---

Not very long ago, I came across a letter from a woman somewhere in the press. She is absolutely convinced that UFOs exist, but that all of them are manufactured on Earth by ordinary people at secret factories. Where does such a strange conviction come from? Once, when she was just a little girl, she saw a 'saucer' hovering in the forest over a lake and managed to get so close to it that she could examine the hull. The hull was assembled with our earthly hex-head bolts. To her, the thought that super-advanced civilizations could use such a purely earthly anachronism as bolts seems far too incredible.
She is absolutely right. Nowhere in Cosmos would it ever cross anyone's mind to assemble the hulls of spacecraft with bolts. What she saw is indeed not a product of super-advanced civilizations.
But the funniest thing is that not a single earthly design bureau would ever risk assembling the hull of an aircraft—or any other vehicle, for that matter—with bolts. This was exactly what she, not being a specialist, did not know. The hull is a load-bearing structure, and assembling it with bolts means exposing the pilot to deadly danger, since during a hard landing, the bolts can be shorn off, and then the hull will collapse like a house of cards, snapping shut like a mousetrap on both the crew and the passengers. Here on Earth, we use welding in such cases, and if the parts cannot be welded, we use rivets which, when bucked, fill the entire hole, keeping them from being shorn off even during the hardest landing.
Perhaps we possess some other new technologies, but bolts... even for us, this is old hat from the century before last, since under vibrations, threaded connections happen to unscrew on their own. Assembling a bridge over a river with bolts is fine, but as for the body of an automobile—that is highly questionable. This was known even in pre-revolutionary Russia, which is why the hulls of marine vessels back then were already made with rivets (though today it is welding).
So, what did that woman actually see? A common imitation. Those bolts were never screwed in by anyone, and no one will ever unscrew them, because they are molded as a single whole with the hull—just like the nuts on the wheels of plastic toy cars. There might be a steering wheel inside, a tank, and headlights, all looking exactly like the real thing. But... it is a toy.

---

---

For a long time now, all the ufologists on Earth are perplexed by why the aliens make such a strange choice of candidates, whom they 'took for a ride and returned.' People of science, people seriously studying the paranormal, and even simply people with a higher education—let alone two—are invited to ride on a flying saucer extremely rarely. On the other hand, people with below-average intelligence and children are the favorite passengers.
Everything is correct. Such passengers may be more or less observant, but they will easily swallow any nonsense about anything they are told. But just try explaining to a graduate of a physics and technology institute what kind of fuel a saucer runs on when it… has no engine at all, and other things in that same vein. That's why here, in the sky above us, UFOs are scurrying around, invitingly blinking their lights, flying yet unable to fly.

---

---

The Zong massacre was a mass killing of more than 130 enslaved African people by the crew of the British slave ship Zong over several days from 29 November 1781.[a] The William Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship as part of the Atlantic slave trade. As was common business practice, they had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water after a series of navigational errors, the crew threw enslaved Africans overboard.

After the slaver ship reached port at Black River, Jamaica, Zong's owners made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the enslaved Africans. When the insurers refused to pay, the resulting court cases (Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug. KB 232) held that in some circumstances, the murder of enslaved Africans was legal and that insurers could be required to pay for those who had died. The jury found for the slavers but at a subsequent appeal hearing the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, ruled against the slave-trading syndicate owners, on the grounds that new evidence suggested that the captain and crew were at fault.

Following the first trial, Olaudah Equiano, a freedman, brought news of the massacre to the attention of the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, who worked unsuccessfully to have the ship's crew prosecuted for murder. Because of the legal dispute, reports of the massacre received increased publicity, stimulating the abolitionist movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the Zong events were increasingly cited as a powerful symbol of the horrors of the Middle Passage, the transoceanic route by which enslaved Africans were brought to the New World.[3]

The non-denominational Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787. The next year, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1788, its first law regulating the slave trade, to limit the number of slaves per ship. Then, in 1791, Parliament prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship owners when enslaved Africans were murdered by being thrown overboard.[4] The massacre has also inspired works of art and literature. It was remembered in London in 2007, among events to mark the bicentenary of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished British participation in the African slave trade (though stopped short of outlawing slavery). A monument to the murdered enslaved Africans on Zong was installed at Black River, Jamaica.

The above represents less than a quarter of the information at the link.

---

---

In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with inspector Roy Teague, a serving West Midlands Police tactical firearms commander whose new book, "Close Encounters of the Police Kind," collects unidentified aerial phenomenon encounters from about 250 British police officers. Teague explains how a 2016 documentary on UAP over American missile fields led him to ask which witnesses the public would find hardest to dismiss and why he concluded the answer was serving police.

The conversation works through his strongest cases, among them a metropolitan police helicopter crew and an Army warrant officer who watched a dart-shaped aircraft over central London accelerate away and disappear into an opening in the sky in July 1997; an off-duty constable who lost two and a half hours on the A14 with his wife, his children and the family dog; and a Grampian officer whose MRI shows a small metallic object behind his right eye. Teague also details the pressure that follows these sightings, from a colleague grounded and quietly debriefed by the RAF at a private address in Croydon, to the senior officers who advised him to pick another subject to write about. Of the officers who came to him, all but nine agreed to be named and Teague argues the ridicule attached to this subject is exactly why so few of these accounts have ever surfaced.

---