© 2007 The Associated Press

SAN DIEGO — Walter M. Schirra Jr., one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the only man to fly on NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, died Thursday. He was 84.

Schirra died of a heart attack at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, said Ruth Chandler Varonfakis, a family friend and spokeswoman for the San Diego Aerospace Museum. NASA had said he died late Wednesday but the family and the medical examiner's office both said it was Thursday.

An aviation buff since childhood, known to fellow astronauts for his colorful personality and independent streak, Schirra became the third American to orbit the Earth in October 1962. He encircled the globe six times in a flight that lasted more than nine hours.

Americans in space before him were Alan Shepard and Virgil "Gus" Grissom, who flew suborbital flights in 1961, and John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who orbited Earth earlier in 1962. The Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space, putting cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April 1961, weeks before Shepard's suborbital trip.

Schirra returned to space in 1965 as commander of Gemini 6 and guided his two-man capsule toward Gemini 7, already in orbit. On Dec. 15, 1965, the two ships came within a few feet of each other as they shot through space, some 185 miles above the Earth. It was the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit.

His third and final space flight in 1968 inaugurated the Apollo program that the following year put men on the moon.

The former Navy test pilot said he initially had little interest when he heard of NASA's Mercury program. But he grew more intrigued over time and the space agency named him one of the Mercury Seven in April 1959.

Supremely confident, Schirra sailed through rigorous astronaut training with what one reporter called "the ease of preparing for a family picnic."

"He was a practical joker, but he was a fine fellow and a fine aviator," Carpenter recalled Thursday. "He will be sorely missed in our group." Carpenter said he last saw Schirra several months ago and talked to him just a few days ago.

Roger Launius, a space historian at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said Schirra "had a personality that was fun and effervescent. He had the gift of gab. He was able to take complex engineering and scientific ideas and translate that to something that was understandable."

Launius recalled that Schirra smuggled a corned beef sandwich on his Gemini flight and also reported seeing a UFO ... Santa Claus.

Schirra blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Oct. 3, 1962, aboard the Sigma 7 Mercury spacecraft.

"I'm having a ball up here drifting," Schirra said from space.

At the end of his sixth orbit, Schirra piloted the capsule for a perfect splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

"No one has flown better than you," NASA Administrator James E. Webb told him a few days later.

The only Mercury Seven astronauts who survive him are Glenn and Carpenter.

Although he never walked on the moon, Schirra laid some of the groundwork that made future missions possible.

He liked to stress that NASA never planned to simply send a person to the moon.

"Moon and back," Schirra would point out. "We did confirm a round trip from the very beginning. And `moonandback' is one word. No hyphens. No commas."

His Gemini mission represented a major step forward in the nation's space race with the Soviet Union, proving that two ships could dock in space. Schirra's Apollo 7 mission in October 1968 restored the nation's confidence in the space program, which had been shaken a year earlier when three astronauts, including Grissom, were killed in a fire on the launch pad.

The Apollo 7 crew shot into space atop a Saturn rocket, a version of which would later carry men to the moon. But Schirra and his two fellow crewmembers were grumpy for most of the 11-day trip. All three developed bad colds that proved to be a major nuisance in weightlessness.

The following year, Schirra resigned from NASA and retired from the Navy with the rank of captain. He had logged 295 hours 154 minutes in space.

"Mostly it's lousy out there," Schirra said in 1981 on the occasion of the first space shuttle flight. "It's a hostile environment, and it's trying to kill you. The outside temperature goes from a minus 450 degrees to a plus 300 degrees. You sit in a flying Thermos bottle."

A native of Hackensack, N.J., Schirra developed an early interest in flight. His father was a fighter pilot during World War I and later barnstormed at county fairs with Schirra's mother, who sometimes stood on the wing of a biplane during flights.

Wally, as he liked to be called, took his first flight with his father at age 13 and already knew how to fly when he left home for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

After graduation in 1945, Schirra served in the Seventh Fleet and flew 90 combat missions during the Korean War. He was credited with shooting down one Soviet MiG-15 and possibly a second. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals.

In 1984, he moved to the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, serving on corporate boards and as an independent consultant. His favorite craft became the Windchime, a 36-foot sailboat.

Schirra was inducted into the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor in 2000.

Survivors include his wife, Josephine, daughter Suzanne and son Walter Schirra III. _

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Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Fla., Seth Borenstein in Washington and Rasha Madkour in Houston contributed to this report. Source & References:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/4772368.html

2/5/2007-A retired Air France pilot has backed Aurigny' Ray Bowyer's UFO sighting.

Captain Jean-Charles Duboc claimed he saw a huge object over Paris on 28 January 1994 while flying an Airbus 320 from Nice to London.

It was well documented in the French media and on internet sites.

The 55-year-old's sighting was supported by fellow flight crew and French radar, which picked up the object about 25 miles east of Paris for 50 seconds.

"The observation of Captain Ray Bowyer is really impressive for several reasons," he said.

"The fact it was daytime, a huge size, low altitude, nine minutes of sighting, passengers and another crew to confirm it.

"In fact, Captain Bowyer' observation is very similar to mine, except there was two objects and they were very low."

However, unlike Captain Bowyer, who gave no suggestion as to what the UFO might have been, Captain Duboc believes the one he saw was from another world.

"My position about the sighting off Alderney is that an extraterrestrial civilisation wants to develop contacts with our planet and that they deliberately organise UFO sightings."

He said that in the last 60 years, there have been approximately 1,300 sightings by pilots and about 15% have been confirmed by radar.

"It is a really scary reality, but pilots have exceptional training and are the best qualified observers to identify UFOs."

Air France would not say if Captain Duboc had flown for it because of data protection laws.

Captain Duboc said the size of the objects seen by Captain Bowyer and a Blue Islands pilot was similar to that of the UFO he saw which he described as a huge lens with a bank angle of 45 degrees.

"We soon realised it was about 25 nautical miles away and it didn"t move. It was absolutely huge because it is impossible to see an airplane distinctly at that distance.

"The dimensions of that object could have been around 500 metres and we saw it for between one and two minutes before it dematerialised in about 10 to 20 seconds."

Aurigny pilot Ray Bowyer has today told of his delight at the response to his UFO sighting.

The 50-year-old captain, who claimed he saw two identical objects as he was approaching Alderney from Southampton, said he had been inundated by people telling similar stories.

"Since the story has been publicised, I must have had a least 20 people come up to me and tell me their story," he said.

He said it has had a very positive impact.

"I think what it has done is make it acceptable for other people to tell their stories. It seems to have lubricated people's tonsils to talk about this sort of experience."

Captain Bowyer's UFO sighting received national media attention last week and the story has been seen by people all over the globe after being picked up by various news websites.

He said the stories people had told him varied greatly.

"I must say that some of the people said things that I thought could be explained. However I reckon that there are people out there that have seen stuff that cannot be explained."

He added that he had received a lot of support from fellow pilots.

"In the profession it' fairly well known that if you come forward and tell these sort of stories, you become unemployable."

Captain Bowyer praised his bosses at Aurigny for their understanding.

"I think if I had not had eight years with the company it would not have been mentioned. But I"m lucky that I had the security with Aurigny and I want to thank them for their support.

"It's really nice that other people have come forward to say that they have had similar experiences."

Source & References:

This Is Guernsey, Channel Islands, UK

http://tinyurl.com/39udne

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan.

And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day.

After all, they have written "An Introduction to Planetary Defence", a primer on how humanity can defend itself if little green men wielding death rays show up at our cosmic doorstep.

And yes, they're serious.

"The probability really is there that aliens exist and are old enough to have technology to enable them to come here," Taylor said in an interview.

Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the Defence Department and the U.S. space agency NASA.

But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specialises in fringe topics and books with titles like "The Science and Lore of the Plant Cell Wall" and "ESP and Psychokinesis".

Taylor acknowledged alien invasion is hardly a mainstream concern but said it is naive to assume -- as scientists like the late Carl Sagan did -- that any beings advanced enough to master star travel will have evolved beyond war.

"It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality," Taylor said.

FERMI'S BLUNDER?

Taylor and Boan -- along with co-authors R.C. Anding and T. Conley Powell -- revisit two issues that frequently pop up in the debate about whether homo sapiens is alone in the universe: Drake's Equation and Fermi's Paradox.

The formula drawn up by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake in 1960 tries to estimate how likely contact with an alien civilisation is given factors such as the number of habitable planets.

Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10 percent of the speed of light.

After crunching the numbers, they say it is possible that our Milky Way galaxy harbours thousands of intelligent alien species and that there is a "high probability" that one or two of them visit Earth every century.

But if there are so many aliens out there, why haven't we heard from them already?

That is the question famously posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 to dismiss speculation by his colleagues that intelligent life should be routine.

Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used Godlike technology to jump across thousands of light years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy.

They simply may not have stumbled across our neck of the woods yet.

MUJAHIDEEN-STYLE RESISTANCE

Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion about defending against terrorist attacks.

"One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens. Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute the comments started setting in," Taylor said.

"Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway," Taylor said.

Failure to prepare may mean mankind will have to dig in and fight with improvised weapons and hit-and-run tactics, much the same way Islamic extremists have battled the U.S. military in Iraq, Taylor said.

"You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type resistance," Taylor said. "The insurgents know how to win this war against us. It also tells us that if we were attacked by aliens, this is our best defence."

© Reuters 2006. All rights reserved

Source & References:

http://www.raidersnewsnetwork.com/full.php?news=4910

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