January 16, 2018
Boston Globe
Martin Finucane

David Fravor is a recognizable type. Affable, neatly dressed, with a men’s regular haircut and semi-rimless glasses, he’s a retired military man who works as a consultant in the Boston area. He could be standing in front of you in a Starbucks line and you wouldn’t notice him at all.

But the story he has to tell is literally out of this world.

Thirteen years ago, the Windham, N.H., resident was a veteran US Navy pilot at the controls of an F/A-18-F fighter jet flying off San Diego when he sighted an unidentified flying object and tried to intercept it.

“I want to join on it. I want to see how close I can get to it,” Fravor, 53, said, describing his thinking as he began the pursuit.

Then the object, which looked like a 4o-foot-long Tic Tac candy, “goes whoosh, and it’s gone.” he said. It accelerated rapidly and disappeared like no aircraft he had ever seen in his career.

Fravor has been in the news recently after the New York Times broke the story that the Pentagon had a secret program that investigated reports of UFOs. The Defense Department says it closed down the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2012 after five years, but the program’s backers say it remains in existence, investigating UFO reports from service members while carrying out other duties………

See full article HERE.

See PRG Media Archive HERE.

December 16, 2017
New York Times
Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal

The following recounts an incident in 2004 that advocates of research into U.F.O.s have said is the kind of event worthy of more investigation, and that was studied by a Pentagon program that investigated U.F.O.s. Experts caution that earthly explanations often exist for such incidents, and that not knowing the explanation does not mean that the event has interstellar origins.

Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission 100 miles out into the Pacific when the radio in each of their F/A-18F Super Hornets crackled: An operations officer aboard the U.S.S. Princeton, a Navy cruiser, wanted to know if they were carrying weapons.

“Two CATM-9s,” Commander Fravor replied, referring to dummy missiles that could not be fired. He had not been expecting any hostile exchanges off the coast of San Diego that November afternoon in 2004……

See full article HERE.

See PRG Media Archive HERE.

December 16, 2017
New York Times
Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, Leslie Kean

WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties……

Full article HERE.

See PRG Media Archive HERE.

Variety
11/27/17
Stewart Clarke

A series of real-life reported UFO sightings in Britain near an air base used by the U.S. Air Force will be the basis of a new drama series, “Rendlesham.”

London-based producer Eleventh Hour Film will make the series and Sony’s international TV production arm has come on board. The studio is backing the development of the project and will handle international distribution. There is not yet a broadcaster or platform attached.

Joe Ahearne (“Doctor Who”) will helm the show, which will recount the claimed UFO landings near the air base and Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England, in the 1980s.

A complex family drama will form the backdrop to the series, which will also fast-forward from the height of the Cold War to 2020, the 40th anniversary of the incidents, which are fabled among UFO enthusiasts and have been dubbed “Britain’s Roswell.”

Ahearne said: “When Eleventh Hour Films drew my attention to this extraordinary piece of British and American history it pressed all my buttons, and I think it will do the same for a wide audience.”

Eve Gutierrez and Jill Green will executive produce for “Collision” and “Safe House” producer Eleventh Hour Films.

“Joe is a master storyteller with a long-standing fascination for science fiction,” Gutierrez said. “Now working with Sony Pictures Television we are looking forward to bringing this timely, other-worldly story to the global market.”

See article here.

11/27/17
Newsweek Special Edition
Kastalia Medrano

A Turkish university is including a new course called “Ufology and Exopolitics” in The Dogan News Agency reported that the purpose of the class is to prepare students for the possibility of extraterrestrial contact.

“We believe representatives from the world and extraterrestrial civilizations will soon be making official contact with each other. We think they will be in an open and mass contact,” the class’s tutor, Erhan Kolbaşi, told the Dogan agency. “[It will be the] biggest change seen in the history of the world.”

The course will focus not just on practical preparations and galactic diplomacy but also on the purported history of cover-ups related to alien contact. Kolbaşi, who told Dogan he expects contact within 15 years, also maintains that aliens have already visited Earth and that technologies like fiber-optic cable, microchips and night-vision instruments were developed from intelligence gathered at crash sites. He claimed that public knowledge of this kind of alien activity is being suppressed by a group known as MJ-12………

See full article here.

Newsweek Special Edition
11/21/17

The phenomena of UFO abductions is familiar to everyone—even if the experience of one has only ever been secondhand at best. But the ubiquitous perception may be largely inaccurate, stemming from the likes of hackneyed depictions in sci-fi films and clickbait fabrications on the internet. That’s unacceptable to the small but dedicated group of individuals who have pledged their lives to solving this mystery. “I continue my research no matter what, and nothing’s going to stop me, nor will it stop others in the field,” says Denise Stoner, one of the world’s leading authorities on UFO abduction reports and a member of the Mutual UFO Network’s (MUFON) Experiencer Research Team. Experts in the field know that the truth about abductions, whatever it may be, lies within the reports from thousands of people in dozens of countries………….

See the full article here.

11/20/17
Newsweek Special Edition

In December 1969, the United States government called for the end of Project Blue Book, its 22-year investigation into unidentified airborne phenomena. Overnight, the authorities’ official position changed from one of indulgent public curiosity to absolute public disinterest. “The Air Force was the head agency during Project Blue Book, where they went out into the field and talked to witnesses, essentially trying to figure out what was going on,” explains John Greenewald, founder of The Black Vault, an Internet-based resource that has compiled more than 1.4 million declassified government documents. “After 1969, it was the United States Air Force that said, ‘no government agency including our own has any interest in this phenomenon.’” But thanks to the dogged effort of Greenewald and other UFO researchers wielding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, anyone with an Internet connection and an open mind can deduce the government isn’t quite as apathetic toward UFOs as it claims……..

See full article here.