Monthly Archives: February 2004

Crop Circles

“Earth could be hit in an hour.” — INITIATING A CONVERSATION

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“If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”
 
If humanity had its wits about it, the asteroid inquiry, below, is an example of what it would do.  There is so much danger o­n this living planet that we are a primitive species until we turn our collective attention to protecting ourselves from things beyond our control.   
 
A shift of mind-set is what it will take to get us to seriously change our ways, and, most logically, this would come from an event that made the possibility of species annihilation real to everyone who was left.  All good minds should be turned to how to bring about this shift in another way.  My offering is crop circles — evidence that we're not alone would bring us all together in a vastly different juxtaposition to the universe, plus it would conceivably enroll a greater intelligence than ours in coming to our aid.  The pattern so far has been that the incidence and complexity of the crop formations have increased in response to interest that has been shown, and anything that can put crop circles in our landscape conceivably could put an asteroid shield around the earth.  (We've tweaked our booklet showing why crop circles can't be hoaxed, and it's done now.  Please look: http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html.  To view the booklet you must have at least Flash Player v.5. To get the latest version of the free Flash Player go to www.macromedia.com/flash.)
 
Does anyone have another idea for how to bring about a radical change in the way humanity thinks, or are there responses to this o­ne?

Scientists Want to Be Ready to Block Asteroid

A group gathered in O.C. says Earth could be hit in an hour — or in a thousand years or more.

By David Haldane, February 24, 2004

A huge asteroid heading for Earth could kill 1.5 billion people and devastate the planet, scientists at an international gathering said Monday in Garden Grove.

The o­nly question is when.

“It could happen this year or in a century or in a millennium” or far longer, said David Morrison, a space expert at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Northern California. Whenever it does, he said, we need to be ready.

Making sure that we are is the mission of 120 scientists and engineers attending the four-day gathering called the Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth From Asteroids, which began Monday at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Billed as the first major conference of its kind, the confab has attracted astronomers, aerospace engineers, astronauts and emergency preparedness specialists from throughout the United States as well as Italy, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia.

Among the strategies to be discussed are such extravagant-sounding scenarios as deflecting asteroids with nuclear warheads, lasers and mirrors — which would create gas jets that would disrupt the object's trajectory.

“We have reached a point in the evolution of life o­n this planet where we can actually do something about this, but not if we don't start planning,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, which organized the conference along with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Reston, Va. “Our goal,” Ailor said, “is to raise the consciousness of the public and of people who work in the field.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) who, among other things, chairs the House subcommittee o­n space and aeronautics and has introduced two bills encouraging research o­n threats from outer space, set the tone during a keynote address.

“Bin Laden was out there like a near-Earth object for a long time,” he said. “It took 9/11 — the slaughter of 3,000 innocents — for us to pay attention to that threat. I hope it won't take that long for us to recognize the threat of near-Earth objects; so far we've had a very tepid response.”

In fact, the U.S. government has been tracking and charting the paths of large asteroids since 1998. To date, Morrison said, about 60% of all those known have been charted; about 90% are expected to be done by 2008. “Among those charted,” he said, “there appears to be no danger.” As for the others, Morrison said, “I can't tell you anything about them — o­ne could hit us in an hour, though it's not very likely.”

He bases that mixed assessment o­n the belief of most scientists that truly catastrophic asteroid collisions occur o­nly about o­nce every million years. The uncertainty, he said, stems from the fact that, because the last such collision occurred in prerecorded history, its date is unknown. (A more minor incident — the magnitude of which occurs about o­nce every 100 years — happened in 1908, leveling more than 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest.)

“We want certainty,” Morrison said. “If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if o­ne's coming.”

Conference organizers say that, for starters, they intend to encourage the continuation of that process. The conference — held in Garden Grove because, Ailor said, “it seemed like a good place to start [and] the weather is good this time of year” — is expected to be the first of many held at least o­nce every four years.

At Monday's opening session, participants heard presentations o­n the threat posed by asteroids and the methods by which it is assessed. Sessions through the rest of the week, Ailor said, will cover such topics as how to move a near-Earth object off course (including the early planning of a mission to do so), how to prepare for the disaster that will ensue if preventive efforts fail, and how to affect political and policy issues related to the impending threat.

“We want people to get excited about this topic,” Ailor said. “We want young people to consider it as a subject for future work.”

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“Earth could be hit in an hour.” — INITIATING A CONVERSATION

57 Comments
“If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if one's coming.”
 
If humanity had its wits about it, the asteroid inquiry, below, is an example of what it would do.  There is so much danger o­n this living planet that we are a primitive species until we turn our collective attention to protecting ourselves from things beyond our control.   
 
A shift of mind-set is what it will take to get us to seriously change our ways, and, most logically, this would come from an event that made the possibility of species annihilation real to everyone who was left.  All good minds should be turned to how to bring about this shift in another way.  My offering is crop circles — evidence that we're not alone would bring us all together in a vastly different juxtaposition to the universe, plus it would conceivably enroll a greater intelligence than ours in coming to our aid.  The pattern so far has been that the incidence and complexity of the crop formations have increased in response to interest that has been shown, and anything that can put crop circles in our landscape conceivably could put an asteroid shield around the earth.  (We've tweaked our booklet showing why crop circles can't be hoaxed, and it's done now.  Please look: http://theconversation.org/booklet2.html.  To view the booklet you must have at least Flash Player v.5. To get the latest version of the free Flash Player go to www.macromedia.com/flash.)
 
Does anyone have another idea for how to bring about a radical change in the way humanity thinks, or are there responses to this o­ne?

Scientists Want to Be Ready to Block Asteroid

A group gathered in O.C. says Earth could be hit in an hour — or in a thousand years or more.

By David Haldane, February 24, 2004

A huge asteroid heading for Earth could kill 1.5 billion people and devastate the planet, scientists at an international gathering said Monday in Garden Grove.

The o­nly question is when.

“It could happen this year or in a century or in a millennium” or far longer, said David Morrison, a space expert at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, in Northern California. Whenever it does, he said, we need to be ready.

Making sure that we are is the mission of 120 scientists and engineers attending the four-day gathering called the Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth From Asteroids, which began Monday at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Billed as the first major conference of its kind, the confab has attracted astronomers, aerospace engineers, astronauts and emergency preparedness specialists from throughout the United States as well as Italy, Great Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany and Russia.

Among the strategies to be discussed are such extravagant-sounding scenarios as deflecting asteroids with nuclear warheads, lasers and mirrors — which would create gas jets that would disrupt the object's trajectory.

“We have reached a point in the evolution of life o­n this planet where we can actually do something about this, but not if we don't start planning,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, which organized the conference along with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Reston, Va. “Our goal,” Ailor said, “is to raise the consciousness of the public and of people who work in the field.”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) who, among other things, chairs the House subcommittee o­n space and aeronautics and has introduced two bills encouraging research o­n threats from outer space, set the tone during a keynote address.

“Bin Laden was out there like a near-Earth object for a long time,” he said. “It took 9/11 — the slaughter of 3,000 innocents — for us to pay attention to that threat. I hope it won't take that long for us to recognize the threat of near-Earth objects; so far we've had a very tepid response.”

In fact, the U.S. government has been tracking and charting the paths of large asteroids since 1998. To date, Morrison said, about 60% of all those known have been charted; about 90% are expected to be done by 2008. “Among those charted,” he said, “there appears to be no danger.” As for the others, Morrison said, “I can't tell you anything about them — o­ne could hit us in an hour, though it's not very likely.”

He bases that mixed assessment o­n the belief of most scientists that truly catastrophic asteroid collisions occur o­nly about o­nce every million years. The uncertainty, he said, stems from the fact that, because the last such collision occurred in prerecorded history, its date is unknown. (A more minor incident — the magnitude of which occurs about o­nce every 100 years — happened in 1908, leveling more than 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest.)

“We want certainty,” Morrison said. “If you cross a street, you don't predict the probability of a car being there; you look to see if o­ne's coming.”

Conference organizers say that, for starters, they intend to encourage the continuation of that process. The conference — held in Garden Grove because, Ailor said, “it seemed like a good place to start [and] the weather is good this time of year” — is expected to be the first of many held at least o­nce every four years.

At Monday's opening session, participants heard presentations o­n the threat posed by asteroids and the methods by which it is assessed. Sessions through the rest of the week, Ailor said, will cover such topics as how to move a near-Earth object off course (including the early planning of a mission to do so), how to prepare for the disaster that will ensue if preventive efforts fail, and how to affect political and policy issues related to the impending threat.

“We want people to get excited about this topic,” Ailor said. “We want young people to consider it as a subject for future work.”

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9/11: You Are There

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I think this is a must read. David Floyd, who sent it to his list, said, “An amazing account of heroism and inaction (and cover-up) during and after the events of 9/11.” With conspiracy theorists having a heyday about 9/11, and all of us disturbed by things that are inexplicable about that day, this probing into what happened comes with minute by minute detail about what actually occurred, so that we see for ourselves the disconnect between those occurrences and the investigation of their import. Although it's painful to have what happened be so compellingly evoked, it feels important to engage the horror as is, to best fuel our passion to change the world in which we are threatened by what could be even worse.

Stewardess ID'd Hijackers Early, Transcripts Show, by Gail Sheehy, 2/12/04

Here's some of what's in the piece:

The politically divided 9/11 commission was able to agree o­n a public airing of four and a half minutes from the Betty o­ng tape, which the American public and most of the victims’ families heard for the first time o­n the evening news of Jan. 27. But commissioners were unaware of the crucial information given in an even more revealing phone call, made by another heroic flight attendant o­n the same plane, Madeline (Amy) Sweeney…

“My wife’s call was the first specific information the airline and the government got that day,” said Mike Sweeney, the widowed husband of Amy Sweeney, who went face to face with the hijackers o­n Flight 11. She gave seat locations and physical descriptions of the hijackers, which allowed officials to identify them as Middle Eastern men—by name—even before the first crash. She gave officials key clues to the fact that this was not a traditional hijacking. And she gave the first and o­nly eyewitness account of a bomb o­n board…

Sweeney slid into a passenger seat in the next-to-last row of coach and used an Airfone to call American Airlines Flight Service at Boston’s Logan airport. “This is Amy Sweeney,” she reported. “I’m o­n Flight 11—this plane has been hijacked.” She was disconnected. She called back: “Listen to me, and listen to me very carefully…this plane has been hijacked,” Ms. Sweeney repeated. Calmly, she gave him the seat locations of three of the hijackers: 9D, 9G and 10B. She said they were all of Middle Eastern descent, and o­ne spoke English very well…At least 20 minutes before the plane crashed, the airline had the names, addresses, phone numbers and credit cards of three of the five hijackers…and 9D was Mohamed Atta—the ringleader of the 9/11 terrorists.

“The nightmare began before the first plane crashed,” said Mike Sweeney, “because o­nce my wife gave the seat numbers of the hijackers and…Mohamed Atta’s name was out there. They had to know what they were up against.”…

Amy Sweeney’s account alerted the airline that something extraordinary was occurring. She told Mr. Woodward she didn’t believe the pilots were flying the plane any longer. She couldn’t contact the cockpit. Sweeney may have ventured forward to business class, because she relayed the alarming news to Betty Ong, who was sitting in the rear jump-seat. In professional lingo, she said: “Our No. 1 has been stabbed,” referring to a violent attack o­n the plane’s purser, “also No. 5,” another flight attendant. She also reported that the passenger in 9B had had his throat slit by the hijacker sitting behind him and appeared to be dead. Betty o­ng relayed this information to Nydia Gonzalez, a reservations manager in North Carolina, who simultaneously held another phone to her ear with an open line to American Airlines official Craig Marquis at the company’s Dallas headquarters.

The fact that the hijackers initiated their takeover by killing a passenger and stabbing two crew members had to be the first tip-off that this was anything but a standard hijacking. “I don’t recall any flight crew or passenger being harmed during a hijacking in the course of my career,” said Peg Ogonowski, a senior flight attendant who has flown with American for 28 years.

Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney also reported that the hijackers had used mace or pepper spray and that passengers in business class were unable to breathe. Another dazzling clue to the hijackers’ having a unique and violent intent came in Betty o­ng’s earliest report: “The cockpit is not answering their phone. We can’t get into the cockpit. We don’t know who’s up there.”

A male colleague of Ms. Gonzalez then comes o­n the line and makes the infuriating observation: “Well, if they were shrewd, they’d keep the door closed. Would they not maintain a sterile cockpit?”

To which o­ng replied: “I think the guys are up there.”

Ms. Sweeney told her ground contact that the plane had radically changed direction; it was flying erratically and was in rapid descent. Mr. Woodward asked her to look out the window—what did she see?

“I see water. I see buildings. We’re flying low, we’re flying way too low,” Sweeney replied, according to the notes taken by Mr. Woodward. Sweeney then took a deep breath and gasped, “Oh, my God.”..

Peg Ogonowski, the widow of Flight 11’s captain, John Ogonowski, knew both Betty and Amy very well. “They had to know they were dealing with zealots,” she said. “The words ‘Middle Eastern hijackers’ would put a chill in any flight-crew member’s heart. They were unpredictable; you couldn’t reason with them.”

Ms. Ogonowski knew this from her nearly three decades of experience as a flight attendant for American…After Sept. 11, she imagined herself in Sweeney’s shoes: “When Amy picked up the phone—she was mother of two very young children—she had to know that, at that point, she might be being observed by another hijacker sitting in a passenger seat who would put a bullet through her head. What she did was incredibly brave.”

How, then, could the commission have missed—or ignored—crucial facts that this very first of the first responders communicated to officials o­n that fateful day?…

What her husband wants to know is this: “When and how was this information about the hijackers used? Were Amy’s last moments put to the best use to protect and save others?”

“We know what she said from notes, and the government has them,” said Mary Schiavo, the formidable former Inspector General of the Department of Transportation, whose nickname among aviation officials was “Scary Mary.” Ms. Schiavo sat in o­n the commission’s hearing o­n aviation security o­n 9/11 and was disgusted by what it left out. “In any other situation, it would be unthinkable to withhold investigative material from an independent commission,” she told this writer. “There are usually grave consequences. But the commission is clearly not talking to everybody or not telling us everything.”

This is hardly the o­nly evidence hiding in plain sight…

It ends like this:

“It is incomprehensible why this administration has refused to aggressively pursue the leads that our inquiry developed,” fumes Senator Bob Graham, the former co-chairman of the inquiry, which ended in 2003. The Bush White House has ignored all but o­ne or two of the joint inquiry’s 19 urgent recommendations to make the nation safer against the next attempted terrorist attack. The White House also allowed large portions of the inquiry’s final report to be censored (redacted), claiming national security, so that even some members of the current 9/11 commission—whose mandate was to build o­n the work of the congressional panel—cannot read the evidence.

Senator Graham snorted, “It’s absurd.”

 

 

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