So, you ate less and exercised more and lost weight. But now the pounds are piling back on. You're hungrier than ever, and you can't seem to resist food. Once again, it's all your fault, right?

Wrong. Blame evolution, and the fact that for the vast majority of human history, famine was a bigger threat than flab. Even your seeming lack of will power is part of a complex biological system that drives humans who have lost weight to regain it, according to new brain-scan research by scientists at Columbia University Medical Center. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com

"Loosely put, after you've lost weight, you have more of an emotional response to food and less ability to control that response," says Michael Rosenbaum, lead author of the study in this month's Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The key driver of this system is leptin, a hormone secreted by fat cells. When humans (and rodents) lose 10% or more of their body weight, leptin falls rapidly and sets off a cascade of physiological changes that act to put weight back on. Skeletal muscles work more efficiently, thyroid and other hormones are reduced -- all so the body burns 15% to 20% fewer calories, enough to put back 25 pounds or more a year.

This mechanism kicks in whether people are obese or relatively lean before losing weight -- and researchers believe the effect can last for years. In previous studies, giving subjects replacement leptin reversed the metabolic changes, in effect tricking the body into ignoring the weight loss.

The latest study shows that these metabolic changes are mirrored in altered brain activity when people lose weight. The Columbia researchers put six obese subjects on liquid diets and reduced their weight by 10%, then gave them replacement leptin or a placebo. At each stage, researchers observed their brain activity using functional MRIs when they were shown food and non-food items.

The scans showed that in the weight-reduced state, the subjects had more blood flow in areas of the brain that govern emotional and sensory responses to food and less in areas involving control of food intake. When the subjects were given replacement leptin, brain activity returned to what it had been before they lost weight.

There are still many unknowns about how blood flow in the brain corresponds to behavior. "I can't look at these scans and say, in 30 seconds, you're going to eat a banana," says Rudolph Leibel, a co-author of the Columbia study who helped discover leptin in the 1990s at Rockefeller University. Still, he says, the brain images provide further evidence of the powerful biological forces that send humans into survival mode, mentally and physically, when food is scarce and fat stores decline. "These people act as if they are hungrier, and combined with reduced energy expenditure, that's the 'perfect storm' for gaining weight."

Dr. Leibel also says that people should understand that regaining lost weight "is not free will. It's biologically determined and the species that didn't have this are the ones you see in the Museum of Natural History." It's only been in recent decades that this mechanism is contributing more to obesity than survival. "Now, anyone can summon an unlimited amount of food just with a cellphone," he says.

Scientists originally thought leptin might be harnessed as a weight-loss drug. Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. continues to research that possibility and is in Phase 2 trials of a combination of leptin and pramlintide, a diabetes drug. But leptin may hold more promise in helping to keep weight off, an area that the Columbia researchers say deserves more attention.

How do some people manage to overcome the leptin effect and keep weight off? Generally by watching their food intake very carefully and continuing to increase their physical activity. "Anybody who has lost weight and kept it off will tell you that they have to keep battling," says Dr. Rosenbaum. "They have essentially reinvented themselves, and they are worthy of the utmost admiration and respect."



Warning: just reading this article might make your skin crawl. Thinking about itching, seeing people scratch, looking at pictures of bedbugs or other itch inducers—all can bring on an irresistible urge to flick away that irksome feeling.

But itching—“pruritus,” to physicians—is more than an occasional nuisance. The sensation, which arises from an irritation of the nerve cells along the skin, serves as a helpful warning about potential hazards such as insects or foreign materials—and scratching is often a simple and effective method for dealing with them. Itching is also the main symptom of many skin diseases and appears in some systemic conditions, such as chronic renal disease, cirrhosis and some types of cancer.

Whereas a quick skin scrape has its pleasures, constant itching can become an agony if underlying conditions are not treated. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com
According to estimates, 8 to 10 percent of people worldwide endure chronic itching, and it is the most frequent complaint confronted by dermatologists. The sensation’s sources, however, have been mysterious and poorly understood.

Long overlooked as a milder form of pain, itching is now gaining a new appreciation in the research community because of its complexity and its significance to thousands of sufferers. In addition to physical causes such as skin conditions or allergies, the source of that tingling torment has a strong mental component. Scientists are now probing the phenomenon’s underpinnings with imaging technology and other means—even down to the molecular level.

A New Understanding
Itching’s sources have puzzled people for ages. In the second century A.D., for instance, Greek physician Galen observed that itching might arise from an underlying condition not related to the skin. German physician Samuel Hafenreffer defined itching almost 350 years ago as an unpleasant perception on the skin that subsequently triggers the need to scratch. Napoleon famously experienced severe itching, as did physician Jean-Paul Marat, an intellectual leader during the French Revolution.

As little as 10 years ago the medical profession viewed itching as pain’s little brother. After all, the logic went, the sensation courses along the same nerve paths to the brain as pain does, except that the intensity of the irritation is less severe. This notion was based on, among other things, the observation that pain switches off itching. According to so-called intensity theory, weak neuronal stimulation causes itching, whereas stronger stimulation leads to pain.

In 1997, however, neurophysiologist Martin Schmelz, then at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, proved that the need to scratch reaches the spinal cord from the skin via independent nerve fibers called polymodal C-fibers. These C-fibers seem to be identical to those that signal pain, but they transmit only itching sensations. Signals conveying skin irritation travel down the nerve fiber to the spinal cord and then on to the brain. Scratching and rubbing may interfere with these nerve endings by stimulating pain and touch receptors in the same areas, thus inhibiting the surrounding itch receptors, called pruriceptors.

In addition, Schmelz’s team, together with Hermann Handwerker, also at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, discovered connections between the itch-mediating C-fibers and pain C-fibers. This finding of possible communication between signaling fibers adds a further mechanism by which pain relieves itching.

In 2001 researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix identified specific nerve cells in cats that respond selectively to the signaling molecule histamine—which triggers itching—but not to heat or pain stimuli.

A Real Pain
Itching gets to be a real pain when it is chronic—that is, when it persists or recurs. According to a study by Norwegian psychiatrist Florence Dalgard, stress is the most important trigger apart from allergic reactions. Other studies have found that scabies, which is caused by mite infestation, affects about 300 million people worldwide. And more than 30 million Americans suffer from eczema, which is associated with a strong desire to scratch. Furthermore, about 42 percent of almost 19,000 dialysis patients from 12 countries included in a 2006 study reported moderate to severe itching. The situation is similar for patients with liver damage.

Itching may also be triggered by the mind. Most people need only watch others scratching to start themselves. Just seeing a picture that is connected with scratching—a photograph of fleas, for example—can do the trick as well. But until recently, there was not even any clear scientific evidence of this widely shared experience.

To close this gap, our team, under the direction of medical psychologist Jörg Kupfer, conducted a psychological experiment with students. Our unsuspecting participants were asked to evaluate the educational quality of a lecture on the topic, “Itching—What Is It?” The test subjects—60 medical and psychology students—attended one of two different lectures. One group viewed images of lice, fleas, bedbugs and allergic skin reactions; the other group saw babies and calming landscapes. Unsurprisingly, the students in the first group scratched themselves significantly more frequently during the presentation than their counterparts in the second one did. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com

It may be that this mental trigger is associated with so-called mirror neurons. These specialized nerve cells fire both when we ourselves perform a certain action and when we observe someone else doing it]. The contagious character of yawning, for example, is attributed to mirror-neuron activity.

To find out which areas of the brain are particularly active during itching, researchers have used imaging methods to look into the heads of their test subjects after generating itchiness with histamine. Neuroscientist Francis McGlone of Unilever Research and Development in Cheshire, England, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal firing in parts of the cerebellum and in regions of the frontal lobe. The researchers found that the behavioral responses result from the different frontal lobe activation for itching and pain—that is, scratching, on the one hand, and pain perception, on the other.

A team at the Bender Institute of Neuroimaging at the University of Giessen in Germany also used fMRI to study the itching triggered by histamine over a period of approximately 15 minutes, the time it generally takes for such experimentally induced itching to subside. The researchers found that several areas of the brain would activate in characteristic ways: regions, for example, in the frontal lobe, in the left temporal lobe and in the left hemisphere of the cerebellum. Surprisingly, however, there was no apparent activity in the sensorimotor cortex—the areas of the cerebral cortex that process sensory stimuli and control movement. Instead many of the regions that fired are those that tend to be associated with emotion.

On the Trail of Neurodermatitis
Other researchers have confirmed the importance of brain areas that process emotion. According to a recent study by Handwerker, itching is partly processed and activated in some of the same regions of the brain that pain is and, additionally, in the emotion center, the amygdala. And according to a team led by Hideki Mochizuki of the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, the cingulum, a switching center that processes emotions, and the insula, an area also associated with emotion and disgust, both fire during itching—but not during pain.

Gil Yosipovitch of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center has demonstrated that the brains of patients with neurodermatitis (chronic itching) react markedly differently than those of healthy persons. Only in the latter individuals does scratching inhibit activity in the cingulum. The researchers hypothesize that this control mechanism normally prevents itching from being strengthened by emotion. In neurodermatitis patients, the mechanism seems to be overridden, and itching gains the upper hand as a consequence.

Itch research has recently spread to molecular biology as well. In 2007 Zhou-Feng Chen and Yan-Gang Sun of the Washington University Pain Center in St. Louis, for example, looked at the GRPR gene, which contains the building instructions for a receptor that is activated by a compound called gastrin-releasing peptide (GRP). Such neuropeptides are proteins that neurons release, often with profound effects on behavior. Mice in which the GRPR gene has been deactivated react to substances that stimulate itching with less scratching than control animals do. When the researchers injected normal mice with a blocker for the GRP receptor, these animals were also less susceptible to itching.

The connection between itching and neuropeptides such as GRP has been a topic of research for some time and is a special focus of the work of Martin Steinhoff and his colleagues at the University of Münster in Germany. They have found that certain neuropeptides, along with their receptor molecules and so-called endopeptidases (which degrade neuropeptides), play a key role. If the regulation of these biochemical processes gets out of whack, the result may be problems with chronic inflammation, itching and pain.

Neurodermatitis is a very common case in point. Here the endopeptidases do not work fast enough, so that the neuropeptides end up activating far too many immune cells. The consequence is a cascading inflammatory response and itching.

Soothing News
Scratching offers temporary relief but may further irritate the skin or cause it to tear. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com
Treatments include lotions and creams (such as calamine and hydrocortisone), antihistamines, opioid antagonists (such as naltrexone, a drug used to treat narcotic and alcohol dependence), aspirin and ultraviolet-light therapy. Chronic itching is primarily treated medically. In a recent study of 385 patients, Dorothee Seipmann and Sonja Ständer of the University of Münster showed that 65 percent of sufferers benefit from such drugs. The most frequently prescribed medications are antihistamines. The epilepsy drug gabapentin is used in cases of neuropathic (caused by nerve fibers) itching, and combinations of naltrexone, pregabelin, the antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) and the immunostatic cyclosporine are also in use.

The most promising treatment approach at the moment may include substances that affect the opioid receptors involved in itching. Opium and heroin addicts almost always suffer from itching, brought about largely by hyperactivation of the mu-opioid receptors. Pursuing this trail, researchers might explore the therapeutic approach of blocking this type of receptor. The receptors’ natural antagonists are the kappa-opioid receptors, whose activation decreases itching. Initial clinical studies are already looking at substances that stimulate the kappa receptors.

A number of calming techniques, among them autogenic training (in which patients repeat a set of visualizations) and Jacobson’s progressive muscle relaxation (in which patients relax muscles to relieve tension), have proved effective in supplementing medical treatment. Psychotherapy is generally not very useful in getting rid of the urge to itch.

And what can sufferers do at home to decrease persistent, bothersome itching? Cool showers or baths, particularly with bath additives that contain soothing substances suggested by a dermatologist, can help. Cold packs can also be useful in getting a localized itch under control. A cool environment, especially at night, is helpful. Air out the bedroom and wear loose-fitting pajamas—if you need to wear anything at all. Sometimes that is all it takes to reduce itching to a tolerable level.

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

The release on Monday of the unclassified parts of the decision followed a brief court notice last week. The notice said a classified decision had directed the government to release Mr. Parhat, transfer him to another country or conduct a new military hearing at Guantánamo to determine if he had been properly classified as an enemy combatant.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.

Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.

American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment and that some 100 other countries have refused to accept them.

Detainees’ lawyers said the ruling in the case of Mr. Parhat, who says he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to escape China, could broadly affect other detainees because of its skeptical view of the government’s evidence.

A lawyer representing other detainees, Marc D. Falkoff, said the evidence against many of the 270 men now at Guantánamo was similar to that in the Parhat case.

“This opinion shows that the government is going to have a hard time defending the military’s decision to detain many of these men,” said Mr. Falkoff, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law.

Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com

The ruling released Monday overturned the Pentagon’s finding after a 2004 hearing that Mr. Parhat was an enemy combatant based on that affiliation. He and the 16 other Uighurs were detained after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

“Those bare facts,” the decision said, “cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”

Some lawyers said the ruling highlighted the difficulties they saw in civilian judges reviewing Guantánamo cases.

“This case displays the inadequacies of having civilian courts inject themselves into military decision-making,” said Glenn M. Sulmasy, a law professor at the Coast Guard Academy and a national security fellow at Harvard.

The appellate panel reviewed Mr. Parhat’s case under a limited procedure Congress provided for challenging military hearings at Guantánamo. The case was argued before the Supreme Court’s decision on June 12 that detainees have a constitutional right to seek release in more expansive habeas corpus proceedings.

The 17 Uighurs now held at Guantánamo say they are allies, not enemies, of the United States.

The Uighur Muslims, who come from an area of far western China they call East Turkestan, claim oppression at the hands of the Chinese government, including forced abortions and relocations of educated people to remote areas.

The Chinese government has described the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist organization. American officials agreed in 2002, when they were pressing for Chinese support for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The decision was written by Judge Merrick B. Garland, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. It was joined by Chief Judge Sentelle, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a 2005 appointee of President Bush. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com

The following interview took place on Wednesday, 4 November, in
Wytheville, VA. Dan Gordon is the news director of radio station WYVE in
Wyethville. Since October 1st, his station has been besieged with calls
from residents who have witnessed something strange in the night skies.
When the calls wouldn't stop, he decided to take a look for himself.
Gordon was interviewed by ParaNet member Ronald Jennings of Newport News.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Gordon: ...I call it an aircraft because that's the only term I can
think of for it. But on October the 13th, on a Wednesday, I was
with a friend of mine who's a former pilot. And we had spent
about two and a half hours in the cold with our heads out the
window looking for the UFO that people had seen. Because I had
been reporting UFO sightings [as a newsman] up to my neck, and I
decided that the only way I could actually solve the puzzle was
go out and see the UFO for myself...

My friend and I rode through all the areas where the sightings
had occurred, especially multiple sightings. As we were coming
home, we had about given up the search, I looked to the left on
Route 21 South, which is about four and a half miles due south
of Wytheville, between Wytheville and [Speedwell?], I noticed a
very unusual aircraft coming to my left. So I stopped the car
and got out. http://louisfjfsheehan.blogspot.com
As it approached, it looked like it had...the front
shape was kinda like a funny-looking, round front to a craft,
with a long, split cockpit, and I say "split" because as it
approached, one side of the cockpit went dark. It had a strobe
that was putting out five different colors of lights on the
right side of the craft. I told my friend to get out, because he
was on the other side of the car, and he got out, and we both
were pretty astounded just from what we saw as it was coming
toward us.

I had a 35 mm camera on the dash, he had an [?] in the trunk of
the car. From there on in, we were so astounded and appalled we
were froze to our spot. We did not use either camera. I've been
in the news business nine years, I've never missed a shot, to my
knowledge. In sports...I've covered murders, fires, guy hung
himself from a tree...everything. So nothing appalls me. This
appalled me. I probably was standing with my mouth agape.

As it came by me, a side view...it seemed like it went on
forever. We're talking a couple thousand feet [altitude]. The
altitude was estimated by my partner, who's a former pilot and a
former airplane mechanic in Florida...we estimated 2000 feet
based on the treetop level. As it came past, like I say, it was
a very large craft, some 8-900 feet in length, probably bigger
than any 747 I've ever seen at an airport. As it came by, it
continued very slowly, just like it would skim through the
air...no sound, no jetstream [contrails], no smell, no nothing.
Totally quiet, and now we're on a road where there's radio
going, there's no noise whatsoever. No other cars coming. As the
craft gets past me, the rear of it - and I say the rear, that's
the area that we are looking at as it was going away from us -
had three panels of what appeared to be windows. The top one was
parallel with the ground, and appeared to be like in a circular,
dome shape at the top...looked like a window pane you would see
in a house. To each side of this window was two, they were going
vertically, same size windows, looked like three windows on the
end of a house. It was emitting no light, yet it shone a very
soft white light from the inside like a 75-watt bulb would show
in a house with very thin shades.

We were both, like I say, appalled. We watched it continue...it
went behind a cloud. At the same time it went behind a cloud, I
noticed a spherical dull-red object come from the left, parallel
with the ground, not from up or down, at a high rate of speed.
It was not a hologram or a laser or anything because it blotted
out the stars as it traversed across the sky. It went behind the
cloud directly with the aircraft. The aircraft momentarily
(maybe a minute elapsed) came out of the cloud, the spherical
object didn't, at least not by itself. The craft continued on
south and we lost sight of it. Because it was the first sighting
I had ever had, being a skeptic I automatically asked my friend,
"what did you see? Describe it back to me," to make sure I had
seen the same thing he did. Because during this whole time we
were almost quiet. He described virtually the same craft, and
told me it was unlike any conventional aircraft he had ever
seen, in magazines or in his dealings with aircraft. And
naturally we couldn't explain the spherical object. So, because
we didn't get a picture, we cursed ourselves all around.

So the next night, with a photographer, John Stember, a fashion
photographer, and his girlfriend and the pilot and myself went
back in the general area, stopped in the same area, didn't see
anything. About two miles up the road, the same route, on
Thursday night of this week, the day after I'd seen the first
sighting, we saw a craft hovering over a dirt road, to the left.
I pulled over, slammed on the brakes, we jumped out. The craft,
like it sensed us, turned and proceeded along the mountain top.
We grabbed cameras and started shooting with videotape and two
35 mm, at a pretty good distance. I had a 135mm lens, 1000 speed
film, shot [1/50th?]. He was shooting with, I believe, a Nikon,
500mm lens, and a multiplier, which made it 1500mm. My camera
quit after three shots. Don't know why. Got back in the car, it
worked fine. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
Next day the camera was checked by a local camera
shop. Wasn't anything wrong with the battery. I put a new one
in, just in case, but for some reason it stopped after three
frames.

What I got was a light shape of a spherical object, a dome
shape, and another craft coming down, preparing to dock in
behind. We witnessed this craft docking behind us, large domed
craft, and proceed with it some 15 miles before it went out of
sight. The videotape showed nothing but just some very dim
lights. The 500mm lens with the multiplier came out blank. Mine
just had a few dots, it was blank. Not enough light let in,
undoubtedly.

So we decided from there to go public with it that Friday in a
press conference here at the radio station. And we had a
gentleman who's a computer analyst, Andrew Convery, in from
Virginia Beach. He had seen it at a motel, the same night, in
[?], some 15 miles away. We went public, we did not have the
film developed yet. We tried to see if we could get any response
from the military, or if we could get any input from anybody
else, before we actually told people, and showed them what we
saw. We had no response. We got no response from anybody except
the public, they had seen the same thing. We had fifty reports
of the same object, same description, before they had ever heard
our description. We had never gone public in the media in any
form in this county, in this area, with this type of sighting,
even though we had other sightings, we had not described this
large, "mother craft", I'll call it. We had 50 sightings. We
even had a lady come in and participate in the press conference,
Emma Burchette, who had seen it the night before, had not told
me what she had seen, we put her on the panel and she told the
press. It was the first time I'd heard it. It was identical to
my sighting.

After the press conference, I was hit by a media blitz. So I was
having a hard time finding [time] to go look for the object. I
went with a lot of TV crews in the area, and we never saw
anything. So, finally the media blitz died down a little bit
last Friday. My wife, my child and I went back to 21 South, the
same area, finally spotted the craft up on the mountain - Sand
Mountain - and watched it hover for 20 minutes. Same craft. It
would not come off the mountain, just hovered up there. And I
drove all around trying to find a road to get up to that area,
so I could photograph it. I wanted something close. I came to
town to get gas, I was about to run out of gas, I came back and
it was gone.

I've seen it on three occasions, in a nocturnal sighting. On
October 16th, after about two weeks of UFO sightings, I'm still
not sure if my mind was playing tricks on me, but I seen, in a
bright blue sky, 6:00, at Exit 19 off Interstate 81, looked up
and saw what appeared to be a pie-pan turned upside down, just
sitting there, and all of a sudden, zoom! it was gone. Silver,
kinda gold-silver object. No wings, no sign of jetstream,
nothing, it was a day where you could see jetstreams everywhere.
I assumed at that time that maybe my eyes were playing tricks on
me. To this day I'm still not sure but it appears, we have had
three daytime sightings by people who will not come forward to
the public but they've told me. And we've had over a thousand
sightings total.

Jennings: In what period of time?

Gordon: Since October 1. Last Monday night, October 26th, I was in the
Speedwell area with five people, including four members of a TV
crew from channel 9 in Washington, DC, we saw 25 jets in one
area chasing red and white spherical objects. Chasing, but
couldn't catch. The objects would hover, they'd chase, and
they'd hover and stop and chase again. Never caught 'em. Finally
the objects went off over the horizon. When I called Langley
about it, the lady said they were conducting some kind of
starflight exercise, its something they scramble their crews
without notice, and they were done by 6:00. I said, "Lady, they
were here at 8:30." She said, "no we weren't." That's the end of
the conversation. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com


Jennings: Was this Langley, VA or Langley Air Force Base, Hampton?

Gordon: Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

Jennings: OK, could you tell me approximately the times that these
sightings occurred at, that you've seen?

Gordon: Between 8 and 10 o'clock. All the sightings that I have
documented that people have called me, with the exception of
three or four, have occurred between 8 and 10 o'clock, Monday
through Friday.

Jennings: What about the one in the daylight, do you know what time that
was?

Gordon: 6:00. One gentlemen saw them at 5 and one saw them at 4:45.

Jennings: In the evening?

Gordon: Yes. We had one sighting at 6AM in the morning, another at
12:45AM, but primarily everything from 8 to 10.

Jennings: Did the object emit any sort of a noise?

Gordon: People that have gotten closer than I have, say 6-700 feet, one
gentleman had it 400 feet above his house, based on [the size
of] his house and three more houses, he said that it had a real
solid "hum," when you quit talking you could hear a real faint
hum. Most anybody's told me, its either a drone or a hum. No
roar, no hiss, no whoosh, or nothing. Course mine was at 2000
feet, I couldn't hear it.

Jennings: Could you describe the shape of the object, again, please?

Gordon: Well, the front, is like a very, like a flat, round shape, its
almost like somebody took a "U", I mean a circle, and cut off
the side and made it flat on one side. You've got a long,
elongated cockpit area, it appears to be a cockpit area, with a
slope on the front. And the rest of the aircraft takes many
forms. Even though the back has windows in it, it almost looks
identical to the Star Wars vehicle, that was in the movie "Star
Wars" that flew between the asteroids, and it had all the
different shapes and sizes on it. It [the Star Wars ship] was
real dirty charcoal-gray, whatever, if you remember the Star
Wars vehicle. That's what people keep describing it as, is a
Star Wars vehicle.

Jennings: Well, which vehicle in "Star Wars," it wasn't an X-wing fighter,
was it?

Gordon: http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com
No, we're talking about the battleship, whatever,...

Jennings: Well, are you talking about the ship that Han Solo used, by any
chance? That big thing...

Gordon: Whatever the big ship was that....

Jennings: Not the Death Star, not the big round sphere, it wasn't
something like that?

Gordon: No, we're talking a ship that had a lot of different shapes on
it, it was not smooth.

Jennings: All right, that was the ship, I think, that Han Solo flew in the
movie.

Gordon: That's what people describe it as, and that's the only I know
that closely fits it. Its not a smooth object that people are
seeing, now, that's hovering over their houses.

Jennings: OK, one more question, are the sightings still going on?

Gordon: Oh, yeah, we had five today reported to me on the telephone,
another five walked in the door and told me.

Jennings: Also, there's some reference to the Sheriff having seen
something?

Gordon: We talked to three members of, deputies of the Sheriff's
department, in the town of [?], the town of Wytheville, and the
chief of police in [?] saw it, saw it in [?] on the first night.
That's what initiated the sightings, but since then, primarily I
think maybe because of the media blitz, they decided all the
sightings were refueling of aircraft.

Jennings: And as far as you know, no photographs of the object came out,
as yet?

Gordon: Well, mine has come out, its just not definitive enough to
produce, it doesn't show the mountain range because its too
dark. It can't show anything in comparison to the object,
because of the distance and the light.