Now even ET is making crop circles (with a little help from GPS and MICROWAVES)

By Daily Mail Reporter
From: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

UFO fanatics clinging to the belief that extra-terrestrials are responsible for crop circles sometimes like to echo the X Files catchphrase: ‘The truth is out there.’

But, as it turns out, the answer might actually be much closer to home - inside your kitchen in fact. 

Because, for example, this 200ft image of a pipe-smoking alien – carved into a Wiltshire field – could have been created using an ordinary microwave oven, according to scientists.

From kitchen to field: Microwaves may have created this 200ft alien crop circle near Cherhill, Wiltshire

A handheld device called magnetron – made using parts from the common household cooker and a 12-volt battery – may have ushered in a new generation of crop circles.
Professor Richard Taylor, a physicist, claims to be able to reproduce the intricate damage inflicted on crops using such a gadget developed by his team at the University of Oregon.

 

He believes similar advances have been made by others – despite avid UFO spotters insisting that the growing phenomenon is beyond scientific understanding.

Prof Taylor said microwaves – the radiation waves that are capable of heating food when utilised in an oven - cause crop stalks to fall over and cool in a horizontal position.
The technique could explain the speed and efficiency of the artists and the incredible detail that some new crop circles exhibit, such as the alien, which was created two weeks ago alongside an ancient white horse at Cherhill, near Stonehenge.

Strange goings on: The two-week-old alien appeared alongside an ancient white horse, near Stonehenge

Dispensing with rope, wooden planks and bar stools that have traditionally been used to create such designs, Prof Taylor suggested these spectacular patterns could also be carved with lasers.

And he believes the satellite Global Positioning System could track the markings.

Mathematical analysis of some of these ever-more complex designs has revealed the use of constructions lines, invisible to the eye, that are used to design the patterns.

Writing in Physics World, he said: ‘Crop-circle artists are not going to give up their secrets easily. 

‘This summer, unknown artists will venture into the countryside close to your homes and carry out their craft, safe in the knowledge that they are continuing the legacy of the most science-oriented art movement in history.’ 

Physics World editor Matin Durrani said: ‘It may seem odd for a physicist such as Taylor to be studying crop circles, but then he is merely trying to act like any good scientist - examining the evidence for the design and construction of crop circles without getting carried away by the side-show of UFOs, hoaxes and aliens.’ 

But as fascinating as the patterns are to scientists, farmers find crop circles infuriating.
Tim Carson, who owns the land where the recent alien design appeared, has had 125 circles on his land since 1990. 

The price in ruined crops is particularly steep this year because of soaring fuel and fertiliser costs, and a 25 per cent drop in wheat yields due to the drought.

Booming: Crop circles in Wiltshire are attracted tourists to the area, but farmers are unhappy with lost income

Cropping up: This circle is one of those that has appeared at Devizes in the last few weeks

Elaborate: This 409 circles in this creation brought the farmer whose land it was on thousands in media fees and helicopter landing fees

‘I’m beginning to get a bit tired of it all,’ said Mr Carson. 

‘Each circle costs me £1,000 in lost income. This year, I decided to destroy circles as soon as I found them, but that means losing more crops. And, whatever you do, the circles affect the growing next year, as the thick mat of crops covers soil, compromising its quality.’

Every year, 50 to 60 circles materialise in the rolling chalk downlands of Wiltshire. 

In the rest of the world put together, only 40 to 50 appear annually. 

And, in recent years, a booming tourist trade has developed. From Belgium, Holland, America, Norway and Australia, crop-circle enthusiasts come in their thousands — each with their own theory, each rushing to a new site as soon as it is reported.

This week, within hours of the first reports of a new circle on Windmill Hill — near the neolithic stone circle at Avebury — a Dutch tour party of nine people rushed to the spot.

‘There are heaps of biophysical anomalies here,’ said the tour leader, Janet Ossebaard, 45, author of Crop Circles: Scientific Evidence.

Hard at work: Crop circles are often made by groups of six who work at night using basic tools such as bamboo sticks, tape, and 3ft-wide wooden planks

‘This wasn’t made by people, otherwise you’d see damage from board marks [where hoaxers lay planks to flatten the wheat]. It’s been hit by a plasma vortex.

‘You can see the burn marks on the crops and cavities,’ she says, holding up a grain stalk, which does indeed have small holes in it. 

‘We also found a half-fried caterpillar. This is a vortex that has been intelligently guided — not by hoaxers, nor the Army [which is heavily represented in this part of Wiltshire].’
Crop circles have been reported in England since 1678, when a Hertfordshire news pamphlet referred to The Mowing Devil, a creature that cut a farmer’s oat crop into a series of concentric circles. 

In the 19th century, occasional circles were recorded and the first-known photograph of one appeared in Sussex in 1932. 

But it wasn’t until the early Nineties that Wiltshire crop circles started multiplying at an extreme rate. 

In 1990, Led Zeppelin released an album, Remasters, with a picture on the cover of an elaborate crop circle created on Mr Carson’s land.

7 Old West UFO Encounters That (Probably) Actually Happened

by Justin Thomas

from http://egotvonline.com/

Cowboys & Aliens opens this weekend, and moviegoers are already chomping at the bit for a chance to see cowboys duke it out with UFO’s. As crazy as this genre-blending fantasy world seems, American history boasts a fairly healthy collection of Old West UFO stories during the 1800′s. Even before Roswell and Area 51, people were seeing strange things in the sky, describing them to their local papers, and coming up with wild theories as to what the mysterious objects could be. Of course, there were no video cameras in the 1800′s, and even still photography technology was in its infancy, so collecting documentation of Old West UFO encounters was nearly impossible. Nonetheless, newspapers from the 1800′s are jam-packed with awesome Old West UFO encounters. Here are 7 Old West UFO Encounters That Actually Happened…(maybe).

The Aurora Incident

Aurora, Texas, 1897


The Aurora Incident is one of the more famous Old West UFO Encounters. The incident occured on the morning of April 17, 1897 in Aurora, Texas, a small town in the northeastern corner of the state. According to the Dallas Morning News, Judge J.S. Proctor was preparing his breakfast when he heard a loud crash outside of his farmhouse. Upon investigating, Judge Proctor discovered a strange airship that had collided with his windmill, causing it to crash to the ground. In the wreckage, the Judge found the ship’s pilot, who was dead and described as “not of this world”. Of course, that could just mean “horrifically burned”, but who knows for sure. The Judge buried the wreckage in an old well on his property and the pilot’s body was reportedly buried in a nearby cemetery, with a plaque marking the grave site that briefly describes the incident. Because of the popularity of this legend, there have been numerous follow up investigations (especially in recent years) that have yielded no conclusive evidence to support the theory that a) the pilot of the mysterious craft was an extraterrestrial, or b) that the event ever happened in the first place, aside from a plaque in the cemetery describing the event as it was reported in the papers. Nonetheless, the town of Aurora considers the incident to be a local precursor to the Roswell incident, which occurred nearly 50 years later, because the two stories bear a remarkable resemblance to one another.

John Martin’s “Flying Saucer”

Denison, Texas, 1878


Many people attribute the term “flying saucer” to Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who used the term to describe an object he encountered while flying a plane in 1947. But the term was used almost 70-years earlier in a Denison Daily News article about a strange object that Texas farmer John Martin spotted on a recent hunting trip. Martin, a reputable local farmer, was out hunting one morning when he suddenly noticed a strange, shiny object in the sky.  As he watched it, the object gradually moved closer to him. When the object silently flew overhead, Martin clearly saw the craft and later described it as dark and saucer-shaped, using the term “flying saucer” for lack of a better explanation. Despite Martin’s solid reputation, nobody else saw the craft and no evidence of its existence was ever unearthed.

Lumley’s UFO

Great Falls, Montana, 1865


This story appeared in a few different newspapers in 1865. The papers reported the story of a fur trapper named James Lumley, who claims to have witnessed a UFO crash in the deep woods of Montana in 1865. Lumley was in the forest trapping animals for his fur trade when he suddenly noticed a brilliant, bright light in the sky. The object streamed across the sky, then broke into several parts and crashed to the ground out of view. So far it sounds like a meteorite, right? That’s what Lumley thought too, until he investigated the crash site the following day. As Lumley approached the site where the object crashed, he noticed a huge stretch of land that had been completely cleared of trees and other foliage. The object had forcefully cleared a path in the woods upon touching down. Lumley followed the trail of devastation and eventually discovered its source: a large stone-like object that had smashed into a mountainside. Upon investigating the object, Lumley discovered that it was sectioned off, almost as if it had rooms inside of it. Lumley said that the object was also covered with “heiroglyphics” that could only have been made by humans or other intelligent creatures. In other words, they weren’t just random scratches on a rock. He also stated that the hunk of rock he came upon appeared to be a small part of a much larger object that he could not find in the area. While sifting through the debris, Lumley found a number of glass-like shards and chunks of what seem to resemble melted metal. Despite Lumley’s claims, the “ship” was never found, and besides his awesome story, there’s no evidence of his extraterrestrial treasure.

The Niagara Falls Lights

Niagara Falls, 1833


In 1833, a series of strange incidents were reported near Niagara Falls in New York. The incidents involved sightings of luminous objects in the sky along with reports of a strange, jelly-like substance falling from the sky. At around 2am on November 13th, a strange luminous object was spotted hovering in the sky near Niagara Falls. The object looked like “a square table that hovered in the sky and emitted bright rays of light”, according to one eye witness. Later that day, a series of jelly-like blobs were discovered littering the ground throughout New York, Newark, and New Jersey. The blobs were described as flat, jelly-like transparent blobs about 4 feet in diameter that fell from the sky, then dissolved within a few hours of exposure to air. Despite numerous eye witness accounts of the blobs and other mysterious lights, no samples of the jelly substance were taken and, aside from eye witness accounts and newspaper reports, there is no concrete evidence to substantiate the sightings or the mysterious jelly blobs.

The Mystery Airships of 1896

San Francisco, California 1896


1896 was a great year for mysterious airships. Hot air balloons and crude airships had already been invented by this time, although it would be another 7 years until the Wright brothers would record their first successes in their flying machine. But something else was flying around in Northern California in 1896. Hundreds of eye witnesses reported seeing a massive airship slowly floating about 1,000 feet over the city on the night of November 18, 1896. Most of the witnesses were drawn by the ship’s light, mainly because people just weren’t accustomed to seeing anything besides a bird flying around in the sky in 1896. The following night, Colonel H.G. Shaw was driving in his buggy in Stockton, California (near San Francisco) when he came upon a large airship that had landed in a field. He later described the ship as being cylindrical shaped, about 150 feet long and 25 feet in diameter, and made entirely of metal. Not exactly an every day sight in 1896. He also claims that three very tall, slender men were accompanying the ship, and that they examined his car briefly before boarding the ship again and taking to the skies, and eventually out of site. For the next few weeks, numerous mysterious airships were spotted all along the west coast, in western Canada, and even as far east as Nebraska. While airships had already been invented in 1896, nobody had one that could cover such vast distances and reach such heights, which is why the incident is referred to as The Mystery Airships of 1896.

 

The Flying discs of Salem, Massachusetts

 
1952 Salem, Massachusetts July 16, 1952 1952 was a busy year for UFO sightings, and about that time Shel Alpert, a USCG seaman on duty in the Coast Guard Weather Office at the Salem Coast Guard Station, witnessed four unexplained brilliant lights in the sky. After dimming and brightening again Alpert was able to get a single photograph through the window of this office. This photo has been published in many places, including books, newspapers, magazines, and now websites. (source:UfoCasebook)

The Mysterious Lights of 1897

Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska & Illinois, 1897
 
There were a lot of “mysterious” things happening in the late 1800′s. A tidal wave of “mysterious lights in the sky” sightings were reported throughout the Midwest in April of 1897. The first reports came from Omaha, where hundreds of eye witnesses reported seeing the same thing: a 12-foot wide egg-shaped metallic object flying through the air. That night, hundreds more reported being awakened by a blinding bright light flooding through their bedroom windows, apparently coming from a moving object in the sky. Similar reports came in over the next few nights from Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and even Chicago, where thousands of people stood in the streets and stared at the mysterious object in the sky with one bright light at the “front”, and a red and green light on either side that seemed to rotate around the object. Apparently, two photos were taken of the object by a Chicago resident, but the photos have since disappeared.

U.S. Cavalry vs. Aliens

Southwestern U.S., 1909


There’s an unconfirmed story floating around regarding a U.S. Cavalry unit that encountered a UFO, and possibly even some pesky little aliens, in 1909. As the story goes, a Cavalry unit was in hot pursuit of a gang of Mexican bandits in the Southwestern U.S. in 1909. During their pursuit, the Cavalry unit came upon a cave that they’d never seen before, despite being familiar with the region. Upon entering the cave, they discovered a number of metallic, horseshoe-shaped flying vehicles, along with a small collection of “little grey demons”, which may have been aliens. The Cavalry unit’s horses were spooked by the ships and the creatures, and the Cavalry immediately left the cave. Upon returning the next day, the cave was empty and the ships and aliens were nowhere to be found.

Area 51 De-Classified and Uncovered

As information from the top secret US military base is declassified, The Independent talks alien conspiracy theories, the Cold War and UFOs with a man who was there

Interview by Jonathan Owen
From: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Rumours that the U.S government had proof of visiting alien life hidden away in a top secret military installation known as Area 51 have persisted for half a century.

One of the most famous secret military bases in the world, Area 51 has been shrouded in secrecy since it was set up during the early years of the Cold War.

Access to the Nevada base has always been highly restricted and those who worked there were sworn not to speak of it.

A U-2 pilot is being fitted into a partial pressure suit at Area 51. These early pressure suits bore a cunning resemblance to the alien costumes of 1950s B-movies.

 CLICK HERE FOR DECLASSIFIED IMAGES

But now early veterans have spilled the beans for a documentary Area 51: I Was There being broadcast on National Geographic Channel on Sunday.

The documentary combines personal testimonies with recently declassified information, photos and video (some of which can be found above).

Here T.D Barnes, 74, one of the documentary participants and a man who was commissioned to test secret aircraft by the CIA at Area 51 in the late ‘60s, shares his experiences:

I think the people selected were all the same. We weren’t really nosy. There were 23 of us but we protected our own secrets from each other. You didn’t snoop into what each other was doing and we still don’t today because some of it is still classified.

You didn’t volunteer to tell people what you were doing. You only reported to what we called ‘the customer’, which could be the CIA or it could be any other agency, could be air force foreign technology division.

I decided to talk about my experiences because about eight or ten years ago we started realising that we were losing our people and that the stories of what we did have never been told. When the CIA started declassifying information, I started gathering these stories together.

The more we talked to the historians and the military the more we realised that they simply did not know what we did. A lot of the technical stuff that we did that was classified so the world never knew about it and today they had gone ahead and reinvented the wheel that we had invented back in the 1960s.

For example a lot of [the work I was doing] had to do with high speed flight and the radar- that was one of my specialties. I came from a programme where I was used to dealing with tracking planes so one of the things I did at Area 51 was radar tracking. We were developing the very first stealth plane but we didn’t know what the radar would see when it was flying overhead at 2,200 miles an hour.

They brought me out there because I was used to dealing with high speed radar [monitoring]. The plane would fly overhead and we would look for it with the radar. Technology like that that was really primitive back then, we marvel today they can do the same thing with computers, but we didn’t have computers back then.

When I was in the army I became a specialist in electronic counter measures. The CIA was evaluating the capabilities of the Soviet Union, would we be able to shoot this plane down, that sort of thing. So when the Russians set up camp in Cuba that made it really easy for the CIA to evaluate the equipment.

A lot of activity took place not necessarily at the area [Cuba]. That’s what few people know about. And that less than 5 per cent of all the people working on the programme even knew the CIA was involved.

I was on a special project working for the CIA. I was a consultant/contractor. I left them in 1975 and have always been available for consulting and that sort of thing and they call me up on different things but after that I went into private business, the oil and gas business.

I was loaned out to the Nevada test site [by the CIA] for a period to work on the rig that was drilling the holes for the atomic bomb and I got familiar with the drilling equipment and the geology and that sort of thing.

When I was in the army my wife knew I was working on top secret projects. The wives were very important in the screening process. Anyone who had a wife that was a security risk didn’t get into the programme. They’d vet the wives and families almost as strongly as they did us.

I think the reason [there are so many conspiracy theories] is that for many years no-one knew about Area 51. Then all of a sudden the general public found out that it had been there all these years and it was like “What had they been doing there?” and “Oh, it must be tied in with the aliens”.

We brought some of this on ourselves. For instance the A12 - we flew 2,850 missions out of area 51 from 1952 to 1958. So people were obviously seeing things. Even flying 90,000ft at 2,200 miles an hour, which is faster than a bullet, people would occasionally see it or maybe an airline pilot or people on a commercial airline - and to them it was a UFO.

We were so secret even our own military didn’t know that we existed. No-one knew that we existed. So the air forces started investigating the sightings and they would start getting too close to finding out what we were doing and they would hit that security block where someone said “That’s a top secret programme, make up a story, go home and don’t say another word about it”.

So they would make up a story to explain the UFO sighting and the stories were just not very good and the people just didn’t believe them and rightly so.

The rumours of aliens are not true. It was so primitive back when we drilled the first water wells out there in the desert, you just didn’t have anything, it was just desert. I think it was because it was such a mystery what was going on that’s what attracted the conspiracy theories.

The Soviets had satellites looking at us all the time, every 45 minutes one came over the horizon. If [there had been anything to do with aliens] going on Russia would have certainly known about it.

We got our hands on a Soviet Mig-21 [a jet fighter aircraft], to find out why they were giving us such a rough time and that was exciting. We were flying the enemy’s planes, tracking it with their radar. During the Six-Day War Israel captured a lot of Soviet radar and, of course, that was my area of expertise. We brought them out to Nevada and actually got them operating so that we could see what the Russians were seeing when they would track us.

That was a big part of the Stealth programme, we realised that we needed to have all these various radars scattered around the desert

Some of [the stuff I know] will probably never be declassified. A lot of it is political or based on technical details. A lot of it is just plain political.

I believe in secrecy. There’s a lot of stuff that should never be secret that is, but then when the CIA started declassifying the documents in 2007 they were putting major documents on their website. I told the CIA security people then “Are you crazy, the enemy would love to have this knowledge even though its 50 years old, it’s never been reinvented.” So we started working together on some of the sensitive things. They didn’t realise because they didn’t know enough about what we did.

Secrets don’t stay secret very long now, not like they used to.

Area 51: I Was There premieres on Sunday at 9pm on National Geographic Channel

3 of the FBI's real life X-Files investigated

From: http://dvice.com/archives/

A memo from FBI agent Guy Hottel that many believe proves Roswell's crashed saucer (more on that below).
It's one of many FBI docs now available.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation's newly-revamped online "Vault" gives the public easy access to formerly-secret documents that detail everything from counter-terrorism investigations to rundowns on prominent individuals and potentially "subversive" national organizations.
It's a fascinating resource. For example, we were able to discover that the U.S. government spent actual time and money investigating the mid-1960s make-believe band, The Monkees. The curiously heavily-redacted Monkees dossier summarizes the pretend bands' television show as "four young men who dress as 'beatnik types' and is geared primarily to the teenage market." During a Monkees performance, a (name-redacted) source reports that an onstage screen flashed subliminal "left wing innovations of a political nature."
But the Bureau isn't all about keeping tabs on fake boy bands, assessing threatening letters sent to Colonel Sanders, or probing Carl Sagan's tenuous connections to Central American terrorists. They also launched numerous investigations into crazy supernatural stuff! The Vault's features previously secret FBI documents looking into phenomenon usually reserved for Hollywood-style escapism. Here's a look at some of the most fascinating real life X-Files.

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Mysterious Cattle Mutilations

As early as the 1960s, ranchers throughout several western states reported the mysterious deaths of stray cattle whose mutilated corpses were found butchered with near surgical precision and drained of their blood. Here's some gory details from a 1979 letter between state officials:

[Officer] O'Dell said the steer's scrotum and penis had been removed with surgical precision — a feature common to all previous mutilations — and indicated that patches of hair around the carcass seemed to indicate that the steer had been dropped or bounced — another feature common to all previous mutilations. The steer's intestines had been removed through the hole where the scrotum had been cut out, but were not disturbed.

Slowly, the strange phenomenon — which evidently occurred with some frequency — began to move beyond ranching circles into media and public at large. Rumors spread of helicopters and UFOs hovering over locations shortly before the mutilated bovines were discovered.
As early as 1974, there was some collaboration between the FBI and state investigators looking into the mutilations. But the record shows that by mid-decade local officials grew tired of ineffectual local investigations and began petitioning the FBI to take the lead. These correspondences largely consist of local press clippings detailing the bovine slayings backing up urgent appeals from senators and representatives. The FBI, for its part, seemed mostly reticent to launch an investigation into this spree of mysterious — but decidedly non-Federal — crimes. A 1975 letter from Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell to the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the investigation epitomizes the urgency felt by ranchers in his state:

...The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves: in virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum, and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no foot-prints. In Colorado's Morgan County area, there has also been reports that a helicopter was used by those who mutilated the carcasses of the cattle, and several persons have reported being chased by a similar helicopter.

Freaky.
After lamenting the disorganized and un-serious investigations undertaken by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Senator also goes on to describe a sort of mass hysteria overtaking his constituents.

Now it appears that ranchers are arming themselves to protect their livestock, as well as their families and themselves, because they are frustrated by the unsuccessful investigation. Clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt.

Apparently, the cattle mutilations became common enough that there was even an official mutilation form:

In 1979, a federal investigation into the mutilations was finally launched under the "Animal Mutilation Project." In March of 1980, we have a record of mysterious "flake" samples sent to FBI lab for examination and identification. The flakes corresponded to "a U.F.O. [that] was reportedly observed by a resident of Taos, New Mexico, reportedly hovering over a pickup truck. The next morning the enclosed powder flakes were reportedly recovered from the roof of the aforementioned pickup." The flakes turned out to be white enamel paint.
Documented cases of animal mutilations largely subsided in the U.S. after the federal investigation began (though similar incidences of "horse ripping" continued into the late-1990s in Europe). Officially, the authorities concluded that the mysterious mutilations were largely the work of natural wild life that would often attack the "soft" parts of deceased cows first, such as the ears, eyes, and genitals. Though, to this day, many aspects of the mutilation phenomenon remains officially unexplained.

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Extra Sensory Perception

Declassified CIA documents have revealed that the KGB was investigating the use of ESP (or "remote viewing") until as recently as the early 1990s. While citizens of the Cold War era could sleep better knowing Russian intelligence agency's plans of psychic imperialism didn't go unchecked, who was protecting brave American brainwaves on the domestic front? You may harbor visions of the FBI cultivating a covert Dreamscape team of subconscious commandos with a secret base buried under Mount Rushmore in Franklin Roosevelt's forehead. Unfortunately no super awesome dream warrior base existed.
But, boy, did the FBI want one!
In particular, there was a lot of back and forth regarding the astounding feats of a Richmond, Virginia-area man named William Foos. Mr. Foos used to travel around the mid-Atlantic region giving "demonstrations" of his extrasensory method, which he claimed was both authentic and teachable. Foos could boast some bona fides via past collaborations with Duke University's Department of Parapsychology (the department was the focal point of some ire by established academia in its day and has since divorced from the university and been reincarnated as the independent Rhine Research Center).
Foos, a high-school educated part-time railway employee, never charged admission for his demonstrations, but was actively seeking funding to set up a center which would teach the blind to see. Foos had hopes the proposed center would instate him as the organization's president while hiring various members of his family.
According to the released documents, Foos' presentations didn't do much to sway other government organizations such as the Blind Veterans Association. They did, however, manage to impress at least one agent who took in a demonstration at a D.C.-area American Legion Hall in July of 1957:

Mr. Foos, resident of Richmond, Va., is a high school graduate employed in a minor capacity with the C. and O. Railway. About two years ago he became interested in extra sensory perception (a term probably technically inaccurate) and began experimenting with members of his family. He claims to have achieved amazing success... Very simply, Foos claims the ability to teach the blind to see: in six months to teach a person without eyes to see sufficiently well to drive an automobile safely. He disclaims any supernatural power and, not being a scientist or physician, has no technical or scientific explanation.

After witnessing Mr. Foos' teenage daughter walk about a room while blindfolded, as well as reading and distinguishing colors "with complete ease," the agent speculates:

Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit the value which could accrue to the FBI — complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings — the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned.

I get the feeling think this special agent's brain might explode if he ever saw one episode of Mindfreak.

As fantastic as this may appear, the actuality of extra sensory perception has long been recognized — though not to the degree of perfection claimed by Mr. Foos. It is difficult to see how the Bureau can afford to not inquire into this matter fully. [REDACTED NAME], Bureau interest can be completely discreet and controlled and no embarrassment would result.

And then, unfortunately, the Freedom of Information Act came along and now the whole world is clued into the FBI's secret psychic shame. By 1960, the Bureau still kept a skeptical eye on Foos, but seemed willing to kick his particular skill set on over to the CIA or Army Intelligence.

Foos may, of course, be attempting to commercialize on a "fake trick" he and his daughter and the young boy have perfected. On the other hand there is a possibility that Foos does have extrasensory perception abilities. This, of course, is something we cannot afford to overlook in our work but we should not, however, under any circumstances allow Foos the privilege of indicating to outsiders the FBI is interested in his work... It is believed advisable, however, to have checks made with CIA and the Intelligence Division of the Army to determine what reaction those agencies had after witnessing the demonstration as put on by Foos, his daughter, and the young boy traveling with them.

In June of 1960, an FBI memorandum stated that "[Foos'] alleged powers [have] no scientific basis. Other Government agencies such as Veterans Administration, Central Intelligence Agency and Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence also checked on Foos and were highly skeptical of his work."
As for the FBI's current research into paranormal showmen, that part of the FBI story remains shrouded in mystery. Penn Jillette is pretty upfront with his anti-government views. Teller remains a bit more mum on the subject.

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Roswell

The majority of the the FBI's unexplained section is dedicated to UFO sightings, and in particular the reported "flying disc" which crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Roswell has been thrown back into the public's consciousness recently due to the implications in Annie Jacobson's new book about Area 51.
In her book, Jacobson's inside source claims that the Roswell crash did occur and strange child-sized alien-like bodies were recovered from the wreckage. However, according to Jacobson, the "crash" was part of a Soviet plot to disrupt U.S. society and defenses — a plan inspired by the chaos that unfolded in the wake of Orson Wells' War of The Worlds mockumentary broadcast from 1938. Most disturbingly, Jacobson's source claims there were actual child-sized human bodies recovered from the crash that were genetically or surgically altered to resemble extraterrestrials.
Which is almost a stranger concept than visiting aliens.
Here's the text of a 1950 memo from Special Agent Guy Hottel to the FBI Director regarding the Air Force's investigation into Roswell.

The following was furnished to [Special Agent in Charge], [REDACTED TEXT]... An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.
According to Mr. [REDACTED] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers.
No further evaluation was attempted by S.A. [REDACTED] concerning the above.

This stands is some contrast to a 1947 memo from the Dallas FBI office to the Cincinnati branch which stands by the official story that the flying disc was a downed weather balloon.
There are literally hundreds of pages regarding UFO investigations in the FBI's vault. Much of these documents include press clippings in addition to correspondences with private individuals and organizations inquiring about the Bureau's investigations into the phenomenon.

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The truth is out there. And by "out there," we mean photocopied and available online. Happy reading!

For the latest tech stories, follow us on Twitter at @dvice

SETI Turns Radio Telescopes Toward Kepler Candidate Planets, Listening for Signs of Life

Listening to places where conditions are right for life

By Rebecca Boyle

From http://www.popsci.com/

Is There Anybody Out There? The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, is listening to 86 Kepler candidate Earth-like planets in the hopes of hearing from alien life. Wikimedia Commons

A gigantic radio telescope in Virginia has started listening to 86 Earth-like planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, hoping to hear signs of alien life. Astronomers aren’t even sure the stars to which they are listening actually harbor planets, let alone radio-communicating extraterrestrials, but hey, we might as well bend an ear, right?

The SETI Institute is looking at Earth-like (rocky) planets with a focus on those with temperatures between 0 and 100 °C (32° and 212 °F), where liquid water can exist. As far as our Earth-biased science can tell us, that’s a crucial ingredient for life.SETI has been listening to parts of the sky for decades, but pointing directly at Kepler findings stands among the project’s best-informed attempts yet. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico looks at stars like the sun, hoping they might have planets around them.

“But we’ve never had a list of planets like this before,” said physicist Dan Werthimer, director of the SETI project at Arecibo, in an interview with AFP.

In February, Kepler scientists announced they had found 1,235 potential planets orbiting sun-like stars in the Milky Way, including 68 approximately Earth-size and 288 super-Earth-size. Scientists have been verifying and refining the measurements in the months since.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope will gather 24 hours of data on each of 86 planets identified this spring by the Kepler space telescope science team as potential Earth-like planets in “Goldilocks” orbits, where conditions are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

SETI has its own telescopes, too, but apparently they’ve gone dark for a lack of funding, according to the AFP — SETI announced last month it was shutting down its 42-dish Allen Telescope Array because of a budget shortfall, AFP reports. While the 4-year-old, $50 million project is on hiatus, the Green Bank telescope will assume its responsibilities.

While Arecibo will also keep listening, Green Bank can hear a lot more — it scans 300 times the range of frequencies that Arecibo can, so it can collect as much data in one day as Arecibo could in one year.

The Kepler listening project will take about a year, AFP reports. SETI@home users will help crunch the data; the program uses small bits of unused processing power from idle Internet-connected computers to run calculations. You can find out more, and sign up to help, by clicking here.

[AFP]

Jerusalem UFO Spottings Over Islamic Landmark Spark Debate (VIDEO)

Dueling clips of a purported UFO hovering over Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine, on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, have created an online ruckus since surfacing online.

Not surprisingly, AOL is reporting on the blogosphere's ongoing debate over the legitimacy of the videos, which show round, bright objects hovering over the landmark's iconic dome before rocketing upwards. The videos, which include audio of the inspired reactions of spectators, were reportedly shot over the weekend.
Take a look at the rumored UFO clips here:

THIS MAN REALLY, REALLY LIKES E.T.

From: http://www.viceland.com/

Nick Gjoka got his first E.T. toy soon after he saw the film, when he was four. When he hit his teens he stepped up his game and started hunting for more obscure bits of E.T. merchandise in flea markets and yard sales. Then came eBay. “When I turned 21 or 22, that’s when I started to really collect,” he says. He’s now 32, and estimates there are thousands of items in his collection. He didn’t want to discuss such matters over the phone so we enjoyed this sprightly email exchange.

Vice: What’s your living situation?
Nick: In March, I moved in with my Grandmother who has Alzheimer’s, to take care of her in Pennsylvania. My collection is mostly boxed up in a storage spot. I don’t collect as much as I used to, but when I do find something I usually bring it here first or have the item shipped here and my family doesn’t mind. They think that it’s funny and they always ask questions about it.

What do you do for a living?
My “life” is on hold right now. All I do is take care of my grandmother. It truly is a 24/7 job. Everyday I also ride my bike (bicycles and no, not one with an E.T. on front), meditate, read, workout, and cook. My Gram and I like to take naps watching Lifetime TV network movies too. When I’m not doing this, I can be found (or not found) traveling, touring, cooking, skating, cycling, snowboarding and going to shows.

What do you think it is that compels you to collect?
I’m pretty sure it’s in the family. My parents collect and sell antiques. I was raised around it. An average summer holiday get away would be for a weekend of drag racing, flea markets, 50’s doo-wop, rock ‘n roll, and hot rods. I used to hate it back then but I look back at it now and I am glad that I was raised around that stuff. Besides that, I really like E.T. because it reminds me about my Grandfather that I had growing up. I can clearly remember opening one of my first E.T. toys at his house on Christmas morning. He was my only Grandfather growing up, and I thought maybe my collecting was a connection with him. When I was younger and had started collecting, E.T. items became an easy gift to get me, so all of a sudden I had a huge collection and started looking for more rare E.T. things.

Do you think there’s some OCD going on here?
After that comment I made up above (he was my only Grandfather, growing up and I thought maybe my collecting was a connection with him), I sound like some of the people on those reality TV shows about hoarding. I probably do have OCD with other things in my life but not with my collecting. Now it’s just an on-and-off hobby for me. It’s not like crack where I NEED to have this E.T. doll to where I would go beg someone for money. I’m a 31-year-old straightedge vegan guy so I don’t waste money on a Big Mac before washing it down with a beer after, so I have some extra money lying around. I’ll buy an E.T. item if the mood strikes and if it’s something that I don’t already have.

When people you meet find out about your E.T. collection, what do they think about it?
I typically don’t tell people. I have a couple of E.T. tattoos so sometimes someone may ask about them and it will lead into some other E.T. discussions. If I do meet someone who knows about my collection it is usually because a mutual friend might have mentioned it to them. More often then not, people are usually totally down with it and want to see it. A lot of people talk about an E.T. toy they had as a kid and they say something like, “If I can find it, I’ll give it to you.” I like when people try to find something I don’t already have. It’s nice.

Have you met any other big E.T. fans?
Well not to boast, but I AM THE BIGGEST E.T. FAN! Seriously though, I have met a few other collectors through eBay over the years. We’ll swap stories, collectibles etc. One other fan started collecting because his mum had an E.T. collection so he just continued it. Another collector from the UK is a little girl. E.T. is her favorite movie and her family buys her tons of E.T. stuff. Other collectors are fans of Spielberg’s movies and this being one of the most popular ones, they collect E.T. items.

What’s the most expensive E.T. thing you’ve bought?
The most expensive item that I paid for would be an E.T. clothes hamper. It is basically a life-size E.T. doll that opens in the back to put stuff in. Items that should have been more but I found for cheap were some candid production photos and crew items. The item that’s worth the most to me would be the E.T. toys that my grandfather gave me when I was a little kid.

What’s the worst piece of E.T. merchandise you’ve seen?
There are too many bootleg items to mention! The official red light-up finger that was sold in 1982 is pretty phallic and disturbing looking.

I hear you own a piece of E.T.’s foot.
I guess when I say “foot”, it’s kind of a stretch. It is really a piece of foam from the puppet’s foot. It was sent to Collegeville Costumes as a color swatch so they could get the color correct in the making of the E.T. Halloween costumes that they made in 1982. It was a plastic mask with a smock/bib plastic like top. The costume company couldn’t get the color correct so they sent a piece of the original E.T. from the film. I received it along with some correspondence letter between the producer of the film and someone at Collegeville Costumes.

What bootleg stuff have you got? Would you buy anything that was E.T. branded, even unofficial rubbish?
I have some ceramic E.T. dolls, some school supplies and a cookie jar. I like to buy more official stuff but once in a while I see some outrageous bootleg item that I have to have! A couple of my friends (not E.T. collectors) like to collect weird bootleg stuff too so we look out for each other. Along with that, another one of the E.T. collectors focuses on bootleg stuff so I try not to bid on it.

What about the Turkish E.T. rip-off?
You mean Badi? I have yet to see it.

What about E.T. porn?
Oh geez. I’ve heard about at least two different ones involving E.T. but I don’t bother with any of that.

Do you think you’ll stop collecting at some point?
I go in spurts. I will go for a week, checking eBay and then I’ll go for a month or two and not check it. If I got a fair offer for the collection, I would sell the whole thing!

Tell us about the Halloween parade, when you and your friends dress up and ride through New York.
NYC has an annual Halloween parade that goes up 6th Ave for over 20 blocks. It is a huge deal and people come out from all over! The first time my friends and I just wanted to ride around through Brooklyn and NYC on Halloween dressed up like Elliot, with E.T. in a basket on the front of our bikes. One of my friends that rode the first couple of times was also an E.T. fan and bit of a collector. Over the years it has evolved and the group became bigger and bigger. The last time we did it, we had it down to a science. We knew the best ways to attach the crates to the bikes, we had the E.T. bust already made, we had extra red hoodies, white blankets, and BMX bikes in case anyone wanted to join us. We had at least eight riders as opposed to the three we had the first time. After a friend would do it once they would always want to do it the next year too. It was soooooooo much fun!

You also run a Morrissey blog. How does Morrissey compare to E.T.?
I don’t think they are similar at all. I would love for someone to try and find some similarities. Some people are maniacs. They will over analyze stuff and somehow make a connection. Oh wait, how about this one? E.T. came out in 1982 and The Smiths started in 1982!!! Bam! there you go, there’s your connection. People are strange.

If E.T. came down and visited you and asked you to go off in his spaceship forever, would you go?
Those kind of ideas are on some next level. That’s some Star Trek nerd’s fantasy, not mine. It’s just a hobby for me and a way for someone to finally notice me in this cold miserable world.

ALEX GODFREY

You can see more of Nick’s collection at www.iloveet.com

Seti: The hunt for ET

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years, scanning the skies with an ever-more sophisticated array of radio telescopes and computers. Known as Seti, the search marks its half-century this month. Jennifer Armstrong and Andrew Johnson examine its close – and not so close – encounters

Rex

Scientists have been searching for aliens for 50 years

E.T., Why Don't You Just Call?

Scientists have started to scan the heavens with a new telescope that searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

(Courtesy Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute)

New Tools Help in Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

OPINION By LEE DYE

June 3, 2009 —

An innovative new radio telescope has given new life to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, leading one of the leaders of the search to make a bold prediction.

"We'll find ET within two dozen years," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, proclaimed in a speech at the California Institute of Technology. Shostak went on to say that he not only has a pretty good hunch about how long it could take, he thinks he knows what ET will be like.

But don't expect him to look like us.

"I think that if there's a conscious intelligence out there, it's synthetic," Shostak added. He's talking robots, folks. The argument goes like this: Darwinian evolution is a very slow process, and although it probably has occurred on many planets, it has it's limitations -- like us. Technological evolution, by contrast, can advance at warp speed, as we've all seen in the computers that are out of date by the time we get them out of the box.

Thus, any biological life, like us, will eventually lose out to the machines we create, and synthetic intelligence will take over where we leave off. The real challenge, of course, will be to keep the robots under control but still let them do our thinking for us, a neat trick if we can pull it off.

It's probably going to happen, Shostak said, because technological evolution "just blows Darwin away." So, ET not only should be out there someplace, he should be one really smart machine.

Now, predictions about how long it will take to find ET are not rare, since that's probably the most common question put to scientists at the SETI Institute, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy. The institute has been the largest player in the search since NASA abandoned a formal program several years ago. The space agency has continued searching for other Earth-like planets, including the launching of the Kepler telescope last March, but it has shied away from looking directly for ET.

What makes the search different now is the creation of the Allen Telescope Array in a dusty valley 290 miles northeast of San Francisco that will, for the first time, look for ET 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Only 42 of the planned 350 radio dishes that will make up the array have been completed, but that's enough for scientists to begin combing the heavens for many secrets, including the hiding place of ET.

The array is a joint project by the University of California, Berkeley, and the SETI Institute. The primary financial support has come from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, who put up $25 million in seed money in 2001.

The array is the first panchromatic, wide-angle, snapshot radio camera ever built, according to scientists at Berkeley. The design is based on the idea that it's cheaper to build a lot of small radio antennas that act as one than it is to build huge dishes.

As part owner of the new array, SETI finally has its own toolbox and scientists will no longer be forced to use "other people's telescopes, which is like doing cancer research with borrowed microscopes," Shostak said.

Shostak's optimism is based partly on the availability of the array, and partly on the fact that new planets are being discovered outside our solar system on about a monthly basis. They are not all capable of sustaining life as we know it, but some of them may be. That has lead many scientists to speculate that life, and possibly intelligent life, abounds throughout the universe.

But that contributes to one of the debates that have plagued SETI over the years. If there are lots of other planets out there like ours, with living creatures that are at least smart enough to build radio transmitters, why haven't we found them? SETI may not have had all the tools it needed, and funding has been scarce, but lots of very smart people have been looking very hard for ET for several decades.

Some astronomers dismiss those questions by noting that there's just zillions of places to look, and they are a long ways away, and no one is certain what to look for. So in the past, searchers have counted on finding radio signals that are beamed our way by someone on another planet who is looking for us.

It would probably have to be a directed beam because "leakage," like from television broadcasts, would be too weak. Besides, why would someone who is so much smarter than us broadcast over the air when fiber optics are more reliable and efficient? Our own electromagnetic signature is shrinking, Shostak noted in his talk, so we're not likely to stumble across ET's version of "ABC News with Charles Gibson."

But new tools, including the Allen Telescope Array, could open new ways to search for ET. Unlike other radio telescopes, the array can image a huge piece of the sky at once, or concentrate on a single star with an interesting planetary system. All objects in space emit radio waves, which can reveal much about their composition.

One way to narrow the search is to look for some of the things produced on Earth that would not be here if there had been no life. Methane, Shostak noted, would disappear from a planet's atmosphere in a relatively short time, so if it's there, something must be producing it.

"Much of the methane in this room is produced by what is politely called 'bovine flatulence,' and also by porcine flatulence, so this technique would at least allow you to find pigs in space," he added. But, of course, they would not necessarily be smart pigs.

It is widely believed that water would have to be present on another planet for it to support life, and scientists at the University of Washington have devised a technique that they say would determine if another planet has oceans. Using instruments aboard a NASA spacecraft, the scientists studied light intensities from Earth in seven bands of visible light from near ultraviolet to near infrared.

They found two dominant colors, blue and red, and surmised that the red came from land masses, and the blue from oceans. If they could detect the same colors from a distant planet, they would have evidence that the planet had huge areas of water, the scientists said in an article that is scheduled for publication in Astrophysical Journal.

"Liquid water on the surface of a planet is the gold standard that people are looking for," said Nicolas Cowan, a doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of the paper.

Of course, oceans do not necessarily mean life, especially intelligent life, but such a discovery would help focus the search on more promising planets. It will, however, require a new generation of space telescopes.

And if Shostak is right, we may already know by then.

"If we don't find ET within a generation, there is something very fundamentally wrong with our assumptions," he said in his talk, which was published in Caltech's quarterly, Engineering and Science.

It would make things a lot easier if ET would just give us a shout.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

SETI Chief Astronomer: "Humans Predicted to Make Contact with an Extraterrestrial Civilization Within Two Decades"--A Galaxy Classic

"That's 500 billion planets out there, and bear in mind there are 100 billion other galaxies. To think this [the Earth] is the only place where anything interesting is happening, you have got to be really audacious to take that point of view."

Seth Shostak, SETI senior astronomer

Some leading astronomers are quite confident that mankind will make contact with intelligent alien life within two decades. The search for extraterrestrial life will leap forward next year when NASA launches the Kepler space telescope. The instrument will be constantly scanning the same 100,000 stars over its four-year mission with the exciting objective of discovering Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around suns.

This will allow SETI to home in on where the odds of life are possibly greatest. Currently, SETI’s mission to find life on other planets is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. But now, whenever Kepler identifies planets most likely to sustain life, the team at SETI will be able to focus in on those solar systems using deep-space listening equipment. This will be a huge upgrade from their present work of randomly scanning the outer reaches of space for some kind of sign or signal. Also, upping the ante, is the recent discovery of Earth-like planets outside our solar system, which has led astrophysicists to conclude that Earth-like planets are likely relatively common in our galaxy.

"Everything has caused us to become more optimistic," said American astrophysicist Dr Frank Drake in a recent BBC documentary. "We really believe that in the next 20 years or so, we are going to learn a great deal more about life beyond Earth and very likely we will have detected that life and perhaps even intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy."

However, some astrophysicists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earthlike conditions. In other words, what we’re looking for may not even lie in our version of a “sweet spot”. After all, even here on Earth, one species “sweet spot” is another’s species worst nightmare. In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based occasion.

Alternative biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions. Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines. Several other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen sulfide.

Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.

So what about water? Isn’t at least water essential to life? Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based "habitability zone". One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn's largest moon Titan.

Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these “water replacements” have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.

At any rate, the odds of there being some type of life somewhere out there are good. As for intelligent life, well, that will depend on the definition of intelligence. There are a lot of other intelligent species here on Earth besides humans, that we don’t generally regard as such. In spite of many Star Trek episodes to the contrary, the odds of alien life forms having evolved to talk, look and act exactly like super hot humans are slim to none. If life is out there, it will have evolved according to it’s particular niche in the universe and will likely be quite foreign to us in the way it looks, communicates and thinks. We might not even be able to recognize hypothetical life forms as alive in the sense that we understand life. In fact, it would be more “miraculous” if we could effectively communicate with extraterrestrial life than to find that it exists. From that perspective, even if there are other life forms out there, we’d still be alone in the universe. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn't look for the answers.

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

In a Lonely Cosmos, a Hunt for Worlds Like Ours

Ball Aerospace

PEERING DEEPLY The primary mirror of the Kepler telescope. The craft’s mission, set to begin Friday, is to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Published: March 2, 2009

Someday it might be said that this was the beginning of the end of cosmic loneliness.

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Searching for Habitable Planets

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Troy Cryder/NASA

COSMOS CENSUS TAKER The Kepler spacecraft is coated with solar panels.

Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft’s mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places — that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot, Goldilocks zones around stars where liquid water can exist.

The job, in short, is to find places where life as we know it is possible.

“It’s not E.T., but it’s E.T.’s home,” said William Borucki, an astronomer at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, who is the lead scientist on the project. Kepler, named after the German astronomer who in 1609 published laws of planetary motion that now bear his name, will look for tiny variations in starlight caused by planets passing in front of their stars. Dr. Borucki and his colleagues say that Kepler could find dozens of such planets — if they exist. The point is not to find any particular planet — hold off on the covered-wagon spaceships — but to find out just how rare planets like Earth are in the cosmos.

Jon Morse, director for astrophysics at NASA headquarters, calls Kepler the first planetary census taker.

Kepler’s strategy is, in effect, to search for the shadows of planets. The core of the spacecraft, which carries a 55-inch-diameter telescope, is a 95-million-pixel digital camera. For three and a half years, the telescope will stare at the same patch of sky about 10 degrees, or 20 full moons, wide, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It will read out the brightnesses of 100,000 stars every half-hour, looking for the telltale blips when a planet crosses in front of its star, a phenomenon known as a transit.

To detect something as small as the Earth, the measurements need to be done with a precision available only in space, away from the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and far from Earth so that our home world does not intrude on the view of shadow worlds in that patch of sky. It will take three or more years — until the end of Barack Obama’s current term in office — before astronomers know whether Kepler has found any distant Earths.

If Kepler finds the planets, Dr. Borucki explained, life could be common in the universe. The results will point the way for future missions aimed at getting pictures of what Carl Sagan, the late Cornell astronomer and science popularizer, called “pale blue dots” out in the universe, and the search for life and perhaps intelligence.

But the results will be profound either way. If Kepler doesn’t come through, that means Earth is really rare and we might be the only extant life in the universe and our loneliness is just beginning. “It would mean there might not be ‘Star Trek,’ ” Dr. Borucki said during a recent news conference.

The need, indeed even the possibility, of a planetary census is a recent development in cosmic history. It was only in 1995 that the first planet was detected orbiting another Sun-like star, by Michel Mayor and his colleagues at Geneva Observatory. In the years since then there has been a torrent of discoveries, 340 and counting, that has bewildered astronomers and captured the popular imagination.

“What exists is an incredibly random, chaotic, wild range of planets,” said Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University, also a veteran planet hunter who is not a member of the Kepler team. So far none of them qualify as prime real estate for life, and few of them reside in systems that resemble our own solar system. Many of the first planets discovered were so-called hot Jupiters, gas giants zipping around their stars in a few days in tight, blisteringly hot orbits.

Most of the planets have been found by what is called the wobble method, in which the presence of a planet is deduced by observing the to-and-fro gravitational tug it gives its star as it orbits. The closer a planet is to its star, the bigger the tug and the easier it is to detect.

The smallest exoplanet discovered is about three times as massive as the Earth. It is known as MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b, but astronomers don’t know yet whether its home star is real star or a failed star called a brown dwarf.

Last summer Dr. Mayor announced that his team had found three so-called warm super-Earths — roughly four, seven and nine times the mass of the Earth — orbiting within frying distance of a star known as HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor. Indeed, Dr. Mayor proclaimed that according to their data, about a third of all Sun-like stars host such super-Earths or super-Neptunes in tight orbits.

But all this is prelude. Astronomers agree that these planets are oddballs according to any reasonable theory of planet formation. But as Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington pointed out, they are easy to detect by the wobble method. The fact that they are there suggests that there are many more modest-size planets to be found in larger, more habitable orbits.

The Kepler mission is a tribute to the perseverance of Dr. Borucki, who began proposing it to NASA in the 1980s, before any exoplanets had been discovered, and kept campaigning for it. “He had the true faith,” Dr. Boss said.

Many technical hurdles had be overcome before Kepler became practical. In particular it required very accurate and sensitive digital detectors, said James Fanson, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kepler’s project manager. As seen from outside the solar system, the Earth blocks only about 0.008 percent of the Sun’s light when it passes in front, or “transits.” Kepler has been built to detect changes in brightness as small as 0.002 percent, equivalent to a flea crawling across a car headlight.

By measuring the diminution of a star’s light during an exoplanet transit, astronomers in principle will be able to determine the size of the exoplanet. From the intervals between eclipses, astronomers will be able to determine its orbit.. By combining this with other data, from, say, wobble measurements, they will be able to zero in on important properties like mass and density.

However, natural variations in the star’s output, caused by something like starspots, could interfere with the data and obscure the signals from small planets. That is a problem, Dr. Fanson said, with the Corot satellite, which was launched by the European Space Agency at the end of 2006 and also carries a telescope and camera to look for small changes in starlight. To weed out the noisy stars, Kepler will keep track of 170,000 stars for the first year and then narrow its attention to a mere 100,000.

Corot, which stands for convection, rotation and planetary transits, is smaller than Kepler and is designed to investigate the structure of stars by detecting vibrations and tremors within them that cause them to periodically brighten and fade. Corot, which Dr. Borucki called “a complementary mission,” also looks at a given patch of stars for only a few months and so would miss the successive transits of an Earth-like planet, which, to be habitable, would have to take about a year to orbit a Sun-like star.

Not all 100,000 stars in the field of Kepler’s view would have their planetary systems oriented to provide eclipses from our particular point of view, of course. Dr. Borucki and his colleagues estimate that for an Earth-like star in its habitable zone, the stars would align to produce a blot out in half of 1 percent of cases, yielding a few dozen to a few hundred new Earths out there. For planets that are closer in, however, the odds rise to about 10 percent, so there are ample reasons to expect a bumper crop of new planets.

Dr. Borucki said the astronomers had set the goal of observing at least three such transits, to confirm the period and rule out interference from starspots, and then obtaining backup observations from other telescopes — of wobble measurements, say — before announcing they have found a planet.

“When we make a discovery we want it to be bulletproof,” Dr. Borucki said.

That means that the first planets to be discovered and announced will be the biggest planets with the shortest orbits, the so-called hot Jupiters. Four stars with such planets are in the search area and thus will be an early test of Kepler’s acuity.

“In the first six months, hot Jupiters are going to roll off the Kepler assembly line,” Dr. Fischer said, adding, “These are bizarre planets, we don’t understand how they form.”

The hardest and most exciting part of the mission, detecting bona fide Earths, will also take the longest. Such a planet should take about a year to circle a Sun-like star, producing only one blip a year in its starlight. So it would take more than three years to produce the requisite three blips and subsequent confirmation by ground-based telescopes before the epochal discovery is announced.

Dr. Borucki said, “We’re not going to be able to tell you very quickly.”

But they will eventually tell us.

Dr. Boss, a high-ranking member of the Kepler science team, said: “It really is going to count many Earths. About four years from now we will have a really good estimate of how many Earths there are.”

If the history of exoplanet astronomy is any guide, there are likely to be surprises that geologists had not imagined — water worlds, for example. And then, if all keeps going well, it will be time to confront the next series of questions: whether anywhere else in this galaxy the dust that once spewed from stars has come alive and conscious.

“In my 25 years of working with NASA this is the most exciting mission I’ve worked on, said Dr. Fanson, who will step down as project manager after the launching. “We are going to be able to answer for the first time a question that has been pondered since the time of the ancient Greeks. Are there other worlds like ours? The question has come down to us from 100 generations. We get to answer it. I find that tremendously exciting.”

When a reporter departed from journalistic objectivity to venture a hope that other Earths are out there, Dr. Fanson happily joined in. “I hope the answer is yes,” he said. “I hope the universe is teeming with planets like Earth.”