'Invisible UFOs' fill the skies

By Natalie Wolchover

"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.

You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?

"Some people claim to see actual battles between UFOs up in the sky, using night-vision equipment," the ufologist Robert Sheaffer told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those devices magnify faint objects so much that the sky seems to be filled with invisible UFOs. In reality, of course, they are seeing owls, bats, moths, airplanes, satellites, etc." Night-vision optics trade low resolution for high sensitivity, he explained, so that points of light (such as distant satellites) spill out into circles that make the objects appear huge.

However, some of the invisible UFOs out there really are spies of a sort — or whatever else you choose to call military drones.

Consider, for example, an invisible triangle UFO recently caught on camera by the Laredo Paranormal Research Society, a Texas group. In their footage, captured using an infrared-sensitive third-generation night-vision camera and posted to YouTube July 13, an object composed of three evenly spaced glowing orbs streaked southward across the field of view and disappeared behind the roof of a house.

According to LPRS founder Ismael Cuellar, the "infrared-cloaked" object could not be seen with the naked eye, and cruised silently. "[We] have ruled out birds, bugs, airplanes, helicopters, and even flying drones by comparing them side by side as a point of reference," Cuellar told Life's Little Mysteries. This seems to leave just one explanation: It's a cloaked alien spaceship.

Not so, according to Ben McGee, a geoscientist, aerospace consultant, UFO skeptic and lead field researcher on the National Geographic series "Chasing UFOs." In McGee's opinion, all the signs point to this object being a border patrol drone with infrared anti-collision or identification lights. Here's why he thinks so.

"Nearly one-third of traffic through the nearby Laredo International Airport has historically been military in nature. Laredo is very near to the Mexican border. The military is increasingly using drones to assist with border security, which are small, quiet, and dim (to the naked eye) aircraft," McGee wrote in an email, adding that most drones are also triangular.

This alleged drone oversaturated the camera's infrared sensor. Why? "Particularly with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), anticollision systems are of the utmost importance," he wrote. "One custom UAV lighting manufacturer recently announced custom infrared navigation lights for a major UAV defense contractor. Using these lights in 'constant-on' infrared mode would make the tail, belly, and wingtips extraordinarily bright in infrared, washing out the shape of the aircraft in-between."

And that description pretty closely matches the case.

"In short," McGee said, "high-intensity/close-range infrared lights interacting with a sensitive infrared camera is the problem — turning an aircraft into a triangular blob — rather than the infrared camera being the solution to revealing invisible triangles or pyramids zooming about our airspace."

WATCH VIDEO - Triangle UFO Laredo, Texas

Arpaio: Obama birth record 'definitely fraudulent'

By Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — Investigators for an Arizona sheriff's volunteer posse have declared that President Barack Obama's birth certificate is definitely fraudulent.

Members of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's posse said in March that there was probable cause that Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April 2011 was a computer-generated forgery.

Now, Arpaio says investigators are positive it's fraudulent.

Mike Zullo, the posse's chief investigator, said numeric codes on certain parts of the birth certificate indicate that those parts weren't filled out, yet those sections asking for the race of Obama's father and his field of work or study were completed.

Zullo said investigators previously didn't know the meaning of codes but that the codes were explained by a 95-year-old former state worker who signed the president's birth certificate. Zullo said a news reporter who has helped out in the probe let investigators listen in on an interview he concluded of the former state worker.

The Obama campaign declined to comment on Arpaio's allegations.

The Arizona Democratic Party says in a statement that Arpaio's investigation is intended to draw attention away from problems within his own agency, such as hundreds of sex-crimes cases that the sheriff's office failed to adequately investigate over a three-year period.

So-called "birthers" maintain Obama is ineligible to be president because, they contend, he was born in Kenya.

Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama's citizenship.

Obama released a copy of his long-form birth certificate in an attempt to quell citizenship questions.
Courts have rebuffed lawsuits over the issue.

IRGC not scared of USA’s ‘scrap metal’ aircraft carriers: Iranian general

By Tehran Times

MASHHAD - The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has no fear of the giant U.S. aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and views them as just “scrap metal”, a top IRGC commander said on Tuesday.

“The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has never had a fear of large U.S. aircraft carriers, the thunder of U.S. missiles, and the extra-regional enemies, and in their view, these … are nothing more than scrap metal,” the deputy commander of the IRGC, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, told a seminar of IRGC Naval Force commanders in Mashhad.

If Damascus falls, Israel and its gas fields feared threatened

DEBKAfile  Exclusive Report

Syrian military forces were gathered in Tuesday, July 17, to save Damascus.

Tanks and armored vehicles were positioned in strength in the capital’s center and around government buildings. However, the noise and fury of battle in the Syrian capital Tuesday, July 17, were produced, debkafile’s military sources report, by six battalions of Bashar Assad’s loyal Allawite militia in clashes with the rebels who captured the two southern suburbs of Meidan and Tadmon Monday. They are trying to pound the enemy into extinction before its forces reach central Damascus.

The two beleaguered districts are home to a quarter of the capital’s 1.8 million inhabitants.

The Syrian general staff has withdrawn its command headquarters to a well-fortified complex on Shuhada Street in the capital’s center.

If Damascus falls and Assad is cornered, the entire region stands in peril of wider repercussions, because neither he nor Tehran will take defeat lying down.

debkafile’s military sources report their campaign will be paced and scaled according to the momentum of the Syrian rebels’ advance on Bashar Assad’s door-step, which could be drawn out and bloody.

On the Iranian-Hizballah list are Middle East oil installations as well as Israeli, US, Turkish, Saudi and Jordanian strategic targets.

Saturday, the Cypriot police captured a Hizballah terrorist before he could blow up an Israeli El Al flight and tourist buses in Limassol.

Tehran is feared to be focusing on the Mediterranean island as part of a plot to set Israel’s Mediterranean gas field Tamar on fire. The field is 80 kilometers west of Haifa
It would be a spectacular curtain-raiser for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and for strikes against Gulf oil installations.

Navy Commander, Maj. Gen. Ram Rothberg called last week for an extra five warships and submarines to safeguard Israel’s burgeoning gas fields at the cost of a billion dollars.

The Syrian ruler has stoked up the menace by moving out of storage missiles and shells armed with mustard gas, sarin nerve gas and cyanide stockpiled for years.

They are on operational readiness at Homs, Latakia and Aleppo and, according to Nawaf Fares,
Syrian ex-ambassador to Iraq who defected to the opposition, may already have been used against rebel concentrations.

The longer the battle for Damascus goes on, the greater the danger that the Syrian ruler will release his poison-tipped missiles against Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

Bernanke gloomy on economic outlook

By Robin Harding in Washington

Ben Bernanke offered a gloomy outlook for the US economy but the Federal Reserve chairman offered no hint of further monetary easing in testimony to Congress.

“We are looking very carefully at the economy, trying to judge whether or not the loss of momentum we’ve seen recently is enduring, and whether or not the economy is likely to continue to make progress,” he said, warning that progress in reducing a 8.2 per cent unemployment rate “seems likely to be frustratingly slow”.

The testimony initially disappointed markets – which are on tenterhooks for a signal of further monetary easing from the Fed – with stocks falling and the dollar rising before turning around later in the day.

A run of weak reports on the economy, with net job creation falling to 80,000 in June, has led to speculation that the Fed could ease policy further as soon as its August meeting.

Mr Bernanke said that recent data points to annualised growth of less than 2 per cent in the second quarter of 2012. “Households remain concerned about their employment and income prospects and their overall level of confidence remains relatively low,” he said.

The Fed chairman set out a list of options for further easing but refused to say which he might prefer. “The logical range includes different types of purchase programs. That could include Treasuries or include Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. Those are the two things we’re allowed to buy,” he said.

Asset purchases – also known as quantitative easing – are a way of driving down long-term interest rates to boost the economy when short-term rates are already at zero.

The Fed’s other options include lending via the Fed’s discount window, communications about future policy, or cutting the interest that the Fed pays banks on excess reserves, Mr Bernanke said. “We haven’t really come to a specific choice at this point, but we are looking for ways to address the weakness in the economy should more action be needed to promote a sustained recovery in the labour market.”

New data on Tuesday showed little sign of inflationary pressure – the overall consumer price index was up by 1.7 per cent on a year ago – and a rebound in industrial production, which was up 0.4 per cent in June after falling in May.

Mr Bernanke chided Congress for its failure to act on fiscal policy, citing it as one of two main risks to the economy alongside the eurozone crisis, and warning against a repeat of the market volatility and loss of economic confidence caused by last summer’s debacle over raising the debt ceiling.

The Fed chairman has ramped up his rhetoric on fiscal policy with each successive visit to Capitol Hill, but there is little sign that Congress is willing to compromise before the November election, even in order to boost growth.

“The most effective way that the Congress could help to support the economy right now would be to work to address the nation’s fiscal challenges in a way that takes into account both the need for long-run sustainability and the fragility of the recovery,” said Mr Bernanke. “Doing so earlier rather than later would help to reduce uncertainty and boost household and business confidence.”