he Magic Kingdom ' a Secret Underground Base in Hampshire, UK, Feb 2016, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of video: Feb 2016
Location of base: Hampshire, UK

The fact that this secret base has this alien figure depicted on its surface above shows us that there is a sign to the alien who may work here that they are a welcome part of the base. As we all know from research, faces and figures of alien species are very important to their cultures and found all over every planet and moon in our solar system. 
Scott C. Waring
www.ufosightingsdaily.com

BeamsInvestigations of Youtube states:
The British Earth and Aerial Mysteries Society (BEAMS) have released a comprehensive final report, (now 127-pages!), following a "special investigation" into the former MoD Defence Evaluation and Research Agency site now run by the world's leading defence, security and aerospace developer Qinetiq... part of which is referred to by insiders as 'The Magic Kingdom'. BEAMS reveals that Farnborough has had high UFO sighting and alien abduction activity for years and is certain that this is connected to this facilty. ~Concealed~ "One source (who holds a sensitive government post) says that he knows several people currently employed at British subterranean facilities where acquired alien technology and genetics programs are being carried out." and how "there is as least as much hidden below ground at Qinetiq's Farnborough site as there is above", and what goes on down there in this deep facility includes Classified medical programs involving experiments on abducted human subjects (all part of a MKUltra-type project), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project... and futuristic flight development. Possible alien involvement is also suggested. Illuminati/Masonic-type geometric symbols have been "discovered" in aerial photographs taken of the site, and these are presented together with both intelligence service whistleblower testimonies, responses from remote viewers/researchers (who have psychically travelled some 3 miles down into 'The Magic Kingdom' to spy on what is happening there), and gathered archival research material. 

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

02-02-2016 om 13:18 geschreven door peter  

Mass UFO activity over Los Angeles 1-Feb-2016

Here’s one strange UFO sighting that was seen and filmed in the sky above Los Angeles in California. This was taken on 1st February 2016.

02-02-2016 om 13:11 geschreven door peter  

Soldiers Close Encounter With An Alien Triangle

(Before It's News)

02-02-2016 om 01:28 geschreven door peter  

Earthquakes Can Cause Mysterious Lights In The Sky

Earthquake Lights (EQLs) seem to be old phenomena. Irish engineer and amateur seismologist Robert Mallet published a catalogue in 1851-1855, where he dated back EQLs to Biblical times, interpreting descriptions of fire-columns in the Bible as early observations of EQLs. The Italian priest and naturalist Ignazio Galli published in 1910 a first classification scheme of EQLs. In his book Raccolta e classificazione dei fenomeni luminosi osservati nei terremoti (Collection and Classification of luminous phenomena observed during earthquakes) he recognized four types: short-lasting (just a few seconds) and long-lasting (for minutes or hours) diffuse lights, flares and luminescent clouds and finally moving orbs of light.

He also noted that the different EQL types show different temporal patterns. For example, short-lasting lights like flashes occur mostly before a quake, clouds and orbs during a quake and flames after. However, nobody could explain the origin of these apparitions. One of the most plausible explanations at the time, proposed by Italian seismologist Giovanni Ciuseppe Bianconi in 1840, explained the lights as burning gas (“Swamp gas?” as agent Mulder would state), coming from fissures opening during a quake. However, burning gas could explain only small flames, not large-scale glowing clouds.

For a long time, only anecdotal accounts and tales existed and most seismologist didn´t take accounts of EQLs very serious. It wasn’t until 1973 that Japanese geologist Yutaka Yasui  provided some photographic evidence, showing glowing reddish and blue clouds in the sky above the city of Matsushiro during a series of earthquakes occurring between 1965 and 1967.

So EQLs seem to be a real thing, however, we still don´t know exactly why they occur. Today’s best explanation considers electromagnetic effects behind the atmospheric glow; this could also explain reports of malfunctioning electronic devices (especially telephones) during such events. Electric charges can accumulate over time during the tectonic deformation of rocks, during an earthquake this energy is suddenly released in form of a visible spark. EQLs could also be a sort of glowing gas, formed by the ionizing properties of this energy.

Some researchers made even a connection of EQLs to another, supposedly unexplained phenomenon –  Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs. In 1977, psychologists Michael A. Persinger and Ghislaine Lafreniere published the book Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events, arguing that UFOs are misidentified electric sparks from underground caused by accumulated electric charges.

Going even further, some UFOlogists speculated that the generated electric fields are strong enough to influence a bystander´s mind and cause hallucinations. To support their hypothesis the authors tried to correlate UFOs sightings with seismic zones in the U.S. However, there also seems to be a high correlation with booze consumption…

UFOs, UFOs everywhere …. simplified map with seismic activity in the United States and supposed areas of increased UFOs sightings in 1870-1960, modified after PERSINGER and other authors.

Interested in reading more? Try:

DERR, J.S. & PERSINGER, M.A. (1990): Luminous Phenomena and Seismic Energy in the Central United States. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 4 (1):  55-69

FIDANI, C. (2010): The earthquake lights (EQL) of the 6 April 2009 Aquila earthquake, in Central Italy. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. 10: 967-978

THERIAULT, R.; ST-LAURENT, F.; FREUND, F.T. & DERR, J.S.(2014): Prevalence of Earthquake Lights Associated with Rift Environments. Seismological Research Letters Volume 85 (1): 159-178

{ http://www.forbes.com/ }

02-02-2016 om 01:23 geschreven door peter  

N.J.'s own 'X-Files': 1 town's mysterious and complicated UFO sighting

Do you believe in aliens and UFOs? From unexplained phenomena, to known hoaxes, and popular culture depictions N.J. has had its share of alien experiences. More than 1,800 UFO sightings have been reported to the National UFO reported center as of Aug. 2015. 

But whether you believe in UFOs or are just a fan of the show, many people in New Jersey have claimed sightings through the years, and one state township's little-known UFO history, beginning with a mysterious 1970s sighting, serves as a reminder that the "truth (could be) out there."

North Bergen: A little-known UFO history

It was after 2 a.m. on Jan. 12, 1975.

72-year-old George O'Barski was on his way home, after finishing up his work as a liquor store owner in New York City.

Suddenly, as he was driving through a short-cut in North Hudson Park, O'Barski later would say, his car radio suddenly filled with static.

A brightly lit 30-foot-long domed aircraft descended, he claimed.

O'Barski said about 11 3.5-feet-tall helmeted, "uniformed figures" had walked out of the craft and quickly taken soil samples, before the spacecraft flew away within four minutes.

The sighting was later covered covered in The Village Voice, in March 1976.

"Sane Citizen Sees UFO" was the title, and the story was written by the now-late UFO investigator Budd Hopkins, who personally knew O'Barski.

Is North Bergen a UFO capital?A UFO tracker, professor, & local spokespeople sound off

1. North Bergen police spokesman Captain Patrick Irwin... had not gotten any UFO calls in 25 years.

"None."

2. North Bergen spokesman Phil Swibinski... had not heard about the sightings.

"North Bergen is known as a progressive community where people really care about each other and residents love to live here because of its cultural diversity, stable property taxes and great public schools, among many other reasons. A few UFO sightings several years ago are not especially relevant to the township's image."

3. Saint Peter's University's Communication Professor Barna Donovan (who studies conspiracy theories)... found the 1975 incident intriguing.

"By (1975) UFO movies were kind of passé... Something like the O'Barski case, if I personally was sitting in the basement of a real-life X-Files office, and I had to stamp this, I would probably say 'This is unexplained.' With all that detail, either it's true or he's making it up."

But he was highly skeptical.

"We're so close to three major airports and so many smaller regional airports. Basically the skies are so full of flying objects, it's so easy to misidentify things... Why would aliens want to go take soil samples in a place as busy, as crowded, as Hudson County?"

4. Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center Director Peter Davenport (who has recorded 1,910 alleged UFO sightings in N.J.)... had not heard of North Bergen's mid-1970s sighting or its UFO reputation.

"I have yet to find a settlement or a city or a village that doesn't claim it has a hot spot with UFO activity... (but I hold) Budd Hopkins's work in very high regard."

Evidence existed that O'Barski was telling the truth, Hopkins claimed: marks in the ground, and a mysteriously shattered glass window in the lobby of the iconic Stonehenge apartment building across the street, where the doorman told Hopkins he had seen unusual bright lights about 10 feet off the ground.

The end... or is it?

After that, some people in North Bergen were scared, and others were claiming sightings.

Bose Bozicevic, a retired North Bergen police officer, remembers the commotion.

When he was a high school student in North Bergen, Bozicevic and his 17- and 18-year-old friends thought the UFO stories were hilarious: "UFOs? Yeah, right," he said.

To test people's gullibility, his friends once even dressed Bozicevic in tinfoil, gave him a WWII gas mask from one of their grandfather's closets — and then unleashed him in North Hudson park.

"They start screaming 'oh there, he is!' People were freaked out by seeing me. I thought it was pretty obvious this is somebody just (messing) around. The police, they see me in the distance. My buddies take off, but I got tinfoil all over me, as you can imagine," Bozicevic recalled.

"I start jogging away. I hear one of the bystanders screaming 'Shoot him! Shoot him! He ate my grandmother!' As I'm running, I'm ripping the tin foil off. It looked like Forest Gump."

The irony is that about 10 years later, Bozicevic became a police officer, and he was on duty on Park Avenue near the Guttenberg-North Bergen border when he would have his own seeming UFO sighting.

His story has gotten him more than enough grief from his smirking officer buddies, he says, but he shares it anyway.

At about 4 a.m. one Sunday morning in the 1980s, as he was in the midst of writing a parking citation, Bozicevic heard a whirring in a desolate street, he said, and then saw a "ship, a something," with bright lights, float over his head, "inches" above the buildings.

"I remember reaching for the radio on the car to call something in. I was holding it and I was looking at this thing and I put it down. I said 'nah,'" he said. "As I reached 79th Street, the thing made a right and went sideways and just went 'zsst' and disappeared right down past the Hudson River... I was like, 'Wow, nobody can corroborate this.'"

A Stonehenge maintenance worker, who did not give his name because he wasn't authorized to speak, told NJ Advance Media this past fall that he believed the Stonehenge never learned why that window smashed.

"No rhyme or reason, supposedly," he said. "It was just a very strange set of circumstances that took place that day."

North Bergen has an interesting story but it's not special when it comes to UFO sightings: Based on the New Jersey database from the National UFO Reporting Center, there have been numerous UFO sightings reported all around the state for the past several decades, and counting. (Check to see if your town is a UFO hotspot here.)

However, in some ways, the North Bergen 1970s sighting was relatively unique among New Jersey sightings: the month of January, and a sighting time of around 2 a.m., are relatively rare, based on a National UFO Reporting Center data analysis, through Fall 2015.

Below, a map of all the UFO sighting locations in New Jersey, dated from 1930 through Fall 2015, as reported to the National UFO Center database:

Laura Herzog may be reached at lherzog@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @LauraHerzogL. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

{ http://www.nj.com/ }

02-02-2016 om 01:18 geschreven door peter  

15 years of UFO Shapes over NY

Columnist Cheryl Costa explores the magnitude of UFO shapes seen in New York skies for the past 15 years.

I frequently have people tell me about their personal UFO sightings and every one of them does their best to describe the shape of the object in question. When words fail to describe the object, they often resort to drawing on a pizza box or a cocktail napkin. One lady I remember fondly was so passionate about showing me her UFO, she dug out an eyeliner tube from her purse and drew the UFO shape on the table top at a diner.

If you want to see a chart of the various types of UFO configurations, there are plenty of sighting charts on the Internet; simply Google: “UFO shapes.” In the spirit of the UFO shapes discussion, I’ve decided to share a summary of the 3,163 UFO shapes reported in the past 15 years from 2001 through 2015.

It’s not all that uncommon for people to see some bright light in the sky that behaves in a unusual way, so 643 reports of witnessing “light” doesn’t surprise me. The next most common sighting is a “circle.” Most usually it’s reported as a ring of lights, like a string of bright, glowing balls. The other way I’ve heard circle UFOs described is being glowing rings, sort of like a glowing “hula hoop.”

Next up are fireballs, which are frequently described as red-orange. I have seen one and it’s an amazing thing to see. First off, it has a flicker, which my author friend Thomas Conwell, crisply described as a pulsed digital flicker. These things aren’t Chinese lanterns, as some write me to suggest, because when they not hovering or darting around like a bumble bee they’re flying at the speed of an airliner. Fireballs are increasing in the reporting numbers and we see a lot of them in NY.

Following fireballs on the list are black triangles. Now before some of the arm chair skeptics try to casually write these craft off as something developed by our industrial military complex, please know there have been reports of these triangles in the late 19th century.

Flying spheres are the next, and happen to be some of the first UFOs I witnessed when I was around the age of 12. A huge silver ball hung in the western sky for roughly 20 minutes before whizzing off at tremendous speed. It took my breath away to see it. We only see about a dozen reports of them a year here in the Empire State.

The last UFO shape I will discuss is the disc. When the UFO fever hit this country in the 1940’s, 50s and 60s, the moniker given to the flying disc was “flying saucer.” The number of disc-shaped UFO reports average about a dozen per year. Some Ufologists suggest that the classic disc is being slowly phased out by the black triangle. I suppose one can’t argue with a popular new model!

{ http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/ }

02-02-2016 om 01:03 geschreven door peter  

REMEMBERING THE SANTA ROSA ENCOUNTER

By Rainbow Radaelli

Sometimes memories are locked away in places that aren’t necessarily secret but for some strange reason they are placed in obscure places, undisclosed even to us. A run of the mill day can pass by without any forethought or care beyond the expected and then all of a sudden with no warning, we recall an experience that we swore to ourselves we would never forget. It’s moments like this that reminds us, we are not alone and that sometimes there are unique encounters, that change our world just by a chance meeting. It’s these fleeting moments in time when we are taken from our comfortable existence, and thrust outside the box of accepted reality into a world of unlimited possibilities.

02-02-2016 om 00:51 geschreven door peter  

FROM EARTH TO THE MOON: ROCKETS, SATELLITES & OTHER SPACECRAFT

By Robert D Morningstar - 

 

 ************************************************************ 

 Abstract

Major satellite launches have often been followed by UFO sightings soon afterwards, for example, after Sputnik I and II in 1957.   In Ottawa, Canada, UFOs were seen on March 3, 1969 after the Apollo 9 launch, on June, 5, 1969 after a suborbital (failed launch) to the moon by the Soviet Union, and in July, 1969, as Apollo 11 orbited the Moon. These correlations, among others, suggest that major rocket launches, especially those extending out of near-Earth orbits, tend to stimulate UFO activity.

Introduction

Major rocket launches have often been followed by UFO activity, possibly coordinated from outposts on the Moon (Lorenzen, 1966, pp. 266, 267).

By 1969, however, there were so many rocket launches and UFO sightings that any attempt to establish correlations between them would be difficult.  A decade earlier, there were fewer objects in orbit, though many suborbital flights were still taking place in the late 1940s.  To establish the proper sequence of events in this article, Universal Time (designated Z for Zulu) will be given, as well as some local (24 hour time) equivalents (in parentheses). 

Following the launch of Sputnik 1 from Baikonur, which the Encyclopedia Astronomica (1957) recorded as onOctober 4, 1957 at 19:28 Z (Oct. 5, 0:28 local time), Lorenzen (1966, p. 65) reported that a 23 year-old farmer inBrazil, Antonio Villas-Boas, observed a nearby area “...lighted as if by a giant searchlight” at about 11 p.m. local time (Oct. 6, 02:00 Z).

This observation was therefore made 30 hours, 32 minutes after the Sputnik I launch.  Subsequently, while plowing a field on October 14, the same farmer saw a cartwheel-shaped UFO about 122 meters (400 feet) off the ground, an observation suggesting a UFO for the earlier Oct. 5 source of light.

UFO activity spiked after the launches of Sputnik I and II, as numerous reports in the NICAP 1957 Sighting Wave Chronology (2014) reveal.  Only 1.5 to 4 hours after the Sputnik II launch on Nov. 3, 1957 at 2:30 Z, for instance, a glowing egg-shaped object landed on roads and stalled car engines near Levelland, Texas; on Nov. 4, a UFO was tracked for 20 minutes on radar and was seen by two people at Kirtland Airforce Base (Hynek, 1972; Encyclopedia Astronomica, 1957).

Also on Nov. 4, 1957 at 05:03 Z a large disc-shaped UFO with an orange glow descended at an army garrison atItaipu, near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and produced a wave of heat that struck two soldiers, causing first- and second degree burns to 10 percent of their bodies (Lorenzen, 1966).

In some UFO cases, the time lag between a rocket launch and a UFO sighting has been relatively short.  

For example, a UFO tracked a Polaris missile during test firing on January 10, 1961; similarly in 1964 soon after another launch, a UFO intercepted an Atlas rocket (Dolan, 2000; Fox & Coleman, 2007).  Most surprisingly, perhaps, only four minutes after launch of a rocket carrying China’s first female astronaut on June 16, 2012, an infrared video camera recorded two glowing UFOs nearby (Good, 2013).  If it is assumed that UFO responses are coordinated from a Moon base, then launches made from the side of the Earth hidden from UFOs on the Moon would not be as rapid (and the launch site would be obscured), as if they were made from the side of the Earth facing the Moon.  These relationships could explain different time lags between rocket launches and UFO sightings, though this would assume that the UFOs were all stationed on the Moon at launch times.

Apollo 9 Test of Lunar Module Docking Maneuvers in Earth Orbit

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March 4, 1969, Ottawa, Canada

Less than 34 hours after launch of Apollo 9 on March 3, 1969 at 15:00 Z , a round UFO was observed onParliament Hill by seven (7) RCMP officers between 0:45 and 2:34 Z.  Twenty-six minutes later another RCMPofficer reported two red flashing lights in the sky above Sussex Drive without any associated engine noise(Bondarchuck, 1979).

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/apollo/apollo-9/apollo-9.htm

June 4 to 6, 1969 Rocket Launches

In addition to the three rocket launches on June 5 described by Nentwich (2008), there was a fourth launch, namely aSoviet Luna mission to the Moon, which failed to achieve orbit

.http://www.ispyspace.com/1967_to_1974.html

Although this launch was excluded from Clark’s (1977) list of Luna launch failures, Greg Kennedy, compiler of the online “Chronology of Human Space Exploration Part 5: 1967-1974”  informed me in an email on Oct. 17, 2008that the ‘Mission Planner’s Manual Proton Commercial Launch Vehicle’ document, printed in 1989 by the Space Commerce Corporation in Houston listed the launch on June 5th, with the note that the second stage failed, while the 1996 TRW Space Log listed the same launch as June 4th, also pointing out that it failed to orbit.

http://www.ispyspace.com/1967_to_1974.html

The ideal time for this launch, as given in a “1969 June 1 – Soviet lunar plans”, would have been June 3, 1969 at 23:18 Z, and because Soviet lunar launches were usually within an hour of the ideal time, as noted by Clark (1977), an early June 4th launch seems to be the most likely. In fact, Sokolov (2001) confirmed the Luna launch on June 4 or earlier, stating that because of an electrical problem (p. 461) “...the upper stage could not fire. The complex fell into the Pacific Ocean.”

In addition, he pointed out that another rocket was launched after Luna on June 4, 1969 which reached a height of only 100 metres, at which point it exploded with a power of about ten (10) kilotons!  

Editor's note: The Hiroshima A-Bomb blast equaled approximately 20 kilotons

The 1960s Nedelin Proton Rocket Explosion

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7a1_1220200651

Could this explosion have caused a UFO response as well?

 http://www.astronautix.com/project/lunar13.htm

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June 5, 1969 UFOs in South and North America

A resident of Uba, Brazil was driving in a car with six passengers when at 09:00 Z their car was “...pursued by a bright orange-colored object which flew around in circles above them, producing interference with the car radio and stopping the engine for a few moments” (Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, 1971, p. 16; UFOCAT, 2005).  In addition, several witnesses also observed a UFO after 20:00 Z at a lake 60 km west of Quebec City, Canada,

http://thecid.com/ufo/uf09/uf9/099250.htm

Between 22:50 and 23:00 Z, more than 50 witnesses reported UFOs in Iowa (Southern Illinoisan, June 6, 1969; Muscatine Journal, June 6, 1969).  

Dr. J. Allen Hynek “stated he understood the phenomenon was flashing silver, orange and copper colored, with chunks flying off of it”, while other reports told of two or three objects with bluish-green wakes (Southern Illinoisan, June 6, 1969, p. 14).

Dr. Hynek suggested that the objects could have been parts of a re-entering Russian satellite, although an official with the Space Defence Center stated that “…it was highly unlikely that the objects were from a satellite because one is rarely placed in an east-west orbit.” (Daily Capital News, June 7, 1969, p. 1) 

The IOWA Fireball of June 76th, 1969

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pohLTTR2mv

Iowa Fireball seen in above link- June 2014

 *********************************************************** 

An FAA official stated that sightings at Riverside and Iowa City, were “...variously described as a bright ball of fire, flash[ing] and cigar-shaped objects” with “Colors…from silver to blue and blue-green” (Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 6, 1969, p. 4).  The azimuth of the ground path of the “Iowa Fireball” on the map of plate 4 in Klass (1975) was about 272º, equivalent to an inclination of 178º, and therefore larger than the maximum reported inclination of any satellite launched up to that time.

Here it should be noted that the ground path of a satellite is determined by the inclination of its orbit, which is the angle between the Earth’s equatorial plane and a spacecraft’s orbital plane (major axis).  Of the thousands of launch-related items in the NORAD Catalog (2012) prior to June 7, 1969, with the exception of 13 which did not re-enter the atmosphere in the June 4 to 6 time interval, the maximum inclinations were all less than 121º, corresponding to azimuths larger than 329º but less than 90º.

Three (3) satellites were expected to re-enter June 5 or 6 but would not cross the sky from east to west (Southern Illinoisan, Friday, June 6, 1969, p. 14).

A Soviet rocket body (NORAD ID 3223) with an inclination of 64.8º (25.2º azimuth) re-entered the atmosphere onJune 5, as listed in the NORAD Catalog (2012), but obviously did not have the east to west ground path of the “Iowa fireball”.

Cosmos 284 had an inclination of 62.3º (azimuth 27.7º), re-entering the atmosphere on June 6 at 5:46 Z, making a soft landing in the Soviet Union (Fairbanks Daily News, June 6, 1969, p. 1; NORAD Catalog, 2012)

www.zarya.info/Diaries/1969.php  

For all of these reasons, Cosmos 284 was not responsible for the “Iowa fireball” and, in o summary, neither a rocket launch nor a re-entering satellite explains the “Iowa fireball”.

This leaves us with the only other possibilities: 

Meteors or UFOs

 **********************************************************

 

Phottos courtesy:-> http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/meteorite-ufo-mystery-surrounds-strange-6828603

 *********************************************************** 

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory concluded that the “Iowa fireball” had been a meteor, and members of its Meteorite Recovery Project proposed a landing site in southern Iowa (Blue Book files, 1969; Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 7, 1969).  However, the following descriptions from several witnesses should be considered before drawing such a conclusion. For instance, a pilot, a teenager and a woman described the object “…as blue and circular, with no wings or indication of a propulsion system…flying east to west above the runway at an altitude of less than 1,000 feet” and with a speed between 483 and 644 km/hr (300 and 400 mph) (Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 6, 1969, p. 3).

A witness north in St. Louis, Missouri reported three objects in a line heading WNW for 60 to 80 seconds, with shapes resembling elongate badminton shuttlecocks (Blue Book files, 1969, p. 14 - 21). A student in East St. Louis, Illinois saw three bright self-luminous, lime-green oval objects beside each other about 805 meters (half a mile) away, decreasing in altitude from 518 to 457 meters (1,700 to 1,500 feet), whereas another witness saw four objects in a line heading west, one of which was oval-shaped with a blue-silver tail (Blue Book Files, 1969, p. 24 – 42).

Several other witnesses saw one of the objects speeding up relative to the other two, while a civilian 53 km (33 miles) northwest of downtown Chicago saw a single tear-drop shaped object (silvery-aqua color), with a tail 10 times as long as the diameter of the head, and with a piece falling upwards from the object as it traveled silently straight and level (Blue Book Files, 1969).

The most easterly sighting was made by a pilot and two other persons in an airplane near Greenfield, Indiana, who, for about 30 seconds saw a single object with an almost metallic “face” south of Greenfield heading west (Blue Book files, 1969, pp. 47-50).   Its trajectory was south of the one shown in plate 4 of Klass (1975), such that different objects were travelling along separate parallel paths.

To summarize, the object(s) had the following characteristics, some of which were not meteor-like: a silvery metallic appearance; flying without being heard; one “piece” moving upwards; one object speeding up relative to the other two; a change in relative positions of the objects from one after another to one beside the other; visibility in flight for over a minute; apparent shapes resembling either a tear-drop, oval, cone, bullet or badminton shuttlecock.

The most compelling evidence for a UFO interpretation, however, was described in a UFO Investigator (1972) article, based on a sighting by an FAA controller and several pilots, who were flying east near St. Louis, Missouri on June 5.  Interestingly, a drawing of a side view of the object in that article resembles the side view of the Roswell UFOillustrated in Randle and Schmitt (1994).  The UFO was described in this 1972 article as hydroplane-shaped, 18 to 20 feet long, 7 to 8 feet thick and 12 to 14 feet across at the back end. Viewed from the side, such an object could have had an elongate teardrop shape, but seen at different angles from a distance, it would have had different shapes.

June 6, 1969 in the West End of Ottawa, Canada

On June 6, 1969 between 2:00 and 2:45 Z, and most likely at about 2:30 Z (June 5, 22:30), a UFO about 60 m long (Fig. 1) was observed in the west end of Ottawa (Nentwich, 2008).  Its surface was not uniformly reflecting light, but was partly covered with a black film.

Figure 1: Side and cross-sectional end views of the Ottawa UFO described in Nentwich (2008).

At about the same time in Ottawa, UFOs appeared over Parliament Hill, after which they travelled to Uplands Airport (Bondarchuk 1979).

 ********************************************************** 

July 18, 1969 about 321,861 km into the flight of Apollo 11

Buzz Aldrin wrote that with the help of an on-board telescope, a UFO was seen pacing their spacecraft; the UFO resembled “a series of ellipses, but when you made it real sharp it was sort of L-shaped”

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case592.htm

July 20, 1969, in Ottawa, Canada

An employee of the National Research Council, as well as some of her neighbors and a police officer, reported a UFOin Hull (now Gatineau just north of Ottawa) between 11:00 and 1:00 Z.  The NRC employee stated that it was “A single object, shaped like a watermelon, glowing brightly with an orange hue”... that “Passed slowly overhead and then travelled at great speed across the Ottawa River to the Parliament Bldgs”, over which it hovered (NRC File N69-128, 1969).  This sighting was on the same day as the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

 

Apollo Flights and UFO Sightings

Maurice Chatelain, former chief of NASA communications systems, quoted in Good (1988, p. 385), stated that “...all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin....Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who ordered absolute silence.”  Further evidence supporting this claim includes an analysis of Apollo 16 film by Nakamura (2003, p. 409),who described an enormous domed disc travelling 20 to 40 km/second and wobbling like a leaf falling from a tree.

In addition, indirect evidence presented by Good (2013) suggests that after landing the lunar module on the Moon, theApollo 11 astronauts observed large UFOs nearby.  A summary of tentative evidence concerning life on the Moon, including UFO activity there, has been considered by Proud (2013, pp. 279-356), based on many sources in the literature.

Conclusions

UFOs appearing after major rocket launches at or near the launch site or even following the rockets leaves little doubt that such launches stimulate UFO activity.  In some cases, however, UFOs have appeared large distances from the launch sites, as in the Texas UFO sightings after the Sputnik 2 launch.  These cases are less convincing though the appearance of a UFO shortly after a launch when there were only a few objects in orbit is still significant.  The reports of UFOs in Ottawa after the Apollo 9 and Luna launches, and on the day of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, considered together, do not seem entirely coincidental, especially if one includes the Apollo 11 sightings on the way to the Moon.

It may be that UFO reports correlate more strongly with artificial satellites sent by humans beyond near Earth orbits than they do with orbital or suborbital flights.  On the other hand, UFOs were also reported on dates when there were no Apollo flights.  For instance, a UFO on April 22, 1969 about 25 miles east of Ottawa was seen flying along a power line while another was seen on May 11, 1969 on Allumette Island west of Ottawa (Bray, 1979; Rutkowski, 2006).

Acknowledgements

I thank the staff of the Archives, University of Ottawa for making available the article from Flying Saucer Review Case Histories.  Also, I am grateful to Greg Kennedy for the Luna launch data sources. All newpaper articles were retrieved from: 

www.newspaperarchive.com

 ********************************************************** 

References

Blue Book Files (1969). Original sighting reports (68 pages).  Retrieved from www.nicap.org/docs/690605stlouis_docs.pdf

Bondarchuk, Y. (1979). UFO Sightings, landings and Abductions: The Documented Evidence. Methuen: Toronto, Canada.

Bray, A. (1979). The UFO Connection.  Jupiter Publishing: Ottawa, Canada.

Cedar Rapids Gazette (June 6, 1969, p. 3). Three persons report seeing UFO at airport. Cedar Rapids Gazette.  Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Cedar Rapids Gazette (June 7, 1969, p. 2). Meteor possible answer to C.R. Report of UFO. Cedar Rapids Gazette.  Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Clark, P. S. (1977). Launch failures in the Soviet Union’s space probe programme.  Spaceflight, 19 (July-Aug.), 275-278.

Daily Capital News (June 7, 1969, p. 1). St. Louisans See Flaming Objects.  Daily Capital News. Jefferson City, Missouri.

Dolan, R. M. (2000). UFOs and The National Security State: An Unclassified History.  Volume One: 1941-1973. Keyhole Publishing: Rochester, New York.

El Paso Herald-Post (June 6, 1969, p. A4).  Cat Delays Launch of Missile. El Paso Herald-Post.  El Paso, Texas.

Encyclopedia Astronomica. (1957 Chronology).  Retrieved from http://www.astronautix.com/chrono/index.htm

Fairbanks Daily News (June 6, 1969, p. 1).  Cosmos returns. Fairbanks Daily News – Miner, v. 47, no. 133. Fairbanks, Alaska.

Flying Saucer Review Case Histories (1971, Oct.). Case 129.  Early June 1969. Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, Supplement No. 7, 16.  The original source was a June 13, 1969 article in O Dia, a Rio de Janeiro newspaper.

Fox, J., & Coleman, T. (Executive Producers). (2007).  Out of the Blue: The Definitive Investigation of the UFO Phenomenon. Special (Updated) 5 Year Anniversary Special.  [Documentary Film].  Produced and directed by J. Fox, T. Coleman, & B. Zubov. Part 4 of 9 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH4geZ58pVQ

Good, T. (1988). Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up.  MacMillan: Toronto.

Good, T. (2013). Earth: An Alien Enterprise. Pegasus: New York, NY.

Hynek, J. A. (1972). The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Ballantine Books: New York, NY.

Klass, P. J. (1975). UFOs Explained.  Random House: New York, NY.

Lorenzen, C. E. (1966).  Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space.  A Signet book. New American Library: New York, NY.

Muscatine Journal (June 6, 1969, p. 1).  UFO sightings.  Muscatine Journal, Muscatine, Iowa, no. 133.

Nakamura, H. (2003).  Video analysis of an anomalous image filmed during Apollo 16.  Journal of Scientific Exploration, 17 (3), 409-433.

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_17_3_nakamura.pdf

Nentwich, F. W. (2008). UFO’s on June 5, 1969, in Brazil, Missouri, Iowa and Canada, with personal observations of the Ottawa case. MUFON UFO Journal, 477 (Jan. issue), pp. 9-11, 20.http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/MUFON/Journals/2008/January_2008.pdf

NICAP 1957 Sighting Wave Chronology (2014). Retrieved from http://www.nicap.org/waves/1957fullrep.htm

NORAD Catalog (2012). Retrieved from http://satellitedebris.net/Database/index.php

NRC File N69-128. (1969).  In: Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. Planetary Sciences Section. National Research Council of Canada RG 77, Vol. 306, File N69/128, 1 page.  On Microfilm Reel T-1741 at the National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

Proud, L. (2013).  The Secret Influence of the Moon: Alien Origins and Occult Powers. Destiny Books: Rochester, Vermont.

Randle, K. D., & Schmitt, D. R. (1994).  The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell. Avon Books: New York.

Rutkowski, C. (2006).  The Landing on Allumette Island.  In C. Rutkowski and G. Dittman: The Canadian UFO Report: The Best Cases Revealed (pp. 103-104). Dundurn Press: Toronto, Canada.

Sokolov, O. A. (2001). The Race to the Moon: A look back from Baikonour. In D. C. Elder & C. Rothmund (Eds.), History of Rocketry and Astronautics (pp. 459-466). San Diego, California: Published for the American Astronautical Society by Univelt, Inc. Retrieved from http://epizodsspace.no-ip.org/bibl/inostr-yazyki/iaa/2001/Sokolov_The_Race_to_the_Moon.pdf

Southern Illinoisan (June 6, 1969, p. 14). Illinois UFO’s ‘probably meteors’. Southern Illinoisan. Carbondale-Herrin-Murphysboro, Illinois.

UFOCAT (2005). UFOCAT.com – On This Day – June 5. Retrieved fromwww.ufocat.com/on_this_day/June05.html

UFO Investigator (Feb. 1972). FAA Controller recounts ’69 sighting, p. 2. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nicap.org/docs/690605stlouis_nicap.pdf 

 Franz W. Nentwich

{ http://ufodigest.com/ }

02-02-2016 om 00:40 geschreven door peter  

Dashcams filmen meteoor aan Amerikaanse oostkust - HLN.be

Door: Steven Alen 

VIDEO Aan de Amerikaanse oostkust schoot het voorbije weekend een meteoor door de nachtelijke hemel. Enkele bestuurders konden het lichtspoor vastleggen met hun dashcam.

01-02-2016 om 23:23 geschreven door peter  

Famous UFO cases: Hessdalen Lights

Click on the picture to enlarge.

Documentary about the UFO hotspot in Hessdalen, Norway (2009)

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

01-02-2016 om 23:07 geschreven door peter  

Famous UFO cases: Belgian UFO wave

The sightings

Photograph

* Balloons
* Ultralight aircraft (ULM)
* Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)
* Aircraft (including Stealth)
* Laser projections or holograms
* Mirages or other meteorological phenomena

Skeptical explanations

Summary: Summary of the offical report by the Belgian Air Force regarding the UFO events of March, 1990.

Background:
1. Starting early Dec 89 the BAF has been contacted on several occasions by eyewitnesses who observed strange phenomena in the Belgian airspace. On some occasions they described the phenomena as a triangle-shaped platform up to 200 feet wide with 3 downward beaming projectors, hovering at +- 100 m above the ground and making only a very light humming noise. Some witnesses saw the object departing at very high speed after a very fast acceleration. All observations were made in the evening or during the night.
2. The radar stations which had been alerted by eyewitnesses could not definitely determine a correlation between the visual observations and their detection on radar. On two occasions the BAF scrambled 2 F16 during the evening hours.
a. On the first occasion the F16 arrived +- 1 hour after the visual detection. Nothing was observed.
b. On the second occasion, pilots could identify a laser-beam projector on the ground. After investigation it appeared however that the description of the observations totally differed from previously described phenomena.
3. Consequently the Belgian Airforce, anxious to identify the origin of the phenomena, authorised F16 scrambles if following conditions were met:
a. Visual observations on the ground confirmed by the local police.
b. Detection on radar.

Events:
4. On 30 Mar 1990 at 23.00 Hr the Master Controller (MC) of the Air Defense radar station of Glons received a phone call from a person who declared to observe three independent blinking lights in the sky, changing colours, with a much higher intensity than the lights of the stars and forming a triangle. Meteo conditions were clear sky, no clouds, light wind and a minor temperature inversion at 3000 Ft.
5. The MC in turn notified the police of WAVRE which confirmed the sighting at +- 23 30 Hr. Meanwhile the MC had identified a radar contact at about 8 NM North of the ground observation. The contact moved slowely to the West at a speed of =- 25kts and an altitude of 10.000 Ft.
6. The ground observers reported 3 additional light spots which moved gradually, with irregular speeds, towards the first set of lights and forming a second triangle.
7. At 23.50 a second radar station, situated at +- 100 NM from the first, confirmed an identical contact at the same place of the radar contact of Glons.
8. At 00.05 2 F16 were scrambled from BEAUVECHAIN airbase and guided towards the radar contacts. A total of 9 interception attempts have been made. At 6 occasions the pilots could establish a lock-on with their air interception radar. Lock-on distances varied between 5 and 8 NM. On all occasions targets varied speed and altitude very quickly and break-locks occurred after 10 to 60 seconds. Speeds varied between 150 and 1010 kts. At 3 occasions both F16 registered simultaneous lock-ons with the same parameters. The 2 F16 were flying +- 2 NM apart. No visual contact could be established by either of the F16 pilots.
9. The F16 flew 3 times through the observation field of the ground observers. At the third passage the ground observers notified a change in the behavior of the light spots. The most luminous started to blink very intensively while the other disappeared. Consequently, the most luminous spot started to dim gradually.
10. Meanwhile the head of the police of WAVRE had alerted 4 other police stations in the area. All four, separated +- 10 NM from each other, confirmed the visual observations.
11. The aircraft landed at 01.10 Hrs. The last visual observation was recorded at +- 01.30 Hrs.

Conclusions:
12. The Belgian Air Force was unable to identify neither the nature nor the origin of the phenomena. However, it had sufficient elements to exclude following assumptions:
a. Balloons. Impossible due to the highly variable speeds (confirmed visually and by radar).
b. ULM. Same as for balloons.
c. RPV. Impossible due to the hovering characteristics.
d. Aircraft (including Stealth). Same as for RPV. No noise.
e. Laser projections or Mirages. Unlikely due to lack of projection surface (no clouds). Light spots have been observed from different locations. Light spots moved over distance of more than 15 NM. Form of inlighted part of spots has been observed with spectacles. Laser projections or mirages can not be detected by radar.

{signed}
W. DE BROUWER Kol Vl SBH
VS3

UFO Sightings in Belgium, 1990

Belgium UFO Wave Part 1

https://youtu.be/d9PVBL2MkKk

Belgium UFO Wave Part 2

https://youtu.be/VX0S7Mt_jBA

Belgium UFO Triangle Sightings Pt 1

https://youtu.be/6r-wdH3qdLs

Belgium UFO Triangle Sightings Pt 2

https://youtu.be/V3qA-TY6rFg

Belgium Triangle – Top 10 UFO Encounters #7

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

01-02-2016 om 22:58 geschreven door peter  

2016 Del Rio UFO Festival: Robert Salas

Robert Salas is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, class of 1964. He served seven years on active duty before separating from the Air Force in 1971. While on active duty he worked as a Weapons Controller, flew target drones, commanded inter-continental ballistic missiles as a launch officer, and a worked as an Air Force missile propulsion engineer on the Titan III program.

{  http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

01-02-2016 om 21:39 geschreven door peter  

Columbia Disaster: What Happened, What NASA Learned

On Feb. 1, 2003, space shuttle Columbia broke up as it returned to Earth, killing the seven astronauts on board. NASA suspended space shuttle flights for more than two years as it investigated the disaster.

An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and fatally breached the spacecraft wing. This problem with foam had been known for years, and NASA came under intense scrutiny in Congress and in the media for allowing the situation to continue.

"Seconds from Disaster: Columbia's Last Flight."" />

A fatal strike

Columbia, on mission STS-107, left Earth for the last time on Jan. 16, 2003. At the time, the shuttle program was focused on building the International Space Station. However, STS-107 stood apart as it emphasized pure research.

The seven-member crew — Rick Husband, commander; Michael Anderson, payload commander; David Brown, mission specialist; Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; William McCool, pilot; Ilan Ramon, payload specialist from the Israeli Space Agency — spent 24 hours a day doing science experiments in two shifts. They performed around 80 experiments in life sciences, material sciences, fluid physics and other matters.

During the crew's 16 days in space, NASA was investigating a foam strike during launch. About 82 seconds after Columbia left the ground, a piece of foam fell from a "bipod ramp" that was part of a structure that attached the external tank to the shuttle. Video from the launch appeared to show the foam striking Columbia's left wing.

Several people within NASA pushed to get pictures of the breached wing in orbit. The Department of Defense was reportedly prepared to use its orbital spy cameras to get a closer look. However, NASA officials in charge declined the offer, according to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and "Comm Check," a book about the disaster.

On Feb. 1, 2003, the shuttle made its usual landing approach to the Kennedy Space Center. Just before 9 a.m. EST, however, abnormal readings showed up at Mission Control. They lost temperature readings from sensors located on the left wing. Then, tire pressure readings from the left side also vanished.

The Capcom, or spacecraft communicator, called up to Columbia to discuss the tire pressure readings. At 8:59:32 a.m., Husband called back from Columbia: "Roger," followed by a word that was cut off in mid-sentence.

At that point, Columbia was near Dallas, travelling 18 times the speed of sound and still 200,700 feet (61,170 meters) above the ground. Mission Control made several attempts to get in touch with the astronauts, with no success.

It was later found that a hole on the left wing allowed atmospheric gases to bleed into the shuttle as it went through its fiery re-entry, leading to the loss of the sensors and eventually, Columbia itself.

Searching for debris

Twelve minutes later, when Columbia should have been making its final approach to the runway, a mission controller received a phone call. The caller said a television network was showing video of the shuttle breaking up in the sky.

Shortly afterward, NASA declared a space shuttle "contingency" and sent search and rescue teams to the suspected debris sites in Texas and later, Louisiana. Later that day, NASA declared the astronauts lost.

“This is indeed a tragic day for the NASA family, for the families of the astronauts who flew on STS-107, and likewise is tragic for the nation,” stated NASA's administrator at the time, Sean O’Keefe.

The search for debris took weeks, as it was shed over a field of some 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) in east Texas alone. NASA eventually recovered 84,000 pieces, representing nearly 40 percent of Columbia. Among them were the crew remains, which were identified with DNA.

Much later, in 2008, NASA released a crew survival report detailing the Columbia crew's last few minutes. The astronauts probably survived the initial breakup of Columbia, but lost consciousness in seconds after the cabin lost pressure and then died as it disintegrated.

Report calls for more funding, emphasis on safety

In the weeks after the disaster, a dozen officials began sifting through the Columbia disaster, led by Harold W. Gehman Jr., former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, or CAIB, as it was later known, later released a multi-volume report on how the shuttle was destroyed, and what led to it.

Besides the physical cause – the foam – CAIB had a damning assessment about the culture at NASA that led to the foam problem and other safety issues being minimized over the years.

"Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety were allowed to develop," the board wrote, citing "reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices" and "organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information" among the problems found.

CAIB recommended NASA ruthlessly seek and eliminate safety problems, such as the foam, to help astronaut safety in future missions. It also called for more predictable funding and political support for the agency, and added that the shuttle must be replaced with a new transportation system.

"The shuttle is now an aging system but still developmental in character. It is in the nation's interest to replace the shuttle as soon as possible," the report stated.

Space Shuttle Columbia Disaster LIVE NASA TV

Returning to flight

The shuttle's external tank was redesigned, and other safety measures implemented. In July 2005, STS-114 lifted off and tested a suite of new procedures, including one where astronauts used cameras and a robotic arm to scan the shuttle's belly for broken tiles. NASA also put more camera views on the shuttle during liftoff to better monitor foam shedding.

Due to more foam loss than expected, the next shuttle flight did not take place until July 2006. After STS-121's safe conclusion, NASA deemed the program ready to move forward and shuttles resumed flying several times a year.

"We're still going to watch and we're still going to pay attention," STS-121 commander Steve Lindsey said at the time. "We're never ever going to let our guard down."

Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster Nova documentary

Columbia's loss – as well as the loss of several other space-bound crews – receives a public tribute every year at NASA's Day of Remembrance. That date is marked in late January or early February because, coincidentally, the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia crews were all lost in that calendar week.

The crew has received several tributes to their memory over the years. On Mars, the rover Spirit's landing site was ceremonially named Columbia Memorial Station. Also, seven asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter now bear the crew's names.

— Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com Contributor

{ http://www.space.com/ }

01-02-2016 om 18:15 geschreven door peter  

{ http://www.beautyinspace.com/ }

01-02-2016 om 18:07 geschreven door peter  

NASA's Next Great Space Telescope: The Quest Begins

The hunt is on! NASA has begun a quest to select its next big instrument to study the cosmos.

Observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope have revolutionized humanity's view of the cosmos. And upcoming projects, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the WFIRST-AFTA mission — which the agency aims to launch in 2018 and the mid-2020s, respectively — promise to make big discoveries of their own.

But what will happen after that? What kind of space telescope does NASA aim to build a few decades from now? The picture is getting a little clearer: Earlier this month, the space agency announced that it is forming four working groups to investigate possible concepts for a large-scale space mission that would likely launch in the 2030s. [The Most Amazing Views of the Cosmos from Hubble]

One of the four mission concepts is focused on direct imaging of the surfaces of exoplanets, to potentially search for signs of life. The other three concepts are for space telescopes built to detect specific wavelengths of light: the ultraviolet/optical/near-infrared range, similar to what Hubble sees; X-ray light; and far-infrared light. The space agency is now accepting applications from scientists to join one of the four groups. Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, delivered a town hall talk at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Florida earlier this month, in which he announced the formation of the groups and put out a call for applications.

The groups will put together a report that will show what kind of science each concept could accomplish, what capabilities it would have, what limitations exist for building it, and how each space telescope would benefit the entire astronomy community. Much of the potential science that each mission could accomplish was written about at length in NASA's 2013 Astrophysics Roadmap: "Enduring Quests, Daring Visions: NASAAstrophysics in the Next Three Decades."

Here is a brief description of each of the four mission concepts and what they hope to accomplish.

The habitable exoplanet imager mission

Scientists have indirectly identified about 2,000 planets outside Earth's solar system using the Kepler Space Telescope and other instruments. Now, scientists want a way to look directly at exoplanets that aren't too far from Earth. A direct-imaging planetary telescope could potentially reveal the atmospheres and surface conditions of alien worlds, and would search for signs of habitability or even bio-activity (yes, alien life), according to Bertrand Mennesson, an exoplanet scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is helping to lead this mission concept group.

The so-called "HabEx" mission would "help assess the prevalence of habitable planets and [the] possibly of primitive life in our galaxy," Mennesson told Space.com in an email. HabEx would also allow scientists to look at the atmospheres and surface conditions on all kinds of planets, including ice giants, gas giants and rocky planets, around various types of stars and in various solar system arrangements.

Such a telescope would also capture images of young planetary systems in the early stages of formation, providing a look at solar system evolution across the galaxy. Direct imaging of exoplanet atmospheres has already been demonstrated from the ground, Mennesson said.

Large ultraviolet, optical and infrared (LUVOIR) telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope, with its 7.9-foot-wide (2.4 meters) primary mirror, has revolutionized how humans see the cosmos. Imagine what a space telescope with a 39-foot (12 m) mirror could do.

There have been many proposals in the astronomy community for a 26- to 39-foot (8 to 12 m) telescope that collects light in the ultraviolet, optical and infrared wavelengths, as Hubble does. One of the most recent such proposals has been named the "High Definition Space Telescope," (HDST), but the general concept is called LUVOIR (Large Ultraviolet Visible Infrared). (The $8.8 billion JWST has a 21.3-foot-wide (6.5 m) mirror and will collect light mostly in the infrared, with some capability in the optical range.)

"LUVOIR could study the formation of stars and planets in our galaxy, map the evolution of galaxies, illuminate the birth of the first stars in the universe and probe into black hole environments," said Aki Roberge, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who is helping to lead the group for this mission.

A LUVOIR telescope could also have some overlap with an exoplanet direct-imaging instrument such as HabEx, and would be able to characterize the atmospheres and surfaces of a wide range of planets, potentially identifying signatures of life. These capabilities are discussed extensively in an HDST report that was published in 2015.

"There will likely be a greater emphasis on astrophysics capabilities in the LUVOIR study than in the HabEx study, though both will be looking hard at exoplanet capabilities," Roberge told Space.com in an email. "LUVOIR may enable a broader range of exoplanet observations. The two teams aim to collaborate on the overlapping science and technical aspects as much as we can." [The Strangest Alien Planets]

X-ray surveyor mission

The X-ray universe has already revealed itself to be a strange and beautiful place, through observations (and jaw-dropping images) taken with various space telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory and NASA's NuSTAR mission.

All of these telescopes have helped scientists study a wide variety of fascinating cosmic objects, including supernovas (exploding stars), black holes (and the disks of matter that swirl around them), galaxies and mysterious dark matter. [Photos: The X-Ray Universe Revealed by Chandra]

A new X-ray surveyor could provide insight into how matter behaves in some of the cosmos' most extreme environments, such as the region around a black hole, proponents say. It could provide a look at the birth and growth of the first supermassive black holes in the universe, and would allow scientists to look at how galaxies have formed and evolved over the lifetime of the universe (13.8 billion years). This backward glance would also reveal a look at the evolution of the larger structure of the universe according to the NASA Astrophysics Roadmap, and NASA scientists working with the concept group.

The X-ray surveyor would look out to the edge of the visible universe, allowing scientists to observe how galaxies have formed and evolved over the lifetime of the universe (about 13.8 billion years). This backward glance would also reveal a look at the evolution of the larger structure of the universe.

If NASA does end up building the X-ray Surveyor, the mission would provide orders of magnitude more sensitive than any other X-ray mission, the scientists said. 

Far-IR surveyor mission

All the stars in the universe collectively radiate an incredible amount of visible light, but scientists now know that as much as half of that starlight is blocked by dust clouds, and then reradiated as infrared light.

"If you don't do things in the infrared, you're missing half the picture, effectively," Kartik Sheth, a program scientist in the astrophysics division at NASA Headquarters, told Space.com.

With a next-generation far-infrared space telescope, scientists could study how stars and planets form by studying in detail the nurseries where these cosmic babies come to life. Infrared observations are also especially good for identifying the chemicals present in distant cosmic objects. This could mean looking for water in newly forming solar systems.

The vast majority of elements in the universe are made by stars (which means that "we are made of starstuff," as the late astronomer Carl Sagan famously said). A next-generation far-infrared telescope could study stars at various stages of their life cycles to reveal when and where different elements are being made. Effectively, such an instrument would provide scientists a list of ingredients in many cosmic objects, advocates say.

The far-infrared mission concept would look at a range of wavelengths that fall between what will be observed by JWST and the ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is coming online in Chile. This particular range of light gets distorted by Earth's atmosphere, which means scientists must put an infrared telescope into space to capture them properly. The instruments on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope that captured light in the far-infrared range have all shut down (although a few shorter wavelength instruments are still operational). Following Spitzer's retirement, there will be no space observatories studying the far-infrared wavelength range. The only other observatory operating in this wavelength range is NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which is a modified Being 747 aircraft that can fly to altitudes where the Earth's atmosphere is significantly thinner. It is currently the largest airborne observatory in the world.

"The far-infrared community has not had a space-mission like Hubble or Chandra that has continuously operated for a long time," Sheth said.

Which mission will be selected?

NASA invests in missions of various sizes, such as the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope, or the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). But the four mission concepts being reviewed by the newly announced working groups will be large-scale missions that follow in the footsteps of Hubble, JWST and WFIRST-AFTA (whose name is short for Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets). Missions of this size take decades to complete, which is why NASA is starting the process now, even though any of these missions might not begin operating until the mid-2030s or 2040, Hertz said.

The decision about which, if any, of these concepts becomes a reality will likely be strongly influenced by a group outside of NASA. Every 10 years, the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council puts together a committee to talk about what priorities the astronomy and astrophysics communities should set for the coming decade. The committee then releases a report, known as the "decadal survey," that makes specific recommendations for the next 10 years. Past surveys have recommended current NASA projects including JWST and WFIRST-AFTA. NASA typically follows the recommendations set by this survey.

The four concept groups will work to provide the decadal committee with all the information they need to make a decision about which mission concept should become a reality. One of these mission concepts may inform NASA's next big mission to explore the cosmos.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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01-02-2016 om 17:41 geschreven door peter  

7 of the most surreal UFO documents from the CIA archives.

aka Tman/Flickr

Nearly 40 years ago, the CIA declassified a mountain of documents related to UFO sightings.

Now that "The X-Files" has been revived as a miniseries, the CIA decided to resurface those files. Many of them trace back to the early 1950s, at a time when political tensions were still frozen over and flying objects were seen as national security threats.

Here are some of the most interesting.

View As: One Page Slides

A memo on national security and the 'vulnerability to air attack' from flying saucers

CIA

On October 2, 1952, the Assistant Director in the Office of Scientific Intelligence sent a memoto the Director of the entire CIA with the subject "Flying Saucers."

As the AD wrote, "'Flying saucers' pose two elements of danger which have national security implications. The first involves mass psychological considerations and the second concerns the vulnerability of the United States to air attack."

The AD recommended more research be conducted to explore the "implications of the 'flying saucer' problem."

(If you listen closely enough, you can almost hear them typing the word "drones" decades ahead of time.)

Uzbekistan's mysterious light show

CIA

The late 1940s in the Uzbekistan capital city of Tashkent saw more unidentified light shows than it could count. 

"From May to September 1947," a CIA information report reads, "three light phenomena happening at intervals of about 15 minutes were seen almost every night between 9 and 10 p.m. local time." At its highest point, the light seemed to be roughly a fifth the diameter of a full moon.

As the report details, the light always began as a bright red ball. Within seconds it would grow a fiery tail and then morph into a green, then white, mass.

"Smoke trails, noises, or detonations were not noticed."

Fiery disks looming over Belgian uranium mines

CIA

A daily newspaper in Vienna, of all publications, reported on a peculiar sighting of "two fiery disks" hovering over uranium mines in mid-August, 1952.

As the report explains, the two objects supposedly tore through the airspace in a highly erratic fashion. At one point they would be soaring vertically away from the onlookers, and the next they'd be diving down "to within 20 meters of the tree tops." 

Commander Pierre of the local airfield took off in his own fighter plane to wrangle the unknown aircraft. However, "Pierre had to give up pursuit after 15 minutes since both disks, with a loud whistling sound which he heard despite the noise of his own plane, disappeared in a straight line toward Lake Tanganyika."

Pierre later estimated the disks were traveling more than 900 miles per hour.

The East German flying saucers of 1952

CIA

The CIA published this internal document reporting on one German man's fantastic account of a 45-foot-wide disk he spotted in a forest when his motorcycle broke down.

Accompanied by his 11-year-old daughter, the man approached the strange-looking object to find two men in "shiny metallic clothing" kneeling over the disk, which had a cone-shaped capsule on top.

Once the two men realized they were being watched, the man says, they hopped into the capsule and the disk began to leave the ground. Eventually, it rose high above the trees and took off.

"I had never heard of the term 'flying saucer' before I escaped from the Soviet Union into West Berlin," the man later said. "When I saw this object, I immediately thought it was a new Soviet military machine."

Flying objects passing over Casablanca

CIA

In early September 1952, multiple sightings were reported of various UFOs over Casablanca, Morocco. The town made famous in the 1942 film of the same name saw two flying saucers that were "elongated in shape" and "followed by a trail of white light."

On a separate occasion in July, two other people reported seeing a "blue-green, ball-shaped object" just before midnight "moving at a high rate of speed." The mysterious object disappeared after only three or four seconds, however, "as though it had literally melted into the sky."

The very next morning, another couple observed a mysterious object around 9 a.m. for roughly 30 seconds. Several more accounts, all with differing details, emerged that summer. 

Three Norwegian guys walk into a forest...

CIA

In mid-November 1952, three men working in a forest in Kirkenes, Norway spotted a flat, round object just hovering roughly 1,500 feet in the air.

"The object appeared to have a diameter of 15-20 meters (50-65 feet)," the CIA report stated. "After the workers had observed the object for a while, it suddenly flew away at great speed in a northwesternly direction."

They were the only people who reported seeing the object, unfortunately for them. "They swear, however, that their report is true."

The CIA begins to have its doubts

CIA

With all these reports coming in, it didn't take long for the CIA to get suspicious. In August 1952 (keep in mind, still two months ahead of its memo on those two national security concerns), the Deputy Assistant Director of the Scientific Intelligence office released a memodiscounting the threat posed by UFOs.

"Of 1000 to 2000 such reports received by ATIC (Air Technical Intelligence Center), a large percentage are clearly 'phoney,'" the report reads. In fact, many of the reported flights were easily explained as known missions using US equipment, the report went on.

Owing to the agency's uncertainty, however, the Deputy AD recommended CIA surveillance continue on the mysterious "flying saucers" under the cover of darkness. 

"It is strongly urged ... that no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public," the report read, "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies to accept such interest as 'confirmatory' of the soundness of 'unpublished facts' in the hands of the U.S. government."

{ http://www.techinsider.io/ } 

01-02-2016 om 17:26 geschreven door peter  

Où sont tous les extraterrestres ?

Extrait du film "E.T. l'extraterrestre". © Universal Pictures.

La scène se passe en 1950 aux Etats-Unis, dans la cafétéria du Laboratoire national de Los Alamos où la bombe atomique américaine a été développée pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le Prix Nobel de physique 1938, l'Italo-Américain Enrico Fermi, entouré de quelques collègues, se demande si notre civilisation est la seule à avoir atteint un stade technologique dans la galaxie. Le raisonnement est schématiquement le suivant : si ce stade a été atteint par des peuples extraterrestres, il y a de bonnes chances que certains  l'aient fait depuis des milliers voire des millions d'années. Par conséquent, ils ont eu le temps de résoudre les problèmes des voyages interstellaires et de mener à bien la colonisation de la Voie lactée. D'où la question, logique, que Fermi pose : "Si les extraterrestres existent, où sont-ils donc tous ?"

Devenue célèbre sous le nom de paradoxe de Fermi, cette question posée à une époque où, primo, l'aventure spatiale humaine n'avait pas encore véritablement commencé et où, secundo, on était fort loin de découvrir la première planète extrasolaire – il faut bien que les extraterrestres vivent quelque part –  a fait cogiter nombre de chercheurs, qu'ils soient astronomes ou biologistes. Les décennies ont passé et bien des inconnues que mettait en lumière le paradoxe de Fermi se sont estompées. On sait que les exoplanètes rocheuses semblables à la Terre sont sans doute pléthore dans la Voie lactée et on a mieux précisé les conditions favorables à l'apparition de la vie. Dans son livre A l'écoute du vivant, le chercheur belge Christian de Duve, Prix Nobel de médecine, expliquait ainsi que "la vie fait partie de l'Univers. C'est une manifestation normale de la matière qui obéit à ses lois." Une affirmation qui renforçait encore le caractère "poil à gratter" du paradoxe de Fermi car si le passage de l'inerte au vivant est réellement un processus physico-chimique simple, à condition qu'on ait beaucoup de temps devant soi, qu'est-ce qui empêche qu'E.T. soit partout ou qu'il ait du moins laissé des traces visibles par tous ?

A la fin des années 1990, alors que le programme SETI d'écoute du ciel à la recherche de signaux radio artificiels ne faisait état que d'un assourdissant silence, a émergé, sous la plume de l'économiste Robin Hanson, le concept de Grand Filtre : ainsi que le résume le site Astronomes.com d'Olivier Esslinger, le Grand Filtre est"un obstacle insurmontable qui empêche le passage de la matière inerte à une civilisation galactique". A un moment donné, quelque chose bloque. Ce "quelque chose", ce goulot d'étranglement, a souvent été placé très tôt dans le long processus censé mener à l'avènement de cette "civilisation galactique".

Dans une étude australienne publiée le 20 janvier par la revue Astrobiology, les chercheurs Aditya Chopra et Charles Lineweaver pensent que le point de blocage ne se trouve pas au tout début de la chaîne mais plus loin : si l'on suit leur raisonnement, si les extraterrestres ne sont pas partout, c'est parce qu'ils sont morts avant d'en avoir eu le temps et non pas parce que la vie naît difficilement. Pour arriver à cette conclusion, les deux auteurs de cette étude ont, un peu comme la check-list d'un pilote et d'un copilote, méthodiquement repris les grandes étapes de l'apparition et de l'évolution du vivant pour voir où le Grand Filtre avait le plus de chances de se placer. Y a-t-il un problème astrophysique ? Non, car les étoiles autour desquelles des planètes rocheuses sont susceptibles de se former à une distance où l'eau serait présente sous forme liquide se comptent probablement en milliards dans la Voie lactée, voire davantage. Y a-t-il un problème chimique ? Non, car les éléments essentiels à la vie telle que nous la connaissons, à savoir les CHNOPS (carbone, hydrogène, azote, oxygène, phosphore et soufre), sont aussi parmi les éléments les plus courants dans l'Univers. Y a-t-il un problème d'énergie ? Non plus, car l'étoile en fournit suffisamment.

Pour Aditya Chopra et Charles Lineweaver, le problème est ailleurs. On peut, selon eux, trouver facilement des environnements propices dans lesquels la vie éclora. En revanche, rien ne garantit que ces environnements garderont durablement des conditions favorables, parce qu'une planète, à sa manière, est "vivante", qu'elle évolue, qu'elle est soumise à des règles physiques et à des cycles. Ces deux chercheurs reprennent ainsi les exemples de Vénus et de Mars, nées dans la "zone d'habitabilité" du Soleil. L'eau y a coulé sous forme liquide. Peut-être la vie y est-elle même apparue. Mais si c'est le cas, elle n'a pas pu s'y maintenir : soumise à un effet de serre galopant, Vénus s'est transformée en enfer surchauffé, à plus de 400°C, tandis que Mars a perdu son atmosphère et s'est gelée. Il faut bien admettre que l'eau n'est pas facile à maintenir sur une planète sous sa forme liquide. D'ailleurs, elle aura disparu de la Terre d'ici un à deux milliards d'années...

L'étude d'Astrobiology pose la question de savoir si le fait que la vie ait perduré sur notre planète est uniquement dû à des conjonctions physiques favorables. Et la réponse est surprenante. Pour ses auteurs, si la Terre n'a pas perdu son habitabilité, c'est probablement grâce... au vivant lui-même. Celui-ci n'est en effet pas un simple"passager passif", pour reprendre la jolie expression présente dans cet article, mais il "modifie et régule activement son environnement". Comment ? Par exemple en agissant sur la composition de l'atmosphère, sur les gaz à effet de serre, sur l'albédo de la planète, c'est-à-dire sur sa capacité à renvoyer ou à absorber les rayons solaires. Par ces mécanismes dits de rétroaction, la vie crée les conditions de sa propre perpétuation... ou, si tout tourne mal, de son extinction.

J'en prends pour exemple, même s'il n'est pas cité dans l'étude, l'épisode dit de la Grande Oxydation. Les premiers organismes terrestres étaient anaérobies : ils n'avaient pas besoin d'oxygène pour fonctionner et celui-ci était même une sorte de déchet relargué dans l'océan où il était capturé par le fer. Mais lorsque tout le fer a été utilisé, l'oxygène s'est accumulé dans les mers et dans l'atmosphère. Non seulement cet élément était toxique pour les organismes de l'époque mais il s'est aussi associé avec le méthane présent dans l'air, retirant de l'atmosphère ce puissant gaz à effet de serre. Cela aurait provoqué une chute brutale des températures et, entre 2,4 et 2,1 milliards d'années, l'épisode dit de la glaciation huronienne, où la Terre aurait été recouverte de glaces. Catastrophe ? Au terme de cette très longue glaciation, de nouvelles formes de vie compatibles avec une atmosphère riche en oxygène ont pris le relais et nous sommes leurs lointains descendants. Cette histoire illustre bien la capacité de la vie à influencer les cycles géochimiques et à les transformer en cycles biogéochimiques. On pourrait aussi citer l'action de l'homme sur le cycle du carbone et toutes les conséquences qui en découlent...

Au bout du compte, si les extraterrestres ne sont pas partout, c'est, estiment les auteurs de cette étude, parce que, sur la plupart des planètes, le changement des conditions physiques "conspire à éliminer la vie naissante avant qu'elle ait une chance d'évoluer suffisamment pour réguler les cycles globaux". Selon leurs modèles, la grande majorité des planètes vivables seraient incapables de maintenir leur habitabilité plus de 1 ou 1,5 milliard d'années. Les planètes telles que la Terre, celles où le vivant a pris la barre avant d'être balayé, seraient donc une minorité chanceuse.

Pierre Barthélémy (suivez-moi ici sur Twitter ou bien là sur Facebook)

Lire aussi :

• A la recherche des extraterrestres autour de l'étoile mystérieuse
• Peut-on voir mourir une civilisation extraterrestre ?
• Le grand bobard du voyage vers les étoiles
• En 1938, le Nobel de physique récompensait... une incroyable erreur

{ http://www.lemonde.fr/ }

ps remarque d'un mebre de Magonie = L'auteur est un sceptique dur et plus stupide que la moyenne de sa tribu !!! Qu'est-ce que pensez vous?

01-02-2016 om 17:04 geschreven door peter  

Monthly Statistical MUFON Report - for January 2016:

CMS continues to amass sighting reports from around the globe. In January 2016 there were 687 sightings reported to MUFON through CMS from the following countries; 

Within the United States the distribution by State was as follows;

If you are getting more sighting reports than listed here, please be sure to enter them manually into CMS. To make this happen automatically, make sure your local MUFON Website is pointing to the CMS Reporting form onwww.mufon.com and direct all calls you get to the MUFON website so that witnesses can enter their own report directly into CMS.

ALL sighting reports received by CMS are already filled in by the witness, saving you and your investigators time. Each report is automatically sent to YOU, the State Director and Assistant State Director, for you to assign someone to follow-up and complete the report.

If a UFO sighting comes in over the phone, or by e-mail, and you want to enter it yourself, simply go to CMS athttp://mufoncms.com (once logged in) and click on "ADD CASE" in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This gives you a blank sighting reporting form that you can fill out while the witness is on the phone. Once the report is filled out be sure to click "SAVE" and you will have easily added your NEW report to CMS.

Other interesting data points in CMS during January 2016 are the shape of the UFOs reported which were as follows; 

as well as the distance from the observer;

Most impressively there were 28 Landings, Hovering, or Takeoffs reported and 1 Entities observed.

To review the CMS data yourself go to www.mufon.com and click on "UFO Case Files" to 1.) Easily look at the Last 20 Sightings, or 2.) Do a customized search of the CMS database by date and/or location, or 3.) Logon to CMS for even more detailed UFO sighting information about your State and the World.

I hope you are enjoying our new internet based Sighting and Reporting System. For questions regarding its use please refer to the User Guide available on your CMS main menu screen. Please send your questions and/or suggestions to Jan Harzan at janharzan@hotmail.com.

Thank you!

01-02-2016 om 16:36 geschreven door peter  

Bob Lazar 25 Years Later - "Wish I Hadn't Told The Truth"

01-02-2016 om 16:05 geschreven door peter  

According to Ufologists, a cigar-shaped UFO caused the eruption of one of Mexico’s volcanoes

01-02-2016 om 15:50 geschreven door peter