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

Area 51, the Bermuda Triangle, Roswell. Why are the most famous UFO mysteries so United States-centric? Movies probably have a lot to do with it.

In fact, it was the Independence Day Resurgence home release last week that got us thinking — what about Australia?

Our overseas mates might be surprised to learn that Australia can really hold its own when it comes to spooky UFO reports and abduction testimonies. With mass sightings, "alien hot spots” and even a mysterious oceanic triangle of its own; Down Under has its fair share of alien stories to tell around the camp fire.

Want to hear some? It's almost Halloween, after all. Granted, it's not a holiday directly associated with aliens but you get it. *insert spooky synth sounds*

Mary Rodwell is the founder and principal of the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network, and she's the person you call when you spot a potential UFO, FYI. Especially since the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) officially stopped looking into reported sightings in the '90s. She says that it's due to Australia's large size and small population that you don't hear about UFO sightings more.

She told Mashable: "A lot of the time so we don't get it [UFO sightings] recorded or people don't want to talk about it, particularly in more isolated places where farmers see stuff, as they do, and have that experience.

"I have people contacting me every week ... So this isn't just dear old America here, this is everywhere," she said.

While it may be happening everywhere and on the regular, there are some definite Aussie stand outs when it comes to UFO tales. And thanks to Rodwell, we have some leads on the best ones. You're welcome!

1. Mass sighting at Westall High School

The Westall incident is often referred to on the dark corners of the web (where Angel Fire websites dwell), as Australia's most significant mass UFO sightings. It occurred in 1966 at Westall High School in Melbourne. Over 100 students, teachers and members of the public claimed to have seen three metallic objects in the sky, hovering closely.

Afterwards, witnessed claimed they were paid a visit by "men in black" and teachers said they were told to dismiss the incident by police and military authorities. A case of mass hysteria, or something more? *X Files theme tune plays softly in the background*

2. Frederick Valentich, the pilot that vanished

Okay, this is a doozy. in 1978, a 20-year-old pilot and UFO enthusiast named Frederich Valentich was flying over the Bass Strait (separating Tasmania and mainland Australia) when he radioed air traffic control in Melbourne.

In the transmission, the young man describes an object hovering 300 metres (1,000 feet) above him and said it was "not an aircraft." He made statements like "it has a green light and a sort of metallic light on the outside," and "It’s coming for me right now," before his signal was lost. His plane disappeared without a trace. *mystery intensifies*

These nice YouTubers have recorded a reenactment of the transmission.

3. Kelly Cahill, X Files inspiration

Australian woman with the pseudonym "Kelly Cahill" was referenced in the first rebooted episode of the X Files, because that's how cool her case is. In 1993, she and her husband were driving though the Dandenong Ranges when they saw a big ol' "blimp" thing and went to get a closer look.

Next minute, Cahill wakes up in her own car feeling oddly relaxed. The couple returned home only to realise they'd lost an hour and creepily, that Cahill had a painful triangular mark near her bellybutton. Over the next few weeks, she experienced flashbacks, eventually appearing on TV programme Today Tonight (of course) to tell the story of her abduction.

4. The case of the Knowles family

Believers like Mary Rodwell say the 1988 experience of Faye Knowles and her three sons (and their two dogs) is one of the most significant "close encounter" testimonies ever.

Also reportedly involving several witnesses, the story goes involves the family witnessing an egg-like, bright structure. They then went on a high-speed car chase against the object, climaxing with the family's car being lifted from the road as weird black dust, high-pitched sound and a horrible smell overwhelmed the car. "I felt like my brain was being sucked out," said eldest son Patrick at the time. *dun dun DUN*

5. Wycliffe Well, self-described UFO capital

UFO hobbyists rejoice! Australia's got its own tiny town chock full of cute alien signposts. It's a great place for a road-side Instagram. Wycliffe Well is found in the Northern Territory and it calls itself the UFO capital of Australia.

While the idea that it actually experiences "nightly UFO sightings" is up for debate, there's no doubt that it's got the quirkiest caravan park for miles around.

While it's cool to think about road tripping to Australia's UFO hotspots, according to Rodwell, if extra terrestrial beings want to contact you, they'll damn well find a way.

"There does seem to be certain places where craft are seen that little bit more often," she says, "but to be quite honest with you if you're someone they're interested in they can pick you up ... It can be a huge craft above Sydney that you would never see but it would be there if it needs to be…"

Better keep those eyes peeled, earthlings. The truth is out (back) there.

Mysterious 'Dark Energy' May Not Exist, Study Claims — This image of the Type Ia supernova remnant 0509-67.5 was made using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Analyses of Type Ia supernovas’ motion through space has led most cosmologists to conclude that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force called dark energy.
**Credit: NASA, ESA, and B. Schaefer and A. Pagnotta (Louisiana State** University, Baton Rouge); NASA, ESA, CXC, SAO, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Hughes (Rutgers University)

The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate after all, meaning that mysterious "dark energy" might not actually exist, according to a new study.

This is quite the claim. In 2011, three cosmologists from two research teams won the Nobel Prize in physics for independently showing that distant Type Ia supernovas, which are a kind of exploding star, are moving away from Earth faster than nearby ones are.

These surprising results, which were published in the late 1990s, strongly suggested that some strange force must be spreading space-time apart. If no such force exists, the reasoning goes, then the expansion of the universe that began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago should not be accelerating. Instead, it should be decreasing, slowed by the collective gravitational pull of all the galaxies, black holes and other matter in the cosmos. [Dark Energy: The Mystery Explained (Infographic)]

This hypothetical dispersive force came to be known as dark energy, because astronomers didn't really know what it was (and still don't, as a matter of fact).

But the new study, which was published online Friday (Oct. 21) in the journal Scientific Reports, questions this Nobel Prize-winning conclusion. Lead author J.T. Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and his colleagues analyzed 740 Type Ia supernovas using a different theoretical framework than the one that the two research teams employed in the 1990s. (The previous work also looked at just 70 or so Type Ia supernovas, Nielsen's team pointed out.)

**Astronomers know more about what dark matter is not than what it actually is. See what scientists know about dark matter in this Space.com infographic.**
**Credit: Karl Tate, Space.com Infographics Artist**

The new analysis found just "marginal evidence" for the concept of dark energy and accelerating expansion.

"The evidence for accelerated expansion is, at most, what physicists call '3 sigma.' This is far short of the 5-sigma standard required to claim a discovery of fundamental significance," co-author Subir Sarkar, of Oxford University in England, said in a statement.

"So it is quite possible that we are being misled, and that the apparent manifestation of dark energy is a consequence of analyzing the data in an oversimplified theoretical model — one that was in fact constructed in the 1930s, long before there was any real data," Sarkar added.

Sarkar acknowledged that "a lot of work will be necessary to convince the physics community" that this latter possibility could actually reflect reality. This appraisal seems to be accurate; there has indeed been pushback from other astronomers.

One skeptic is Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University (and a contributor to Space.com's "Expert Voices" section). For starters, Sutter thinks that Nielsen et al. shouldn't be so dismissive of the statistical link that they found.

"I don't know, 3 sigma is pretty great to me," he told Space.com. "Their paper very clearly points to a universe with dark energy."

While Sutter agreed with Sarkar that a 3-sigma detection is not entirely convincing by itself, he stressed that the motion of Type Ia supernovas is far from the only evidence supporting the existence of dark energy. Sutter cited, among other things, oscillations in the cosmic microwave background (the ancient light left over from the Big Bang); observations of large-scale structure in the universe; and "baryon acoustic oscillations," which are odd fluctuations in the density of matter.

"If we had a universe with no dark energy, those features would have disappeared long ago," Sutter said. "We have scads of evidence — multiple and independent probes — that all point to a universe with dark energy. And the authors [of the new study] try to just kind of hand wave this stuff away."

Sutter said that the new paper should help scientists better understand how to use supernova data to get a better handle on dark energy. But he thinks the authors made an unwarranted leap in suggesting that, as Sarkar put it, "a key pillar of the standard cosmological model is rather shaky."

"If you took out the strong claims that the authors are trying to make, it's an interesting nuts-and-bolts methodology paper," Sutter said. "But it doesn't really even begin to rock the foundations of modern cosmology."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us@Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.