SHUTTLE PROBE - WHAT THEY ARE HIDING
How, you might ask, do you know they are hiding anything? The short answer is, because they said they were. On May 6th Admiral Harold Gehman, chairman of the board investigating the Columbia disaster, told a congressional committee that transcripts of interviews of some 200 witnesses taken in secret session, “will never see the light of day.”
Most people, including members of congress, had been led to believe that all meetings of the board would be in public. How the board got around that is a good example of the duplicity much too prevalent in government today.
But first, a brief review of the board and how it came into being.
The “Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board," part of a contingency plan created by NASA in 1995 was activated by NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe on the same day of the disaster (Feb. 1st). The plan had been put in place to make sure that NASA controlled any investigation of future shuttle mishaps preempting appointment of a presidential commission as done in the Challenger disintegration on takeoff.
A seven-member board was to consist of four top military aviation and safety officials, two civilians from the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation, and a NASA employee. NASA would appoint the members and the board would report to NASA. Retired Admiral Harold Gehman was added as chairman and an eighth member of the board.
However when the board members were announced it was top heavy with military brass that had responsibility or command over research or operations of directed energy weapons and other space weapon systems. This seeming contradiction to the announced flavor of the board prompted this writer’s first article on the subject to be titled, “Columbia: Accident or Shootdown?”
When congressional and other critics began complaining the lack of non-government employees on the board would affect the credibility of any report, NASA agreed to the appointment of six “independent” members with no ties to NASA but subject to NASA’s approval.
What we did not know until the Orlando Sentinel broke the story on May 11, was that the new “independent” members were immediately made NASA employees with yearly salaries of $134,000. Admiral Gehman had been signed on as a NASA employee on Feb. 2nd, the day he was appointed, at a salary of $142,500.
The reason advanced for this subterfuge was that in order to get frank and open testimony from witnesses, the board had to be able to promise confidentiality. By making all the board members federal employees, a federal law was bypassed that would have required all sessions to be public and all records eventually made available to the public.
This is the same subterfuge Hillary Clinton tried with her “health care task force” to hold secret meetings. However that was exposed when it was found that a number of executives from private companies, e.g. insurance companies, HMO’s, etc. participated in the meetings. When Hillary’s coordinator of that project, Ira Magaziner, tried to advance that argument in a lawsuit, a federal judge called him a liar. NASA learned from that precedent and made all board members actual federal employees.
One aspect not covered in the Sentinel expose was the possibility of the transcripts and other information being classified as confidential, secret or top secret by NASA or the board. Board members would be in jeopardy of criminal prosecution if they disclosed any information so classified.
On March 25, 2003 President Bush signed an Executive Order (EO 13292) amending the authority to classify information. It allows an agency head to designate anyone he wishes with the authority to classify information. It is not known if that authority has been given the board or if any documents have been classified. The delegation of that authority is required to be in writing, but then that document itself might be classified.
In the first few days after the Columbia had broken on up on Feb. 1st killing all seven astronauts aboard, it was speculated that a piece of foam insulation that had broken loose from the external fuel tank may have struck the wing of the shuttle during launching and doomed the shuttle on reentry. On Feb. 5th, shuttle program manager Ron D. Dittemore said the impact to the shuttle of the piece of foam was unlikely to have done damage causing the accident. He said investigators would “have to look elsewhere” for the cause.
The following day Dittemore reversed himself saying no potential cause had been ruled out and that all possible theories would be fully pursued until the Feb. 1 crash was explained. As we shall see, that statement wasn’t exactly true. From that day on the major effort has been trying (unsuccessfully) to build a case that the piece of foam had opened a hole in the left wing of the shuttle that on reentry allowed hot plasma to get past the protective heat tiles and melt the aluminum body of the shuttle.
Cameras that were in the best position to track the piece of loose foam were malfunctioning so there is no clear record of whether or not the foam actually hit the shuttle’s wing and, if so, where.
Nevertheless, for the last two weeks the board has been supervising tests where a piece of foam of approximately the size seen on the fuzzy film was shot out of a device at a shuttle wing. There are several acknowledged problems with the tests.
First, they have no idea of the weight of the piece of foam. It could have varied from two pounds to 20 or 25 pounds depending on whether it was saturated with frozen water. The shuttle and tank had sat on the launching pad for several days during periods of rain before liftoff. The board settled on a weight of 2.7 pounds for the test. They also had to estimate the rate of speed of the foam as well as the angle at which it may have struck the wing.
The preliminary assessment of the first of the tests was that the foam hitting the wing could not have produced a hole, or more specifically a 4 by 2 inch hole found in one of the recovered pieces of debris. At this point the only acknowledged facts are that hot plasma generated by the friction of reentry had gotten past the protective tiles and caused the eventual breakup of the Columbia.
However, contrary to Dittemore’s promise to pursue all possible theories, there is one explanation supported by credible evidence that the board is refusing to consider. That possibility is that a burst of directed energy zapped the shuttle as it was crossing eastern California,
On the basis of the over 1,500 photos submitted by amateur photographers, the board has had to admit that the shuttle began breaking up over California. But NASA and the board are not talking about two particular submissions. One was a shot taken in California with a digital camera by an amateur astronomer that shows a purplish lightning-like strike on the shuttle. The camera has been furnished to NASA but the picture has not been made public.
However, a reporter and the science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle did view it on the photographer’s home computer. They described the energy surge as sort of an odd “L” shaped bolt of lightning.
The second is a video shot from the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno by Jay Lawson. It clearly shows the shuttle suddenly glowing brightly followed immediately by the start of a debris trail. The video has been put on the Internet and has been viewed by thousands of net users including this writer. According to a time line released by NASA, that flash of light appears just as heat sensors started to record a rapid rise in temperature.
Further evidence of an extraordinary event was found in parts recovered from the shuttle. An actuator made of steel had a hole burned through it that could not have been caused by the hot plasma, which flows like water over surfaces.
Paul A. Czysz, an emeritus professor at Parks College of Engineering and Aviation at St. Louis University in Missouri and a long-time consultant to NASA said,” Boy, to have that thing cut through the actuator, that’s tough. They are steel and they are built to be pretty tough. So it had to be a very, very high-temperature jet cutting through that portion of the craft.” He likened it to a welder’s torch where the spot directly under the torch melts and the rest gets hot but doesn’t melt.
NASA engineers are also at a loss (at least publicly) to explain why some parts had burn marks perpendicular to the direction of travel. Of course that would be perfectly consistent with an ultra high-temperature jet coming from the ground.
But where could such a jet have originated? Despite some wild conspiracy theories on the Internet ranging from, “the Chinese did it” to a transmission from the Air Force’s HAARP installation in Alaska, the most likely source is much closer to the event.
Kirtland Air Force base in Kirtland, New Mexico runs the Directed Energy Directorate of the AF Directed Energy Laboratory located 140 miles north of the base at the northern end of the White Sands missile range. The Directorate’s charter is to improve the Air Force’s ability to track missiles and then destroy them with laser energy through the atmosphere. It is conceivable that a misdirected shot from that location brought the Columbia down. Major General Kenneth W. Hess is U.S. Air Force Chief of Safety, Kirtland AF Base and is a member of the shuttle probe panel.
There is also the Department of Energy’s super secret Sandia laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico run by Lockheed Martin (a subsidiary of Boeing) and a contractor in the shuttle program. The lab experiments with accelerators capable of generating pulses 20,000 times faster than a lightning bolt and carrying 1,000 times the electrical current. One of the byproducts, according to Sandia’s website, is flashover arcs much like stokes of lightning.
Despite the silence from NASA and the investigating board, it is fairly certain that the Columbia was hit by some kind of directed energy over California. The source of that directed energy is still a matter of conjecture.
Could the Air Force or the Sandia lab have committed the colossal blunder of conducting some kind of test coinciding with passage of the shuttle? Even more unthinkable is the possibility that the shootdown of the Columbia was deliberate.
As a result of the Columbia disaster, the NASA space program has come under increasing attack and its survival is not assured. Some believe the military would love to take over the program and the Columbia disaster would be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
In these days of government duplicity it is difficult to rule anything out.
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The author is a freelance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.
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