Tag: government

Defense department acknowledges secret program to investigate UFOs

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Conspiracy theorists rejoice: according to a recent New York Times report, the Department of Defense spent $22 million to secretly investigate UFOs from 2007-2012. Billed as the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” and instigated at the behest of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the DoD’s efforts “produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion” and “videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft.” Although funding for the program expired in 2012, officials have apparently continued to investigate these episodes even while carrying out their other duties.

The video below, filmed in 2004 by a jet fighter near San Diego and investigated as part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was released by the Defense Department along with these disclosures.

Of course, this is not the first time that the U.S. government has conducted official, systematic investigations into unidentified flying objects. From 1952 to 1970, Project Blue Book (which might sound familiar to fans of Twin Peaks) was an Air Force program that collected, categorized, and analyzed thousands of reports of UFOs. The results of these efforts were summarized in the Condon Report.

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The Cranberry Crisis of Thanksgiving 1959

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While cranberries have been cultivated and consumed by Native Americans since pre-Columbian times – and have long been associated with Thanksgiving celebrations in the United States – the fruit’s position on our harvest table has not always been so secure.

Near the end of the second Eisenhower administration, fears of widespread chemical contamination prompted the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Arthur S. Flemming announced that

The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroids of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.1

American consumers panicked: a “fifty-million-dollar-a-year business collapsed overnight [and] sales of fresh cranberries […] dropped sixty-three per cent from the year before.” Fearful of poisoning, cranberries vanished from Thanksgiving tables that year; even the Eisenhowers declined to serve them at the White House dinner.2

Afterward, two things became clear. First, that the contamination was not widespread, and that scientists had simply erred on the side of caution since there was no way for consumers to determine on short notice where their cranberries had come from. Second, the cranberry industry concluded that it could not depend on Thanksgiving sales alone – prompting the introduction and marketing of cranberry juices that could be sold year-round.3

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