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 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 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...
29-12-2016
UFO DISCLOSURE: THREE REASONS COMPLETE DISCLOSURE COULD HAPPEN IN 2017
UFO DISCLOSURE: THREE REASONS COMPLETE DISCLOSURE COULD HAPPEN IN 2017
UFO disclosure advocates began 2016 in the same position as most years, fighting an uphill battle to get the government to disclose what it knows about UFO phenomena. By May, hopes were rising that complete UFO disclosure by 2017 could be a real possibility, as a candidate from a major political party, Hillary Clinton, was profiled about disclosure with the New York Times. At the end of the year, many are dismayed with the loss of what appeared to be a golden opportunity.
As noted here in the Inquisitr, the election of Donald Trump may well ensure UFO disclosure in the near future, whether or not that is his intent. And there are no guarantees Mrs. Clinton would have been able to disclose anything, as she added the proviso that she would only disclose anything not related to national security. But the brief return to the headlines is fading, so what hope is there for complete UFO disclosure soon?
Could Donald Trump’s space plans ensure disclosure? [Image by Mark Wilson/Getty Images]
Well, to classify the first option as hopeful wouldn’t work. That is because not many people hope for war, but war might be a certain way for UFO disclosure to occur. In spite of the certainty of mutually assured destruction, humans have not lost the stomach for violence. Would a world war spark contact with the UFOs and aliens?
In this scenario of complete UFO disclosure, an alien ship could arrive in a way that ensured that it was witnessed by masses. Whether they came as messengers of peace, or more likely as the exterminators to clean up the hornet’s nest, with human advances in communication the world would achieve disclosure, official or not. As frightening as this possibility may be, it may be on the agenda for 2017.
The second option for complete UFO disclosure is more whimsical, but certainly less dire than the first. 2017 is the 70th anniversary of both the Kenneth Arnold “flying saucer” sighting and the Roswell misunderstanding for which the evidence seems to get softer with each passing year. That will translate into plenty of media coverage, and a raised awareness about UFOs. What makes that a potential treasure for UFO researchers is that more people will be paying attention.
Perhaps that one “smoking gun” piece of evidence is sitting in someone’s attic. Maybe that person remembers how grandpa never will forget that time that he went to recover an acorn-shaped metal box UFO in Western Pennsylvania. Maybe that person goes rummaging through grandpa’s old stuff that was left up there after he passed and finds “the” picture of a UFO. Maybe a government spokesperson slips up answering questions about an old case and spills the details on something new and different. Crazier things have happened, and when the UFO anniversary events coverage begins, who knows what might happen?
The point is that any time UFO coverage goes to a national level, the UFO disclosure movement has the opportunity to educate the wider public. This is an opportunity to embrace the challenge to state the case for disclosure. Some may view it more as a commercial feeding frenzy, but what does that mean? So is the Super Bowl in American football, which also draws a billion or so viewers each year. How nice would it be to have an audience that big for just 30 minutes to explain why complete UFO disclosure matters?
Could NASA’s new Webb Space Telescope spot a UFO or signs of alien life? [Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]
Finally, one should never rule out the ever-present possibility of contact from sentient beings through programs like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). One unmistakable radio telescope captured signal could completely set the UFO research world into a frenzy of excitement. Really, any type of contact along the frontiers of human scientific exploration would do the trick.
While any, or none of these scenarios could occur in 2017, the idea is that UFO disclosure advocates have no reason to be pessimistic. It would be closer to the truth to suggest that those people who really would like to see UFO disclosure happen should utilize the big anniversaries in the coming year to discuss how far UFO research has come, and what lies ahead to a wider audience. One never knows when a difference maker will be listening.
Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us
Either stars are strange, or there are 234 aliens trying to contact us
by Evan Gough, Universe Today
A portion of the 234 stars that are sources of the pulsed ETI-like signal. Note that all the stars are in the narrow spectral range F2 to K1, very similar to our own sun. Credit: Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier This graph shows the …more
We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.
That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
Skepticism still rules the day when it comes to these headlines, and the events that spawn them. That's the way it should be, because we've always found a more prosaic reason for whatever signal from space we're talking about. But, being skeptical is a balancing act; it doesn't mean being dismissive.
What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.org. ArXiv.org is a pre-print website, so the paper itself hasn't been peer reviewed yet. But it is generating interest.
The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.
This graph shows the number of detected signals by Spectral Type of star. Credit: Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier
Prediction is a key part of the scientific method. If you develop a theory, your theory looks better and better the more you can use it to correctly predict some future events based on it. Look how many times Einstein's predictions based on Relativity have been proven correct.
The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?
The authors acknowledge five potential causes of their findings: instrumental and data reduction effects, rotational transitions in molecules, the Fourier transform of spectral lines, rapid pulsations, and finally the ETI signal predicted by Borra (2012). They dismiss molecules or pulsations as causes, and they deem it highly unlikely that the signals are caused by the Fourier analysis itself. This leaves two possible sources for the detected signals. Either they're a result of the Sloan instrument itself and the data reduction, or they are in fact a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligences.
The detected signals are pulses of light separated by a constant time interval. These types of signals were predicted by Borra in his 2012 paper, and they are what he and Trottier set out to find in the Sloan data. It may be a bit of a red flag when scientist's find the very thing they predicted they would find. But Trottier and Borra are circumspect about their own results.
As the authors say in their paper, "Although unlikely, there is also a possibility that the signals are due to highly peculiar chemical compositions in a small fraction of galactic halo stars." It may be unlikely, but lots of discoveries seem unlikely at first. Maybe there is a tiny subset of stars with chemical peculiarities that make them act in thisway.
A portion of the 234 stars that are sources of the pulsed ETI-like signal. Note that all the stars are in the narrow spectral range F2 to K1, very similar to our own sun. Credit: Image: Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier
To sum it all up, the two astronomers have found a tiny number of stars, very similar to our own Sun, that seem to be the source of pulsed signals. These signals are the same as predicted if a technological society was using powerful lasers to communicate with distant stars.
We all want there to be aliens, and maybe the first sign of them will be pulsed light signals from stars like our own sun. But it's all still very preliminary, and as the authors acknowledge, "…at this stage, this hypothesis needs to be confirmed with further work."
That further work is already being planned by the Breakthrough Listen Initiative, a project that searches for intelligent life in the cosmos. They plan to use the Automated Planet Finder telescope at the Lick Observatory to further observe some of Borra's 234 stars.
The Breakthrough team don't seem that excited about Borra's findings. They've already poured cold water on it, trotting out the old axiom that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" in a statement on Borra's paper. They also give Borra's findings a score of 0 to 1 on the Rio Scale. The Rio Scale is something used by the international SETI community to rank detections of phenomena that could indicate advanced life beyond Earth. A rating of 0 to 1 means its insignificant.
An artist's concept of Europa's surface. On the moon's still-unknown terrain, a mobile lander could have trouble moving away from a contaminated site, scientists say.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Searching for signs of life, or life's precursors, on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa could spoil the hunt before it begins — which is why many scientists advocate going underground.
An ocean containing twice as much water as all of Earth's seas is thought to slosh beneath Europa's 10-to-15-mile-thick (15 to 25 kilometers) ice shell. For this reason, astrobiologists regard the 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 km) Jovian moon as one of the solar system's best bets to host extraterrestrial life.
Furthermore, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted evidence of water-vapor plumes emanating from Europa's south polar region, suggesting that material from the ocean may fall back onto the moon's icy surface. [Europa May Harbor Simple Life-Forms (Video)]
That's an exciting prospect for NASA, which aims to put a lander on Europa in the 2020s to look for chemical evidence that the moon could support life. (NASA's Europa mission began as a flyby-only affair, but the U.S. Congress ordered the inclusion of a lander late last year.)
However, the very landing could complicate this search greatly. Firing thrusters to slow the spacecraft's descent "will be like hosing down the ground with ammonia, and this is a very inconvenient thing to do," said Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
It's inconvenient because ammonia contains nitrogen, he said. "Everything in our body has nitrogen," Lorenz told Space.com. −−"If you are interested in nitrogen as a prerequisite for life, then finding even traces of it at Europa is important, and so even a little thruster contamination matters a lot."
If such contamination were to occur, scientists would struggle to figure out if nitrogen detected at Europa was native or imported from Earth, he said.
In a study published in the journal Planetary and Space Science this past August, Lorenz found that putting a 440-lb. (200 kilograms) spacecraft down on Europa would disturb the surface out to 30 feet (9 meters) around the lander. He concluded this after studying images of past surface disturbances caused by spacecraft landings on Earth's moon and Mars.
Scientists cannot assume that the Europa lander will be able to move away from such a contaminated site. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has wheels, so it drove away from its Red Planet landing site back in 2012. But scientists know little about the hazards on Europa's surface, Lorenz said.
"The distribution of rocks could cause a lander to tip over, or it could fall into a crevasse," Lorenz said. "In space exploration, it's not good enough to speculate that this will work. Why throw 1 [billion] or 2 billion [dollars] into it?"
The issue of nitrogen contamination on Europa is more problematic than it is on Mars or Earth's moon because the Jovian satellite is much colder than these other worlds, Lorenz said. At its warmest, temperatures on Europa don't rise above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 160 degrees Celsius). Under such frigid conditions, ammonia is more likely to stick to Europa's surface, allowing it to interact with other molecules and perhaps make a mess of observations, Lorenz said.
Other researchers think that sampling Europa's surface is important, but that the best samples lie deeper. "We have to go down, beneath the surface," said Britney Schmidt, a planetary scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who has worked on NASA's Europa lander mission concept.
This means drilling into Europa's ice. Schmidt thinks a mission needs to drill at least 4 inches (10 centimeters) down, to a place where the thrusters haven't contaminated the ice and space radiation hasn't destroyed biogenic molecules — the stuff− necessary for life's processes to take place.
"If we get 10 centimeters, or a meter [about 3 feet], down, this area hasn't been blasted with the thrusters," Schmidt told Space.com. "Maybe a portion, but the confidence for getting a pristine sample goes up the further you go down."
The Europa lander won't just be looking for ammonia or nitrogen, stressed Peter Willis, a chemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Still, he said, the Europa lander mission will take precautions; the lander will likely bore into the ice, Willis said. NASA also plans to employ the sky-crane landing method, which put Curiosity down on Mars, with the Europa craft, he added. −−After descending toward Europa, a hovering spacecraft will fire thrusters into the air to stay aloft while it uses a cord to lower the lander down to the surface. Then, it will let go. [How Curiosity's Sky Crane Landing Worked (Infographic)]
In such a case, "the spacecraft actually falls, but we hope not too far," Willis said.
Limiting the amount of Earthly organics being sprayed on Europa's surface will help NASA's quest to find extraterrestrial life —− even if what researchers are looking for doesn't walk or swim, Schmidt said.
"People want us to drill into Europa and find a fish," she said. "But right now, this is not realistic;− the hope is to land there and detect biogenic molecules, the molecules essential for life."
Have you heard about the candle maker who was swallowed up by the Earth in Hanley? The pub landlord who kept explosives in a bedroom? Or the dwarf who challenged a pit bull to a fist fight?
The Sentinel archives are chock full of fascinating facts that open a window to the past here in the Potteries. Here are 12 of the more surprising titbits of information, contained within.
In 1864 a loud blast shattered the still night of Longton and destroyed the Roebuck, one of the town's best frequented pubs. According to the Weekly Sentinel, the explosion was caused by landlord Henry Johnson's lax attitude to health and safety. In his day job he worked as a miner and kept a large stock of explosives in his bedroom, used for blasting coal. Mr Johnson's two children were asleep when the dynamite exploded, but luckily, were not seriously hurt.
In December, 1903, candle maker Thomas Holland was walking to his shop along St John Street, Hanley, when without any warning, a gaping hole appeared in the ground and swallowed him up. An old pit shaft had suddenly opened and poor Tommy was never seen again.
Thomas Holland
London journalist James Greenwood claimed to have witnessed a fight between a “dwarf", a four-and-a-half feet tall battler called Brummy and a pit bull called Physic, at Hanley in 1874. In lurid detail, Greenwood described the fight between man and dog, which lasted 11 rounds before the dwarf was declared the victor. Although the truth of the battle was never proven, three years later The Sentinel reported how a drunken miner from Burslem was jailed after starting a fight with a Newfoundland dog – possibly influenced by the notoriety of the "dwarf versus dog" fight.
In October, 1966, The Sentinel reported on a woman who was so scared of going to the dentist that she literally dropped dead of fright. Cause of death was a cerebral haemorrhage, but an inquest found the 46-year-old Sneyd Green woman died of, “fright from the thought of a dental extraction".
Royals have been visiting North Staffordshire for centuries – but perhaps the most bizarre stop-off came in June, 1987, when Prince Edward, Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and the Duchess of Kent, Sarah Ferguson, all captained teams in It's A Royal Knockout, held at Alton Towers. At the end of the spectacle, where royals and celebrities competed in whacky games wearing oversized comedy outfits, Prince Edward asked an embarrassed press conference, “well, what did you think of it"? The awkward silence prompted him to storm out in anger.
Prince Edward (left) at Alton Towers during It's A Royal Knockout
In November, 1966, The Sentinel was raving about Port Vale's 16-year-old goalkeeper Michael Lawton, who pulled off a string of remarkable saves in 'near Siberian' conditions at Wigan. He was destined to find fame – but not in football. Lawton reinvented himself as comedian Mick Miller, instantly recognisable with his trademark bald head and long hair at the sides.
Garden gnomes were stolen from a garden in Uttoxeter, in November, 2002. Soon after a note, written with words cut from a newspaper, was pushed through their door. It said: “Mum, we have been taken by the gnome police. This is not a ransom letter but because you were nasty to us and left us in the cold, wet and rain, they want you to say you are sorry. We will be in touch."
In 1908, Joe Deakin – a grocer's son from Shelton – became the city's first Olympic hero, winning gold in the three-mile team event at the London Games. To celebrate, the British team were treated to a lavish lunch of steak and Champagne. Immediately after eating, Joe was due to compete in the five mile race. He failed to finish.
Joe Deakin at the 1908 London Olympics
In March 1965, children's TV show Blue Peter appealed for a mystery boy from Stoke-on-Trent to come forward after he rescued his hamster from a washing machine. The boy was washing his jeans in a self-service laundry when he remembered his pet was in his pocket. He plunged his hands into the hot water, rescued the hamster and managed to revive him using massage – a feat worthy of a Blue Peter medal.
Cowboys and Indians came to Stoke-on-Trent in August, 1891, when the famed frontiersman Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show to North Staffordshire. Passers by witnessed the bizarre spectacle of cattle being driven along Station Road in Stoke, while the show itself spectacularly recreated events like Custer's Last Stand.
Buffalo Bill meets some admirers at his Wild West Show
Jack Wilson, son of Pottery owner David Wilson, of David Wilson & Sons (formerly Neale & Co, based at the Church Works in Hanley), was one of the city's most notorious gang leaders. He was infamous notorious for playing mean tricks on citizens – such as convincing a grieving family a relation had returned from the grave – for using his pet monkey to terrorise passersby and leading the Rough Fleet Gang, Hanley's version of Peaky Blinders. His reign predated the Sentinel (Wilson died in the early 19th century) but his exploits were recounted in a series of character studies published in the 1870s.
Have aliens ever visited the Potteries? Among the more credible X-files in The Sentinel's archives are of a "bowl shaped object, square lights around it, red in colour", reported to the police above Stone in December, 1981; and a report filed by Staffordshire Police in February, 1985, of a large "mushroom shaped" object, with a "glowing orange colour", which was observed hovering over Bucknall for about an hour, before it headed off at speed towards Stoke. In 1967, paranormal investigators Anthony Pace and Roger Stanway investigated 80 UFO sightings in Stoke-on-Trent, which they collected in a book, UFOs Unidentified Undeniable.
Do you know of any strange and bizarre stories from Potteries past? Please send letters and pictures to Colette Warbrook, including your full name, address and telephone number, at The Way We Were, Sentinel House, Bethesda Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 3GN, or email waywewere@thesentinel.co.uk
Terrified musician says mysterious fiery UFO floated in the Devon sky for three hours before ‘flying directly at him’ after he snapped it
MEN FROM OUTER SPACE?
Terrified musician says mysterious fiery UFO floated in the Devon sky for three hours before ‘flying directly at him’ after he snapped it
Bizarre object flew towards stunned onlookers before vanishing without a trace during daylight hours
EXCLUSIVE
BY PAUL HARPER
THIS spectacular UFO left onlookers baffled when it soared through the skies with a fiery tail and vanished without a trace in a Devon town.
A witness told how they thought the bizarre object was a comet until it began flying at lightning speed towards them before disappearing in Exmouth yesterday.
FACEBOOK/MARK EMMINS
The weird object left a fiery tail when it was spotted flying through the skies in Exmouth towards baffled onlookers
FACEBOOK/MARK EMMINS
This UFO was photographed in Devon after it appeared like a comet at first before flying and disappearing
Mark Emmins said he first noticed a white object in the sky at 1pm which was still present when the “blood-red sunset set in”.
He was stunned when three hours later, and watching with neighbour Tyron Osborne, the object began moving as they tried to take a picture.
“My neighbour had asked ‘have you seen the comet?’,” said Mark, a local musician.
“All of sudden it began moving towards us coming from Dawlish towards Exmouth, which took about two minutes.
“It was leaving behind a trail and at the front of the object was a big bright light which went a dark colour as it neared.
“Then it just disappeared, vanished without a trace. There was absolutely nothing left behind.”
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The most bizarre aspect, according to Mark, was that the “huge” UFO moved at the same time as six nearby white dots.
Mark, aged 53, said the sighting has left him “dumbfounded”, adding: “It definitely was not a plane because there was no trail afterwards.
“I have no idea what it was, we have been baffled.
“It wasn’t scary, but after seeing it move across the sky we were left thinking what on earth have we just seen? This was a ‘wow’.”
FACEBOOK/MARK EMMINS
Mark said he was “baffled and dumbfounded” after seeing the UFO in Exmouth yesterday, which he first believed to be a comet
Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, said: “The basic problem is that if a UFO photograph is taken in daylight and looks close, clear and sharp, you suspect it is a fake, and if it is out-of-focus, distant and hard to define, then it can be a picture of anything in the sky – from a bird to a balloon.
“In this case the pictures seem consistent with the witness descriptions, and the length of the sighting suggests it wasn’t an aircraft or drone.”
Brazilian fisherman recently got the shock of their lives while on a twilight trawl of the ocean when they spotted the silhouette of a UFO on the horizon in footage seen below.
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VIDEO: UFO spotted in skies over Sheffield city centre
VIDEO: UFO spotted in skies over Sheffield city centre
The UFO spotted above Sheffield on December 27. (Photo: YouTube).
Is this the moment a UFO was spotted in the skies over Sheffield city centre?
The clip, uploaded to video sharing website YouTube, shows a mysterious ball of white light rising slowly through the skies above the city just a couple days after Christmas.
The footage, which was filmed early in the morning of December 27, was shot by the University of Sheffield and shows the flickering, white globe slowly getting bigger as it rises through the atmosphere.
The video, entitled "UFO in Sheffield" begins with a caption which reads: "Real time recording of strange light in Sheffield sky."
The footage was shot at 7.18am from a fixed webcam which is used to monitor peregrines in their nestbox on top of the University's St George's Church lecture theatre in St George's Terrace.
In the film, one of the peregrines can be seen on its perch, oblivious to the light rising above the twinkling streetlights of the sleeping city.
What do you think? What are your explanations for the UFO?
Kerry visited the frozen continent last month, officially to highlight the effects of climate change, but conspiracy theorists bizarrely claim it was to examine “Nazi UFO bases.”
The madcap claim stems back to earlier conspiracy theories, one being that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in May 1945, but escaped in a submarine to a secret base in Antarctica.
The other is astonishingly that the Nazis shared secret Antarctic UFO bases with reptilian alien species in the run up to WWII, where they experimented with flying saucer technology.
Now, after the Kerry visit, which conspiracy theorists suggest was to view these bases, it is being claimed that a Nazi UFO base is visible in images of the Antarctic taken by NASA.
GETTY
Did Hitler really have a secret base for UFOs in Antarctica?
Conspiracists believe a number of the images – which have resurfaced online after being taken in 2006 – prove the German fascist party built massive bases for alien ships during World War II.
YouTube channel SecureTeam10 has claimed the 2006 images from the US space agency show a weird anomaly in the ice.
This area stretches around 150 miles, with scientists previously saying it is a crater from asteroid impact.
Tyler Glockner, who narrates the outlandish SecureTeam10 videos said in the new one: “To this day, scientists have no idea or way to discover exactly what is buried deep under this thick ice shelf.
"This continent has been shrouded in a mystery of its own for years now."
Nigel Watson, author of the UFOs: The Nazi Connection by Unexplained Rapid Reads, said: "The idea of alien or flying saucer bases in Antarctica is nothing new. In 1962, Albert Bender who ran the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) in Bridgeport, Connecticut, claimed that alien beings took him to their underground HQ in Antarctica.
"At the base, he saw beautiful female aliens and aliens in the form of men.
"The purpose of the base was to extract chemicals from seawater to send back to their home planet. They told him that if we attacked them they could detonate all of our atomic weapons.
"Such stories are used to support the idea that flying saucers are of Nazi origin and that they established an underground base at Antarctica after World War II.
"Sceptics think such stories are the product of malicious disinformation or fantasies, yet that doesn’t stop people continuing to believing in their existence."
The three glowing UFOs and some of the helicopters both snapped by the couple.
A couple told how they saw three unusual UFOs in the sky for 15 to 20 minutes while travelling to Albuquerque, in New Mexico, in the US.
They claimed the following morning that 15 unmarked black helicopters were seen flying towards the location of the earlier UFO sighting.
Alien conspiracy theorists claim unmarked black helicopters are often seen in the vicinity of UFO sightings.
The theory being that the choppers belong to the so-called “Men in Balck” - an alleged secretive government department whose staff try to hush up evidence of aliens visiting earth to avoid the public finding out.
MUFON
The three bizarre objects that the husband thought were military flares.
The next day outside Boulder City, Nevada at about 6am we videoed 15 black Helicopters flying in the direction of where we saw the objects the night before.
Unnamed woman
Her report said: “I spotted three glowing objects to the west over the hills. My husband pulled over and we observed the objects just hover above the hills.
“They stayed in one spot for about 15 to 20 minutes.
“My husband thought they were military flairs. I say that they are UFOs.
“We took pictures and watched them just hover there the whole time.
She added: “The next day outside Boulder City, Nevada at about 6am we videoed 15 black Helicopters flying in the direction of where we saw the objects the night before.”
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Mystery UFO hovers over Brazilian rainforest as stunned fishermen scramble to capture stunning footage
Mystery UFO hovers over Brazilian rainforest as stunned fishermen scramble to capture stunning footage
The men, fishing from a boat in a river, captured the haunting images on a mobile phone just as the sun was coming up
BY MARC WALKER
A group of fishermen stare in amazement as a ' UFO ' hovers in midair above the rain forest before suddenly disappearing into the dense canopy of trees.
The men, fishing from a boat in a river, captured the haunting images on a mobile phone just as the sun was coming up.
"It lingers just above the vast vegetation for several seconds before dipping below the horizon.
In the footage, posted on YouTube, the shocked fellas discuss the jaw-dropping sight in Portuguese.
The 'UFO' lingers just above the rain forest for several seconds before dipping below the horizon(Photo: YouTube / jmhz71)
It comes after another bizarre object was spotted deep in the Amazon basin earlier this year.
The unidentified shape, believed by some to be an alien spaceship, also appeared to be using the trees as cover as it was only visible using satellite imagery.
The haunting images were captured just as the sun was coming up over the Amazon basin(Photo: YouTube / jmhz71)
This latest sighting echoes 1987 action horror film Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger , in which an extraterrestrial craft crash lands in the jungle, sparking a fight to the death with a group of special forces soldiers.
Express.co.uk revealed this month there have been an increasing amount of extraordinarily similar Triangle UFO sightings, mostly across the US.
The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) has been bombarded with reports of the bizarre craft that are often said to hover at low altitudes, silently with a slow speed.
The latest happened on Boxing Day in Park Ridge, Illinois, at midnight.
The report to US-based MUFON sent yesterday said: "My husband and I were driving on Toughy Rd in Park Ridge after just exiting 294, heading east.
"I looked out of my window and on the right side I saw a triangular craft hovering over the Forest Preserve.
"It was completely still, each side had approximately five steady lights.
"I told my husband and he caught a glimpse as well.
"He proceeded to make a u-turn. As soon as we turned around, the object had disappeared with no trace."
The MUFON global database of UFO sightings receives hundreds of similar reports each year, with numbers seemingly on the rise.
The Triangle UFO reports are often eerily similar, leading to speculation the bizarre UFOs could be REAL.
YouTube
A triangle UFO allegedly snapped during the Belgian UFO wave.
MUFON
Sketches drawn by the witness of the triangle UFO at Gainesville, Florida.
Many reports tell of a silent triangle shape, defined by a series of lights, that are said to be in some cases as big as a football field, moving slowly across the sky.
The latest sighting followed a Christmas Eve report from Clearwater, Florida.
A man and his daughter saw three of the slow, silent objects, before they disappeared behind trees.
Roger Marsh, communications director for MUFON, said triangle UFOs "frequently pass closest to witnesses".
Another reported "huge triangle UFO" sighting came on December 11, just 500 metres above homes in Gainesville, Florida, at midnight.
The witness was returning home from a family dinner when the object was seen hovering.
The witness report said: "It had large white, solid lights on each of the three corners of the craft and a pulsating red light on what appeared to be the rear.
“We could actually see framework or something on the side facing us, which indicted it wasn’t a smooth surface, but rather a metallic structure.”
The witness drove north watching the object.
The report added: “It made a turn toward the northeast and, after a few seconds without making a sound, it ascended to a tiny point in the sky in an instant.
"At the moment it took off into the sky, the sky seemed to bend around the lights of the craft.
"Before, during and after the sighting we could see normal aircraft in the sky, as there is a close-by small, commercial airport.
"I cannot imagine no one else, particularly pilots, didn’t see this craft. It was enormous.”
Florida MUFON Field Investigator Carl Paulson investigated the sighting, but closed the case as an unknown event.
The most infamous mass triangle UFO sighting was the Phoenix Lights incident of March 13 1997 over Arizona.
Five lights were seen in a formation by thousands of people over three hours from 7.30pm to 10.30pm.
The sightings took place a cross a 300-mile area from Phoenix to Tucson.
It was blamed by officials as military flares at the time.
Another mysterious case was the Belgian UFO wave from November 1989.
Thirty different groups of witnesses, and three groups of police officers, reported seeing on November 29 a large object flying at low altitude.
The craft was described as "flat, of triangular shape, with lights underneath", and being silent as it slowly moved across Belgium towards the Netherlands and Germany.
I looked out of my window and on the right side I saw a triangular craft hovering over the Forest Preserve. It was completely still, each side had approximately five steady lights.
MUFON report
Just a day before the Gainesville sighting, a band about to go on stage in Torrance, California, reported seeing another triangle UFO at midnight.
A brief report to MUFON said: "Four of us were outside waiting to go onstage and one of us noticed this object in the sky above Palos Verdes and it looked like the Star Trek logo with lights making a boomerang shape, with the lights dimming, and brightening.
"It drifted away and hovered with no noise at all and after 10 minutes or so, it slowly turned position, and drifted out of view."
MUFON is getting an unprecedented amount of reports of the mysterious UFOs, usually from within the US.
Some alien hunters believe they are the motherships of extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
However, many conspiracy theorists believe they are actually secret aircrafts developed by the US Air Force (USAF) which are being tested.
The allegations are that these crafts are created at top-secret military bases like Area 51 in Nevada, by reverse engineering alien technology.
Another low-flying triangle sighting took place on December 2 at 6.50pm in Reno, Nevada.
A witness and two children saw the object from their driveway.
The dad said in his report to MUFON: “My son was looking up at the sky and said,‘Hey guys, look up. Do you see that?’
“He pointed it out as it was directly above us.
"My son said he thought it was an airplane or he was just hallucinating, but after we all saw it we knew it was something else because it made no noise whatsoever and was shaped nothing like an airplane.”
The size of the silent craft was estimated to be between 100 and 300 feet.
He continued: “It was moving in a pretty straight line towards the northwest and the Sierra mountains.
"The thing itself made no noise at all and appeared to be going moderately fast.
"The object itself was shaped almost exactly like the ‘Phoenix Lights’ in Arizona.
"It was very triangular; two edges came together and had lights going up the edges.
Nevada MUFON Assistant State Director Sandra Countiss investigated the case and also closed it as "unknown".
MUFON
A CGI sketcj done by the witness to the triangle sighting in New MIlford, Connecticut.
Another triangle which reportedly flew at about 500 feet was reported to MUFON in November.
The silent, triangle-shaped UFO that made a 90-degree turn was seen in New Milford, Connecticut at 8.45 pm on November 17.
The witness report said: "Approached a stop sign in rural area and noted a brightly lit craft flying very slowly directly towards me at low altitude.
“The white spotlights were very bright and spaced widely apart, making a helicopter unlikely, so I stopped at the intersection to observe what seemed like a strange phenomenon.
"It was so slow, low and silent.
“Moments before it would have been overhead, it made a perfect 90-degree turn.
"At that point I could see its underbelly clearly.
"It was a perfect black triangle, slightly wider at the back than the sides with white and red line of lights along the back flashing in a sequence back and forth."
Connecticut MUFON Field Investigator Warren Fentress is investigating.
Mr Marsh said: "Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made."
Scott Brando runs website ufoofinterest.org which exposes hoax UFO sightings.
He is sceptical any unexplainable sightings have been made.
He says the Phoenix Lights Incident was explained as aircraft and military flares.
He told Express.co.uk: “The Phoenix lights were explained with two different events. The first was the flight of five planes in V-shape formation.
"This is what the witness saw in that day.
"The second event was the launch of military flares over Estrella mountains."
He said of the Belgian UFO Wave: "The Belgian UFO wave began as a normal sighting (some lights in the sky) and then spread virally, but it took more time because at that time the
media coverage had no internet like now."
Referring to triangle UFOs generally, he added: “About other similar sightings I'd like to see some reports by MUFON, however many formation of sky lanterns or the launch of skydivers
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Massive object hidden under Antarctic ice could be a secret Nazi UFO base, conspiracy theorists claim
Massive object hidden under Antarctic ice could be a secret Nazi UFO base, conspiracy theorists claim
A bizarre theory claims a mysterious mass under the Antarctic ice cap could be a secret alien lair
A mysterious object lurking beneath the frozen wastes of Antarctica could be a secret Nazi UFO base, conspiracy theorists claim.
The object was first detected in 2006, when a team of scientists from Ohio State University used NASA's GRACE satellites to uncover a "gravitation anomaly" in an area of Antarctica known as Wilkes Land.
The anomaly indicated the presence of a huge "mass concentration" in the middle of a 300 mile wide impact crater, hidden beneath the ice cap.
(Photo: YouTubes/Secureteam10)
Some researchers believe the mass concentration (or mascap) is the remains of a giant meteorite, which was nearly three times the size of the Chicxulub asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
If this theory is correct, it could explain the Permian–Triassic extinction, which occurred 250 million years ago and wiped out 96% of all of the Earth’s sea creatures and 70% of land-based vertebrates.
However, a group of UFO hunters known as Secure Team 10 has come up with a much more outlandish theory for what the object could be.
(Photo: YouTubes/Secureteam10)
In a video posted on YouTube, Secure Team 10 suggests that the it could be a secret Nazi UFO base, left over from the Second World War.
"Some evidence of this [has come] to light in recent years, purporting to show various entrances built into the side of mountains that hold a saucer shape, and are not to mention at a very high altitude," Secure Team 10 states in its video.
"[This] begs the question, how exactly would you enter these entrances without something that could fly and that was the same shape as the entrance itself?"
(Photo: YouTubes/Secureteam10)
Secure Team 10 also discusses the theory that the mysterious anomaly could be a portal to a another world.
They claim the US Navy's numerous missions to Antarctica during the 1940s, as part of its "Operation Highjump," were actually an attempt to locate this portal.
"Even though the public reason for the operation was to 'establish the Antarctic research base, Little America', many believe its true purpose was to investigate an entrance found toward the centre of continent that may have led to an inner Earth," the said.
Watch: Alien spacecraft in Antarctica? Theory claims Nazi UFO site buried under Antarctic ice. [Representational image]Creative Commons
It is a well-known fact that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were heavily into researching supernatural as well as extraterrestrial phenomena, objects and locations. And now, if a new theory is to be believed, they may have even had a secret UFO site buried deep under the Antarctic ice — whose evidence has been possibly detected by two satellites that were measuring gravity in different parts of Earth.
According to a video posted on YouTube by conspiracy theorist channel "secureteam10," a mass of land hidden beneath the Antarctic ice could well be the site of a secret base the Nazis built during World War II, and something that the Americans encountered during "Operation Highjump."
Although the operation's stated purpose was to establish the Antarctic colony Little America, many believe it was to investigate Nazi UFO bases in Antarctica. Now, it has been reported that secret Nazi bases have been discovered in the Arctic. This video, however, explores the possibility of a Nazi UFO site under Antarctica, in a region hundreds of kilometres across, known as Wilkes Land.
The video says the gravity in this part of the Antarctic ice shelf is much higher than in any other part, and rules out any volcanic eruption. It then goes on to add that this could be a secret Nazi UFO base: "There is some evidence of this coming to light in recent years, with images purporting to show various entrances built into the side of mountains, with a saucer shape and at a very high altitude. This begs the question: How would you enter these entrances without something that could fly and was the same shape as the hole itself?"
What's more, it quotes the leader of the aforementioned Operation Highjump has saying that his fleet was attacked by what seemed like UFOs. He is also quoted as saying that this threat was much more dire than that posed by Russia, and that these opponents could attack North and South America any time, and at will.
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AMAZING! IDENTITY CARD OF A NAZI OFFICER FROM THE SECRET ANTARCTICA 'STATION 211'
AMAZING! IDENTITY CARD OF A NAZI OFFICER FROM THE SECRET ANTARCTICA 'STATION 211'
Numerous covert operations took place during the Nazi era, and one of the most memorable is that of Neuschwabenland or New Swabia and the enigmatic station 211 located within Antarctica, between 20°E and 10°W in Queen Maud Land.
Now for the first time an identity card of a Nazi Officer from the secret Antarctica "Station 211" was found.
For half a century, rumours about secret Nazi expedition and a secret base called ‘Station 211’ has existed among writers and researchers. But were the Nazis equipped to carry out such fascinating missions? And is the above-mentioned quote from Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz true?
After Highjump was complete, there were three then-secret nuclear explosions in the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere. They didn’t occur near Queen Maud Land, though, nor even over Antarctica, and they had no military target. Instead, they were detonated at high altitudes over the ocean to study the effects of nuclear explosions high up and outside the atmosphere.
This majestic capture of the sun fading into the thick clouds shows us that even though the light is strong, it eventually gives way to the dark. The two balance each other in this world and show that there can be a happy medium between the two, given the right circumstances.
It reminds us that we must be grateful for the precious moments in life and that even though we face adversity, the light will be there to cut through the clouds to greet us with warmth. The biker had to pull over to film this controversial footage.
China steekt een tandje bij in zijn plannen om de ruimte in te trekken. Het wil er in 2018 als eerste land in slagen om een sonde te laten landen op de achterkant van de maan. En in 2020 is Mars aan de beurt. Dat heeft het land deze week bekendgemaakt.
In het communiqué worden de plannen voor de komende vijf jaar uit de doeken gedaan. En die zijn ambitieus. "De uitgestrekte kosmos verkennen, een ruimtevaartindustrie ontwikkelen en van China een ruimtevaartmacht maken zijn de doelstellingen", staat er te lezen.
Het is een publiek geheim dat een eerste Chinees op de maan daar ook bij is, iets waar niets wordt over gezegd in de mededeling. In 2003 lanceerde het land zijn eerste bemande ruimtevlucht. De crew deed daarbij ook een eerste ruimtewandeling. In 2013 landde een eerste Chinees ruimtetuig op de maan, het eerste sinds de Amerikanen op de maan actief waren in de jaren zeventig. En vorige maand nog werden twee astronauten voor een maand naar een experimenteel Chinees ruimtestation gestuurd. Dat was de zesde en langste ruimtevaartmissie tot nu toe.
Maan Doel is om over zes jaar een volledig operationele en bemande ruimte basis te hebben rond de aarde. En naar de achterkant van de maan te reizen, als eerste land ter wereld. Daar zal onder meer onderzoek worden gedaan naar het ontstaan en de evolutie van de maan.
Mars En er is meer. De Chinezen willen ook naar Mars. En een eerste ruimtetuig daar naartoe zou in 2020 moeten vertrekken. Het moet stalen van de bodem verzamelen en onderzoek doen naar de evolutie van ons zonnestelsel en eventueel buitenaards leven.
Here is an encounters with a UFO along a highway in Mexico this month. I really liked the detailed reports and something that really stands out is that the UFO so easily matched speed with the vehicle. This is something we see a lot in UFO reports, especially UFOs caught on live cam at the space station. No matter how fast or how slow, these craft are highly maneuverable and can easily match speed in seconds. Scott C. Waring
News states:
With two new UFO sighting reports along the Mérida-Tixkokob Highway, this stretch of road is becoming known due to sightings of this sort. Localities such as Ticul and the Muna and Homún roads are also UFO hotspots. Reports came from employees working on the construction of a highway exit toward Tixkokob: "We were heading home in late December was it was getting dark. My co-work grabbed his motorcycle and we took off toward Tipéxhual. We had progressed a few kilometers past the Villas de Oriente checkpoint when a sort of UFO or spaceship with a powerful blue light crossed right in front of us, at an altitude of some 20 meters. It was so close that there was no way we could be mistaken. My companion even pulled over to look at it more closely. In fact, it made no noise whatsoever," explained one worker. It is worth noting that although no further information was forthcoming in this regard, a worker had seen a similar object only a few days ago, just one kilometer before reaching this community. "We're certain that it was a UFO. The time was around nine o'clock at night. The light was very bright, like a sort of sphere, making erratic moves. It suddenly took off, vanishing at high speed. I think it went upward," he concluded. A few years ago, Carlos Benitez Novelo, a vendor who customarily covers the Tixkokob route and encircling municipalities, informed Enigmas of the following case: "I let my house in Merida very early to start my collections in Tixho. I normally travel along the road that leads straight to that town, but on one instance I became distracted and went straight to Tipéxhual. Since it's the same distance, I didn't see a problem with it, and kept going. Within a few minutes after leaving Tipéxhual, going over the train tracks, I witnessed an object flying at low altitude, perhaps five meters. It was a black circular object, shaped like a spacecraft and metallic-looking, since the sunlight caused to have a slight glow. I slowed down but didn't stop, and then suddenly realize that it was matching my speed. I was very startled, it occurred in a matter of seconds, and then out the corner of my eye, I saw it take off and vanish into the sky. That's when I pulled over to calm down and see where it had gone off to, but I didn't see it again. Such stories have become commonplace in recent years. All agree on the UFO's characteristics: it flies at high speed and a short distance from the road. However, the reason behind these sightings is unknown.
One of the most recent UFO news from a Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) news story highlights a Christmas Eve sighting in Clearwater, Florida. The latest UFO sighting involves an unknown triangle object that raises speculations about the cloaking abilities of these kinds of UFOs.
The sighting can be likened to the UFO sighting in Los Angeles that took place at the beginning of December. The UFO that spotted in Missouri also made the rounds online because of its strange translucent appearance, which strengthens theories on alien cloaking technology.
The Clearwater UFO involved two objects that disappeared when they passed behind a tree line, but the third one vanished completely before the witnesses’ eyes.
In Missouri UFO sighting, the conspiracy theory focused on a possible skin of ceramic material that could make people difficult to notice an aircraft in flight.
Triangle UFOs often reported to be flying low, and many enthusiasts suggest that flying at low altitude could be part of their missions. It brings to the theory that these UFOs find using cloaking technology a necessity.
News of alien planets, strange sounds from the seafloor and a bizarre new state of matter turned 2016 into a strange year, scientifically speaking.
The weirdest discoveries of 2016 ran the gamut from relatively academic (unexpected discoveries in quantum physics) to very relevant to daily life on Earth (the Arctic's unusual, melty behavior).
Here's a rundown of the oddest and most surprising scientific discoveries of the past year.
Credit: agsandrew | Shutterstock
1. Light's new momentum
The speed of light (186,000 miles per second, or 299,792 kilometers per second) hasn't changed, but a report in May revealed that another of light's basic properties might not be as basic as scientists once believed.
While doing some calculations based on a 200-year-old discovery, physicists at Trinity College Dublin found that light particles — photons — weren't behaving as they should. When shone through particular crystals in order to force the light beams into a hollow tube of light, the photons spun at an angular momentum of one-half of Planck's constant. Planck's constant is one of those basic numbers in physics. It determines the relationship between a wavelength of light and its energy.
What surprised physicists is that photons shouldn't be able to spin at a speed that's one-half Planck's constant. All photons are supposed to spin at speeds that are whole-number values of Planck's constant (twice Planck's constant, or three times Planck's constant, but not half of Planck's constant). Another class of particles, fermions, can spin at fractions of Planck's constant.
"Our result shows that we can make beams of photons, which behave like fermions — a completely different form of matter," Trinity College physicist Kyle Ballantine told Live Science at the time.
The finding doesn't mean that quantum physics is wrong, the researchers said, but it does mean that something about light works differently than they'd thought.
Credit: Jorge Chau.
2. Echoes in the atmosphere
In 1962, researchers at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in Peru noticed something weird: Some of the radio waves they were beaming into space were bouncing back. It was as if there were some sort of reflector in the upper atmosphere, about 80 to 100 miles (130 to 160 kilometers) up. But the reason for the echoes remained a mystery until 2016. It took supercomputers to solve it. Researchers simulated the upper atmosphere and found that the echoes owe their existence to the sun. When sunlight hits the ionosphere, where the echoes originate, they strip electrons from the molecules in that atmospheric layer. The resulting, highly energetic charged particles zip through the masses of cooler particles around them, causing those cooler particles to vibrate like strings on a cello. The vibrations aren't particularly organized, the researchers said, but they create a low-level "froth" that's strong enough to bounce back the Jicamarca radio waves.
Credit: Painting by Victor Leshyk
3. Ancient reptile with an anteater claw
Two hundred million years ago, a chameleon-like reptile named Drepanosaurus roamed the land. Paleontologists first found the fossils of the 1.6-foot-long (0.5 meters) reptile in Italy in the 1970s, but it wasn't until this year that they realized just how strange this animal really was.
The weirdness is all in the arms. New fossils found in New Mexico revealed Drepanosaurus' front limbs in three-dimensional detail for the first time. Unlike all other four-limbed creatures (known as tetrapods), Drepanosaurus had a crescent-shaped ulna — one of the bones of the forearm.
Tetrapods generally follow the same body pattern: Each of their front limbs has an upper-arm bone (the humerus) and two lower-arm bones (the ulna and radius). Drepanosaurus' version of these bones was unlike anything scientists had seen before. The lizard also had abnormally long wrist bones.
Credit: Genevieve Martin, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
4. Dancing electrons in a new form of matter
It's not every year physicists discover a new form of matter, but 2016 was one of those years.
To be specific, the researchers actually created the new form of matter by bombarding sheets of alpha ruthenium chloride with neutrons. This created something called a Kitaev quantum spin liquid, which looks solid — you could hold a chunk of it in your hand — but contains electrons that dance about as if they were in a liquid.
Physicists had theorized about quantum spin liquids for decades. One of those theorists, Alexei Kitaev of the California Institute of Technology, predicted a form of matter in which the electrons would interact as if they were Majorana fermions, a type of particle that acts as its own antiparticle (a particle of the same mass but an opposite charge). Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee decided to test this theory and found that their neutron-bombarded alpha ruthenium chloride did in fact behave in this way.
In the new form of matter, the orientation (or spin) of the electrons affects the orientation of other electrons, but these electrons still remain chaotic no matter how cold the material becomes, the researchers reported. The electrons don't actually fragment into particles and antiparticles as in Majorana fermions, but their spin interactions make it look as if they do, so researchers call them "quasiparticles." The material might be useful for increasing the reliability of quantum computing.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
5. A brand-new neighbor
Earth may have had a next-door neighbor all along. This August, scientists announced that they'd detected a tiny disturbance in the light coming from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth besides the sun.
The disturbance indicates the presence of a planet in the red dwarf star's habitable zone, meaning life could theoretically exist there. Models based on the planet's distance from its star and its mass (1.3 times that of Earth's) suggest that it might have an atmosphere and be entirely covered by a deep ocean, which would be potentially amenable to life. But there are multiple theories about the planet's atmosphere and environment and little hard data, so aliens are far from a foregone conclusion.
As of Dec. 1, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 3,431 exoplanets, or planets outside Earth's solar system, according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Two hundred and ninety-seven confirmed or suspected planets in the habitable zones of their stars have been discovered so far, according to the Archive.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
6. Strange red spot
Closer to home, a big red spot festoons the north pole of Charon, Pluto's largest moon. In September, researchers announced that they'd figured out where this colorful blemish comes from: Pluto's atmosphere.
Pluto is a tiny planet, and since it doesn't have a strong gravitational pull, its atmosphere radiates out into space. When the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto and its moons in 2015, the red spot on Charon was immediately apparent. Scientists thought that it might be a result of the moon gravitationally capturing some of Pluto's lost atmospheric gases.
By modeling the temperatures Pluto and Charon over time, the researchers confirmed their hunch. Charon's winters last more than 100 Earth years, and they are frigid — temperatures hover around absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius). Methane from Pluto's atmosphere gets frozen at Charon's frigid poles. There, cosmic radiation strips away the hydrogen from the methane, leaving only carbon behind. These carbon atoms link up to create incredibly complex organic compounds called tholins, which make up Charon's red spot.
7. One odd head
Throughout history, some cultures have gone to extreme lengths for beauty, including practices that involved flattening or reshaping the skull. The skull of a woman from Korea's ancient Silla culture appeared to have come by its odd shape naturally, though.
Anthropologists reported their strange find in June after excavating the skeleton of a woman from a traditional burial site near Gyeongju, the capital of the Silla Kingdom (57 B.C. to A.D. 935) on the Korean peninsula. The woman, who died in her late 30s, had an elongated head, with its length being more than 75 percent of its width, the researchers reported. The term for this head shape is dolichocephalic.
It's plausible that the people who inhabited Silla performed cranial shaping, the researchers told Live Science, but the woman's bones showed no signs of flattening or of compensatory growth on the side of the skull — which is usually seen when boards or bricks are used to alter the skull of a baby or growing child. It's likely, they concluded, that the woman's head was just part of a normal variation. [See Images of the Long-Headed Woman's Facial Reconstruction]
Credit: Stefan Hendricks, Alfred Wegener Institute.
8. Unprecedented heat in the Arctic
It's been a strange year at the North Pole. Temperatures have hit all-time highs (the North Pole was 36 degrees F, or 20 degrees C, above normal in November 2016). And ice hasn't expanded in the winter season as it usually does when the temperature dips. This December, data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showed that the Arctic was missing a chunk of sea ice the size of Mexico — and that sea ice had actually retreated in November. The ice declined by 19,300 square miles (50,000 square kilometers), vastly outpacing the only other November ice retreat ever seen, which is a loss of 5,400 square miles (14,000 square km) in 2013. Ultimately, the November sea-ice extent ended at 753,000 square miles (1.95 million square km) below the 1981-to-2010 long-term average for the month, the NSIDC reported.
In some ways, the warm temperatures and lack of ice aren't surprising. Scientists have long known that the Arctic is particularly vulnerable to climate change, and the region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, on average. At current rates of warming, scientists expect that the Arctic will be ice-free in midsummer by the middle of the century.
Credit: Copyright Victoria Dorrer
9. Sticky traps made of … pee?
The larvae of a cave fungus gnat (Arachnocampa) are well-known weirdos. They glow, for one thing — thus, their common name, glowworms — and they also live in tubes that are made of mucus.
Glowworms are also responsible for great beauty: They form long, sticky "fishing lines" of silk and mucus that they cast from cave ceilings to capture insects, millipedes, snails and other prey. Recently, scientists found out that glowworms' strangeness goes even deeper. These silken fishing lines get their shimmer from urea, the major ingredient in pee.
A team led by University of Vienna researchers ventured into two caves on New Zealand's North Island and painstakingly collected more than 4,000 sticky, unwieldy glowworm threads. They found that the threads contain crystals that are made partly of urea, which seems to be produced in the glowworm gut (they spin the threads through their mouths). The urea attracts moisture from the air, causing droplets to condense on the threads. Lit by the blue-green bioluminescence of the glowworms, these droplets create a fairyland atmosphere in cave tunnels, and apparently prove irresistible to creeping cave critters.
Credit: NASA/NOAA
10. A noisy deep-sea mystery
Let's end the year on a mysterious note: Ping.
That’s the noise coming from the seafloor in the far-north Nunavut region of Canada … and no one knows why. In November, Canadian officials admitted that they had no idea what was causing the ping, which had been heard in the Fury and Hecla strait. Military patrols sent to the area found no anomalies, but hunters say that the noise is driving wildlife away. Some people blame the pinging on the mining activities of local companies or Greenpeace, but those companies as well as the activist group said that they weren't operating in the region. The government said it had no plans for further investigations.
Thousands of miles away, though, a second sea-sound mystery may have been solved. Researchers who were taking recordings in the Mariana Trench near Guam detected an otherworldly noise — a cross between moaning and twanging — during robotic vehicle dives in 2014 and 2015. This December, they reported that the bizarre noises may be the cries of a minke whale, an elusive type of baleen whale that's rarely seen at the surface. Researchers said in a statement that they don't know much about minke whale activity around the Mariana, or what the call might mean. [Listen to the New Whale Call from the Mariana Trench]
"If it's a mating call, why are we getting it year-round? That's a mystery," Sharon Nieukirk, senior faculty research assistant in marine bioacoustics at Oregon State University, said in a statement. "We need to determine how often the call occurs in summer versus winter, and how widely this call is really distributed."
For as long as humans have had consciousness — two or two hundred millennia depending on who you ask — human scholars have made great efforts to understand and define what that means. The most facile and purely conceptual description of consciousness might be that it is an awareness of the self within the context of the world. But without an understanding of the underlying mechanism, consciousness keeps chasing its tail. This is, in part, why neuroscientists have successfully interjected themselves in the ongoing conversation about consciousness by pointing to physical phenomena within the brain. But linking the metaphysical to the physical still results in the sort of quasi-scientific, quasi-philosophical overreach that gets academics laughed out of faculty lounges and labeled eccentric.
No wonder we’re struggling to understand whether the artificial intelligences we build are conscious. No wonder the Turing Test increasingly falls short of providing the sort of answers we require.
Because we cannot prove artificial consciousness, many engineers and experts are reflexively dismissive of the idea. But Jürgen Schmidhuber is not many engineers or experts and he’s fine playing the eccentric. He’s 53 years old and has been working on A.I. since the 1980s, which is why traces of his pioneering work in the field are surface in Google, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM products. A professor of A.I. at Switzerland’s University of Lugano, scientific director of the Swiss A.I. Lab IDSIA, and president of NNAISENSE (pronounced “nascence”), a startup that aims to build the first practical general purpose A.I., Schmidhuber believes that some current A.I. systems are already conscious. He believes he helped engineer it, which is both why he can come across as self-aggrandizing and why he’s one of the most interesting figures in a growing field.
The irony of Schmidhuber’s positions is that if he turns out to be right, his belief will likely be retroactively validated by some future hyperconscious A.I.. Schmidhuber may be one of the few people on the planet ready to actively empathize with A.I. so Inverse asked him what he sees in the programming that other people miss and what — if anything — that has to do with human consciousness.
Jürgen Schmidhuber at the International Health Forum, 2015.
What, in your mind, is the role of artificial intelligence in our future?
All of intelligence — human or artificial — is about problem solving. For a long time, we have been trying to build general problem solvers that not only can solve one little problem here and another over there, but many different problems. [Problem solvers that can] learn new skills on top of previously learned skills, always adding new skills to the repertoire in an unlimited way, becoming more and more general problem solvers. Of course, to the extent that we succeed, this is going to change everything, because every computational problem, every profession, is going to be affected by this.
You claim that some A.I.s are already conscious. Could you explain why?
I would like to claim we had little, rudimentary, conscious learning systems for at least 25 years. Back then, already, I proposed rather general learning systems consisting of two modules.
One of them, a recurrent network controller, learns to translate incoming data — such as video and pain signals from the pain sensors, and hunger information from the hunger sensors — into actions. For example, whenever the battery’s low, there’s negative numbers coming from the hunger sensors. The network learns to translate all these incoming inputs into action sequences that lead to success. For example, reach the charging station in time whenever the battery is low, but without bumping into obstacles such as chairs or tables, such that you don’t wake up these pain sensors.
The agent’s goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain until the end of its lifetime. This goal is very simple to specify, but it’s hard to achieve because you have to learn a lot. Consider a little baby, which has to learn for many years how the world works, and how to interact with it to achieve goals.
Since 1990, our agents have tried to do the same thing, using an additional recurrent network — an unsupervised module, which essentially tries to predict what is going to happen. It looks at all the actions ever executed, and all the observations coming in, and uses that experience to learn to predict the next thing given the history so far. Because it’s a recurrent network, it can learn to predict the future — to a certain extent — in the form of regularities, with something called predictive coding.
For example, if you have a video of 100 falling apples, and all of these apples always fall down in the same way, you can learn to predict how they fall down, and what you can predict, you don’t have to store separately, which means that you can compress the entire video to a much smaller number of bits.
A photo from 1963 of Jürgen with his father, Johann Schmidhuber, playing chess.
As the data’s coming in through the interaction with the environment, this unsupervised model network — this world model, as I have called it since 1990 — learns to discover new regularities, or symmetries, or repetitions, over time. It can learn to encode the data with fewer computational resources — fewer storage cells, or less time to compute the whole thing. What used to be conscious during learning becomes automated and subconscious over time.
As the network makes progress, and learns a new regularity, it can measure the depth of its new insight by looking at how many computational resources the unsupervised world model needs to encode the data before it learns that and afterwards. The difference between before and after: That is the “fun” that the network has. The depth of its insight, which is a number, goes straight to the first net, the controller, which has the task to maximize all the reward signals — including reward signals coming from such internal joy moments, from insights the network didn’t have before. A joy moment, like that of a scientist who discovers a new, previously unknown physical law.
Can you help me understand all that processing within the context of my own consciousness and experience
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As you are walking through the world, you are encountering lots of faces of humans, which means that it’s really efficient for you to compactify, to compress your observation history by constructing, in your brain, some sort of recurrent sub-network. A “face encoder,” which corresponds to something like a prototype face. When a new face comes along, all you have to do is encode the deviations from the prototype.
I’m still not sure why we can say that it’s conscious, though.
One important thing about consciousness is that the agent, as it is interacting with the world, will notice that there is one thing that is always present as it is interacting with the world — which is the agent itself.
For data compression reasons, it’s really efficient for the recurrent world-model network to set a couple of neurons aside to encode this agent itself. It will be able to better compress the entire history of actions and perceptions by creating a symbol of itself, and additional symbols for things that belong to the agent: Maybe the hands, and the feet, and whatever. During the search for a solution to a new problem, whenever you wake up these neurons that are responsible for that self-symbol, then the guy, the agent, is basically thinking of itself.
So we have had that since 1991. Sure, it’s just a rudimentary form of consciousness — not as impressive as your own, because your brain is much bigger than the brains of our little artificial agents. You have maybe 100,000 billion connections in your cortex, while today’s largest LSTM networks — long short-term memory networks — have maybe only a billion connections. So your cortex is still 100,000 times larger, and the consciousness that can be carried by it is more impressive than what we can fit into our little artificial brains. However, we just take notice that every five years, computing gets 10 times cheaper. So maybe we’ll need only another 25 years until — for the first time — we will have rather cheap LSTM networks which have as many connections as your entire cortex.
And these cortex connections are much slower than the electronic connections of our artificial brains.
Schmidhuber with an android.
In the technical jargon, the real challenge is known as the “hard problem of consciousness.” It’s the what it’s like of experience, which philosophers tend to call “qualia.” When you have an experience — when you watch a sunset, listen to your favorite band play your favorite song, smell a cappuccino, and so on — there’s something it’s like for you to have that experience. It’s just not clear why. Philosopher David Chalmers, who identified this as the “hard problem,” put it this way: “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” Are you confident that this model also reproduces the qualia — the what it’s like — for these A.I.s?
I do think so, yes. Behaviorally, our A.I.s are quite similar. When we confront them with other A.I.s who can hurt them — in predator-prey scenarios, for example — they don’t like to get hurt. Whenever one A.I. hits another A.I., whose pain sensors go up — this is something that the second A.I. can learn to predict and avoid, say, by hiding behind the curtain, or the equivalent in the simulation. So, of course, from the behavior of the agent, you see that it doesn’t like that.
That’s what we have seen for a long time. Our A.I.s try to avoid pain, and they try to maximize pleasure — including fun, or internal joy, from insights into patterns — because they have a built-in utility function or reward function that they want to maximize. Humans also have such a reward function, already built-in as babies. And the behavior of these artificial beings is at least qualitatively similar to what we see in higher level animals, or in humans, and so on. So there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this is not replicable.
It’s almost like you’ve invented a new language for discussing our own minds. When you introspect, do you think as if you were a computer? Are you thinking, “My higher level brain is dealing with this problem, while my lower level brain is running through these automatic processes?” Do you introspect in that way?
Yeah. I often think about whether these insights, derived from first principles, whether I can rediscover them in my own thinking, and I believe I can, although I am aware that many people have been fooled by introspection. But it seems pretty obvious to me: That’s more or less what I’m doing. To me, it’s not obvious that there is a need for something else to explain consciousness. I’m pretty convinced that all the basic ingredients to understand consciousness are there, and have been there for a quarter-century. It’s just that people in neuroscience who maybe don’t know so much about what is going on in artificial neural network research, they are not yet so aware of these simple basic principles. But I’m sure they will learn more about that. At least that’s what I’m hoping is going to happen.
Recently in New York, I spoke about this at a conference about ethics and A.I. I replied to a provocative question from the audience by repeating more or less what I have told smaller audiences since the 1980s: “I have to make a confession: My company is making androids. I am a prototype. I may not have consciousness, but I am good at faking it.”
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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