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 BBS: The Matrix BBS
Date: 03-29-98 (08:00)             Number: 195
From: JACK SARGEANT                Refer#: NONE
  To: ALL                           Recvd: NO
Subj: 7                     2/5      Conf: (195) UFO
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[W 3]******
Source: The Associated Press
Date: January 1998
From: Lloyd Bayliss 
Steve Schiff Won't Run Again
By REBECCA ROLWING
Steve Schiff said Friday he won't seek re-election in the fall
because of his battle with skin cancer.
The five-term Republican, diagnosed a year ago, has been absent from
Congress since April.
``Because I have not yet recovered from my illness as anticipated, I
must regretfully announce that I will not be seeking re-election in
1998,'' he said.
Schiff, 50, is scheduled for a third round of chemotherapy next week
to treat squamous-cell skin cancer, which spread from his ear to his
face.
Squamous cell is considered one of the more treatable forms of
cancer, but the congressman said he has a particularly aggressive
case.
As one of two Republicans on the ethics subcommittee that
investigated Newt Gingrich last year, Schiff signed a letter to
fellow Republicans declaring they knew of no reason why he should
not continue as House speaker.
The letter was instrumental in helping the GOP leadership build
support for Gingrich's re-election.
In 1993, Schiff asked the General Accounting Office for information
about the so-called UFO crash in Roswell in 1947, stirring up a new
round of investigations of extraterrestrial visits.
Schiff was first elected to the House in 1988, succeeding Manuel
Lujan Jr., who was appointed interior secretary under President Bush.
Before that, Schiff was district attorney in Bernalillo County.
[W 4]******
Source: The Times Interface
Publish Date: Wednesday 4th March 1998
Red faces at the Pentagon as hackers drop in on the military
The sleepy Californian town of Cloverdale, north of the Golden Gate
Bridge, awoke one morning last week to find the FBI roaming it's
streets. Two students from the local high school had orchestrated
what Defence Department officials called "the most systematic attack
the Pentagon has seen to date."
During February, the hackers logged on to at least 11 Air Force,
Navy and Marine computer systems but, according to the Pentagon, the
intruders got no further than unclassified files - although they did
leave trap doors so they could return. The US military, which spends
one billion dollars a year to protect itself from hackers, says it
thinks the spate of attacks it has seen from many sources is
unrelated to the tensions in the Persian Gulf.
But more embarrassing than that naivety is the fact that the US Air
Force had flagged February as Computer Security month.
[W 5]******
Source: The Times newspaper
Publish Date: Friday 6th March 1998
Probe finds water on the Moon
By Nigel Hawkes
Science Editor
An American spacecraft has discovered water on the Moon, scientists
announced yesterday.
The water is scattered in small pockets over a large area around the
north and south poles. It is found in craters, where deep shadow has
protected it from direct exposure to the sun.
The satellite, Lunar Prospector, was launched in January and went
into orbit around the Moon. The first results from its instruments
were announced at a press conference at Nasa's Ames Research Centre
in Moffett Field, California. The north pole appears to have about
twice as much water as the south, the results show. In total, there
appear to be between 11 million and 330 million tons of water spread
over the two poles.
If it could be exploited - a big if, as it appears to be rather
thinly dispersed - 33 million tons of water, towards the lower end of
the estimates, would support 1,000 two-person households for over a
century, without recycling. To lift the equivalent amount of water
into Earth orbit would cost at least $60 trillion (=A336.5 trillion).
The water could also be used as a source of oxygen for breathing,
and to make both oxygen and hydrogen to use as a rocket fuel. It
would enormously enhance the prospect that the Moon could be
colonised, or used as a base for further space exploration. The
presence of water also hints at the remote possibility of simple
forms of life. Water is essential to life: without it, none can
exist. With it, the possibility exists of some simple life forms such
as bacteria, possibly beneath the surface.
The water has been found using a neutron spectrometer which detects
neutrons bouncing from the lunar surface as a result of cosmic ray
bombardment. The neutrons carry the signal of hydrogen, which can be
used as a signature for the presence of water.
"Our data are consistent with the presence of water ice in very low
concentrations across a significant number of craters," said Dr
William Feldman, a spectrometer specialist from Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico. The estimate is that the ice is mixed with
the rocky soil, at a ratio of only 0.3 to one per cent. This would
mean that it would have to be "mined" from the soil, rather than
simply collected like ice.
At the north pole, the ice is found over an area of 18,000 square
miles, while at the south pole it is dispersed across about 7,200
square miles. The most likely source of the water is comets, which
are "dirty snowballs" containing a lot of ice. Over billions of
years, huge amounts of water could have reached the Moon through
cometary impacts, but the bulk has disappeared.
Dr Jim Arnold of the University of California at San Diego has
estimated that the maximum amount that could conceivably be present
on the Moon as a result of impacts over the past two billion years
would be between 11 billion and 110 billion tons. That assumes that
the water lies in the top two metres of soil.
The Lunar Prospector neutron spectrometer signal can penetrate only
about half a metre, so there could be considerably more water
present than it has found - perhaps four times as much. But Dr
Feldman and Dr Alan Binder of the Lunmar Research Institute in
Gilroy, California, caution that their estimates could be wrong by a
factor of ten in either direction.
Dr Wesley Huntress, Nasa's Associate Administrator for Space
Science, said that the results would cast light on the rate of
cometary impacts in the history of the solar system.
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