The Texas Contrabandidos

The business of hauling consumer goods (contraband) into Mexico on airplanes and landing on grass airstrips to avoid outrageous Mexican import duties has been going on ever since airplanes were put into commercial service, that is, until 1989 when Mexico repealed most 100% duties on imported goods, effectively ending the reign of the infamous Texas Contrabandidos -- a group of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants cargo and bush pilots, many of whom had flown in the service of Air America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Known as "Contrabandidos", pilots choosing this form of freelance employment had to know the limits of their aircraft operating into extremely marginal landing strips  -- and their own limits, operating under the most adverse conditions of unknown weather, overloaded, old unreliable aircraft without the benefit of navigation aids. Relying on the age-old method of dead reckoning navigation and pilotage, pilots had to make their own rules and follow them in order to stay alive. But with an over abundance of veteran war pilots returning and occupying all the "normal" pilot gigs, this kind of work was the best many could find.

A friend, lets call him Ron Fox, was one of the key pilots in a very successful contrabandido operation in Deep South Texas unitl it ended in the mid 80s. His adventures and those of his gallant and perhaps daring cohorts is a story deserving a book and/or a movie, and certainly has earned a place in American history. Get started reading the introduction to this short series and then progress through the chapters for a delightful and daring story I think you will love.
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CDs of the Ancient? Or Alien LPs?

What are they? Where did they come from? Who made them? WHat do they do?

The story of the Dropa Stone: In 1938, an archeological expedition was sent to investigate a secluded area of the Baian-Kara-Ula Mountains on the border that divides China and Tibet. The group discovered a series of caves at the summit of the mountains. The caves contained a large collection of graves and the walls were decorated with drawings of people with elongated heads together with images of the sun, moon, and stars.  The archeologists uncovered the graves and discovered the remains of ancient beings.  The skeletons were a little more than three feet tall, with abnormally large skulls. Inside of the tombs a collection of stone disks were recovered. The disks were almost twelve inches in diameter, with a hole in the center.  The objects had a groove on the surface of the disk and spiraled outwards from the center hole forming a double spiral. Closer inspection showed that the grooves were actually a line of small carvings or signs.

The disks were labeled the Dropa Stones. Subsequent investigations have found a total of 716 Dropa Stones in the Baian-Kara-Ula Mountain caves.  The Dropa Stones were sent to a variety of scholars for investigation.  One of them, Professor Tsum Um Nui of the Beijing Academy for Ancient Studies, found that the spiral grooves were actually a line of characters written in an unknown language. In 1962, he announced that he had managed to translate the language. For a long time, the Peking Academy of Prehistory forbade the professor from publishing anything about the Dropa Stones. However, after many years of debate he published his hypothesis.

Tsum Um Nui claims that an alien spacecraft crashed in the Bayan Har Shan region 12,000 years ago. The occupants were aliens called Dropa or Dzopa.  The Dropa could not repair their craft, so they tried to adapt to the conditions on Earth. Meanwhile, the local Ham tribesmen hunted down and killed most of the aliens. Supposedly, the aliens had intermarried with the locals, making identification of the origins of the skeletons more difficult. Many people have challenged these claims and Tsum Um Nui was forced to resign from the Beijing Academy.  The Dropa Stones have been disappearing all over the world and are not available for public viewing at any museum.  However, pictures of the artifacts do exist.

Perseid Meteors Tonight: If You Can't Watch, You Can Listen

The 2011 Perseid meteor show will be largely masked tonight - the peak night of the year - thanks to a gorgeous full moon. But if you're into meteors and spacial things that go "glow" in the night - take heart. While you may not be able to see but only the brightest of meteorites falling through our atmosphere this year, you can still hear them What?! Yes - hear them.  Distant FM radio signals tend bounce off the streaks of hot, ionized gas the meteors leave in their wakes as speed through our atmosphere, meaning if you take a small FM radio with you when you head outdoors to catch a glimpse of the showers, you may not see some of them, but when a snippet of a distant song comes across your radio speaker or a "ping" can be heard where you normally wouldn't be hearing a FM station, then you will know a meteorite just streaked across the moon-filled sky even though you didn't see it. I would recommend tuning to a station a couple of hundred miles or more away from you - one you don't normally get, and make certain it is the only station on that frequency in your area. You might hear a ping instead of the actual station - and that makes it all the cooler because it sounds like -- well, like spacey stuff out of a science-fiction movie. It sounds like this. In fact, that is it! It is better if you listen with headphones. See what you can learn from a radio guy?

A FEW FACTS
The meteors are bits of debris that comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle casts off when it approaches the sun, warms, and begins shedding its dust and gas. The shower gets its name from the constellation Perseus, which appears to be the point in the sky from which the shower originates. Swift-Tuttle returns once every 130 years. But each August, Earth's orbit takes it through the debris cloud Swift-Tuttle leaves behind. Over the last five years, the number of meteors one could expect to see in an hour under dark skies has ranged from 93 in 2007 to 173 in 2009. But, like this year, 2009's display was tempered by a nearly full moon.

WALL STREET: RIP OFF AMERICA

For those that may not have a clue, Wall Street is not your buddy. Oh sure, in years past Wall Street represented at least a little part of the Great American Dream. But rest assured, today's stock market(s) is not your Daddy's stock market. Greed, power-hunger, monopoly grabbing insiders have degraded the markets with enough inside trading, misleading assessment and tightly controlled leadership to make the open market little more than a playground for the elite and their buddies who are getting filthy rich at the expense of the average speculator. This is not an empty accusation. There is a horrifying game taking place below radar that is nothing more than complete and total manipulation of the open market and chances are slim that an average investor will weather the tricks, deceit and lies being fed to the media designed to influence investors into putting their money in a market that is programmed to rise and fall at the whims of these insiders. They get rich, you get poor and as they gain more control and power, you are headed down a road you should not be on. Times have changed, and so, apparently, has the honor among financial markets. Invest in yourself - not in the market. This little piece of advise you can trust - and hopefully take to the bank!

The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce

Following the recent airing of the season three premiere episode of the Ancient Aliens TV Series, "Aliens in the Old West", I have received a great deal of correspondence from fans of the program wanting to know more about adventurer and writer Ambrose Bierce and the strange story surrounding his mysterious disappearance in 1913 America. While I have included a section on Bierce in my latest book release (Ancient Aliens of the Americas) for those of you who want a more detailed look, I thought I would provide a link about the incident for those of you who want just the "short of it" - the bottom line to this great American mystery.
http://loganhawkes.com/ambrose.htm

My New Book Trailer - Ancient Aliens of the Americas

Not Your Daddy's Cap...But It Works!

I'm dating myself here, but how could a guy my age not jump at the chance to relive those Golden Years of adolescence by catching the new Captain America:First Avenger summer blockbuster? Or will the new movie release be a summer bust?

I grabbed the chance on opening weekend and was a little disappointed - not in the movie necessarily but in the turn out at the box office. I admit I watched the film at an odd hour, meaning not the peak time for movie goers to line up at the theater. None-the-less, I couldn't help notice that by and large those assembled for the screening were "older" - not your typical young crowd that the Marvel super hero movies seem to attract, making me wonder if the Cap - my all time favorite super hero as a kid - just isn't as popular anymore with the young crowd, not like Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) or Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) or even DC's Batman (Christian Bale) or, for Heaven's sake, evil hero The Joker (the late Heath Ledger).

What's the world coming to? Admittedly, American patriotism is not exactly at an all time high (thanx to the idiots in American politics - and I do mean all of them), plus this new Cap movie is actually a period piece set in the early 1940s. Still, in a day when Superman is denouncing his U.S. citizenship to appeal to an apparent "New World Order" crowd and in the latest X-Men movie the characters are getting younger instead of older (I assume to impress the younger crowd), one must wonder what has gone wrong to dampen the enthusiasm for America's greatest hero of all time? Am I just that old and outdated?

I must be. Most of the other theater patrons were older (like me) and the crowd was rather sparse to say the least. That's not to say the other screenings weren't packed. Maybe the movie will do well by the end of the weekend when the final box office numbers come in. Still, it has me worried. I caught the movie at an early release party on Wednesday night - in spite of being "under the weather" - yet I still enjoyed the movie greatly.

It doesn't help that the film is being released a week after the final Potter thriller and a week before Spielberg's Cowboys & Aliens - a tough sandwich when you're in the middle. And Marvel didn't give the movie as much promotional play as they typically do, like for the recent Thor flick and X-Men First Class.  Add to that the difficultly of trying to make a quality movie about such a dynamic super hero and it makes the chances for a successful Captain America film difficult at best.

For what it's worth, the producers did a pretty good job with the film and it was well worth the ticket price to see my favorite shield-wielder in action. If you miss it you will have missed a good flick - nuff said.