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| Santa Ana: August, 1965. Never satisfactorily explained. |
MASS EXTINCTIONS: FIVE OVER THE COURSE OF 540 MILLION YEARS.
The extinction of species is to be expected in a violent universe; that's why we have paleontologists. They have identified five mass extinctions over the past 540 million years in which the number of species declined by over 75% in a geologically brief interval. These mass extinctions mark the end of the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous Periods. Recovery from each of these episodes took millions of years. There is a growing conviction among paleobiologists that Earth is on the brink of mass extinction—six. The only exception is Homo sapiens. By any measure, Homo sapiens is thriving at the expense of wild species. Now numbering almost seven billion, the population has doubled since Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb (Oxford, 1968) which warned of mass starvation by the turn- of-the-century.
BRITISH UFO FILES: THE TRUTH IS STILL OUT THERE.
Yesterday, the British National Archives released thousands of pages of files related to UFO sightings. The only mystery is why this crap was kept secret or kept at all. It served only to fuel the UFO myth. Within hours of the release, a new cover-up had emerged. The British government admitted that the files on the Rendlesham Forest Incident have disappeared. That must be the file with the unequivocal evidence of a space-alien conspiracy. I was sympathetic. A decade earlier, pressured by Rep. Stephen Schiff (NM), the US Air Force sent everything it had on UFOs, to the US National Archives in a number of huge wooden crates. Along with a historian, I was asked to be present when the crates were opened and verify that the contents were not tampered with. In addition to paper, there were films and photographs and some hardware. Much of it seemed to have little or no connection to the UFO controversy. That so much could have been made of so little, indeed of nothing at all, continues to amaze me.
