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On Wednesday, April 25, 2001 as I watched some footage of the space shuttle and the space station being broadcast live on television, a glowing space craft appeared and crossed the field of view passing by the shuttle and the station (all this happening live on television). This event coincided with the triple failure of the command and control computers on the station (both the main and the two redudant backup systems failed, with the failure of the third backup taking place coincident with the passing of this luminous craft outside the space station, which was caught on camera and broadcast live.
I considered this event to be one of the pivotal moments in my life, in that after having witnessed these craft so many times, and having made so many attempts to communicate this fact to people, this was the first time I had ever seen one of them appearing live on television in this manner, and given that this event took place only three days after what turned out to be the most important event in my life (that weird 'Eden Wing over the Sahara' protest at the Summit of the Americas on Earth Day 2001) this event, coming as it did only three days later became linked in my mind to the events on Earth Day, and also the triple failure of the command and control computers also became linked to this passing space craft.
The Eden Wing page is located here, along with a link to that foolish sounding 'Press Release' I was sending out (just one more weird piece of spam I am sure people must have thought at the time), and there is also this foolish sounding Message for the Space Shuttle Crew that I sent out a few days later after watching that space craft pass by the station on live television. Included on the page is a link to a BBC page where in one brief mention NASA expresses interest in a certain videotape of a UFO saying that 'it resembled an object caught on the shuttle camera during a previous mission' (this terse mention being the closest thing I have heard of an admission on the part of NASA that the aforementioned videotape actually does exist.)
The BBC reported the story of the failure of these computers as follows...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1298026.stm
Technicians worked through the night to restore control over the orbiting platform after losing contact with its payload computer system, a backup and a standby on Wednesday.
During the computer failure, Nasa used systems on board Endeavour to communicate with the ISS. It could also have talked to the station via Russian ground controllers.
The use of rotating main, backup and standby systems is designed to prevent such a communications breakdown, but, it seems, all three systems were cut off at the same time.
Another story appeared in the Houston Chronicle...
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/space/sts100/889880
The station's three command and control computers are located in the U.S. Destiny science module, the research compartment that was delivered to the orbital base in February by another shuttle crew.
Two of the computers serve as backups.
When the station's second command and control computer crashed several hours after the first, ground controllers activated the third computer. It faltered as well around midday Wednesday.
It was on midday Wednesday that cameras outside the shuttle filmed one of these objects as it passed by the space station and the shuttle, and the event was broadcast live on television as I watched. Some of the footage that followed showed some very frightened looking astronauts, and although I have been searching for some pictures that would make this clear, so far no luck. As you search the web you will notice that the official story is that even though all the command and control computers failed, including the redudant systems, 'the astronauts were never in any danger.' I suppose then, that photographs of those astronauts looking as frightened as they did are not exactly the sort of image to present, but this was in fact the way they looked, and I would suppose that, given that they were never in danger in having their computer systems knocked down, perhaps it was that space craft that flew past the station around the time that third system was knocked down that was the scary part.
Today, after this latest shuttle disaster, I should point out that I do not believe that 'space aliens knocked the shuttle out of the sky.' It is to soon to judge what really happened here, but it seems not to far fetched to speculate that whatever fell off the shuttle at lift off and hit the wing probably had something to do with the disaster that ensued when the shuttle, travelling at many thousands of miles an hour, entered the atmosphere surrounded by the inevitable ball of flame, and then rather than being protected by heat shields, suffered the disaster everyone has viewed on their tv screens today.
However life be short, and some things are more important than others, and perhaps having been reminded of such things today, it might be the case that after giving the matter some thought in the light of recent events, people might come to realize that whatever transient and passing concerns they might have that would cause people to resist revealing the existence of the aforementioned piece of videotape really, at the end of it all, doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. What is revealed on that videotape is much more important than the temporary concerns that might motivate people to hide such interesting footage, and given the doorway this opens to some very important truths about the real nature of the universe around us, and our place in it, you might say that such a piece of videotape actually has something timely to say to people during such a time of grief as this, if it should be the case that they choose to listen and accept what they are seeing, not to mention what they hearing.
When times are easy it is that much easier for people to ignore inconvenient facts, or to make questionable decisions for reasons motivated by transient concerns, but there are those times that come to pass, that cast everything into a new light. What a difference a day can make. There is a story being told on that piece of videotape, and while it might be the case that people do not want to acknowledge it or do not want it revealed (yesterday) a day can make a big difference, and it might be the case that if someone is deep in gloom, they might want to fish out a copy of that videotape and then reflect on what they see there and consider what it all means.
Today, on Feb. 1st, 2003, the page I have on the web ('the message for the space shuttle crew' page linked to above) is suddenly the busiest page on my website and so it would seem that concurrent with this disaster, suddenly the appeal I was making for the release of that videotape is getting a really good airing, and you know perhaps there are some lessons to be learned there as well. Over the course of the last couple of years there has been link after link after link made to various pages on my site that people found interesting enough to link to, and the end result is that suddenly I have become a high ranking source of news about space shuttles and their crews, which is kind of unfortunate, when you think about how that came about, but life does sometimes unfold in strange and unexpected ways.
By the way, for some interesting feedback on how people respond to these things, you might consider visiting the following page on the Portland IndyMedia site, where, yesterday, I felt the need to vent on this subject leading to some interesting commentary..
http://portland.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=42766&group=webcast