UFO sightings beaming up -- as are explanations

Quebec led country with 38.5 per cent of reports

{ http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/ }

Bijlagen:
2016data.pdf (189.4 KB)   
2016essay (4).pdf (102.7 KB)   

REVEALED: THESE are the world’s best places to spot an ALIEN

ALIENS can be tricky to pin down, but heading to these extraterrestrial hot spots will give you the best chance of having a close encounter with a UFO.

31-03-2017 om 21:17 geschreven door peter  

Bright lights, light-fingered aliens: all part of annual report on UFO sightings

A handout photo of a sketch of a UFO reportedly observed in Falcon Lake, Man. in 1967.

{ http://www.ctvnews.ca/ }

31-03-2017 om 21:02 geschreven door peter  

 Brit Rockstar Reveals Encounters With Aliens After Sighting UFOs

A musician has shared the story of his unexpected encounters with aliens, as well as physic communication with ETs.

Famous British rocker Dave Davies, 70, claimed he first observed UFOs in northern Devon sky.  The Kinks guitarist, who is a believer of life in space, even stated aliens have already made contact with humans.

He further said that the government has knowledge of extraterrestrial life, but did not comment on the alleged wide-scale cover-up.

The revelations have come after Apollo astronaut Alan Bean disclosed that he believes aliens exist out there.

The rock musician, however, does not think extraterrestrials have touched down on Earth.

According to Davies, he began receiving physic impressions or communications from ETs after seeing them in the sky.

Davies told in an interview that he had several experiences of seeing UFOs and they were interesting. He shared his UFO sightings in north Devon, England where he spotted lights and zigzags in the skies.

Rolling Stone Magazine named Davies as one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. He collaborated with Ray Davies, older brother, in The Kinks.

Dave explained that after experiencing with a UFO, he has been keeping those feelings, and then getting into his subconscious and super-conscious.

He continued that he started to understand those feelings when he got into ufology.

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

31-03-2017 om 20:55 geschreven door peter  

UFOs Showing Up All Around Guys House! March 30, 2017, UFO Sighting News.

Above I added contrast, below is original untouched. 

Date of sighting: March 30, 2017

Location of sighting: Unknown

 

From the sound of it, I would say this UFO was seen in Scotland or England, but not sure on that. Still there eyewitness posted it yesterday and is fantastic! He catches several UFOs and as he is talking and says hello to a second one, the UFO hesitates, as if it can hear him, or read his thoughts, then continues on its way following the other. 

I will ask him where he recorded this, and will update soon.

Scott C. Waring

{ http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

31-03-2017 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

Multiple UFOs caught on tape over Atlanta, Georgia 29-Mar-2017

This UFO video was filmed in the sky above Atlanta in Georgia on Wednesday, 29th March 2017.

Witness report:

The video was shot on an iPhone around 3am on March 29, 2017. For perspective, the camera is shooting south (from NW side of Atlanta). It was 5 orange lights in a “V” formation with one blue light underneath. There were a few other orange lights that flanked the main formation and possibly one in the distance beyond the rest. It’s hard to see clearly because we were filming through the wood line. 
Once the lights moved into formation, we heard helicopters coming from the north and moving south — but we couldn’t see them. They sounded like they were flying in big circles, and they did that for hours (until I had to leave). The lights moved slightly up and down every so often but always stayed in formation. What I saw with my eyes was very different than on the footage. Very weird. 
There was no info online talking about why the helicopters were circling all night. That is also weird. Atlanta PD and all the news outlets are very good about letting us know that kind of stuff.

Author (source: MUFON)

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

31-03-2017 om 20:21 geschreven door peter  

Physicist Warns Aliens are Here and Plan to Quarantine Earth

 Paul Seaburn

He has BS and MS degrees in Physics from University of Chicago. As a nuclear physicist for a number of major corporations and military contractors, he worked on secret projects to build nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants to be used in outer space. He was the first civilian to investigate the Roswell UFO incident and has since become known as the Father of Roswell and the Flying Saucer Physicist. Is this enough to believe Stanton T. Friedman when he gives this kind of warning to his fellow Earthlings?

I think they are here. I think they are here to quarantine us, keep us from going out there. With our track record – we’re evil.

Uh-oh. In a new interview, Stanton Friedman addresses the recent Wikileaks releases of formerly-classified CIA documents on UFO sightings around the world. He believes these documents should tell everyone else what he already knows.

We have enough to prove without a shadow of a doubt that Planet Earth is being visited [by aliens].

Do we? Even if the redacted portions of those documents were revealed, it doesn’t seem they contain the “beyond a shadow of a doubt” missing link. Perhaps he’s implying that someone or some organization is keeping that crucial piece of information from us.

This is kept from people because who would want the world in upheaval? There would be mass panic and distress.

He’s right about that. Just the announcement of a potential big snowstorm can cause mass panic. Imagine what a prediction of a 50% chance of alien encounters would do. But this time, Friedman reveals that it’s not governments that are keeping the truth from us, it’s the aliens already on Earth themselves.

If they (the aliens) want to make themselves known, it’s easy – they will.

How much more evil do we have to get for this to happen? Are they secretly sabotaging space travel already? Elon Musk might think so after the problems SpaceX has encountered. Or perhaps they have infiltrated the space program and stopped the return of humans to the moon and any exploration beyond. Is Friedman warning the current administration and private space corporations to back off on going to Mars? Or is he predicting a military conflict that will be caused by the first verified revelation that a nation has reverse-engineered alien technology?

The first country to replicate [alien] technology will rule the roost if they can build it. It’s political too – the US says ‘are we ready to put out anything if the Russians don’t or the Chinese don’t.

Would that trigger a war? Probably. Would it trigger the alien “quarantine” Friedman warns about? Who knows? What would that look like? Armed aliens guarding all of the world’s major launch pads? A Dyson sphere around the planet to keep us in?

Friedman has a long history with military and government contractors and in the field of ufology. Is it time for doubters to start listening to him a little more closely?

 TAGS: alien, CIA, flying saucer, nasa, quarantine, reverse engineering, Roswell, Science, secret documents, space, Stanton Friedman, Stanton T. Friedman, technology, ufo, UFO files, Ufologists, Ufology

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/  }

31-03-2017 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

The Strange Sounds of Stars Reveal Origins of the Universe

 Brett Tingley

Despite the epic THX-mastered theatrics of science fiction soundtracks, space is a cold, airless vacuum in which sound does not travel. Nevertheless, celestial objects still produce their own sounds which can sometimes be heard within their own atmospheres or with special instruments. Just as a star’s or planet’s physical composition can reveal much information about its history, so too can the sounds that they emit. To pioneer the study of these sounds, researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney have devised a method of recording and analyzing the sounds coming from the insides of stars in order to reveal their cosmic origin stories.

Each star technically has its own unique sound that could be used to identify it.

The team of astrophysicists used NASA’s Kepler space observatory to record ‘starquakes’ – the massive, turbulent oscillations of energy and plasma inside the hearts of 48 different Red Giant stars in two clusters. Using these otherwordly sounds alone, the researchers were able to correctly determine the directions of each of the stars’ spins. According to UNSW Sydney’s Dennis Stello, this approach could open up completely new avenues of sound-based astronomical research:

Just as seismologists use earthquakes to understand the interior of our planet, we use starquakes to understand the interior of stars. Our new study provides the first evidence that this approach is a powerful way to gain insights into processes that occurred billions of years ago, close to the beginning of the universe.

The authors of this research published in Nature Astronomy claim that the spins of close to 70% of the stars studied in each cluster were closely aligned, meaning that they likely preserved some of their initial directions and momentum after the violent celestial explosions which created them:

It’s remarkable that the imprint of these initial conditions can still be seen billions of years later, by studying tiny oscillations in stars that are many light years away.

It’s a mystifying thought: the songs of the stars are like the soundtrack of the very origin of the universe. Sounds like one hell of a prog rock concept album if you ask me. 

In some ways, the sound of the Big Bang is still being sung by the universe’s oldest stars.

 TAGS: Astronomy, Kepler space telescope, nasa, Science, sky sounds, sound, sound of space, space, star alignment, star measurements, starquakes, stars, strange sounds

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-03-2017 om 01:27 geschreven door peter  

Spinach Leaves Used to Grow Human Heart

 MJ Banias

A study published this month in the journal Biomaterials has proven once again that spinach is basically the best superfood to ever exist. A team of scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro have successfully used spinach leaves to grow human heart tissue.

While 3D printing definitely has a future in the medical sciences, the technology is still too new and does not have the ability to generate the intricate vascular systems a human heart needs in order to pump blood effectively. In simple terms, 3D printers can give you sledgehammers when you need needle points. However, using existing biological material, such as a plant, does provide the intricate vein system required, but trying to grow human tissue inside a plant is basically impossible. The trick is keeping the veins, but getting rid of the plant.

 

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

The authors of the paper wrote,

Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures… The development of decellularized plants for scaffolding opens up the potential for a new branch of science that investigates the mimicry between plant and animal.

So how did the research team keep the intricate vein system needed? Detergent. Using spinach leaves, the team bathed the leafy salad greens in chemical detergents to remove its plant cells, but maintain the cellulose, the fibrous building block of plants. More importantly, cellulose is biocompatible which means that animal cells can build upon it as effectively as plant cells can. Infact, many medical practices already use plant based cellulose in healing wounds and mending cartilage.

Once the leaf’s plant cells were completely removed, all that remained was the cellulose vein structure of the spinach. The team then immersed the ex-spinach into a bath of human cells, and allowed the cells to form around the veins, creating a sort of mini heart. Once the human cells latched onto and successfully grew around the veins of the spinach leaf, the team pumped fluid and microbeads through the vein system to simulate blood flow. As it turns out, the spinach veins handled the concoction perfectly.

While the team admits there is still plenty of work to be done, the use of plant based cellulose in the production of organs, such as hearts, is incredibly efficient, inexpensive, and has almost no environmental impact compared to creating synthetic organs from plastic or other human made materials. The team concludes by explaining that,

By exploiting the benign chemistry of plant tissue scaffolds, we could address the many limitations and high costs of synthetic, complex composite materials. Plants can be easily grown using good agricultural practices and under controlled environments. By combining environmentally friendly plant tissue with perfusion-based decellularization, we have shown that there can be a sustainable solution for pre-vascularized tissue engineering scaffolds.

In other words, your next heart could be a nice leafy green grown by good old Mother Nature. Until then, keep eating your veggies kids, they are better for you than you know.

 

 TAGS: biology, medicine, organs, spinach, technology

31-03-2017 om 01:18 geschreven door peter  

UFO and secret alien base reports found in declassified U.S. Forest Service documents

The UFO files of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) have been declassified. There are 20 pages in the files, and although there is a dubious claim about the construction of a secret alien base and an unconvincing UFO photo, there is an interesting UFO report from U.S. Air Force personnel at a radar station in Montana.

The Forest Service UFO files were obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by John Greenewald. Greenewald runs TheBlackVault.com, a site that houses over one million declassified files obtained via FOIA requests.

Greenewald says he made the request in November, 2016 and received the files in February, 2017.

UFO Photo in Bighorn National Forest

The first report in the file is a letter and photographs from a man who says he caught something “very strange” in a photograph he took while visiting Lost Twin Lakes in Bighorn National Forest. The witness says he did not see or hear anything unusual while taking the picture, but he noticed an odd object in one of the photos when he reviewed them later. He speculates that perhaps it is a drone, but also says he did some research and did not find any drones that looked like the object in the image.

The marker shows the location of Lost Twin Lakes in Bighorn National Forest.

(Credit: Google Maps)

The photograph was taken at about 2:30 pm on September 12, 2015.

Images of unidentified object at Bighorn National Forest provided to U.S. Forest Service.

(Credit: U.S. Forest Service)

It is hard to make out what exactly the object in the image is, but the USFS files did not include a high resolution image. Greenewald says he did inquire if higher resolution images were available, but they were not.

Enlargement of object in photo.

(Credit: U.S. Forest Service)

Without better images, this blob of light and shadows could be anything, and is likely a bird in flight. Often vacation photos with weird objects that were not noted at the time of their taking turn out to be birds or bugs that look strange in photographs once they are reviewed back home.

The USFS did not include their response to the UFO photog, or if they responded at all.

UFO Sighting at Yaak Air Force Station in Kootenai National Forest

Following the UFO photos letter and was a copy of an article regarding Yaak Air Base. According to the article, Yaak Air Base was in operation from April, 1952 to July, 1960, as part of a number of stations throughout the country that served as an early warning system during the cold war in case of a potential Russian attack. The base was near Yaak, Montana, in the Kootenai National Forest.

Location of Yaak Air Base as described in the article.

(Credit: Google Maps)

For our purposes, the most interesting paragraph in the article is the last, and in the file provided to Greenewald, is highlighted in yellow.

It reads:

The Yaak Radar Station also had its share of mystery, on Sept. 1 , 1952, Yaak, Montana. 4:45 a.m: Two USAF enlisted men, and three men using AN/FPS-3 radar set. Report visually sighting two small, varicolored lights becoming black silhouettes at dawn, and flying erratically for one hour. The crew at the radar station saw a, “dark, cigar shaped object,” right where the radar had the UFO pinpointed. What these people saw is a mystery to this day.

This is my favorite part of the USFA UFO files. Unfortunately, no further information is provided.

Alien Base Construction in Tonto National Forest

The most sensational claim in the files, and the one picked up by silly UK tabloids, is a report of a secret government installation being constructed that has something to do with aliens. The subject of the report is “Secret govt installation being built in the Salt River Canyon area on the TNF [Tonto National Forest].”

Area of alleged construction of secret government base that has some relation to aliens that eat people.

(Credit: Google Maps)

What is scary is that this is not far from my house. However, it does make it less scary for me that I do not believe an alien base was actually built there.

Here is a report regarding the call that was taken by David of the Forest Service on the morning of December 30, 2013 regarding UFOs, aliens and one detached head.

David received a call this morning at the front desk from a male caller reporting the construction of a secret government installation upstream from the Salt River Canyon past Pinal Creek (upstream from Roosevelt Lake). Aliens and at least one detached head are involved.

Caller claims to have seen construction cranes coming out the side of the cliffs, miniature stealth planes and UFOs, aliens and people working together at the site, aliens eating people. He found a severed head and claims to have pictures of some of this stuff.

Caller reported that he is 60, not crazy, and doesn’t do drugs. He said he had already called the “office at the lake,” but he didn’t know if those people were turning the other cheek or maybe those people have been paid off.

David had him leave a message with Bray.

Please let me know if t here are any Talking Points to be developed. I’m sure the Phoenix media will be all over this.

Thanks.

P.S. David and I aren’t doing drugs either.

The only other item in the files was a report in 2012 of a meteor or space junk that landed in George Washington & Jefferson National Forests and caused a fire. It was determined the fire was caused by a lightning strike. The report states, “Witnesses saw flaming space junk or satellite crash land in these mountains [Massanutten Range, Virginia] which may have caused the forest fire of last year: June 24, 2012, at around 1150PM Sunday.”

You can check out the files yourself at TheBlackVault.com.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

31-03-2017 om 01:04 geschreven door peter  

Star Wars: US Must Prep for Space Battles, Commander Says

The United States needs to make clear that it's ready and able to fight a war that extends into space, a top military official said.

Such a "preparation without provocation" strategy would both protect American space assets and help prevent conflicts from flaring up in the final frontier, said Navy Vice Adm. Charles A. Richard, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).

"Just as nuclear assets deter aggression by convincing potential adversaries there's just no benefit to the attack, we have to maintain a space posture that communicates the same strategic message," Richard said on March 22 during a presentation at a Center for Strategic and International Studies conference in Washington, D.C. [The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Concepts]

"I submit [that] the best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war, and we're going to make sure that everyone knows we're going to be prepared to fight and win wars in all domains, to include space," he added.

The United States has long ruled "the ultimate high ground" of space, launching sharp-eyed satellites and other high-tech gear that have given the nation critical advantages on the battlefield. But that supremacy is under threat today, Richard said, citing reports that both China and Russia are developing a range of advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) technologies.

Indeed, space is no longer the "benign environment" it used to be, he said.

"While we're not at war in space, I don't think we can say we're exactly at peace, either," Richard said.

This changed situation in orbit is part of a larger struggle for control that's playing out around the globe, he added.

"Major power competition is back on the table in a way that we have not seen in the world for perhaps 15 or 20 years," Richard said. "That applies in all domains."

The United States should work to deter not just conflict, but also "bad behavior" in space, such as the 2007 Chinese ASAT test that created 3,400 new pieces of trackable orbital debris, Richard added.

"Our goal ultimately is to promote secure access to space so it can be explored for generations to come," he said. "While we view space as just another domain — like land, air, sea and cyber — it is still something special. It is still a domain that people look up to and dream. And it's USSTRATCOM's job to help keep it that way."

You can watch Richard's entire presentation here.

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

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Manned Orbiting Laboratory: Secrets of a US Military Space Station (Infographic)
  • XS-1: A US Military Space Plane in Pictures (Gallery)
    • Gallery: Declassified US Spy Satellite Photos & Designs

{http://www.space.com/ }

31-03-2017 om 00:54 geschreven door peter  

Lost in Space: How Mars' Atmosphere Evaporated Away

Mars may have once possessed an atmosphere about as thick as Earth's, but then lost most of it to space due to solar wind and ultraviolet rays, a new study found.

The new finding could shed light on the habitability of not just early Mars, but also distant worlds, researchers said.

Mars is currently a frigid desert world with extremely thin air. The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface is on average only about one-hundredth to one-thousandth that on Earth at sea level. (In comparison, the atmospheric pressure at the highest point on Earth's surface, the top of Mount Everest, is about one-third that on Earth at sea level.) [The Search for Water on Mars in Pictures]

In the thin air of Mars, water easily boils. Still, previous research has unearthed ample evidence that Mars was once covered in water, with features resembling dry riverbeds and minerals that could have formed only in the presence of water. This suggests that the Martian atmosphere was once much thicker than it is today, with seas that could have supported life billions of years ago.

To learn more about how the atmosphere of Mars has changed over time, scientists in the new study analyzed data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission. They focused on argon, a gas that almost never chemically reacts with other elements.

The researchers examined two different isotopes of argon: the lighter argon-36 and the heavier argon-38. Each isotope of an element has different numbers of neutrons; for instance, argon-36 possesses 18 neutrons in its nucleus, while argon-38 has 20.

Argon-36 is more plentiful than its heavier counterpart, argon-38, at higher altitudes. This makes the lighter isotope more susceptible to getting stripped from the atmosphere by solar ultraviolet rays and by high-energy winds composed of particles from the sun.

The concentrations of the two argon isotopes at different heights in the Martian atmosphere suggest that 66 percent of Mars' argon has disappeared from there since the Red Planet formed, the researchers said. "The escape of gas to space might have played a major role, if not the major role, in changing the climate of Mars over time," said study lead author Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Using this data on argon loss, the scientists then estimated the amount of other gases that Mars had lost the same way. Their findings suggested that the Martian atmosphere was thick with carbon dioxide, with the atmospheric pressure of this gas on Mars about the same as the atmospheric pressure of air on Earth at sea level, the study said.

Carbon dioxide is a "greenhouse gas," meaning it traps heat and can help warm planets. The loss of this carbon dioxide from the Red Planet may "tell us why the surface of Mars could have gone from habitable in ancient times to not being able to support life today," Jakosky told Space.com.

In addition, "we've identified a set of processes that might tell us more in general about the habitability of planets around other stars," he said.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• How Did Mars Lose Its Atmosphere? MAVEN Aims To Find Out | Video
• Photos: NASA's MAVEN Mission to Mars
• Boron Found On Mars For First Time By Curiosity Rover | Video
• NASA's MAVEN Mission to Mars: 10 Surprising Facts

{ http://www.space.com/ }

31-03-2017 om 00:43 geschreven door peter  

Europe's ExoMars Rover Will Land in 1 of These 2 Spots on Mars in 2021

Mission managers have narrowed the landing-site candidates for the ExoMars 2020 rover down to two finalists, European Space Agency (ESA) officials announced today (March 28).

The life-hunting rover and its accompanying stationary platform will touch down at either Oxia Planum or Mawrth Vallis, two locations in Mars' northern hemisphere that harbor evidence of long-ago liquid water activity.

Neither site has been visited by a robotic explorer to date, though Mawrth Vallis was once a candidate for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. (NASA ended up selecting the huge Gale Crater, inside which Curiosity landed in August 2012). [Photos: Europe's ExoMars Missions to Mars in Pictures]

"Both candidate sites would explore a period of ancient Martian history that hasn't been studied by previous missions," Jorge Vago, ESA's ExoMars rover project scientist, said in a statement.

A third site, called Aram Dorsum, had been under consideration as well. But Oxia Planum was selected for further study back in 2015, and Mawrth Vallis emerged as the second finalist after a recent two-day meeting attended by ExoMars team members and other Mars experts from academia and industry, ESA officials said.

"While all three sites under discussion would give us excellent opportunities to look for signatures of ancient biomarkers and gain new insights into the planet's wetter past, we can only carry two sites forward for further detailed analysis," Vago said.

Mission team members will continue studying the two finalist sites, assessing them from both a scientific and engineering perspective. This latter work will attempt to ensure that the ExoMars 2020 rover comes down in a safe, flat spot free of dangerous boulders. (Mission managers aim to guide the rover down inside a landing ellipse 75 miles long by 12 miles wide, or 120 by 19 kilometers.)  

The final decision will likely be made about a year before the rover's planned 2020 launch, ESA officials said.

The rover and landing platform make up the second part of the two-phase ExoMars program, a project led by ESA with help from Roscosmos, Russia's federal space agency. The first part, which launched in March 2016, consisted of the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and Schiaparelli, a landing demonstrator designed to prove out technologies required for the rover's 2021 touchdown.

TGO made it to orbit safely on Oct. 19, but Schiaparelli crashed that same day.

The ExoMars 2020 rover will study the habitability of Mars and search for signs of past or present life. Part of its work will involve drilling up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) beneath the surface to collect samples shielded from the harsh Martian radiation environment.

Instruments aboard the stationary landing platform, for their part, "will provide context imaging at the landing site, and long-term climate monitoring and atmospheric investigations," ESA officials wrote in the statement.

TGO is currently working its way toward its final science orbit. Later this year, the orbiter should begin searching the Martian atmosphere for methane and other gases that could be signs of Red Planet life. The spacecraft will also serve as a communications link for the ExoMars rover and its handlers back on Earth.

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

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)
• Deeper Drill Destined For Red Planet - ExoMars 2018 | Video
• ExoMars Going Forward - Continuing Mission and Lander Crash Explained | Video

{ http://www.space.com/ }

31-03-2017 om 00:34 geschreven door peter  

Father-of-two spots a fleet of incredible multi-coloured UFO-shaped clouds hovering in the skies above Swansea

• Miles Davis, 49, was driving when he spotted the UFO-shaped clouds in the skies above Morriston in Swansea 
• Lenticular clouds are more or less isolated clouds, which form in the lowest level of the Earth's atmosphere 
• On account of their shapes, lenticular clouds are often mistakenly identified as Unidentified Flying Objects

By Amie Gordon For Mailonline

A father-of-two chanced upon an unusual meteorological sighting - as he spotted a fleet of UFO-shaped clouds in the sky. 

Miles Davis was driving through the town centre of Morriston, Swansea, when he spotted the spaceship-shaped formations.

The 49-year-old stopped his car and grabbed a camera to capture the natural spectacle - which he says looked 'like something out of a 50s' sci-fi film'.

Miles Davis was driving through the town centre of Morriston, Swansea, when he spotted the spaceship-shaped formations

Mr Davis, a full time carer for his wife, said: 'We had had interesting clouds all day after blanket grey for days on end. 

'But these particular clouds didn't pop up until later on in the afternoon.

'I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. 

'I was driving through town when I spotted them and I stopped as soon as it was safe so I could jump out my car and get some pictures.

'They do look very UFO like even if you don't have much of an imagination and the lighting was giving them this technicolour hue.

'They look like something out of a 1950s sc-fi B-movie with a limited budget, like a bad painting of UFOs. It was incredible.

'Trying to get my phone camera to focus on something thousands of miles away was tough but I'm really glad I got the photos. 

'Everyone I've shown them to has really liked them and my wife thinks they're great.

'I wasn't keeping an eye on the local news that day so I'm not aware of any claims but I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people thought they'd experienced a UFO sighting.

'One guy I spoke to said he saw the same clouds over the valleys which is 25 - 30 miles away. 

'They stuck around for a good few hours before they broke up or moved on.'

The lenticular clouds - lens-shaped clouds that form in the troposphere - are renowned for being confused for UFOs throughout history. 

The 49-year-old stopped his car and grabbed a camera to capture the natural spectacle - which he says looked 'like something out of a 50s' sci-fi film'

The clouds are a rare spectacle and a treat for Mr Davis, who is a keen cloud spotter.

He said: 'Some days I will take up to ten photos a day. As soon as the weather is nice, I can just sit and watch the clouds go by, changing from one moment to the next.

'I can lose myself for a good few minutes, getting a stiff neck looking up and people pass by wondering why that idiot is looking up.'

{ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html }

30-03-2017 om 23:51 geschreven door peter  

Inventing tools for detecting life elsewhere

 by Whitney Clavin

Recently, astronomers announced the discovery that a star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven Earth-size planets. Three of the planets reside in the "habitable zone," the region around a star where liquid water is most likely to exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Other potentially habitable worlds have also been discovered in recent years, leaving many people wondering: How do we find out if these planets actually host life?

At Caltech, in the Exoplanet Technology Laboratory, or ET Lab, of Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet, researchers have been busy developing a new strategy for scanning exoplanets for biosignatures—signs of life such as oxygen molecules and methane. These chemicals—which don't naturally stick around for long because they bind with other chemicals—are abundant on Earth largely thanks to the living creatures that expel them. Finding both of these chemicals around another planet would be a strong indicator of the presence of life.

In two new papers to be published in the Astrophysical Journal and the Astronomical Journal, Mawet's team demonstrates how this new technique, called high-dispersion coronagraphy, could be used to look for extraterrestrial biosignatures with the planned Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which, when completed by the late 2020s, will be the world's largest optical telescope.

Using theoretical and laboratory models, the researchers show that this technique could detect biosignatures on Earth-like planets around M-dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than our sun and the most common type of star in the galaxy. The strategy could also be used on stars like our own sun, using future space telescopes such as NASA's proposed Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) and Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR).

"We've shown this technique works in theory and in the lab, so our next step is to show it works on the sky," says Ji Wang, one of the lead authors on the two new papers and a postdoctoral scholar in the Mawet lab. The team will test the instrumentation on the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii this year or next.

The new technique involves three main components: a coronagraph, a set of optical fibers, and a high-resolution spectrometer. Coronagraphs are devices used in telescopes to block or remove starlight so that planets can be imaged. Stars outshine their planets by a few thousand to a few billion times, making the planets difficult to see. Many different types of coronagraphs are in development; for example, Mawet's group recently installed and took initial images with its new vortex coronagraph on the Keck Observatory.

Once an image of a planet has been obtained, the next step is to study the planet's atmosphere using a spectrometer, an instrument that breaks apart the planet's light to reveal "fingerprints" of chemicals, such as oxygen and methane. Most coronagraphs work in conjunction with low-resolution spectrometers. Mawet's new technique incorporates a high-resolution spectrometer, which has several advantages.

One main advantage is in helping to further sift out the unwanted starlight. With high-resolution spectrometers, the spectral features of a planet are more detailed, making it easier to distinguish and separate the planet's light from the lurking starlight.

What this means is that, in Mawet's method, the coronagraph does not have to be as good at sifting out starlight as was thought necessary to characterize Earth-like worlds.

"This new technique doesn't require the coronagraph to work as hard, and that's important because we can use current technologies that are already available," says Mawet, who is also a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech for NASA. "With a high-resolution spectrometer, we can improve the sensitivity of our system by a factor of 100 to 1,000 over current ground-based methods."

Another advantage of using high-resolution spectrometers lies in the richness of the data. In addition to providing more detail about the molecular constituents of a planet's atmosphere, these instruments should be able to reveal a planet's rotation rate and provide rough maps of surface features and weather patterns. "It's a long shot, but we might even have the ability to look for continents on candidate Earth-like planets," says Mawet.

In the team's design, the coronagraph is connected to the high-resolution spectrometer using a set of optical fibers. Surprisingly, laboratory experiments revealed that the fibers also filter out starlight.

"This was completely serendipitous," says Garreth Ruane, co-author on the two new papers and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Mawet's group. "It's icing on the cake."

Next, the researchers will demonstrate their technique at the Keck Observatory. Although the instrumentation cannot yet study potential Earth-like planets—that will require the larger Thirty Meter Telescope—the system should be able to reveal new details about the atmospheres of larger gas exoplanets, including exotic varieties that are nothing like those in our own solar system.

"This new innovation of combining the coronagraph with a high-res spectrometer gives us a clear pathway to ultimately search for life beyond Earth."

 Explore further: Keck Observatory planet imager delivers first science

More information: Observing Exoplanets with High Dispersion Coronagraphy. I. The scientific potential of current and next-generation large ground and space telescopes. arxiv.org/abs/1703.00582

Observing Exoplanets with High-Dispersion Coronagraphy. II. Demonstration of an Active Single-Mode Fiber Injection Unit. arxiv.org/abs/1703.00583 

{ https://phys.org/ }

30-03-2017 om 23:36 geschreven door peter  

Chilean government releases video of disturbing UFO sighting

By JAKE ELLISON, SPECIAL TO SEATTLEPI.COM

• 

This is a screen grab from a YouTube videopublished by “ufosontherecord” taken on Nov. 11, 2014, by a Chilean Navy helicopter (Airbus Cougar AS-532) equipped with an infrared FLIR high-definition camera,

... more

A video from a helicopter flown by the Chilean navy showing an unidentified flying object releasing something into the atmosphere has been confirmed by an agency in the Chilean government to be official and unexplained so far.

"The incident remains open as we cannot be absolutely certain of its nature, contrary to other incidents whose nature has been proved," said Jose Patricio Lay Lagos, acting director of CEFAA, which is an agency within Chile's DGAC (an agency similar to the FAA but part of the Chilean Air Force).

According to the official report, translated here by Google:

On November 11, 2014, a helicopter from the Chilean Navy (Airbus Cougar AS-532), equipped with an infrared FLIR high-definition camera, was patrolling in the coastal sector between the port of San Antonio and Quinteros a At 16.48 UTC, when the camera operator detected an unknown object, apparently flying at a constant speed similar to that of the helicopter, and moving forward.

The sighting was visually confirmed by the two officers who made up the crew (pilot and camera operator) and lasted more than 10 minutes.

Officers questioned Air Traffic Control whose radar failed to detect the object.

They also received no response from the unknown traffic when trying to interrogate it in the frequency prepared for these cases.

The DGAC's radar control system failed to capture the object but confirmed, in turn, the absence of authorized traffic in the vicinity of the helicopter.

The video shot by the helicopter crew was released on Jan. 5, as reported in a lengthy exploration of the encounter in the Huffington Post. The videos below were published with that Huffington Post story, which Lay said was "the real version," and embedded from YouTube.

His agency, Lay said, is not seeing UFOs everywhere or jumping to wild conclusions when it runs into one.

"For your information," he wrote in an email exchange, "the Committee's scientific group, all doctorates in diverse disciplines, from Astronomy to Physics, they are all Skeptics. That is of great help for us to keep our feet firmly on the ground and not get carried away by ufologists at large."

Here are three videos clips of the main points of interest in the longer video above.

And,

"The incident did not cause any particular reaction," Lay said. "In Chile the phenomenon is regarded in a natural way, without fuzz or secrecy." He said the pilots didn't make any statements about the sighting. "They just handed over the video and described the situation as rather unusual," he said.

The journalist who broke the story on Huffington Post, Leslie Kean, wrote that several explanations of the UFO as an aircraft discharging water or other liquid waste have been shot down by the Chilean agency.

The agency wrote:

On two occasions, the object seems to throw a trail of some element that could not be specified.

Some analysts have suggested the hypothesis that it is a medium-sized line aircraft and that the stelae of the detachable element may be the reserve water inside the apparatus, thrown by the crew. However, meteorology asserts that neither the altitude at which the object moved, nor the ambient temperature of that moment, allowed such a wake of condensation.

The object disappeared lost in the clouds.

Kean added in her story "Groundbreaking UFO Video Just Released By Chilean Navy":

Data from the various reports eliminate other conventional explanations. Meteorologists determined that no weather balloons were in the sky at that time, and noted that a balloon would not move horizontally along with the plane because the wind was blowing from the west towards the shore. Comparing the footage to similar IR satellite imagery with known temperature values, they stated that the object's temperature must have been higher than 122 degrees F (50 C). The object was not a drone; all drones require registration with the DGAC and whenever flown, the DGAC is informed, just like it is with aircraft. Also, radar would register drones. CEFAA staff went up the chain of command to a Navy Admiral who informed them that there were no joint Naval exercises underway with the US or any other country. The Admiral confirmed that this could not have been a US drone, or any type of espionage or secret vehicle from a foreign country.

Whatever the craft was, it's fairly disturbing to wonder just what it was releasing into the atmosphere. Of course, there's no end of conspiracies about contrails ...

But hey, happy skywatching!

{ http://www.seattlepi.com/ }

30-03-2017 om 23:23 geschreven door peter  

30-03-2017 om 23:09 geschreven door peter  

Are mysterious 'aliens' on their way to Hertfordshire after being heard in Nottingham and the USA?

Have you spotted a UFO over Hertfordshire-

Hertfordshire residents should be on the look out for mystery 'alien' noises which have been heard in the UK.

READ MORE: UFOs in Hertfordshire - we reveal the calls made to police regarding aliens

The 24-year-old marketing worker sent the video to the Nottingham Post.

He told them: "I was amazed I actually managed to get it recorded.

"It was going on for about five or 10 minutes before I started recording and then it carried on for about another 30 minutes.

"It was coming from the direction of the Victoria Centre but from the sky. I was at home with my partner and we could both hear it - it was really weird."

The eerie sounds have been heard at all different times and locations for almost a decade.

The first video of the noise was in posted in 2008 when a user recorded the night sky in Belarus.

That same year, another anonymous user shared the 'ear-deafening' sounds that they insisted 'were not a hoax,' from a quiet neighbourhood believed to be in the U.S.

{ http://www.hertfordshiremercury.co.uk/ }

30-03-2017 om 23:02 geschreven door peter  

Rectangle-shaped UFO described over California town

A California witness at Eureka stepped outside after hearing a loud, jet-like sound, and watched a rectangular-shaped object with odd lighting configuration crossing the sky, according to testimony in Case 81992 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

Witness illustration.

(Credit: MUFON)

The witness moved outside at 10:35 p.m. on February 9, 2017, after hearing jet sounds moving overhead.

“I heard a very loud jet, similar to a common commercial jet sound, except it was much louder,” the witness stated.“I went out the back door onto the deck to take a look. At first I couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. I turned around and scanned the sky behind me toward the east. I then saw what at first I took for a really huge jet, like maybe a military cargo jet, until I realized it couldn’t be, as it looked at first like it had two sets of wings stacked one on top of the other like a bi-plane.”

The witness then noticed the object had a pulsing red light in the center and two big, orange lights that seemed too far behind it for it to be a plane.

“At that point, I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ My wife heard me and came out. I pointed at the object. She tells me to hurry and grab my binoculars, so I ran inside and grabbed them, which took about 10 seconds. I came out and the object was further away than I thought it should be, as if it was speeding up.”

The object appeared to be rectangle-shaped.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The witness the looked through his binoculars at the object.

“I saw a very large, square, or possibly a home plate-shaped object. I perceived it to be fairly flat. There were several orange lights on it configured in a sort of arrow shape, and it had a red pulsing light in the center. The orange lights on it were illuminating the surface of the object, which was a light color. My thought was that the light configuration looked like a swept wing bomber jet from the 40s, and that it might be trying to look like a plane, except with the binoculars, I could clearly see there was surface area to it, where there shouldn’t be if it was a plane. It was clearly rectangular.”

The object did not look like anything the witness could identify.

“The lights that would’ve been the tail of the plane were too far back, and too wide for a plane as well. Those lights were actually on the rear corners of the object. It travelled west to east in a straight line. As it got further away, it seemed to accelerate due to how fast it disappeared into the distance, as compared to the standard passenger jet flying by every so often.”

The object seemed to be flat. Pictured: Eureka, California.

(Credit: Google)

The witness has seen similar objects in the past.

“This is the second time I’ve seen this type of object in the last year and-a-half or so. This time it was a lot higher, different light configuration, and traveling much faster, but the flight path was the same. It is rare to see large jets flying west to east in this area. I checked the website flightaware.com and there were no flights in the area except for a local commuter coming into our little airport. That plane was still quite a ways away still.”

Eureka is the principal city and county seat of Humboldt County in the Redwood Empire region of California, population 27,191. MUFON California Assistant State Director Devlin Rugne closed this case as an Unknown. Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made. The above quotes were edited for clarity. Please report UFO activity to MUFON.com.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

30-03-2017 om 22:55 geschreven door peter  

Life Outside Our Solar System Might Exist on Exomoons

As some scientists search for habitable planets outside our solar system, other researchers are tackling a similar question for the moons of these planets. So-called exomoons have yet to be found outside our solar system, and a detection could be a decade away — or more.

But scientists, writing in a new research paper, theorize a Mars-sized exomoon of a gas giant planet and ask whether or not liquid water could be found on its surface.

In our own solar system, the closest analog is Jupiter's Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system and about five-sixth the size of Mars.

Do you believe alien life exists elsewhere in the universe?

•  Yes - We may not have found them yet, but they're out there. 
•  No - Aliens are just part of science fiction. 
• I'm not sure 

  Get Results Share This

NASA confirmed in 2015 the presence of a liquid ocean on Ganymede after performing Hubble Space Telescope observations of the moon's auroras, which appear to rock back and forth less than expected with Jupiter's magnetic field. The space agency said the attenuation is likely due to a salty ocean under Ganymede's surface.

As for this theoretical Mars-sized exomoon, the picture is murky. The scientists considered energy sources such as stellar radiation (which changes as a function of distance to the star), the stellar reflected light from a Jupiter-sized planet on the moon, the planet's own thermal emission on the moon, and the tidal heating inside the moon that is generated due to the changing gravitational pull of the planet. (This tidal heating would be most pronounced if the moon had an eccentric orbit, like the volcanic moon Io has around Jupiter.)

RELATED: 'Habitable' Exoplanets Might Not Be Very Earth-Like After All

It's know that tidal heating rates decrease if a moon is molten inside, because lava creates an inherent negative feedback mechanism where the heating sort of switches off, and the moon cools down inside. This is called the "tidal thermostat effect," co-author of the paper Rene Heller said in an email. Heller is an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

"We investigate, for the first time, the interplay of all the possible exomoon heat sources as a function of various distances from the host star," he added. "Actually, we even consider two possible types of host stars: a sun-like star, and a red dwarf star (an M dwarf)."

For a sun-like star, the authors found that any moon around a gas giant beyond three astronomical units, or three Earth-sun distances, would have a high enough energy flux to stop the tidal thermostat effect from happening. But if the moon is volatile enough, it could have global volcanism — just like what we see on Io.

Heller described this situation as "dangerous" for organisms.

"They might have lots of liquid surface water, but their surfaces could at the same time be blotched with devastating volcanoes," he wrote. "Nevertheless, we illustrate that they could be habitable given the right amount of tidal heating, and we show at which distances to their planets these moons would need to be."

M-dwarfs are a common target for exoplanet searches because they are smaller and dimmer, making it easier to see planets passing across their surfaces, or the effect of planets tugging on the star itself. But for exomoons, it's even less clear how habitable they would be in such a system. "Moons cannot be stable in the very inner regions of the stellar habitable zone," Heller said.

The best examples for tidally heated bodies in our own solar system are all moons: Jupiter's Io and Europa, as well as Saturn's Enceladus. While Europa and Enceladus are strongly suspected to have oceans underneath an icy surface, Heller pointed out his research is more focused on habitability on the surface of the moon. A better analog, he said, might be Saturn's moon Titan — but with a much warmer surface. Titan has a thick orange atmosphere, as well as liquid hydrocarbon lakes.

"Due to observational selection effects, which will prefer big moons around low-mass planets, I think the first exomoon will be unlike anything we know from the solar system," Heller said.

RELATED: What Cassini's Daring Ring-Dive Around Saturn Could Tell Us About Uranus

"It could be a Mars-like thing around an Earth-like planet, or an Earth around a Neptune, at a distance to their star that could be similar to Mercury's distance from the Sun (sufficiently close so that we have enough transits to find it). It'll probably be something that will be incredible at first glance, like a planet around a pulsar or a hot Jupiter. I'm really curious to know what this object will be like."

While there are several new planet-hunting telescopes joining astronomy in the next decade, Heller said they are not optimized for exomoons. Searching for exomoons is financially risky and the payoff highly uncertain, which means it is likely to remain a low priority for the astronomical community.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a multi-purpose telescope which launches in 2018, is expected to look at only a few exoplanets — so its chances of finding an exomoon are low, Heller said. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which also launches next year, will only observe very short-period transiting planets. "These planets will be so close to their stars that any moon around the planet would be immediately flung out of the system by the stellar gravitational perturbations," Heller said.

Better other chances could come with the European Extremely Large Telescope, which is currently under construction, or CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite), another European space telescope.

"I know that some people in the CHEOPS Science Team are actively compiling strategies to go and search for moons around transiting planets in wider orbits," Heller said. But he added the "ultimate weapon" would likely be PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars), which will launch around 2024. It will conduct dedicated planet searches like the Kepler space telescope, but around more bright stars.

WATCH: We Found New Planets. No, You Can't Live There

Originally published on Seeker.

EDITOR'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life
• 13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens

{http://www.space.com/ }

30-03-2017 om 22:41 geschreven door peter