UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

The Charleston area has a stellar history with UFO sightings. After digging through the newspaper’s archives, we’ve found some fascinating stories that are too good to keep to ourselves.

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Every Thursday, we will do just that: Dig through the archives to bring you entertaining, meaningful and interesting stories from our past.

Some (like this one) should make you laugh.

Others (we hope) will make you think.

Video: Radio signal sparks alien life speculation

For this first installment of “To the Archives!” we’re thinking big — out of this world big.

Here are a few of the interactions the Lowcountry has had with the extraterrestrial.

1973: What’s that on the horizon?

Ten callers reported seeing a UFO to both police and The News and Courier on Sept. 30, 1973.

According to an Oct. 1, 1973 article in The News and Courier, the object appeared to be the size of a large star and could be seen with the naked eye, even though members of the City Fire Department had a telescope trained on the object.

James Howard, a firefighter, told the newspaper that the object started out higher in the sky before it moved steadily northward. He also said it looked bright with red and green lights blinking around.

The best details about the event would come later in a 1986 article published in the Feb. 2, 1986 edition of The News and Courier/The Evening Post.

One of the reporters who was tasked with covering the sighting in 1973 said they saw it, too.

“The reporter didn’t say whether he thought spacemen were inside,” the 1986 article said.

1977-1978: Beamed up

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Wedged alongside letters published in the May 31, 1978 edition of the Charleston News and Courier was a letter unlike the rest.

A North Charleston mechanic by the name of William J. Hermann said he had beef with an article written about UFOs. The reason why, he wrote, was because he believed they were real.

He also sent in a picture.

A profile of Hermann the following year would go on to tell just how intense his experience had been.

Hermann told the newspaper that he was abducted by aliens not once, but twice. He claimed both incidents happened between October 1977 and March 1978.

“Their skin was the color of a marshmallow. Their eyes were long and dark with a brown iris. Their heads looked like overgrown human fetuses with no ears or hair. I heard a voice telling me to have no fear...” Hermann said.

Hermann said he did not remember the first incident until extraterrestrials sent him a strange-looking metal bar with the letters “MAN” on it. Only then, he said, did he remember the March 1978 abduction

“I’m the token UFO guy,” Hermann told The Post and Courier in 1981.

But he wouldn’t want that title for long.

Two years later, he washed his hands of all of it when he wrote a letter to the editor. He called the UFO phenomena “satanic in nature, demonic in origin.”

1989: ‘It was a monstrous looking thing’

On a later summer night in 1989, seven people saw something fly across the sky while they were standing in a parking lot near Rivers Avenue and Remount Road

At first, they thought it was a plane.

Then, they weren’t so sure.

A July 17, 1989 article published in The Post and Courier describes the flying object:

“It was a dark shapeless object 300-500 feet long, and fiery white and yellow sparks were shooting out of what seemed to be its tail end. Its front end appeared to be glowing.

It didn’t have any other lights or windows. It was about 1,500 feet in the air, moving slowly, and had just passed soundlessly above them from north to south.”

When Bessie Dixon asked what it was, no one could answer her question.

The object that went soaring across the sky was so large that it was seen streaking across the sky in Myrtle Beach.

Leo Martin told The Post and Courier by phone that he had never seen anything like it.

“I looked up and saw an enormous ball of fire with a tremendous tail. I’m former Air Force and have never seen anything like that.”

Martin also took a video of the incident, and sold the footage to ABC for an undisclosed price.

Is there something you want us to look up in our archives? Let us know. Send us message on Snapchat at @postandcourier, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. You can also send an email directly to Caitlin Byrd at cbyrd@postandcourier.com.

Reach Caitlin Byrd at 937-5590 or follow her on Twitter at @MaryCaitlinByrd.

{ http://www.postandcourier.com/ }

**NASA's DXL sounding rocket ventured through the sun's helium-focusing cone to investigate the origin of X-rays in space.**
**Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Lisa Poje**

A NASA sounding rocket zoomed above Earth's atmosphere, confirming one interstellar source for X-rays and one more local one — and discovering others whose origin remains a mystery.

NASA's rocket, called the Diffuse X-ray emission (DXL) rocket, discovered that some of the X-rays that bombard Earth's atmosphere likely come from the "Local Hot Bubble," which is believed to be a zone of hot interstellar material surrounding the solar system. While the bubble has been hypothesized since the 1990s, DXL showed that its existence is likely true.

Other X-rays happen as a part of solar wind exchange. The solar wind is a constant flow of charged particles from our sun; because the gas is ionized — it includes charged particles and the electrons separated from them — the solar wind can carry electric and magnetic fields. At times, the solar wind pushes into neutral gas (where electrons and ions are more tightly bound), and "excites" the electrons in this gas. When the electrons stabilize, they release energy in the form of X-rays. [The X-Ray Universe: Chandra X-Ray Space Observatory Pictures]But the study scientists also found higher-energy X-rays that originate from an unknown source.

"At higher energies, these sources [solar wind and the Local Hot Bubble] contribute less than a quarter of the X-ray emission," Youaraj Uprety, lead author on the study and an astrophysicist at University of Miami, where the research was conducted, said in a NASA statement. "So there's an unknown source of X-rays in this energy range."

DXL flew for about 15 minutes, providing a glimpse of X-rays beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere normally blocks out these high-energy forms of light.

NASA's Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local Galaxy (DXL) sounding rocket launched in 2012, gathering data above the atmosphere about the X-rays that bombard Earth. A new study based on data from that excursion was published in 2016.
**Credit: White Sands Missile Range, Visual Information Branch**

DXL was sent aloft at a time that is advantageous to measure X-rays coming from the solar wind: When the rocket flew, Earth was passing through something called the helium-focusing cone. Space is full of hydrogen and helium; as the solar system passes through it, the neutral helium creates a tail around the sun because helium is heavier than hydrogen.

Scientists were able to use those conditions to figure out how much X-ray emission comes from the solar wind, because the solar wind's exchange depends on interactions with neutral material such as helium. From there, scientists at first hypothesized that all of the remaining X-ray emission comes from the Local Hot Bubble — a large gas pocket that was supercharged by two or three supernova explosions, one inside the other, Massimiliano Galeazzi, an astrophysicist at the University of Miami and an author on the study, said in the same statement.

But something happened that they weren't expecting. Some of the X-rays detected by the rocket were too high of an energy to be from the Local Hot Bubble, because its temperature is too low. These X-rays also weren't in the helium-focusing cone, and so they didn't come from the solar wind. The origin of this third set of X-rays is completely unknown.

A study based on the research was published Sept. 23 in the Astrophysical Journal.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.