Back in September 2004 I wrote an article for my web site about UFOs that were seen over Cleburne, Texas in June 1995. These objects were filmed by my very good friend Jason Leigh, and you can read my commentary on the story here.

So, with that in mind, I was extremely interested to read today that Jason has had yet another sighting. This time he saw what he describes as being akin to a “Triangle-shaped UFO” flying over his hometown of Cleburne on Christmas Night. He first reported his sighting to Frank Warren’s “The UFO Chronicles” web site, and included a drawing of what he had seen.

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"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians–OSHA inspectors, insurance agents, religious workers–in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens has reported a web-exclusive companion piece on ICE agents' ruse…

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Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens. The so-called ICE "subfield offices" are mainly used to house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards applied to ICE and even military prisoners.

At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in "a barely converted storage facility."

"You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," explained Ahilan Arulanantham, an ACLU immigration attorney interviewed by The Nation. "Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

The report continued: "B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area…

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When an ad hoc team of 5000 people who assembled in just two hours found 10 weather balloons hidden across the US by the Pentagon's research agency earlier this month, it was just another demonstration of the power of crowdsourcing – solving a task by appealing to a large undefined group of web users to each do a small chunk of it.

So far crowdsourcing has been associated with well-meaning altruism, such as the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia or searching for lost aviators. But crowdsourcing of a different flavour has started to emerge.

Law enforcement officials in Texas have installed a network of CCTV cameras to monitor key areas along that state's 1900-kilometre-long border with Mexico. To help screen the footage, a website lets anyone log in to watch a live feed from a border camera and report suspicious activity. A similar system called Internet Eyes, which pays online viewers to spot shoplifters from in-store camera feeds, is set to launch in the UK in 2010.

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# 1 Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
# 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
# 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
# 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
# 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
# 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
# 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
# 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
# 9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
# 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
# 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
# 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
# 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
# 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
# 15 Worldwide Slavery
# 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
# 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
# 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
# 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
# 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record

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One of the large mental health hospitals in Israel was recently surprised to receive a young, good-looking patient in a psychotic state who was accompanied by a personal security guard, Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Sunday.

The doctors, who asked why the woman was accompanied by a guard, were shocked to learn that she was a Mossad agent and that the security guard was not assigned to her in order assure her safety or protect her life, but to ensure that she not reveal any state secrets in her shaky mental state.

The Mossad guard's orders were clear: "It is forbidden that the organization's secrets be passed on to those unauthorized to hear them." The doctors, who are unaccustomed to the presence of a third party during their treatment sessions, were left with no choice but to acquiesce to their demands. In addition, the staff had to receive a security clearance before being allowed to work on her exceptional case.

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Approximately 40 years ago, psychologist David Rosenhan conducted a daring experiment.1 He and seven confederates presented themselves for psychiatric evaluation at several psychiatric institutions, with each claiming to hear voices that said “empty,” “hollow,” or “thud.” All eight were subsequently admitted to the hospitals in all but one case with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Once entry was gained, each was instructed to tell hospital staff that he or she felt better, and desired to be discharged.

In reality, of course, neither Rosenhan nor his confederates were hearing voices or having any symptoms of mental illness. None had any psychiatric history whatsoever, in fact.

Rosenhan’s experiment sought to determine just how long it would take for the psychiatric experts in a hospital setting to figure out that the pseudopatients were not mentally ill. The results were alarming. The pseudopatients were not easily detected – in fact they were never detected to be pseudopatients

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The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.

But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period.

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Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation. Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world’s economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun’s heat just enough to counteract the effects of global warming. The estimated cost would be about two hundred and fifty million dollars. Nathan Myhrvold suggests that volcanoes and other natural processes already pump out sulfur into the stratosphere and that his scheme, if adopted, would increase that amount by only one percent. Nathan Myhrvold therefore thinks that there would…

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by Loren Coleman, Cryptozoologist and Author, Mysterious America, Cryptozoology A to Z, and other books.

The general public and media were captivated in 2008 by stories of an alleged Bigfoot in ice, which was quickly revealed to be a costume. In contrast, perhaps in reaction to last year, exploration, historical appreciation, and baseline work were at the forefront of this year’s top cryptozoology stories. The communiques for 2009 were highlighted by several searches for hidden species, some surprising discoveries, the public opening of a museum, sighting series, and other events that turned this into quite a year for cryptozoology. It certainly was an upbeat way to end the decade.

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Yesterday news was brought to us thanks to Roger Marsh with the UFO Examiner regarding a UFO report filed with the Texas chapter of the National MUFON organization, in which two “creatures” were seen emerging from a landed UFO craft.

Today, yet another story has been issued from the Lone Star State, detailing a similar set of circumstances. However, although the verdict is, of course, still out on the nature of sightings that may or may not be taking place, the similarity of the incidents reported, as well as the demeanor in which they have been issued, may call some skepticism into question, in addition to lending some credibility to each case. Below is the second, most recent report from MUFON in its “raw” and unedited form:

TX, December 5, 2009 – Saw UFO land and occupants come out. MUFON Case # 21000.

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Dan O’Bannon, the screenwriter behind the 1979 sci-fi horror movie “Alien,” has died. O’Bannon passed away on Thursday, the Writers Guild of America confirmed on Friday. He was 63 years old.

“Alien,” which starred Sigourney Weaver and was directed by Ridley Scott, took science fiction seriously. It was set in a future that didn’t look overtly futuristic–the Nostromo, the spaceship at the center of the movie looked grimy and lived in, more like a flying oil rig than some Buck Rogers fantasy. The weary astronauts on board the vessel, driven by shadowy corporate and military interests, were more like punch-the-clock factory laborers than the hopeful, elite crew members of ”Star Trek.” O’Bannon had a vision of the future that looked like the present–the technology had improved, but human motivation, greed, and griminess had remained unchanged.

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C. D. B. Bryan, a novelist and journalist whose 1976 book, “Friendly Fire,” about the accidental death of a soldier in Vietnam, the consequent anguish of his family and their rage at the Army and the federal government, became one of the enduring works of reportage on the Vietnam War, died Tuesday at home in Guilford, Conn. He was 73.
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Edith Pavese

C. D. B. Bryan
The cause was cancer, said his son, St. George Bryan.

Mr. Bryan’s career was that of an old-fashioned man of letters. He wrote both novels and nonfiction books; he taught writing at Colorado State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he contributed articles to many magazines; and he was a voluminous book reviewer, including for The New York Times Book Review, where over the years he assessed works by Tom Wolfe, Richard Ford, Michael Herr, Erica Jong, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., William F. Buckley and Julio Cortazar, among others.

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The death of author C. D. B. Bryan, 73, who wrote his last book about an academic symposium that examined claims of alien visitations, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abductions, UFOs and the Conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NY: Alfred A. Knopf,1995), has been detailed in an obituary by Bruce Weber at The New York Times.

C. D. B. Bryan, a novelist and journalist whose 1976 book, "Friendly Fire," about the accidental death of a soldier in Vietnam, the consequent anguish of his family and their rage at the Army and the federal government, became one of the enduring works of reportage on the Vietnam War, died Tuesday [December 15, 2009] at home in Guilford, Conn….The cause was cancer, said his son, St. George Bryan.

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1969 was a great year for hippies, a bad year for Beatles fans and an even worse year for UFO enthusiasts. Forty years ago, on Dec. 17th, the U.S. Air Force officially shuttered Project Blue Book, the agency's third and final attempt to investigate extraterrestrial sightings, and the country's longest official inquiry into UFOs. From 1952 until 1969, more than 12,000 reports were compiled and either classified as "identified" — explained by astronomical, atmospheric or artificial phenomenon — or "unidentified," which made up just 6% of the accounts. Thanks to such a meager percentage and an overall drop in sightings, officials axed the program and ended the research. So much for the truth being out there.

The U.S. government search for extraterrestrials began in 1948, a year after an amateur pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed he saw nine crescent-shaped objects in the sky while flying near Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold evoked images of "saucers

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