Internet users hoping to protect their privacy by using anti-virus software, Web anonymizers, false identities and disabled cookies on their computer's Web browser have something new to worry about –- a patent filed by the National Security Agency (NSA) for technology that will identify the physical location of any Web surfer.

Patent 6,947,978, granted this week, describes a process based on latency, or time lag between computers exchanging data, of "numerous" known locations on the Internet to build a "network latency topology map" for all users.

Identifying the physical location of an individual user, reports CNET News.com, could then be accomplished by measuring how long it takes to connect to an unknown computer from numerous known machines, and using the latency response to display location on a map.

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Pre-dawn Pacific -- Between Hawaii and the US: Cameras on shuttle aimed at the ocean as several lights fly around with one object coming to a stop and reversing direction.

At the beginning of the tape, you will see a graphic that shows the shuttle halfway between Hawaii and California -- in the dark -- and approaching orbital sunrise. The next scene shows the camera looking down at the Pacific and it should be all dark... but it isn't! There are lights all over the place.

Since the shuttle is flying upside down, Earth appears at the top of the picture and space is below, and the glow of the atmosphere outlines the horizon. (Ships at sea CANNOT be seen from space). Some lights are flashing and some are steady. (Stars in space do NOT twinkle!)

After a while, an object near the left edge will light up and start moving across the screen to the right following the curvature of the Earth.

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"The only other things I can tell you about Area 51 is that there will never, in our life times, be any information let out about some of the things that are out there. I will say that it has become a storage area for oddities. That’s where, other than Kirkland Air Force Base, the Roswell debris was supposedly taken.

"All I can say is sometime, during my tenure at the Nevada Test Site, there was debris from Roswell, New Mexico stored away at Area 51. I was lucky enough or unlucky enough to see some of it.

"I don’t take any pleasure in that knowledge because it puts a constrain on me I don’t like to have."

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Paul Hellyer, one-time cabinet minister and a political chameleon who went through Liberal and Tory colours before founding two political parties of his own, has a new cause -- UFOs.

Hellyer is to be a featured speaker at a UFO conference in Toronto later this month and organizers are making much of his credentials as a former defence minister in the Pearson administration 40 years ago.

Skeptics are, well, skeptical.

The 82-year-old Hellyer says he believes not only that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, but that some governments -- the United States at least -- know all about it and are covering up.

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In 1979, the Peoples’ Republic of China publicly reported that several thousand of its children aged 8-14 were capable of telepathy, clairvoyance, X-ray vision, or psychokinesis.

Having already heard about this program, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, and the US Army were simultaneously pouring billions of dollars into their own similar research.

The Army program was headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, and was part of the Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). Leaders included Generals Edmund Thompson and Albert Stubblebine, and Colonel John Alexander.

Officers assigned to the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania contributed research to the project, and "The First Earth Battalion" is essentially a textual copy of one group's unclassified briefing slides.

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