DS: I saw both of them.
SDI: Were they yet classified?
DS: I don't know. People have asked me
that. There wasn't any classified designation on them when I saw them, or when
Marcia showed them to me.
SDI: What would you say the odds were
for an eager beaver researcher to be able to get their hands on either one of
those reports via the Freedom of Information Act there in the states?
DS: I don't know. It would depend upon
whether or not they were classified. If they were classified, that's one of the
twenty-two grounds on the basis of which the freedom of Information Act will
not give you material.
SDI: But I can't see them not being
classified, in view of the content, and what you said you saw.
DS: Well, it's not clear. Again, I
just don't know. We couldn't tell what it is that was going on at that time.
That was right at the time when we were filing the Karen Silkwood case. I had
just filed the Karen Silkwood case in November of 1976, and was in the midst of
all kinds of preliminary hearings and depositions and such. While I was
extremely interested in this, I couldn't tell what was really happening. I was
waiting for the President to say something -- to do something, but he got kind
of swept up in all those other affairs I mentioned earlier.
SDI: In that room back in Washington,
obviously there were other things that you saw. This one particular picture of
a plowed furrow in a field, and an object stuck in an embankment, and
hieroglyphics. Beyond that, anything else that you took out of that room that
was significant in terms of its impact on you?
DS: No, no. I realized that there was
probably going to be a limited amount of time that I was going to get to be
there, so I first started looking through some of the reels that had
documentation on them. I started to say to myself, "Look, if I start
trying to look through these documents, I'm going to run out of time." So
I was trying to find some key photographs. So that's why I went looking into
the canisters looking for a canister that had photographs in it. That's how I
happened to come to that particular canister.
SDI: Danny, explain this for me if you
would. Amuse me I guess. I am a layman, not a lawyer. Lawyers think
differently, and are used to long periods of waiting. If I had come across
something like that in a basement in Washington, and done my little sketch, I'd
be talking to everyone and anybody about what I had seen. Now explain it away
to me, that I'm just a lawyer, I think differently, and things take a long
time. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
Why would you have just not gone public
with that?
DS: Well that is interesting. That's a
perfectly logical question. At the time when I was in Washington D.C. the thing
that I realized, being the general counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters, is that
you actually bring information to the proper authority and try to make the
legal system work the way it is supposed to work. It took quite some time for
me to realize that really it was necessary to go out to the people, and have
the people mobilize, rise up against the major institution, and try to force
them to do what they were doing. I had come into Washington in 1975, and I was
still operating in 1976 and 1977 very much under the idea that we can get these
legal institutions to work. Since we had the new President, and I understood
that the President knew about this stuff, that he had actually seen one, and
that he was going to get copies of this report, that I was anticipating that it
was going to start to work. When I was working on the Karen Silkwood case, I
was out in Oklahoma most of the time doing depositions regularly, running
professional investigators in the field -- into a major confrontation with the
Central Intelligence Agency over the potential smuggling of plutonium out of
these facilities -- I got kind of swept up in all of that stuff, and I was
really very much buried in much of that stuff for the next couple of years. I
was surprised frankly, that nothing came out of the White House and the
Executive Branch. Basically the time sort of passed for that sort of key piece
of information to come out. I was waiting for some stuff to happen. I talked to
people about it -- informally when I would see them. That's one of the reasons
when people contacted me to talk to John Mack about representing him, I
immediately agreed to do that. SDI: Daniel, you obviously carry with you a
great deal of credibility -- the cases you have been involved with, the whole
Silkwood thing, incredible. Hollywood movies and so forth have come from what
you have worked on. Given who you have talked to, what you have been privy to
in the way of statements from individuals, documents, pictures, the information
that came to you as a result of people trusting your credibility, what do you
believe?
DS: (pause) Interesting. Actually, I
believe that we are going to have a major private professional investigation
sponsored by the UFO community that I am going to get to play a fairly major
part in -- I hope. Therefore, I need to remain open to what exactly is going
on. I did make a presentation to the International UFO Congress at Laughlin
[March 2000] setting forth what I thought were seven or eight different
potential explanations for the various phenomena that are going on, and rather
than saying that I came to the conclusion that any one of them was true, to the
exclusion of others, I believed that some percentage of incidents that have
been reported are probably attributable to different phenomena. I laid that out
for them at the Congress, as a preliminary view of what were the areas that I
thought really needed to be investigated -- what potentials really needed to be
looked at with potential explanations for various aspects of this phenomena.
Now that having been said, in general, what I believe, I believe that a
substantial portion of the very up-close sightings, where you get to see a
vehicle that's absolutely clear, that it isn't just a mistaken light of some
sort. I think that a substantial plurality of these are in fact vehicles from
an extraterrestrial civilization, and I believe that they probably have a means
of transporting themselves, which in fact exceeds the speed of light, and for
that reason they would appear to be almost other-dimensional. Because when they
come out of that mode of transport they appear to sort of materialize and
dematerialize from that realm. So what some people think makes these beings
extra-dimensional beings, my opinion is that some of them are in fact
extraterrestrial. The report that Marcia showed me on extraterrestrial
phenomena actually stated that it was the conclusion of the Library of
Congress, Science and Technology Division, that from two to six, at least,
other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed civilizations exist right
within our own galaxy. Now they based this upon the Drake's equation, in
working out various probabilities. They are increasing every day now that we
discover that other star systems outside of our own star system -- where
planets exist. We have discovered evidence of water in other solar systems now.
http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com/
I think that it's clear that these
civilizations exist, and the only question is a fact question: Whether or not
they have been capable of developing a mode of transportation that exceeds the
speed of light. I believe that they have.
SDI: That is fascinating information
that we have here on our desk this evening for this radio program. The House
Space Science committee, information coming and statements being made among the
advances and discoveries -- at least fifty planets have been found in orbit
around distant sun-like stars in the last five years -- and researchers now
believe those systems may be common throughout the system. Finding planets was
considered an essential step to finding life of course, and that is being done.
DS: I was with my two sons, the night
before last, and I said, "It's just amazing. You can tell your
great-grandchildren that you were alive right at the time when they discovered
other planets outside of our solar system. Now that's just an extraordinary
step for human beings to take. My son said to me, "Well, that will
probably be dwarfed by the fact that we will probably establish contact with a
whole extraterrestrial civilization." I said, "Ya, you're probably
right. That's probably true." The big discoveries we are making here each
. . . (Part of line missing) SDI: Can you stay for ten to fifteen minutes after
the news?
DS: Ya. My wife has agreed to stand by
to wait to go out to dinner tonight. So I have agreed to do that.
SDI: We'll just keep you for another
ten or fifteen minutes. Good stuff. Dan how did you get hooked-up with the
Disclosure Project?
DS: Well, I just got called by Steven
Greer, and he asked if I would participate in it and I have been trying over
the last year or so to make myself available to each of the major groups that
have been involved in the UFO issue, such as the International UFO Congress,
MUFON, Steven Greer's group, Dr. John Mack, and others on a kind of an equal
basis, so that I can demonstrate I am open to talking to people from all points
of view, and actually establish a level of confidence in our relationships
together. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
We can try and draw the people
together, and share information, and work together in a common investigation.
SDI: Daniel, perhaps this is the
development that we have been waiting for without many of us realizing that
that is it. We have been hoping for some critical mass to occur, so that this
can become publicly legitimate and properly researched and uncovered as it
were. I think to date it has been the hopes of many that there would be enough
sightings, that there would be video footage, that there would be enough
multiple personal experiences, that someone would have to admit to this. The
kind of critical mass that seems to be coming to the fore now is the critical
mass that well-noted, well-respected, learned individuals who are now saying,
"I am stepping into this arena." People such as yourself. That kind
of critical mass is very, very exciting to hear -- someone such as you say what
you said before we broke for news: "I believe this is real." That is
incredibly exciting.
DS: I think that also the ability of
people in our generation, our post-war generation, to actually conduct
ourselves in a responsible and civil manner towards each other, even though
different people have different points of view. To avoid being scurrilous and
antagonistic towards each other is also part of the coming-of-age that really
entitles a movement of this sort to receive the type of respect that is going
to be necessary in order to get people in high positions of responsibility,
both civilian and military, to come forward and to be willing to participate. I
have heard many people say, "I don't want to go near that, because they
are going to chew you up and kill you." They are not talking about any
secret government official. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/They are talking about the people in the movement itself. I am
hoping that this can in fact be a very important crossing that we make
together, and avoid picking on each other's points of view, and try to share
different perspectives, to that we can come to a collective of what is really
going on here.
SDI: You are very diplomatic but the
bottom line is that the UFO community as a whole has a nasty habit of eating
it's young and stabbing each other in the back.
DS: Well I just think that what we
have to do is that we come to participate. We have to be aware of the fact that
this is a risk that we all take when we come into this area, but if we are able
to smile and kind of pass aside those kinds of shots taken, and be civil and be
respectful of everyone, and try and get people to come together at a common
event such as this big MUFON gathering on July 19, 20, 21, and 22nd down in
Irvine. If people will come to those things, and say, look, we are all here and
we've got five, six, or eight of the top major participants in these
investigations. Why don't we try an form some kind of common coalition here,
without anyone being the chief of the thing? Why don't we try and work together?
I think that this type of collegial decision making, where we take
responsibility for ourselves -- not be dependant upon some military authority,
government official, or even the President of the United States to come forward
and spoon feed us this information, is the type of responsibility that may well
be what is essential for us to demonstrate the type of worthiness that is
necessary in order to be prepared for this information.
SDI: Excellent point. So in summation,
for your moments here with us this evening, what next? Other than the Irvine
symposium.
DS: Well, I hope that what we will do
is come to an insight, that we pool our resources together and actually sponsor
-- I pointed out before when I was on the Art Bell show -- a tribunal which we
can actually bring forth and marshal our evidence. Put it forward in a way that
is admissible, with present rules of federal civil procedure, that we act
responsibly in this way, that we try to do this in a way that will encourage
people who have opposing points of view, to those that are held by the UFO
community in general, to come forward to try and represent the other side in a
responsible and respectful way, and that we can subject the various witnesses
to cross-examination and to testing of their evidence. We can then bring on
federal judges who will sit in judgment of this. We can empanel a real jury,
who can participate in listening to this information, that it can be broadcast
over radio and television, or web cast over the Internet so that people can
witness this type of major event, so that we can bring the information forward
in the most responsible and careful way that we can, and then watch the jury
deliberate. We can actually have cameras, live cameras in the room to see
regular citizens deliberating on the respectability of the respective
witnesses, the different pieces of evidence, and see what kind of conclusion
that we can come to here.
SDI: Yes, if we are still not being
told, or the information is not forthcoming then what do we accomplish with all
that? Those that hold the details, hold the evidence, military, government,
whatever, even despite that sort of arena.
DS: Well we have experience that in
the past, as you know, the government withheld the information about the
dangers of nuclear power, it withheld the information about Watergate, it
withheld the information about Iran-Contra. You know the entire Iran-Contra
hearings were brought -- the government official hearings -- about only because
we as citizens mobilized and prepared this information and brought it forward
in a completely comprehensive way. They were finding themselves getting behind
the power curve, so they had to respond. You know Ed Meese, the Attorney
General, under Ronald Reagan. The only reason he ever asked for the appointment
of a special prosecutor was because it was getting out of control. I think that
is what we really need to do, kind of a citizens initiative utilizing the
standard rules of federal civil procedures in a kind of sophistication that we
have learned as a collective community to utilize. That is the exact type of
procedure that we need to undertake. If the government chooses to try to
respond to it in some way, then that is fine. We will provide a forum for them,
to come forward and participate in such a process. It is very much like Harvard
Law School when I began at Harvard in 1967. We as a studentry organized the
Joint Student Faculty Committee at Harvard Law School. There was no faculty on
it, because they wouldn't gain to participate in it, in the kind of sharing of
authority to make decisions. Yet, after two full years of holding meetings, the
faculty at Harvard found it absolutely essential that they come forward and
participate, because they were losing their authority and power. So I think we need
to have sort of a citizens diplomacy program coming forward, where we take
responsibility for these decisions ourselves. You know, the fact of the matter
is, there are images where five hundred or six hundred Jewish people would sit
there with two German soldiers holding guns on them, and leading them into a
German prison camp. If people would only rise up, and take control of their own
lives we cannot be coerced like this. What I think we need to do is mobilize
people; utilize the training that our two-post war generations are the most
widely educated educations in the history of our human family. We don't have to
sit back and wait for someone like the king, or the pope, or someone like this
to tell us this information.
We can get this information ourselves,
if we are willing to take the responsibility ourselves.
SDI: The time to move forward and take
advantage of the inevitable critical mass situation.
DS: Right. Absolutely.
President Jimmy Carter was the first
President of the United States of America to have officially reported the UFO
he saw to the authorities. He was also the President who said that if elected
he would see that UFO-Alien Full Disclosure would take place. That the American
public would be told the truth about everything was one of the campaign cries
of Jimmy Carter. Carter made a promise he could not or would not be able to
keep.
After Carter won the White House, he
paid a visit to the then-CIA Director, George Bush. Carter had an interest in
UFOs ever since experiencing his first sighting sometime in 1969 while standing
outside a Lion's Club in Georgia. His campaign speeches promising to unravel
the government's long held cover-up was the "Parting of the Red Sea"
for Ufologists not only in America but around the world. Here was the one guy
who would open up the "Promised Land" and lead them into Full
Disclosure.
Carter wanted the U.S. Government's
UFO secret documents declassified. George Bush more or less told Carter that
the President of the United States did not have the need to know the
information contained in those documents. Can you even begin to imagine that?
What lends even more mind-blowing credibility to this alleged event between
Carter and Bush is the credibility of the allegation maker: Daniel Sheehan.
Daniel Sheehan was born in1946 and
graduated from Harvard Law School. There, he was co-founder of the Harvard
Civil Rights and Civil Liberty Law Review. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
He went on to work for the American
Civil Liberties Union and became general counsel for a host of entities
including The Disclosure Project-a group dedicated to getting the U.S.
Government to allow full and unfettered access to what the Feds know about the
UFO-Alien phenomenon.
According to Sheehan, Bush Senior, who
was the CIA Director, refused Carter's request for disclosure of the UFO
documents, even to the President of the United States, because it was generally
believed in the halls and corridors of the secret, black-ops government that
Carter would then turn the truth over to the American people.
Director of a California think tank,
Sheehan's credentials are impeccable. Sheehan's career is a litany of
high-profile cases like, "legal counsel team for the New York Times'
Pentagon Papers case, defense of the Berrigan brothers, going after the
Kerr-McGee nuclear plant (Karen Silkwood), Three-Mile Island, Iran-Contra. At
the Disclosure Conference, Sheehan says the Bush-Carter story was relayed to
him in 1977 by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service, part of the
Library of Congress."
Sheehan's interest in this phenomenon
came about when Sheehan met Marcia Smith through a mutual acquaintance. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
Smith told Sheehan that she was
involved in a research project for the Science and Technology Committee of the
Library of Congress that would address the issues of the potential existence of
extraterrestrial intelligence and make an evaluation of the data on the
phenomena of UFOs. When Sheehan queried Smith as to who exactly wanted this
study done, her answer was none other than Jimmy Carter.
This all was with a view to
investigate exactly what could or could not be turned over to the general
public, according to Daniel Sheehan.
Smith asked Sheehan if he could, since
he was the then-General Counsel to United States Jesuit Headquarters at their
National Office in Washington D.C., get access to the records on the UFO-Alien
issue contained in the Vatican. Though Sheehan made repeated attempts to gain
access to the Vatican's documents through official channels, he was refused
each time.
This makes one wonder just why, if all
there is to this UFO-Alien issue is weather balloons, flocks of geese, and
swamp gas, would the Vatican (or any government on the earth, for that matter)
have top-secret, and highly unattainable records pertaining to a nonexistent
issue?
After telling Marcia Smith of his
roadblock with the Vatican Library, she asked if he could help with a team that
was lobbying Congressional leader to reinstate funds for the SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial
Intelligence) program. Sheehan indicated to Smith that he was glad to help out.
Smith also later asked him if he could help out with an investigation into
"the potential theological religious implications of potential contact
with extraterrestrial civilizations."
This again begs the question that if
there's nothing at all to this phenomenon, then why this study?
Sheehan agreed to Smith's request but
insisted he have access to the documents pertaining to this issue that she had
garnered for an investigation she did for the Science and Technology Committee
in Congress. When asked what exactly Sheehan wanted to see, he indicated he
wanted access to "the classified sections of the Project Blue Book."
Astoundingly, Daniel was granted
access.
He was not allowed to take notes,
photos, or carry anything into the room containing the documents or out with
him when he left the Library of Congress where the documents were stored. After
proceeding through multiple layers of security, he was shown to the room with
microfiche machines. Before entering, he was told he could not take his
briefcase with him. Almost absent-mindedly, he had a yellow legal pad under his
arm that wasn't confiscated before he entered the room. He proceeded through
small canisters of film. It didn't take long to find proof.
He discovered photos of what appeared
to be a disc-shaped craft. It had crashed.
"It had hit into this field and
had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was
wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The
vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment -- kind of up at
an angle."
The men taking photos were
unmistakably, in Sheehan's mind, American Air Force personnel.
As Sheehan continued to review the
film, he discovered a close-up of the craft that revealed symbols or glyphs
written on the craft. He thought it was an insignia. He wanted to record what
he saw, but remembered he was not allowed to take notes. He knew it was likely
his legal pad would be discovered when he left the room and the guards would
examine it to see if he had taken notes. However, since he wanted those
insignias, he had to find a way to record them. He decided to arrange the
cardboard backing of his legal pad in such a way against the microfiche screen
so he could trace the symbols. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/When he left the top-secret document room, he was searched. His
pad was taken and flipped through for notes. Finding none, and not noticing the
traced symbols on the cardboard backing of the yellow pad, it was returned to
him by the guards and Sheehan left.
Sheehan not only revealed to Marcia
Smith what he had found but he also revealed the information to his boss at the
Jesuit National Headquarters. Meetings and conventions were convened on the
issue. Reports were written. President Carter saw at least one of the reports
made by Marcia Smith, which included information from Daniel Sheehan's
discoveries.
Sheehan still has the yellow notepad
with the symbols but says no analysis has been done on the symbols.
Oh, are you wondering about the
reports Marcia Smith finished after Daniel Sheehan's discovery and what they
said? Well, Sheehan read them and according to Sheehan:
"The one report that Marcia
showed me on extraterrestrial phenomena actually stated that it was the
conclusion of the Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, that
from two to six, at least, other highly-intelligent, technologically-developed
civilizations exist right within our own galaxy." [sources]
"The second report," says
Sheehan, "they had drawings of different shapes of UFOs that have been
sighted," continued Sheehan. "They didn't site any particular cases,
but they said that they believed there was a significant number of instances
where the official United States Air Force investigations were unable to
discount the possibility that one or more of these vehicles was actually from
one of these extraterrestrial civilizations. They put this together, and sent
it over to the President. I ended up seeing a copy of it."
The Carter Administration, though not
bringing about Full Disclosure, had a very busy four years of UFO phenomena. I
can't help but wonder if he had had another term in office, what could have
come of all of this?
If you're sitting in front of a
computer, it's easy to look up information on the Web. It's almost as easy if
you have a sophisticated cellphone with a decent Web browser and you're in a
place with a good Internet connection where it's possible to type.
But what if you only have a standard
cellphone with a lousy Web browser -- or even the best Web-browsing phone, but
it lacks a fast data connection? What if you're speeding down the road in a
car, where typing is dangerous?
Walt Mossberg says ChaCha, a free
mobile search service that answers queries over your cellphone via calls or
texts, does "a pretty good job." The service performed well when
asked about sports, nutrition and even shopping, he says.
Now, there's a way to get your
questions answered despite those hurdles. It's a free cellphone service that
lets you ask any question answerable via a Web search, using any cellphone, by
simply making a voice call. It's called ChaCha, and I've been testing it out.
To use ChaCha, you just dial
800-2chacha (800-224-2242) and state your question. In a few minutes, you'll
get an answer via text message. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com/
In one test, I asked ChaCha who was
the winning pitcher in the previous night's Red Sox victory against the
Yankees. In a few minutes, I received a text message with the correct answer:
Daisuke Matsuzaka.
ChaCha requires no registration and
works on any cellphone carrier. It needs no special codes or key words. You
just state your question as if you were asking a friend. If you prefer to type
your question, you can text it to "ChaCha," or 242242. Though ChaCha
itself charges no fees, your phone carrier may charge for the minutes you use,
or for the text messages.
The service works by routing your
questions to one of 10,000 hired "guides" -- students, stay-at-home
parents, retirees and others -- who look up the questions on the Web and reply.
They get paid 20 cents per answer.
Naturally, these guides vary as to
their speed and accuracy. If you don't like the answers they give you, or you
want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a
follow-up question. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
For instance, after learning which
pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was
quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.
Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most
cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses.
One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service.
When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came
up with a choice that few locals would cite.
The other is that, unlike many other
cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn't automatically know your
location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it's clueless about
questions such as "Where's the nearest drugstore?"
ChaCha is hardly the only information
service for cellphones. Google offers a text-message service where you can ask
questions on a wide variety of topics, and a voice-based service that locates
businesses near your location. Microsoft's TellMe subsidiary just introduced a
voice-based service that answers location-specific questions about businesses,
weather, traffic and movies, and displays the answers on the screens of
BlackBerrys.
But these competitors are more limited
than ChaCha in key respects. Google's broader mobile-search service, Google
SMS, requires that questions be sent via text message using special key words.
Its voice service, Goog411, finds only local businesses. TellMe's new service
is limited to location-based information and works only on certain phones.
I tested ChaCha using three very
different phones: a cheap, bare-bones Samsung flip phone from Sprint; a
midrange Motorola Razr from Verizon; and an Apple iPhone running on AT&T. I
asked questions via voice and text from various locations, including my car,
where I used a hands-free microphone.
I asked about sports, TV shows,
journalism, history, weather, nutrition, demographics and shopping. ChaCha
handled most of these inquiries correctly and was able to fix most of its
errors after I asked follow-up questions. For each question, it sends two text
messages: one restating your query and saying it's working on it, and the
second containing the answer.
Each ChaCha answer is accompanied by a
Web link. If your phone has a decent browser, you can go to that link to learn
who the guide was, and what his or her Web-site source was.
ChaCha gave me the weekend weather
forecast in Boston, the date of death of Abigail Adams and the cast of the TV
show "Brothers & Sisters." It provided Peyton Manning's salary
and the sodium content of a McDonald's quarter pounder. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
Its most impressive performance came
when it correctly answered an obscure historical question: "When was the
Gaspee burned?" The Gaspee was a British tax-collection ship burned in
Rhode Island in 1772 in what is often considered the first act of war of the
American Revolution.
Afar, Ethiopia
The Afar region, a low-lying spot in
northern Ethiopia, is home to two important anthropological discoveries: the
famous hominid fossil Lucy and the world’s oldest stone tools. But it has
several other distinctive features. Located near the meeting point of three
tectonic plates (the African, Arabian, and Indian plates), the area is
seismically active, with near-continuous earthquakes that can split the earth’s
crust, opening long rifts. According to recent reports, a large fissure has
appeared in Afar that will eventually separate the Horn of Africa from the rest
of the continent. There are also volcanoes. Rising from below sea level, Erta
Ale, the most active volcano in Ethiopia, erupted several times in 2005,
reportedly displacing about 50,000 nomads. The Afar depression happens to be
one of the hottest inhabited places on earth, especially from May to August,
when temperatures can reach a dangerous 113 degrees F.
1 Drink up: It takes three months for a recycled aluminum can
to make its way back onto the shelf in reincarnated form.
2 Or build a bridge: In 2002 researchers from Rutgers
University built a 42-foot-long bridge over a river using plastic beams made
from polystyrene cups and polyethylene milk jugs.
3 Or construct a boat: During World War I, enough metal was
salvaged from corset stays to build two warships.
4 On April 27 the boat Earthrace will begin an attempt to
break the maritime around-the-world speed record. It will use biofuel, some of
which comes from liposuctioned human fat.
5 No fat here: During Britain’s 2007 Recycle Now week, svelte
models strutted down Brighton beach wearing swimsuits made from steel cans.
6 These boots were made for flooring: Nike gathers old
athletic shoes and turns them into raw material for “sports surfaces” like
tennis courts and running tracks.
7 Meanwhile, in China, more than 1 million unsold copies of
British singer-songwriter Robbie Williams’s latest CD will be used to resurface
roads.
8 Last year Chinese hair salons caused a stir by unlawfully
recycling used condoms, possibly donated by local nightclubs, into hair ties.
9 Elsewhere in Asia, an enterprising dental technician
established the Japan Denture Recycle Association in 2006 to cash in on the
precious metals in discarded choppers. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
Proceeds go to Unicef.
10 Each year Americans junk more than 80 million dollars’ worth
of copper, gold, silver, palladium, and platinum in the form of retired cell
phones.
11 Cell phones, laptops, and, um, personal massage devices: New
British laws mandate that old electronic appliances—including sex toys—cannot
be dumped. They must be recycled with other so-called e-waste.
12 E-waste is for the birds: An Australian nut orchard converts
the shells of vintage Macintosh computers into houses for pest-eating birds.
13 Humans need houses too: When Luiz Bispo built his house in a
Rio de Janeiro slum out of construction waste last year, city authorities
threatened to destroy it. Now the house—which floats atop a junk-filled river
on a base of plastic bottles—is being touted as an icon of sustainable
development.
14 Cities have long been gold mines for recyclers: Beginning in
ancient times, tanners collected human urine to use in turning animal skins
into leather.
15 In the Middle Ages, urine was also used to make saltpeter, an
essential component of gunpowder.
16 Cities get recycled too: Masonry from Roman settlements made
a handy source of stone for medieval church builders.
17 But enough is enough: In 1821 Turkish soldiers surrounded
Greek forces holed up in the Parthenon and started stripping lead from temple
columns to make bullets. The horrified Greeks promptly sent the enemy a fresh
supply of ammunition to discourage further recycling.
18 Using every part: There are now sheep-poo air fresheners.
Sterilized sheep droppings are turned into packets stuffed with grass- or
daffodil-scented material.
19 Green to the end: The Doggone Project in Mannheim, Germany,
can recycle deceased pets into fertilizer.
20 You, too: Ecopods, a British company, sells stylish coffins
made from hardened recycled paper, available in a range of colors including
indigo and silver leaf.
Years ago, I profiled a theater
designer who had just created 200 sumptuous costumes from garbage bags. Green,
rose, black, white, sky blue, and see-through—the plastic was pliable and it
pleated, flounced, puffed, fluffed, and glowed with reflected light. The title
of that long-ago theater production was 33 Scenes on the Possibility of Human Happiness.
From trash to the sublime, plastic was cheap, durable, endlessly protean, and
astonishingly beautiful. Christo would agree.
How could that loveliness be linked to
what seems its ugly opposite: the contortions and distortions that chemicals in
plastic may have bequeathed us? The stunted testicles in fish and alligators;
girls blooming breasts and pubic hair at an eerily young age; the steadily
rising numbers of human males born with abnormal urethras; climbing rates of
testicular and breast cancer; declining sperm counts. Not to mention the death
of wildlife, particularly seabirds that mistakenly feast on discarded plastic.
Those garbage-bag ball gowns are now married in my mind with a photo of a
Laysan albatross whose belly, slashed open by biologists, was jammed with 306
pieces of plastic flotsam—a surreal bird version of a junkyard.
The most pressing question about plas–tic, though, may be whether daily
exposure alters the health and fertility of our children and perhaps even our
children’s children. It turns out that the hormonelike chemicals in plastic may
remodel our cells and tissue during key stages of development, both in the womb
and in early childhood. When pregnant mice are exposed to chemicals in plastic,
the mammary and prostate tissue of their developing embryos proliferates
abnormally, and sensitivity to hormones is forever turned up. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
Perhaps most disturbing is the
significant increase in chromosomal abnormalities in the eggs forming in those
embryos. Those are the eggs that will make the next generation. Thus, if the
worst-case scenario proves true, early exposure to plastic can reshape not just
our children but their children, too.
Present in everyday items like panty
hose and perfume, computers and catheters, baby rattles and billiard balls,
plastics are so ubiquitous we seldom give them a second thought. Yet they pose
problems both familiar and unfamiliar. Some of the public health issues are as
familiar as those posed by tobacco, lead, DDT, and asbestos—all hazards that
were understood, monitored, and regulated only after decades of research and
advocacy. Plastic presents new kinds of concerns because it requires a
radically different paradigm of toxicity. Whereas lead exposure can be quantified
by the drop in a child’s IQ and asbestos exposure can eventually be tallied by
mesothelioma incidence, the typical standards of toxicology do not apply to the
chemicals in plastic. If plastic harms, it does so by stealth: by mimicking our
own hormones, by scrambling signals during development, by stimulating our own
pathways excessively. And it may have that power at astonishingly low exposure
levels, amounts that by typical toxicological measures look just fine. With
plastic, less may be more, and a little may be a lot.
At the center of the Pacific Ocean in
a windless, fishless oceanic desert twice the size of Texas, a swirling mass of
plastic waste converges into a gyre containing an estimated six pounds of
nonbiodegradable plastic for every pound of plankton. Called the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, it is an indelible mark of human domination of the planet. But
plastic has also left its mark in us. Plastic’s chemical co-travelers make
their way into our urine, saliva, semen, and breast milk. Two in particular
stand out: bisphenol A (or BPA, used in polycarbonates and resins) and
phthalates (used to make plastic soft and pliable). Both upset the way certain
hormones function in the body, earning them the designation endocrine
disrupters. They are both now the subject of fierce scientific and public
scrutiny. Figuring out whether plastics are toxic to people at current levels
of exposure is complex. To take one example: Do rodents metabolize BPA
differently from humans, and are rodents therefore more sensitive to it? Are
mouse studies reliable indicators of what is happening to humans?
If there is one point on which many
scientists agree, it is the risk to the developing fetus and the young child.
“At least a dozen studies have shown the effects of phthalates on human
reproduction,” says University of Rochester epidemiologist and biostatistician
Shanna Swan, the lead author of a much-cited study that showed higher exposure
to some phthalates in mothers correlates with reduced “anogenital distance” in
newborn boys. Biologists recognize a reduction in the length between the anus
and the sex organ as an external marker of feminization, easily measured
because it is typically twice as long in males as in females.
The evidence on phthalates is strong
enough for the European Union to have banned them in children’s toys, and last
October California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation, to take
effect in 2009, setting stringent limits on the concentrations of phthalates in
child-care products for children under age 3. The ban focuses on soft baby
books, soft rattles, plastic bath ducks, and teething rings. Several other
states are considering similar legislation.
BPA, in turn, is becoming this year’s
poster child for all our doubts and fears about the safety of plastic. New
research highlighting the possible dangers of BPA has received tremendous media
coverage. In mice, at least, BPA exposure at crucial stages of development
induces observable changes (such as breast or prostate abnormalities) that last
a lifetime. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
The research may be confusing to a
layperson, yet some consensus has been reached: Last November a panel sponsored
by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) determined that there was at least
“some concern” about BPA’s effect on the fetal and infant brain. Around the
same time, the Centers for Disease Control reported that researchers there had
found BPA—the United States produces 6 billion pounds of it yearly—in 93
percent of urine samples from 2,500 Americans aged 6 to 85. Children under age
12 had the highest concentrations.
What is not known is whether infants
and children under 6 are even more heavily exposed, since they have not yet
been studied (for phthalates, Swan says, levels are definitely higher in
children than in adults). This, at least, has been measured: Infants fed canned
formula heated in a polycarbonate bottle—one source of BPA—can consume more
than 20 micrograms of the chemical a day. Animal studies show effects of BPA at
much lower concentrations.
To shift public understanding on this
issue is staggeringly difficult, especially given that exposure to plastic is
not a matter of individual lifestyle. Unlike tobacco and lead paint, plastics
are so useful we can hardly manage a day without them. Biologist Frederick vom
Saal of the University of Missouri likens the issue to another colossal
environmental threat. “This is the global warming of biology and human health,”
he says.
Last summer, a panel of 38 researchers
headed by vom Saal published a report in Reproductive Toxicology warning that
BPA (much like the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol, or DES) is a
potential chemical time bomb that may lead to multiple problems, including a higher
risk of cancer, especially if exposure occurs in the womb or an infant’s early
life and on an unrelenting daily basis.
Two weeks after the report came out,
an NIH panel came to a different conclusion: Although public exposure to BPA
could pose some risk to the brain development of babies and children, there was
“negligible concern” about reproductive effects in adults. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com/
This was the first official federal
report on BPA, and the chemical industry took it as good news: An August 2007
statement by the American Chemistry Council claims that “BPA is not a risk to
human health at the extremely low levels to which consumers might be exposed.”
Criticism of the report began even before its publication and has dogged it
ever since. In January the NIH agreed to a thorough review of the report. This
NIH decision came in response to claims from scientists and public health
advocates that members of the panel worked for the chemical industry and
cherry-picked the data in favor of industry-funded studies, which did not test
low-dose exposure to BPA. A new panel has been convened, and its findings are
expected in June.
Chemicals like BPA pose a challenge
for conventional toxicology, vom Saal says. To determine what level of a toxin
is safe, researchers take a dose that has no observed toxicological effect in
an animal and divide it by 10 once (to account for the differences between
species) and then again (to account for variations among humans’ ability to
handle toxins); for pesticides, the dose is then divided by 10 a third time (to
allow for the extraordinary sensitivity of babies and children). http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Although this is somewhat arbitrary,
it generally gives enough room to provide protection. The first studies of BPA
toxicity in the 1980s tested rats at high levels of exposure (50 milligrams of
BPA per kilogram of body weight per day). Lower levels were not tested; BPA was
deemed safe.
But the modus operandi of
hormone-mimicking chemicals is different from that of typical toxins. In fact,
they are not toxins in the strict sense of the word because they behave like
ordinary hormonal signals. “It turns out we are, to a very intriguing degree,
programmed by phenomenally small amounts of hormones in terms of our behavior,
our core physiology, our neuroendocrine system, and our ability to metabolize
drugs,” vom Saal says. “The brain along with the reproductive system and every
other cell in your body is exquisitely sensitive to exceedingly small changes in
estrogen and other sex hormones, and the fact that the environment is full of
chemicals that can activate estrogen receptors means this phenomenally
sensitive system is being perturbed constantly by environmental factors.”
At key stages of development, a
seemingly infinitesimal dose of an estrogenic chemical such as BPA or
phthalates may be life-altering. This is most evident in fetuses. When BPA hits
cell receptors, it is as powerful as estradiol, the most potent estrogen in
humans. “Our cells are built to take a single molecular-binding event,” vom
Saal says, “and turn that into a huge, highly amplified outcome. We’ve studied
doses of BPA between 2 and 20 micrograms per kilogram of body weight—the lowest
dose ever tested before was 2,500 times higher—and it scrambles the male
reproductive system in mice.”
In other research, by reproductive
biologist Patricia Hunt of Washington State University, female mice exposed to
low amounts of BPA in the womb—amounts deemed “environmentally relevant”—had
high levels of genetic errors in the eggs they produced. Worse still, the
genetic errors in those eggs led to chromosome abnormalities in 40 percent of
the next generation’s eggs. That is 20 times the incidence of such
abnormalities in unexposed mice. How might this relate to human risk? According
to commentators reviewing Hunt’s work in PLoS Genetics, the answers will be
hard to tease out: Nearly one in five human pregnancies ends in miscarriage,
half of which are due to chromosomal abnormalities. Abnormalities in a woman’s
eggs increase as she ages, and more women are having children at a later age.
“A proper study of this problem,” they wrote, “would require assessing the
woman’s level of chemical exposure now and maintaining those data for two to
three decades,” tracking the abnormalities in her children and grandchildren.
Another troubling animal study comes
from Randy Jirtle, a Duke University geneticist, who found that BPA permanently
reprogrammed a gene in pups of mice fed BPA-laced food. Jirtle is well known
for his work on mice that carry the agouti gene, which is highly vulnerable to
environmental influences. In this study, he exposed lean, brown-furred female
mice to 50 milligrams of BPA per kilogram of body weight daily, and the next
generation was transformed: More of them were fat, with blond fur. “If I were a
pregnant woman, I would try hard to avoid exposure to BPA,” Jirtle says.
Phthalate studies show similarly
dramatic effects. When pregnant rats are exposed to high doses of phthalates,
their male offspring are born with deformed genitalia. In 2005 Shanna Swan
published the first study that looked for evidence of an obvious effect among
boys. In 134 boys aged 2 months to 30 months, she found that sons whose mothers
had higher levels of certain phthalates in their urine had a shorter distance
between the anus and the penis. These boys were also likelier to have smaller
penises and incompletely descended testicles. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
About one-quarter of American women
have the higher phthalate levels she found in her study. This was particularly
evident among women working in poorly ventilated nail salons, where one
especially harmful phthalate, DBP, is released.
Chemicals leaching out of plastics may reshape
not only your children but your children’s children.
In a recent study, Swan found that “we
could predict the anogenital distance in babies just by knowing which
phthalates a mother was exposed to and how much.” Those with the highest
exposure to phthalates gave birth to boys with the shortest anogenital
distance.
Phthalate exposure does not come just
from moms. A new study gives evidence that infants and toddlers exposed to
lotions, shampoos, and powders with phthalates may have up to four times as
much of it in their urine as those whose parents do not use the products. The
study, just published in Pediatrics by Sheela Sathyanarayana of the University
of Washington, looked at 163 children between the ages of 2 months and 28
months between the years 2000 and 2005. The results were alarming, not least
because manufacturers are not required to list phthalates as ingredients on
labels.
So what are the long-term consequences
of exposure to plastics? Teasing out the answers is difficult, in part because
early exposure can have effects observed only much later in life. One of the
scientists at work on the problem is Danish researcher Niels Skakkebaek of Copenhagen
University Hospital, who has been documenting reproductive problems in men for
more than two decades. His research in the 1970s showed links between
testicular cancer in adults and abnormalities in genital development. He
suspected that clues to the disorder lay in early life, when the reproductive
organs are still developing. An especially crucial time is around 3 months or
earlier, when boy babies experience a surge of testosterone. To see if
phthalate exposure might influence this developmental period, Skakkebaek and
his colleagues investigated how the amount of phthalates in breast milk
correlated with a baby’s hormonal profile. In a study of 65 infants published
in 2006, they discovered that the higher the level of phthalates, the greater
the evidence of anti-androgenic hormonal activity.
Whatever the impact of plastics
exposure, the effects are not easy to isolate. There are no babies rendered
obviously deformed, as with thalidomide. There are no children robbed of mental
agility, as with lead exposure. There is no clear-cut evidence of lung cancer,
as with tobacco. As Swan admits: “The baby boys in our study were not freaks.
They did not look abnormal. We’re talking about small changes you won’t find
unless you look carefully.”
“Nobody knows what to do with the
information,” says Tufts University environmentalist Sheldon Krimsky, author of
Hormonal Chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endo–crine Hypothesis. “This is a highly
contested arena with no standards for consensus. And because, for instance, BPA
is not put into food but leaches into food from containers, it doesn’t qualify
for the Delaney clause, which mandates that if an additive causes cancer in any
amount in two species, we can’t put it in the food supply.”
Back in the 1940s when plastics were
being developed, no one suspected that chemicals leaching out of these
marvelous materials could have insidious biological effects. What industrial
chemists did know was that by tinkering with a highly reactive molecule called
a phenol they were able to devise countless synthetic chemicals for use in new
materials. Only through subsequent studies has it been shown that the estrogen
receptor has a particular affinity for a characteristic molecular component of
phenols. “I’d say 99.9 percent of what turn out to be chemical estrogens have a
phenolic hydroxyl group on the molecule, and any of those can bind to the
estrogen receptor, ” says Wade Welshons, a University of Missouri cell
biologist and endocrinologist who has spent his career studying estrogen.
Moreover, “almost everything that binds to the estrogen receptor turns it on in
some way. I’ve run across only two chemicals that fully antagonize, or switch
off, the receptor.”
Despite this new insight, regulation
of synthetic estrogens as a class seems far off. BPA alone is “worth at least a
million dollars every hour,” Welshons says. “And that figure is conservative.
I’m surprised the chemical industry hasn’t tried to blow up our labs.”
In 1989 little was known about synthetic
chemicals in everyday plastics and how they mimicked estrogens. Ana Soto,
professor of cellular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine, and her
colleagues were studying the effects of estrogen on a breast cancer cell line.
“Suddenly all the cancer cells were proliferating maximally, whether they were
being grown in a medium with estrogen or not,” Soto recalls. “We thought that
somebody must have opened a bottle of the female hormone estradiol in the wrong
place. We scrubbed the whole room, we bought new batches of everything, and the
cells kept proliferating. So we began one by one to replace and substitute our
equipment, and we finally found the contamination in tubes storing a component
of the medium. The tube manufacturer had changed its formula, with the best
intention of rendering the tubes more impact resistant. They said the new
chemical was a trade secret. So we analyzed it ourselves, and it turned out to
be nonylphenol. We injected the chemical into rats and demonstrated that it
makes the epithelial lining of the uterus proliferate—a sign of its being an
estrogen.” Nonylphenol is also a component in some detergents and other
products, and its presence in British streams has been linked to the
feminization of fish.
In 1998 another synthetic estrogen
leached from animal cages and bottles in a different lab—this was the
now-infamous BPA. Patricia Hunt (then working at Case Western Reserve
University) was studying the endocrine environment of the aging ovary in mice.
Suddenly, as in Soto’s lab, “our control data went nuts,” Hunt says. “We saw
chromosomal abnormalities that would lead to pregnancy loss and birth defects.
It turned out that all of our cages and water bottles were contaminated by the
BPA in the polycarbonate plastic, which was being sterilized at high
temperatures. We set about proving this contamination was coming from the water
bottles and cages.” They published that work in 2003. In 2007 Hunt and her
colleagues published a paper in PLoS Genetics demonstrating that BPA exposure
in utero disrupts the earliest stages of egg development. The fetuses of
pregnant mice exposed to low doses of BPA, Hunt says, had “gross aberrations.
We were stunned to see the effects of this estrogenic substance.”
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