The Joe Murphy Column This year I think fanciers will agree has been the worse for losses with the young birds being excessive to say the least. I have spoken to many fanciers about this throughout the season and recently had a couple of people phone me regarding my Space Weather chart that I included ever week during the racing season. One person highlighted that he was a radio ham who held communications with lots of people throughout the whole of Europe. However his radio frequency was of a low transmitter facility but did not have any problems contacting his friends over the air. He did say when my Space Weather K index factor was low then he had no problem however when it was high then he did find it very frustrating to communicate with his friends. He also stated that over the past 4 or 5 months he has been unable to contact anyone due to interference on his radio. Needless to say he has tried everything but to no avail and wondered if there was something going on in the atmosphere that could also have an effect on the amount of young bird losses. Then the following day I received a call from Tony Cottrell saying he also follows the Space Weather chart but did I know about HAARP, to which my reply was NO. Therefore I looked this up and found this very interesting and I hope you the readers of my column do so as well. There are Billions of dollars being spent on the Space Activity and I wonder if pigeon fanciers realise this could have a major effect on why we do not get our birds home. As recently as the 14th of September 2016 on the BBC news I noticed that the European space agency has released details of the Gaia space telescope that over the past three years has collected the position and brightness of more than a billion stars. The study will be used to create the most accurate map ever of our galaxy. One billion stars in the Milky Way have been charted by the Gaia spacecraft mission of the European Space Agency. But that only accounts for one percent of all the stars in our galaxy – and a mountain of work remains in years to come, the agency added. ‘Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before,’ said Alvaro Giménez, the director of science for the agency. Gaia was launched on 19th of December 2013 from French Guiana and its camera, with nearly one billion pixels, is the largest ever put into space. It set a course toward an orbit at the Lagrangian point L2, some 1.5 million kilometres farther from the sun. The first release of data was today, 1,000 days after the launch and this release includes all the information collected from July 2014 through September 2015. A catalogue of 1,0140,622,719 stars with sky position and brightness has been accumulated. The spacecraft has two telescopes, with 10 mirrors of different shapes and sizes to focus, direct and collect light into the camera. Every 24 hours, the Gaia spacecraft performs 637 million astrometric measurements – and tens of millions of other measurements. (NOW HERE IS THE BIT THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU THINK) The daily data sent back to Earth is roughly 40 gigabytes. The wide variety of stars includes varying classifications of astral bodies. But it also includes 2,152 quasars – the bright cores of galaxies hosting black holes. Now onto Tony Cottrell question about HAARP this is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) was an ionospheric research program jointly funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), designed and built by BAE Advanced Technologies(BAEAT). Its purpose was to analyse the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. The HAARP program operated a major sub-arctic facility, named the HAARP Research Station, on an Air Force-owned site near Gakona, Alaska. The most prominent instrument at the HAARP Station is the Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI), a high-power radio frequency transmitter facility operating in the high frequency (HF) band. The IRI is used to temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere. Other instruments, such as a VHF and a UHF radar, a fluxgate magnetometer, a digisonde (an ionospheric sounding device), and an induction magnetometer, were used to study the physical processes that occur in the excited region. Work on the HAARP Station began in 1993. The current working IRI was completed in 2007 and its prime contractor was BAE Systems Advanced Technologies. As of 2008, HAARP had incurred around $250 million in tax-funded construction and operating costs. It was reported to be temporarily shut down in May 2013, awaiting a change of contractors. In May 2014, it was announced that the HAARP program would be permanently shut down later in the year. Ownership of the facility and its equipment was transferred to the University of Alaska Fairbanks in mid-August 2015. HAARP was a target of conspiracy theorists, who claimed that it was capable of modifying weather, disabling satellites and exerting mind control over people, and that it was being used as a weapon against terrorists. Such theorists blamed the program for causing earthquakes, droughts, storms and floods, diseases such as Gulf War syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome, the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, and the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia. Commentators and scientists say that proponents of these theories are "uninformed", because most theories put forward fall well outside the abilities of the facility and often outside the scope of natural science. This article was first published on August 1, 2010 “It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. The European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.†– Quote from a TV documentary on HAARP by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a little-known, yet critically important U.S. military defence program which has generated quite a bit of controversy over the years in certain circles. Though denied by HAARP officials, some respected researchers allege that secret electromagnetic warfare capabilities of HAARP are designed to forward the US military’s stated goal of achieving full-spectrum dominance by the year 2020. Others go so far as to claim that HAARP can and has been used for weather modification, to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, to disrupt global communications systems, and more. Major aspects of the program are kept secret for alleged reasons of “national security.†Yet there is no doubt that HAARP and electromagnetic weapons capable of being used in warfare do exist. According to the official HAARP website, “HAARP is a scientific endeavour aimed at studying the properties and behaviour of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defence purposes.†The ionosphere is the delicate upper layer of our atmosphere which ranges from about 30 miles (50 km) to 600 miles (1,000 km) above the surface of the Earth. The HAARP website acknowledges that experiments are conducted which use electromagnetic frequencies to fire pulsed, directed energy beams in order to “temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere.†Some scientists state that purposefully disturbing this sensitive layer could have major and even disastrous consequences. Concerned HAARP researchers like Dr Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa and Alaska’s Dr Nick Begich (son of a US Congressman) present evidence suggesting that these disturbances can even cause tsunamis and earthquakes. Two key major media documentaries, one by Canada’s public broadcasting network CBC and the other by the History Channel, reveal the inner workings of HAARP in a most powerful way. The very well researched CBC documentary includes this key quote: “It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. In January of 1999, the European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.†To view the European Union (EU) document which brings HAARP and similar electromagnetic weapons into question? The actual wording at bullet point 24 in this telling document states that the EU “considers HAARP by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body before any further research and testing.†This revelling document further states that the EU regrets the repeated refusal of the U.S. government to send anyone to give evidence on HAARP. Below are quotes from the History Channel documentary: “Electromagnetic weapons … pack an invisible wallop hundreds of times more powerful than the electrical current in a lightning bolt. One can blast enemy missiles out of the sky, another could be used to blind soldiers on the battlefield, still another to control an unruly crowd by burning the surface of their skin. If detonated over a large city, an electromagnetic weapon could destroy all electronics in seconds. They all use directed energy to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse.†“Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.†For those who still doubt that such devastating secret weapons have been developed, here is an intriguing quote from an article in New Zealand’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald: “Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war, it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb. Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.†If the military secretly developed a weapon which could cause a tsunami over half a century ago, what kind of advanced deadly weapons might be available now? And why is it that the general public still doesn’t know about secret weapons developed over 50 years ago? To understand why the media isn’t covering these highly critical issues: Clearly the military has the capability to cause a tsunami and likely to cause earthquakes and hurricanes, as well. It’s time for us to take action to spread the word on this vital topic. Some researchers have raised questions about the possible involvement of HAARP in major disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, Indonesian tsunami, and hurricane Katrina. Could these have been HAARP experiments gone awry? Might they even have been caused by rogue elements which gained control of this devastating technology? Of course disasters like this happen regularly on a natural basis, yet if you begin to research, there is some high strangeness around some of these disasters. The evidence is inconclusive, yet with the known and unknown major destructive capabilities of this weapon, serious questions remain. My Conclusion I am not a scientist or the brain of Britain but if the above things are happening in the atmosphere could this have effects on our young bird losses or racing pigeons in general? However as fanciers we all know that they have some magnetic method of finding their way home, if interrupted by some behaviour of the atmosphere could this be the reason? But again how do some make it home and others return don't and that is the million dollar question? We have all heard of birds returning weeks or even months after a race. This has not just happened this year away back in 1973 I had a cock who was lost as a youngster. He turned up on the first old bird race the following year and had lived rough all this time. He was given a couple of races but was always late then after a good moult as a 2 year old he turned out to be my best pigeon and flew Nantes 630 miles for me. My point is NOT all the pigeons lost this year are BAD and some of them will return to prove their worth. If anyone is aware of any current research carried out in in this area regarding the impact on electromagnetic and racing pigeons then I would appreciate any feedback. A solar flare in the middle of the sun Pentland Hills Federation News from Andy Miller asking if I would highlight that claims forms for the Breeder/ Buyer which was held on 27th March 2016. Fanciers need to only enter the relevant details as requested and NOT to enter the name of the claimant on the form. These have to be submitted to Mr. R. Graham, 18 Newton Church Road, Danderhall, EH22 1LU on or before the 9th October 2016. Joe’s Joke Wife: "In my dream, I saw you in a jewellery store and you bought me a diamond ring." The husband replied, "I had the same dream and I saw your dad paying the bill." **************************************************************************************************************************************************************** An Australian man went to church one day and afterward he stopped to shake the preacher's hand. He said, 'Vicar, I'll tell you, that was a damned fine sermon, damned good!' The Vicar said, 'Thank you sir, but I'd rather you didn't use offensive language.' The man said, 'I was so damned impressed with that sermon I put five thousand pounds in the offering plate!' The Vicar said, 'No sh**?' Please continue to keep the news flowing; to Joe Murphy Mystical Rose Cottage 2 Flutorum Avenue Thornton by Kirkcaldy KY1 4BD or phone 01592 770331 or Email to joejmurphy1@gmail.com REMEMBER THE J IN THE MIDDLE or log onto www.elimarpigeons.com www.fancierchat.co.uk and www.pigeon-chat.co.uk also www.pigeonbasics.com who wish my weekly contribution portfolio on pigeon topics from Scotland. © Compiled by Joe Murphy
