Organization for SETV Research

• 1959

~ Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Coconni publish " Searching for Interstellar Communication " in Nature magazine.


• 1960

~ The first SETI search, Project OZMA, is conducted by Frank Drake and Bernard Oliver at Greenbank Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia.


• 1961

~ The optical approach to SETI using continuous wave laser beacons is proposed by Schwartz and C. Townes (Professor Townes, a Nobel prize winner and inventor of the LASER).


• 1961

~ The Greenbank Conference for the Search for Extraterrestrial Life take place at the Greenbank Observatory. Carl Sagan, Frank Drake and other leaders in SETI take part.


• 1966

~ Carl Sagan and I. S. Shkolovskii write "Intelligent Life in the Universe".


• 1971

~ Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Phil Morrison join Russian scientists at the US-USSR SETI Conference in Byurakan, Armenia, Soviet Union.


• 1971

~ The Pioneer Plaques, (created by Jon Lomberg, at the bequest of Dr. Carl Sagan) contain messages about Earth and its inhabitants destined for points beyond our solar system, are launched 1972 on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft.


• 1977

~ The Voyager Interstellar Gold Record Plaques, (created by Jon Lomberg, at the bequest of Dr. Carl Sagan) containing several types of messages aswell as audio recordings about Earth and its inhabitants destined for points beyond our solar system, are launched 1977 on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft.


• 1979

~ The Planetary Society is founded by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman (JPL --Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, USA).

~ The Search for Extraterrestrial Radio from Nearby Developed Populations (Project SERENDIP I) launches at Hat Creek Observatory, UC-B.


• 1981

~ The Proxmire Amendment kills NASA support of SETI

~ International SETI Conference, Talliinn, Soviet Union. Because the Proxmire Amendment prevented US scientists to participate, The Planetary Society sends US delegates to the international meeting.

~ The Planetary Society begins strong advocacy for NASA to conduct searches for extraterrestrial signals. Carl Sagan, then president of the Society meets with Senator Proxmire to help convince him to stop opposing government funding for SETI.


• 1982

~ NASA begins SETI searches with High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS).


• 1982

~ George Gatewood conducts first extrasolar planet search at Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

~ Paul Horowitz's suitcase SETI is tested at the Arecibo radio telescope.

~ The International Astronomical Union establishes Commission 51, dedicated to bioastronomy and the search for extraterrestrial life.


• 1983

~ Samuel Gulkis and Thomas Kuiper begin a southern hemisphere search using the 64-meter DSN antenna, Australia; focus: water vapor lines.

~ Michael Papagiannis launches Bioastronomy News, the official newsletter of the International Astronmical Union's Commission 51.

~ Paul Horowitz launches Project Sentinel using the 26-meter-diameter (84-foot) radio telescope at Harvard Massachusetts.


• 1984

~ The SETI Institute is founded as a home for research investigating all aspects of life in the Universe, with most support coming from NASA. SETI Institute is intransitive to other non-narrow band search strategies[OSR].


• 1985

~ The Mega-Channel Extraterrestrial Assay (Project META) begins at the Oak Ridge Observatory in Harvard Massachusetts, scanning 8.4 million 0.05 Hz channels. The launch was sponsored by a generous grant from film director Steven Spielberg. Spielberg later consults Dr. Jacques Vallee to create his epic ET visitation film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", in which Spielberg depicts Dr. Vallee, the real-life model of Francois Truffaut in the film.

~ Ohio State University begins the Project "Big Ear" search at Columbus.


• 1986

~ UC-Berkeley’s SERENDIP II begins to scan the skies.


• 1987

~ Robert Stephens begins a Canadian search from the Hay River Radio Observatory, Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada.


• 1988

~ The Planetary Society organizes an international meeting on SETI in Toronto, Canada.


• 1989

~ The Planetary Society takes over the publishing of Bioastronomy News as one of its special-interest newsletters.


• 1990

~ The Columbus Optical SETI (COSETI) Observatory, developed by OSETI pioneer Dr. Stuart A. Kingsley, becomes the first optical SETI research facility in North America.

~ Project META II launches outside Buenos Aires, Argentina, with funding from the Planetary Society.


• 1992

~ UC Berkeley launches SERENDIP III.

~ NASA’s High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) is launched at Goldstone Observatory outside Barstow, California and at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.


• 1993

~ Dr. Stuart Kingsley organizes the first OSETI Conference, sponsored by The International Society For Optical Engineering (SPIE).

~ US Congress stops NASA (public) funding for High Resolution Microwave Search (HRMS) SETI search.


• 1995

~ The SETI Institute launches Project Phoenix, using the 210-foot Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere. Phoenix is the successor to the ambitious NASA SETI program that was cancelled by a budget-conscious Congress in 1993.


• 1995

~ The Billion-Channel Extraterrestrial Assay Project (BETA) begins scanning the skies from the Harvard radio telescope in Massachusetts.


• 1996

~ OSETI II, the second SPIE Conference, is held under the direction of Dr. Stuart Kingsley.

~ Project Argus, launched by the SETI-League began searching, inaugurating their Project Argus Search Strategy on Earth Day, April 21, 1996, with five operational radio telescopes. By September, 1999, 81 stations in 16 countries and 27 of the United States were actively participating. The ultimate goal is 5,000 small dish corellated SETI search, which would provide near Earth all-sky SETI search. The SETI League is directed by Dr. Paul Shuch for SETI League president and philanthropist Richard C. Factor.


• 1996

~ The Planetary Society funds Project SERENDIP IV at UC-Berkeley.


• 1996

~ After being shut down for one year due to equipment upgrades funded by the Planetary Society, a more powerful Project META II resumes sky searches in Argentina.


• 1997

~ At the University of California, Berkeley, Leuschner Observatory, the Optical SETI Pulse Search, directed by Dan Werthimer, begins.


• 1998

~ Optical SETI is becoming accepted by the SETI establishment previously dominated by radio astronomers who had questioned the viability of OSETI as a search mode; both The SETI Institute and The Planetary Society now support searching for light signals.

~ The Harvard/Smithsonian Optical SETI program, directed by Harvard's Paul Horowitz, becomes operational at the Oak Ridge Observatory.


• 1999

~ SETI@home, implements a 'screen-saver' program that taps into the often unused power of personal computers while they are idle.

This project out of Berkeley University, Berkeley California, USA, uses the personal computer during the time the user or other processes are not.

Designed for public participation, this post (after) acquisition search schema implements a 'screen-saver' program that 'crunches' data downloaded via an InterNet server whose source is the Arecibo Radio Astronomy Observatory located in Puerto Rico. The program reduces or 'crunches' blocks of raw SETI data while searching for evidence of ETI 'hits' in the data. The data blocks processed are about 300K bytes in size and the program uses 16M bytes of RAM while running. The CPU time required to process each block can be anywhere between hours and weeks depending upon hardware performance and user's system usage behavior. It is very clever idea and one that may well prove to be of some value to the narrow band SETI search effort.[OSR]

The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) simply stated, is a scientific search for technical signatures or 'indications' of the existance of extraterrestrial intelligence located outside Earth's solar system. Formally, SETI is perceived as being a narrow-band electromagnetic search. This specific search type is a process of 'listening' for either microwave (~2.0 gHz to ~4.0 gHz microwave) radio signals or more recently, optical signals hopefully transmitted by other intelligent specis which are speculated to be located in the Milky Way galaxy. (Earth's solar system and the Earth are also located within the Milky Way Galaxy.) These hoped for narrow band electromagnetic 'beams' would be transmitted by an ET civilization using a very stable, coherent (monochromatic or not-varying) frequency source.

Several microwave SETI signal search efforts tune their radio astronomy SETI receivers to the so-called 'water-hole' frequency, with the implication being that an ET civilization would know that most of the Universe is Hydrogen and that it is the most primitive element makes it a "special frequency" and that the number of the frequency of the received ET radio signal energy would be part of the intelligence 'encoded' in the 'message'.

Narrow-band, microwave SETI search hardware simply described, are comprised of microwave antennae (similar in appearance to a consumer satellite dish) and microwave receivers. The larger the diameter (aperature) of the antenna the further away, or deeper in space, a signal may be detected. There are essentially three types of 'narrow band' or microwave/optical SETI search being commonly conducted today:

• The SETI Institute, uses vary large dish antennae (such as the Arecibo Radio Astronomy Observatory, Puerto Rico) to 'peer' or 'listen' more deeply into the galaxy for signatures of ETI signals.



• The SETI League, and their Project Argus, implement small microwave (satellite) dish antennae, with commercial off the shelf (COTS), Amateur Radio receivers, coupled with personal computers (PC) and software to 'peer' or listen 'out-to' approximately 14 LYs (Light Years) to about 200 LYs into the galaxy from Earth. Competency of builder, equipment deployed and calibration technique determine the depth-of-space which may be searched. Typically it is thought that the 'average' Project Argus Station can easily detect and 'listen-to' signals out to about 50 LYs distance from Earth.
  
  The basic amateur radio astronomy SETI station commonly implemented is often derived from a configuration which was designed by Ham Radio Operator, Daniel Boyd-Fox, KF9ET.
  
  
  
  Danial Boyd-Fox is also the author of the popular personal computer based 'sound-card' amateur SETI (FFT) analysis software, " SETI-FOX".



• The Columbus Optical SETI (COSETI) observatory does not use radio, but uses electro-optical receivers to search for ET generated optical signals. Dr. Stuart Kingsley, (member of the IEEE) a pioneer in the use of electronic optical signal receivers for SETI (should not be confused with passive optical astronomy telescopes) has long been a proponent for alternative search strategies.

• February 26, 1942

- The Royal Netherlands Navy ship Tromp reports that a (shiny) aluminum disk approached the ship at high speed circled it and departed area. This report was considered very reliable and was taken from US Army Air Force Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) files. Strange reports like this in the early 1940’s prompted the US Army Air Force (AAF) to begin to take an interest in these unusual objects. [#JV-1 p. 50]


• November and December 1944

- Foo Fighters, the name given to small glowing objects that followed and paced American, British, German and Japanese military aircraft. This occurred mainly over Northern Europe, Japan and the Mediterranean basin. The white, red or green objects were said to fly singly and in linked groups or formations under perfect control. Publicly, the sightings were blamed on pilot fatigue and delusions. Interestingly, these fatigued and delusional pilots kept flying for the AAF. [#JV-1 p.51]


• Summer 1946

- Reports of Ghost Rockets flying over Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Morocco and Turkey. Described as various colored luminous balls or projectiles and sometimes sounds were heard. These were thought to be Russian test flights, a speculation which was a consequence of the early days of the ‘cold war’ and the establishment of the iron curtain in eastern Europe. Or, they could have just been very unusual meteor showers. [#JV-1 p.?]


• June 24, 1947

- Sighting by Kenneth Arnold of several disk shaped objects while he was flying his private airplane near Mt. Rainier Washington. The formation of objects was reported to hug the mountain terrain as they flew. Arnold’s quote that the motion of the objects looked like a saucer skipping across water is credited with the popular term flying saucer. The Air Force conclusion was that Arnold suffered from a hallucination, but their statement did not result in him losing his pilots license. This incident was sensationalized at the time and triggered an awareness and public fascination with strange objects in the sky. [#EJR p. 13,14]


• July 8, 1947

- The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) announced that they had come into possession of a flying disk that had crashed several days before at a ranch some 75 miles to the north in Corona, New Mexico. The story was printed in newspapers around the world. Later, after some further investigation, the AAF story was changed to a weather balloon that probably exploded and crashed during an electrical storm. The weather balloon explaination was accepted as the truth for quite some time. [#CB p. 25]


• September 23, 1947

- Project Sign, sometimes mistakenly called Project Saucer, was initiated by the US Army Air Force. This began the first ‘official’ and formal investigation by the government of unusual aerial objects and phenomena. [#RC p. ix] [#JAH-1 p. 170]


• December 30, 1947

- The establishment of a research commission was set up by order and signed by then Secretary of Defense James Forestal. The intent of the commission was to study the sighting cases and come up with an official explanation that would reassure the public that there was nothing to be alarmed about. The commission came under the authority of the Air Material Command at Wright Field Air Force Base. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Astrophysicist from Ohio State University, was one of the commission members. [#JV-2 p. 88]


• 1948

- Dr. J. Allen Hynek, then director of Ohio State University’s McMillin Observatory joins project Sign.


• January 7, 1948

- Captain Thomas Mantell of the Kentucky National Guard is killed in the crash of his F-51 aircraft at about 3:30 p.m. after trying to intercept a huge metallic looking object above him at an altitude of 20,000 feet. That object according to the Air Force was misidentified by Mantell as the planet Venus, and later changed to that of a Skyhook balloon. The loss of control and crash of his jet was blamed on his blacking out due to lack of oxygen (anoxia). This is the first documented case of a military person dying while trying to intercept a would-be flying disk. [#DK-1 p. ?]


• January 22, 1948

-


• July 25, 1948

- Eastern Airlines DC-3 pilots Chiles and Whited report having their airplane rocked by the passage of a very large flying fuselage with portholes that exhibited a bright blue contrail. After an extensive investigation, the Air Force was unable to find any natural or rational explanation for the incident, and it was filed as an unknown. Cases like this, made by competent observers, were of great concern to the Air Force for it forced them to concede that some of the cases were real and defied explanation.


• February 11, 1949

- By written order the project code named Sign is changed to Grudge. This was done in response supposedly to Project Sign’s classified name being compromised. [#EJR p. 59] [#JAH-1 p. 1]


• August 20, 1949

- Acclaimed astronomer Dr. Clyde Tombaugh of Lowell observatory, the astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto on February 18, 1930 using a blink comparator, witnessed a geometric formation of rectangular shaped lights in the sky over Las Cruces, New Mexico that disappeared at the southeast horizon. Tombaugh was one of a very few number of astronomers who were willing to step forward with reports of unusual lighted objects in the sky. [#JV-1 p. 96]


• December 27, 1949

- Air Force press announcement that Project Grudge was being closed and that a final report on flying saucers would be issued. The report was titled Unidentified Flying Objects-Project Grudge and had the technical report number of 102-AC-49/15-100. The report did not settle the ET issue as planned mainly because of an appendix to the document titled Summary of the Evaluation of Remaining Reports in which admittedly 23% of the total cases studied had no rational explanation, but had to be dismissed somehow. [#EJR p. 65]


• 1950

- The Frank Scully book titled, 'Behind the Flying Saucer', and a book written by Major Donald E. Keyhoe titled, 'The Flying Saucers are Real' are released. Both books deal primarily with sightings reports, and the Scully book discusses spaceship crashes and little men.


• January 1950 to October 1951

- The US Air Force did nothing [officially] to investigate or explain the various sightings reports that came in to Air Force Intelligence. [#EJR p. 82]


• June 1950

- The release of an article titled 'The Mystery of the Flying Discs and Other Strage Sky Craft' by the Holloway School of Philosophy along with a book written by Gerald Heard titled 'The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World Watching?' seriously proposed the idea that ET intelligence was behind the sightings of these objects and that they were visitors from other planets. From works like these stemmed the beginnings of the ET Hypothesis. [#GNH-1 pp. 2-4]


• October 27, 1951

- The US Air Force Intelligence department officially reactivated its investigation of unusual aerial phenomena with formation of the new Project Grudge. [#EJR p.114]


• January 1952

- Formation of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization APRO by James and Coral E. Lorenzen. The first civilian organization founded to document and study reports of Unidentified Flying Objects in a scientifically objective way. [#CEL -1 p. 25]


• March, 1952

- The new Project Grudge was changed to Project Bluebook, and it was headed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, a well respected aeronautical engineer and WWII bombardier.


• July 26, 1952

- Sensational late evening reports of objects tracked by RADAR over Washington DC. The objects were repeatedly seen on RADAR and would disappear just before the F-94 jet interceptors arrived in the vicinity. Thus began a situation in which these objects were not only being seen visually, they were also being picked up on RADAR at the same time. The troubling question was can eyes and RADAR sets both be wrong? [#EJR pp. 164-165]


• January 14 to 18, 1953

- The Robertson Panel, formed at the instruction of the CIA, analyzes a few selected files from Project Bluebook and makes conclusions and a policy recommendation to the US Air Force. The conclusions and policy recommendations sound much like the anti-red rhetoric of the era, and were directed largely to a defense and security problem rather than to a scientific one. Notably, according to Dr. Hynek [the panel] made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable, and for nearly 20 years not enough attention was paid to the subject to acquire the kind of data needed even to decide the nature of the UFO phenomena. Additionally, the recommendation of the panel, representing a scientific position, opened wide the door to debunking of the phenomena and its witnesses. The panel members were Drs. H. Robertson, Luis Alverez, Lloyd Berkner, S. Goudsmit and Thornton Page. [#JAH-1 pp. 168-69] [#JAH-2 p. 22]


• February, 1953

- Captain Edward J. Ruppelt takes another assignment and steps down as head of Project Bluebook. He is replaced by 1st Lt. Bob Olsson until Capt. Ruppelt returns in July to work for the project until May 1954 [#JAH-2 p. 25]


• March, 1954 to April 1956

- Captain Charles Hardin heads Project Bluebook.


• May 13, 1954

- The term Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) said by an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon who told to news media to use it as a substitute for the term ‘flying saucer’. Two days later General Nathan Twining used the term in a speech he gave to an audience in Amarillo Texas. The acronym was admittedly coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt who previously headed Project Bluebook. [#FE-2 p. 49]


• October, 1956

- The civilian, non-profit organization named the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) is founded. Its director is retired Major Donald E. Keyhoe. By 1966, NICAP had claimed the largest membership of 5,500 among the other UFO groups. NICAP had an inside access to many Project Blue Book reports and became more interested in the USAF’s concealment of details than collecting data themselves and doing their own research. [#JV-2 p. 225]


• April 1956 to October 1958

- Captain George Gregory heads Project Bluebook.


• October 1958 to July 1963

- Lt. Colonel Robert Friend heads Project Bluebook. During his almost five years as head of Bluebook, he was considered its best head, since he kept his personal beliefs to himself and was a practical realist in considering the role of the project and his office. [#JAH-1 p. 187] [#JAH-2 p. 25]


• September 19, 1959

- Phillip Mossison and Giuseppe Cocconi propose, in the journal Nature, that a scientific search for ET radio signals from space be carried out and that it deserves a considerable effort. Although Dr. Frank Drake was talking to private groups about looking for ET radio signals during this time, the publishing of this article is considered to be the catalyst for the SETI effort. [#Nature Searching for Interstellar Communication, September 1959, 184, 844-846]


• 1960

- Captain Edward J. Ruppelt passed away from a heart attack.


• April to July 1960

- Project Ozma, a short-lived (» 150 hour) observational effort by Dr. Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia to detect ET radio signals at 1420.4 Mhz emanating from the nearby stars e-Eridani and t-Ceti. [#FD]. Some man made pulses were detected which led to a lot of excitement, but no signals of a confirmed ET origin were detected.


• September 19, 1961

- Barney and Betty Hill witness a hovering craft outside of Lancaster New Hampshire while driving through the White Mountains on their way home. According to the witnesses, the craft landed and the Hill’s were reportedly abducted by small persons who ran medical examinations on them. They did not remember the experience but suffered from anxiety for some time afterward. They sought medical help at the urging of friends and were thereafter treated by a psychiatrist named Dr. Benjamin Simmons who used hypnotherapy to treat their anxieties. Aside from claims made by Adamski about ET contact, the Hill’s case, because of its involuntary nature, is considered to usher in the era of ET abductions and the curiosity of abduction psychologists.


• 1961

- National Academy of Sciences CETI conference.


• 1963

George Adamski, self proclaimed contactee and abduction victim passes away. [#FE-2 p. 82]


• January 1963 to December 1969

- Major Hector Quintanilla heads Project Bluebook. Of the six men who headed the project, he was considered the most skeptical and critical of the phenomena, and was not averse to outwardly expressing his scornful opinions. The project ended while under his leadership. [#JAH-2 p. 25]


• March 1964

- Nikolai S. Kardashev proposed in the Astronomical Journal of the Academy of Sciences (U.S.S.R) that ET civilizations can be categorized into three types based upon their technological level and energy utilization. Earth rates as an emergent type I civilization. [#NK The Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations]


• March 27, 1966

- Dr. J Allen Hynek announces at the Detroit Press Club that strange lights seen over the Dexter and Hillsdale Detroit areas for the past week were probably caused by spontaneously igniting swamp gas. Hynek admitted that this incident and his statements, 'along with the reaction to it by the public was the low point of my association with UFO’s'. [#Saturday Evening Post, December 17, 1966 Issue].


• 1966

- The University of Colorado receives a contract from the US Air Force to perform a scientific study of its anomalous aero object UFO cases.

January 8, 1969
- Release of the book titled ' Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects', authored by Dr. Edward U. Condon and the members of the Colorado Project staff headed by Dr. Condon. The hardback version of the book was published by E.P Dutton & Company, and the paperback version was published by Bantam Books. The rather volumnous book must be read to be appreciated for it contains a multitude of topics, analysis and scientific discussions on the phenomena of UFO’s. However, as thorough and objective as the Air Force, Condon and his remaining staff claimed the study was, it came under intense criticism by pro-ET organizations. Many of the critics claimed that the 'Air Force got what it paid for', and that was a "way out of the UFO game". [#EUC p. ii] [#RC p. 252]


• December 17, 1969

- Project Bluebook was officially cancelled in an announcement by the Secretary of the Air Force after the conclusion of a study made by the University of Colorado and reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences. The findings and conclusions of the Colorado Project staff headed by Dr. Condon led to the Air Force’s decision to cancel Project Bluebook. Between the time the report was released and the official closeure, there was a significant effort to discredit the report. Notably, a book titled "UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong" written by David Saunders and Roger Harkins was released in October 1968 and had an ex-members’ story on the real findings of the Colorado Project [#RC p. 235, pp. 240-246] [#CB p.51]


• August 19, 1972

- David Akers performs a two week instrumented field survey at an Indian Reservation in Yakima Washinton. His equipment included cameras, an optical spectrometer, magnetometer, IR detector and acoustic transducers. Aside from some interesting photos of lights in the night sky, the study was too short and scientifically unproductive. [#ref]


• 1972 to 1976

- Project Ozma II was carried out by Ben Zuckerman of University of Maryland and Patrick Palmer of the University of Chicago. In all they scanned 674 of the nearest stars using a much larger radio telescope at NRAO for a total of 500 hours. Again, no signals of ET origin were confirmed. [#ref]


• 1973 to 1980 -

Project Identification was carried out in the area of Piedmont Missouri. Dr. Harley Rutledge, professor of physics from headed up the team. [#HR]


• 1974

- Dr. Edward U. Condon passed away.


• November 16, 1974

- The 305 meter radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, transmited a 169 second duration binary coded message toward the globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules. This Active SETI message was sent at a frequency of 2380 Mhz and described some characteriestics of life on Earth. [#Icarus December 1975 No. 26 pp. 462-466]


• 1976

- Dr. Donald Menzel passed away.


• December 1981 to 1985

- Project Hessdalen Erling Strand, Dr. Alan J. Hynek and others began studies from the end of 1981 to 1984, durring large "UFO-flap" in the Hessdalen valley, Norway. Project Hessdalen was established in the summer of 1983, and conducted an instrumented field investigation during January and February 1984. An automatic measurement station was designed by Erling Strand (MSc. EE) and his students at Otsfeld College and has been operating in Hessdalen since August 1998. [#ref],


• April 1986

- Dr. J. Allen Hynek passed away.


• October 14, 1988

- Television program aired titled "UFO Cover Up? Live", hosted by actor Mike Farell. A two hour show which attempted to make a case for the existence of alien visitors from the testimony of several high profile investigators, retired military personnel and eye-witnesses. The program introduced the Gulf Breeze sightings case and reports from investigators in the Soviet Union. Although it was entertaining and provocative, the show didn’t answer it’s question and was admitted as a flop by some of its guests who regretted appearing.


• 1988

- Major Donald Keyhoe passed away.


• 1988

- NASA begins funding for SETI research.


• October 1989

- Robert Lazar goes public with his claims of having worked to reverse-engineer an alien spacecraft, located at Area 51, Nellis Air Force Base. This was televised on a nine part special report titled UFO’s: 'The Best Evidence' that was hosted by anchorman George Knapp. There is tremendous controversy surrounding the Lazar story, but some believe that at least a fraction of his claims are correct. This will be explored later. [#ML p. 87]


• October 12, 1992

- The NASA High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) observational phase is inaugurated at the NASA Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It was curious that NASA, under Dan Goldin, chose the name HRMS instead of SETI, and some engineers at JPL mused that HRMS stood for: 'He Really Means SETI'.


• October 1993

- The HRMS effort is cancelled after Congress voted against it during NASA budget trimming. HRMS, costing about $12 million annually, was considered of lesser importance than Space Station funding. Many narrow-minded goverment officials saw HRMS as a waste of tax dollars and some arrogantly proclaimed 'We already know there is intelligent life in the universe.'


• September 8, 1994

- A report titled the Roswell Incident is released by the US Air Force. The report was authored by Colonel Richard Weaver and was prepared in response to inquiries made by the Government Accounting Office (GAO) for declassified documents relating to the incident. The GAO became involved at the request of U.S. Representative Steven Schiff (died of cancer) of New Mexico. The report reiterates that what crashed in Corona, New Mexico was a survellience balloon, and not a suspected alien disk/vehicle as others have claimed. The 58 page report said that the balloon was part of Project Mogul, a top-secret high altitude surveillance effort to detect Soviet nuclear testing using geophones and other sensing devices. A copy of the report is available from the United States Government Printing Office. GPO stock no. :008-070-00697-9.

[#RC p. 256, partial reference]


• December 20, 1996

- Dr. Carl Sagan passes away (cancer). While being a critic of the ET visitation hypothesis, he was more open-minded to the possibility of ET visitations than his fellow astronomers. His famous quote being, 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' He wisely and steadfastly claimed that the acceptance of the ET hypothesis needed to be based on more than just incomplete eye-witness testimonies, fuzzy photos, and claims of alien abduction.


• June 24, 1997

- At a Pentagon news conference, Air Force Colonel John Haynes announces the release of the second report on the Roswell Incident in a document titled 'The Roswell Report: Case Closed'. This was a more detailed follow up report to the one released September 1994. This report caused even more confusion and suspicion among the UFO researchers in that it claimed the Roswell incident didn’t happen as reported 50 years ago and that witnesses memories of the retrieval of alien bodies were confused with anthropomorphic dummy tests in the early 1950’s. The 230 page report is available from the Government Printing Office.

Notes:

1    [CB] Charles Berlitz & William Moore, The Roswell Incident (New York:   Grosset and Dunlap Publishers, 1980) p. 25, p. 51

2    [CEL-1] Coral E. Lorenzen, 'Flying Saucers, The Startling Evidence of the Envasion from Outer Space' (New York: The New American Library, Signet Books October 1966) p. 25, pp. 104-145

3    [EJR] Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc. 1956) p. 13, p. 14, p. 59, p. 65, p. 82, p. 114, pp. 164-165

4    [FD] Frank D. Drake, Project Ozma (Physics Today, April 1961) vol. 14 pp.40-46

5    [FE-2] Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers Here and Now! (New York: Lyle Stuart Inc. August 1967) p. 49, p. 82

6    [JV-1] Jacques Vallee, 'Latest Findings on Ubidentified Flying Objects, Anatomy of a Phenomenon' (Ace Books: Henry Regnery Co. 1965) p. 50, p. 51, p. 96

7    [JV-2] Jacques and Janine Vallee, Challenge to Science, The UFO Enigma (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1966) p. 88, p. 225

8    [ML] Michael Lindemann, UFOs and the Alien Presence, Six Viewpoints (Newberg, Oregon: Wild Flower Press, 1991) p. 87

9    [RC] Roy Craig, UFOs, An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence (Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1995) p. 234, p. 256

10    [NK] Nikolai S. Kardashev, The Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations (U.S.S.R.: Astronomical Journal, March-April 1964) vol. 41 pp. 282-287

11    [JAH-1] J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, A Scientific Inquiry (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1972) p. 170,

12    [GNH-1] Gilbert N. Holloway, Flying Saucers, The Mystery Deepens (Holloway School of Philosophy Pub. 1951) pp. 2-4