Christmas on the Ranch 

 Christmas is always a time to remember friends, family, and memorable times that have passed. Having spent the better part of six years at what was once Rancho Encantado, 

I started thinking about what the first Christmas on the ranch may have been like. It would have been Christmas, 1936. At that time, it was known as Rancho Del Monte. A dude ranch that was first opened by Bess Huntinghouse, in the little Tesuque valley, north of Santa Fe. Later purchased by Betty Egan, it was renamed, Rancho Encantado. 

 I let my mind drift back to what was probably a cold winter day, in December 1936. Maybe a foot of snow on the ground, and the only way to access the ranch would have been by horse and sleigh. The old 1934 Ford pickup, owned by Bess, like a few other vehicles at the ranch, completely covered with snow and undriveable. The only road in, a small dirt path, completely covered with snow as if it was never there. Can’t you just picture a small group of hardy souls, gathered around a roaring fire in the large stone fireplace, when the large wooden door opens and a withered ranch hand enters with a freshly cut Christmas tree, dragged down the mountain by horseback. 

 I can almost feel those blustery winds howling outside. Inside, the laughter and holiday cheer of the small group of employees and a few guests fill the room as they decorate the Christmas tree, now in the center of the lodge. As the fireplace crackles, they sip fresh warm cider, and sing the age-old carols we are all familiar with. There were no worries about cell phone service or TV reception. No upset guests, simply good times with good friends. 

 Things were quite different then. In1936 the average cost of a new house was $3,925.00. The average wage per year was $1,713.00. The cost of a gallon of gas was a mere 10 cents, and the cost of a loaf of bread was just 8 cents. And, oh yes, you could buy a brand-new Studebaker car for a whopping $665.00. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to go back at least once in your lifetime and experience an event such as this? 

There’s a lot to be said about the good old days

It has been just a few short months since her Uncle Charlie’s passing, and Posey Summers is trying her hardest to keep the small antique shop she inherited from going under.

Then, unexpectedly, she stumbles onto Charlie’s well-kept secret. A secret shrouded by mystery, locked deep in the dark and dingy basement of that little antique shop on Water Street. It is a secret that will lead to more trouble than she could ever have imagined.

So then, why does she fail to heed the warning clearly displayed above the door? 

‘Voyagers must traverse the sequence of time ever so carefully, for your choices may be irrevocable’.

Did she let her heart get in the way of logic? That will become the million-dollar question.
Scrambling to justify her interference with history, the unpretentious Posey continues to create one complex crisis after another.

Danger, mystery, and love, complicate Posey’s life as she traverses the annals of time.

 

 

Las Vegas family called 911 after claiming they saw two aliens crash in their backyard 

There were a number of other police reports that night of unusual sky activity in the area A Las Vegas family called 911 in late April after an object fell from the sky into their backyard containing what they claimed were two large "aliens" with shiny eyes. 

A Las Vegas police officer arrived at the house on April 30 to interview the family. They claimed to see “a big creature” that was “long, 10 feet tall," according to body camera footage released by the Las Vegas police on Friday. The man also added that they were "100% not human." 

Stay tuned, there is bound to be more to this story in days ahead. 

 This call was one of several made that night in Nevada, California and Utah, claiming to have seen a flash in the sky, one of which was caught on the body camera footage

 

Watching for Aliens in the Bonnybridge Triangle 

Scotland has a fantastic reputation as a tourist destination, the dark rolling mountains, the crystal clear lochs and misty glens. Every year thousands of visitors flock to Scotland from America, Japan, Europe and um err Outer Space! 

But strangely our little green backpackers don’t pour up the A9 to Inverness, stopping off for an overpriced coffee and a cashmere scarf at Brewer Falls, they don’t even take in some street theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe – no that’s just too ‘touristy’. No the alien elite head for the town of Bonnybridge. 

Bonnybridge is a small town near to Falkirk with a population of around 6,000 – it could possibly be the most unremarkable town in central Scotland and yet the area, which is now referred to as ‘The Falkirk Triangle’ averages around 300 UFO sightings per year – this is more than anywhere else on the planet making this sleepy little notch on Scotland’s central belt the place to be seen if your transport of choice is saucer shape, you have a penchant for mutilating cows and have a distinctly greenish pallor. 

Having passed through Bonnybridge I have to confess that I’m at a loss to see the attraction. It has a very nice public library (the science fiction section being particularly well stocked) The Antonine Wall and Forth & Clyde canal run nearby and there’s the usual smattering of commuter housing. But there’s no secret military installations (but then I guess if they were secret we wouldn’t know) No alien autopsy sites, in fact the perfect place for Zarg the merciless and his little Zargons to get away from all the stress of interplanetary domination. 

But don’t worry because the local ‘cooncil’ have been on the case. Falkirk Councilor Billy (Fox Mulder) Buchanan has been helping to put Bonnybridge on the UFO spotters map, bringing the case of Bonnybridge in front of three prime ministers (probably four now) and the Queen. Heated debates have been held in the locality discussing possibilities that Bonnybridge was a gateway to another dimension, or that there may have been other spirits involved – the spirits in this case being along the lines of Buckfast tonic wine and the odd bottle of ‘mad dog’ or of course the possibility that there was nothing in it but it wasn’t harming the potential for less otherworldly tourists. I have even read a theory that the UFO activity is linked to the real Stone of Destiny and that the lights are guiding the righteous to its location hidden somewhere nearby. 

So when we trim away the mis-identified aircraft, the weather balloons, the odd cloud formations and the 1974 Nissan Sunny with an oversized spoiler and a fat exhaust what is left? Well there are a few that make it into the ‘Ecks Files’ 

In October 1994 three cleaners on their way to work said they saw five UFOs. When they got to work they told their manager what had happened. To his surprise a number of employees then came forward to confirm that they too had seen flashing lights and strange orange orbs glowing in the vicinity for the past week. Strange enough but the best known case has become part of UFO lore as the ‘Dechmont Law Encounter’. 

ON November 9, 1979, forestry worker Bob Taylor was shocked to discover a large circular craft in front of him in an area of woodland known as Dechmont Law, near Livingston Robert Taylor worked as a forester working for the Livingston Development Corporation. On the 9th November 1979 he traveled up to a plantation close to the M8 Motorway to inspect the site. As he walked up towards a clearing at around 10:30 am he saw a large spherical object with a gray metallic finish. The object appeared to be around 20 feet in diameter and 12 feet high. 

As Taylor approached the object it dropped towards the ground and two smaller spheres with protruding spikes (he described them as looking like old naval mines) appeared from the bottom and began to roll towards him. Taylor attempted to escape but the spheres caught his trousers – ripping them at the bottom and began to drag him back towards the larger object. 

Taylor passed out for around 20 minutes – when he came too he heard a hissing sound and then said the UFO just vanished. He had to crawl nearly 100 yards to his pickup truck as the encounter had left him temporarily unable to walk. After reporting the incident the site was thoroughly investigated and several marks in the ground were detected in the clearing, which could not be explained. 

Lothian & Border’s Police were baffled and since Taylor had shown signs of being attacked had to treat the case as assault. Thereby ensuring that the first recorded aliens to visit Scotland could go home with a criminal record. Despite several appeals the Aliens have not come forward – no doubt not fancying a short spell in the Bar-L. 

So the next time you are driving along a deserted highway and you see lights hovering in front of you – don’t panic its just another spring break road trip from planet Zark lost on the way to Bonnybridge!

 From www.scotclans.com/pages/bonnybridge-most-ufo-sightings-on-the-planet

 

US Shoots Down Fourth Object 

 The sudden spate of US jets blasting unidentified objects of mysterious origin from the skies has provoked so much befuddlement — not to mention panic — that Pentagon officials were forced to field questions about the issue Sunday night, just as Americans were tuning into the second quarter of the Super Bowl.

 One reporter even asked if it was possible the objects-turned-targets were sent by extraterrestrials. “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point,” said General Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. In reality, the answer is probably more mundane. Officials said they had started watching the skies more closely in the days since the alleged Chinese spy balloon traversed US territory, provoking both a national uproar and a new round of tensions with China. That resulted in the US shooting down smaller objects over Alaska on Friday, northern Canada on Saturday, and Michigan on Sunday. “We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we’ve detected over the past week,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Melissa Dalton told reporters. Democratic Representative Jason Crow of Colorado told CNN on Monday that there’s a “different dynamic” now. “These are benign objects from what we can tell, and it’s not a new phenomena,” said Crow, who serves on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees. 

The growing number of incidents is raising more questions about the direction of relations between the world’s two largest economies, especially now that the Biden administration is hyper-alert about the threat it says is posed by a global Chinese military-backed surveillance program spanning more than 40 countries — a claim Beijing has rejected. China also stepped-up accusations against the Biden administration, saying on Monday the US sent balloons over its territory more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022. Over the weekend, a Chinese news outlet, The Paper, said China was getting ready to take down an unidentified object flying over its waters near the port city of Qingdao. “It is nothing rare for US balloons to illegally enter other country’s airspace,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters at a regular briefing in Beijing on Monday. “We reserve the right to take necessary means to deal with relevant incidents.” 

National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson called reports of it using surveillance balloons over China “false” and turned the accusation back on China. “This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control,” she said. While each incident in the US may have a reasonable explanation, questions persist for the Biden administration. 

The most immediate: Will the Pentagon send up fighter jets every time it spots some new object — be it a weather balloon, a hobbyist’s craft or a drone — if it potentially threatens civilian aviation or drifts near one of many military sites scattered across the country? The two officials on the Pentagon conference call with reporters weren’t able to answer that question, with VanHerck calling it a “policy decision.” Dalton acknowledged that researchers and companies send up lots of devices “for purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.” The inability of US officials to say anything about the sources of the latest three downed objects has spawned theories that they could be balloons relaying signals to China or Russia, an alien object or just airborne junk.

 “There is a lot of garbage up there,” Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. One possibility is that they were nodes in a larger spying enterprise that went undetected before US radars and other sensors were optimized to detect slowflying objects above 50,000 to 60,000 feet, said Charlie Moore, a retired lieutenant general and former vice director of operations at Norad who teaches at Vanderbilt University. DateLocation of ObjectWhat We Know Feb. 4 Offshore Carolina Chinese craft. Salvage operations continue Feb. 10 Northern Alaska “Size of a small car” Feb. 11 Yukon, Canada “A small, cylindrical object” Feb. 12 Lake Huron “Neared sensitive military sites” “Since we’ve seen the development of these balloons over the last couple of years, we’ve had to go back and look at all the sources and methods we might use to detect their launch, monitor their movement and then obviously be able to track them as they approach the United States and Canada,” he said. US officials have briefed dozens of foreign diplomats on the matter last week and say they will know more once they recover the wreckage of the Chinese balloon, whose payload has been located — but not retrieved — in about 50 feet (15 meters) of water off Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. US and Canadian search crews are also still looking for the three other objects that were shot down. 

The episodes have created a new wave of partisan bickering, with Republicans arguing Biden should have shot down the Chinese balloon when it was first spotted over Alaska instead of letting it drift across the country. That has only contributed to the anxiety in Washington about the potential threat posed by China, which has denounced the US for downing what it says was simply a weather balloon that went astray. “We have probably reached peak media and political frenzy related to the PRC spy balloon,” said Jacob Stokes, a former Obama administration foreign policy adviser who is now at the Center for a New American Security, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “But even when the public attention subsides, the US government will likely be working to respond to this problem for a long time to come.” 

Story by Peter Martin • 1h ago--With assistance from Katrina Manson, Iain Marlow, Jenny Leonard and Maria Luiza Rabello

 

Congress Holds Historic Public UFO Hearings Military Struggles to understand ‘mystery’ flying Phenomena Thru AARO 

Most new sightings have been reported by U.S. Navy and Air Force pilots. "UAP events continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity," the report said. The AARO was established by Congress last year to track objects in the sky, underwater, and in space. Interest in UFOs spiked in 2021 after the DNI's preliminary assessment on UFOs, which found that some of the objects had the ability to "remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernable means of propulsion." Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said that the AARO will continue documenting UFO sightings to guard against any possible threats. "The safety of our service personnel, our bases and installations, and the protection of U.S. operations security on land, in the skies, seas, and space are paramount," Ryder said in a statement on Thursday. "We take reports of incursions into our designated space, land, sea, or airspaces seriously and examine each one.

" Paul Best is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. Story tips and ideas can be sent to Paul.Best@fox.com