Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

You know that big sand-octopus that ate Boba Fett in the beginning of the third Star Wars movie? Well we were promised an interview with it – and we shouldn’t have gone dressed like a gigantic space-hot dog. It tentacled our legs together and that’s the last we remember for the last three weeks.

Honest to goodness, that’s where we’ve been.

But now we’re back – and we’re ready to tell you about Project Moon Dust – a supposedly secret military operation somehow related all UFO crashes everywhere forever and ever.

That’s a slight exaggeration only.

Government UFO conspiracies abound like fruit flies on a black banana. The only problem is the government never lets us prove any of the conspiracies by sending us clear cut mission statements written in 12-point times new roman font.

Usually – enter Project Moon Dust.

There aren’t really a lot of varied accounts of Project Moon Dust. There’s not even a Wikipedia page on it. There are a few UFO books and magazines that claim to be in the know. In USAFR Captain Kevin D. Randle book entitled simply Project Moon Dust, for example, you find paragraphs like this:

“Moon Dust is defined “As a specialized aspect of [the Air Force's] overall material exploitation program, Headquarters USAF has established Project Moon Dust to locate, recover and deliver descended foreign space vehicles.””

That’s interesting, right? What is perhaps more interesting is that in 1986 a magazine entitled Just Cause (from what we can tell) put out a call for anyone with information on Project Moon Dust. A man named Robert Todd responded – and it appeared as if Mr. Todd had done his homework.

Here are some excerpts detailing what Todd found, according to sacred-texts.com:

“As a result of inquiries by Todd about Moon Dust, and other matters, the
Air Force released a letter on August 20, 1979. It was identified as “AFCIN-1E-
O”, dated 3 November 1961. The letter was partly deleted, but enough was left
to open the door on Moon Dust: (emphasis added where necessary–ed.)

“Extract, page 1: “c. In addition to their staff duty assignments,
intelligence team personnel have peacetime duty functions in support of such
Air Force projects as Moondust, Bluefly, and UFO, and other AFCIN directed
quick reaction projects which require intelligence team operational
capabilities (see Definitions).”

“Extract, page 2: “f. Blue Fly: Operation Blue Fly has been established
to facilitate expeditious delivery to FTD of Moon Dust or other items of great
technical intelligence interest. ACIN SOP for Blue Fly operations, February
1960 provides for 1127th participation.”

“Extract, page 3: “c. Peacetime employment of AFCIN intelligence team
capability is provided for in UFO investigation (AFR 200-2) and in support of
Air Force Systems Command (AFCS) Foreign Technology Division (FTD) Projects
Moon Dust and Blue Fly. These three peacetime projects all involve a poten-
tial for employment of qualified field intelligence personnel on a quick
reaction basis to recover or perform field exploitation of unidentified flying
objects, or known Soviet/Bloc aerospace vehicles, weapons systems, and/or
residual components of such equipment. The intelligence team capability to
gain rapid access, regardless of location, to recover or perform field
exploitation, to communicate and provide intelligence reports is the only
such collection capability available to AFCIN, and it is vitally necessary
in view of current intelligence gaps concerning Soviet/Bloc technological
capabilities.”

If the excerpts are what they say they are, then that’s really something. The only problem is proving a letter allegedly written in 1961 wasn’t written by a ponytail-wearing fat kid from the depths of his mother’s basement. Of course, the letter doesn’t have any references to hyper drives, star command, or intergalactic conspiracies – which really lends this whole thing some legitimacy if you think about it.

Don’t think about it.

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

When that weather balloon crashed in New Mexico all those years ago, it certainly was an inconvenience. Seriously – think of all that precious farm land that was now good for nothing except being a large dent.

Not only that – but think of all the nice people who were allegedly forced to cover it all up. Soldiers who woke to revelry that morning, marched through the mess hall as usual – and then suddenly they have a very strange secret to not tell a soul for the rest of their lives.

Almost the rest of their lives anyway. One former soldier, although not on the original Roswell scene, says he saw one of it’s aliens in captivity.

If we were offered the privilege of seeing an alien in captivity under the solemn promise that we’d never tell a single person what we saw – you can be sure we’d not tell anybody. Did you hear that government? We said we wouldn’t tell anybody if you showed us some aliens. Please place that prominently in our file.

That’s what 80 year old Paul Epley tried to do – until the 1990s anyway, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here’s how the story goes as per Sitfu.com:

“In the summer of 1950, Paul was in the U.S. Army and working at Camp Wallace on the James River in Virginia. One day, for reasons he no longer can recall, he went to Camp Perry near Williamsburg, Virginia. While there, he recognized an MP guarding a bunker; they had served in Guam together. “I went down and asked him what he was guarding,” says Paul, “and he said I can’t show you. So I kept talking to him and he said, ‘All right, I’ll give you a brief look at it.’ So he opened the door.”

“Behind the door, just 15 to 20 feet from him, was an alien standing in a small cage with a base that was only three to four feet square. The alien was about 4 ½ feet tall and only wearing briefs. What caught Paul’s eye the most was the alien’s skin color which he described as “an old orange-gray, dead-looking color.” Despite the color, Paul assured [Sitfu.com] it was alive and seemed to be aware of his presence.”

Aliens and alien bodies really didn’t show up in the Roswell story until long after that crash happened – decades after if we’re not mistaken. Although this may seem suspicious, does it really rule it out as a possibility? Epley isn’t the only one to claim he saw the grays either - Philip Corso claimed to have seen dead ones. UFOs.About.com says:

“Not only did Corso claim to have seen an alien body from Roswell, but also secret Pentagon files regarding the incident. He stated that the Pentagon had the bodies of aliens shipped to the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D. C. Autopsies were done on the dead aliens.”

Corso came out with the info towards the end of his waning years, as has Epley. Why would those in the alien-know wait so long to spread their knowledge? Epley actually didn’t. He tried talking in the nineties, but the FBI allegedly showed up on his front stoop telling him to shut up before they tear off his skin and feed it inside-out to whatever exhibit seems hungriest down at the local zoo.

And then they were going to pour salt on the rest of him.

That’s more of a summation than a quote, mind you.

One thing you’ll have to keep in mind is that even though this Epley character says he saw a captive alien being held by the military, he also says he was a super secret military assassin, and that he was once offered a job to kill Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a lot of tall tales. Do you believe them?

Well maybe you should hear it from Epley’s own mouth before you make a rush to judgment:

Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, aliens, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, EVPs, ancient artifacts, strange facts, odd sightings or just the plain unexplainable.

Roswell’s big problem is it’s all word of mouth. There are these tremendous claims of what went on there, but why believe a low-brow farmer? The same goes for Kecksburg. Sure, we’ve heard the military hauled out a tarp-covered something-or-other that was shaped like a gigantic acorn, but show us the pictures.

That said, there’s finally a UFO-crash discovery that was caught on film – and we owe it all to commie-riddled Russia!

There are only two pieces of news that ever come out of Russia. The first is that Joseph Stalin‘s nipples used to bleed every Easter. Some say it was a heavenly reminder of his parents’ religion that he so casually cast aside. This news re-breaks every two years or so. Wait for it – you’ll see.

The second news story that always breaks from the formerly red country is that their babies are born with temporary-but-reappearing Koranic tattoos. They’ve got some crazy stuff going on over there – we’re tellin’ ya.

Imagine our surprise then, when we discovered this third story came out of the country where we thought they only had a two-template newspaper. It happened in 1968.

No doubt you’d like us to cut to the chase. Here it is as All News Web puts it:

“The Soviet Defense Ministry wrote in March 1969, Order No. 481 addressed to the Commander of the Air Defense Forces in the Sverdlosvsk Military Region Lieutenant General A.G. Ponomarenko. He was ordered to assist in every way the local KGB authorities in the operation “Sverdlovsk Midget” (small aliens), signed by the Deputy Commander in Chief of the USSR Air Defense Forces, Colonel General S.D. Lebedey, Seal stated, General Staff of the USSR Defense Ministry.

“In a second letter from November 3, 1969 on the KGB letterhead addressed to Deputy Chief of the Scientific Research Department KGB USSR, Colonel Grigoriev. The letter stated that on March 5, 1969 information was received about discovery of the unidentified object wreckage, 3 meter high and 5 meter in diameter with remains of small unknown human like creature, Operation called “Sverdlovsk Midget”.”

 

Prince William knows only too well that being second in line to the throne has its perks.

For instance, when you're going to be King Of England all sorts of lovely young girls routinely throw themselves at you even though you're an uppity rugby tosser with insane male pattern baldness, a near-incomprehensible speaking voice and a face like a pre-kiln Toby jug of an Easter Island statue made by the blind lady from that Lionel Richie video. Plus people let you fly fighter planes.

That's basically what we're getting at – someone's decided to let Prince William fly a fighter plane. That's about it.

Unlike his layabout brother Harry, who can spend the rest of his life groping girls and pretending that he doesn't want a DNA test, Prince William knows that one day he'll be King of England, and that he has to prepare mercilessly for the overbearing responsibility of waking up every day, eating a swan, opening a hospital, eating another swan, throwing a bit of a tantrum when people take his photo, eating another swan and then going to sleep on a waterbed filled with the tears of the poor.

Actually, there's a little more to it than that. As King, Prince William also automatically becomes head of the British armed forces. Leaving aside the terrifying thought that an 81-year-old woman is currently in charge of an entire nation's military firepower – something that, from our experience, leads us to believe that Britain will soon go to war with the council and all these young people with their music that's all bang bang bang – it means that Prince William needs to get ready for everything to come. 

And, as head of the British military, Prince William needs to be able to fly a fighter plane, just in case the rest of the army all gets ill on the same day that there's an important country to bomb. So, starting from today, that's exactly what Prince William is learning to do. CNN reports on the start of Prince William's RAF training:

A defense ministry spokesman said William will first learn about modern air power and the traditions of the RAF. Then he is to begin flying lessons with several units, including support helicopter, search-and-rescue, air transport, and fighter aircraft. William will start his lessons in a training aircraft for fighter jet pilots, the defense ministry spokesman said. The prince will then learn to fly the four-passenger Squirrel helicopter.

Once that's done, Prince William will have achieved military experience in the army and the RAF, meaning that he'll just have to sail around the world in a Royal Navy submarine and he'll have got the hat-trick. Thus, able to kill foreigners on land, sea and air, Prince William will be able to lead the British Armed Forces effectively.

And if the man's got any sense, the first thing that Prince William will do is enrol his big-faced girlfriend to be the first one who charges into any conflict with a hunting knife clenched between her teeth firing a shotgun into the air. She needs the practise, you see.

Read more:

Prince's flying career is launched - CNN 

There are two things that soldiers enjoy – one is shooting foreigners and the other is watching hungover, coked-out amateur porn stars who used to be on a reality TV show slur out one halfhearted Bonnie Tyler cover version after another.

But that's not going to happen, because an American charity has decided that it doesn't want our new favourite good girl gone bad (or bad girl gone worse? Crap girl gone terrible?) Jessica Sierra to perform at a Washington Christmas tribute concert for US troops on Friday, thanks to her currently being held in custody for violating her parole in an embarrassingly drunk, vomit-stained, sexually-propositioning way, and also because of the imminent internet release of the grubby-looking Jessica Sierra sex tape.

But, undeterred, Jessica Sierra has vowed to help the army out in any way she can despite the concert snub, which is why this week she'll be offering sad-faced handjobs to crooked prison guards in return for donations to the war effort. Possibly.

Long-forgotten American Idol reject Jessica Sierra is like the seedy flipside to our old friend Vanessa Hudgens. When Vanessa Hudgens got naked earlier in the year, there was a spirit of naive innocence about it which, rather than harming her career, actually enhanced it somewhat.

And while news of a Jessica Sierra sex tape and reports of her multiple arrests have made Sierra a bigger name than ever, it's hardly likely to enhance any career of hers apart from being the first choice of destination for grotty, filth-encrusted Florida cab drivers when obviously poor tourists ask them if they know where they can have a good time.

The Jessica Sierra story so far is an enduring classic – voted off American Idol early on two years ago, Jessica Sierra made a name for herself recently by getting arrested for throwing a cocktail glass at a man's head with cocaine in her possession, which she neatly followed up by getting in a drunken argument with police, resisting arrest, throwing up in the police car, racially and homophobically abusing some of the arresting officers, offering to suck off another officer if he'd let her go and then becoming the unfortunately-timed star of a soon-to-be-released internet sex tape. 

Now, currently held in custody ahead of a court case that could see her spending up to 11 years in jail, Jessica Sierra has to face the sad fact that her services are no longer welcome at Friday's 'A Song for Their Service' holiday concert in Washington to honour serving members of the US military.

Jessica Sierra was due to perform at the concert alongside Mark Wills, Russ Lee, Melanie Dekker, Diana Nagy and a whole host of other singers we've never even heard of, but because of a rule stating that nobody can perform at military charity concerts if they've starred in a sex tape so depressingly cruddy-looking that it makes the final scenes of Requiem For A Dream look like Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, organisers MoveAmericaForward.org have decided that she's no longer welcome.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson said of Jessica Sierra in a statement:

"While we appreciate Ms. Sierra's past efforts to support U.S. troops, including performing for them in Iraq on Independence Day, it is quite obvious that Ms. Sierra needs to devote a great deal of time to putting her life back together."

But perhaps this is a good thing after all – Jessica Sierra's talents are obviously wasted singing a series of mid-level MOR cover versions at a wartime charity concert. That's why everyone has agreed that it's better for everyone if Jessica Sierra is airlifted to Fallujah and allowed to witlessly stumble around the city being arbitrarily aggressive to anyone she meets. That would surely bring about the end of the war for good, as it would result in hordes of Iraqi insurgents fleeing the country fearing for their lives because they thought there'd been some sort of horrible 28 Days Later-style zombie outbreak and that they'd all end up looking like her if she coughed blood into their eyes or something.

Read more:

Ex-"Idol" Finalist Won't Sing in Concert – Associated Press