Now, 30 years later, the extraordinary encounter is among thousands of previously secret cases contained in the government's 'X-Files' that officials are to release in their entirety.

The cases, many from a little-known defence intelligence branch tasked with investigating UFO claims, will be published by the Ministry of Defence to counter what officials say is 'the maze of rumour and frequently ill-informed speculation' surrounding Whitehall and its alleged involvement with Unidentifed Flying Objects.

The public opening of the MoD archive will expose the once highly classified work of the intelligence branch DI55, whose mission was to investigate UFO reports and whose existence was denied by the government until recently. Reports into about 7,000 UFO sightings investigated by defence officials - every single claim lodged over the past 30 years - are included in the files, whose staged release will begin in spring.

The decision to release Whitehall's full back-catalogue of UFO investigations was taken last month after the Directorate of Air Space Policy, the government agency responsible for filtering sensitive reports, gave its permission to publish the biggest single release of documents in MoD history. Now the government fears a repeat of the unprecedented demand and the website crash experienced by the French national space agency in March when it released its own UFO files. Government IT experts are believed to have drawn up contingency plans to avoid a repeat scenario when Britain's dossiers are finally made public.

Among the first tranche of UK cases will be the official government files into the famous Rendlesham incident, dubbed 'Britain's Roswell' after the US incident when a flying saucer is said to have crash-landed in the New Mexico desert 60 years ago. On a foggy night in 1980 several witnesses reported a UFO apparently landing in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk. Statements claimed the craft was covered in markings similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics and aliens emerged from it. Although a man later confessed to having staged the incident as a hoax, the files will clear up continuing speculation as to whether radiation was detected at the site after the event.

Another case reported to the intelligence branch DI55 - Britain's version of the 'Men In Black' - chronicles a series of reports sent to RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, by the crew of a Vulcan bomber on exercise over the Bay of Biscay early on 26 May 1977. According to documents seen by The Observer, five crewmen, including the captain, co-pilot and navigators, watched 'an object' approach their aircraft at 43,000ft above the Atlantic. The mysterious craft then appeared to turn and follow their precise course from a distance of four miles.

Initially, the crew said the object resembled landing lights 'with a long pencil beam of light ahead' but as it turned towards them the lights suddenly went out leaving a diffuse orange glow with a bright fluorescent green spot in its bottom right-hand corner. Then, according to signals sent back to Scampton, the crew noted a mystery object 'leaving from the middle of the glow on a westerly track... climbing at very high speed at an angle of 45 degrees'.

The Vulcan's navigator recorded interference on his radar screen from the direction of the UFO which continued for 45 minutes as the plane headed back to Britain. On return to the UK, the camera film from the aircraft's radar was examined by RAF intelligence. They found a 'strong response' from the direction of the sighting. The UFO was captured as 'an elongated shadow' of a 'large-sized' object travelling at a similar height to the Vulcan. An intelligence report sent to the MoD the same day says the crew 'were unable to offer a logical explanation for the sighting'.

Although hailed as the complete disclosure of the UK's UFO files, questions are likely to remain over whether all available information will be made public. Despite the Vulcan sighting being investigated by DI55, no details remain in the file indicating what they found or what became of the radar film.

The disclosures are more likely, claim some experts, to lend credence to the theory that such UFO incidents were, rather than alien visitations, military activities such as missile launches, testing of prototype aircraft and other activities during the Cold War.

David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and author of Flying Saucerers: A Social History of UFOlogy, said: 'Something was definitely going on, but really these files show that the government did not know either. This release will be a source of disappointment or vindication for some, and embarrassment for others.

'Conspiracy theorists who believe that the various governments of the world are hiding secrets about the "reality" of aliens will see this as another whitewash effort by the MoD and will probably continue their self-sustaining "campaign for the truth", when the truth will in fact now be "out there".'

UFO researcher Joe McGonagle said: 'There will always be a hard core who believe these files were prepared for release and that there is a secret department within the military who has a separate stash of files that have not been disclosed.'

UFOs remain one of the most popular subjects for Freedom of Information requests and the release is certain to generate a massive response from the public when the files are placed in the National Archives. Clarke, who has lodged hundreds of FoI requests, recently discovered that the government was considering destroying the 24 files created by DI55 because they were contaminated by asbestos. Not only were the UFO records polluted, but a total of 63,000 files estimated at between six to 12 million pages - most of them classified as secret - were facing the same fate. Having admitted the existence of the problem to Clarke, the MoD opted to instigate a £3m project digitally to scan the files before they were destroyed. Scanning of the 24 contaminated UFO files owned by DI55 was completed last year, although it is understood that names of officials in the reports will be removed.

Although the government remains reluctant to discuss its intelligence work on UFOs, it is known that DI55 has been hot on the trail of flying saucers since the Sixties. Experts admit that they work closely with the security services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to collect and assess evidence of potential threats to Britain.

The decision by the UK to open its files could lead to the US government following suit. A group of former pilots and government officials recently urged the Pentagon to reopen investigations into claims of UFO sightings.

UFO claims

1980 Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk. US servicemen claim to have seen an alien craft and its landing site.

1984 Minsk, USSR. Aeroflot pilots say they are pursued by a glowing shape.

1989 Bonnybridge, Scotland. Fire crew report objects rushing towards them before veering away at the last moment.

1990 Brussels, Belgium. Two F-16 fighter pilots recount being engaged in 75-minute mid-air chase with a UFO.

4) China and India Exploit Icy Energy Reserves

By Gerald Traufetter, Der Speigel, Dec. 13, 2007, http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,523178,00.html

China and India have reported massive finds of frozen methane gas off their coasts, which they hope will satisfy their energy needs. But environmentalists fear that tapping these resources could have adverse effects on the world climate.

Shengxiong Yang and Nengyou Wu, the two expedition leaders, stand an excellent chance of going down in the history of their country as heroes. The material they pulled from the muddy ocean floor of the South China Sea has the potential to satisfy the energy needs of China and its fast-growing economy.

The flames in the drill core were coming from methane hydrate, a material first discovered in the 1970s. Its unique characteristic is that it is a seemingly frozen and yet flammable material.

In the West, this potential fuel from the ocean floor has for the most part been the stuff of fantasy. But it's a different story in Asia. The People's Republic of China is investing millions to study this massive source of energy. The same holds true for India, South Korea and Taiwan, all nations that are on a fast track to surpassing the West as economic powers.

The needs of these emerging economies continue to rise. Each year, China increases its power consumption by an amount equal to France's total annual power production. By the end of 2007, the country, with its population of 1.3 billion, will have surpassed the United States as the world's No. 1 producer of greenhouse gases.

It is one of the ironies of the Kyoto Protocol that China is still treated as a developing country, which means that, legally speaking at least, it is not obligated to pay any heed to climate protection issues. However, China and the world's other budding economic superpowers will no longer enjoy that status under a follow-up agreement to Kyoto, which the delegates in Bali plan to initiate.

The Chinese government is pursuing a double strategy. On the one hand, it expresses great concern over climate change. Observers were astonished to note that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao used the terms "environment," "pollution" and "environmental protection" 48 times in his address to the National People's Congress this year. China, he said, will not repeat the mistake of "polluting first and cleaning up later."

At the same time, however, China is energetically seeking new ways to satisfy its voracious demand for more energy. And Chinese officials are pinning their hopes on methane hydrate as one of these ways.

Methane, trapped in an icy cage of water molecules, occurs in permafrost and, in even greater quantities, beneath the ocean floor. It forms only under specific pressure and temperature conditions. These conditions are especially prevalent in the ocean along the continental shelves, as well as in the deeper waters of semi-enclosed seas (see graphic).

World reserves of the frozen gas are enormous. Geologists estimate that significantly more hydrocarbons are bound in the form of methane hydrate than in all known reserves of coal, natural gas and oil combined. "There is simply so much of it that it cannot be ignored," says leading expert Gerhard Bohrman of the Research Center for Ocean Margins (RCOM) in the northern German city of Bremen.

A few months ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held the material in his hand -- or rather, in a metal ice bucket with flames shooting from the top. He was visiting an Australian research center at the time, but now he can just as easily watch the same spectacle unfold in Chinese research laboratories.

The Chinese researchers found the methane hydrate, also known as crystal gas, because of its molecular structure, in a layer of sediment 15 to 20 meters (50 to 65 feet) thick off the Chinese coast. "It was embedded in clay and silt ," says John Roberts, whose firm Geotek provided the technical equipment for the drilling expedition.

This is the sort of information natural gas companies like to hear. The porosity of this sediment mix is well suited to drilling for the gas. "The gas hydrate has never found in this form before," Roberts explains. It suddenly seems conceivable that production using conventional techniques could work.

One possible method would involve the use of drilling tubes that would conduct heated fluid into the cold reservoirs. This would dissolve the icy cage encasing the methane. The next step would be to capture the gas through a second opening.

These are the kinds of prospects that have inspired others to emulate the Chinese researchers' success. Japan has built the world's largest research drilling ship, the Chikyu, primarily to study methane hydrate. India has invested €200 million to launch a major national program -- and has already reported successes.

Part 2: Can a Potential Curse Be Transformed into a Blessing?

For More Information

Map of Coastal Methane Fields - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,grossbild-1046027-523178,00.html

Part 2: Can a Potential Curse Be Transformed into a Blessing? - http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,523178-2,00.html

At present there is a great deal of interest (and confusion) around a new field of science generally referred to as torsion physics. The Einstein-Cartan theory upon which it is based describes magnetism and gravity as two sides of the same coin – the curvature and twisting of spacetime. It may well give us the missing link needed to solve the world's energy and ecological crises while offering the ultimate "Theory of Everything."

Most of us are aware of Einstein's General Relativity Theory and how it describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime similar to the way a bowling ball stretches a trampoline. In torsion physics, this model adds a spin or twist to spacetime making it more like the surface tension of water going down a drain. As water swirls due to the change of density between the air and water in the drain, the water surface curves and curls towards the drain creating torque. Torsion physics describes everything as spinning like this into regions of high density.

For example, a hurricane spirals due to the difference in density/temperature in our atmosphere. As air currents gather large quantities of water into clouds, the atmosphere at the center of the hurricane becomes denser than the surrounding air, thus creating pressure and causing the formation of a spinning vortex. Our Milky Way galaxy does the same thing, but instead of a dense atmosphere it spins towards dense plasma gases that puncture a black hole at its center. It is this increasing density differential and corresponding torque that causes both a hurricane and our galaxy to spiral like water down a drain.

Now, as hurricanes and galaxies rotate they form arms that spiral inward. This is due to the "Coriolis Effect" which creates two rotating toruses (or donuts) of material spinning in opposite directions one on top of the other. As they spin, their circular outer surface also rotates over and into the donut hole causing anything on the surface of each donut to appear to spiral continuously inward like a vortex.

When the Coriolis Effect is perfectly balanced and most coherent, a very special spiral called a golden spiral begins to form. A golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral that gets wider from the origin by a constant factor of the golden ratio (about 1.61803) for every quarter-turn it makes. We can even see this effect in our own solar system in the spacing of the planet's orbits.

Starting at Mercury, each planetary orbit (including the Ceres asteroid belt and the new dwarf planet Eris) can be estimated simply by multiplying each preceding planet's orbit by the special constant 1.687741698, which is the golden ratio 1.618 plus the additional amount needed to create a highly resonant spiral. Amazingly, this method predicts the average spacing of planets within a tiny margin of error of only 764km from actual orbits. It works because our solar system was once a swirling disc of plasma just like our galaxy, apparently forming planets at every quarter-turn along the golden spiral formed from the Coriolis Effect.

The presence of the golden ratio as an organizing principle in torsion physics led the team of Haramein and Rauscher to arrive at a Unified Field Theory that connects black holes to the structure of an atom. Their theory proposes that an atom is formed from the pumping or "breathing" of gravity in the space vacuum between the shape of a cube (dual tetrahedrons) and an octahedron, forming the simplest possible harmonically oscillating structure. As these two shapes oscillate, they pass through an icosahedron (or its dual dodecahedron) to form a golden spiral.

Space is then seen as being organized into a polarized structured vacuum, called a Schwarzchild lattice, organized into 120 tiny black holes, each in its own "cell" of the lattice. Each cell is itself organized as a 12-faced pentagonal dodecahedron (or icosahedron). The Haramein-Rauscher atomic model is then used to explain each cell as a harmonically oscillating cubeoctahedron that passes through the Schwartzchild dodecahedron in the space lattice (centered on a tiny black hole). This pumping action creates an electromagnetic Coriolis Effect and double torus identical to a miniature spiral galaxy or hurricane.

From the torquing edge or "event horizon" of the black hole in each cell of the space lattice, resonant atomic structures can form depending on the number of particles or atomic weight of different atoms. Of all the known elements, one particular atom, carbon-12, is more stable and resonant than any other element, accounting for its use as the international standard for atomic weight. In fact, carbon-12 resonates so well that it easily bonds with itself and other small atoms to form polypeptide amino acid chains and DNA molecules capable of evolving into the wide variety of water crystals we know as life.

From the micro to the macro, torsion physics describes everything as a double torus of orthogonal (or "right-angled") gravitational and electromagnetic forces that together spin off resonant harmonic structure at the perfectly balanced event horizon between them. Based on this theoretical model, some scientists are calling for increased funding and research to find ways of engineering the torsion field. Nicola Tesla was the first to suggest this more than a hundred years ago.

Telsa found that when he placed two resonantly tuned electromagnetic coils near one another, they created a very strong repelling interference pattern and dense electromagnetic field between them. As we might expect, this then induced the double torus Coriolis Effect to occur and cause electromagnetic standing waves to form causing scalar components to form outward longitudinally. He found that these scalar components could even be used to transmit electricity without being absorbed into the surroundings like other waves.

In 2001, German scientist Dr. Konstantin Meyl reproduced Tesla's wireless electricity experiments using a simple demonstration kit he built consisting of a dual-coil transmitter and matching receiver. He found that as the frequency was increased on the transmitter, scalar components were produced that tunneled over to the receiver to light an LED. Sold as a simple demonstration kit to more than fifty universities, the apparatus not only proved that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly, it also showed that scalar information could not be blocked by a shielded Faraday cage. More stunning than this, Meyl found that the scalar born information traveled more than 1.5 times the speed of light, confirming Tesla's own experimental results.

But torsion physics and scalar tunneling promise much more. Scalar components might also be used to perturb the vacuum to induce torque in spacetime and release residual zero-point energy still "seething" in the space lattice. Scientist Dr. Tom Bearden claims the spacetime vacuum can be engineered to violate the second law of thermodynamics by revising Maxwell's outdated electromagnetism equations from the 1880's to include the asymmetrical Aharonov-Bohm Effect. He likens this effect to "uncurling field-free magnetic vector potential" in the vacuum, thus releasing the energy still resonating as standing waves from the Big Bang. This is something like putting up a sail to catch the wind only instead of air we would catch the virtually unlimited energy tunneling through the space lattice all around us. Every demonstrable example for over-unity "zero-point" energy, like water cars, hydrogen from micro waved water, air turbines or Bearden's own solid-state electromagnetic device, would all obtain their extra energy by torquing the vacuum based on the Aharonov-Bohm effect.

Many other applications of torsion physics and scalar standing waves may be possible, such as mobile communications that transmit directly through the Earth, gravity modification and specific warps of spacetime to enable superluminal (faster than light) travel. However, mainstream science continues to drag its feet in this field by referring to torsion physics as a "pseudoscience". Without immediate acceptance of these concepts through funded research and inclusion in classroom curriculum, there may be no time to turn around the economic and ecological impact of fossil fuels on the planet. As Dr. Bearden points out rather bluntly:

"Only by using vacuum engineering for electrical power systems that dramatically decrease our dependence on oil, coal, gas, and nuclear power can our economic collapse – and the possible collapse of Western civilization – be avoided."

But perhaps the greatest loss in ignoring torsion physics is the continued misunderstanding of how nature really works and the very special role we all play in it. As Nassim Haramein says in his four DVD set entitled Crossing the Event Horizon: Rise to the Equation:

"Everything we see in the Universe is the infinity of the energy density of the vacuum in various scales. The biological resolution is the link between the large and the small. You are the event horizon. Instead of seeing yourself as an insignificant little dot that means nothing to the Universe, you start to see yourself as the center of creation. Everyone else is the center of their Universe as well. And thus we are all equal and we're all one."

Ed. Note - Dr. K. Meyl was a speaker at the IRI Tesla Science Conference here in DC in 2003. Also, I saw N. Haramein give a lecture on this topic at the Earth Transformation Conference in Hawaii last year and have worked with theoretical physicist, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher in several projects and events. IRI is also editing Rauscher's book on earthquake prediction as well.   - TV