THE TALL WHITES: ET EXPERIENCES IN THE NEVADA DESERT

THE TALL WHITES: ET EXPERIENCES IN THE NEVADA DESERT, with Charles James Hall - Charles Hall was a weather observer in the United States Air Force during the mid-sixties. He was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base and the Indian Springs gunnery ranges outside Las Vegas, followed by a year in Viet Nam. After the service, Charles married and earned a Masters degree in Nuclear Physics at San Diego State University.

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The Las Vegas UFO Crash, April 18, 1962

Very few of the crash/retrieval stories take place on a military reservation. The majority of the reports are from civilians who have happened onto the scene of an extraordinary event. The reported destruction of a craft near Nellis Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1962 is the exception that proves the rule. The vast Nellis complex is the one location where it seems a flying saucer crashed right into government and air force hands. And there are, literally, dozens of firsthand witnesses to the fact.Like many of the reports of UFO crashes, the Las Vegas case was overlooked by most of the UFO research community. Frank Edwards, who mentioned the Roswell case in a single paragraph in his 1966 book Flying Saucers-Serious Business, wrote more about the crash near Las Vegas in his 1964 book Strange World. Although he often wrote from memory and didn't always check his facts as closely as possible, he did get the basics of the case reported before anyone else bothered with it.

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Coast to Coast: Discovering Area 51

Aviator John Lear and screenwriter Gene Huff joined George Knapp to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Area 51 mystery. The duo discussed their role, alongside Bob Lazar, in bringing the Area 51 story to the world. "It sounds a lot more convenient than it was. It was a lot of synchronicities, a lot of sheer coincidences that made things turn out the way they did," Huff said about the series of events that brought them together two decades ago.

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I-Team: Was the Needles UFO a Secret Military Craft

NEEDLES, Ca. -- It's a UFO, in the literal sense -- it's still unidentified. Half a dozen witnesses say they saw something in the sky over Needles and Bullhead City or watched it being carried away by a phalanx of military helicopters. Was it a spy plane or a drone or something more exotic?

Several eyewitnesses say the mystery object blazed out of the sky in the early hours of May 14, 2008. The long cylinder with the turquoise glow was seen over Bullhead City by former cop Frank Costigan and others. It seemed, at one point, to slow down in its descent.

South of Needles, a fisherman in a houseboat saw the light pass over and slam into the riverbank 50 or so yards west of the Colorado River. Minutes later, at least four military type helicopters appeared in the area and a giant sky crane was used to haul the object into the air and away toward the north.

The fisherman, who uses the nickname Bob on the River, said what he saw. "It didn't look like a meteor. I've seen meteors before. It looked like a plane crashing."

In the two years since the story broke, a lot of people have traveled to the rough terrain of the tri-state area to search for the point of impact -- UFO enthusiasts, TV producers, aviation buffs -- but the shifting sand and thick salt cedar defied efforts to identify a crash site. 

The I-Team traveled with Houseboat Bob to whittle down the search area, though we still did not locate the spot. But Bob kept looking. 

He traded in the houseboat for an RV and now lives in the desert, not on the river, but he never stopped searching, driven by one thing.

"Everybody thinks I'm an idiot. Everybody thinks I'm looney tooney in the cabooney," he said.

His weekly one-man safaris into the riverbank region came up with something no one else noticed, not even those who searched by air. A large, flat clearing where someone used heavy equipment to remove the gnarly brush, about 70 yards west of the river at almost the exact spot where Bob says the object landed. 

It's an unusual spot, he says. "You would not see another hardened ground clearing like this anywhere between here and Needles. It's all sugar sand everywhere."

Ex-cop Frank Costigan is one of those who searched for the crash site. He's also amazed to find the clearing, but says area residents encountered members of what was described as a clean up team in the weeks after the crash.

"There was a cleanup crew dining at the Topock Marina on occasion, after that thing had been removed and we were hunting for the spot," he said.

But if this is the spot, we still don't know what hit the ground. Retired intelligence Colonel John Alexander speculates it could be any number of high tech UAV's -- unmanned spy planes being developed at several western test ranges, including Area 51 in Nevada, or Edwards in California.

"It's also the possibility it lost control and flew off the range. It's not that far from Edwards or the test ranges," he said.

Last month, a classified object was launched into space by the Air Force. The Pentagon has confirmed it's the X-37B space plane, an unmanned spy plane, sort of the military's version of the space shuttle. A few images of the X-37 have been made public, along with video of a sister vehicle the X-40. 

The military acknowledges these crafts have been test flown at Edwards and Vandenberg, not too far from Needles. The shape and the size are a near perfect match for what the witnesses saw.

Bob confirms it looks like the object he saw. "Without the horizontal surfaces, yes. Without the wings," he said.

Houseboat Bob said even though the glow from the object was blue green, the object appeared to be black and shiny as it was being airlifted away. Photos of the X-37 show black, shiny tiles on the exterior.

The I-Team sent records requests to numerous agencies and none were able to shed light on what the Needles object might have been. The Air Force won't say much about the mission of the X-37, but military analysts have some guesses.

"What they say they will use it for testing space technologies, and certainly having a re-usable vehicle would be a way of sending up prototypes, batteries, cooling systems, electronics, testing them then bringing them back down so you can modify them. Possibly, it's a space maneuver vehicle so it can duck back in the atmosphere and change its orbit so next time it flew over China, the Chinese wouldn't expect it coming," said military watchdog John Pike.

Another military analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity says he thinks it could be part of a weapons program known as the Rods from the Gods, which we know has been tested out at Area 51. These are spaced-based kinetic weapons that literally fall out of the sky and cause problems for the bad guys. 

But for now, the best guess of the witnesses is the X-37.

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Travel Between LA and Vegas Without Fear Or Loathing On The Gambling Train

 Now that road-safety laws have tightened up since the '70s when Fear and Loathing was published, you'll need to look at alternative transport for your LA-to-Las-Vegas trip if you want to play Hunter S. Thompson while under the influence.

A gambling train? Sure, I think Thompson would improve. There are no bats on trains, after all.
Believe it or not, the X Train is actually going to happen, with the developers boasting of a 2011 launch. It'll use converted railcars, and as the renders show it'll be very red! plush! swirly-swirly! plush! Though apparently one of the photos—this one—is actually a real-life photo from the Blue Train, in South Africa. Puzzling.

Despite doubts over one of the photos, you've got to admit it's a bloody cool idea. It'll take 5.5 hours to travel between the two cities—with no Tobey Maguire-lookalike hitch-hikers to be found, hopefully. [X Train via Core77 via FastCompany]

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