Posted on 04/13/2009 11:39:11 AM PDT by TaraP
A former engineer at the top secret airfield "Area 51" in Nevada has spoken out about UFO sightings in the region in the 1960s, saying the witnessed flashes of light were part of top secret US aircraft experiments.
In an interview with ABC News, Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, a former special-projects engineer at Area 51 said: "No one really knew we existed. Even our wives didn't know where we were going when we left Monday morning and came back Friday evening."
Barnes was an electronics engineer for NASA who also specialised in advance radar and Soviet MiG fighter aircraft and was asked to join a team of CIA experts who would work on secret military projects at the infamous base.
UFO folklore has it that Area 51, about 80 miles north northwest of Las Vegas, is where captured aliens and their spacecraft have been stored by the US military. The conspiracy theory comes in part because of the preponderance of strange, unaccounted for lights that have been seen in the region of the top secret military base.
However Barnes poured cold water on the theory saying the "alien spaceships" were in fact light flashes from top secret spy planes being flown at 2,000 miles per hour at altitudes of 90,000 feet.
The experimental planes produced light flashes that some interpreted as alien spaceships and this was considered helpful by the team in covering their activities.
"We considered it to be a bonus," said Barnes. "They made it easier to conceal what we were doing."
However some ufologists have said the area has only been partly declassified and UFO work at the base may well have carried out though in a region unknown to engineers such as Barnes.
"Those guys who came forward may very well be telling the truth, with the caveat that they wouldn't know if there was something going on," said Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist, lecturer and top UFO researcher.
Friedman added that evidence coming out of places such as Area 51 proved how much was going on in the country without peoples' knowledge.
"National security has a real place in all of this stuff. There is no way to tell your friends without telling your enemies," he said. "A lot of Americans woke up to the fact that there's a lot going on that they don't get told about."
Let me ask a question:
Do you mean to say UFO sightings are non-real events, or that merely the names given the events differ based on the level of technology (or culture) that existed during the event?
Thanks for your kind and reasonable words.
Yeah studying a topic since 1962 does leave one with a fair amount of distilled data! LOL.
Now to be more certain what is true and what is disinfo is still a huge challenge.
Some of our UFO threads have such pics of such artworks on them.
I don’t have ready links to them.
Maybe someone else will or you can dogpile it.
Actually, some of the Australian very ancient rock carvings of . . . space visitors . . . do include bug-eyed figures.
INDEED.
And now I have to get to work teaching . . . LOL.
Maybe he should come up with some evidence or eyewitnesses instead of asking us to prove a negative.
Some of us get weary of the naysayers routine assaults, insults and realize that
that’s the only language they seem to register on their noggins.
There is a connection, both Lucent and Lucifer got their names from the same Latin root for light. Lucifer is the light carrier (lux ferre), and lucent is actually the Latin suffix form of the word.
Lucent isn’t actually “in charge” of the lab. Lucent is the name they gave it when they spun Bell Labs off into its own company.
Have a great day!
Come back soon!
“My point was that Friedman made a statement that can never be proven wrong. Hundreds of Area 51 employees could come forward and say they never saw anything, and Friedman could say the exact same thing. It’s a common tactic of conspiracy theorists.”
Not to say I have 100% faith in Stanton Friedman, but what he said, if it were on a more mundane military tech discussion would not get this kind of heat. The statement was not a sensational one, and Friedman may just know more because he’s made it his bread-and-butter to dig into the matter.
“Maybe he should come up with some evidence or eyewitnesses instead of asking us to prove a negative.”
He has written many books and articles, and are completely accessable to the public. If every person asked any question were required to trot out everything they knew every time they made a statement, nobody would get anything done. Especially when the statement are of such a general nature.
This thread is nucking futs.
That’s a cop out. If the facts are on your side you don’t need the fallacy of ad hominems. And shouting about logic mistakes while using logical fallacies just plain doesn’t sell you as someone who should be allowed to register in the noggins. That’s the kind of stuff that makes it easy to call believers nuts.
I believe in possibilities, but I also know the vast majority of “sightings” are from people either hoping for easy cash or just plain too eager for the paranormal to understand the normality of what they’re seeing.
I, too, am an engineer. Some of it is pretty interesting stuff, for sure, but I have yet to see any plausible connection to (non-earth) aliens. Zero.
Quix’s info is interesting to some extent, obvious nuttery in other cases, still, none is anything verified nor verifiable, ever.
There is plenty of research material on this subject that's currently available on the Internet. Nobody is going to waste their time posting a list of website links because skeptics like you wouldn't bother yourself to click on them. If you want to research this subject, you need to take the initiative.
I call it Spirited and Colorful with a flair for egg throwing.
Eaxactly the nasty kind of response I write of! Thank you for helping to prove my point.
If you’re gonna prove your case then you need to PROVE your case. “I’m not going to waste time presenting the evidence” just plain doesn’t cut it.
There's a lot of porn and scammers on the internet, too. I don't think I'd use that argument too hard.
Sorry, my post #95 was meant for Quix and not you.
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