From: jamesoberg@aol.com (JamesOberg)
Newsgroups: sci.space.history
Subject: Re: Message from STS-29
Date: 05 Jun 2000 12:24:17 GMT

Here's Ratsch's retraction message (his current email address is
sts48@home.com):



Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 18:51:37 -0800
From: sts48@ix.netcom.com (Donald Ratsch)
Subject: Re: NASA WAV file
To: bdzeiler@students.wisc.edu (Brian Zeiler)

Brian, yes I have the full story on that. The details was carried on
the July 1989 issue of the MUFON Journal. Briefly I recorded some of
the radio broadcast via my audio scanner from the space shuttle
Discovery through WA3NAN, the club station of the Goddard Amateur Radio
Club at Greenbelt, Md, transmitting on 147.450 MHZ. It is a
retransmission from the NASA Select original. I heard what I thought
was one of the male astronauts saying, "Houston, Discovery, we still
have the alien spacecraft under observance". Well I was pretty excited
and got in touch with Walt Andrus of MUFON and Vince Dipietro (Mars
Face Fame) who is employed at Goddard Space Flight Center who I later
handed over the tape to have a voice print analysis performed to
compare the target voice to the astronauts' voices that were aboard
during that mission. The result of the analysis showed that a few
positive hits on Astronaut Bagian (the physician on board) but not
enough hits to say he was the one who said the target words. So the
results were inconclusive. Later a check showed there was no target
voice on the original NASA Select audio.

About a year after that, I was again monitoring the audio from another NASA
mission via my scanner and I heard that voice again, saying something similar
to the target voice a year earlier.  However on this mission, all the
astronauts were different compared to the other one. This led me to conclude
that unfortunately, the target voice was a hoax probably from an amateur
radio operator. Jim Oberg emailed me some time ago and asked me about
that case and I told him what I just told you.