Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

Page 116 of 135

Page 116 of 135
Our Haunted Planet - John Keel-pages

Page Content (OCR)

had even heard of Oswald or had any reason to think that he might have been implicated in the assassination. None of the regular police dispatchers had broadcast that alarm. Who did? The question remains unanswered. Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, a phoney broadcaStsjn the police band sent all the police rushing to the wrong side of town, while the alleged killer went ofi in the other direction unhindered. Our radio pranksters are a fact, not a myth. They operate in all languages and are obviously equipped with rare, specialized transmitters so powerful they can drown out all conventional signals. Their enterprises are usually pointless, sometimes harmful, never explainable. It must be a very expensive operation , .. if it is purely terrestrial. But many of these incidents smack of the mischievous work of our ultraterrestxials. Our phantom broadcasters have also zeroed in on super sophisticated scientific equipment. At 4 ajn. on the morning of April 8th, 1960, the great dish antenna of the radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia, swept across the skies and focused upon the predetermined target: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. This was Project Ozma, the search for intelligent signals from outer space, headed fay Dr Otto Struve and Dr Frank Drake. They tuned their equipment to 1420.4 megacycles (they had calculated that communication over vast stellar distances would be most feasible at this wavelength -the frequency of hydrogen). Eureka! Even before they could switch on their loudspeakers a powerful signal blasted in, *knocking the needles off the dials,' as Drake put it. They received a very strong series of pulses, about eight per second, so uniform that they had to come from an intelligent source. After recovering from their initial excitement, the scientists re-checked every part of their equipment but could find nothing wrong. The signals lasted for about five minutes and then stopped abruptly. Later the Naval Research Laboratory revealed that its stafi had been listening to these same signals for the past six months. Two weeks later the men at Green Bank tuned into the signals again. This time they carefully moved their antenna away from the two stars as they listened, and they found the signals continued to come in loud and clear. This proved that the transmissions were not coming from a star but were very probably of local, terrestrial origin from some unknown but amazingly powerful transmitter. Rumours that secret radar experiments were responsible for the signals proved unfounded. Radar does not use that wavelength, does not pulse eight times per second, and could not affect the highly directional radio telescope. A trio of Soviet scientists, Gennady B. Sholomitsky. Nikolai S. Kardashev, and I. S. Shklovskii, won world-wide headlines in 1965, when they announced that they had received radio signals c from Immediately after the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot in