Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
17-11-2016
The X-Files and UFO History: Reel vs. Real
The X-Files and UFO History: Reel vs. Real
The X-Files took believers seriously. We look at how the series mined UFO myths and played off our fears and suspicions.
Anyone driving across a barren interstate freeway at night has likely looked up into the sky and wondered about the possibility of witnessing the unexpected. For people who have held beliefs in extra-terrestrials or alien craft, the entire history of the UFO phenomenon is an obsession that goes beyond mere fascination.
Books, movies, and television help alien seekers conceptualize what an encounter could potentially look like. Perhaps no show has flown as close to the sun with depicting real-life accounts of the UFO phenomenon than The X-Files, the seminal sci-fi series from Fox and Chris Carter.
When Carter’s series made its return to Fox for a revival in 2016, it honed in on a new extra-terrestrial threat for the digital age. Ever since they successfully blurred the line between fiction and real world events when the pilot debuted in 1993, The X-Files has depicted triangle-shaped crafts, or disc shaped crafts of various sizes, or even more recently in the new episodes, ARV’s - Alien Reproduction Vehicle’s. But the series drew from real world belief in the phenomenon, as well as the belief in global conspiracies.
The Basis for The X-Files
Chris Carter’s pre-pilot research revealed something startling. He read a Roper Organization survey stated that three percent of the U.S. population believes they have been abducted by aliens. When Carter would later direct the “Duane Barry” episode, a fill-in crew member revealed his brother-in-law believed he had been abducted. Carter’s persistent mantra in the early years was that the show had to be “scientifically plausible.” This meant that a lot of the research was pulled from real UFOlogy archives.
One key plot element in the series has been the Roswell incident, which the Deep Throat character first mentioned in season one’s final episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” when he comments that “Roswell was a smokescreen.” It was a comment that would be mirrored by the old man in “My Struggle I” from the new event series.
The Roswell incident from 1947 in New Mexico has remained the holy-grail source for the subject, touching on most of people’s concerns. As The X-Files heavily played up in the first episode of season 10, “My Struggle,” they showed the military retrieving wreckage from an unidentified craft, and using intimidation, misdirection, deniability, or direct threats to hide from the public secret military technology, or the existence of extra-terrestrials. What is known about the incident is that an event took place in July of 1947. The public might not have known about it had it not been for a military press release on Tuesday, July 8th that confirmed a disc-shaped object that “landed” on a Ranch, just outside of Roswell Army Air Field.
"Are They Really A Hoax?"
The Roswell story caused a sensation for hours in the press before a second story was released that the wreckage of a weather balloon was recovered. Major Jesse A. Marcel was the head of 509th Bomb group intelligence office at the time of the incident. But the story of a landing wouldn’t jive with one of the eyewitness accounts of a foreman named William Brazel, who was working for rancher J.B. Foster at the time.
William and his son Vernon claimed to have come across an area strewn with unfamiliar material that was part of some collected wreckage. In a matter of days, Major Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt of the Counter-Intelligence Corps contacted them and took the materials. In spite of residential eye witness accounts by the Wilmonts, the flying saucer story was debunked by the Roswell Dispatch by July 9th. Interest in the story was revived by the late ‘70s, but most of the eyewitnesses had passed away by then.
Many UFO believers regard the incident as a key moment, pointing fingers at segments of the military, whom they say created smokescreens to cover up alien technology, or secret military aircrafts. Original witnesses had offered conflicting stories; some had described a crashed disc, with two hundred yards in diameter that formed a long, thin strip some three quarters of a mile long, between two hundred to three hundred feet wide, and at one end was a deep gouge in the ground, ten feet wide, and five hundred feet long. That account would have indicated a significant amount of debris.
Some of the wreckage recovered had “I-beams” which Marcel’s son described as having hieroglyphic-type characters. These first accounts would describe something fairly mundane, and likely a crashed experimental craft in development near Roswell Army Air Field, or a shot down foreign craft.
The mythology of Roswell became evident here. There were no initial reports of an intact craft or alien bodies recovered. In 1974, TV researcher Robert Carr put out comments about a craft, and frozen alien bodies being held in Wright-Patterson AFB, related to a crash in 1948 that was later debunked.
Despite the falsehood, it triggered interest in the UFO research community, and the Roswell case started to be taken seriously. Other figures have elaborated the story with greater claims, such as Frank J. Kaufman, Glenn Dennis, Jim Ragsdale, “Pappy” Henderson, Mr. Rowe, and Major Edwin Easley. Several figures even claiming there were two crash sites, which has only complicated the narrative about what was found.
Some theories suggest that a Japanese Balloon bomb from World War II was recovered, or a V-2 rocket that veered off course, as part of the MOGUL project, a project developed with sensitive instruments and high altitude balloons to monitor soviet nuclear test activity.
Roswell’s Rumble is Chris Carter’s Treasure
What The X-Files did do well was add fragments from the known history to create an unsettling agenda in the series’ mythology. Carter and Co. borrowed much of the tone of the 1960s ABC sci-fi series The Invaders, which starred Roy Thinnes, a future X-Files acting alumnus who played the character of Jeremiah Smith.
In The Invaders, Thinnes played David Vincent, a man who witnesses a flying saucer land with alien beings intent on taking over the Earth. Over the course of the series, Vincent manages to gather a small circle of people who believe him, and eventually the invaders change their plans.
The series had an obvious parallel to the plight of the X-Files iconic villain. “We had a perfect conspiracy with an alien race,” The Cigarette Smoking Man ominously intoned in The X-Files season six episode, "One Son"; “Aliens who were coming to reclaim the planet and destroy all human life. Our job was to secretly prepare the way for their invasion. To create for them a race of human-alien hybrids. They were good plans, right plans. Kept secret for over fifty years, ever since the crash at Roswell.”
Some of the events in the series that speak of a clandestine meeting between the Colonists and the Syndicate in 1973 revealed in “One Son” mirror a rumored alleged clandestine meeting in February 1954 at Muroc, now Edwards, air force base, with on-going contact between Extra-Terrestrials and eminent people, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Which has also lead to the argument with some UFOologists that recovered technology from Roswell was “reversed-engineered,” and lead to developments like the current laser, transistors, microchips, Velcro, and microwave ovens. It has also been argued that such "reverse-engineering" gave the United States leverage with such contact. Deep Throat certainly suggested the Military use of “reverse-engineering” in season one’s second episode.
In The X-Files season five episode “Redux,” Michael Kritschgau offered up an counter explanation regarding Roswell as a cover, a red herring for other agendas.
“The Military saw a good thing in ’47 when the Roswell story broke. The more we denied it, the more people believed it was true. Aliens had landed – a made-to-order cover story for generals looking to develop the national war chest.”
Kritschgau further noted that such official investigations as Grudge, Twinkle, Project Blue Book, and Majestic 12 fed into the belief in UFOs, Kritschgau also noted that the first supersonic flight was in 1947, after which, every experimental flight was considered a U.F.O. All of these points are part of the historical lore.
The new X-Files episode, “My Struggle” depicted a version of the Roswell Crash, while also citing several other events, including the Kenneth Arnoldsightings from June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington.Other events noted were the Maury Island sighing from June 21, 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, as well as the 1952 UFO flap over Washington D.C.
The Arnold sighting is notable. A pilot was commanding his own light aircraft to Pendleton Oregon from a job at Chehalis Air Service, Washington State, when he found himself near a location where an aircraft had vanished. At an altitude of 9,200 feet (2,760 m), he saw a bright flash, which he described as a “screwy formation… a chain of nine peculiar-looking aircraft” flying north to south at approximately 9,000 feet (2,790 m) elevation and going in a definite direction at an angle of 170 degrees.
The objects approached Mount Rainier at a very high speed, some of them changing or dipping direction. He realized they were moving much too fast to be a flock of birds. Upon landing in Yakima, Arnold described what he had witnessed to his fellow pilots. He would later describe them as half-moon-shaped oval in front and convex in the rear. At first, the news of his sighting was treated as a hoax, but Arnold’s impeccable record and integrity prompted people to take him more seriously. Arnold had assumed it was some sort of secret weapon or Soviet aircraft invading US airspace, an idea that was reinforced in private by a former USAF officer, that it was some rocket-powered jet, skeptics have suggested he witnessed a flock of pelicans, but this ignores the little known fact that Arnold had another sighting in the same area five days later at La Grande Airfield, Oregon.
Another key sighting that was visually referenced in the “My Struggle” teaser was the Maury Island incident. Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman at Tacoma, was on his boat with his fifteen-year-old son, his dog, and two crewman on the 21st at around 2 p.m. when they saw five doughnut-shaped objects with rows of portholes circling around a sixth object. They estimated it was about 2,000 feet (600 m) above the water at the Puget Sound. They estimated that the objects were about 100 feet wide with a 25-foot hole in the middle.
While landing on the beach of Maury Island, Dahl took several photographs. One of the ships appeared to be trying to repair the other ship. There was a thunderous explosion, and the entire object emitted dark, almost molten, rock-like material and sheets of an extremely light metallic substance. Being directly under the shower, Dahl’s dog was killed, his son’s arm was injured, and the boat was damaged. After the UFOs headed out to sea, Dahl tried to get help via his radio, but it was dead. Dahl and others collected sample evidence and took it back to Tacoma to his boss, Fred Crissman. Soon, Kenneth Arnold was investigating the incident, and within days had his own encounter.
Lastly, there was the incident in Washington from 1952. As the nuclear age developed through the ‘50s, the ratio of UFO activity seemed to increase. In June of 1952, there were reports of UFOs over the skies of the east coast of the United States. Starting in Quantico, Virginia, there were various accounts of witnesses from Pan American Airline and National Airline crews spotting crafts through July, seen on radar at the Air Route Traffic Control. At Washington’s National Airport, the sightings near the capital reached such a degree that B-52s and F-94s were dispatched to intercept but to no avail.
These cases would evolve and become more complicated, and many themes were cited and explored on The X-Files. UFO abductions, the alien-human hybrid hypothesis as first cited in “The Erlenmeyer Flask,” UFO cults cited in episodes like “Red Museum,” or Ancient Astronaut Theory first cited in “Biogenesis,” or animal experimentation as cited in “Fearful Symmetry.”
Such real life incidents fed into the story arc’s of The X-Files, and often acted as a starting off point for the writers imagination. What is also to be noted is the point that writers would attend conventions about the UFO phenomenon in the early years, which would lead to the invention of characters like The Lone Gunmen, or other UFO investigators, there’s even accounts of the series writers enjoying cooperation from some government agencies. This cross pollination helped to shape the science and speculation that detailed the series.
Chris Carter and The X-Files took subjects that had been discussed in whispers and brought them into the mainstream, hence the popularity of Ancient Aliens for the History channel, or NASA’s Unexplained Files for the Discovery channel. Indeed, The truth is often stranger than fiction.
Den of Geek’s X-Files correspondent Matt Allair is a writer, freelance filmmaker, musician, and the webmaster of The X-Files Lexicon. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
NOVEMBER 4, 2016 ………….. NEWTON ABBOT DEVON ENGLAND
Hi Ken : I was sky watching when I spotted a luminous object approaching.
The object was sphere shaped and the top half was blue while the bottom half was white. The sphere moved very slowly across the night sky before coming to a stop. The sphere just hung there in the sky like it was waiting for something. I looked through my binoculars at the sphere looking for a conventional explanation but there was none it was definitely odd and unusual.
After a while of watching the sphere I then spotted a larger object that was approaching from the west. This larger object was shaped like a gherkin. The gherkin shaped object glowed different colours as it moved and got closer. As soon as the gherkin shaped object was near and in front of the sphere it seemed to somehow attach it’s self to the sphere by using light. It was like the tractor beam out of star trek. The beam appeared to fluctuate in brightness as it began to pull the sphere.
I quickly took a photograph and watched in amazement as the gherkin shaped object pulled the Sphere away across the night sky and off in to the distance. I was speechless. I have seen a lot of UFOs but I have never seen anything like this before it was really incredible to witness this. I have been sky watching a lot lately and have seen and photographed some very unusual things. Why do I see UFOs on a regular basis? The photograph was taken on the 4th of November 2016 at Newton Abbot Devon England.
The project team hopes to raise at least $1 million through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter by December 21, 2016, to lay the technical groundwork for the project, representatives said in a statement.
According to Space.com, the initiative would launch a small space telescope designed specifically to look at Alpha Centauri, which, along with Proxima Centauri, is the nearest stellar neighbour to Earth's solar system.
Because of the star system's closeness, that small telescope would be able to take a "pale blue dot" image of any potentially Earthlike planets orbiting there — a photo of a small blue speck like the one the Voyager spacecraft 1 took of Earth from afar. A blue hue would indicate potential oceans or atmosphere surrounding the planet.
Kickstarter
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and the University of Massachusetts Lowell have already signed on to collaborate on the project.
The entire mission would cost between $10 million and $50 million, Jon Morse, mission executive for Project Blue told Space.com when the project was announced in October.
The project's first $1 million raised will go to "crucial analysis, design and simulations that form the foundation of the mission," the Kickstarter page reads.
If more money is raised, the researchers also have stretch goals: $2 million will allow them to test the coronagraph that lets the telescope spot planets around the bright glare of Alpha Centauri's stars, and $4 million will let them finish the telescope's design, start building components and incorporate interested students and universities into the building process.
Science of 'Arrival': If Aliens Call, Does Humanity Have a Plan?
Science of 'Arrival': If Aliens Call, Does Humanity Have a Plan?
By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor
Credit: Dennis van de Water | Shutterstock.com
The science fiction movie "Arrival," which opened in theaters last weekend, poses tantalizing questions about how humans might make contact — and eventually communicate — with intelligent aliens. The much-hyped film has renewed people's interest in the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But what would happen if humans really did make contact with an intelligent alien civilization? If E.T. calls, is there a plan?
The answer is yes, and no, said astronomer Seth Shostak, who leads efforts to detect radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
In the 1990s, Shostak chaired a committee of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) that prepared a revised version of the "post-detection protocols" for researchers who watch for possible alien transmissions using radio telescopes, a field known as SETI (short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).
The protocols were first drawn up in the 1980s to help scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union share information about any potential SETI signals. But, Shostak explained, the SETI post-detection protocols are guidelines for governments and scientists, rather than a global action plan for dealing with alien contact.
"They say, 'If you pick up a signal, check it out ... tell everybody ... and don't broadcast any replies without international consultation,' whatever that means," he said. "But that's all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that's as official as they ever got."
"Men in Black"
In the movie "Arrival," spaceships land in several cities around the world, and a linguist (portrayed by actress Amy Adams) and a physicist (played by actor Jeremy Renner) are recruited as part of an international effort to try to communicate with the aliens and find out why they are here.
In real life, apart from the protocol dictating that researchers should share news about SETI signals with other astronomers around the world, Shostak said he is not aware of any government-level plans or established procedures in case of an alien contact, whatever form it might take.
And it seems there really are no "Men in Black," shadowy government investigators of UFO-lore, depicted in the comedy sci-fi movie series starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
"If [the government] could afford the 'Men in Black,' then they could afford to support SETI," Shostak joked. [7 Huge Misconceptions about Aliens]
But the U.S. government has shown no interest in SETI research so far, he said. "It's not a government program, so they have nothing to do with it. I would love to see some interest from them, but I never have," he added.
After one early SETI "false alarm," which eventually turned out to be a signal from a European research satellite, the only response was from journalists.
"In 1997, we got a signal that looked pretty promising for most of the day. We thought it was possibly the real deal," Shostak said. "I kept waiting for the 'Men in Black' to show up — they didn't. I kept waiting for the Pentagon to call. I kept waiting for the White House to call. They didn't call. But The New York Times called."
The supposed military plan, which became known as "Seven Phases to Contact," was first reported in a 1967 book on UFOs by the American broadcaster and UFO researcher Frank Edwards.
But Shostak said he has seen no sign of any extraterrestrial action plan for U.S. government agencies or the military. "As far as I know, there's nothing, and I think I would have heard something because of the [SETI] false alarms," he said.
While detecting an alien radio signal would be different from encountering spaceships that landed on Earth, Shostak doesn’t think protocols will play a big part in how we respond.
"Some people asked me at a conference last week, 'What plan does the military have to deal with aliens should they land?' And I said, 'I don’t know … but to the best of my knowledge, they don't have a plan.'"
Shostak noted that any aliens who could travel here in a spacecraft would need to be centuries or thousands of years more technologically advanced than humans are now, so it's almost impossible to imagine the consequences of contact between the species, let alone the thought of developing a plan to deal with them. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]
"It would be like the Neanderthals having a plan in case the U.S. Air Force showed up," he said.
Calling planet Earth
Although the aliens in "Arrival"helpfully travel to Earth in faster-than-light spaceships, willing and ready to talk, Shostak said a more likely "first contact" scenario would be the detection of a SETI radio signal, perhaps from a source hundreds or thousands of light-years away.
That means it could take centuries for the aliens to receive any reply transmitted from Earth in an effort to communicate with them, he said. As such, there might not be any real hurry to decide what to say.
And if E.T. does call, what should humans say in response? Some scientists, including British physicist Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern about "Active SETI" programs designed to transmit messages from Earth to any aliens that might be listening. Hawking warned of the potential threat posed by unknown extraterrestrials and their alien motivations.
There's also the difficult matter of making the right first impression in any extraterrestrial chat, Shostak said.
"I've been to several conferences where people discuss whether we should tell [aliens] all the bad things about humanity, or just the good things, and that sort of thing," he said. "But I think that is terribly overdrawn. To me, that would be like the indigenous people of Australia seeing Capt. Cook coming over the horizon in his ship, then saying, 'We're going to have a couple of conferences to discuss what we're going to talk to these guys about, and what language we'll use’ — [but] it doesn’t matter."
Shostak pointed out that humans have already been broadcasting news into space for decades, in the form of television and radio signals, and so it's probably too late to keep quiet.
"Those signals have been going out into space since the Second World War, so we've already told them we're here," he said.
In the sci-fi film Arrival, alien spaceships suddenly appear above twelve locations on Earth. The aliens—seven-limbed creatures called heptapods—are willing to let a few humans come aboard for quick chats, but there's no universal translator gizmo to help the two species parley. Instead, each country calls upon its top linguists, including Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams.
Banks is whisked away to the nearest spaceship in Montana, tasked with untangling the heptapods’ languages and figuring out why they have come to Earth. To find out how linguists might react when faced with an extraterrestrial language, the filmmakers consulted Jessica Coon, a professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal.
“These aren’t your typical Star Trek aliens that have two arms and two legs and a vocal system just like ours, but happen to be a different color or have strange bumps on their heads,” Coon says. “They’re really not human looking at all and the sounds that they make are completely nonhuman sounds, and that’s probably more likely what we would expect to find.”
We asked Coon about what the film gets right about field linguistics, why alien languages will be difficult to decipher, and how linguists might go about doing so.
Aliens will play by a different set of rules
If aliens ever do touch down on Earth, their language is likely to offer challenges not found in any human language. “What linguists have discovered about human languages is that even though they can sound very different from one another and their grammars do show a lot of variation…languages tend to fall into certain patterns,” Coon says. So given certain pieces of information about a human language, linguists can often make reliable predictions about its other properties.
Take word order. In languages where verbs come before objects, it’s also common for prepositions like “on” to precede nouns. So in English, we say, “ate the apple,” and, “on the table.” In other languages, such as Japanese, both patterns are reversed. “Most of the world’s languages fall into one of those patterns or the other,” Coon says. “The variation isn’t completely unconstrained.”
Alien languages are unlikely to follow the same rules that human languages share. “Humans seem to be hardwired for this capacity to learn language,” Coon says. “Because it is part of our genetics and part of being human, it’s very unlikely that other creatures…would have the same kinds of constraints or show the same kinds of similarities that human languages do.”
And experiences that can be represented in every human language may not show up in an alien one. Every human language will have some way of representing intent, Coon says. “Kids are going to want to be able to say, ‘I didn’t mean to break that cup.’” But, as Banks explains to her colleagues in Arrival, if an alien species acts instinctively their language may have no concept of self-will, or no way to distinguish between doing things on purpose as opposed to by accident.
Linguists won’t even be able to assume that an alien language will have nouns, verbs, questions and other elements that are basic building blocks of our speech. “We would just have to hope…that we would still be able to recognize patterns and match it up with we’re seeing,” Coon says.
Even our own biology could limit us from understanding an alien language. Assuming our visitors even have mouths, we still might not be able to pick apart the speech they utter. In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” the short story that inspired Arrival, Banks’s character points out that human ears and brains are built to understand speech made using a human vocal tract. But when it comes to aliens, she says, “it’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful.”
While they are able to make progress with the aliens’ unique written language, Banks and her colleagues are hampered by an inability to reproduce the heptapods’ noises. “With the spoken language it’s just a nonstarter because she can’t produce these strange sounds that sound like whale calls and purring cats,” Coon says.
So how would we talk to aliens?
For her first fieldwork assignment, Coon spent a summer in Mexico learning the Mayan language Ch’ol. “Going to the site of a recently arrived UFO isn’t really anything like driving into the jungle in Chiapas,” she admits. Still, Coon says, Louise Banks’s attempts to decipher the heptapods’ languages in Arrivaloffer a pretty accurate representation of how we would try to translate alien speech.
If future linguists find themselves facing down intelligent aliens, they will have to introduce themselves, communicate what they want to do, and practice speaking or writing with the aliens. Like Banks, linguists will start small, understanding very basic terms before working up to more complicated questions.
“The film doesn’t really go into the nitty gritty details of how exactly she deciphered the language…but I think they did a very nice job piecing together the montage scene of Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner working together and acting out different scenes, and getting translations for basic things you can point to, and you see her poring over the logogram looking for patterns,” Coon says. “I think that’s exactly what linguists would be doing if they do call us to translate for aliens.”
When deciphering human languages, most field linguists bring along a few simple tools, such as an audio recorder (and perhaps a video camera), some pencils and paper, and whatever information they already have about their target language or related languages. “That’s always a good starting place,” Coon says. For any new language, she says, “Really it’s about interacting with speakers and asking lots of questions, and building up hypotheses about how the grammar works, and testing them by asking speakers more questions and refining our understanding of detailed parts of the grammar.”
What can we learn from afar?
So actually being able to interact with aliens will be key. But what if we can't get close enough to attempt discourse with our alien guests? Linguists might still be able to make some progress with recordings, Coon speculates.
In the film, Banks’s first chance to hear the newly arrived aliens arises when a military officer plays her a brief audio file and asks what she can figure out from it. “That is obviously an impossible task, you need some kind of matchup between the sound and what’s being said,” Coon says. But Banks might have had more luck with videos and some knowledge of what context shaped the scene. If she had access to a large number of longer recordings, she could look for noises that reliably correspond to particular actions. “With enough of that kind of information…you could sort of whittle away at the grammar of a language,” Coon says.
Ancient human languages have been deciphered without help from living speakers. “If you have enough information and enough of the context and the history, I think there’s hope that even without a lot of interaction you could be able to make at least significant progress in understanding the grammar of a language—again depending on how likely we are to be able to understand alien life at all,” Coon says.
Does this mean that we could pick up an alien language from their broadcasts, or that they could learn ours? “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if creatures who could make giant spaceships that just show up on Earth could easily figure out our languages from the many broadcasts we put into outer space, and that we might be able to do the same thing with sufficient resources and sufficient information,” Coon says.
A drone at 9,000 feet? Not likely. Also, photos in this video are clearly not the actual incident.
UFO Report Canada:November 15,2016 ilot of passenger jet forced to put the aircraft into a steep DIVE to avoid a ‘UFO’ that was ‘too high to be a drone’ in emergency over Canada that injured two cabin crew. A UFO nearly caused an air crash over Toronto when a passenger plane with 58 people on board came face-to-face with the mystery object. Two flight attendants were injured when the pilots put the plane into a sudden nose-dive to avoid a head-on crash. They later reported the object which appeared on their flight path might have been a hot-air balloon or a drone but aviation experts have voiced doubt over both theories.
The second video addresses:
Can Crop Circles be used as a reference points for time travel. Space portals used by extraterrestrials from another planet to create crop circle “messages” to mankind? Tall, blond Extraterrestrials who look human with Scandinavian-type accents? What messages are crop circles trying to communicate to us, and are they an invitation for us to shift our worldview?
Crop circles offer humanity the opportunity to make a profound collective discovery.
It all began in the hamlet of Spring Valley in Rockland County during the summer of 1929. A 9-year-old girl was playing outside her home and suddenly she saw a flash of light in the sky. Upon a closer look, she thought what she was seeing was a big, metallic dirigible airship.
As she looked even closer, port holes all around the dirigible shaped object became visible. She would later tell investigators that the dirigible seemed to glow with an unusual light. The girl told investigators that three or four odd-shaped beings dressed in what looked like deep sea diving suits left the dirigible. The beings floated down to the ground where she was.
For some reason she said she was unable to move her feet or arms. She remembered that the local animals became unusually quiet while this was happening. She told investigators that she remembers seeing the beings floating back to their craft. She also noted that she had no idea how long the event took place.
When she returned home, she was scolded by her mother for having been away from the house for so long. It was the aftermath that investigators found intriguing, however. The girl developed a phobia about being alone. Shortly after the experience, she felt sick with a strange illness that doctors could not diagnose. Years later, she told investigators that she wondered if she’d caught some strange disease from the odd shaped beings.
Through her teens and into womanhood, she had nightmares about being chased by the strange visitors. Investigators experienced in abduction cases explain that the young woman’s incident, lifelong phobias and peculiar health problems were representative of the classic alien abduction scenario.
NOTE: The above image is CGI.
Thanks to the Syracuse News Times and Phantoms and Monsters.com
Wetenschap opent jacht op aliens die ons al ontdekt hebben
Wetenschap opent jacht op aliens die ons al ontdekt hebben
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Waar moeten we aliens zoeken? Misschien wel in het stukje heelal van waaruit zij ons heel gemakkelijk kunnen ontdekken, zo stelt nieuw onderzoek.
Al heel lang zijn mensen op zoek naar antwoord op die ene vraag: zijn we alleen in het universum? In een poging die vraag te beantwoorden, wordt de laatste decennia onder meer actief gezocht naar radiosignalen afkomstig van aliens. Vooralsnog zonder resultaat. Dat is op zich ook niet zo gek. Stel dat er aliens bestaan en ze proberen contact te leggen met de aarde. Dan moeten wij precies op het juiste moment en in de juiste richting ons oor te luisteren leggen. En het heelal is zo uitgestrekt, dat het best mogelijk is dat we elke keer net de verkeerde kant opkijken.
Kleiner zoekgebied Onderzoekers stellen in een nieuwe studie daarom voor om het gebied waarin we luisteren naar signalen van aliens te verkleinen. “Het zoekgebied wordt flink verkleind, waardoor we in een periode korter dan een mensenleven uit kunnen zoeken of er in dit gebied buitenaardse astronomen zijn die de aarde ontdekt hebben,” vertelt onderzoeker René Heller.
Overgang Maar op welk gebied moeten we ons dan richten? Heller en collega’s hebben daar wel ideeën over. Ze stellen dat we ons moeten richten op het gebied van waaruit eventuele aliens onze planeet voor onze zon langs kunnen zien bewegen.
Net als Kepler Veel van de exoplaneten (waaronder potentieel leefbare exoplaneten) hebben wij ontdekt door een ruimtetelescoop – Kepler – langdurig naar sterren te laten kijken. Wanneer Kepler ziet dat het licht van een ster regelmatig minder helder wordt, wijst dat erop dat rond de ster een planeet cirkelt. Op vergelijkbare wijze kunnen aliens ook onze planeet ontdekken en deze gaan bestoken met signalen. Het mooie is dat het gebied van waaruit aliens de aarde voor de zon langs kunnen zien bewegen vrij klein is. En in dat gebied moeten we volgens de onderzoekers dus op zoek naar signalen van buitenaards leven.
De onderzoekers wijzen in hun studie 82 nabije, zonachtige sterren aan. Vanaf planeten die rond deze sterren draaien is de aardovergang zichtbaar. Onze zoektocht naar signalen van aliens zou zich in eerste instantie op deze 82 sterren en hun omgeving moeten richten. Maar, zo benadrukken de onderzoekers, we kennen nog lang niet alle sterren in onze Melkweg. Ze schatten dat er zo’n 100.000 sterren zijn waar wellicht planeten omheen draaien met daarop aliens die ons ontdekt hebben en proberen te contacteren. Een deel van die planeten gaan we wellicht in de nabije toekomst ontdekken. En wel met behulp van de PLATO-missie. Tijdens deze missie hopen onderzoekers – wederom door naar overgangen te speuren – kleine planeten, waaronder aardachtige exemplaren te ontdekken. “PLATO kan zelfs de overgang van exoplaneten detecteren waarop mogelijk aliens leven die de aarde voor de zon langs kunnen zien bewegen,” vertelt Heller. “In zo’n gekke situatie zouden we elkaars planeten bestuderen door te kijken hoe ze voor hun ster langs bewegen.”
Stormachtige noordpool van Saturnus schittert op nieuwe foto
Stormachtige noordpool van Saturnus schittert op nieuwe foto
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het lijkt een heel vredig waterverfschilderij, maar in werkelijkheid worden alle ‘penseelstreken’ veroorzaakt door heftige stormen en winden.
De prachtige foto is gemaakt door ruimtesonde Cassini. Op het moment dat de sonde de foto maakte, was deze zo’n 1,4 miljoen kilometer van Saturnus verwijderd. Elke pixel op deze foto laat een gebied zien dat zo’n 86 kilometer groot is.
Hexagon Wat natuurlijk direct opvalt, is de beroemde hexagon van Saturnus: een zeshoekig wolkenpatroon. In het hart van de hexagon bevindt zich een grote zwarte ‘stip’ die de noordpool van Saturnus lijkt te markeren. Het is waarschijnlijk het oog van een orkaan-achtige storm die op de noordpool woedt. Het oog is zo’n 2000 kilometer breed, ongeveer twintig keer groter dan het oog van een gemiddelde orkaan op aarde. Orkanen op aarde zijn geneigd om zich naar het noorden te haasten. Het exemplaar op Saturnus bevindt zich reeds op het meest noordelijke punt en verplaatst zich niet. Aangenomen wordt dat de enorme storm op de noordpool van de gasreus al jaren woedt.
De noordpool van Saturnus.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.
De banden Naast de storm op de noordpool springen natuurlijk ook de verschillende ‘banden’ die we op verschillende breedtes rond de gasreus aantreffen, in het oog. Elke band kent andere windsnelheden dan de band ernaast. Ook de hoogte waarop de wolken zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus ophouden, verschilt van band tot band. Op de grens tussen twee banden – waar banden dus ook de interactie met elkaar aangaan – zien we wervelingen ontstaan.
Foto’s zoals deze moeten we koesteren: de missie van Cassini – de enige ruimtesonde in een baan rond Saturnus – nadert zo langzamerhand zijn einde. Binnenkort begint de sonde aan de ‘Grande Finale’. Tijdens dit deel van de missie zal Cassini herhaaldelijk in de ruimte tussen Saturnus en zijn ringen duiken. In september 2017 zal de sonde opdracht krijgen om zich in de atmosfeer van Saturnus te boren. De enorme druk en temperatuur in de atmosfeer van de gasreus zal de sonde fataal worden. NASA wil zo voorkomen dat Cassini – wiens brandstof na twintig jaar een eind op is – op één van Saturnus’ manen neerstort. Een aantal van deze manen – Titan en Enceladus bijvoorbeeld – bezitten onder hun ijzige korst een oceaan bestaande uit vloeibaar water. Onderzoekers sluiten niet uit dat in die oceanen leven mogelijk is en dus willen ze deze manen absoluut niet ‘besmetten’ met aardse microben die wellicht nog op Cassini aanwezig zijn.
De komeet – die een beetje doet denken aan een badeendje – zou zijn huidige vorm pas 1 miljard jaar geleden hebben aangenomen.
Toen ruimtesonde Rosetta komeet 67P/C-G naderde, ontdekte deze dat de komeet een bijzondere vorm had. De komeet had een ‘romp’, ‘hals’ en ‘kop’ en deed wel een beetje denken aan een badeendje. Aangenomen werd dat de komeet deze vorm zo’n 4,5 miljard jaar geleden – toen ons zonnestelsel nog in de kinderschoenen stond – had aangenomen.
Nieuwe visie Maar daar moeten we op terugkomen, zo stellen onderzoekers in een nieuw paper. “Het is onwaarschijnlijk dat een hemellichaam zoals Chury (67P/C-G, red.) zolang zonder beschadigingen heeft weten te overleven, zo laten onze computersimulaties zien,” vertelt onderzoeker Martin Jutzi.
De laatste foto die ruimtesonde Rosetta van 67P/C-G maakte. De sonde crashte op 30 september op de komeet. Afbeelding: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA.
Zwakke plek Aangenomen wordt dat de oorsprong van ons zonnestelsel heel rustig begon, maar daarna een stormachtig verloop kende. In die laatstgenoemde periode verkregen hemellichamen grotere snelheden en vonden er veel botsingen plaats. De onderzoekers berekenden hoeveel energie er nodig was om 67P/C-G tijdens zo’n botsing te vernietigen. En zo ontdekten ze dat de komeet een zwakke plek heeft: zijn hals. “We hebben ontdekt dat deze structuur gemakkelijk vernietigd kan worden,” stelt Jutzi.
Botsingen De onderzoekers wijzen erop dat kometen zoals 67P/C-G in hun beginjaren meerdere botsingen meemaakten. En zelfs weinig energierijke botsingen moeten al voldoende zijn geweest om de komeet – met die ene zwakke plek – uit elkaar te trekken. Daarom is het volgens de onderzoekers onmogelijk dat de komeet reeds in de beginjaren van ons zonnestelsel deze vorm had. “De huidige vorm van Chury is het resultaat van een grote inslag die waarschijnlijk ergens in de laatste miljard jaar heeft plaatsgevonden,” stelt Jutzi. En daarmee is de komeet veel jonger dan gedacht.
Geen originele vorm, wel een originele samenstelling Uit eerder onderzoek is gebleken dat komeet 67P/C-G uit materiaal bestaat dat minstens net zo oud is als ons zonnestelsel. Die bevinding lijkt in strijd te zijn met deze resultaten. Maar dat is niet zo. Computersimulaties laten zien dat de botsingen de komeet niet helemaal verwarmen en samendrukken. Vandaar dat de kern nog steeds poreus is en de vluchtige materialen die deze tijdens het ontstaan van de komeet heeft ingesloten, nog steeds aanwezig zijn. “Tot op heden is aangenomen dat kometen originele bouwblokken zijn, vergelijkbaar met Lego,” stelt Benz. “Onze studie laat zien dat de Lego-blokken niet langer hun originele vorm hebben, maar dat het plastic waar ze uit bestaan nog wel hetzelfde is als in het begin.”
In een tweede paper gaan Jutzi en Benz na hoe komeet 67P/C-G precies aan zijn bijzondere vorm is gekomen. Ze gebruiken daarvoor computermodellen. In die modellen lieten ze kleine objecten (met een diameter van 200 tot 400 meter) op een vijf kilometer groot roterend hemellichaam met de vorm van een rugbybal botsen. Zo’n botsing kon de rugbybal uiteenrijten. Die twee brokstukken zouden later – door toedoen van hun zwaartekracht – weer samen zijn gekomen, waardoor een komeet met een badeend-achtige vorm ontstond.
Bronmateriaal:
M. Jutzi et al.: How primordial ist the structure of comet 67P/c-G?, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 9 November 2016 M. Jutzi, W. Benz: Formation of bi-lobed shapes by sub-catastrophic collisions – A late originin of comet 67P/C-G’s structure, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 9 November 2016
10 Biggest Historical Mysteries That Will Probably Never Be Solved
10 Biggest Historical Mysteries That Will Probably Never Be Solved
By Owen Jarus, Live Science Contributor
Credit: Photo by I. Vassil, released into public domain through Wikimedia
INTRO: Unexplainable?
There are some historical mysteries that may never be solved. Sometimes, that's because the relevant excavated material has been lost or an archaeological site has been destroyed. Other times, it's because new evidence is unlikely to come forward or the surviving evidence is too vague to lead scholars to a consensus.
The lack of answers only makes these enigmas more intriguing. Here, Live Science takes a look at 10 of these historical questions that may never have definitive explanations.
Credit: Pyty / Shutterstock.com
1. Who was Jack the Ripper?
In 1888, Jack the Ripper killed at least five women in London, mutilating their bodies. A number of letters, supposedly from the Ripper, were sent to police taunting officers' efforts to find the Ripper. (Whether any of them were actually written by the Ripper is a matter of debate among scholars.) The name "Jack the Ripper" comes from these letters.
Needless to say, the Ripper was never found, and over the years, dozens of people have been brought up as possible candidates. A recent book suggested that a woman named Lizzie Williams was the Ripper, although other Ripper experts cast doubt on it. It appears unlikely that the true identity of the Ripper will ever be known for sure.
Credit: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
2. Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
The teamster union leader known for his involvement in organized crime disappeared in Oakland County, Michigan, on July 30, 1975, and is now presumed to be dead. The identity of his killer(s) and the location of his body are ongoing mysteries. Police and forensic anthropologists have searched a number of sites in Detroit and Oakland County to no avail.
One popular theory was that Hoffa's body was buried beneath Giants Stadium in New Jersey. However, this theory has been debunked. The identity of his killer is also unclear. Before his death in 2006, Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski, a hit man, claimed to have killed Hoffa and dumped his body in a scrap yard. An author named Philip Carlo visited Kuklinski in prison before he died and wrote a book on Kuklinski's confessions. After the book came out a number of police officers cast doubt on the confession in media interviews. As the years go by, it appears increasingly unlikely that Hoffa's remains will ever be found.
Credit: Public Domain
3. Where is Cleopatra's tomb?
Ancient writers claim that Cleopatra VIIand her lover, Mark Antony, were buried together in a tomb after their deaths in 30 B.C. The writer Plutarch (A.D. 45-120) wrote that the tomb was located near a temple of Isis, an Egyptian goddess, and was a "lofty and beautiful" monument containing treasures made of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory.
The location of the tomb remains a mystery. In 2010, Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, conducted excavations at a site near Alexandria now called Taposiris Magna, which contains a number of tombs dating to the era when Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt. While many interesting archaeological discoveries were made, Cleopatra VII's tomb was not among them Hawass reported in a series of news releases. Archaeologists have noted that even if Cleopatra's tomb does survive to this day, it may be heavily plundered and unidentifiable.
Credit: Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News; Public Domain
4. Who killed JFK?
This is probably the biggest mystery in American history that will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald (although some speculate that he wasn't the only one shooting). On Nov. 24, 1963, before Oswald could stand trial, Oswald was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. Ruby died of lung cancer on Jan. 3, 1967. [10 Persistent Kennedy Assassination Theories]
The most widely accepted explanation is that Oswald killed JFK on his own and Ruby killed Oswald, on his own volition. Ruby's stated motivation was to spare Jacqueline Kennedy "the discomfiture of [Oswald] coming back to trial." However there are still a significant number of professional historians, along with many amateurs, who do not agree with this explanation and since JFK's death, numerous alternative explanationshave been brought forward by historians and amateurs. Given that significant new evidence is unlikely to appear, a firm consensus will probably never be reached.
Credit: Public domain
5. Oak Island money pit
For more than two centuries, stories have circulated that Oak Island, located off Nova Scotia, Canada, held a money pit of buried treasure — supposedly left by the pirate Capt. William Kidd(1645-1701). Over that time, numerous expeditions costing millions of dollars have traveled to the island searching for the lost treasure, to no avail. [The 10 Most Notorious Pirates Ever]
Despite centuries of searching no treasure has been found on Oak Island. Nevertheless that doesn't stop people from trying to find it. A History Channel show called the "Curse of Oak Island" follows a modern-day expedition; the show was just renewed for a fourth season in 2016.
Credit: Public Domain
6. The Copper Scroll treasure
Another treasure tale that will probably never be resolved is more ancient. In 1952 a copper scroll was found by archaeologists in a cave, along with other Dead Sea Scrolls, at the site of Qumran. As its name suggests, the writing was engraved onto a copper scroll. The scroll records a vast amount of hidden gold and silver treasure — so much, in fact, that some scholars believe that it is impossible for it to exist. [Gallery of Dead Sea Scrolls: A Glimpse of the Past]
The scroll dates back more than 1,900 years to a time when the Roman Empire controlled the Qumran area. There were a number of revolts against Roman rule at the time the scroll was written, and scientists have hypothesized that the treasure was hidden to prevent its capture by Roman forces. Whether the treasure is real, where exactly it was hidden, whether it was ever found and whether it could still exist today are all mysteries that will likely never be solved.
Credit: Photo by I. Vassil, released into public domain through Wikimedia
7. The fate of the Ark of the Covenant
In 587 B.C., a Babylonian army, under King Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered Jerusalem, sacking the city and destroying the First Temple, a building used by the Jewish people to worship god. The First Temple contained the Ark of the Covenant, which carried tablets recording the 10 Commandments.
The fate of the Ark is unclear. Ancient sources indicate that the ark was either carried back to Babylonor hidden before the city was captured. It's also possible that the ark was destroyed during the city's sacking. In any event, the ark's location is unknown. Since the disappearance, a number of stories and legends about the ark's fate have been told. One story suggests the ark eventually made its way to Ethiopia, where it is kept today. Another story says the ark was divinely hidden and will not appear until a messiah arrives.
Credit: garanga / Shutterstock.com
8. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Ancient writers describe a fantastic series of gardens constructed at the ancient city of Babylonin modern-day Iraq. It's not clear when these gardens were built, but some ancient writers were so impressed by the gardens that they called them a "wonder of the world." Around 250 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote that the Hanging Gardens had "plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth."
So far, archaeologists who have excavated Babylon have been unable to find the remains of a garden that meets this description. This has left archaeologists with a question: Did the hanging gardens really exist? In 2013, Stephanie Dalley, a researcher at the University of Oxford, proposed in a book that the gardens were actually located at the Assyrian city of Nineveh. Over the past two decades, both Babylon and Nineveh have suffered damage from wars and looting, and it seems unlikely that this mystery will ever be fully solved.
9. Was the City of Atlantis Real?
Writing in the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato told a story of a land named Atlantisthat existed in the Atlantic Ocean and supposedly conquered much of Europe and Africa in prehistoric times. In the story, the prehistoric Athenians strike back against Atlantis in a conflict that ends with Atlantis vanishing beneath the waves.
While no serious scholar believes that this story is literally true, some have speculated that the legend could have been inspired, in part, by real events that happened in Greek history. One possibility is that the Minoan civilization(as it's now called), which flourished on the island of Crete until about 1400 B.C., could have inspired the story of Atlantis. Although Crete is in the Mediterranean, and not the Atlantic, Minoan settlements suffered considerable damageduring the eruption of Thera, a volcano in Greece.
Additionally, archaeologists found that the Minoans were eventually overcome (or forced to join with) a group of people called the Mycenaeans, who were based on mainland Greece. It's unlikely that this debate will ever be fully settled.
The earliest surviving gospels date to the second century, almost 100 years after the life of Jesus (although recently, it was announced that a possible first-century fragmenthad been found).
The lack of surviving first-century texts about Jesus leave biblical scholars with a number of questions. When were the gospels written? How many of the stories actually took place? What was Jesus like in real life? Archaeological investigations of Nazareth, Jesus' hometown, reveal more about the environment where he grew up. More recently, scientists discovered a first-century housethat, centuries after Jesus' time, was venerated as being the house that Jesus grew up in, but whether it was actually Jesus' house is unknown.
Although new research will provide more insight, scholars think it's unlikely they will ever fully know what Jesus was really like. [Who Was Jesus, the Man?]
John Bradford, president of SpaceWorks Enterprises, wants to talk about Mars, hibernation, and bears, which is tricky because — despite what grade school teachers sometimes claim — bears don’t hibernate. What bears do, perhaps better than any other species on Earth, is chill. Every winter, grizzlies crawl into their dens, bed down, and enter a state called torpor. Their internal temperatures drop by 10 degrees, their breathing slows with their heart rate, and their metabolic activity drops as they begin to cycle nitrogen that would otherwise be excreted in urine to prevent muscle atrophy. This feat of physiology is remarkable on its own, but the real reason spaceflight entrepreneurs are so interested in torpor is what would happen if you poked a resting bear: It would wake up and eat you.
Torpor isn’t deep sleep. It is sometimes considered a type of hibernation, and the two are similar. In both cases metabolic activity slows, although true hibernation is more extreme — some animals can reach near-freezing internal temperatures and thaw out just fine. It’s the closest thing the natural world has to suspended animation, a way to avoid the negative physical and mental effects of time in space by leveraging a mammalian superpower — one humans might, on some level, possess.
“We still really don’t understand a lot of the triggers and mechanisms for even why some animals do it,” says Bradford, who has enlisted the help of biologists working on these very questions. His thinking? If we can get a handle on how our mammal cousins shut down without suffering long-term ill effects, we might be able to replicate those results in ourselves.
“I’m very encouraged,” he adds.
Here’s what he imagines: Astronauts entering pods, slowly losing consciousness, and letting their internal temperatures drop as engines fire up and blast away. Six months later, these unconscious explorers wake up on Mars without recollection of the journey.
NASA buys into this vision, which sounds science fictional, but might become a key component of the plan to get humans to the Red Planet this century. Spaceworks is now in the second phase of a NASA-funded project to research the feasibility of inducing torpor in Mars-bound astronauts in order to keep them healthy and save money.
A SpaceWorks design concept for a Mars-bound spacecraft.
As it turns out, the strongest argument in favor spaceflight hibernation is economic. Bradford estimates that a torpor habitat and launch system would weigh half as much as a traditional living space loaded up with food and oxygen tanks. Shipping costs to Mars work out to about $50,000 a pound, so when you’re talking savings in the realm of hundreds of tons, even a very large investment in research and design could pay off.
Plus, torpor might offer protections against bone density loss, muscle atrophy, and possibly even space radiation for astronauts on the long haul. “They’re still looking for good solutions to address those, and consequently you end up with multiple technology paths trying to solve each one of these individually, and we think we can with this one technology offer some benefits to all of those,” says Bradford.
From a medical perspective, it’s unclear at this point whether stasis would in itself protect against cellular damage from radiation, but from an engineering perspective, it’s a lot easier to implement shielding if astronauts are contained to a capsule.
Which all brings the question back around to feasibility. Humans do not typically hibernate, but many mammals do, and there are reasons to believe that we have our biology can be hacked to create a similar response. The best evidence is in rare and extraordinary cases where people have been found apparently frozen to death, only to come back to life once they warm up. As biochemist Mark Roth memorably put it in a 2010 TED Talk: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”
In 1999, Anna Bågenholm spent 80 minutes trapped under a frozen waterfall in Norway, and her internal temperature dropped to 57 degrees. Her heart was stopped for three hours, and yet thanks to a careful medical resuscitation, she came back to life and recovered almost completely.
In 2006, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi of Japan got lost in the forest and was found 24 days later in a hibernation-like state. His body temperature was just 72 degrees, and he had no recollection past the second day of his absence. He also recovered.
These days, Roth is working to develop a chemical way to induce hibernation or suspended animation in humans as an aid for emergency medical treatment. If you put someone in stasis right after a heart attack, stroke, or traumatic injury, his thinking goes, you can essentially stop the clock, giving doctors time to fix the problem while preventing the damage to the brain and other organs that would otherwise result from oxygen deprivation.
Hydrogen sulfide seems to have some promise as an inducer of suspended animation. The compound binds to oxygen receptors, which decreases the body’s demand for O2 and causes metabolism to shut down. The clinical trials were canceled, but Roth hasn’t given up on similar compounds that could help minimize injury from blood rushing back into tissues after a medical procedure.
Crew members would be fed nutrients intravenously through the flight.
Still, most of the medical research into human stasis is focused on finding ways to safely slow human metabolism for a period of a few hours to a few weeks. To get to Mars, that timeline will have to be expanded significantly, although that work will certainly provide crucial insights that will guide the future of space hibernation. And in order to accomplish that there will need to be human trails, which, again, gets tricky.
“Other than space flight, there isn’t really a compelling reason to do this to a healthy person,” says Bradford.
Even though Leroy Chiao, former NASA astronaut and commander of the International Space Station, is cheerleading for the project, not all astronauts are pumped to go under either. “At one of our technical conferences Buzz Aldrin voiced concerns,” says Bradford. “He didn’t want to do it. He wants to be awake.”
Bradford understood where the NASA vet was coming from, but he has a slightly more pragmatic perspective.
“If it means the difference between being able to go to Mars, and not,” says Bradford, “I think everybody will do it.”
National Geographic’s 'Mars' Offers a Glimpse of Our Future
National Geographic’s 'Mars' Offers a Glimpse of Our Future
That said, there are some science plot holes.
Producers pulled all the stops in the highly anticipated miniseries Mars, debuting Monday night on the National Geographic Channel. The $20 million, six-part television event pulled together an A-list team from the worlds of Hollywood and the scientific community: We’re talking about Oscar-winning producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and Justin Wilkes sitting in the same room and talking about Mars with people like science writer Stephen Petranek, astronaut Mae Jemison, aeronautics engineer Bobby Braun, and many others.
The producers blend science fiction with reality to portray what a crewed mission to Mars will look like in the near-future mixed with real-world commentary and interviews from today’s leading space and engineering experts.
And in the interest of providing people with something that can still qualify as “entertainment,” Mars does not shy away from taking dramatic liberties that come at the price of scientific accuracy, interspersing a fake crewed mission with real-world commentary from leading engineers.
Two Inverse writers — Kastalia Medrano and Neel Patel — watched an advance screening of the first Mars episode. Warning: There are some spoilers.
NP: When I first heard about the concept for Mars, I was admittedly very skeptical about how this would turn out. Talking about traveling to Mars through a narrative of fiction almost never goes well. But I thought the first episode actually did a good job to bring to attention the types of obstacles and issues that are big for NASA, SpaceX, and other companies looking to get to the Red Planet — like the lack of Martian atmosphere that makes the descent to the planet such a dangerous move.
KM: It’s an interesting concept, treating the 2016 “flashbacks” as non-fiction, using cameos with the biggest names in the real-life journey to Mars like Elon Musk. I hope that they keep that balance with the rest of the episodes, because the future they’ve extrapolated can get a bit cheesy. I think in order to be successful as an academic tool and not just a source of entertainment, the series will have to be a little more economical with the “dramatic liberties,” as you put it.
Which isn’t to say the show by definition needs to be drier — Mars is cool! The reason the journey to Mars has captivated so many people is that the science is legit dramatic and high-risk, high-reward on its own terms, so I hope they can tap into that instead of just sensationalizing. One of the real-life challenges they touched on was the immense stress and degradation the astronauts’ bodies will face — but it was kind of just thrown in as an ominous bullet point to beef up a speech and make everything seem more dire while also making the characters seem more heroic. Granted, it was just the first episode, but I’d really like to see them work in some scientifically valid takes — not just on the more well-known narratives like loss of bone density, but on things like the challenges of organ regeneration in space, and how to cope in a vacuum without incoming medical resources. For instance, how do you hope they’ll handle the radiation issue?
NP: As you know, I’ve been harping on space radiation being the single biggest obstacle keeping us from sending people to Mars. It’s an issue that not even Elon Musk will fully address — and he and SpaceX are targeting to send the first humans to Mars by 2024 or 2025. How they’re going to keep those kinds of radiation levels from decimating the body is still a complete mystery. And it’s not just about the trip to Mars. Astronauts will need to be protected from the sun’s rays while they live and work on the Red Planet. If the goal is to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, it needs to be with the idea that we can live healthily and happily on the planet.
Speaking of health, that’s another issue I had with the premiere. The crew commander for the mission gets injured, but works to keep the extent of his injuries a secret from the rest of the crew and from ground control. Not only does this seem impossible — I would imagine the first astronauts to head to Mars would be completely wrapped in medical devices that measured vitals constantly — but it’s also impractical. Would an astronaut really work to keep problems with his/her health hidden from his team? Almost certainly not. Punting those problems down the road poses an enormous risk to the rest of the and forces them to potentially deal with much worse later on. I get putting forth something like this for the purposes of drama and suspense, but this does a disservice to astronauts as a whole and makes it seem the mental and physical prowess of those men and women are matched by a cavalier attitude.
KM: I felt the same way about the scene where they essentially begin hiking across Mars. I dunno what kind of rad spacesuits we’ll be working with in 2033, so I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it came off a bit cavalier. I did, however, appreciate the fact that they made it pretty clear that, whether or not the mission was successful, the team wasn’t really expecting to come back. The first generation of Mars colonists won’t be travelers who live there a few years and then go back and forth — when they leave Earth, they’ll need to do it with the understanding that they’re never coming back, since, even if they all survive, the distance and resources inherent to the whole thing makes a return journey just not feasible. So I was glad to not see a romanticized We’ll see you in X years!narrative, though of course the idea of leaving Earth never to return isn’t exactly lacking in drama either.
This probably won’t happen because it’s not the most scientific or animated thread in the plot, but I’d actually be interested in getting a bit more context about how the future supposedly arrived at the entity they call the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF). Utopian organizations that have united all available civilizations are a pretty common optimistic sci-fi trope (see: Star Trek), but as of 2016, we already have the seeds of global cooperation — Russians and Americans coordinating on the International Space Station (well, sort of), new space laws meant to foster inter-country collaboration, private spaceflight companies working in tandem with NASA, and so on. I’d like to see them connect those dots to their 2033 timeline.
NP: For sure. I actually loved how they spent a bit of time explaining what SpaceX is currently doing by bringing rocket boosters back to Earth for a safe landing after a launch , and explaining why reusability is such an important part of making future space travel work.
It was especially clever how they let the footage of the June 2015 SpaceX explosion unfold — making it very clear that we have a long ways to go before we fully figure out how all of this is going to go.
Mars is fascinating, and it arrives at a time when the prospect of humans going to the Red Planet has transcended the realm of possibility to inevitability. I think the real thing will possess fewer histrionics, but will be no less an achievement of staggering proportions.
In collaboration with Fraser Cain, from Universe Today, we asked for your most pressing questions about physics and astronomy. Here, we dive into the answers.
Today, we have a host of innvative technologies that allow us to understand our universe as never before. Take, for example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is an accomplishment of unprecedented proportions. It is, without a doubt, one of the most amazing (and important) pieces of technology that humanity has ever made. It allows us to simulate the earliest moments of our universe and, in so doing, better understand the physics that governs it.
Then there is the the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The JWST is Hubble’s successor, and it will be more sensitive by a factor of about 100 than all the telescopes that came before it. It could help us see some of the first stars forming in the universe. It could allow us to image planets orbiting alien stars. It will open up a world (a universe) of possibilities. We will be able to see farther and deeper than ever before.
However, despite all of these advancements, there is a lot that we don’t know. But where does knowledge stop and uncertainty begin? How much do we really know, and what remains in question?
We asked for your most pressing questions, and they came pouring in: Does intelligent life exist beyond Earth? What’s beyond the edge of our universe? Here, Fraser Cain, the founder of Universe Today, dives into the answers—separating what we know from what we’ve yet to discover.
A Porter AIrlines aircraft similar to the one in this image took evasive action on Monday to avoid an unidentified flying object, possibly a drone or balloon, while descending into the Toronto area.
Two people suffered minor injuries after an aircraft swerved to avoid a “UFO” in the skies over Lake Ontario on Monday.
The Porter Airlines Dash 8 aircraft, which was carrying 54 passengers, encountered the object at about 9,000 feet as it descended into the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.
At first the pilots thought it was a balloon. However, after debriefing, they said the object could have been a drone.
“Nobody knows at this point. It happened so quick,” Peter Rowntree, senior regional investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, told The Star. “It definitely wasn’t a bird. It was a fairly large object.”
The Canadian government is now working to pass new rules to regulate the growing number of drones, and possibly help prevent incidents such as this one.
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Astronomers Detect A New “Super Earth,” And It’s Right Next Door
Astronomers Detect A New “Super Earth,” And It’s Right Next Door
Artists impression of a Super-Earth, a class of planet that has many times the mass of Earth, but less than a Uranus or Neptune-sized planet. Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
IN BRIEF
The exoplanet has five times the mass of our planet but does lie outside of the habitable zone of its star.
The search for exoplanets is more than just a search for habitable worlds, the understanding these discoveries can bring alone is worth the effort.
Scientists engaging in exoplanet hunting have recently seen a host of new discoveries. Teams of these celestial sleuths are combing the observable universe looking for a planet that might be capable of hosting life similar to our own.
Now, another exoplanet has been discovered, one with several intriguing characteristics. A new study reveals a “super Earth” orbiting GJ 536, a red dwarf star just 32.7 light years (10.03 parsecs) from Earth.
Artist rendition of a similar system. NASA/JPL
The planet’s “super Earth” classification comes from its size— super Earths are planets between one and fifteen times the mass of Earth. This planet is more than five Earth masses.
They also found that the planet has an orbital period of less than nine Earth days, and is just 0.06661 AU away from its star. The research studied data from ESO’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) and HARPS-N instruments.
It’s not just the detection that is offering new opportunities in exoplanet research. The brightness of the red dwarf and the planet’s closeness to its star makes it an excellent candidate for transmission spectroscopy. That’s where scientists figure out the chemical composition of the atmosphere of the planet based on how the star’s light strikes the atmosphere.
Artist’s depiction of the interior of a low-mass star, such as the one seen in an X-ray image from Chandra in the inset. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
ALIEN-LOOKING SKULL FROM PERUVIAN DESERT AWAITS FURTHER INVESTIGATION
ALIEN-LOOKING SKULL FROM PERUVIAN DESERT AWAITS FURTHER INVESTIGATION
The skull was found, along with several others, in a cave in the southern desert of Peru, the exact location will be given, hopefully, soon in the future.
The caretaker and the group that found this, along with other skulls, have no access to artisans or taxidermists that could have made them. The caretaker removed some of the bone from the underpart of the skull and exposed what is presumably marrow.
This, as well as the bone and skin can be sampled for DNA and radiocarbon testing in important laboratories in USA that they are working with already.
Other skulls have been found in recent years, the elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru caused a stir in 2014 when a geneticist that carried out preliminary DNA testing reported that they have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far”
Are these alien skulls? please watch video below and share your comments.
Voormalig Chinese overheidsfunctionaris bevestigt bestaan aliens tijdens UFO-top
Voormalig Chinese overheidsfunctionaris bevestigt bestaan aliens tijdens UFO-top
Een voormalige Chinese overheidsfunctionaris zei tijdens een hoorzitting tegenover zes Amerikaanse oud-congresleden dat er buitenaards leven is.
Ufoloog Sun Shili, die voorheen deel uitmaakte van het Chinese diplomatieke korps, deed zijn claim tijdens de zogeheten Citizen Hearing on Disclosure, schrijft de Daily Star.
“Na jarenlang onderzoek te hebben gedaan is een groot aantal Chinese ufologen, waaronder ikzelf, overtuigd van het bestaan van UFO’s en aliens,” vertelde hij aan het panel.
Encyclopedie
Hij vertelde ook dat hij als professor werkzaam was op een universiteit, maar zich in de jaren zeventig meer wilde gaan verdiepen in UFO’s en de mysteries van het heelal.
“Ik heb ook artikelen geschreven die zijn opgenomen in de Chinese encyclopedie,” voegde hij toe.
“Aan de totstandkoming van deze prestigieuze encyclopedie hielp onder meer Shen Shituan mee, een beroemde wetenschapper in mijn land.”
Tientallen miljoenen
Shituan, een raketwetenschapper en de voormalige baas van de Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (nu: Beihang University), zei dat iedere UFO-waarneming nader moet worden onderzocht.
“Sommige waarnemingen zijn echt, sommige zijn nep en soms is het niet gelijk duidelijk,” zei hij.
“Al deze fenomenen moeten worden onderzocht,” vervolgde hij.
Volgens Sun Shili, die in 1971 zijn eerste UFO zag, kunnen tientallen miljoenen Chinezen worden gezien als UFO-enthousiastelingen.
Spaanse ministerie van Defensie geeft schat aan informatie vrij over UFO’s
Spaanse ministerie van Defensie geeft schat aan informatie vrij over UFO’s
Het Spaanse ministerie van Defensie heeft een enorme hoeveelheid informatie vrijgegeven over vreemde en onverklaarbare fenomenen in het Spaanse luchtruim.
Het gaat om een rapport van bijna 2000 pagina’s dat betrekking heeft op de periode tussen 1962 en 1995.
Net als in andere landen worden ook in Spanje geregeld UFO’s gezien. Het rapport gaat over 80 verschillende waarnemingen van onverklaarbare vliegende objecten.
Eén van de onverklaarbare objecten (bibliotecavirtualdefensa.es)
Buitenaardse wezens
Meestal wordt een UFO gezien als een vliegend object van buitenaardse wezens.
Het grootste deel van de UFO-waarnemingen is gedaan bij de Canarische Eilanden. Het eiland La Palma werd klaarblijkelijk het vaakst bezocht door aliens.
Er zijn ook relatief veel UFO’s gespot in Madrid en Barcelona. Mensen hebben daarnaast onbekende objecten gemeld in Extremadura, Andalusië, de Balearen (vooral Mallorca en Menorca) en Castellón.
In 1968 werden de meeste onbekende objecten gemeld. De allereerste waarneming vond plaats boven San Javier in Murcia.
Een tweede object dat is waargenomen (bibliotecavirtualdefensa.es)
Achter slot en grendel
Het is niet bekend wat er na 1995 is gebeurd. Mogelijk liggen de gegevens vanaf 1996 nog achter slot en grendel. Hoe dan ook zijn er nog veel vragen die beantwoord moeten worden.
Een greep uit de waarnemingen:
Op 27 november 1979 zagen veel mensen vreemde lichten in de lucht. In 1971 werd een oplichtend object waargenomen door de piloot van een T-33.
In 1977 zijn onverklaarbare lichten boven Madrid gezien. Op 4 januari 1984 verscheen een onbekend vliegend object boven Cáceres.
En in 1984 zagen veel militairen een vreemd oplichtend object boven het luchtvaartterrein van Léon.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
ilot of passenger jet forced to put the aircraft into a steep DIVE to avoid a ‘UFO’ that was ‘too high to be a drone’ in emergency over Canada that injured two cabin crew. A UFO nearly caused an air crash over Toronto when a passenger plane with 58 people on board came face-to-face with the mystery object. Two flight attendants were injured when the pilots put the plane into a sudden nose-dive to avoid a head-on crash. They later reported the object which appeared on their flight path might have been a hot-air balloon or a drone but aviation experts have voiced doubt over both theories.
