Tuesday 21 February 2017

Churchill on UFO's

The famous wartime UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill has always been a man of mystery and controversy and that continues to this day. Numerous histories and biographies have been produced about him that portray him in all kinds of different lights. Fifty-two years after he died new evidence is still appearing, and the latest revelations are the most remarkable yet. The old statesman had many hobbies and interests, and one of those was popular science. He was interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life and wrote an article about it in 1939 that has only just been discovered. He intended it for the newspapers, but it was never published. He understood the concept of the "Goldilocks zone", the narrow gap between the minimum and maximum distance from a star that a planet must be in order for water to exist in liquid form, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. Too close and the star's heat will turn any water to steam; too far away and it will only be found as solid ice. Churchill knew that life was possible on planets around other stars, but he thought only Venus held any prospects for it being found in the solar system along with Earth. We knew almost nothing about Venus in those days; since then we've found out from the Venera programme that it is probably the least likely place life could ever exist with its dense superheated atmosphere. It also seems that the Goldilocks zone is bigger than we first thought because there is liquid water on the moons of the outer planets and possibly life there too. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38985425. Winston Churchill also took the idea of UFO's seriously throughout his premiership. Recently released British government files show that there was a real "X-Files" style project to address the UFO issue that was active in the late 1950's and probably earlier. Churchill himself was briefed on the subject during World War II when RAF aircrews reported encounters with strange objects while flying on combat missions. This is probably connected with the stories of "foo-fighters" that were well known among aviators in the war. The Prime Minister was so alarmed by the phenomenon that he ordered the matter classified for at least fifty years. He was concerned that it might cause "mass panic" if released. Considering that the British public coped very calmly with the Blitz, U-boats and their sons dying in foreign fields, it indicates how gravely the government regarded the UFO situation. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10853905. Also in the newly released files are details about the Berwyn Mountains incident and the "spaceman" at the Blue Streak missile test in Australia in 1964. At the same moment on the other side of the world in Cumbria, England a second spaceman was captured in an amateur photo; see background links below. The files are at the National Archives and are free to download for a month, so grab them while you can, see: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos/.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

ben please do an hpanwo show on this if you can,fascinating stuff-Mark

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Hi Mark. I'm sure I can. Might mention it briefly tonight