Free Republic

He played the great Klingon warrior Kang on three versions of "Star Trek" and a Native American on ABC's "Broken Arrow." Michael Ansara, the rugged character actor who played Klingon commander Kang on three different Star Trek TV series, has died. He was 91 ... Born in a small village in Syria to American parents, Ansara starred as Native Americans on two 1950s primetime series ...

Frank Frazetta's original 1955 artwork for Weird Science-Fantasy #29, considered by many comic art fans to be the finest comic book cover of all time, has been sold in a private treaty sale for $380,000 – almost certainly the most ever paid for a single piece of original American comic book art – to Heritage Co-Chairman and Co-Founder Jim Halperin, a collector known to own one of the finest comic book and original comic art collections in the world. It was an outright purchase for immediate payment, with no trade-ins involved. "Knowing I'm a huge Frazetta fan, and a...

Almost 50 percent of Americans, according to recent polls, and millions of people elsewhere in the world believe that UFOs are real. For many it is a deeply held belief. For decades there have been sightings of UFOs by millions and millions of people. It is a mystery that only science can solve, and yet the phenomenon remains largely unexamined. Most of the reporting on this subject by the mainstream media holds those who claim to have seen UFOs up to ridicule. On Feb. 24, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing" takes a fresh look at the UFO...

WHY would a serious journalist like Peter Jennings tackle a silly subject like UFOs? Maybe it's because 40 million Americans can't be wrong. It turns out that 40 million of us have claimed to have seen UFOs, while half — yes, half — of all Americans believe in their existence… < snip > So, why, if millions of people have seen UFOs, are the eyewitnesses immediately reduced to the level of raving loonies (from "lunar")? Interestingly enough, that is the legacy of another successful government PR campaign…< snip > The feds thought they could keep a lid on UFO sightings...

Dennis Birch compares the U.S. soldier to a Christmas tree: Whenever improvements in technology help lighten a soldier's load, someone else wants to hang on a new piece of gear like an ornament. The result is "100 pounds of great ideas hanging off him in all different directions," Birch said. So in its prototype for a high-tech uniform of the future, researchers at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass., have shaken all gear from the soldier and started from scratch. In the researchers' designs, soldiers of 2011 will step into wired uniforms that incorporate all the...