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  • Conspiracy Journal #214
    Commander X
    15 Jul 2003

    Don't touch that dial! We control your television. We know what you watch. We have control of your computer - We have your email - We know what you want to read - And that is Conspiracy Journal! Yes, once again it is time for your favorite email newsletter of the world of conspiracies, UFOs, the paranormal and everything else weird and strange.

    This week Conspiracy Journal brings you such vein-throbbing tales as:
    - WMDs and the Psychology of Fanaticism -
    - Theorems in Wheat Fields -
    - Canada May Still Hold Millions in Secret Confederate Gold -
    - Secret Papers Tell how RAF Hunted UFOs -
    - AND, Blessing Ends Phantoms' Shopping Trip-


    - THE GROWING DISSENT DEPARTMENT -

    WMDs and the Psychology of Fanaticism - By Arianna Huffington

    By all accounts, the behind-the-scenes battle within the Bush administration over just what information should be used, or spun, or hidden, to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to America and the rest of the world was a knockdown, drag-out fight between the facts and a zealous, highly politicized, "who needs proof?" mindset. And, at the end of the day, the truth was left writhing on the floor.

    Hey, why let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good war?

    This pathological pattern of disregarding inconvenient reality is not just troubling - it's deadly. And it's threatening to drag us into a Sisyphean struggle against evildoers in Syria, Iran, North Korea, or whatever locale Karl Rove thinks would best advance "Operation Avoid 41's Fate."

    Since I'm not a psychiatrist, I consulted the work of various experts in the field in order to get a better understanding of the fanatical mindset that is driving the Bush administration's agenda - and scaring the living daylights out of a growing number of observers.

    Dr. Norman Doidge, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has identified among the telltale symptoms of fanatics: an intolerance of dissent, a doctrine that is riddled with contradictions, the belief that one's cause has been blessed or even commanded by God, and the use of reinforcement techniques such as repetition to spread one's message.

    Sound like anyone you know? George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle... come on down!

    According to Doidge, one of the essential features of fanatics is their certainty that not only is their cause good "but that it is the only good, an absolute good." Or as President Bush famously declared: "There is no in-between, as far as I'm concerned. Either you're with us, or you're against us."

    This absolute intolerance of dissent, says Doidge, often extends beyond the fanatics' enemies - frequently leading to a "campaign of terror" against those within their own ranks. If you're wondering what this has to do with the Bush administration, you might want to give a call to Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich.

    After having the temerity to question the wisdom of the president's massive tax cut plan, the senatorial pair became the targets of withering TV attack ads, sponsored by allies of the White House, that portrayed them as "so-called Republicans" and compared their opposition to the latest round of tax cuts to France's opposition to the war in Iraq. It was a Night of the Long Knives, GOP-style.

    Another crucial element of a fanatic's faith, according to Professor Dixon Sutherland, who teaches religion at Stetson University, is that he "sees himself as acting for God... You have a circular logic that is very powerful that combines God's authority - through the Bible - with a messenger who carries out that authority."

    Tom DeLay, for example, saw the 2000 election as a choice between a "biblical worldview" and the worldview of "humanism, materialism, sexism, naturalism, post-modernism or any of the other -isms." And the Republican Party, of course, represented the biblical worldview, God and all things good.

    Gustav le Bon, a social scientist known for his crowd psychology theories, has stressed the importance of repetition as a weapon in the fanatic's arsenal. Repetition breeds blind acceptance and contagion.

    "Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs," writes le Bon, "possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes." As James Moore, co-author of "Bush's Brain," says, "If the president says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11."

    The technique was so successful that a poll taken by the Pew Center in 2002 showed that 66 percent of Americans believed that Hussein and bin Laden were both behind the attacks. In the words of that giant banner that Rove had placed behind the president following his Top Gun landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln: "Mission Accomplished."

    Wonder why the WMD are MIA? The answer may lie in the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I know it can sound a bit cheap to call people you disagree with nuts, which is why I refer you to the psychiatric literature. And keep an open mind, something the Bushies stopped doing a long time ago.

    -Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." -

    Source: Alternet.org http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16204
    =====================================================================
    - SECRET MESSAGES IN THE FIELDS DEPARTMENT -

    Theorems in Wheat Fields

    It's no wonder that farmers with fields in the plains surrounding Stonehenge, in southern England, face late-summer mornings with dread. On any given day at the height of the growing season, as many as a dozen farmers are likely to find a field marred by a circle of flattened grain.

    Plagued by some enigmatic nocturnal pest, the farmers must contend not only with damage to their crops but also with the intrusions of excitable journalists, gullible tourists, befuddled scientists, and indefatigable investigators of the phenomenon.


    Indeed, the study of these mysterious crop circles has itself grown into a thriving cottage industry of sightings, measurements, speculations, and publications. Serious enthusiasts call themselves cereologists, after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

    Most crop deformations appear as simple, nearly perfect circles of grain flattened in a spiral pattern. But a significant number consist of circles in groups, circles inside rings, or circles with spurs and other appendages. Within these geometric forms, the grain itself may be laid down in various patterns.

    Explanations of the phenomenon range from the bizarre and the unnatural to the merely fantastic. To some people, the circles-which began appearing nearly 3 decades ago-represent the handiwork of extraterrestrial visitors. Others attribute the formations to crafty tradesmen bent on mischief after an evening at the pub, pranksters commemorating a recent movie, or even hordes of graduate students driven by a mad professor. To a few, the circles suggest the action of numerate whirlwinds, microwave-generated ball lightning, or some other peculiar atmospheric phenomenon.

    These scenarios apparently suffered a severe blow in 1991, when two elderly landscape painters, David Chorley and Douglas Bower, admitted to creating many of the giant, circular wheat-field patterns that had cropped up during the previous decade in southern England. The chuckling hoaxers proudly displayed the wooden planks, ball of string, and primitive sighting device they claimed they had used to construct the circles.

    But this newspaper-orchestrated, widely publicized admission didn't settle the whole mystery, and new patterns continued to appear during subsequent summers. Moreover, in the wake of their admission, retired astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins felt compelled to write to Bower and Chorley. He asked how they had managed to discover and incorporate a number of ingenious, previously unknown geometric theorems-of the type that appear in antique textbooks on Euclidean geometry-into what he called their "artwork in the crops." Hawkins concluded his letter as follows: "The media did not give you credit for the unusual cleverness behind the design of the patterns."

    Hawkins' first encounter with crop circles had occurred early in 1990. Famous for his investigations of Stonehenge as an early astronomical observatory, he responded to suggestions by colleagues that he look into crop circles, which were defacing fields suspiciously close to Stonehenge.

    Of course, there was no connection between crop circles and the stone circles of Stonehenge, but Hawkins found the crop formations sufficiently intriguing to begin a systematic study of their geometry. Using data from published ground surveys and aerial photographs, he painstakingly measured the dimensions and calculated the ratios of the diameters and other key features in 18 patterns that included more than one circle or ring.

    In 11 of those structures, Hawkins found ratios of small whole numbers that precisely matched the ratios defining the diatonic scale. These ratios produce the eight notes of an octave in the musical scale corresponding to the white keys on a piano.

    The existence of these ratios prompted Hawkins to begin looking for geometric relationships among the circles, rings, and lines of several particularly distinctive patterns that had been recorded in the fields. Their creation had to involve more than blind luck, he concluded.

    Hawkins' first crop-circle candidate, which had appeared in a field in 1988, consisted of a pattern of three separate circles arranged so that their centers rested at the corners of an equilateral triangle. Within each circle, the hoaxers had flattened the grain to create 48 spokes.

    Hawkins approached the problem experimentally by sketching diagrams and looking for hints of geometric relationships. He found that he could draw three straight lines, or tangents, that each touched all three circles. Measurements revealed that the ratio of the diameter of a large circle-drawn so that it passes through the centers of the three original circles-to the diameter of one of the original circles is close to 4:3.

    Was there an underlying geometric theorem proving that a 4:3 ratio had to arise in such a configuration of circles? Armed with his measurements and statistical analyses, Hawkins began pondering the arrangement. After several weeks, he had his proof.

    Hawkins' first theorem was suggested by a triplet of crop circles discovered on June 4, 1988, at Cheesefoot Head. Hawkins noticed that he could draw three straight lines, or tangents, that each touched all three circles. By drawing in the equilateral triangle formed by the circles' centers and adding a large circle centered on this triangle, he found and proved Theorem I: The ratio of the diameter of the triangle's circumscribed circle to the diameter of the circles at each corner is 4:3.

    Over the next few months, Hawkins discovered three more geometric theorems, all involving diatonic ratios arising from the ratios of areas of circles, among various crop-circle patterns. In one case, for example, an equilateral triangle fitted snugly between an outer and inner circle, with the area of the outer circle precisely four times that of the inner circle.

    Theorem II: For an equilateral triangle, the ratio of the areas of the circumscribed (outer) and inscribed (inner) circles is 4:1. The area of the ring between the circles is 3 times the area of the inscribed circle.

    Theorem III: For a square, the ratio of the areas of the circumscribed and inscribed circles is 2:1. If a second square is inscribed within the inscribed circle of the first, and so on to the mth square, then the ratio of the areas of the original circumscribed circle and the innermost circle is 2m:1.

    Theorem IV: For a regular hexagon, the ratio of the areas of the outer circle and the inscribed circle is 4:3.

    For Hawkins, it was a matter of first recognizing a significant geometric relationship, and then proving in a mathematically rigorous fashion precisely what that relationship is. "That was the approach I had taken at Stonehenge," Hawkins remarked. "It wasn't just one alignment here and nothing there. That would have had no significance. It was the whole pattern of alignments with the sun and the moon over a long period that made it ring true to me. Once you get a pattern, you know it probably won't go away."

    There was more. Hawkins came to realize that his four original theorems, derived from crop-circle patterns, were really special cases of a single, more general theorem. "I found the underlying principles-a common thread-that applied to everything, which led me to the fifth theorem," he said. The theorem involves concentric circles that touch the sides of a triangle, and as the triangle changes shape, it generates the special crop-circle patterns.

    Hawkins' fifth crop-circle theorem involves a triangle and various concentric circles touching the triangle's sides and corners. Different triangles give different sets of circles. An equilateral triangle produces one of the observed crop-circle patterns; three isosceles triangles generate the other crop-circle geometries.

    Remarkably, Hawkins could find none of these theorems in the works of Euclid, the ancient Greek geometer who had established the basic techniques and rules for what is known as Euclidean geometry. Hawkins was also surprised at his failure to find the crop-circle theorems in any of the mathematics textbooks and references, ancient and modern, that he consulted.

    This suggested to Hawkins that the hoaxer (or hoaxers) had to know a lot of old-fashioned geometry. Hawkins himself had had the kind of British grammar-school education that years ago had instilled a healthy respect for Euclidean geometry. "We started at the age of 12 with this sort of stuff, so it became part of one's life and thinking," Hawkins said. That generally doesn't happen nowadays.

    The hoaxers apparently had the requisite knowledge not only to prove a Euclidean theorem but also to conceive of an original theorem in the first place-a far more challenging task. To show how difficult such a task can be, Hawkins often playfully refused to divulge his fifth theorem, inviting anyone interested to come up with the theorem itself before trying to prove it. In an article published in The Mathematics Teacher, he challenged readers to come up with his unpublished theorem, given only the four variations. No one reported success.

    What Hawkins had obtained was a kind of intellectual fingerprint of the hoaxers involved in creating these particular crop-circle patterns. "One has to admire this sort of mind, let alone how it's done or why it's done," he remarked. Curiously, in 1996, the crop- circle makers showed knowledge of Hawkins' fifth theorem by laying down a new pattern that satisfied its geometric constraints.

    Did Chorley and Bower have the mathematical sophistication to depict novel Euclidean theorems in the wheat? Not likely. The persons responsible for this old-fashioned type of mathematical ingenuity remain at large. Their handiwork flaunts an uncommon facility with Euclidean geometry and signals an astonishing ability to enter fields undetected, to bend living plants without cracking stalks, and to trace complex, precise patterns, presumably using little more than pegs and ropes, all under cover of darkness.

    Perhaps Euclid's ghost is stalking the English countryside by night, leaving its distinctive mark wherever it happens to alight.

    Source: Science News http://www.sciencenews.org/20030628/mathtrek.asp
    =====================================================================
    - THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN DEPARTMENT -

    Canada May Still Hold Millions in Secret Confederate Gold

    Southern spies preparing for a Confederate resurgence after the U.S. Civil War may have buried millions of dollars in gold at sites across Canada in the 1860s -- part of an enormous treasure that, say the authors of a new book, is only now being unearthed.

    Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, who co-wrote Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy, say Canada was an important haven for Confederate operatives during the Civil War who went on to form the nucleus of a secret society -- the Knights of the Golden Circle -- that kept the South's dream of independence alive for decades after the Union army's victory.

    "By war's end, exiled Confederate and KGC cadres operating out of Canada under the seasoned leadership of Jacob Thompson, Clement Clay and Thomas Hines had amassed a treasury estimated at more than $2 million in gold and silver coinage," the book says.

    The authors believe that most of the money from Canadian bank accounts and coin caches, which totalled as much as $5 million according to some of the book's sources, was eventually repatriated and hidden in the American south.

    But because of the strict secrecy surrounding the Confederacy's cash reserves, and the generations that have passed since the money was buried, no one can for say for sure where the treasure is.

    Mr. Brewer, who is descended from members of the KGC, claims to have discovered -- among other finds -- a fruit jar filled with gold and silver coins in the Arkansas backwoods after deciphering a series of coded maps, inscribed stone tablets and other landscape markers. The book offers only general clues about where other caches might be found, since Mr. Brewer is continuing his own hunt for the Confederate hoard.

    "Bob and a few others have been finding real treasure that was buried in this coded, geometric grid system," said Mr. Getler, a journalist who has worked for the Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune, yesterday in an interview.

    Canada's connections to the Confederacy are well-documented by historians, who have long been aware that John Wilkes Booth -- who assassinated U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 -- may have planned the attack a few months earlier during meetings in Montreal with Confederate spies and Southern sympathizers.

    "Agents -- some people call them Confederate secret service, we call them KGC -- were operating out of key areas such as Toronto, Montreal, Niagara Falls, Windsor," says Mr. Getler. "They were operating there as a financial reserve or haven and as an operational platform" conducting sabotage runs and robbery raids in the northern U.S.

    Among the key figures involved in the KGC was Albert Pike, a Confederate exile in Canada whose experience as a leading Freemason appears to explain the elaborate coding system used to hide money and which Mr. Brewer is now unlocking to find treasure sites.

    The treasure is believed to have been amassed from the Confederacy's government reserves, from wartime raids on northern banks and from tithes offered by northern supporters of the Southern cause.

    Mr. Getler and Mr. Brewer say cash burials offered the only reliable method of safekeeping Confederate wealth at the time. The authors believe that a network of KGC "sentinels" were responsible for hiding various amounts gold and silver, protecting the caches during their lifetime, and then passing on to others the coded information that would one day yield the treasure locations and help finance a second Civil War.

    "I would say there is a possibility that KGC treasure does exist in the north, because this organization was operating throughout the country and in Canada," says Mr. Getler. In particular, he adds, "there's a possibility that Confederate treasure is buried in that region around Windsor." But the clues also point to "treasures in the northwest of the country, places like Oregon and Montana" and the sparsely settled Canadian west that bordered those states.

    In another bizarre twist in the story, the authors say that the infamous outlaw Jesse James was part of the KGC network. He is alleged to have led a convoy with $80,000 worth of Confederate gold to a hiding spot in New Mexico, while "other convoys headed south into Florida, one went into Mexico, another into Canada, after traveling west into Kansas and going north to avoid Union troops."

    Source: The Ottawa Citizen
    http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=B6D0CC00-63B4-4F8A-A4D1-
    74D71A5D7440 =====================================================================
    - MYSTERY OF THE MISSING JETLINER DEPARTMENT -

    Pilot Of Stolen Boeing Probably Killed Says Brother

    An American pilot who sparked a global terrorist alert when he disappeared in Africa with a fully-fueled jetliner has probably been murdered, his brother said yesterday.

    In an exclusive interview with Scotland on Sunday, Joe Padilla spoke for the first time of his belief that his brother Ben was hijacked at the controls of the Boeing 727 at Luanda airport in Angola and killed after the plane took off without permission, vanishing without trace.

    Neither Ben Padilla, who comes from Miami, nor the plane have been seen since their disappearance on the evening of May 25, despite an extensive search across the continent by several African nations, the US State Department and the CIA.

    "I hate to say it, but my brother is probably deceased," said Joe Padilla from his home in Pensacola, Florida.

    "He would have been in touch with his family had he been able to. We desperately want to see him home again, but we are steeling ourselves for the worst."

    Padilla's mystery disappearance prompted fears that terrorists had taken the plane for a September 11-style suicide attack somewhere in Africa, particularly because the aircraft, a former American Airlines passenger jet, had been converted into a fuel carrier and had just been filled with 14,000 gallons.

    At first the family discounted terrorism, preferring to believe a theory that the plane might have crashed through mechanical failure because it had spent 14 months on the Tarmac in Luanda and had not been properly maintained.

    But Padilla says he has new information from the planeís owner, the president of an aircraft-leasing firm in Miami, which points instead to a hijacking. Ben, a 51-year-old freelance pilot who has flown cargo planes around the world for more than 20 years, was hired to organise the repossession of the plane from a company that failed to maintain lease payments.

    "Ben spent two-and-a-half months in Angola overseeing a full reworking of the plane so it was in tip-top condition," Padilla said. "On the day it disappeared, Ben was only taking the plane out to the end of the runway and back just to see how things were working. He wasn't licensed to fly a plane as big as that and the two pilots he was hiring weren't even on board, so that tells me right there it's been hijacked.

    "The plane took off without permission and failed to respond to the control tower, but we don't know what happened after that. We hope he was just captured, but I have to doubt he's still alive. I hope I'm wrong, but whoever took that plane probably killed him."

    Padilla also rejects a theory that Ben was part of a plot to steal the plane. "Two days before he disappeared, he paid $43,000 of the owner's money to the airport authorities to clear the bill for the plane having been there so long. If my brother had stolen the plane, he'd have taken the money also."

    American authorities believe the aircraft was more likely to have been taken for criminal purposes such as smuggling drugs or weapons rather than any terrorist activity, although the FBI will not reveal any details of their investigation.

    Whatever the truth of Benís disappearance, however, his family have been deeply affected. "We were all very close, and he used to call me wherever he was," said Padilla, who said his sister Benita and her baby son Johnathan were also missing him.

    "We got an e-mail to him a couple of months ago telling him our mother had had a heart attack and he promised to call as soon as he was able, but since then we've heard nothing.

    "But we've got to keep searching, even if he's dead. If he is, we want his body home."

    Source: scotsman.com http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=735302003
    =====================================================================
    - IT'S CALLED A GLOBSTER DEPARTMENT -

    Giant Sea Specimen Sliced for Science

    Experts sent pieces; giant octopus theory loses ground.

    Scientists around the globe were waiting to get their hands on samples from a huge sea specimen found on Chile's coast, but already some were discounting the possibility it could be the remains of a giant octopus. "From the photos I've seen, I've little doubt that it is going to turn out to be from a whale, but maybe I'll be surprised," Sidney Pierce, the biology departmert chair at the University of South Florida, told MSNBC.com.

    Pierce's team is one of five that have been sent samples for DNA testing. Others are in England, France, Italy and New Zealand.

    In Chile, meanwhile, a researcher who took samples from the 40-foot- long mass said he was certain it is not a giant octopus. "I couldn't tell you what it is but it's not an octopus," said Sergio Letelier, a scientist with the Museum of Natural History in Santiago.

    Letelier, who heads a mollusk laboratory, said the tissue was extremely tough and thick but did not have the tentacles, organs or the smell of an octopus. But he was too puzzled to venture a guess on its identity.

    "It may be an unknown species of marine animal. It might be part of the stomach of a whale. I can't confirm anything until tests are done," he said.

    Pierce hoped to receive a sample this week, and then it would take a week or so to do some of the measurements. "If we are able to recover any DNA, it may take a couple of more weeks after that," he said.

    "It's fairly expensive and time consuming to do this stuff," he added, "so if we don't get results fairly rapidly, I'll have to give up on it - but I'm optimistic that we can get an answer."

    Pierce noted that his team has tested samples from four earlier finds and that electron microscopy determined that all were whale blubber collagen. The oldest specimen was found in 1896 on a Florida beach. The others were found on Australia's Tasmanian coast in the 1960s, another off Bermuda and one along Nantucket Sound.

    Dubbed the "blob" since it was first spotted two weeks ago by a Chilean Navy plane, the specimen was initially mistaken for a beached whale. When whale experts with Chile's Center for Cetacean Conservation got to the remote site they didn't know what to make of it.

    "We'd never before seen such a strange specimen," said Elsa Cabrera, director of the center, adding that the blob didn't smell like a whale or feel like whale skin.

    The round substance looks like a mammoth jelly fish and is about as long as a school bus.

    Steve Webster, senior marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, said the specimen could be skin, particularly if it had rooted or separated from the rest of the whale.

    "In addition," he said, "at least 50 percent to 80 percent of the length of a giant squid or octopus is arms and tentacles, not the body. From what I can see in the picture, this is one big mass of tissue, and is not divided into what might be arms or tentacles."

    Webster raised the possibility that "if the blob is really gelatinous, and not particularly tough and leathery," then it could be what's known as a pyrosome - a colony of millions of plankton that can grow to up to 60 feet long.

    He said that genetic analysis of the tissue should reveal some clues to identify the specimen.

    "If this were just the head and body of a squid or octopus," he added, "then it appears to be far larger than any such critter known to date."

    Source: MSNBC.com =====================================================================
    - THOSE SILLY FLYING SAUCERS DEPARTMENT -

    Secret Papers Tell how RAF Hunted UFOs

    They have been the subject of derision for claiming aliens have visited Earth from outer space, but believers in the existence of UFOs were this weekend excitedly poring over newly released military documents that show how fighter aircraft were scrambled to intercept strange shapes in Britain's skies.

    The secret papers obtained from the US military give an insight into an astonishing chain of events sparked by UFO sightings over East Anglia in 1956.

    After receiving numerous calls reporting bright lights darting across the sky, fighters from RAF Lakenheath spent more than seven hours trying to shoot down the objects, which were picked up on army radar screens.

    The classified documents were secured under the US Freedom of Information Act by Dave Clarke, an author researching the subject.

    One US Air Force intelligence report described how '12 to 15' objects were picked up on radar screens on 13 August 1956. They were tracked for more than 50 miles. One object was logged travelling at 4,000mph. 'Operators making these radar sightings are of the opinion that malfunctions of equipment did not cause these radar sightings,' the document said.

    The radar logs describe white lights darting across the skies. At times, the objects travelled in formation and performed sharp turns.

    One document describes how an object was tracked by radar for 26 miles, before it hovered for five minutes then flew away again.

    A cable was sent from US Air Force Headquarters in Washington warning of the 'considerable interest and concern' at the sightings and demanding an immediate inquiry. The cable asked if they were linked to a similar scare reported by a British radar station on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea a week later.

    Most UFO sightings are explained by phenomena such as clouds, weather balloons or unusual atmospheric events. At the time of the 'Lakenheath incident', observers did report an unusual level of meteorite activity. Meteors, and the trails they leave behind, can register on radars and critics have said this explains the Lakenheath incident.

    Astronomical phenomena are also considered a possible cause. One pilot sent up to intercept the objects reported 'chasing a star.' Others described objects they were able to 'lock on' to with their radar systems but that then manoeuvred around them.

    But for UFO believers the new documents confirm their Lakenheath sightings as the most dramatic of British UFO encounters and provide proof that alien craft have 'buzzed' Britain for the past 50 years. 'I am absolutely convinced they were breaches of our airspace by some extraordinary flying machines,' said Graham Birdsall, editor of UFO magazine.

    Clarke admitted this weekend it was difficult to attribute all the visual sightings and radar activity both from the ground and the on- board radar systems to meteorites or weather conditions. He believes the incident was treated so seriously by the military that it sparked a Cold War security scare. By 1956, the RAF Lakenheath air base, where the fighters were scrambled from, was on the front line of the geopolitical divide. Lakenheath played host to the new super- sensitive American U-2 spy planes and also provided storage facilities for atomic bombs.

    Clues to solving the mystery may still lie in secret US archives. After being told no more documentation existed, Clarke discovered a reference to a further document on the incident in the US National Archives. He has logged a request to release it. All British reports were destroyed in a fire five years after the event, according to RAF records.

    Clarke believes the incident had such serious security implications that documents must still exist. 'I am a UFO sceptic but this is an incident that has me baffled. It is just possible that some form of Soviet spy craft was responsible, but difficult to match any of their planes to what was observed at the time,' he said.

    Source: The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk%5Fnews/story/0%2C6903%2C992218%2C00
    .html =====================================================================
    - THE MANY ARMS OF OCTOPUS DEPARTMENT -

    Promis software transferred to bin Laden and Saddam

    Top spy catcher quits Homeland Security Department… Paul Redmond was on trail of how Promis software was transferred to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

    America's top spy-catcher, Paul Redmond, has suddenly resigned in the middle of his secret investigation into how Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden obtained state-of-the-art US computer software.

    The software is claimed to enable the two most wanted men in the world to avoid capture because it can pin-point for them every move in the global man-hunt. Redmond's departure last week was accepted "without discussion" by President Bush - the man who had brought the spy catcher out of retirement to conduct the investigation. Hours after Redmond had cleared his desk, Bush ordered a £25 million bound bounty on Saddam's head.

    He wants Saddam "dead or alive". And the same for Osama bin Laden. Already Bush has agreed to either man forgoing a trial and to be shot after interrogation.

    The official reason given for Redmond's abrupt departure from his wide-ranging investigation reaching deep into the Bush administration was "health reasons".

    But stunned colleagues in the Homeland Security department in Washington, where Redmond had his office, insist the former Associate Director of the CIA was in perfect health.

    Redmond's abrupt departure has led to intense speculation that he may have begun to uncover embarrassing details of how the software came into the hands of Saddam and bin Laden.

    Documents obtained by the respected International Currency Review, a London based newsletter for the financial community, allege that the software was provided to Saddam on the authority of President Bush's father when he was in the White House - a time when relations between Iraq and Washington were close, during Baghdad's war with Iran.

    The Review's publisher, Christopher Story, a former financial adviser to Lady Thatcher, operates from offices near Buckingham Palace.

    "The documents are extremely sensitive and raise some very serious questions", was all Mr Story would say. He confirmed they had originally been in the possession of Barzan al-Takriti, Saddam's half- brother, when he was managing Saddam's estimated £40 billion fortune.

    A Paris intelligence source said the documents were copied by operatives of DGSE, the French intelligence service, earlier this year when al-Takriti made a visit to several banks in Geneva.

    He is now in American hands - one of the key names on the famous "deck of cards" list. Shortly after the documents reached Washington on the eve of the war with Iraq, President Bush brought Paul Redmond out of retirement.

    Redmond was a legendary CIA spy catcher who helped unmask some of the most infamous spies before his 1998 retirement. He was told to investigate how Robert Hanssen, the renegade FBI computer specialist who was a long-time Soviet agent, had handed over a copy of the software - known as Promis - to his KGB controllers for $2 million. Hanssen, now serving a life sentence for his treachery, has yet to reveal all he knows about how the KGB sold on a copy of the software to Osama bin Laden for $4 million shortly before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

    "But until Redmond's abrupt resignation, increasingly the documents relating to Saddam's use of Promis - and his relationship with President Bush's father - were what Redmond had begun to focus on", said a source close to the departed spy catcher.

    Originally developed by a small company in Washington called Inslaw, there are now a number of versions of the software. One version was installed by MI6 early in the 1990s. After Hanssen's arrest, the software was removed. Germany's intelligence service, BND, did the same to its version of the software - supplied by the CIA in 1993.

    William Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, said that top Bush aides and FBI director Robert Mueller had met to discuss the "implications" of Redmond's investigation.

    "Redmond has said that Hanssen did hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. I have been told that Redmond's health is fine and there is a much more important reason for his resignation", said Mr Hamilton.

    Like Story, Mr Hamilton did not want to elaborate. But both men conceded that Redmond's investigation could have caused embarrassment to President Bush and his family.

    Source: Globe-Intel http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/afn_articles/afn_spy.htm
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    - DIDN'T STAND A GHOST OF A CHANCE DEPARTMENT -

    Blessing Ends Phantoms' Shopping Trip

    Ghosts among the bargains have been haunting staff at one of The Warehouse's stores.

    But a blessing by three ministers appears to have banished the spectral visitors.

    The blessing ceremony was done at The Warehouse store in Nelson after staff reported seeing ghosts in the eight-year-old building.

    Store manager Ross Barnett said he did not know exact details of the sightings, but had heard of several.

    One was of a girl believed to have been killed at the Bishopdale railway shunting yards in the early 1900s.

    And he had been told there used to be a funeral home near The Warehouse site.

    Staff saw the girl "very vividly" in the original building and in an extension added a year ago.

    "They saw her even down to her pale blue dress."

    Mr Barnett said two staff members who had seen the girl's ghost knew the history of her death.

    "They were not terrified, scared or anything - they were aware of the historical tie with what had happened and were more surprised that she was seen."

    Archdeacon Harvey Whakaruru, one of the ministers who blessed the site, said it appeared the "unusual happenings" came after the building was extended across a waterway.

    The tapu-lifting was not an exorcism, he said.

    It was an "acknowledgment of our old Maori customs that if you disturb our earth mother, you carry out a blessing in respect of the disturbance that has been made".

    Mr Barnett said no ghosts had been seen since the blessing.

    Source: New Zealand Herald http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3512031&thesection- THE GROWING DISSENT DEPARTMENT -

    WMDs and the Psychology of Fanaticism - By Arianna Huffington

    By all accounts, the behind-the-scenes battle within the Bush administration over just what information should be used, or spun, or hidden, to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to America and the rest of the world was a knockdown, drag-out fight between the facts and a zealous, highly politicized, "who needs proof?" mindset. And, at the end of the day, the truth was left writhing on the floor.

    Hey, why let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good war?

    This pathological pattern of disregarding inconvenient reality is not just troubling - it's deadly. And it's threatening to drag us into a Sisyphean struggle against evildoers in Syria, Iran, North Korea, or whatever locale Karl Rove thinks would best advance "Operation Avoid 41's Fate."

    Since I'm not a psychiatrist, I consulted the work of various experts in the field in order to get a better understanding of the fanatical mindset that is driving the Bush administration's agenda - and scaring the living daylights out of a growing number of observers.

    Dr. Norman Doidge, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has identified among the telltale symptoms of fanatics: an intolerance of dissent, a doctrine that is riddled with contradictions, the belief that one's cause has been blessed or even commanded by God, and the use of reinforcement techniques such as repetition to spread one's message.

    Sound like anyone you know? George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle... come on down!

    According to Doidge, one of the essential features of fanatics is their certainty that not only is their cause good "but that it is the only good, an absolute good." Or as President Bush famously declared: "There is no in-between, as far as I'm concerned. Either you're with us, or you're against us."

    This absolute intolerance of dissent, says Doidge, often extends beyond the fanatics' enemies - frequently leading to a "campaign of terror" against those within their own ranks. If you're wondering what this has to do with the Bush administration, you might want to give a call to Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich.

    After having the temerity to question the wisdom of the president's massive tax cut plan, the senatorial pair became the targets of withering TV attack ads, sponsored by allies of the White House, that portrayed them as "so-called Republicans" and compared their opposition to the latest round of tax cuts to France's opposition to the war in Iraq. It was a Night of the Long Knives, GOP-style.

    Another crucial element of a fanatic's faith, according to Professor Dixon Sutherland, who teaches religion at Stetson University, is that he "sees himself as acting for God... You have a circular logic that is very powerful that combines God's authority - through the Bible - with a messenger who carries out that authority."

    Tom DeLay, for example, saw the 2000 election as a choice between a "biblical worldview" and the worldview of "humanism, materialism, sexism, naturalism, post-modernism or any of the other -isms." And the Republican Party, of course, represented the biblical worldview, God and all things good.

    Gustav le Bon, a social scientist known for his crowd psychology theories, has stressed the importance of repetition as a weapon in the fanatic's arsenal. Repetition breeds blind acceptance and contagion.

    "Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs," writes le Bon, "possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes." As James Moore, co-author of "Bush's Brain," says, "If the president says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11."

    The technique was so successful that a poll taken by the Pew Center in 2002 showed that 66 percent of Americans believed that Hussein and bin Laden were both behind the attacks. In the words of that giant banner that Rove had placed behind the president following his Top Gun landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln: "Mission Accomplished."

    Wonder why the WMD are MIA? The answer may lie in the DSM - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I know it can sound a bit cheap to call people you disagree with nuts, which is why I refer you to the psychiatric literature. And keep an open mind, something the Bushies stopped doing a long time ago.

    -Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." -

    Source: Alternet.org http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16204
    =====================================================================
    - SECRET MESSAGES IN THE FIELDS DEPARTMENT -

    Theorems in Wheat Fields

    It's no wonder that farmers with fields in the plains surrounding Stonehenge, in southern England, face late-summer mornings with dread. On any given day at the height of the growing season, as many as a dozen farmers are likely to find a field marred by a circle of flattened grain.

    Plagued by some enigmatic nocturnal pest, the farmers must contend not only with damage to their crops but also with the intrusions of excitable journalists, gullible tourists, befuddled scientists, and indefatigable investigators of the phenomenon.


    Indeed, the study of these mysterious crop circles has itself grown into a thriving cottage industry of sightings, measurements, speculations, and publications. Serious enthusiasts call themselves cereologists, after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

    Most crop deformations appear as simple, nearly perfect circles of grain flattened in a spiral pattern. But a significant number consist of circles in groups, circles inside rings, or circles with spurs and other appendages. Within these geometric forms, the grain itself may be laid down in various patterns.

    Explanations of the phenomenon range from the bizarre and the unnatural to the merely fantastic. To some people, the circles-which began appearing nearly 3 decades ago-represent the handiwork of extraterrestrial visitors. Others attribute the formations to crafty tradesmen bent on mischief after an evening at the pub, pranksters commemorating a recent movie, or even hordes of graduate students driven by a mad professor. To a few, the circles suggest the action of numerate whirlwinds, microwave-generated ball lightning, or some other peculiar atmospheric phenomenon.

    These scenarios apparently suffered a severe blow in 1991, when two elderly landscape painters, David Chorley and Douglas Bower, admitted to creating many of the giant, circular wheat-field patterns that had cropped up during the previous decade in southern England. The chuckling hoaxers proudly displayed the wooden planks, ball of string, and primitive sighting device they claimed they had used to construct the circles.

    But this newspaper-orchestrated, widely publicized admission didn't settle the whole mystery, and new patterns continued to appear during subsequent summers. Moreover, in the wake of their admission, retired astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins felt compelled to write to Bower and Chorley. He asked how they had managed to discover and incorporate a number of ingenious, previously unknown geometric theorems-of the type that appear in antique textbooks on Euclidean geometry-into what he called their "artwork in the crops." Hawkins concluded his letter as follows: "The media did not give you credit for the unusual cleverness behind the design of the patterns."

    Hawkins' first encounter with crop circles had occurred early in 1990. Famous for his investigations of Stonehenge as an early astronomical observatory, he responded to suggestions by colleagues that he look into crop circles, which were defacing fields suspiciously close to Stonehenge.

    Of course, there was no connection between crop circles and the stone circles of Stonehenge, but Hawkins found the crop formations sufficiently intriguing to begin a systematic study of their geometry. Using data from published ground surveys and aerial photographs, he painstakingly measured the dimensions and calculated the ratios of the diameters and other key features in 18 patterns that included more than one circle or ring.

    In 11 of those structures, Hawkins found ratios of small whole numbers that precisely matched the ratios defining the diatonic scale. These ratios produce the eight notes of an octave in the musical scale corresponding to the white keys on a piano.

    The existence of these ratios prompted Hawkins to begin looking for geometric relationships among the circles, rings, and lines of several particularly distinctive patterns that had been recorded in the fields. Their creation had to involve more than blind luck, he concluded.

    Hawkins' first crop-circle candidate, which had appeared in a field in 1988, consisted of a pattern of three separate circles arranged so that their centers rested at the corners of an equilateral triangle. Within each circle, the hoaxers had flattened the grain to create 48 spokes.

    Hawkins approached the problem experimentally by sketching diagrams and looking for hints of geometric relationships. He found that he could draw three straight lines, or tangents, that each touched all three circles. Measurements revealed that the ratio of the diameter of a large circle-drawn so that it passes through the centers of the three original circles-to the diameter of one of the original circles is close to 4:3.

    Was there an underlying geometric theorem proving that a 4:3 ratio had to arise in such a configuration of circles? Armed with his measurements and statistical analyses, Hawkins began pondering the arrangement. After several weeks, he had his proof.

    Hawkins' first theorem was suggested by a triplet of crop circles discovered on June 4, 1988, at Cheesefoot Head. Hawkins noticed that he could draw three straight lines, or tangents, that each touched all three circles. By drawing in the equilateral triangle formed by the circles' centers and adding a large circle centered on this triangle, he found and proved Theorem I: The ratio of the diameter of the triangle's circumscribed circle to the diameter of the circles at each corner is 4:3.

    Over the next few months, Hawkins discovered three more geometric theorems, all involving diatonic ratios arising from the ratios of areas of circles, among various crop-circle patterns. In one case, for example, an equilateral triangle fitted snugly between an outer and inner circle, with the area of the outer circle precisely four times that of the inner circle.

    Theorem II: For an equilateral triangle, the ratio of the areas of the circumscribed (outer) and inscribed (inner) circles is 4:1. The area of the ring between the circles is 3 times the area of the inscribed circle.

    Theorem III: For a square, the ratio of the areas of the circumscribed and inscribed circles is 2:1. If a second square is inscribed within the inscribed circle of the first, and so on to the mth square, then the ratio of the areas of the original circumscribed circle and the innermost circle is 2m:1.

    Theorem IV: For a regular hexagon, the ratio of the areas of the outer circle and the inscribed circle is 4:3.

    For Hawkins, it was a matter of first recognizing a significant geometric relationship, and then proving in a mathematically rigorous fashion precisely what that relationship is. "That was the approach I had taken at Stonehenge," Hawkins remarked. "It wasn't just one alignment here and nothing there. That would have had no significance. It was the whole pattern of alignments with the sun and the moon over a long period that made it ring true to me. Once you get a pattern, you know it probably won't go away."

    There was more. Hawkins came to realize that his four original theorems, derived from crop-circle patterns, were really special cases of a single, more general theorem. "I found the underlying principles-a common thread-that applied to everything, which led me to the fifth theorem," he said. The theorem involves concentric circles that touch the sides of a triangle, and as the triangle changes shape, it generates the special crop-circle patterns.

    Hawkins' fifth crop-circle theorem involves a triangle and various concentric circles touching the triangle's sides and corners. Different triangles give different sets of circles. An equilateral triangle produces one of the observed crop-circle patterns; three isosceles triangles generate the other crop-circle geometries.

    Remarkably, Hawkins could find none of these theorems in the works of Euclid, the ancient Greek geometer who had established the basic techniques and rules for what is known as Euclidean geometry. Hawkins was also surprised at his failure to find the crop-circle theorems in any of the mathematics textbooks and references, ancient and modern, that he consulted.

    This suggested to Hawkins that the hoaxer (or hoaxers) had to know a lot of old-fashioned geometry. Hawkins himself had had the kind of British grammar-school education that years ago had instilled a healthy respect for Euclidean geometry. "We started at the age of 12 with this sort of stuff, so it became part of one's life and thinking," Hawkins said. That generally doesn't happen nowadays.

    The hoaxers apparently had the requisite knowledge not only to prove a Euclidean theorem but also to conceive of an original theorem in the first place-a far more challenging task. To show how difficult such a task can be, Hawkins often playfully refused to divulge his fifth theorem, inviting anyone interested to come up with the theorem itself before trying to prove it. In an article published in The Mathematics Teacher, he challenged readers to come up with his unpublished theorem, given only the four variations. No one reported success.

    What Hawkins had obtained was a kind of intellectual fingerprint of the hoaxers involved in creating these particular crop-circle patterns. "One has to admire this sort of mind, let alone how it's done or why it's done," he remarked. Curiously, in 1996, the crop- circle makers showed knowledge of Hawkins' fifth theorem by laying down a new pattern that satisfied its geometric constraints.

    Did Chorley and Bower have the mathematical sophistication to depict novel Euclidean theorems in the wheat? Not likely. The persons responsible for this old-fashioned type of mathematical ingenuity remain at large. Their handiwork flaunts an uncommon facility with Euclidean geometry and signals an astonishing ability to enter fields undetected, to bend living plants without cracking stalks, and to trace complex, precise patterns, presumably using little more than pegs and ropes, all under cover of darkness.

    Perhaps Euclid's ghost is stalking the English countryside by night, leaving its distinctive mark wherever it happens to alight.

    Source: Science News http://www.sciencenews.org/20030628/mathtrek.asp
    =====================================================================
    - THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN DEPARTMENT -

    Canada May Still Hold Millions in Secret Confederate Gold

    Southern spies preparing for a Confederate resurgence after the U.S. Civil War may have buried millions of dollars in gold at sites across Canada in the 1860s -- part of an enormous treasure that, say the authors of a new book, is only now being unearthed.

    Warren Getler and Bob Brewer, who co-wrote Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man's Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy, say Canada was an important haven for Confederate operatives during the Civil War who went on to form the nucleus of a secret society -- the Knights of the Golden Circle -- that kept the South's dream of independence alive for decades after the Union army's victory.

    "By war's end, exiled Confederate and KGC cadres operating out of Canada under the seasoned leadership of Jacob Thompson, Clement Clay and Thomas Hines had amassed a treasury estimated at more than $2 million in gold and silver coinage," the book says.

    The authors believe that most of the money from Canadian bank accounts and coin caches, which totalled as much as $5 million according to some of the book's sources, was eventually repatriated and hidden in the American south.

    But because of the strict secrecy surrounding the Confederacy's cash reserves, and the generations that have passed since the money was buried, no one can for say for sure where the treasure is.

    Mr. Brewer, who is descended from members of the KGC, claims to have discovered -- among other finds -- a fruit jar filled with gold and silver coins in the Arkansas backwoods after deciphering a series of coded maps, inscribed stone tablets and other landscape markers. The book offers only general clues about where other caches might be found, since Mr. Brewer is continuing his own hunt for the Confederate hoard.

    "Bob and a few others have been finding real treasure that was buried in this coded, geometric grid system," said Mr. Getler, a journalist who has worked for the Wall Street Journal and International Herald Tribune, yesterday in an interview.

    Canada's connections to the Confederacy are well-documented by historians, who have long been aware that John Wilkes Booth -- who assassinated U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 -- may have planned the attack a few months earlier during meetings in Montreal with Confederate spies and Southern sympathizers.

    "Agents -- some people call them Confederate secret service, we call them KGC -- were operating out of key areas such as Toronto, Montreal, Niagara Falls, Windsor," says Mr. Getler. "They were operating there as a financial reserve or haven and as an operational platform" conducting sabotage runs and robbery raids in the northern U.S.

    Among the key figures involved in the KGC was Albert Pike, a Confederate exile in Canada whose experience as a leading Freemason appears to explain the elaborate coding system used to hide money and which Mr. Brewer is now unlocking to find treasure sites.

    The treasure is believed to have been amassed from the Confederacy's government reserves, from wartime raids on northern banks and from tithes offered by northern supporters of the Southern cause.

    Mr. Getler and Mr. Brewer say cash burials offered the only reliable method of safekeeping Confederate wealth at the time. The authors believe that a network of KGC "sentinels" were responsible for hiding various amounts gold and silver, protecting the caches during their lifetime, and then passing on to others the coded information that would one day yield the treasure locations and help finance a second Civil War.

    "I would say there is a possibility that KGC treasure does exist in the north, because this organization was operating throughout the country and in Canada," says Mr. Getler. In particular, he adds, "there's a possibility that Confederate treasure is buried in that region around Windsor." But the clues also point to "treasures in the northwest of the country, places like Oregon and Montana" and the sparsely settled Canadian west that bordered those states.

    In another bizarre twist in the story, the authors say that the infamous outlaw Jesse James was part of the KGC network. He is alleged to have led a convoy with $80,000 worth of Confederate gold to a hiding spot in New Mexico, while "other convoys headed south into Florida, one went into Mexico, another into Canada, after traveling west into Kansas and going north to avoid Union troops."

    Source: The Ottawa Citizen
    http://canada.com/national/story.asp?id=B6D0CC00-63B4-4F8A-A4D1-
    74D71A5D7440 =====================================================================
    - MYSTERY OF THE MISSING JETLINER DEPARTMENT -

    Pilot Of Stolen Boeing Probably Killed Says Brother

    An American pilot who sparked a global terrorist alert when he disappeared in Africa with a fully-fueled jetliner has probably been murdered, his brother said yesterday.

    In an exclusive interview with Scotland on Sunday, Joe Padilla spoke for the first time of his belief that his brother Ben was hijacked at the controls of the Boeing 727 at Luanda airport in Angola and killed after the plane took off without permission, vanishing without trace.

    Neither Ben Padilla, who comes from Miami, nor the plane have been seen since their disappearance on the evening of May 25, despite an extensive search across the continent by several African nations, the US State Department and the CIA.

    "I hate to say it, but my brother is probably deceased," said Joe Padilla from his home in Pensacola, Florida.

    "He would have been in touch with his family had he been able to. We desperately want to see him home again, but we are steeling ourselves for the worst."

    Padilla's mystery disappearance prompted fears that terrorists had taken the plane for a September 11-style suicide attack somewhere in Africa, particularly because the aircraft, a former American Airlines passenger jet, had been converted into a fuel carrier and had just been filled with 14,000 gallons.

    At first the family discounted terrorism, preferring to believe a theory that the plane might have crashed through mechanical failure because it had spent 14 months on the Tarmac in Luanda and had not been properly maintained.

    But Padilla says he has new information from the planeís owner, the president of an aircraft-leasing firm in Miami, which points instead to a hijacking. Ben, a 51-year-old freelance pilot who has flown cargo planes around the world for more than 20 years, was hired to organise the repossession of the plane from a company that failed to maintain lease payments.

    "Ben spent two-and-a-half months in Angola overseeing a full reworking of the plane so it was in tip-top condition," Padilla said. "On the day it disappeared, Ben was only taking the plane out to the end of the runway and back just to see how things were working. He wasn't licensed to fly a plane as big as that and the two pilots he was hiring weren't even on board, so that tells me right there it's been hijacked.

    "The plane took off without permission and failed to respond to the control tower, but we don't know what happened after that. We hope he was just captured, but I have to doubt he's still alive. I hope I'm wrong, but whoever took that plane probably killed him."

    Padilla also rejects a theory that Ben was part of a plot to steal the plane. "Two days before he disappeared, he paid $43,000 of the owner's money to the airport authorities to clear the bill for the plane having been there so long. If my brother had stolen the plane, he'd have taken the money also."

    American authorities believe the aircraft was more likely to have been taken for criminal purposes such as smuggling drugs or weapons rather than any terrorist activity, although the FBI will not reveal any details of their investigation.

    Whatever the truth of Benís disappearance, however, his family have been deeply affected. "We were all very close, and he used to call me wherever he was," said Padilla, who said his sister Benita and her baby son Johnathan were also missing him.

    "We got an e-mail to him a couple of months ago telling him our mother had had a heart attack and he promised to call as soon as he was able, but since then we've heard nothing.

    "But we've got to keep searching, even if he's dead. If he is, we want his body home."

    Source: scotsman.com http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=735302003