Reading Celestial Intentions Through the Wrong End of the Telescope: Missiles, UFOs and the Cold War

Originally published on SOTT.net on July 12, 2012.

May you live in interesting times

~ Ancient Chinese proverb

There were widespread reports from the Middle East to central Asia of a strange phenomenon in the late evening sky on June 7th. Emergency phone lines lit up as excited eyewitnesses reported a spectacular light display. Judging by the distribution of media coverage that followed, people in Israel and Lebanon were particularly excited about the event, reporting the extraordinary sighting of “multiple airborne objects”. It was apparently unmissable across a vast area because there were also multiple reports in Cyprus, Syria, Turkey, Jordan and several countries in the Caucasus. The earliest reports came from Lebanon where the daily L’Orient Le Jour reported that “meteorites were clearly visible” and LBCI News reported that “luminous objects and meteor bursts appeared over north Lebanon”, before quoting Lebanese astronomers as saying they were the result of a large meteorite that exploded and left “visible trails of dust.” Another Lebanese publication, Naharnet, described the phenomenon as a “meteoric downpour”, while the state-run National News Agency reported that the objects were “clearly visible.”

It’s at this point that the story changed from being one of multiple ‘meteoric’ sightings to just a single fiery object that was “probably” a Russian missile.

The next day, Friday 8 June, the Jerusalem Post reported that Russia had carried out a successful rocket launch of an inter-continental ballistic missile the previous evening, Thursday June 7th. The Post went on to quote a spokesperson for the Israeli Astronomical Association as saying “the object reached an altitude of 80 kilometres.” Sure enough, Russian news agency Interfax carried a report that cited the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN) as saying they had successfully launched an RS-12M Topol ICBM from the Kapustin Yar range in the country’s southern Astrakhan region missile at 21.39 local time on Thursday evening. The Russian Defence Ministry’s spokesman for RVSN, Col. Vadim Koval, told Interfax that “the missile hit the simulated target at the Sary-Shagan range in Kazakhstan with projected accuracy.” The RVSN’s own website was updated to account for this missile launch.

That would appear to have settled the issue for most. I’m not convinced though.

As far as I can tell, it was Israeli Ynet News that first speculated about this being a Russian missile, publishing a report shortly after midnight on June 7th that raises more questions than it answers:

Was UFO a Russian ballistic missile?
Ynet, Friday 8 June, 00:17

The glowing light reported in Israel’s skies around 8:45 pm Thursday apparently resulted from a failed intercontinental ballistic missile test by the Russian military, according to estimates.

[Ynet continued]

Hundreds of Israelis nationwide flooded police hotlines Thursday evening with reports of an unidentified flying object in the nation’s skies.

Later Thursday, Russian news agency Novosti quoted the Defense Ministry in Moscow, which confirmed that a missile was test-fired from the Astrakhan region in central Russia. The trail of light seen in Israel was also reported in Armenia, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan and other countries in the region.

[Ynet continued]

According to a statement issued by Russia’s Defense Ministry, crews belonging to the army’s strategic missile division successfully test-fired a ballistic missile at 9:39 pm, Moscow time. A video shot in the area the missile was fired from showed parts of the missile falling. However, the clip was removed a few minutes after being posted.

[Ynet continued]

Israeli Astronomical Association Chairman Dr. Yigal Pat-El said that it is quite possible that the unidentified flying object reported by residents nationwide was a ballistic missile test.

“It most likely spun out of control and its remnants and the fuel was what people saw. It reached a height of 200-300 kilometers and that’s why it was seen from so many locations,” he told Ynet.

[Ynet continued]

“We saw a large trail of light traveling from a distant spot in the sky,” Dorit from northern Israel reported earlier. “We could not see the source of the light. The trail was massive. It was an unusual sight. Moments later we saw swirling movement where the light was coming from.”

Concerned citizens in Armenia and Lebanon also called their local police stations after seeing the unusual glowing light. One Lebanese citizen reported seeing the light in the sky and in response an American web-surfer said it might be a military test. The Lebanese woman laughingly responded with: “A military test? Here?”

Anatoly Tsyganok, head of Russia’s Military Forecasting Centre and analyst at Russia’s Institute of Political and Military Analysis, was equally skeptical, telling Armenian News.am that “it was hardly a missile”. Russia Today‘s coverage of the ‘missile’ story brings up a couple of important points:

UFO or missile? Mystery lights raise havoc in Israel
Russia Today, Friday June 8th, 2012

Suspicions that the shining flying object could be a missile were further fuelled by a Russian Defense Ministry statement saying the country had successfully test-fired a Topol strategic intercontinental ballistic missile.

The launch was made from Russia’s southern Astrakhan region to a testing area in Kazakhstan 3500 km from Israel’s northern border where the object was seen.

The Russian Vesti-24 news channel quoted unnamed military officials as saying the missile hit the practice target despite the fact that it had an unusual flight trajectory.

“An unusual trajectory”? You can say that again! This ‘missile’ pulled off maneuvers on a par with the Magic Bullet and Flight 77‘s 270-degree corkscrew turn.

The missile was supposedly launched from a launch site in southwestern Russia, heading eastwards towards a missile testing site in eastern Kazakhstan. A “successful” rocket launch from Russia to Kazakhstan would have, presumably, followed the shortest possible trajectory to get there.

Take a look at this map:

Israel is over 2,000 km away from the ICBM’s launch site. It is some 5,500km away from the ICBM’s destination. The Russian Ministry of Defence stated that it travelled due east, directly to its target in Kazakhstan, so the missile’s distance from Israel and Lebanon became ever greater as it approached Kazakhstan’s border with northern China. In addition, eyewitnesses in the Middle East described this ‘missile’ as coming from a northerly direction. Check out this video of the event, taken from Israel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVv449Jkoc0

Did you notice at around 1’20” that onlookers in the street were looking nearly directly upwards when the missile either a.) “spun out of control” and performed that ‘Catherine Wheel‘ stunt halfway to space or b.) was “hitting its simulated target” in eastern Kazakhstan?

If this thing was launched from the ground, reached a certain altitude, then returned to impact the test site in eastern Kazakhstan, wouldn’t we expect to see some variance in the video footage? Instead all the videos I’ve seen so far show essentially the same thing – a dragon-like glowing trail in the distance, a fan- or bell-shaped trail high overhead and the moment the object appeared to break up, with jets creating a spiral motion. I suspect that the distant glowing trail only appears to be lower in the horizon due to the Earth’s curvature, generating the illusion that the object came from below on an upward trajectory. From every location that the event was filmed – in Armenia, for example – we see the same moment when the object generated a spiral effect, even in the following video shot from the Russian city of Astrakhan, which lies just 250 km east of the alleged launch site, meaning that observers there should have recorded radically different footage of the event:

Here’s another video taken from Astrakhan. Again there is no sign of any ICBM launch having taken place nearby. It seems that a couple of guys stopped by the side of the road to film the bizarre luminous trail. They appear to only connect the ‘missile’ to the trail when one of them excitedly spots it passing almost directly overhead:

This one was filmed from Volgograd, which is just 100 km from Kapustin Yar. Not only that, it lies west of the launch site.

Here’s a video taken by some of the CIA’s mercenaries in Syria, aka the Free Syrian Army. In spite of their barbaric behaviour towards Syrian civilians and security forces, and leaving aside their paranoia that they were being sprayed with poisonous gases, there do appear to be a couple of neurons firing between them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2le5OpkqQ

This one was filmed from Iran. I thought it very interesting that the Iranian news agencies apparently didn’t get the Russian ‘ICBM’ memo. The Iranian government instead claimed the ‘missile’ was one of theirs! Specifically, that it was part of their DAWN “scientific research” project. The fact that two major world nations both claimed that the ‘missile’ was theirs suggests that we’re dealing with a cover up here.

Comparisons have been made with the bizarre symmetrical spiral trail left behind by a Russian ICBM above northern Norway in December 2009. A subtle and potentially important difference between that event and the June 7th event is that, in December 2009, the Russian government immediately acknowledged that they had test-fired an ICBM, but had lost control of it. This time around, they discreetly claimed “success”.

There have been other missile and ‘maybe-missile’ launches in recent years that produced totally weird and unexpected displays. Check out this monster trail from California in August 2009. A very similar spiral display to the 7 June one was filmed from Kopeysk, southern Russia in December 2009, around the time of the Norway spiral event. Here’s another ghostly apparition filmed from different angles over Kazakhstan in January 2011. There appear to have been three such events filmed over China going back to 1988.

Almost two years to the day of the June 7th event, on June 5th 2010, another dazzling ‘UFO spiral’ was seen by thousands of eyewitnesses along eastern Australia. On this occasion we were again told that it was a missile launch, this time an American Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The launch was successful and the reason provided for the spiralling motion is that “rockets sometimes spin as they go into orbit.” I hope I am not alone in finding that explanation simply not believable. The object was seen “moving from West to East“, towards sunrise. Florida is 15,000 kilometres away to the northeast. On this occasion we were asked to believe that a ‘spinning rocket’ was just a rocket ‘doing its normal thing’. And yet on June 7th 2012 a ‘rocket/missile’ behaving in this way was one that “failed spectacularly” over the Middle East OR one that successfully impacted the testing site in Eastern Kazakhstan. So which was it?

“We do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!”

~ British astronomer Victor Clube, author of The Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter, in a report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force

Look again at the above map showing the Kasputin Yar launch site and the missile’s supposed target destination. I’ve no doubt that ICBMs are capable of astonishing feats, but launching from southwestern Russia, passing over Armenia, NATO member Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel before looping back northwestwards, presumably over Iran, to eastern Kazakhstan, is probably not one of them.

The circuitous route taken by the missile was noticed by this blogger, who speculated that the Russian government was warning Israel and other regional US allies that its destructive technology could reach them. He was joined by Thierry Meyssan and Voltairenet, who put forward the case that, in the context of the geopolitical implications of Western interference in Syria, this was Russia sending a message to the US: “don’t proceed with your plans for Syria or you will risk WWIII.”

In order to account for the discrepancy of this missile appearing overhead in the Near East (when its official trajectory took it in a different direction), Voltairenet suggested that a second missile was fired, specifically a Bulava R-30 class ICBM. They based this on “witness accounts”, then went on to state, without citing sources, that “the Bulava R-30 was launched from one of the fourth Borey-class strategic nuclear-powered submarines, that is to say either the Alexander Nevsky or the Yuri Dolgorukiy, which were officially scheduled to be deployed in June/July 2012 and one of them at least is already in Mediterranean waters.”

Such a scenario would explain why the phenomenon seen over Lebanon, Israel and Syria must have been ‘launched’ from a location far closer to the Levant than the ‘other missile’ fired over Kazakhstan. But that still leaves many unanswered questions.

Much more widely reported, just two weeks previously on May 23rd, was the launch of a brand new class of Russian ICBM, which was framed in the Western media as Russia’s response to NATO recently activating its missile shield in Europe. This new ICBM launch was “so secret it has no name yet.” Now that is a Cold War story I can believe; it fits the geo-political narrative.

On that occasion an ICBM was launched from Plesetsk in northern Russia, about 1,000 km from Moscow and 600 km from St. Petersburg, to the Kura missile test range on the remote Kamchatka peninsula in the far east of Russia. It too was reported as having impacted the designated test site. Assuming the May 23rd ICBM test was also a secret military launch that wasn’t publicly announced beforehand, shouldn’t Muscovites also have been calling police and emergency phone lines in their hundreds, mistakenly reporting a meteor sighting? And why, if they had very recently successfully launched a brand new ICBM, would the Russians subsequently “secretly test” an older model Topol-M on June 7th?

Speculation that this is Russia’s way of sending the US and Israel a message is also a theme running through many comments left by people on YouTube videos of the ‘missile’. I find this angle unlikely as it’s not in keeping with Russia’s policy of dampening the West’s march towards another war for oil, God and democracy. I also doubt that Russia would stand up to the Zionists in such a confrontational manner. Shouldn’t the Western media have had a field day with this, raking Russia over the coals for its ‘belligerent and reckless behaviour’ while capitalising on the opportunity to make the US, Israel and friends appear as benevolent peacemakers? What most people fail to understand is that, while the Russian government will use many tactics to protect its interests in Syria and the Middle East, initiating a world war with the USA and NATO is not one of them.

The headlines should have screamed something like the following:

‘Russia launches ICBM over Middle East – ‘World leaders condemns reckless action’ – ‘Emergency UN Security Council Convened’ – ‘US retaliates, steps up missile defense shield’…

But that’s not what happened.

Instead there was a wave of propaganda about Russia sending weapons, warships and troops to Syria, while Russia, Iran, China and Syria planned huge joint war games. Where exactly these war games were to take place – in a region so heavily controlled by the US military – was never divulged. But perhaps we shouldn’t have expected less from sources of the “unconfirmed” and “anonymous” kinds. When it all turned out to be fictional, the US government backtracked on its claims, although that hasn’t stopped non-stop hype feeding the Cold War narrative that the US and Russia are engaged in a proxy war in Syria.

In truth, there is only one ‘side’ sending troops and arms into that conflict. The Russians, Iranians and Chinese could well attempt clandestine counter-measures of their own, but the important point here is that, in stark contrast to the missile story’s implication that the Russian government is engaging in hardcore sabre-rattling, the pattern of Russian diplomacy to date has been cautious and very consistent. The Russian government is among the few voices calling for calm in the face of US and Western efforts to ignite civil war in Syria and thus set the whole region aflame. There are only two regimes on the planet that have the means, the motive and the concentration of psychopathy to throw a spectacular curveball by launching an ICBM on a sling-shot over the most politically unstable region on the planet. And the ruling clique in Russia isn’t among those regimes.

Although the Middle East is a tinderbox (and has, in fact, been so for a long time), if you’ve been following what’s really happening in Syria, you’ll realise that the same ‘controlled burn’ policy of destabilising nations in order to bring the ‘right’ types of leaders to power has been going on the world over as part of the deeper agenda towards overt global fascist rule by the psychopathic minority.

I can empathise with the desire to believe that on June 7th Vladimir Putin sent a serious statement of intent to the global pathocrats. It would be really really nice to believe that Putin is prepared to do whatever it takes to stand up to them. But what if that is purely wishful thinking based on several assumptions: that he is sincerely working towards protecting the interest of the greater good, that he is capable of doing so without igniting global nuclear war and that he is unaware that Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Incoming

The earlier reports of multiple meteor sightings, the fact that reports of this ‘missile’ were concentrated in Lebanon and Israel – far away from the ICBM’s trajectory provided by Russia’s Defence Ministry – the ‘circular reporting’ in the immediate aftermath of the event, the inherent contradiction of a failed missile that spun out of control 80km (or “200-300km”) up in the atmosphere and successfully impacted its target destination in Kazakhstan and the implausible notion that Russia would do something so rash, have all left me wondering whether or not the 7 June ‘missile’ was something else entirely.

What if those initial reports in Lebanon were accurate? Perhaps thousands thousands of people actually witnessed one or more meteor or comet fragments (MoCFs) high up in the atmosphere – certainly high enough to have been seen from locations covering a vast area of central Asia and the Middle East.

Thinking along those lines, I wonder if damage control kicked in to lasso that comet and make sure that everyone knew it was under PTB control as a “Russian missile” and if the Russian government had little choice but to go along with the cover-up? Or perhaps there really was an ICBM launch from southern Russia, but it wasn’t responsible for the display seen in the Middle East?

One reason a cosmic origin for this object has been dismissed is because it was said to have been travelling much too slowly to have been a MoCF. But this has been noted before: meteors, cometary fragments and fireballs have been reported down through the ages as doing weird things, such as moving very slowly, ‘spinning’ and even appearing to change directions mid-trajectory. If something is traversing so high up in the atmosphere that it’s practically sub-orbital, then it can briefly travel though middle layers of the atmosphere before re-emerging into space. There is even a name for them: ‘Earthgrazers‘.

The craze surrounding chemtrails is not unfounded; people are correct when they point to the sky and note that jet contrails are hanging around for longer. Noctilucent clouds – ‘night-shiners’ – are being seen further south than ever before. The increasing rate at which fireballs are being observed led the US government to tacitly admit something is ‘up’ when it declared all its satellites’ observations of incoming bolides and fireballs to be classified ‘secret’ in 2009.

The wars for empire – both military and economic serve many cross-purposes, all of them selfish, but they ultimately serve to distract humanity at large from the fait accompli of One World Government and its agenda to retain control in the face of incredible things happening on, in and around our planet at this point in ‘time’. In the context of this deeper reality, the Russian, Chinese, Israeli, American and Iranian leaders are not about to launch us all into battle, at least not in earnest. The relentless threat of war and blaming ‘terrorists’ for natural events serves one overarching purpose: to hide from us a little secret the princes and presidents of the world all share. We are indeed being ‘invaded by visitors from outer space’, just not in quite the way anyone had imagined possible…

See also:

Reign of Fire: Meteorites, Wildfires, Planetary Chaos and the Sixth Extinction

Update July 21, 2012

Two corrections:

I have been sent a link to the original source article from RIA Novosti quoting the Defense Ministry in Moscow. Published at 22.15 on Thursday 7 June, this would appear to clarify the Jerusalem Post‘s citation of the Russian Defense Ministry – the Jerusalem Post was referring to the Russian language RIA Novosti article published 40 minutes after the missile’s launch, while I mistakenly believed the JP was referring to this English language RIA Novosti article published the next day on 8th June 2012. There seems to have been a minor oversight at RIA Novosti offices in Moscow where someone forgot to inform colleagues working on the ‘UFO over Israel’ case on the English language section of their website that there was no need for them to cite the Huffington Post as saying that the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that they launched a missile at 21.39 on 7th June… because it was RIA Novosti themselves who first procured the statement from the Russian Defense Ministry.

In addition, as first brought to my attention by Sott.net readers, voices speaking in Russian can be heard in the video I described in the article as being filmed from Israel (‘No UFO!! Russia test-fires intercontinental ballistic missile… Seen in Israel‘), meaning that it was probably filmed from southern Russia. Israeli Ynet have since updated their article dated 8th June with another video filmed from Israel.

So it seems that the Russians did launch a missile from Kasputin Yar in Southern Russia eastwards to Kazakhstan on the night of 7th June 2012. But it is extremely unlikely that it was the same object that was seen 2,000 km to the southwest in Lebanon and Israel due to the distance between the launch site and the political tensions among the Middle East countries involved.