U.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO

He was told to never talk about Cold War incident; files now are public

LONDON - An American fighter pilot flying from an English air base at the height of the Cold War was ordered to open fire on a massive UFO that lit up his radar, according to an account published by Britain’s National Archives on Monday.

The fighter pilot said he was ordered to fire a full salvo of rockets at the UFO moving erratically over the North Sea — but that at the last minute the object picked up enormous speed and disappeared. The account, first published in Britain’s Daily Star newspaper more than 17 years ago and to this day unverified by military authorities, was one of many carried in the 1,500 pages the archives made available online.

The unnamed pilot said he and another airman were scrambled on the night of May 20, 1957, to intercept an unusual “bogey” on radars at a Royal Air Force Station Manston, an airfield at the southeastern tip of England about 75 miles from central London.

“This was a flying object with very unusual flight patterns,” the pilot said, according to a typed manuscript of his account mailed to Britain’s Ministry of Defense by a UFO enthusiast in 1988. “In the initial briefing it was suggested to us that the bogey actually was motionless for long intervals.”

Ordered to fly at full throttle in cloudy weather, the pilot said he was given the order to fire a volley of 24 rockets at the mysterious object.

“To be quite candid I almost [expletive] my pants!” the pilot said, saying he asked for confirmation — which he received.

Retired U.S. airman Milton Torres told Britain’s Sky News on Monday that he was the pilot and has spent 50 frustrating years attempting to uncover the truth of his aerial encounter. Speaking from his home in Miami, Torres said he never saw the UFO with his naked eyes, but watched in awe as it appeared on his jet’s radar and sped off before he had chance to fire.

Complete story at http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/ufo-shot-down.html

Unexplained Mysteries - Finding Extraterrestrial Life E.T.

Smart aliens might not even live on Earthlike planets Advanced ground and space-based telescopes are discovering new planets around other stars almost daily, but an environmental scientist from England believes that even if some of those planets turn out to be Earthlike, the odds are very low they'll have intelligent inhabitants. In a recent paper published in the journal Astrobiology, Professor Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia describes an improved mathematical model for the evolution of intelligent life as the result of a small number of discrete steps. Evolutionary step models have been used before, but Watson (a Fellow of England's Royal Society who studied under James Lovelock, inventor of the "Gaia hypothesis") sees a limiting factor: The habitability of Earth (and presumably, other living worlds) will end as the sun brightens. Like most stars, as it progresses along the main sequence, the sun's output increases (it is believed to be about 25 percent brighter now than when Earth formed). Within at most 1 billion years, this will raise Earth's average temperature to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), rendering the planet uninhabitable. Four major stepsApplying the limited lifespan to a stepwise model, Watson finds that approximately four major evolutionary steps were required before an intelligent civilization could develop on Earth. These steps probably included the emergence of single-celled life about half a billion years after the Earth was formed, multicellular life about a billion and a half years later, specialized cells allowing complex life forms with functional organs a billion years after that, and human language a billion years later still. Several of these steps agree with major transitions that have been observed in the geological record.

Read more at http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/find-et.html