MITRE brings up just as many questions as answers. They’ve provided funding and expertise to a wide variety of organizations — Postol, MIT, RRF Confections, the IRS. But there’s nothing substantial, nothing to go on. Maybe I’m on the wrong track after all. I feel like I’ve been investigating in circles. All this time searching and I’m right back where I started.
Spending all my time digging into Jason. What information is out there is a little sketchy, but Christofilos was definitely heavily involved in the early going. Looking into something that might prove worthwhile. A company called MITRE was created by the government in the 1960s. From what I can gather, their sole purpose was funding groups like Jason. I’m wondering if all the questions — Christofilos, energy, Argus, Jason — dead end at MITRE.
Figured out why I kept seeing the fine constant symbol. It’s actually a reference to a group called Project 137. Project 137 was a team of elite scientists brought together to propose and conduct secret experiments for the government in the late 1950s. They later changed their name to Jason. What the Manhattan Project was to the 1940s, Jason is to every secret government project since 1960. One of the founding members was Nicholas Christofilos.
Just when I thought I had zeroed in on Christofilos as the probable source of some of my answers, some new questions emerge. Is there anyone out there who can give me a quick lesson on the fine structure constant? For the longest time, I thought the symbol I kept seeing in document after document was just a badly written “a”. Paid no attention to it. Now I’m realizing that it refers to the value of the electromagnetic force on an atomic level. Literally, every redacted document I have has this symbol written on it. What does it mean?
Starting to think that there is more to Christofilos and energy than I originally thought. The documents I found that referenced Astron were heavily notated with “TF88″ and “OBT.” No idea what “OBT” means, but “TF88” is almost certainly Task Force 88, a military group put together to run a project called Argus. Argus was a series of high-altitude nuclear tests conducted in the late 1950s designed to create artificial Van Allen Belts in the atmosphere. And who proposed this massive, multi-million dollar operation? The physicist with no formal training, Nicholas Christofilos. How is that a man who headed a failed project a few years before — Astron — was suddenly tapped to head an even larger military project? It brings me back to the same question — did Astron actually fail or did Christofilos, in fact, discover fusion or some other form of energy? And how is Argus related?
I may have figured what “Astron” was referring to. A scientist named Nicholas Christifilos worked on a project called Astron at the Livermore Labs in the mid-1950s. It was apparently a failed fusion project, but now I’m wondering if it really did fail as spectacularly as reported. After all, immediately thereafter Christofilos started working on high-level government projects involving the Van Allen Belts. The weirdest wrinkle — he had little formal training as a physicist! It got me to wondering — did Nicholas Christofilos accidentally discover fusion or some other energy source?
Another curious reference in some of the material I found – the word “Astron.” Did some research and found several possible answers, but nothing definitive.
There was a Soviet spacecraft called Astron that launched a huge ultraviolet telescope into space that studied the earth’s radiation belts. There’s also an astronomy research group called Astron based in the Netherlands. Either of these ring a bell?
Needed to focus on something so I started researching more about the Van Allen Belts and ended up getting buried in research about them. The strangest article I found was in, of all places, the New York Times.
It was only tangentially about the Van Allen Belts. Most of it was about Explorer 3, a satellite that was launched into space to explore the belts and ended up going missing when, presumably, its orbit decayed.
Several airline pilots reported seeing flashes in the sky around the time that Explorer 3 stopped responding, but government sources insisted that it couldn’t have been Explorer 3 re-entering the atmosphere.
It made me wonder: why was the government so sure? Was Explorer 3 actually doing something different up there? Did it actually lose communication?
Several of you have sent in emails asking for more info about Dr. Leyda Cupe. Frankly, I’m not even sure she exists outside of a few books and journals but I was hoping her name might jog someone’s memory.
I found an old file where she was mentioned, among other things. Her name appeared in connection with a hypothesis that the Van Allen Belts in the Earth’s magnetic field could potentially be used to extract or generate some form of energy source. Notes in the margin seemed to indicate a connection to long-term space exploration. Has anyone else heard more about this idea or her findings?
http://www.crystalinks.com/area51.html
Speaking of nuclear testing, here’s one of the more infamous locations. Anything here we could be missing?
I know there is no shortage of crazy rumors about Area 51, but I also know that there at least a few thousand of you who work[ed] at Nellis. Anyone have anything interesting to send me? Anyone know any of these people? Anyone know what Seesaw might mean in this context?
