TEEN VIDEOTAPES UFOs IN AFYON, TURKEYOn Thursday, December 5, 2002, a teenager used his videocamera to shoot both daylight and night footage of two UFOs that were hovering over the Davulga district of Emirdag, a suburb of Afyon, a city in western Turkey. "Nineteen-year-old Ramazan Elmas captured the images of the bright objects with his videocamera on two successive days and nights," Thursday and Friday, December 5 and 6, 2002. "The video pictures of the objects created much excitement among the residents" of Afyon. "Elmas stated that his father and his friends, Evran Calik, Adem Erdogan and Mehmet Golkuyu, also witnessed the incident. And he (Ramazan Elmas) got in trouble with the local police." "'The police asked me to hand over the cassette, but I rejected their demand,'" Elmas said, "'Then several military officers came over from Afyon. They watched the footage and wanted to get it. I reported this to the Emirdag Public Prosecutor. The Public Prosecutor concluded that I was entitled to the copyright of the video footage. At that point, the police ceased to demand it.'" (Editor's Note: In Turkey, a public prosecutor is similar to a district attorney here in the USA.) Afyon is located 250 kilometers (150 miles) southwest of Ankara, the capital of Turkey. (Many thanks of Haktan Akdogan of Sirius Space Sciences Research in Istanbul for this news story.) (Editor's Note: For more on recent UFO sightings in Afyon, see UFO Roundup, volume 7, number 47 for November 19, 2002, "Six Turkish airline crews saw the UFOs over Afyon," page 2.) LUMINOUS UFO SIGHTED NEAR BIRMINGHAM IN UKOn Thursday, December 19, 2002, at 6 a.m., Joy W. was driving to work through Small Heath, near Birmingham, UK, when she spotted an unusual bright light in the sky. "A very bright white light approached from the east, travelling very fast in a straight line, too fast for a plane," Joy reported, "Constant brightness. At first I thought it was a very large shooting star. But it kept at the same height." "It was a bright silver light, star-like but bigger than a star, roundish in shape. The sky was clear. I was about four miles (7 kilometers) from the Birmingham airport. It could not have been a plane as it was like a ball of very bright light, even as it was going away from me." (Email Form Report) UFO FLAP CONTINUES IN VENEZUELAAlthough the intense level of UFO activity in South America has diminished during the past two weeks, UFO sightings remain at an all-time high in the nation of Venezuela. Reports of UFOs continue to pour out of Venezuela, which is also currently embroiled in a political crisis. "On Thursday, October 17, 2002, Heilinghs Ferreira and his brother observed a stationary UFO over the Cerro Avila (hill) in Caracas," the national capital. "The UFO showed ever-changing lights that were colored red, yellow, blue and white. Then, for ten minutes, the UFO moved laterally through the sky above Cerro Avila, then hovered for another five minutes, and finally disappeared while right over the peak." "On Sunday, November 10, 2002, a witness observed an ovoid UFO with a brilliant aura around it in the sky above Maracay," located 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Caracas. "The object repeatedly brightened and diminished its luminosity until it faded away completely." "On Friday, November 22, 2002, at 8:40 p.m., various witnesses reported the presence of a spherical UFO approximately 40 meters (132 feet) in diameter, moving around in the skies over Caracas. The UFO presented rotating lights on its outer rim. It moved slowly from east to west before becoming lost in the horizon." (See NotiOVNI for December 8 and December 15, 2002. Muchas gracias a Daniel Munoz e tambien a Jose Iglesias del Proyecto Orion de Venezuela para esos informes.) TWO MORE UFO SIGHTINGS REPORTED IN COLOMBIA"On Friday, November 29, 2002, at 8:30 p.m., reporter Nestor Melendez of the Canal Capital TV station in Bogota, the capital of Colombia, captured on video the maneuvers of a large multicolored luminous sphere as it moved about over the Cerro Monserrate (hill)." "On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 9:30 a.m., an enormous silver UFO in the form of a spinning top flew over rooftops in Bogota. The object was captured on video when it passed over a futbol (soccer in the USA--J.T.) field where a local Bogota team was holding a practice scrimmage." (See NotiOVNI for December 15, 2002. Muchas gracias a Daniel Munoz y tambien a William Chavez Ariza del Contacto OVNI de Colombia para esos informes.) UFOs SPOTTED IN THREE STATES OF MEXICO"On Tuesday, December 3, 2002, at 8:15 p.m., a luminous UFO was captured on video over the (large) city of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos" In Mexico. "In this video, taken by Armado Marquez, are recorded the slow maneuvers of a strange object with a very intense luminosity. The UFO finally disappeared over Chalma, a suburb southeast of Cuernavaca. But then, several minutes later, the UFO abruptly reversed its trajectory and flew back over Cuernavaca before disappearing completely." "On Friday, December 6, 2002, according to Mexican ufologist Alberto Gomez, a UFO was sighted by two police officers in Matamoros, a city in the state of Tamaulipas," just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, USA. "Police officer Jaime Mata and his partner, Juan Reynaldo Najera, saw a UFO over the east side of Matamoros. According to the officers, the UFO was white and 'four times brighter than a star' and moved at a very high altitude over the barrio Nueva Jerusalem (neighborhood)." "The UFO was also seen by two other officers, Rosalio Gomez and Juan Carlos Garcia Moreno, who said the UFO 'had several lights on it.' The blinking lights were red, green, orange and yellow. They radioed their watch commander, Captain Jose Luis Valdez, who also saw the slow-moving object." "On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, ufologist Carlos Clemente of Grupo Los Vigilantes reported that, for seven minutes, a spherical UFO was videotaped over Polanco, a town north of Mexico City. Clemente reported that the object was seen by many witnesses. During the period of observation, no airplanes were reported in the vicinity, which is unusual because Polanco is directly beneath the commercial jet lane between Mexico City and the USA." (See the Mexican newspaper El Bravo of Matamoros for December 8, 2002. Also NotiOVNI for December 8, 2002. Muchas gracias a Daniel Munoz para esos informes.) CLOUDS DISCOVERED ON ONE OF SATURN'S MOONS"Astronomers have captured the first images of clouds on Titan, confirming suggestions that the distant moon of Saturn has summer storms such as those on Earth." "The vast glowing clouds, most likely formed of methane rather than water vapor, drift high in Titan's cold, smoggy atmosphere near the moon's south pole. They were discovered by California Institute of Technology planetary astronomer Michael Brown and his colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, using the W.M. Keck 10-meter (33 feet) and Gemini North 8-meter (25 feet) telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii." "'I am looking out my office windows now and seeing clouds. They are white,' Brown said, 'The clouds on Titan look the same.'" "The clouds came as something of a surprise because previous images of Titan," the largest of Saturn's moons, which orbits the ringed planet 880 million miles from Earth, "had revealed only unchanging surface markings and very gradual seasonal changes in the haze, making the moon look 'like L.A. (Los Angeles--J.T.) on a bad day,' Brown said." "But since last December (2001), the clouds have been visible almost every night, invariably as a single large plume almost always in the same general area of the (Titanian) south pole." "'We see the intensity of the clouds varying over as little as a few hours,' said Henry Roe, lead author for the Berkeley group. 'The clouds are constantly changing, although some persist for as long as a few days.'" "The findings were reported in research published this week in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal." (See the Duluth, Minn. News-Tribune for December 21, 2002, "Summer storms found on one of Saturn's moons," page 9A. Many thanks to Steve Wilson Sr. for this news story.) (Editor's Note: Titan's atmosphere is composed of methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide, with no oxygen. What you have in the Titanian Antarctic are methane snowfalls instead of water-based snow. On Titan, Frosty the Snowman would be blue-green instead of white.) GIANT ELEPHANT FOSSILS FOUND IN CENTRAL ITALYWhat is now the city of Rome was once the "Elephant's Graveyard" over a quarter-million years ago, according to an Italian woman archaeologist. "Some 300,000 years ago, ancient elephants trudged into a shallow river to drink but found their legs stuck in the mud. Eventually, they fell and died there, attracting scavenger animals and pre-humans, who fed off the meat and made tools from the bones." "After 17 years of excavation," the site at Castel di Guido in Italy, located 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Rome, "packed with thousands of animal bones and tusks the length of station wagons, opens to the public for the first time this month." "Fossilized bones from ancient forms of deer, oxen, horses, rhinoceroses, mice, birds, small reptiles and fish all lie in the hardened earth of the prehistoric swamp. No pre-human skeletons have been found, although excavators discovered 500 primitive instruments made of flint and bone." "The archaeologist heading the project, Anna Paola Anzidei, says the site was particularly important for fossils of the species Elephas antiquus, an ancestor of the modern elephant." "Though there are several other similar sites in Italy, La Polledrara di Cecanibbio holds the oldest, most plentiful and best preserved bones due to the abundance of the gas flourite in the region, scientists say." "'The site preserves the best samples from anywhere in the world of Pleistocene elephants (Palaeoloxodon--J.T.) from that period of time (300,000 B.C.),' says professor of paleobiology Adrian Lister at University College, London, who visited the site in October 2001. 'The study of skulls, for example, will help us better understand the relation of the population to other fossil elephants. That work has not been done yet.'" "Geology professor Larry Agenbroad at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff highly praised the Italian location, which he viewed in October 2001." Dr. Agenbroad oversees the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota (population 4,129), which is "famed as the best for its museum that contains the remains of 49 Colombian mammoths." "'The size of the elephants I saw at the Italian site was mindboggling,' he says, 'It would be particularly interesting for people who study paleontology and archaeology, as well. I expect the public would be very impressed with it.'" Gigliola Possenti, an archaeologist working at Castel di Guido, said the researchers at the site are "studying the climate and environment of the region during the (Pleistocene) period and the ways in which pre-humans in the area began interacting with big game." (See the Duluth, Minn. News-Tribune for December 22, 2002, "Down to the bones," page 6D.) MYSTERIOUS LIGHT BEAM SHINES ON OREGON TOWNOn Friday, December 6, 2002, at 7:30 p.m., Sonja Maricle was at her home in Chiloquin, Oregon (population 716) when she "first saw it to the south. I sighted balls of flashing light (blue, red, gold and green--S.M.) dancing in the treeline above our house on Chiloquin Ridge. Directly below the lights was a very bright light poking through the forest, causing the forest floor and manzanita bushes to glow." "After about ten minutes, a beam shone down from above our heads onto the glowing forest floor below. The beam of light came from seemingly nowhere, as we could see nothing above us in the trees." "The lights seemed to dance rather erratically for about ten minutes and then stopped and seemed to signal to each other, flashing back and forth, and then started dancing again. After watching for approximately 45 minutes, the lights formed a V-shape and circled several times and moved over quickly out of sight to the southeast." The UFOs were "initially gold," Sonja added, "Flickers of blue, red, gold and green as the objects rotated. They appeared roundish, spherical. About 70 to 80 feet (21 to 24 meters) off the ground when directly in front of the trees. Maybe a mile in the sky, give or take, when leaving." Chiloquin, Ore. is in Klamath County, approximately 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Crater Lake National Park. (Email Form Report) (Editor's Note: Chiloquin is also 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Klamath Falls, which is considered "the UFO capital of Oregon.") REPAIR WORK TO START AT JERUSALEM'S TEMPLE WALLWith the mysterious bulge in the south wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount getting worse on a daily basis, engineers from Jordan plan to start work this week on repairs to the millenia-old masonry. On Monday, December 16, 2002, a team of Royal Jordanian Engineers "arrived and completed their structural survey of the south wall. The team of four engineers found that the bulge is growing. They hope to replace existing stones to ease the strain on the 2,000-year-old wall." According to the Jerusalem Post, Dr. Raiv Nagim warned that "any wall collapse could bring down" entire buildings on the Temple Mount, including the two world-famous Islamic mosques at the summit, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosques. "If such a catastrophe happened, you could have chaos in Jerusalem," Dr. Nagim was reported as saying. Unless the south wall is repaired, even a minor earth tremor could bring down the entire hillside, the Jordanian engineers warned. "Repairs are starting this week, using granite stones similar to those that are already in the wall," Ayesha al-Khatabi, UFO Roundup correspondent in the Middle East, reported. "It's almost like a Cecil B. DeMille movie. Rocks come popping out of the wall like champagne corks. You keep expecting (actor) Charlton Heston to show up or something." Sacred to Muslims is the Al-Aqsa mosque, which was built in 1218 by Malik Muwazzam, the nephew of Saladin, the prophet-general who reconquered Palestine for Islam during the Third Crusade. The mosque was built on the ruins of the earlier citadel of the Knights Templar, erected in 1128 by Sir Hugues de Payen, and a small mosque built in 780 A.D. by Caliph al-Mahdi. "Saladin had the Templar building razed because, even then, there were rumors that the Templars were into black magic. His nephew built the mosque on the site for the same reason the caliph did four hundred years earlier. The prophet Mohammed--peace be upon him--is supposed to return to Jerusalem at the end of the world, and the top of Haram as-Sharif (Arabic for Noble Sanctuary; Jews call it the Temple Mount--J.T.) is where the Prophet will appear." "There's also a tunnel under the hill, closed off to the public, which I always thought was part of Solomon's Temple, although you might have something there about an earlier Canaanite temple." (Editor's Note: The Canaanites called the hill Mount Kankaniya, and it figured prominently in their pagan religion. For more on the Temple of the Two Serpents, see UFO Roundup, volume 7, number 45 for November 5, 2002, "Another mysterious wall bulge in Jerusalem," page 6.) "From what I've read, a lot of prominent people have entered that tunnel for some unknown purpose. The list includes Jesus's enemy, King Herod, the Roman emperor Hadrian and the Byzantine empress Eudokia as well as the Templar grandmasters. But there are Keep Out signs in Arabic, Hebrew, English, French and German all around the Double Gate (tunnel entrance--J.T.)." (See the Jerusalem Post for December 17, 2002. Many thanks to Rick Wiles and Ayesha al-Khatabi for this news story.) From the UFO Files... 1990: A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE IN SASKATCHEWAN"Many years ago my father was an Indian Agent on a reserve (reservation in the USA--J.T.) in northern Saskatchewan province" in Canada. "He was a no-nonsense sort of man. He didn't believe in anything unless he saw it with his own two eyes." "It was almost dark that cold wintry day" in December 1990 "when a very distraught man pounded on the door. His ten-year-old daughter was missing. It seems she had taken a horse and ridden down the road several miles to visit a friend at about 4:30 p.m. He became concerned that she hadn't come home, so he went out looking for her, expecting to run into her on her way home." "He went to the friend's house and found out that she had never been there! Worried, he headed back home, stopping along the way to see if she had gone elsewhere, but no one had seen her." "So the man came to talk to my father, who arranged a search party. Fifty men with lamps searched late into the night for any sign of the girl." "It started snowing heavily. And when it began to snow, the men knew their chances of finding the child weren't very good at all. Not a trace of her was found, nor of the horse. My dad first thought that the horse might've bolted and thrown her. But when the horse didn't come home, either, the town was full of somber faces and sorrowful hearts." "At daybreak, the men met on the main road. They walked slowly, and as they came around the curve in the street, one man gave a startled yell. Everyone stopped." "There, standing in the middle of the field, were the girl and the horse! My father stood and watched as the girl's father ran out into the field and gathered his little daughter into his arms. She was smiling and didn't look as if she had been out in the cold the whole night. And, man, did she have a story to tell us." (Editor's Note: In northern Saskatchewan, the temperature always plummets right after a snowfall. That night, it could have gone as low as minus 20 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit.) "Trotting down the path, she had seen an old couple in traditional native (Anishinabe, also known as Chippewa or Chipewyan--J.T.) costume standing in the middle of the road. She didn't know them, but when she got closer, they smiled and held out their hands to her. Unafraid, she slid down from her horse and started walking with the old couple." "They stood on each side of her and asked her to talk awhile with them as they walked over the deep snow. The couple told the girl about her Native American (Anishinabe) heritage and of the native ways and customs. Then they took her to a log cabin where they sat and talked some more." "Finally, they said it was time to return, and as they said goodbye to her, the old woman pressed an amulet into her hand to protect her from all harm." "The next thing the little girl remembered was being in the middle of the field with her father running toward her." "As she told this story, she held out the amulet for all to see. Her father gave a cry and dropped down to his knees, tears streaming down his cheeks. Her asked her if the old people had known her secret name. She said they had. The couple had also told the girl that her family was blessed by angels." "Her father told her that she had just described her own grandparents. But they had died in a fire" in 1978 "just before she was born. The cabin where the girl said they took her had been destroyed before she was born." Twelve years earlier, the father had searched through the blackened ruins of the cabin for his mother's amulet. But he had been unable to find it. (See Christmas Angels, American Media Mini Mags, Inc., Boca Raton, Fla., 2001, pages 34 to 38.) Tonight is Christmas Eve, and, as most of us settle down to celebrate with family and friends, let us not forget those who cannot join in the festivities. These are the gallant men and women on active duty in the military forces of the nations around the world. Let's take a moment to remember them on Christmas Day and to thank them for the many sacrifices they've made on our behalf. So, if you are a member of one of the armed services on active duty this Christmas, on behalf of all the readers and correspondents and the gang at UFO Roundup, let me wish you a "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year." May you prosper in your chosen career in the year to come. And that wraps up Volume Seven of UFO Roundup. We'll be back next week, on New Year's Day, with the start of a new volume, featuring UFO, Fortean and paranormal news from all over the planet Earth. Brought to you, as fast as we can get it, by "the paper that goes home--UFO Roundup." Have a happy holiday season! UFO ROUNDUP: Copyright 2002 by Masinaigan Productions, all rights reserved. Readers may post news items from UFO Roundup on their websites or in news groups provided that they credit the newsletter and its editor by name and list the date of issue in which the item first appeared.
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