Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

From James Oberg post on the Whispers discussion forum:

More confusion about stuff in the sky…

The government of Georgia claimed last week to have shot down an intruding Russian aircraft over the disputed Caucasus area called Abkhazia. Now it appears they were really shooting at a Russian craft — but it was a re-entering satellite eighty kilometers overhead. Good shooting — or good imaginative bragging — Georgian air defense forces!

Mr. Molczan, a world-renowned Canadian amateur satellite tracker, has confirmed the report from Georgia that the falling, flaming object last week was NOT a Russian aircraft but a falling satellite.

A report earlier today from Sukhumi made that claim. But they provided no identification of which satellite was burning up.

It happened to be Russian, according to Molczan, who has granted permission for his name and conclusions to be cited in the press. He identifies it as Kosmos-2427.

Based on that satellite’s mission, it is my own view that the entry was a deliberate de-orbit at the nominal end of its mission. But Abkhazia was the last thing on the mind of the controllers at the Titov Center at Krasnoznamensk, southwest of moscow, who sent the commands to the satellite to turn on its rocket engine and brake its forward speed. They were performing their job normally and safely.

Here are links about the Titov satellite control center:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titov_Main_Test_and_Space_Systems_Control_Centre
http://www.space.com/news/russia_france_040404.html  
http://www.redorbit.com

Information anout Mr. Molczan’s activities can be found here, for example: http://satobs.org/seesat/Aug-2007/index.html  

All teasing aside — reentering satellites have often been mistaken by pilots and ground observers to be much closer than they actually are. They have sparked some famous ‘UFO sightings’ over the decades, too. A Russian rocket entering over Colorado last year set off excited reports from hundreds of witnesses, many of whom were sure it was a falling airplane on fire.

Jim Oberg
Houston, Texas

Links on ‘crashed aircraft’ story:
http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=15666  
http://www.eurasianet.org/insight/082707gr.shtml  
http://www.civil.ge/eng/detail.php?id=15660

Excerpts from Stan Deyo’s “UFOs Are Here!” (1977), a very interesting documentary for the many interviews with famous figures exactly thirty years ago, from Spielberg — who was about to release Close Encounters — to Hynek and Valleé. On the clip above, a short commentary by Kenneth Arnold himself, plus Ray Palmer on the Shaver Mystery.

For more on the influence of Palmer and the Shaver Mystery on the origins of ufology, check John Keel’s 1986 article on Whole Earth Review, The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers.

From Wikipedia: Oliver was a performing chimp who was once promoted as a missing link, or a “Humanzee” (a human-chimp hybrid). However, despite his somewhat unusual appearance and behavior, Oliver is, genetically speaking, a normal chimpanzee. Anthropologist David J. Daegling (in Carroll 2005) writes:

“‘Oliver’ is a habitually bipedal ape that has captured the imagination of both laypeople and scientists. He has been touted as a relict australopithecine, a bigfoot, or even the result of a clandestine human-chimp hybridization experiment. After years of lively debate, Oliver’s DNA was sampled to settle the issue and perhaps provide us with a breathing version of the missing link. The results are in … and, alas, Oliver is just a standard-issue chimpanzee with a penchant for walking.”

Watch above the first part of a documentary on the subject. The rest can be seen on haha.nu: Oliver the Chimp.

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman shares some uses of the term “Chupacabras” before it was made popular in 1995, “Chupacabras 1951“. Quoting Kenneth Thomas:

…watching the 1951 movie Bride of the Gorilla with Raymond Burr and Lon Chaney. Burr gets poisoned by a witch and either starts becoming a gorilla or it’s all in his mind and he’s running around naked at night in a South American jungle. The natives are convinced that it’s a legendary beast called something like a “sucaris.” (It was hard to tell from the dialect.) When they describe the legendary beast they are quite clearly describing a Chupacabras. The verbal descriptions were a match. When they decide to set a trap for it, they use a live goat as bait. They do bring a goat to the trap they set for the creature.

Coleman also mentions the birds called “goatsuckers” in Spanish, of the Caprimulgiformes order, which means literally goat-sucker in Latin. According to Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez work on the Chupacabras, those birds are indeed called popularly goatsuckers in Spanish, but the actual term used is “Chotacabras”.

“Choto” or “Chota” is the name given to the goat offspring when it’s sucking milk, and the popular (and erroneous) legend is that these birds are able to open their beaks so wide they could suck milk not only from goats, but from cows as well.

But the relationship between the Chotacabras birds and the Chupacabras is more interesting than a mere similarity of names and alleged behaviour, because the main promoter of the Chupacabras in 1995 was also involved on one Chotacabras case some years before.

In 1989, Puerto Rican Jorge J. Martín promoted the case of a bird with snake-like fangs allegedly found and captured by relatives of María Ortiz Hernández while they were fishing. It was promoted as the “serpent-bird of Gurabo“, and if you may wonder where such chimera idea would have come from, you just have to read how it was immediately related to the Quetzalcoatl legend.

Much was made of the creature, which was available for examination, until one policeman visited the house where it was preserved, grabbed the creature and removed its fangs. They were merely parts from the feet of a rooster, attached to a common bird’s beak.

Perhaps more importantly to our post here, the bird was a chotacabras.

And you can actually see some later drawings of the Chupacabras where it also has big fangs and wings.

So, as Noguez pointed out, you can add the “serpent-bird of Gurabo” hoax involving a Chotacabras to the predecessors of the Chupacabras mania that swept the world around ten years ago. According to the Mexican researcher, the term “Chupacabras” is a simplistic and erroneous use of the more widely known term Chotacabras.

Oh well. I was almost forgetting.  While you will probably not find any use of the exact term “Chupacabras” in the Bible, Spanish or otherwise, you will find the term “Chotacabras”, according to Luis Noguez. And it’s related to Lilith. Another kind of mythic vampire.

Mike Smith has already compiled a summary about the video, concluding that “it seems safe to conclude that this video shows something being officially tested at White Sands - maybe some sort of top-secret missile - but certainly something that was expected, something that eventually made its way to Maussan, who then began promoting it, perhaps a bit dishonestly, perhaps just prematurely, as the crash of an extraterrestrial craft”.

But there’s also the investigations of Chilean investigator Rodrigo Fuenzalida, published on La Nave de los Locos in January 2001, “Crónica de un misil anunciado“:

We started to conduct several analyses. The first of them was to watch it repeatedly and in slow motion the impact, after which we discovered that what looked like a compact bright structure was something completely different. It’s rear region showed movement similar to that of a flame. Also, a tenuous smoke trail could be seen. Everything seemed to suggest that what was allegedly a lenticular and luminous UFO was actually a big mass of flames, expelled by some kind of structure. After a compression of the image, we could see the body, that indicated more clearly the hypothesis considered from the beggining. Everything pointed to a military test.

… After presenting my hypothesis in TVN news … some members of AION associated with the army contacted me. We conducted a new analysis on air, this time inviting the defense analyst Roderick Bowen, who presented some diagrams and photos of missile tests that showed exactly the same effect. Mario Pizarro, AION member and Army instructor, identified the missile as an SEII, used during the Gulf War.

I couldn’t locate more information on the SEII missle, nor any video of a missile test where the rocket bounced. But it should be no surprise that missiles are capable of bouncing on the ground, given that some are designed to penetrate meters of solid concrete.

It’s just a shame countless hours have been wasted on this video just because its original source is a sensationalistic quack who wouldn’t clarify where and how he got it, as that would certainly reveal exactly what it was.