2006 Spring Conference and Mini Symposium By Jerry Sievers Indiana MUFON State Director The MUFON Indiana 2006 spring conference and mini symposium was held Saturday, April 29th at the Indianapolis Signature Inn East. Friday evening a small group gathered to view a video tape produced by Trevor James Constable entitled "Rain Engineering Research", a privately funded research project to develop passive rain producing devices. The video was supplied by Flying Saucer Review magazine of the U.K. and was originally produced for high level government review. Some of the cloud formations video taped had definite disc and spheroid shapes to them! A Field Investigators training session was held Saturday morning. Subjects covered were: Preparations for investigations, interviewing witnesses, Review of field kit, and the on-line Case Management System. The afternoon topic presentations led off with an overview of MUFON by Jerry Sievers, Indiana State Director. Jim E. Delehanty, Assistant State Director South and Air Force veteran presented "UFO Case Studies and the Military". Stewart Hill, State Section Director North gave a brief overview of the Indiana MUFON web site and introduced Don Pilz, a researcher and one of our newest members. Jointly they presented "Strange Radar Cases". In addition Don spoke of his personal sighting which launched him into his research on radar cases. Stewart Hill also introduced a special guest (who requested anonymity) who had traveled to Rachel Nevada during February to video tape the Red Flag exercise out of Nellis Air Force Base. While noticing nothing while there after returning he noticed 47 "super fast objects captured on his tape. The objects could only be viewed in slow-motion after recording on DVDs. This tape is currently undergoing review. After a short break Roger Sugden, Assistant State Director North and Chief Investigator presented (with some technical difficulties) a slide presentation of several Indiana cases. He also reviewed several of the more interesting crop circles he has investigated for the Independent Crop Circle Investigators Association for which he is a board member. Additionally he displayed a number of sculptures which feature an "Unexplained Phenomena Theme. Last but not least, David Henninger, FIT presented "Why SETI Won't Work", an argument that the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence will not find signals from other star systems because of quantum leaps that would have been made in their communications. I would like to personally thank all of the presenters, along with Donald Daily our esteemed publisher and editor-in-chief of our newsletter, The Indiana Observer for their work over the past year. Without these gentlemen there would be no MUFON of Indiana. Post Script: Tentative plans are being formulated for a Field Investigators week end in early October, 2006. This would consist of one day of lectures and one day of "mock" investigation of a UFO landing site with plenty of evidence to gather and categorized. It will include an optional night sky watch; much of this to occur at Lucky Point, Indiana's most famous hot spot. Watch our Index page and member's page for more details as they become available. |
