot or
really cold, or (most likely) both…. If you are not in reasonable shape,
or are without proper equipment, you will die. Seriously.”

Despite the less-than-inviting invitation, I was intrigued. For five decades
Area 51 has been the military’s heart of darkness, the core of its “black
world” of classified research and development, a place that appears on no
maps, and, officially, has no name. The U.S. government will divulge nothing
about the site, except that it’s an “operating location” overseen by the
U.S. Air Force. Everything else ? including the most seemingly mundane facts
? is classified in the name of national security.
The territory in question sits deep in a colossal, small country-size, 3.1
million acre Air Force base northwest of Las Vegas. Built on Groom Lake, a
dry lake bed, Area 51 is bisected by a 27,000-foot runway, studded with
massive hangars and communications towers (which look something like
offshore oil rigs topped by giant scoops of vanilla ice cream), and
patrolled by a platoon of camouflage-clad private security personnel with
orders to kill intruders.

Despite the government’s omerta-like code of silence, aerospace experts have
concluded the isolated, mountain-ringed rectangle of desert served as an
incubator for some key cold war machinery, aircraft like the U-2 spy plane
and the black-winged, radar-deceiving F-117A stealth fighter.

UFO-heads, of course, have other ideas. For them, Area 51 is the locus of
fevered, conspiratorial speculation, a remote and incredibly well-guarded
location where the government has hidden a fleet of alien spacecraft.
According to this line of thinking, the mysterious lights sometimes spotted
blipping across the night sky over Nevada are hot rods from another planet.

After doing a little reading on the place, I knew I had to see it for
myself.

. . .

Paglen is steeped in the lore surrounding Area 51, the twin currents of
secrecy and weirdness that swirl around the place like powdery desert dust.
Clandestine military installations are the subject of his doctoral
dissertation in geography at UC Berkeley, an endeavor that’s propelled him
across the American West, mapping the archipelago of bases that dot the
landscape. “The whole thing is about getting people to see the world around
them differently,” Paglen says. “The amount of land devoted to this stuff is
gigantic.”

To Paglen, a good-humored Air Force brat with a Woody Woodpecker-ish laugh,
Area 51 is many things. It’s a pop-culture trope, served up by the X-Files
and the 1996 flick Independence Day. A testament to the supremacy over
American life of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency and their
corporate pals. A fount of disinformation.

One tactic used to shroud zones like Area 51, he argues, “is to make those
places very visible in the wrong way ? all the UFO stuff at Area 51, for
example. Area 51 is far from secret. It’s a clich?. But the fact that it’s a
clich? also hides it.”

Declassified CIA documents, Paglen notes, suggest Langley fomented UFO
rumors during the 1950s and ’60s as a way to deflect attention from the very
real flights of experimental aircraft, including the U-2 and A-12 Blackbird
spy planes.

I met Paglen about 10 years ago when we were both hanging out at East Bay
punk gigs. He’s still got a punkish edge, favoring dark jeans and cowboy
boots and punctuating many of his comments with slang and obscenities. All
this camouflages, to some degree, his eclectic braininess: Before pursuing
geography, Paglen earned degrees in religious studies (with a minor in
musical composition) and art. As you read this, the Lab, a San Francisco
gallery, is displaying Paglen’s solo show “Recording Carceral Landscapes,” a
chilling commentary on California’s leviathan prison system.

In addition to his academic explorations, Paglen also gives informal tours
of classified America, journeying to places like the Tejon Ranch Radar Cross
Section range (where Northrop tests bleeding-edge aircraft), the
headquarters of Science Applications International Corp. (the no-profile
defense contractor tapped to set up a TV propaganda network in Iraq), the
San Diego docks that are home to the Sea Shadow (a classified Naval
watercraft), and the Classic Bullseye listening station (a heavily guarded
collection of National Security Agency eavesdropping equipment). He’s posted
graphics, reports, and pics from all these expeditions on his Web site,
paglen.com.

In mid-March I spent three days probing the dark side with Paglen and a crew
of 10 other sightseers.

. . .

“Uh, guys, we need to be up there,” Paglen says, gesturing to the
snow-encrusted peak looming above us, “and we’re heading downhill.”

We’re somewhere near the base of Tikaboo Peak, a treacherous 8,000-foot-tall
pile of prehistoric rock stippled with scrubby trees. To get to Tikaboo, the
vantage point closest to Area 51, we’ve driven about 120 miles north from
Vegas, following a dirt road through the desolate yet gorgeous Nevada wilds,
surrounded by an ocean of scrubby vegetation and grainy, sunburned soil.

So far, getting up the mountain has been quite a task ? on top of our, ahem,
navigational issues, one member of our crew has already vanished (apparently
he took off to take a dump), and we’ve lost any trace of the trail we’re
supposed to be following. The conditions on this frigid afternoon aren’t
especially favorable, either. The temperature is dropping rapidly, daylight
is dwindling, and three-foot-deep swatches of snow speckle the mountain.

I’ve managed to pull a Homer Simpson move, leaving my heavy, waterproof coat
back in San Francisco. Plus, I’m wearing DC skate shoes, which are already
soaked thanks to the snow.

“Have you ever seen any people out here?” one of the expeditioners asks
Paglen.

“Only once, and it was really crazy,” replies Paglen, a charming character
with an expansive sense of humor. “We ran into this group of cops from Waco,
Texas. They had all these telescopes and high-tech gadgetry.”

Cops from Waco, the nexus of myriad conspiracy theories springing from the
carnage-laden Branch Davidian debacle, descending on Area 51, the hub of UFO
consp
iracy theories? Yeah, that’s a tad weird.

We tromp on, and by 5:01 p.m. we hit our first stopping point, a peak
several hundred feet below the summit. Robby Herbst, the guy who disappeared
to make like a bear in the woods, has resurfaced. He’s weary from the
ascent. “I’m ready for the aliens to take me,” says Herbst, an itinerant art
professor from Los Angeles, clad in an amazing pair of ’70s-era striped
jeans. From here the trek gets totally Lord of the Rings, as we traverse an
exposed ridgeline punctuated with boulders and begin a steep ascent. At this
elevation we’re encircled by sky, not trudging beneath it.

After a two-hour scramble up the mountain, we hit the summit with the sun
hanging low and look out over a vast plain lined by a few unpaved roads.
Dust billows up from one of the roads. Paglen figures it’s a government van
ferrying Area 51 workers around the base.

Unfortunately, we can’t see much more. Our view of Area 51 ? which would’ve
been limited anyway ? is further obscured by charcoal-colored clouds
pregnant with rain and a thick layer of floating dust. “Can the government
make haze?” jokes one guy who flew out from Chicago for the trip.

Paglen has lugged a powerful telescope up with him, so we take turns peering
through it, able to make out a handful of structures on a mountainside about
25 miles away. He snaps a digital camera onto the scope and shoots some
photos.

The whole deal is fairly anticlimactic; we drove hundreds of miles and
dragged ourselves up a fucking mountain, only to be thwarted by Mom Nature?
@!#$.

Until 1995 you could get substantially closer to Area 51 by ascending White
Sides Mountain or Freedom Ridge. Then UFO freaks and stealth-plane watchers
began circulating detailed photos of hangars, fuel tanks, runways, and radio
towers they’d shot from the two mountains, and the Air Force decided to
annex more acreage around Area 51, pushing tourists like ourselves further
away.
From our perch atop Tikaboo, Paglen dives into the history of Area 51, a
locale lacking an official name but endowed with an abundance of enigmatic
nicknames including Dreamland, the Dark Side of the Moon, the Box, the
Container, and the Ranch.

By any name, the site is testimony to the cozy relationship between the U.S.
government and its corporate contractors. “It was originally called the
Ranch, and it was started by Lockheed in 1955 because they were developing
the U-2 spy plane,” Paglen says. “Francis Gary Powers” ? the ill-fated pilot
shot down by the Soviets in 1960 ? “trained here to fly the U-2.”

Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin) had been blueprinting and building new planes
at the Skunk Works, the company’s covert Burbank R&D lab, and testing the
experimental craft at Edwards Air Force Base, in the Mojave Desert near
Palmdale. But the U-2, a joint project of the CIA and the Air Force,
demanded a more private proving ground. The vehicle was an international
incident waiting to happen: a camera-equipped aircraft capable of going to
the upper regions of the stratosphere (up to 74,000 feet) and bringing home
snapshots of the evil empire.

From the start, everything was cloak-and-dagger. The Agency bankrolled the
base by writing $1 million in checks to Skunk Works director Kelly Johnson
and mailing them to his Encino home. Johnson in turn made sure Lockheed’s
fingerprints wouldn’t be on the project by creating a phony front company, C
and J Engineering, which hired builders who erected the basic Area 51
infrastructure in a matter of months.

The next radar-eluding craft developed at Area 51, Paglen explains, owed its
existence to a set of 1870s-vintage physics formulas. Those formulas,
devised by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and known simply as
Maxwell’s equations, predict how a surface will reflect electromagnetic waves.

In the 1970s they became the basis for the F-117A stealth fighter when
Lockheed engineers used state-of-the-art computers to tweak and extrapolate
the equations, hunting for shapes that would scatter and diffuse radar
waves. The result was a chunky, flat-angled, Star Wars-esque vehicle,
weighing 52,500 pounds (loaded) and measuring nearly 63 feet from nose to
tail. It had the “radar signature” of a small bird.

Paglen says, “The stealth fighter became the most secret project since the
Manhattan Project. Ronald Reagan was particularly interested in magic-bullet
technology” like stealth planes and Star Wars missile defense.

In Paglen’s estimation, the historic road to Area 51 goes through the labs
of Los Alamos, N.M., where J. Robert Oppenheimer and company begat the
A-bomb. The Manhattan Project, Paglen writes in an essay for a forthcoming
book, was the “first highly-classified, multi-billion dollar [military
research] effort…. The Manhattan Project had to manage the thousands of
people working on the weapon at any given moment, while restricting the
knowledge of the project’s true purpose to a very small number of people.”

The strategies devised in New Mexico were transplanted to Area 51 and
further refined, he says. In some ways the connection between Oppenheimer
and Area 51 is even more direct: Area 51 abuts the Nevada Test Site, where,
between 1945 and 1992, the government detonated 1,021 nuclear weapons,
sprinkling radiation across a vast swath of the Southwest.

. . .

Enough about the past. What the hell is going on out here now? Even the
experts have few clues.

John Pike directs GlobalSecurity.org, a Beltway think tank, and has been
scrutinizing the Pentagon for 25 years. He says that during the Reagan
years, analysts could figure out ? in broad terms ? what the key classified
projects were, despite all the secrecy. “Twenty years ago, when there was a
big increase in classified spending, we pretty much knew what the programs
were,” Pike says. “We knew there was a stealth fighter. We knew there was a
stealth bomber.”

In 1990, he notes, a New York Times reporter was able to pen a 273-page book
on the “black budget,” the money funneled into clandestine military and spy
programs with little congressional oversight.

These days, Pike admits, he’s baffled. The military is far more successful
at keeping things under wraps. Whatever is going on at Area 51 and similar
spots is truly a mystery at this juncture.

“It’s certainly a testament to Rummy’s ability to keep a secret ? that
they’ve been able to spend this money without anybody noticing,” Pike says.

And they’re spending plenty. The black budget is blimping out to new
dimensions. Estimates by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments,
another nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank, put the total spending for
classified weapons programs at $26.9 billion for 2005; for 2006 the
Department of Defense has asked for $28 billion.

That’s up from a comparatively paltry $11.7 billion a decade ago.

Pike figures a chunk of the increase can be attributed to surging spending
on hardware for the intelligence agencies. “You can probably explain half of
that from growth in the intelligence budget,” he contends, explaining that
spook outfits like the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Organization
disguise their spending by sticking it in the Air Force’s budget.

And at least some of the loot is going into Area 51. Pike was one of the
first people to post overhead satellite photos of Area 51 on the Web, paying
a Russian company for pics of the territory shot in 1998 and 2000 and
comparing them to some rare 1968 pics taken by the U.S. Geological Survey.
(Apparently, all images captured by U.S. satellites after 1972 have been
deleted from the National Archives.) From looking at the photos, it’s
obvious there’s been massive expansion at the site, with new runways and a
gaggle of new buildings doubling the size of the installation.

At the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood has a couple of
ideas about what kind of toys the government is blowing our money on. “To
start burning up lots of money, you have to be building hardware, and if
it’s space-based, that’s a plus,” he says sarcastically.

He points to the outburst of West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller, who in
late 2004 publicly shredded an unnamed covert R&D effort, describing it as
“totally unjustified and very wasteful and dangerous to national security.”
Intelligence analysts quickly connected the dots, theorizing that
Rockefeller was pissed about a stealth spy satellite project, an
eavesdropping device that, like the F-117A, can avoid detection.

“I think it was mainly supposed to be stealthy in regards to radiation and
ground-based detection,” says Aftergood, director of the FAS’s Project on
Government Secrecy.

An earlier project, code-named MISTY, apparently relied on a shield that
would “make it difficult or impossible for hostile enemy forces to damage or
destroy satellites in orbit.” Analysts uncovered that language when the
Defense Department stupidly decided to patent the invention in 1994.

In this time of ballooning black budgets, Aftergood says, “first and
foremost” we need Congress to watchdog the spooks and warriors. “I think
there are legitimate reasons to classify advanced military research. But if
they classify it, they need to receive more, not less, scrutiny, even if
it’s behind closed doors.”

. . .

Read the rest of the article here …

More links …
Geographer Trevor Paglen’s site:

The Federation of American Scientists’s Area 51 page:

Military analyst John Pike’s site:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s site:

Livermore anti-nuke activists:

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I am trying to find anyone that lives in or around the Meridian Ms area. I
have family there that have informed me of large cat sightings ‘” black
panther” term used. I have done some research and there is information these
cats do exist in this part of the southern states.

I wanted information from anyone that has seen or heard of any sightings as
my family described to me.

Would appreciate any information. I also would like to know if there is any
truth to the example of what my granddaughter was told to do . Undress and
leave the clothing behind. I don’t think if a big cat is around it is going
to be standing looking at you waiting for anyone to disrobe.

My thoughts are it would already be on the attack not standing and
looking. These cats are predators and don’t wander around looking at
people. They are hunters in my book this answer was totally bogus.

Can anyone help?

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Russian pilots vs clouds at V-day parade
[img]http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:IlTrFePhHzwJ:www.zzz.com.ru/images/180/cloud_seeding.jpg[/img]Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov says he is sure the Air Force will
repel any hostile clouds looking to rain on next week’s Victory Day parade.

Russian pilots are past masters at seeding clouds to make rain fall away
from major state events, and Mr Ivanov says they will repeat the feat for
the Red Square party celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory
over Nazi Germany.

The party is due to be attended by more than 50 world statesmen and Mr
Ivanov says he will guarantee it will be held under a clear sky.

“Only the Defence Ministry can physically ensure a clear sky,” he said in an
interview with official daily Rossiskaya Gazeta to be published on Wednesday.

However, Russian meteorologists have suggested his pilots might be up
against it, amid predictions of rain for the weekend and most of next week.

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