Paranormal Activities - Fort Worth Army Airfield

June 14, 1947 - William Ware "Mac" Brazel notices some strange and unidentifiable debris at Foster homestead some 30 miles North of Roswell, New Mexico.

July 7, 1947 - Major Jesse Marcel, stationed at Roswell Army Airfield, and a "man in plainclothes" recover the so-called "Roswell debris."

July 8, 1947 - The "object" from Roswell is flown to Fort Worth Army Airfield according to the orders of General Roger M. Ramey of the Eighth Air Force and inspected by Warrant Officer Irving Newton.

March 11, 2011 - Justin Tiemeyer, accompanied by girlfriend Amy Bolan and friends Adam Friedli, Josh Toulouse, Adam Knorr and Corinne Shady see an opening night showing of Battle: Los Angeles at Rave Motion Picture Company at Ridgmar Mall in Fort Worth, Texas.

Last year at this time, I was spending my spring break investigating America's great UFO mystery in Roswell, New Mexico and the surrounding areas. This year I found myself stuck in Fort Worth for my last spring break prior to the completion of my master's degree. While it might seem boring to be stranded during spring break on the campus where you go to school and without a car, I found that instead I was right in the middle of the setting of chapter two of the Roswell story. It just so happens that the UFO debris from Roswell stopped at Fort Worth Army Air Field (Carswell Air Force Base) before being sent to storage at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Last year I was still unfamiliar with Fort Worth. By March of 2010 I had only been in Fort Worth for seven or so months. I knew that Carswell Air Force Base was supposed to be only ten or fifteen minutes from my apartment, but I had never been driven by it and had never heard anyone talk about it. Recently, I came to understand that the air field had been shut down and that Ridgmar Mall had been constructed on the Southern end of the former Air Force base.

Within a week, alien films Battle: Los Angeles and Paul were released in theaters, and the movie theater where I prefer to see my alien movies is on the grounds that hosted the Roswell object for some short period of time. Seeing an alien movie, however bad, where once stood the best known alien artifact in human history - now that's what I call a paranormal activity. Battle: Los Angeles was nothing like I had hoped it would be, but amidst the tragedy of an unsatisfying fictional alien narrative I found myself a part of America's great nonfictional alien narrative for the second consecutive spring break.

NASA Finds Alien Life?

A couple of weeks ago, everyone on the Facebook community was posting one of these two articles, "NASA Finds New Life" or "Nasa Reportedly Discovers 'Completely Alien' Life on Earth." If you've read my article "Office For Outer Space Affairs," you know that I am something of a conspiracy theorist interested in the existence of extraterrestrial life. By extension, you know that I was pretty excited to stumble upon these articles.

Shortly after people began talking about NASA's discovery of aliens on Earth, a much smaller faction of Facebook researchers began to surface. While many had begun to act as if we were living in a momentous time in history, the time of first contact with extraterrestrial life, this faction was devoted to deriding these individuals for their ridiculous beliefs. They began talking about how this scientific discovery was a heck of a let down.

These particular articles talk about how NASA has discovered a new form of bacteria called GFAJ-1 in Mono Lake, California. Nearly all life forms on this planet are called carbon-based life forms, which means that the structures that support us are carbon compounds. These newly discovered bacteria do not fit this mold. Their DNA, RNA, proteins and cell membranes are instead constructed from arsenic compounds.

It has been hypothesized for years that non-carbon-based lifeforms may exist on Earth. When I was in grade school I remember hearing that people suspected that silicon-based organisms lived beneath the Earth's crust. Since silicon is a metal, it would be more useful as a building block of life where heat and pressure reach extremes beyond that which carbon-based life forms can handle. Furthermore, it is directly below carbon on the periodic table, which means that it would function like carbon in many ways. This theory was common enough by the 1960s that Star Trek: The Original Series featured a silicon-based alien life form called a Horta in the first season episode "The Devil in the Dark."

The 20th century has seen its fair share of upsets in the definition of how life forms are defined, most significantly with the discovery of archaea, microorganisms that were originally understood as bacteria but which are now understood as having a completely different evolutionary path. These organisms can thrive in the harshest of climates, in volcanic vents and toxic waste even, because of their ability to metabolize a variety of gases and metals that would kill nearly any other organism. Knowing about these variations on life, it never seemed like much of a leap to suggest that we would find a non-carbon-based life form on or in the Earth.

While the discovery of arsenic-based bacteria is certainly a momentous scientific discovery that can lead humankind down some interesting avenues of research, it has been marketed to the public as if scientists had just discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life capable of long-distance space travel. If the headlines referred to scientists discovering new life, few would find it very interesting. The nature specials I used to watch in the 90s told me that new species are being discovered on a daily basis in places like the Amazon rain forest. Instead, the headlines made use of the "NASA" keyword, which combined with the keywords "new" and "life," plants the false idea that we are dealing with ET here. Throw in the word "alien," meaning "other" or "different," and people automatically think you mean "extraterrestrial in origin."

I would love to fit this story into my greater theory regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial biological entities traveling lightyears to make contact with the civilization of Earth, but it just doesn't fit. This scientific advance is extraordinary but it is also a let down, and the crux of this distinction is the bait and switch that popular sources reporting on this issue have used. They promise Independence Day and X-Files, but instead they give us Nova.

Office for Outer Space Affairs

If you've been watching the news, you'll find that it's getting harder and harder to deny the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The first time I was really astounded by the new wave of interest in aliens was when my friend Emily reported that she was watching reports of UFOs on FOX NEWS. The fair and balanced network (devoted to reporting on all sides of the anti-Obama propaganda) took time away from smearing democrats and setting up straw enemies (Have you ever seen Glenn Beck? Now, have you ever heard Glenn Beck use anything remotely resembling logic?) to report on mass UFO sightings. I haven't seen anything like it in years.

Many residents of Tucson, Arizona reported some strange UFOs in their vicinity in late September (Tucson UFO Sighting: Event witnessed by many remains a mystery). Only one video surfaced (Tucson UFO sighting: UFO enthusiast captures object on video), but massive audiences reported objects in the sky that they could not explain. I'm sure you've also heard the news of mass UFO reports in China (UFOs frequently appear over Taiyuan, Shanxi). It's getting harder and harder to deny the existence of extraterrestrial life now that the evidence is not just coming from oddball ufologists like Dan Aykroyd; the evidence is coming from the population, educated and uneducated alike, of entire cities and provinces.

If I'm not asking you to read the Wired article about the new Cowboys Stadium (Cowboy Upgrade: Welcome to the NFL's Next Flagship Arena) then I'm asking you to read the Wired article about Gleise 581g, the first habitable planet we've been able to find outside of our solar system (A Habitable Exoplanet - for Real This Time). Add to this the fact that scientists have been dealing with a strange laser-like signal from the general vicinity of Gleise 581g for two years (Strange Signal Comes From Alien Planet, Scientist Says), long before Gleise 581g was reported to be capable of sustaining life, and you're dealing with another significant piece of data regarding extraterrestrial life.

A decent amount of the public and some scientists here and there seem convinced that extraterrestrial life is possible, but does that mean that there's any significant reason for anyone else to believe? Perhaps not. But there are certainly some people in very high places who believe that we need to be ready for the possibility that reports we could encounter alien intelligence within my lifetime. About the same time as the massive alien sightings and the discovery of a habitable exoplanet, the UN appointed Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman as the head of the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs (Alien diplomacy: The UN's secretive alien ambassador). Before I read this article, I was going to jokingly title this blog "Office of Alien Affairs," only to find that the actual office has a much better early-20th-century science fiction vibe to it. This means that the people who represent all humanity on our planet (well, most) have decided that despite worldwide economic turmoil it is necessary to pay for a group of people to deal with possible extraterrestrial encounters.

What does this mean? Is the UN privy to secret information on the existence of extraterrestrial life? Is the scientific community putting together the pieces? Is this all a massive conspiracy of viral marketing for the upcoming film Skyline? I don't have enough evidence to know one way or another. I can conclude that it's a great time to look to the skies, that America needs a kick start to its collective imagination after all of the economic troubles we've faced. And what better impetus than evidence that the things we imagine may really exist

Happy Extraterrestrial Abductions Day!

Batman: Dead End (2003)

Batman: Dead End is a short fan-made film by Sandy Collora that debuted at the 2003 San Diego Comic Con. Growing Pains star Andrew Koenig plays the Joker in what Kevin Smith calls "possibly the truest, best Batman movie ever made."