It all depends on time and whether there is interest but AOP Journal ended with volume 2 no. 5 and if you have read an issue you will know that it mainly deals with CE3K/AE reports but also other "anomalous" encounters.
I have the material so vol. 3 number 1 will be a trial issue to see if there is interest.
Becky Ferreira The New York Times
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/news/scientists-seeking-life-mars-heard-113503082.html
DEARBORN, Mich. — At sunset on a late summer weekend in 1924, crowds flocked to curbside telescopes to behold the advanced alien civilization they believed to be present on the surface of Mars.
“See the wonders of Mars!” an uptown sidewalk astronomer shouted in New York City on Saturday, Aug. 23. “Now is your chance to view the snowcaps and the great canals that are causing so much talk among the scientists. You’ll never have such a chance again in your lifetime.”
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That weekend, Earth and Mars were separated by just 34 million miles, closer than at any other point in a century. Although this orbital alignment, called an opposition, occurs every 26 months, this one was particularly captivating to audiences across continents and inspired some of the first large-scale efforts to detect alien life.
“In scores of observatories, watchers and photographers are centering their attention on that enigmatic red disk,” journalist Silas Bent wrote on Aug. 17, 1924. He added that it might be the moment to “solve the disputed question of whether supermen rove his crust, and whether those lines, which many observers say they have seen, really are irrigation canals.”
Scientists plotted for years to make the most of the Martian “close-up.” To aid the experiments, the U.S. Navy cleared the airwaves, imposing a nationwide period of radio silence for five minutes at the top of each hour from Aug. 21 to 24 so that messages from Martians could be heard. A military cryptographer was on hand to “translate any peculiar messages that might come by radio from Mars.”
Then, lo and behold, an astonishing radio signal arrived with the opposition.
A series of dots and dashes, captured by an airborne antenna, produced a photographic record of “a crudely drawn face,” according to news reports. The tantalizing results and subsequent media frenzy inflamed the public’s imagination. It seemed as if Mars was speaking, but what was it trying to say?
“The film shows a repetition, at intervals of about a half-hour, of what appears to be a man’s face,” one of the experiment’s leaders said days later.
“It’s a freak which we can’t explain,” he added.
—
A century has elapsed since the Mars mania of 1924, but the source of that strange signal remains a mystery. The original paper record is presumed lost, though digital copies have survived, ensuring that the crudely drawn face continues to stare out at us across time.
But the story of the 1924 Mars opposition is as much about the audacity of attempting a detection of extraterrestrial life as it was about the murky outcomes. Some things have changed, such as our technologies for studying the cosmos. But what endures is that sneaky feeling that we are not alone in the universe.
“We need some cosmic company out there, whether it’s in the form of gods or extraterrestrials,” said Steven Dick, an astronomer and former NASA chief historian who has written about humanity’s interest in aliens. “People go out and look at the night sky, and there’s all these thousands of stars, and they think, ‘Surely we can’t be the only ones.’”
“That’s a nice thought, but it’s not science,” he added.
The science, so far, includes the discovery that the basic building blocks of life are widely distributed in our galaxy. Researchers have also spotted thousands of planets orbiting other stars, including worlds roughly the size of Earth. And they know Mars was once habitable, a place with gushing rivers, freshwater lakes and substantive skies. They have even discovered possible biosignatures there, both from the past and in the present, although there is still no slam-dunk evidence of aliens there, or anywhere.
Humanity has learned so much about our world, and others beyond it, in a century. But that progress flowed in part from the attitudes that defined the 1924 Mars opposition as an important milestone in the history of our search for aliens — a moment when the physical proximity of two worlds exposed a deeper yearning for cosmic connection, and the will to actively seek that contact through scientific innovation, that is still very much with us today.
—
In the expansive collections of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation near Detroit, there is a boxy artifact that was designed for the trenches and battlefields of World War I. In August 1924, it wound up serving as an interplanetary communications prototype.
Kristen Gallerneaux, a sonic historian and a curator of communication and information technology at the Henry Ford, is a caretaker of many technological relics. But they have a special fondness for the device, a Navy-type model SE 950 radio, and its historic role as a would-be alien-detector.
“It is exactly my kind of object,” Gallerneaux said. “It feels like a buried history to me.”
Manufactured on March 26, 1918, by the National Electrical Supply Co., the hardy portable radio was designed to support troops in combat, but this unit was never battle tested. It ended up, instead, in the Washington laboratory of Charles Francis Jenkins, an inventor who played a key role in the development of television.
It might have been used in many postwar experiments, but its golden hour arrived before the 1924 Mars opposition when astronomer David Peck Todd enlisted Jenkins to solve a problem that still animates the community involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence: If messages from intelligent aliens are wafting through space, how might we capture them?
The astronomer and the inventor cobbled together an answer. During the opposition, a dirigible was launched from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington to an altitude of just under 2 miles. It carried an antenna, pointed at Mars, that relayed signals back from its aerial position to the SE 950 radio in Jenkins’ lab.
The data was then fed into the inventor’s “Radio Camera,” which converted radio signals into optical flashes that left imprints on a 38-foot-long roll of photographic paper. It was this process that produced the repeating pattern that many viewers interpreted as a face.
People were “looking for the pattern of themselves in an output that was never designed to be an understandable visual representation,” Gallerneaux said. “It’s static. Yet people are still seeing things in it and experiencing it as a kind of intelligent static.”
This anthropomorphization of radio feedback may seem like a case of imagination run wild. But it makes more sense in light of claims during that historical period by many reputable experts who believed they had already uncovered evidence of intelligent beings on Mars.
“I have encountered, during my experiments with wireless telegraphy, the most amazing phenomena,” Guglielmo Marconi, a wireless radio pioneer, said in 1920, referring to signals he speculated had been “sent by the inhabitants of other planets to the inhabitants of Earth.”
—
These claims helped to stoke imaginary Martians across the booming genre of science fiction. At the same time, radio emerged as a conduit for conversation with these beings.
“Our ideas about aliens ultimately stem from the way we think about our own world,” said Rebecca Charbonneau, a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics. If radios can communicate across the planet, she added, “it’s not that big of a leap to think we can use the same technology on other planets.”
People in this era were reeling from the fallout of devastating conflicts, disruptive technologies and vanishing wilderness. That provided fertile ground for visions of a civilization on the planet next door, older and wiser than our own, that might offer consolation and guidance, if only we could strike up a conversation with them.
“It is reasonable to suppose that the Martian knows much more about us than we know about him or his world, and it is interesting to speculate what he thinks of us, of our feverish struggle for a living, our vanities, our suicidal World War, our little gardens and our big deserts,” Silas Bent wrote in advance of the 1924 Mars opposition.
As some people longed for interplanetary validation, others worried about the wisdom of communicating with alien neighbors. A 1919 editorial titled “Let the Stars Alone” suggested that humans could be “unprepared” for “superior intelligences.”
Imagine if humans were to “cheerfully wireless to Mars, ‘two plus two is four,’ and Mars answers, ‘no, you’re wrong,’” the editorial posited. “What are you going to do about it?”
The opposition was an opportunity to road-test these competing ideas. From a hilltop in England, a group recorded “strange noises” that “could not be identified as coming from any earthly station.” In Vancouver, British Columbia, a signal “led radio experts here seriously to consider the theory that Mars is trying to ‘tune in.’”
Not all who peered through telescopes were impressed. “Either I’m drunk or Mars is drunk,” one sidewalk observer quipped, referring to the jostling motion of the planet through the eyepiece. “If that’s all you can show, you’re welcome to Mars as far as I’m concerned,” said another.
Ultimately, the opposition produced no lasting evidence of Martian life, a result that vindicated scientific skeptics who had spent years pointing to the red planet’s absence of water or breathable air. Such truth seekers were often mocked.
“Some great talkers conclude that Mars must be uninhabitable,” French astronomer Camille Flammarion, a firm believer in intelligent Martians, wrote in March 1924. “This is not the reasoning of philosophers, but of fish,” he continued, comparing skeptics to fish who believe life out of water is impossible.
Jenkins and Todd also embodied this duality between skeptic and believer. Todd was convinced the Jenkins Radio Camera was capable of establishing contact with alien life, and he interpreted the signals as potentially alien in origin.
“The Jenkins machine is perhaps the hypothetical Martians’ best chance of making themselves known to Earth,” Todd said in The Washington Post.
Jenkins, in contrast, was blindsided by the signal from his Radio Camera, and worried that misinterpretations of its meaning would tarnish his scientific reputation. His anxieties offer an early premonition of the shifting fault lines that the search for aliens continues to drive among academics, the media, the government and the general public, which are far more pronounced 100 years later.
“I don’t think the results have anything to do with Mars,” Jenkins said in an article published on Aug. 28, 1924. He speculated that the sounds had a banal terrestrial origin, like radio interference. Subsequent guesses have included trolley cars or natural radio emissions from Jupiter.
—
Regardless of the source, the radio signals and Mars fever of August 1924 helped set the stage for more practical and scientific efforts to search for aliens.
The current hunt for extraterrestrial life stretches far beyond Mars, but the popular expectation that we will, one day, find it has proved remarkably static and durable. Indeed, many people believe we have already found aliens, or that they have found us. And even as scientists search for aliens in real physical spaces — an ancient Martian lake bed, the geysers of an ice moon and the starlit skies of exoplanets — humanity continues to dream up a mind-bending variety of fictional aliens to populate our mental landscapes.
When Jenkins and Todd conducted their experiment, radio astronomy hadn’t been born; it would be nearly a decade before Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky stumbled upon the vast radio universe.
Today, a host of sophisticated technologies are revealing insights about the universe that nobody could have imagined 100 years ago. Rovers trundle across Mars, telescopes resolve chemicals in the clouds of faraway exoplanets and observatories scan space for messages across millions of radio frequencies.
But with regard to alien life, all of this ingenuity and investment has delivered the same basic result as that inscrutable readout of dots and dashes, mediated by a wartime radio born too late for combat, captured in 1924.
As an object, Jenkins’ radio “can exist in multiple timelines in its own way,” Gallerneaux said. “It existed and it did a certain thing back then, but we can look back on it now and see patterns of behavior.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
B&W
350 pp
Fully illustrated containing photographs and maps
£20.00
Beyond UFO Contact i the fourth book in the groundbreaking series looking at reports of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien-Entity reports from around the world and reassessing these. In addition there is a look at the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligences (SETI) and its relevance to the UFO phenomenon.
contents list:
Introduction: The Path of Counter-Actuality
1. Dionisio Llanca: Truck Driver, UFO Abductee and Human Guinea Pig
2. Aliens -What Can We Expect?
3. The Moreland Incident
4. It Is All Fake: Ufology Needs To Be Reassessed
5. Warminster UFOs and Entity Reports
6. Have Things Changed Since 1977?
7. The Beausoleil Cas -Even Aliens Like Theatre
8. The Pwca
9. Contact...with the Vegetable Alien
10. The Casitas Dam UFO Photograph and Entity
11. The Crystal Lake Encounter
12. The Humanoids at South Riverand the Luczkowich Encounter
13. Harrison Bailey
14. Sonny DesVerger
15. The UFO "Borderline"-The Imjarvi Skiers
16. Some Interesting Reports to Note
17. Dead Aliens in Photographs
18. Ufology, Government Cover Ups and Disclosure
19. The Reports That You Might Not Want To Look Into
20. Conil de la Frontera -a Credible Report?
21. Eighteenth Century Aliens?
22. Clearview Ranch
23. The Pat McGuire Case
24. Piero Fortunato Franzetta
25. The Silbury Hill Encounter
26. The Bridge Abduction
27. The Bagshot Heath UFO Incident
28. Lurkers and Alien Disinterest
29. What If YOU See Aliens Land?
30. So What Would YOU Do If You Encountered A Landed UFO?
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Jorge Eduardo Catoja
We are indebted to the Editorial Committee of our French companion-journal Lumières Dans La Nuit, from No. 198 of which (October 1980) we have translated the curious item. Though many will find the report hard to swallow we think it worth recording, because it seems to smack very strongly - as so many "UFO stories" do - of the classical poltergeist phenomena familiar to us from the annals of psychical research.
It is admittedly difficult to recall any good "poltergeist case" in which the witnesses actually claimed to have Seen the causative agency. Consequently, most parapsychological investigators nowadays tend to veer away from the idea that any external intelligent factor (i.e. other than the human subject or subjects present in the case) can be involved with poltergeists, and they prefer to seek other less bizarre explanations. Note, however, that in the present case the two causative entities allegedly vanished temporarily from sight a feature that sounds extremely "poltergeistic."
The author, Argentinian ufologist Jorge Eduardo Catoja, states that he visited the scene of the phenomena and personally interrogated the witnesses.
EDITOR
At approximately 4.40 p.m. on Sunday, September 10, 1978, in Las Salinas, a small town near San Miguel de Tucuman in northern Argentina, Miguel Angel Carbajal, aged 18, and his friend Miguel Ledesma, aged 23, were sitting in the home of the first-named, watching television, when the picture on the screen began to shrink, so they switched off the television set.
They then put a record on the record-player and switched on, but found the disc turning very slowly as though at 16 r.p.m. From this they perceived that there was clearly a marked drop in the mains electricity current. 1
Finally, they tried to use a portable transistor radio to listen to a local game of football, but were obliged to abandon this too, owing to interference.
The parents of Miguel Carbajal, absent from the house at the time, having gone to spend the afternoon with relatives in San Miguel de Tucuman, are the owners of a shop, and the shop adjoins the house. Both the young men are employed in the shop. Miguel Carbajal has had three years of primary school education, and one year of secondary. The extent of his daily reading does not go beyond the local newspaper, La Gaceta, and he is not a UFO buff or an addict of Science-Fiction. As for his companion, Miguel Ledesma, the latter is quite illiterate. There was nobody else in the house apart from one disabled member of the family.
Just as the two young men were abandoning their attempt to get the portable radio to work, they heard noises coming from the adjoining shop. Thinking that thieves had broken info the premises, the boys first got the disabled relative out of the house, and then they opened the connecting door which led directly into the shop, where the first things to come to view were a smashed bottle of wine and some broken jars of mayonnaise strewn about on the floor.
Proceeding a little further into the shop, they came upon a pair of scales thrown down onto the floor, with the glass smashed, and they noted that the electronic till had been shifted some distance from its normal position.
At this point they became aware of the presence in the shop, standing at a distance of about six metres from them, of two beings resembling humans in their general appearance.
In the words of Miguel Carbajal, as reproduced in the article published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Razon (Sept. 12, 1978): "I was thoroughly scared... for I suddenly saw them. I was unable to speak... I thought they must be Martians, because I had read in La Gaceta that there had been UFO sightings in the district."
The two entities were about one metre in height, and 'dressed in bright blue one-piece suits like frogmen wear'. On their heads they had dark blue helmets. Their faces were brown, and the complexion freckled. The eyes of the entities were straight and level. Their noses, though the two witnesses could not describe these quite precisely, seemed to be 'flattish'. Their hands, arms, and legs all seemed 'normal' by human standards. As regards their sex, the witnesses were unable to judge for sure.
The clothing of the entities (see sketch) was, as already described, a one-piece garment, close-fitting, and a helmet. On their feet they had what seemed to be high-boots, bright blue in colour. On their arms they had shiny black gauntlets up to above the elbow.
One of the entities was holding a weapon of some sort, which he was pointing at them threateningly, and which Carbajal said was like a hair-drier.
"Do, not shout, or we will take you to the saucer!"
This warning, heard by both the witnesses, seemed to come from the entities, though they saw no movement of the lips of either of the two beings, so that the message was probably given telepathically.
Carbajal's account goes on to say that at this point one of the beings raised a hand and put the index finger to his nose, whereupon they both promptly vanished from sight (The outer doors of the shop were locked).
Miguel Carbajal dashed over to the till to get out the keys to the doors of the shop, and as he did so the entities reappeared, in precisely the same position as before. Ledesma grabbed a knife and an iron bar and he and Carbajal, the latter with the store keys in his hand, made for the door.
Again the entities vanished, Ledesma told the reporters: "I stepped over lightly to the store-room and there they were again, in there. And they threw a crate of cigarettes at me. It missed, passing in front of me. At once I made a dash for the exit, which Carbajal in the meantime had managed to open."
The two men were asked by reporters whether they had heard any sort of sound when the entities were materializing and dematerializing. "Yes", said Carbajal. "There was a sort of sound like TIN ...TIN ...TIN .." but only when they were vanishing."
Once out of the shop, they secured the door with padlock and chain and dashed off into Tucuman in the firm's van to find Manuel Carbajal Senior and tell him that thieves had broken into the shop. Then all three returned to the shop and reported the affair to the local police station, at El Timbo. Police Commissioner Miranda at once proceeded with them to the shop, but when they got there, the entities were not to be seen. They checked the contents of the till, and found that no money seemed to be missing. The witnesses estimated that the episode had lasted about 5-10 minutes.
Argentine investigator Jorge Eduardo Catoja, who prepared this report after making a personal inspection of the scene and after interviewing the two witnesses, made a number of interesting discoveries when questioning people living in the neighbourhood.
For example, he found that, two weeks previously, two strange lights had been seen over a near-by salt mine (the only local industry.) And the occupants of a house near there told him that they had recently been the victims of a mysterious plague of stone-throwing.' Other people whom the investigator questioned re-called that three years ago there had been UFO landings at a place known as Ramadeda de Abajo, lying to the east of Las Salinas.
1. The 'shrinkage' of the TV picture would also have been a typical result of such a drop in the current - G.C.
2. And here we have the most characteristic and typical of all the features found in cases of pollergeistic infestations - namely "stones throwing!" - G.C.
The Humanoids was an October-November 1966 special issue published by Flying Saucer Review. It was later released in book form. Why do I me...
