Micah Hanks Reports

Triangle UFOs: Are They Secret Military Aircraft? Micah Hanks Reports

March 28, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Since the years following World War II, “flying saucer” has been widely recognized as a household term. Shortly after its appearance in the American media in 1947, U.S. Air Force investigator Edward Ruppelt introduced the term “unidentified flying object”, or UFO, which was devised with hope of employing a more ambiguous, catch-all term that could be applied to a wide variety of alleged aerial phenomena. However, today the use of “UFO” is generally accepted as representing the presence of extraterrestrial spacecraft in our skies, despite a lack of any sufficient evidence that can support, without dispute, a belief in this exotic origin.

Descriptions of UFOs vary greatly enough, in fact, that no single explanation has ever been offered that accounts for all of the kinds of aerial phenomena observed over the decades. However, within the broader range of UFO reports that have been collected over the last several decades, there are some reliable examples that have emerged, which also present consistencies from case-to-case, particularly in recent years.

Among these are reports of the so-called “flying triangles”, objects which are typically described as large, silent, slow-moving triangular objects which are dark enough in color to nearly blend in against the night sky, save only for lighted portions which are often reported at the corners, as well as the center of the base of the objects. The website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) includes a description given for an alleged kind of mysterious blimp, listed on the site’s page for “Mystery Aircraft”, which began to appear as early as the 1980s:

“A very intriguing aircraft was been reported in the late 1980s. Some observers claim to have witnessed a vast black flying wing, estimated at between 600 and 800 feet in width, passing silently over city streets in California. The craft moved so slowly one observer claimed that he could jog along with it. The aircraft reportedly executed bizarre maneuvers in which it stopped, rotated in place and hovered vertically, pointing its thin trailing edge toward the ground. This vehicle’s unlikely gyrations suggest that it is distinct from the other sightings, and could be a lighter-than-air craft pushed by slow- turning propellers.”

Clearly, the FAS entry excerpted above does appear to reference the giant triangular UFOs which have risen to prominence over last few decades. In fact, the prevalence of triangle UFO sightings has resulted in a number of books, articles, and television documentaries devoted almost entirely to solving the mystery of their appearances. David Marler, an independent UFO researcher and member/State Director of MUFON, published a book on the subject, titled Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation. With the book, Marler has, as described at his website, “collected, collated, and analyzed hundreds of reports. In the process, he has created a detailed profile of these objects and written a rich narrative of their history. He tackles the arguments made by skeptics that dismiss these triangular UFO reports outright. He also addresses the claims of so-called insiders who claim these objects are a creation of the U.S. military.”

Indeed, many have asserted that these strange aircraft are the result of some secretive U.S. Military project, with some further asserting that the triangles are likely a variety of platform blimp developed by DARPA. While this may be a likely explanation for the origin of the objects, no conclusive data has been presented which helps confirm this.

Whatever their origins, as stated previously the “flying triangles” are indeed unique among UFO reports for the consistency they provide. Over the years, this author has collected reports and corresponded with a number of individuals who have claimed to have had their own encounters, a few of which we will review here (though some of the names of the individuals who supplied these reports have been changed or omitted, due to requests for anonymity).

The first of these, which I collected from a South Carolina resident named “Aaron”, occurred in October 1998, just outside the town of Liberty, South Carolina. The time was roughly 1 AM, local time:

“At the time, I was about ten miles from the nearest town, so light pollution was fairly low. As I came around a bend in the road my headlights malfunctioned causing me to stop the car. The car had some electrical problems, and I do not attribute that to what happened next.

As I opened the door to get out of the car, I looked up, and at around a 45 degree angle to my line of sight was a black triangular object. It was to the right side of the road, and moving slowly to my left. It appeared to be about the size of a large commercial airplane, and had three dim red lights near each corner. The illumination of these lights [had been] just enough that I could make out the shape. I watched for about 1-2 minutes as it moved over the road, and it then began to accelerate and moved out of view.

At the time, I was 17 years old and thought that I had witnessed something extraterrestrial. I was terrified, and didn’t tell anyone for months. As I have grown older, I have come to think that this may indeed have been very terrestrial in origin. I find the reports of mystery blimps fascinating, and wonder if this was something similar.”

A similar report was supplied to me by an individual whose encounter occurred in the early 1990s, near the small town of Enon, approximately four miles from Fairborn, Ohio:

“I was driving from Enon into Fairborn on Dayton Springfield Road on the overpass of a railroad track (if you Google map this it is about ½ mile East of I-675). As the crow flies, it is less than 3 miles to the large landing strip at WPAFB. To the North I saw a very large, silent, low flying black triangle. It was headed toward Wright Patterson’s airstrip.

I grew up in Enon and as a child there were B52s at this airstrip where the triangle was headed. The triangle looked to be twice the size of a B52. One last odd thing, it seemed as if I was traveling faster than the triangle.”

The witnesses’s description that the object appeared to move more slowly than he did while traveling by car is not unusual, per se, at least as it relates to flying triangle reports. In many instances, these objects appear to be capable of hovering, in addition to a number of other unusual airborne maneuvers that involve such things as clockwise rotation, as described by “Lance”, a contact who reported observing one of the craft behaving in this manner in the evening sky over Jacksonville, Florida, in 1999. His report described the following:

“This object made the same clockwise and counter-clockwise spins on its axis, hovered motionless and, most strangely, pivoted vertically with either the nose or the tail pointed to the ground until it formed a thin, nearly imperceptible line in the sky. Due to the relatively close proximity of the sighting to a naval air station I’ve always suspected that the object was one of the military’s new toys and your article boosts my belief that this is the case.

I’m hoping that one day soon the pentagon will take the wraps off these things so I can be vindicated in the eyes of my family. Of course, if it helps keep our various global adversaries on their toes to keep them secret then I suppose I can take the sideways glances for another decade or two.”

Note here the recurring sense the witness expresses that these aircraft are some variety of military aircraft, rather than being of exotic origins.

A final report for consideration here was supplied to me by a woman who, along with her late husband, observed a large, black triangular craft as it passed above them at low altitude in August, 2002. It was near midnight on the local question, and the two were watching the Perseid meteor shower together at their home near Saskatoon:

“We had noticed a very bright light on the eastern horizon but didn’t take much notice of it until we realized that it was slowly coming directly towards us. We kept checking in that direction and watched as the now amber light kept coming straight at us. When it was almost on top of us it was like we became frozen to the spot staring at this light that we could now see had a dark shape behind it.

The triangle flew directly over us. I estimate that it was about 75 – 100 ft. off the ground. I made this estimate because at one point I realized that it was so low I was concerned that it was going to hit the chimney on our 2 1/2 story house! We sat transfixed as it seemed to take the triangle forever to pass overhead due to the extremely slow speed that it was travelling at. I would estimate it was going no more than 10 mph. As it was about halfway over I realized that the triangle was so massive that it filled my entire field of vision. We couldn’t make out any detail of the underneath of the triangle; it was just an enormous black shape lit on each corner by an amber light. I really can’t think of anything to compare the size of the triangle to it was so huge.”

The witness noted that the object moved perfectly silently, and that she had been given the impression that she and her husband observed it for much longer than they realized, as it was nearly 2:30 AM when they returned indoors. She further questioned why, in the event that this aircraft had been the product of a U.S. “black budget” program, the object had been moving within Canadian airspace.

While the U.S. military explanation remains the most likely explanation for the flying triangles, their presence in our skies remains a mystery in lieu of the absence of further evidence that clearly helps substantiate a government origin. Whatever the case, the number of similar reports of these objects, now spanning several decades, does seem to support their existence… which is more than can be said of many other varieties of alleged UFOs which have traversed the public consciousness since the late 1940s.

—

Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher whose interests include history, science, current events, cultural studies, technology, business, philosophy, unexplained phenomena, and ways the future of humankind may be influenced by science and innovation in the coming decades. With his writing, he has covered topics that include controversial themes such as artificial intelligence, government surveillance, unconventional aviation technologies, and the broadening of human knowledge through the reach of the Internet. Micah lives in the heart of Appalachia near Asheville, North Carolina, where he makes a living as a writer and musician. You can find his podcasts at GralienReport.com and his books at Amazon.com

Causal Looping: A Strange Story From. . . Nowhere — Micah Hanks Reports

October 29, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

There is an old saying that goes, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

The origin of the phrase actually entails what really were, in fact, free lunches that used to be provided in bars around the United States back in the old days. The stipulation had been that a patron who purchased at least one beverage would be offered food, although generally of a variety rich in salt, which only increased one’s thirstiness. In modern usage, the phrase is generally taken to have the underlying meaning that “you don’t get something for nothing,” and saw its greatest popularity following its use in Robert Heinlein’s libertarian science fiction masterpiece, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

On the subject of issues that arise from “getting something from nothing”, imagine the following scenario: a professor travels into the future and visits a library, where he discovers an innovative book on mathematics. He opens the book and begins skimming through the pages, and eventually finds an equation unlike any he had known to exist in the present day from which he arrived. The professor makes note of this equation, and brings knowledge of it back with him when he returns to his temporal point of origin.

Later, he meets a student for coffee, and tells of his marvelous trip to the future, along with his discovery of this futuristic new mathematical equation. The student is equally fascinated by it, and decides to write a paper detailing the equation, along with the theory behind. The paper is later published, and it appears in a journal… which turns out to be the very same which the professor had discovered in the library during his visit to the future.

There is a problem that arises from this story, however. When the professor learned about the equation by reading of it in a book, we must presume that it existed because of his own eventual actions which, in turn, had the effect of changing the course of events which actually led to the existence of the equation in the first place. Here’s the catch: neither the professor, nor his student, actually created the equation… each of them independently learned of its existence second hand. So where did the equation actually come from?

The problem this presents has to do with what is called a causal loop, a hypothetical time travel scenario in which a future event that occurs is actually the cause of a past event, which thus causes the future event to occur as well. Despite their existence together in spacetime, neither event has a definite, independent origin.

So why, exactly, is this a problem? According to thermodynamic laws, there are serious limitations on what can happen to information in our universe. Like energy, the premise is that it can neither be created, nor destroyed, although transitions may occur between its various states. If the paradox we’ve outlined above—sometimes referred to as “The Bootstrap Paradox”, in reference to a short story by (you guessed it!) Robert Heinlein—holds any water, then we must presume that the information in question came from nowhere, since neither the professor, nor the student, actually did the work that resulted in the formation of said equation. In other words, it simply manifested in spacetime, as if by magic, as a result of the influence (or blundering, perhaps) of our nutty time-traveling professor.

The situation I’ve outlined here bears similarity to what, until fairly recently, had been a long held (and famous) debate between physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind, as outlined in the latter’s book The Black Hole War. In this book, Susskind argued against Hawking’s premise that information was lost once it entered a black hole, rather than being preserved in Hawking radiation. For information to be “lost” in this way would essentially constitute a violation of the conservation of information, an extrapolation upon the law of conservation of energy, which is fundamental to the mechanics of our universe (I will note, however, that Hawking eventually retracted this paradoxical view toward black holes and their appetite for information, accepting a position in agreement with Susskind).

So to be clear, information from nowhere is not the kind of thing that jives well with the laws of physics. Of course, in keeping with the known mechanics of the universe, I tend to agree on all the aforementioned points; although the discussion of causal loops and information paradoxes does remind me of a peculiar experience I had a number of years ago, which had been both serendipitous, as well as a bit baffling.

On the occasion in question, I had been visiting Joshua Warren, author and paranormal researcher, at his home along with a number of other guests. As memory serves, a handful of us were there in Joshua’s living room late one night, probably enjoying a glass of whiskey, as our host began sharing a strange story his family had told over the years. The story detailed the disappearance of Claude Calloway, an ancestor on Warren’s mother’s side of the family. Claude, probably in his late twenties at the time, had been sitting on the front porch talking through the open kitchen window with his father, when he suddenly vanished.

Claude’s father presumed at the time that Claude had simply wandered off someplace, but this would later prove to be the last time anyone recalled seeing Claude alive. The theories about Claude’s fate would range from foul play, to an attempt to leave town quietly due to a bad deal having gone down. Whatever the case, his disappearance seems to have remained a mystery.

The strangest part, however, was yet to come. Only a few days before Claude vanished, he had posed for a family picture, and in the photograph that was later developed, Claude’s face had somehow been obscured. The family had always maintained, rather superstitiously, that the picture had somehow managed to foretell of Claude’s disappearance in the days to follow.

As I sat nearby, overhearing Joshua telling this story, I was amazed, but not because of the incredible nature of the story itself. It was because my family had the exact same story.

In addition to recognizing the story, I similarly recalled that there were a number of Calloways that existed on my father’s side of the family, and hence, it seemed almost undeniable that I had indeed heard this same story before… which would likely mean that Joshua Warren and I were, in fact, distant cousins.

My father has long held an interest in genealogy, and so I went to him with the story, and soon put him in touch with Joshua’s mother, who helped fill in a number of details about various members of the family. Within a few days, my father had managed to fill in the gaps, and confirmed without question that Joshua and I were indeed fourth cousins, and that Claude Calloway had been a common ancestor.

As if this story couldn’t get any stranger, here’s where the real twist enters the picture. Upon the realization that I was correct in my belief that Joshua and I were related to the same line of the Calloway family in Western North Carolina, my father admitted that there had been one element to the story that still troubled him.

“Who did you say originally told you the story of Claude Calloway?” my father asked me. I told him that I had heard it from him, obviously, but this didn’t seem to be case. My father explained that not only had he been unaware of the story until I approached him with it, but that on our side of the family tree, there had been virtually no interaction with the Calloways on Joshua’s side. In other words, there had been no way that any of my immediate family members should have known the story about Claude Calloway’s disappearance.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Did Micah Hanks have his own brush with time travel?” quote=”Did Micah Hanks have his own brush with time travel?”]Moments like this can have the effect of challenging one’s own perception of things. Here, I certainly found myself having to question whether I had really recalled the story from my youth, or if I had merely convinced myself that I had. In psychology, the notion of hindsight bias entails that a person may perceive that they had known the outcome of a series of events, despite that outcome having been unpredictable (this is sometimes also called “creeping determinism”). I wondered if I had merely fooled myself into thinking that I had known Joshua’s story, and its outcome, when in fact it was completely alien to me. And yet, had this been the case, of equal concern would be the question of why this “alien” story had nonetheless managed to confirm precisely what I had thought that it would: that Joshua and I shared a common family story, because we had common ancestors who experienced it. The fact that the story correlated perfectly with common ancestry between us seemed to make the possibility of mis-remembrance increasingly doubtful. Then as now, it seems more likely to me that I had indeed been told the story by some family member of mine… but who could that have been?

Who knows, maybe one day in the distant future, we will finally achieve what, today, seems impossible: actual, physical time travel. Whenever that occurs, perhaps someone scanning the web will have read the odd tale I’ve related here, and will decide to have a go with it themselves. Maybe he or she will travel backwards in time, far enough, perhaps, to be able to find a more youthful version of yours truly.

Maybe they’ll approach the younger “me” of yesteryear, and they’ll share with the young lad a very unusual story about his distant cousin Claude, and how a photo predicted that he would vanish into thin air only days later.

It all sounds like it could be a story fit for the printed page, and in fact, maybe it is: as I’ve written it here, perhaps I’ve just planted the very seed of an idea that will one day make its way back around, and thus explain this strange tale of time travel, paradoxes, and the bizarre synchronism that makes life so interesting. Who knows.

Micah Hanks Reports

There is an old saying that goes, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

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