Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

Page 114 of 135

Page 114 of 135
Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

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In recent years voices catling off numbers on VLF channels have frequently been intercepted by conventional equipment when weather conditions were right. Tape recorders, sound movie pro- jectors, TV sets, and even public address systems have been picking up these signals. For some reason, public address amplifiers in churches in England and the United States (such as the All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Portland, Oregon, and the St Laurence Church in Cambridge, England) have been especially prone to this type of interference. Listeners usually conclude they are hearing broadcasts of taxicab companies. Actually, taxi companies use a much higher frequency, and their signals are not likely to be picked up by low frequency equipment, TV, incidentally, uses FM (frequency modulation) for sound, and it should be nearly impossible for a TV set to intercept any other signal. At the other end of the radio spectrum on the ultratrigh frequencies (UHF) reserved exclusively for space satellites and manned-space flight communications, there has also been a plague of anomalous radiosignals. Back in November 1957, shortwave listeners everywhere were baffled by a strange tonal pattern which was broadcast next to the 20.00S frequency used by the two Russian satellites. Both the Soviet Union and the United States announced emphatically that the signals were not related to the satellites. 'It isn't classified,’ an FCC spokesman declared. "We just don't know what it is.' They never found out either. The signals were much stronger than those being broadcast by Sputniks I and II, they were worldwide, and they were picked up by stations at times when the satellites were out of range on the other side of the world. 15th, 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper's voice transmission was suddenly interrupted and drowned out by "an unintelligible foreign language transmission" on the channel reserved for space flights - a frequency which few if any amateurs are equipped to broadcast on. If the signal came from the ground, it had to come from Hawaii (VHF and UHF are highly directional), but the FCC never arrested a Hawaiian ham for the hoax, NASA recorded that transmission, a voice grunting 1 1 ta 1 whoad 1 toate a Later space shots have been repeatedly troubled by these anomalous transmissions. The broadcasts from our astronauts circling the moon in 1968 and 1969 were often interrupted by strange noises. Anyone listening to those NASA transmissions closely heard things like Indian war whoops and strange music. Because the space channels are highly directional, these odd insertions had to come from space or from specially equipped planes flying directly over the di- rectional dish antennae used to pick up the astronaut's transmission. NASA has been uneasily silent about its investigations into these problems. All of the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts have seen and photographed unusual lights and objects in space. The final report of the Colorado University UFO study devotes a full chapter to the unexplained astronaut sightings. The late Frank Edwards, a famous radio newsman and author of flying saucer books, made much of the weird radio signals that had been received in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1961 (the same area During his fourth pass over Hawaii in MA-9 (Faith 7) on May and speaking rapidly in a language that has never been identified.