A.D. After Disclosure

The Ones Where We Didn't Smile

It's been a run of important Disclosure-related posts here -- writing about the WikiLeaks situation and even the NASA news conference about life in Mono Lake. Hopefully, then, you can excuse a light, quick end-of-the-year journey into a "making of" story about the A.D. After Disclosure book project.

In his classic rock ballad, "Against the Wind," Bob Seger talks about "what to leave in, what to leave out."

Any finished project -- a film, a television series, or even a book like A.D. After Disclosure -- tends to look after it's over like it could only have been the way it turned out. To the right, you'll see the inner flap to our back cover. It looks familiar to us now but, oddly, it was the very last thing to change as the book was going into the printers.

Two nights before, there was another picture on that cover. We weren't smiling in that one.

We had done an entire photo shoot with the talented Los Angeles photographer Alex Asher Sears for the cover photo and, out of the shoot, came three different looks, all variations on a theme. The theme was basically working writers telling a serious story. So the decision was made to go with collared shirts and loosened ties and no smiles. After all, we thought, when you're talking about a sixty-plus year cover-up, what's to smile about?

But, at the last minute, a debate caught fire and the voices that won the day were the ones that argued that book authors had a duty to appear friendly to their potential buyers and that smiles were not a sign of weakness. That is why, if you buy the hardcover version, you will see the smiles. But there was another picture, one that did not make the first cut, or the last-minute replacement and, yet, oddly, it's the one that both of us actually liked best.

Although we liked this photo by Alex Asher Sears a lot, Bryce's son thought he looked like a "badass" and his wife Jackie thought he looked angry, so it became the one that the subjects and the photographer all liked but, possibly, too controversial for a book project that asks people to actually pay for it. 

This photo above was inspired by a photo we'd all admired that had been taken of Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese by French photographer Brigitte Lacombe. We liked the stripped down ascetic of the picture and the white background. We asked Alex not to copy it, but to take inspiration from it, and we knocked off a few quick shots in the last minutes, just for fun. 

Alex also shot a couple of other excellent versions. One was what we called the "All the President's Men" photo which we liked but ultimately didn't fit the vertical photo layout we had in mind for the book cover.

Full Disclosure:  We still love those photos that Alex took that day.

We know we're not smiling.

Think of it this way. We're thinking about the Breakaway Group of secret-keepers and how they've ignored your need-to-know for almost seven decades. It made us a little more somber than usual...

If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.

As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.

Reader's Choice: A Baker's Dozen of the Most Read Posts

This site -- A.D. After Disclosure -- has been steadily growing in traffic and, from time-to-time, explosively so. With so many new readers, we decided to let our "early adopters" recommend some of their favorite material based on the number of page views our posts have received. This comes down to a Baker's Dozen for us -- 13 posts, some of heavier weight than others but all of them, by virtue of our readers so far, worth recommending to those who are joining the conversation in progress.

Please feel free to leave your comments here after a post, or to join our Facebook page and take part in the discussion there. Remember, Disclosure is the biggest change imaginable but that all change begins when people learn new things and decide to act on their new-found knowledge. 

• What If UFO Secrecy Ended Tomorrow?  This is far and away are most widely read post -- it's the entire word-for-word "Introduction" to the upcoming A.D. After Disclosure book. It lays out the mission of the book in detail but, beyond that, it even breaks down what readers can expect in each of the ten individual chapters. If you're thinking about buying a copy, this is a good way to see what you're getting ahead of time.

• If This Isn't a National Security Issue, Then What Is?  Written by Richard Dolan to coincide with the news conference held in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club on September 27, 2010. If you want the basic case for UFO interference with the world's nuclear missile sites, this is the primer you need to read.

• Shame on Evan Davis and the BBC  British news "presenter" Evan Davis managed recently to write a column that was so over-the-top in its arrogance and bias toward UFO research, that it merited special attention and analysis. In fact, we put more thought into our deconstruction of his flimsy reporting than he obviously did to his work in the first place.

• 60 Years On -- The McMinnville Photos  The two photos taken by the Trents in 1950 have stood the test of time and hard-nosed scrutiny. We summarize the story behind the story of the photos but also use it to show a faux-Time magazine cover that the case would  have merited if the national media gave UFO reporting anything approximating the coverage it deserves.

• The 1947 Twining Memo Anniversary  It was 63 years ago that a high ranking United States Air Force General, Nathan Twining, said -- in writing -- that UFOs were the real deal and that people who were seeing them were not crazy or liars but were reporting a real phenomenon. You can read about it, and the even read the memo itself here.

• "The Event" Probably Isn't THE Event  There's been a lot of talk about NBC's new series, "The Event," and whether or not it has an extraterrestrial explanation. While the jury is still out on that, it does seem that even if there is a connection, it will not be dealing with Disclosure in the real, practical way that it will eventually happen, something that gets pointed out in this piece about what true Disclosure really means.

• Art Imitating Life: JFK and Disclosure  Colonel Phillip Corso is famous (or infamous) in UFOlogy for his book, The Day After Roswell, where he claimed to have helped implement key reverse engineering with the Roswell wreckage. Open Minds unearthed an interview from before Corso's death where he also said that President Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy also knew, something that formed the backbone of the 1990s NBC drama series, Dark Skies.

• Mad Men with Aliens Coming to DVD  Dark Skies, like Mad Men, was set mostly in the early 1960s, with all the same great costumes, cars and sets. Now, after 13 years of non-stop attempts to get the 20 hours of episodes released so they could be seen outside the hit-and-miss NBC program-and-pre-empt strategy, it has finally happened. This post contains the details on the January 18, 2011 release, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of President John Kennedy, the time period that begins the series pilot.

• Small Steps and Giant Leaps  Where were you on July 20, 1969? Everyone who was alive then has their own set of "Moonwalk Memories" that brings the time to vivid life. Here is one about fathers and sons, being fired for the first time, and the importance of history. We urge you to read it, and leave your own story in the comments section.

• Our Majestic 12 (Documents)  Here are a dozen documents that takes UFOs very seriously, several of which you may be unaware of, many of which were brought to light and clarified through the Freedom of Information Act. From the Twining Memo to the Teheran Encounter to the Rendlesham Forest incident, if you read this post, you will know more about the subject that 99% of the people you are likely to meet in your daily life. Impress them with your command of the facts.

• Testing Reactions to Disclosure  This is the story of Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka, one of the astronauts who died in the 1986 Challenger crash, and how he claimed to have been exposed to a "test" of UFO Disclosure while being stationed at McClellan Air Force Base in the 1970s.

• What Value Do UFO Photos Have?  We talk about them all the time, there are thousands of them out there, and yet -- in our reader poll -- photos were considered the absolute least likely "trigger event" to force Disclosure. 

• Edgar Mitchell Says "Prepare for the Inevitable"  Apollo 14 lunar pilot Edgar Mitchell has generously recommended this book and when you see the kind of interest his comments generated, you can see what kind of high esteem he is held by people in the know.

We want to encourage you to learn more about this important subject of Disclosure so that you can discuss it calmly and intelligently, not just with people who believe as you do, but also (and especially) those who have yet to form an opinion. We want to grow this conversation, and there is a role you can play, if you want to help. Search engines index sites favorably when they see that other sites and blogs are linking to them. So if you see something you think is worth spreading around, please reblog, repost and let other people know. Thank you.

Thank you for visiting the A.D. After Disclosure site. The book is available and shipping now. Orders are being taken through the PayPal button below. It is not necessary to be a PayPal member to order this way, however. And, if you ask your local bookseller, they will order it for you.

 

 

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A Sign of the Times?

Maybe it's a Disclosure Moment of Zen...

Or maybe it's just evidence that if you have to come up with a striking photographic image on a daily basis that eventually -- real or fake -- you are going to settle on the drama of a crop circle. 

Whatever the reason, here is the September 20, 2010 Bing "Picture of the Day."

 

Besides the intrinsic beauty and mystery of this image, Bing provided this content for the four hover "hotspots" found on the picture: 

1. Messages from outer space, alien landing spots, or pranks by mischievous hay lovers? Everyone has a theory. (The click went to YouTube videos from documentaries.)
2. We don't always know where crop circles come from but one thing is certain... They always look out of this world. (The click goes to a crop circle photo gallery.)
3. Where is Britain's crop circle hotspot? (This click went to a Bing map of Wiltshire, UK.)
4. You never know when you're going to wake up and discover one of these in your field. Have you found one? (Click goes to the search results for "crop circle.")

Is there something to disclose about crop circles? We shall see. But in the meantime, we can still look and appreciate the work that someone put into them.

Another One Bites the Dust

The UFO caught in the headlights? The one with the deer-cam in Texas? It's a camera malfunction, according to MUFON. 

 

We're reminded by this case that photos can be troubling kinds of evidence. In our own poll of readers on the A.D. After Disclosure site, we found that a piece of "photographic evidence" ranked dead last among respondents as to the kind of "trigger" event that could lead to Disclosure. 

Returning to the Brock-Piekarski photos from Texas, A.D. friend and UFO journalist Steve Hammons has written a great piece about the MUFON investigation. We re-print it today with his permission, and welcome him as a guest contributor to the site. And if you want to see the entire collection of original photos, they are available here.

Like a UFO Caught in the Headlights?

NOTE: MUFO says it's case closed here, that the compelling photos were simple evidence of a camera malfunction. We've left up this original post to show that first looks can be deceiving.

 

 

It's a new kind of UFO photo -- one that strips away the fallibility of humans who can lie or perform miracles with Photoshop. We've been working on the pages in A.D. After Disclosure that deal with photos as evidence, finding that they are more prevalent than ever before, but, at the same time, far less trusted. Then along comes something like this one out of Texas.

What Value Do UFO Photos Have?

Well, if you go by our readers on this blog and the people who follow us on the Facebook page, not much at all.

We put a poll up a few weeks ago asking readers to pick the most likely "trigger" from a list of possible events that could force some form of Disclosure on the UFO issue. You can still vote on that poll below.

 

So far, however, there is a clear winner and a clear loser. As the balloting stands now, 53% say it's going to take a MASS SIGHTING while less than 1% believe that PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE will do the trick. In between, in order of votes, FOREIGN DECLASSIFICATION, PUBLIC CONFESSION, PHYSICAL EVIDENCE, WHISTLEBLOWER, and INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING.

Bruce Maccabee: Analysis of Chinese Airport UFO

July 7, 2010, at about 8 PM (standard time; about an hour after sunset), the presence of a "UFO" over the major airport in Hangzhou, China (approximate latitude 30.2 deg, longitude 120.2 degrees), caused the airport to be temporarily shut down. This event eventually made international news.

Photos of an object were taken from (at least) four locations in the city. The press reports of the airport shutdown typically included one or more of four photos and thus implied that the photo(s) showed the object that caused the airport shutdown.  As of this writing there is no clear evidence available to civilian researchers that proves the depicted object was the one that caused the airport shutdown.  Instead, the available evidence indicates that the photos are unrelated to the airport shutdown. The question then is, what sort of object was photographed? The analysis of the photos is the subject of this article.

 

Each photo shows a "UFO", that is an extended bright line in the sky with some other features such as a parallel red line, "dot" images above the bright line, and, in photos 1,3 and 4, evident but "filmy" or "translucent" blue-white light bands below the bright streaks. Photo 2 has what appears to be a white beam extending from the left end of the bright elongated image.  

China UFO - Airport Shutdown - What Happened?

Here is a good look at the alleged craft that caused Chinese authorities to shut down the Xiaoshan Airport in Hangzhou, China yesterday (July 9). You won't find any information about this in The New York Times, though, or virtually any other major American newspaper. Nor did it make the weekend network TV news. It did make AOL's "Weird News." We want to remain properly skeptical about any new photo but there are good reasons to look into this one. Is a hot-shot American journalist on his/her way to China to investigate what happened at Xiaoshan? We doubt it.

This photo clearly is of a structural aerial object, not Venus or a weather balloon or even a flock of birds. It may be American or Chinese technology, the reports indicated that even the Chinese thought it had a military explanation, or it might be something that the Others fly. Right now, it's a mystery. But this photo, whatever it is, was on the Chinese News Service and multiple people saw something operating in the sky that night. If you have any news about the photo's legitimacy, please post it here, or join the discussion on the A.D. After Disclosure Facebook page.

 

UPDATE (7/12/10):  Some people are now arguing that this photo is a helicopter, unrelated to the true anomaly sighted that night. Here is the Above Top Secret thread on that discussion.

UPDATE (7/14/10):  ABC International offers the first mainstream news coverage of the event.

UPDATE (7/16/10): Christian Science Monitor gets in the act with its dismissive "The summer heat must really be getting to people." And Fox Orlando has the video of what looks like a rocket with a chemtrail but is being called the UFO (which looks nothing like the picture above).

UPDATE (7/19/10): Bruce Maccabee has done a photographic analysis of the photos. He does not subscribe to the UFO theory for this incident but thinks they actually could be helicopters.

  

Sixty Years On: The McMinnville UFO Photos

60 years ago, on May 11, something extraordinary happened just ten miles outside the otherwise ordinary town of McMinnville, Oregon. A couple of down-to-Earth farmers — Paul and Evelyn Trent — took two photos of something out-of-this-world. Those images turned out to be probably the most famous and hotly debated UFO photos ever taken, and certainly the ones that many experts have concluded have the highest likelihood of being authentic. 

The nearness of the object and the fact that it was the first to be captured so clearly on film makes the case stand out even now. At the time, the pictures surpassed in quality and credibility anything taken in the first three years of the country's growing awareness of "flying saucers" (1947-1950).

This case resonates with me because 1950 was the year my family moved to Oregon. When the photos were taken by the Trents, the Zabels lived 51 miles away on the Oregon coast in a little town called Nelscott, now part of Lincoln City. Although I hadn't been born yet, I do remember later as a kid seeing the photos for the first time and thinking how incredible it was that they'd been taken so close to our part of the world.

To commemorate this 60th anniversary, we have created the magazine cover the case deserves but will never get.

What you're looking at to the right is not a real Time magazine, of course, because "real" journalists don't cover UFOs. They don't believe in them. 

Try clicking on the image to blow it up to full-size. Then you can really appreciate what a radical act it would be for a major news magazine to put something like this on their cover. 

And yet that should not be the case. Ask yourself: Why is it that a phenomenon that is this enduring — with thousands of excellent cases, radar confirmations, Air Force chases, pilot encounters, police reports, photographs, physical traces, etc. — can't be treated as something worthy of our attention and investigation? Read Richard Dolan's other post on this site about the Twelve Documents That Take UFOs Seriously. How many establishment journalists are even aware of them?

The fact that the mainstream media has completely shirked its responsibilities over the years on this issue is appalling. It is, quite simply, the Greatest Story Never Told.

Before this turns into a rant on media responsibility, something we will address in detail in our upcoming book, let's give this moment over to the famous Trent photos. Remember that by clicking on the photos that follow you can see them in a larger size than they first appear on this site.