Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

Page 60 of 82

Page 60 of 82
Dark Object - Don Ledger and Chris Styles-pages

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Air Force Publication (JANAP) 146, with the subhead "Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings." It made releasing any information to the public about a UFO a crime under the Espionage Act (the National Securities Act in Canada), punishable by a one- to ten-year prison term and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The law also applied to commercial airline pilots. It remained in effect until 1969. Although government agencies in those days put on the appearance of caring little about the UFO phenomenon, in reality it scared the hell out of them, because they didn't have a clue about what the objects were. Whether or not that is still true today, it was the situation on that evening in October 1967. Not long after the Dark Object appeared, we know that the duty officer at the local military base got a call from the local RCMP detachment asking if they had picked up anything on their radar, because there were reports coming in from all over about an airplane crashing in Shag Harbor. There's a chance that the duty officer decided that he could not legally admit having received information about a UFO, because he wouldn't want to start a chain of events that could lead all the way up to the Pentagon and lead to his early retirement from the services. The RCMP report says, "Baccaro Radar - Negative." We've been asking ourselves the question "How could that be?" ever since we started this investigation. An object that was witnessed by at least twelve people to have slowly descended downward to the place where it impacted the waters off Shag Harbor and then was seen drifting on the water by even more people, three of them Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen - how could such an object have been missed by Baccaro Radar? The Dark Object was only thirteen-and-a-half miles from the radar station at its closest point, and this was one of the most sophisticated arrays of scanning and radar equipment that the military of that time could devise. Baccaro had officially become a NORAD long-range radar (LRR) facility two years earlier, in September of 1965, meaning it had control over all aircraft entering its airspace. As such it would have had computers capable of handling multiple data input from radar spread through the NORAD system. This enabled air controllers and interpreters to construct an overall air picture without being 1 a4 overloaded. Baccaro was plugged into the most sophisticated defensive grid in the world, with literally thousands of technicians all over North America watching radar screens, communicating, and interpreting information. Buried in secret rooms in secret places, controlled by the military and the intelligence agencies, were the most powerful computers of the day, capable of assessing the information pouring into them from radar installations all over North America, and making predictions about this information. Predictions were important in the case of a hostile, incoming missile, since it would be necessary to know its point of impact. It could then be intercepted by long-range fighters and shot down over relatively uninhabited areas. What would the Soviets have been doing all this time? They have radar, too, good radar, and they must have been concerned. When this unknown object flew over them, heading for northern Canada and all of those NORAD radar bases, it would have looked for all intents and purposes like a missile. Since its track was describing a line in from Soviet Siberia, it could have been mistaken by the U.S. for an incoming ICBM. The Americans and NATO could have gone on full alert and maybe launched long- range bombers back at them.