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Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
DAILY MAIL (London)
November 11, 2000
SECTION: Pg. 48
LENGTH: 4457 words
HEADLINE: ALIENS UNDER THE SEA;
Forget UFOs, something fishy is going on in the Caribbean. Are Unidentified Submergible Objects the latest space menace? Judge the facts for yourself
BYLINE: Timothy Good
BODY:
IT'S THE most outlandish alien theory yet. Beings from outer space establishing secret bases on Earth, and travelling in ships that are just as much at home beneath the sea as they are in the skies. Beyond belief? Perhaps.
But a new book expounding the idea is written by one of the world's most respected authorities on UFOs, Timothy Good, and his findings are supported by one of Britain's most senior military men, retired Admiral of the Fleet Lord Hill-Norton. Here, in the first of two articles, Good sets out his case.
Read it, and make up your own mind . . .
ON THE morning of September 4, 1971, four members of the National Geographic Institute of Costa Rica were flying in a twin-engined aircraft 10,000ft above Lake Cote, near the Central American state's forbidding Arenal volcano.
A special mapmaking camera was slung underneath their plane. It was automatic and large-format, and every 20 seconds it took another photograph of the lake beneath.
When the photographs were developed, one of the frames showed what seemed to be a metallic disc about 160ft in diameter, which had just left, or was on the point of entering, the lake. It was giving off light, and had made a sudden manoeuvre at the instant the photo was taken.
The object showed up on neither the previous frame of film nor the one afterwards. Checks on the negative eliminated tricks of the light as an explanation.
What the geographers had seen was an extraordinary but little-known phenomenon - a USO. Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, have been reported for centuries. What few people realise is that USOs - Unidentified Submergible Objects - have been reported for almost as long.
Sometimes, as in the mysterious incident at Lake Cote, a UFO can be seen transforming itself into a USO, or vice versa.
Lake Cote is extremely deep, and there have been numerous other reports of unknown submergible craft entering and leaving it. Local fishermen, out on the lake in the small hours, have seen various objects below them, giving off coloured lights.
Sometimes the movement of these objects has caused the men to lose their balance and risk plunging into the water. They have also been blamed for a reduction in the fish population.
One morning, around 9am, two men heard a metallic noise coming from the lake and saw an object emerge that was shaped like a submarine with three 'domes' on its top. It hung there for a few seconds, then shot off towards the mountains to the north.
Other USOs have been seen in lakes and open seas around the world, sometimes giving out light, sometimes deeply submerged, sometimes just below the surface, sometimes skimming across it - and sometimes, as at Lake Cote, entering or leaving.
Evidently, many of the objects we are accustomed to call UFOs can just as easily travel in water as in the air.
On the night of November 6, 1973, a unique encounter with a USO occurred off the coast of America.
Fishermen in Pascagoula, Mississippi, reported it; coastguards confirmed it.
There were nine witnesses.
The object was circular or elliptical in shape, about 12ft long, and gave out a beam of amber light. The two fishermen who raised the alarm said it looked like 'a mini-submarine' and hovered about 4ft below them in the water.
It was so close that they tried to hit it with their paddles.
HOWEVER, each time they tried to make contact, the light would go out and reappear in another position. When coastguard officers were summoned, they, too, tried to hit the USO. They succeeded, and reported that the object, whatever it was, felt metallic.
The coastguards made detailed notes. The object, they said, had a parachute-like shape and moved at a speed of six to eight knots, making steadily for deeper water.
The intensity of its light varied from
nothing to a glare that was sometimes too bright to look at. When a torch was shone at it, the light 'turned off' until the beam was removed. 'The phenomena observed were not consistent with any known fish, other marine life or known light source,' concluded the coastguard report.
So what was in the water - and why was it there?
THERE is one place in the world where reports of Unidentified Submergible Objects are particularly frequent, and particularly strange.
Puerto Rico, the Caribbean's socalled Island of Enchantment, lies in one corner of the area that has become known as the Bermuda Triangle, renowned for the disappearances of ships and boats, and for sightings of 'flying saucers'. It is here, in this former U.S. colony, whose politics and defence are still inextricably bound up with America, that much of my research into the USO phenomenon has focused.
A great deal of the strange activity around the island has centred on the 28,000 acres of mountainous rainforest known as El Yunque, on the north-eastern coast.
Jose Orlando Golis, who works for the Puerto Rican government, lives close to El Yunque. 'Many people have seen UFOs flying over the water close to the surface,' he told me.
'Once, at 1am, we saw one with many coloured lights flying next to the sea just over the surface.
'At first we thought it was a boat. It seemed to be dark underneath and had lights - mostly red and blue - at another, upper level. Then it angled and moved upwards. It made a humming sound, and seemed to head in the direction of El Yunque.' Felix Rivera is a diver with an underwater salvage company based near the American Naval Air Station which adjoins El Yunque, one of many U.S. bases on the island. He confirmed to me that UFOs and USOs have frequently been observed - often by American military personnel.
'Navy Seals - America's elite special forces - have seen USOs here,' he revealed. 'Some have told me that these things will often come up close to boats, then shoot off. They move too fast underwater to be ours.' Another hotspot of activity is off the south-west coast. In an area known as Cayo Margarita, 15 miles out in the Atlantic, many fishermen, as well as commercial and private pilots, claim to have seen USOs entering or emerg- ing from the sea. Fisherman Aristides Medina said: 'Once, I wasfishing late at night and two of them passed under my boat, radiatinga blue light.
On other occasions, I haveseen them when they emerge from th e water and fly away at great speed.' He has also seen them plunge into the water - and always in the same area of the sea. It would seem these objects have definite preferences as to which part of the ocean they choose to emerge from and enter.
A REMARKABLY vivid sighting was reported by a diver called Inocencia Cataquet. He was in the water off PenaBlancas in the north- east of the island when he came across wha t appeared to be a disc- shaped submersible craft, lying on the seabed.
The craft seemed to be camouflaged with a sand-like materialin order to blend in with its surroundings. Next to it lay a rectangular object, with a transparent cable, whichwas moving around in the water.
As if in reaction to the diver's pres -ence, the cable was suddenly retracted. Unnerved, Cataquet raced for the surface - in timeto see the disc emerge from the water with a loud buzzing sound and fly away .
WHAT is going on here?If strange metallic craft are emergin g from the waters around Puerto Rico on any thing like a regular basis,it is incon -ceivable that the militaryauthorities could be unaware of it. Some of the American bases in the area have exactly the sort of equipment that would be needed to track an object from the unknown.
For example, there is the huge aerostat, or tethered balloon, that flies 15,000ft above the island's south-west coast, with radar installations slung beneath it to monitor air traffic. A number of witnesses claim to have seen strange flying objects in the vicinity.
Puerto Rico is also host to the unique radio-telescope at Arecibo, a natural crater turned into the parabolic bowl of a gigantic receiving antenna - the largest and most sensitive radio-telescope in the world.
ONE of the acknowledged roles of Arecibo is as a listening post for alien life-forms broadcasting from outer space. The project is known as SETI - the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
Yet, ironically, unusual craft and beings have been reported around the radio observatory itself. A large boomerang-shaped object was seen 'hanging' above the telescope. One night, witnesses saw a huge disc in the sky, followed by three triangular-shaped objects.
Is the paradoxical truth that, while SETI looks for extraterrestrial beings light years away, they are operating on its own doorstep?
On a visit to the site in January 1999, I interviewed the observatory's Dr Jose Alonso. He told me that many local people believe the observatory is a focus for UFO activity.
'This is a complicated issue,' he said. 'Sometimes I think military experiments are responsible for what people are seeing. There are people who say this is a U.S.
government cover-up.
'As to aliens, statistically, there has to be something. There are between 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and 10pc of them are of the same type as our sun.
'If other life forms exist, it's only a matter of time and technology before contact is made.' Certainly, the Arecibo site is a focus for strange phenomena.
One of the strangest came in March 1993, when a former British Airways pilot, Graham Sheppard, experienced a mysterious 'lateral displacement', throwing him miles off course, as he was flying his Cessna 172 light aircraft close to the telescope.
Sheppard, an expert navigator whose experience in the air spans four decades, and includes flying 747s, describes it as the most bewildering moment of his career.
'After passing over the telescope, a feeling of unease and growing confusion came over me,' he says.
'Minutes went by with no idea of my position, but I was confident the west coast would soon appear at right angles to my course.
'I recall the shock of seeing the coastline, not at right angles to my course, but parallel. It became alarmingly clear that I was flying along the south coast. The navigation error here is enormous and should be impossible.'
An onboard video camera confirms that Sheppard's gyro compass was set to the correct bearing for his original course. It also confirms that he was flying at 2,200ft - yet somehow he had passed over hills up to 3,900ft high.
THE aircraft's instruments had appeared normal, and later weather checks ruled out a freak wind having blown him off course. None of the pilots to whom I have sent records of this flight can rationalise the displacement.
Sir Mark Thomson, a former Royal Navy jet pilot who has taken a close interest in the strange events around Puerto Rico, is as baffled as he is impressed.
'It is one of the most important pieces of evidence I've seen,' he told me.
'There is no explanation in our laws of physics.' Could such aerial displacement be linked to the disappearances that have made the whole area of the Bermuda Triangle so notorious - such as the flight of Grumman Avenger torpedo-bombers that vanished off the Florida coast just after World War II?
In Puerto Rico, there are those who report incidents that are equally sinister and inexplicable. I interviewed two groups of witnesses who, on two separate occasions in 1988, claim to have watched as U.S. Navy Grumman F-14 jets were apparently 'captured' or otherwise 'absorbed' in mid-flight by large, unknown aerial craft they were pursuing.
Perhaps it sounds like fantasy.
But on one occasion, at least, it seems that the object that caused such a disappearance may even have been captured on U.S. radar.
'MAYDAY, Mayday. We can see a strange object in our course. We are lost.
Mayday. Mayday' The distress-call came at 8pm local time on June 28, 1980.
Jose Luis Maldonado Torres, a 31-year-old pilot, was flying an Ercoupe 415D aeroplane, together with a 22-year- old student pilot, from Santo Domingo to San Juan, Puerto Rico's main airport.
I have listened to a tape of some of the Mayday transmissions from the Ercoupe, leaked by a Federal Aviation Administration source, and the pilots' anxiety is clear.
'A weird object in our course made us change course about three different times . . . we have something weird in front of us . . .
We are right again in the same stuff, sir . . .' After these words, the pilots were not heard of again. A sea and air search revealed no trace.
However, a tantalising clue lies in the official report on the incident.
During the Mayday alert, the American Naval Air Station at Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico was in contact with air traffic controllers at San Juan. At 8.16pm, 11 minutes after the Ercoupe's last communication, the Americans made an intriguing comment: 'It looks like we may see a few of them out there . .
.' What did this cryptic message mean? It suggests that the air station had made several radar contacts in the area where the plane disappeared. One of them, of course, was the Ercoupe. But what were the others? Might one of them have been the 'weird object', the disorienting 'stuff' that apparently engulfed the doomed plane?
One possibility is that the U.S.
Navy had been monitoring whatever weird phenomenon caused the plane's disappearance.
Jorge Martin, the island's leading UFO investigator, has an important contact within the military, a high-ranking officer connected to the U.S.
Navy.
From this source, we learn that the American authorities grew alarmed after a number of military aircraft, as well as private planes, disappeared in an area to the north-west of Puerto Rico known as the San Juan Trench.
A steep undersea cleft in the ocean floor, the lowest point of this great chasm lies 30,000ft deep, further below sea level than Mount Everest is above it.
HERE is the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. The pressures of seawater there would crush any surface creature, and any but the most specially-constructed of manmade submarines.
According to Martin's source, the Navy and Air Force found that, on a regular basis, a huge disc-shaped craft would come out of the sea in the Trench, sometimes 'hanging stationary in the air on a great column of water before vanishing or submerging again'.
If this were not outlandish enough, there is more. Pilots were reportedly ordered to approach the object, only for their jets to 'explode silently, to vanish into thin air'.
Can these astonishing claims be true? And if so, what is the terrible secret lurking beneath the ocean?
A STRETCH of 100 miles of open water divides Puerto Rico from its neighbouring island, the Dominican Republic. That stretch is known as the Mona Passage.
Almost halfway across it, some 45 miles to the west of the last cape of Puerto Rico, lies the small, roughly circular, uninhabited Mona Island. At the time of its last communication, the lost Ercoupe aircraft was just to the east of Mona Island.
Other crews crossing the area have reported anomalies affecting their positioning. One pilot in a light aircraft noted an 'an uncontrollable spin' of his compass.
Jorge Martin's U.S. Naval officer offers a remarkable explanation.
His revelations about Mona Island are bizarre, extraordinary, and almost beyond belief.
But when I showed my dossier of
evidence to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Hill-Norton, one of Britain's most respected military figures, he had no hesitation in endorsing my findings. A former Chief of the Defence Staff and ex-chairman of the Nato military committee, he is prepared to stake his reputation on it.
'People must make up their own minds,' he says. 'But before they do so, I would suggest that they try to imagine what their grandparents would have made, even in the 1950s, of the idea that men would shortly be walking on the Moon, or that babies could be conceived in a test tube.
'They would have found such happenings as bizarre, fanciful and incredible as some of the matters which have been reported to Timothy Good by reliable and corroborated witnesses.
'If you look at the evidence and still do not believe something very odd is going on in Puerto Rico, you've brought scepticism to an art form. Anyone who does not believe in alien activity should be required to prove why they don't, rather than the other way round.' So just what are these claims that so challenge conventional wisdom? In short, the U.S. Naval officer claims that Puerto Rico is the site of a huge subterranean alien base - a secret complex extending deep below the ocean, constructed by aliens and visited frequently by their craft.
The officer said: 'We know that in the subsoil of the south-west of Puerto Rico there is an enormous subterranean facility, which extends under the sea as far as Mona Island.
'It is a base of "something" or "someone" that is not from here, that appears to be "extraterrestrial". We have been following and watching the situation for many years - and we know that they are down there.'
FARFETCHED? Perhaps, but there are those who corroborate this account. In 1995, I met a senior reporter in Washington DC, who has provided me with information on the alien presence which he, in turn, obtained from a senior officer in the U.S. Air Force.
My reporter contact, whom I shall call 'John', is a U.S. Army Intelligence veteran. His real name is known to Lord Hill-Norton, who can vouch for his impeccable credentials.
John has always protected the identity of his source. What seems certain is that he worked at the Pentagon in the USAF Air Staff and Joint Staff.
According to this officer, it is known in senior military circles that aliens have been coming to Earth for a very long time. Following World War II, they are thought to have established permanent bases - in Australia, the Pacific Ocean, the Soviet Union, the United States and the Caribbean.
The officer did not give a location for
the supposed Caribbean base,but I believe he is referring to Puerto Rico.
Most remarkably, according to this source, the bases have been established with the knowledge and protection of secret sections of the U.S. military. He says access to information about the alien situation is denied to all but a few senior personnel.
'What would happen,' John once asked his source, 'if I came out with all this, naming you?' 'We'd just make you look very foolish,' replied the officer.
RELUCTANT though we may be to accept this astounding thesis, the weight of testimony emerging from Puerto Rico is breathtaking. We even have two witnesses who claim to have been present in alien craft as they rode into the kind of alien base described by the American Naval officer.
Carlos Manuel Mercado claims to have been taken in an alien craft to a base in the mountains adjoining Lake Cartagena, in the south-west of the island, in 1988. 'As the craft approached the El Cajul mountain,' he told me, 'I saw this brilliant light, something opened up, and the craft went in there, through a sort of tunnel and into a large cavern.' In 1980 Ivan Rivera Morales, a Puerto Rican police officer, was lying ill when his bedroom filled with golden spheres of light. Suddenly, he found himself inside a bizarre, transparent contraption, beside alien beings of grey-skinned, humanoid appearance, about 4ft high.
Morales was transported at a fantastic speed to a point high above Earth, then back to Puerto Rico's south-west coast as the craft dived rapidly towards the sea. 'The waters separated and a sort of tube formed in it, a void around the craft through which it went on descending to the depths.'
Morales describes being taken to an underwater mountain. Inside the dimly lit and freezing-cold base were other, similar beings. Morales was given a bitter-tasting drink and placed on a metallic bed. The next thing he knew, he was back in his house.
Morales no doubt elaborated his story when feted by UFO enthusiasts. But the location of the alien base he claims to have visited ties in exactly with the area mentioned by the naval officer.
Yet another coincidence? Perhaps, but the point comes at which there are too many coincidences and too many eyewitness accounts to ignore.
On Monday I will reveal extraordinary reports that the U.S. military has gained access to alien technology and even engaged in 'war games' with our extraterrestrial visitors.
* Extracted from UNEARTHLY DISCLOSURE by Timothy Good, published by Century at GBP 16.99.
(c) Timothy Good 2000
