Page 70 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - June 2015 Edition

60 Contact - Woodstock of UFOs
Venus and Jupiter are so
bright you might think it's
a UFO
The nighttime sky will have such a spectacular
celestial show in the coming days that some will
likely mistake it for a UFO. “Venus is so bright,
it’s hard for some to believe it’s a natural
object,” said Jim Craig, director of the James H.
Lynn Planetarium at the Schiele Museum.
The nighttime sky will have such a
spectacular celestial show in the coming days
that some will likely mistake it for a UFO.
“Venus is so bright, it’s hard for some to
believe it’s a natural object,” said Jim Craig,
director of the James H. Lynn Planetarium at the
Schiele Museum.
“Especially for people driving west
toward Kings Mountain. They’ll see Venus go
from one side of the road to the other, but they
don’t realize the curvature in the road (U.S.
74),” Craig said.
“I will probably get a lot of UFO calls,”
he added.
Between now and the end of the month,
the brilliant Venus and the giant Jupiter will
dominate the western sky just after it turns dark.
Now about 9 degrees apart, the second
and fifth planets in our solar system will appear
closer together in the night sky until they are just is one of the largest conventions of its kind in the
one-third of a degree apart on June 30 and July
1.
To better understand, remember there are
360 degrees in a circle.
Venus, the brightest natural object in the
nighttime sky besides the moon, shines about
five times brighter than Jupiter, which on
average rates as the third brightest object in the
nighttime sky.
Watching the “Earth-like” Venus and the
gas-giant Jupiter come together proves to be a
treat.
“As far as conjunctions go, this is going
to be a very good one,” Craig said. “ I f
someone doesn’t have their glasses on they may
only see one object when they look in the sky
(toward June 30.”
Conjunctions, the word that describes
pairings in the sky, occur rather often. On
Thursday and Friday of this week, a new moon
will be added to the show.
The planets are not actually getting
closer to one another, but just appear that way,
Craig said.
It makes it fun to look at the planets over
several days.
“If they go out tonight, and then go out
the next night and the next night, they’ll see
them come much closer together,” Craig said. []
'Woodstock of UFOs'
event is bigger than ever
in third year
JOSHUA TREE, Calif. — Bob Dumovitz had
driven more than 600 miles, from the mountains
of Colorado to the deserts of California, looking
for answers.
After darkness fell Thursday, he sat
outside his camper, resting in a lounge chair,
enveloped in silence. Overhead, the dark sky
twinkled, as if every star was giving a knowing
wink.
Maybe — just maybe — the answers
were up there, Dumovitz said.
"I've been on this Earth for 65 years, and I still
don't know who we are or why we are here," he
said. "That's why I came."
Dumovitz, a retired construction worker
from Mancos, Colo., is one of thousands of UFO
enthusiasts who have descended into Southern
California's High Desert this weekend for
Contact in the Desert, an annual UFO
conference.
The four-day event, now in its third year,
United States, and the fastest growing. This year,
Contact has nearly 50 lecturers and more than
2,000 attendees, with both figures doubling
since the event began.
"This is the Woodstock of UFOs," said
Marshall Klarfeld, an alien researcher from La
Quinta, Calif. who lectured at Contact for the
third year in a row. "People come here, and they
stay in tents … because they have basic
questions. Who are we? Who is God? And
where did we come from?"
Klarfeld specializes in the study of the
Anunnaki, 9-foot tall extraterrestrials who
supposedly helped guide primitive humans to
civilization. That might sound a little out there,
but theories like this one are the norm at
Contact, which is dominated with presentations
about a secret history of humanity's ancient alien
benefactors.
Paul Andrews, a Los Angeles event
coordinator who cofounded Contact, said he
started the conference to create a "safe
environment" for this kind of discussion. At
Contact, researchers don't undercut each other,
and conspiracy theorists can share and listen
without anyone "snickering," Andrews said.
Contact is held at the Joshua Tree Retreat
Center, a cluster of iconic mid-century buildings
nestled between the twisty, spiny namesake
trees.
Andrews said this spot was chosen, at
least in part, because of its long history of UFO
sightings.
"We think the likelihood of someone
having a sighting, or having an encounter, are
higher here than anywhere else," Andrews said.
When Contact began on Friday morning,
lectures began at full speed, unraveling the
entire course of human history in a matter of
minutes. UFO experts immediately started
talking about evidence of ancient aliens, crop
circles, gigantic secret pyramids and — of
course — an extensive government cover-up.
"It's all out there," said Jim Marrs, a
renowned author, famous for his books on UFOs
and the Kennedy assassination. "And they are
hiding it from you."
Other lecturers included Giorgio
Tsoukalos, the star of the History Channel's
"Ancient Aliens;" Laura Eisenhower, the great-
granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower;
and Story Musgrave, a veteran NASA astronaut.
In the evenings, Contact attendees gather for sky
watching and a demonstration by a "UFO
caller," which is sort of like a bird caller, only
with aliens.
During a series of interviews on
Thursday evening, numerous Contact attendees
said they were drawn to the event because of the
incredible open-mindedness of both the experts
and the audience.
Not every attendee ascribed to the same
alien theory, but were united by their skepticism
of common science, doubt of by-the-book
history and distrust of the U.S. government.
For example, Dumovitz, the construction
worker from Colorado, believes in Atlantis. One
of the neighboring campers insisted the earth
was flat. Anywhere else, these ideas would have
been met with mockery.
But not here.[]