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...
30-04-2017
ISS Astronaut captured strange moving objects above Earth - ESA confused!
ISS Astronaut captured strange moving objects above Earth - ESA confused!
ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet aboard the International Space Station captured strange moving objects above Earth on April 17, 2017.
The video filmed by Pesquet was initially intended to record an electrical storm near the horizon, just above western US. But he did not only record the electrical storm but also two unidentified objects moving at high speed above the Earth.
The objects are consistent with intact objects, and were most likely satellites in operation however scientists from the ESA Space Debris Bureau were unable to confirm which satellites were captured in the video…If the objects were satellites at all.
Mars Trojans may be part of a planet that was destroyed long ago
Mars Trojans may be part of a planet that was destroyed long ago
Asteroid entourage
NASA
By Rebecca Boyle
Mars has an asteroid entourage, with nine so-called Trojans trailing in its wake. Now it seems these travelling companions all had the same violent beginning: as the innards of a mini-planet, eviscerated in a violent collision. Some remnants may even have been incorporated into the material that became Mars.
Trojans are distinct from the asteroids found in the asteroid belt, which begins about 101 million kilometres past Mars and stretches toward Jupiter. While Trojans orbit the sun, like the asteroid belt, they are trapped in gravitational sweet spots that ensure they will permanently trail or precede the planet in its trip around our star. These are known as Lagrange points.
Mars is the only rocky planet accompanied by Trojan asteroids in stable orbits. Occasionally, a passing asteroid can latch on to Earth’s gravity and temporarily trail the planet for a few thousand years, but Earth doesn’t have any permanent Trojans. They are common around Jupiter, which has about 6000. Neptune has 10.
True Trojans come from the material that was present when the planets were formed, says Apostolos Christou at the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in the UK. “The Trojans are really a relic from the early life of the solar system, when the planets were still forming.”
Trojan Eureka
In 2013, he was studying a Mars Trojan nicknamed Eureka when he spotted a group of asteroids accompanying it. They all seemed to occupy the same area in Mars’s orbital path, which was strong circumstantial evidence that they shared a common ancestor.
Previous research on Eureka showed it is rich in a mineral called olivine, which typically forms within the mantles of large rocky bodies, such as Earth and the other terrestrial planets. This implies the asteroid was once part of a bigger object, maybe even a planet, that has long since been destroyed. But asteroids like this are quite rare.
To find out if Eureka’s fellow Trojans also contained olivine, Christou studied the spectrum of sunlight that two of them reflected and found they did. This suggests that mantle material existed near Mars when it was forming. “These asteroids might well be samples of the original building blocks that came together to form Mars and the other terrestrial planets,” Christou and his co-authors say.
Shaved planet
It is also possible that the Trojans are pieces of Mars itself, shaved off the planet in its youth and still following in its wake, Christou says.
“If it turns out that some of the Trojans are pieces of Mars’s mantle, then presumably we can have sample return missions. You can go get a piece,” he says. “The number of Mars-related science questions you can ask, if you have a piece of its mantle in the lab, would be amazing.”
The Eureka Trojans could shed light on Mars’s past whether the asteroids originated in the planet or not, says Andrew Rivkin at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who studies asteroids. If they did come from Mars, their make-up would give clues about the planet’s interior and formation.
If not, they could still provide clues about where Mars might have been located in the solar system in the past; about collisions that carved out its giant craters; and about the natural history of Mars compared to that of Earth, Venus and Mercury.
“Then solar system dynamics researchers would have to look at it and say, ‘Here’s why Mars has this group of asteroids, and here’s why Earth doesn’t’,” says Rivkin. He adds that interest in Mars Trojans seems to spike every few years. “Hopefully in the next 10 years, we’ll get to have a spacecraft visit them.”
Bees are dying globally at an alarming rate, and to brace for an uncertain future, scientists are figuring out how to replace them with robots.
While bees aren't in immediate danger of going extinct, several species have been placed on the endangered species list. "In today's world," a researcher told the Christian Science Monitor last year, "it's harder to keep colonies alive than it was 20 years ago." Challenges range from habitat destruction to a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.
Enter Eijiro Miyako of the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science. A chemist, Miyako relied on a project from 2007 he had previously considered a failure: attempting to make a liquid electrical conductor, he ended up with an extremely stick gel. The gel sat unused for a decade, until Miyako began to wonder if it could be used to turn drones into bees by giving them a way to grab and transport pollen like a bee's body does.
Miyako's not the first person to have this idea. Engineers at Harvard have been working on RoboBees for years. Pollination, after all, is a crucial natural function, vital to mass fertilization of the Earth. The difference is mainly in cost. Rather than spend years developing a perfectly functioning robot, Miyako and his team simply bought tiny drones off the shelf at $100 a pop. They then applied horse hair to recreate a bee's fuzzy exterior, and after that applied Miyako's signature sticky gel.
Using Japanese lilies, Miyako and his team were able to use the drones to transfer pollen from one flower to another. The successful artificial pollination is promising. "The findings, which will have applications for agriculture and robotics, among others, could lead to the development of artificial pollinators and help counter the problems caused by declining honeybee populations," Miyako says.
As smart as it may seem, current artificial intelligence can only learn what we program it to learn. So far, those skills are often applied to learning how to playvideo games. But what if we introduced robots to the fundamentals of human awareness like pain and safety? Kurzgesagt takes a brief look at the philosophical questions behind such a choice, and it's heavy on the what-ifs.
The question of robotic self-awareness goes as far back the word "robot" itself: the 1920 Czech play R.U.Rthat introduced the term to the lexicon deals with a violent robotic uprising. The existence of a robotic consciousness, something created outside of original programming, would be the equivalent to the creation of an alien life form on Earth.
While Kurzgesagt mentions French philosopher René Descartes' thoughts on animal rights, the debate on the subject has gone back and forth for centuries. More recent arguments include those from Harvard philosopher Peter Singer, who has argued for equality among species, as well as a greater focus on effective charities. Robots could have different desires, as Kurzgesagt points out, but that might not even matter. "If machines can and do become conscious," Singer asked in 2009, "will we take their feelings into account? The history of our relations with the only nonhuman sentient beings we have encountered so far–animals–gives no ground for confidence."
Ultimately, if an issue as unique as robot consciousness ever becomes more than a hypothetical, it will be one that has to be determined by the individual circumstances that brought it about. The robot in question "was designed to have human-like capacities that might incidentally give rise to consciousness," Singer writes, "we would have a good reason to think that it really was conscious. At that point, the movement for robot rights would begin."
The narrator said: "There's always been an eerie blackout when it comes to Venus. You don't hear a lot about it. It's a planet that I believe is shrouded in secrecy for a reason.
"According to NASA, Venus is a fiery planet with an extremely hot surface. It may have been like Earth once but it's suffering from a runaway greenhouse gas effect.
"But there appears to be a part of it that's liveable. Where biological entities could be living. There are some structures there.
YOUTUBE
This pyramid structure could reveal aliens once roamed around Venus
"Venus has a lot of white craters that seem to have a lot of structures in them. I believe it's a base. Nature doesn't create symmetrical shapes, but this is a perfect shape.
"It's raised up off the ground.
YOUTUBE
The square structure appears to be inside a crater, maybe sheltering it from the elements
"These bases with square structures show evidence of intelligent design."
Because the giant planet is believed to have once had the conditions to support life, it is thought some of the structures may have been left over from past existences.
Due to the media blackout surrounding Venus, it is also seen as a potentially perfect location for secret bases.
The voiceover states: "If I was going to put a secret base I would pick the one that's the least visited and talked about where I could have a base and do it in secret.
"I think there is a rich history behind Venus. These finds need to be looked into further."
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Virgin Galactic Aims to Fly Space Tourists in 2018, CEO Says
Virgin Galactic Aims to Fly Space Tourists in 2018, CEO Says
By Irene Klotz, Space.com Contributor
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is on track to begin commercial passenger spaceflights before the end of next year, the company's chief executive said.
For years, Branson has been optimistically forecasting the start of rides aboard SpaceShipTwo, an air-launched suborbital spaceplane that is designed to carry six passengers and two pilots to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 kilometers).
During the suborbital hop, passengers will be able to experience a few minutes of microgravity and see the limb of Earth set against the blackness of space.
Virgin Galactic's commercial spaceplane Spaceshiptwo, shown here during a glide test in December 2016.
Credit: Virgin Galactic
Branson has been more circumspect in his schedule projections since an October 2014 fatal accident during a test flight of Virgin's first vehicle. But in an interview with The Telegraph earlier this month, the billionaire entrepreneur said he'd be "very disappointed" if the program isn't well underway by the end of next year.
Virgin Galactic is one of three companies in the Virgin Group's spaceflight division, known as Galactic Ventures. On Wednesday (April 26), Galactic Ventures chief executive George Whitesides, a soft-spoken, former NASA staff chief, said Branson's expectations for commercial flights in 2018 are realistic.
"We're well into test flight now," Whitesides told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. The Virgin CEO addressed the committee along with other industry leaders during a hearing on reducing regulation barriers in the space industry.
Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides confirmed on April 26, 2017, that the company plans to fly space tourists in 2018.
Credit: Getty Images
"We're looking forward … to a fairly big transition of our staff to your state of New Mexico," Whitesides added in response to a question from Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat.
Virgin Galactic intends to base its commercial spaceflight service at New Mexico's Spaceport America, which was finished five years ago at a cost of nearly $220 million.
Construction funds for the spaceport came from state oil and gas taxes and from bonds, which were backed by a quarter-cent tax levied by the two counties closest to the 18,000-acre spaceport.
"Spaceport America and many New Mexicans hope to see full commercial spaceflight operations begin as soon as possible," Udall told Whitesides.
The second in a planned fleet of Virgin spaceships is undergoing testing in Mojave, California. So far, the ship, known as VSS Unity, has made three glide flights. The company has not said when Unity's first powered test flight will be, nor how many flights are expected before the start of commercial service.
About 500 people have signed up to take a ride on SpaceShipTwo. Tickets are currently selling for $250,000.
Scientists Can Now Create Glass Figurines with a 3D Printer
Scientists Can Now Create Glass Figurines with a 3D Printer
By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor
A three-dimensional glass castle that was created with a 3D printer.
Credit: NeptunLab/KIT
Intricate glass creations such as miniature castles and tiny pretzels can now be fabricated using 3D printing, according to a new study. The technique could one day be used to manufacture lenses for smartphone cameras as well as other key glass components, researchers said.
Archaeological research suggests humans have employed glassmaking for millennia. The process typically requires hot furnaces and harsh chemicals. Recently, scientists have investigated whether they could sidestep these drawbacks using 3D printing.
A 3D printer is a machine that creates items from a wide variety of materials: plastic, ceramic, metal and even more unusual ingredients, such as living cells. These devices work by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay down ink, except 3D printers can also deposit flat layers on top of each other to build objects in three dimensions. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]
Until now, the only methods for shaping glass using 3D printing also required using a laser or heating the materials to searing temperatures of about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), the researchers in the new study said. In both cases, the end products were coarse, rough structures that were not suitable for many applications, the researchers added.
"People thought glass was too difficult to work with via 3D printing," said study senior author Bastian Rapp, a mechanical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
This honeycomb structure printed in fused silica glass is exposed to a flame that is almost 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius).
Credit: NeptunLab/KIT
Now, scientists have developed a new technique to fabricate complex glass structures using a standard 3D printer. The secret, the researchers said, is something they call "liquid glass."
"What this work does is it closes an important gap in the palette of modern 3D printing," Rapp told Live Science.
The scientists began with particles made of silica, the same material used to make glass. These particles were only 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide, which is about 2,500 times thinner than the average strand of human hair.
These silica nanoparticles were dispersed in an acrylic solution. The researchers could then use a standard 3D printer to fabricate complex items using this "liquid glass," the study said. Ultraviolet light could harden these objects into a kind of plastic similar to acrylic glass.
When these pieces of plastic were exposed to temperatures of about 2,370 degrees F (1,300 degrees C), the plastic burned away while the silica nanoparticles fused together into smooth, transparent glass structures, the study said. With the aid of additives, this technique can print colored glasses, tinted green, blue or red, for example, the researchers said.
"Glass is one of the oldest materials that mankind has used, and it's still a high-performance material, and for many applications, the only choice of material," Rapp said. "What our research does is bridge a necessary gap between 21st-century manufacturing techniques and a material that's centuries old."
The commercial 3D printer the researchers used could print features as tiny as a few dozen microns. For comparison, the average human hair is 100 microns wide.
This new method does not require harsh chemicals, and it produces glass components smooth and clear enough for use as lenses and in other applications, the researchers said.
"You can think of creating tiny lenses for smartphone cameras," Rapp said. "You can think about creating chemically and thermally resistant micro reactors made from glass that chemical reactions can take place in."
This new technique could also help create optical and photonics components for high-speed data transmission, Rapp said. (Photonic devices manipulate light just as electronic circuits manipulate electricity.) "You can also think much bigger, with 3D curved pieces of glass for architecture," Rapp said.
"We are now spinning off a company to commercialize this technology," Rapp said. "We hope that in a few years' time, glass will be as convenient to 3D print as plastic is nowadays."
The scientists detailed their findings online April 19 in the journal Nature.
Scientists say they have found evidence that humans butchered a mastodon in California more than 100,000 years before the first humans were believed to have stepped foot on North America.
If that sounds unbelievable, you’re in good company. “My first reaction on reading the paper was, ‘No, this is wrong. Something’s wrong,’” says John McNabb, an archeologist with the University of Southampton who was not involved with the research, in a video produced by Nature.
The mastodon fossil was discovered in 1992 on a construction site in San Diego, but it’s taken a quarter century of research for research to build the case to say that yes, this is a site of human activity, and yes, it is indeed much older than anyone previously believed possible. New radiometric analysis, published Wednesday in Nature, dates the mastodon bones to 130,000 years ago.
No human fossils of that age have been found on the American continent, yet. But you can bet after this a lot of people are about to start looking for them. “If it does turn out to be true, it changes absolutely everything,” McNabb says.
The researchers involved with the find say they have multiple lines of evidence to support the assertion that the mastodon was slaughtered by humans using stone tools shortly after its death. Distinct breakage patterns, as well as scrapes and other markings on the bones, are consistent with other sites where humans have broken apart bones with rock hammers and anvils to harvest the marrow or fragments of bone. The researchers also conducted their own experiments smashing elephant bones and saw similar patterns. Other possible way the bones could have been shattered and scattered produce patterns inconsistent with what was found at this site, they argue.
Also, the fragments of bone were found near large stone rocks, and the scientists could not find an explanation for how they got there besides human transport. The stones were found in a layer of deposited silt, where you would not naturally find large rocks.
It’s going to take more evidence at more sites before the archeological community buys in completely to this new story, but if that happens, the story of the first North Americans will look very different.
If you slept through high school history, here’s your refresher. The dominant theory for decades was that the first people came to North America over the Bering Land Bridge between Russia and Alaska when water levels were much lower during the Ice Age, about 13,000 years ago.
It was a tidy theory, but one that’s currently in upheaval as more and more evidence has surfaced that humans must have come sooner, and over water. For example, last year a mastodon kill site in Florida was dated to 14,500 years, long before folks traveling over the Bering Land Bridge could have gotten there. Rare archaeological sites in North and South America have been dated to possibly as old as 30,000 years — but 130,000 years is something altogether different.
If verified, it would mean that humans figured out how to get to North America long before anyone expected. It would open endless new questions about who these people were, how they got to California, and if they died out or quietly persisted through the millennia.
The scientific process is constantly accepting new data and revising the story based on the available evidence. Normally, we expect new discoveries to fit within the framework of what was previously known. This is not that. “It’s less than a filling in of a gap than an opening of a whole new chapter,” says McNabb.
Here is an amazing capture during Apollo 10 mission. In the NASA archivesStreetcap1 of Youtube discovered this great photo of an alien craft in Earths orbit. The craft has a raised center dome in the craft, and the front 80% is a disk, while the back 20% is flat, which indicates it the back of the ship, compounded by the fact that the thin rounded side is facing the Earth, I have easily determined which is the front and which is the back side of this craft. Its hard to believe that such obvious evidence is right in front of us in NASA photos, in easy reach of the public, and yet, 99.9% of the Earths population will never see any of this evidence. This NASA photo is 100% evidence that earth is being visited by alien from another world.
Here is an amazing capture during Apollo 10 mission. In the NASA archivesStreetcap1 of Youtube discovered this great photo of an alien craft in Earths orbit. The craft has a raised center dome in the craft, and the front 80% is a disk, while the back 20% is flat, which indicates it the back of the ship, compounded by the fact that the thin rounded side is facing the Earth, I have easily determined which is the front and which is the back side of this craft. Its hard to believe that such obvious evidence is right in front of us in NASA photos, in easy reach of the public, and yet, 99.9% of the Earths population will never see any of this evidence. This NASA photo is 100% evidence that earth is being visited by alien from another world.
In the sky. It's a bird - It's a UFO - flying pizza?
In the sky. It's a bird - It's a UFO - flying pizza?
If we don’t provide our children with education in high tech we will be doing them a huge disservice
Chad Mowbray about to demonstrate how a drone works. Frank Giorno for TimminsToday.
Chad Mowbray and DSBONE's drone (bottom left corner). Frank Giorno for TimminsToday.
Mowbray pushes the lever and the drone lifts up to about two feet above the ground. Frank Giorno for TimminsToday.
The drone at about six feet off the ground
The drone reaching near the top of the trees. Frank Giorno for TimminsToday.
The drone is but a speck in the cloudy sky. Frank Giorno for TimminsToday.
It had the feel of one of those scientific experiments conducted behind a building out of sight and out of mind of the general public on a windswept April afternoon in Schumacher, Ontario.
On a raised mound stood Chad Mowbray, District School Board Ontario North East (DSBONE) principal of curriculum innovation and technology, whose mission is to transform learning to meet the needs of the 21st century; he is the lead on the iPad initiative, as well.
He could be a brainy scientist and he looked the part, on that windy day. This could be Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with the Wright Brothers about to fly their prototype plane, except it was much colder!
Mowbray, with a blue trench coat, flapping in the wind, and with a high tech-looking, white control panel strapped to his chest was about to explain his demonstration to a gathering of school board trustees including DSBONE chair, Doug Shearer, board administrators, reporters and young student robotics experts.
On the ground about thirty feet to his left stood a white, pizza shaped device on four pads raised about 12 inches above the still brownish back lawn of the DSBONE Education Centre on Croatia Avenue in Schumacher
It was a white drone.
Mowbray was going to put the high-tech disk through it’s paces.
He gave instructions on how to handle drones safely and cautioned the crowd not to get too close to the device especially while it was airborne.
“These drones have strict controls that must be followed,” Mowbray said. “They can go as fast as 70 Km per hour, but I will keep it in the slow mode we won’t go that fast.”
“Because of the wind, I am going to keep it in beginner mode,” explained Mowbray. “The beginner mode only gives me a 30-metre radius so I can only 30 metres to the side and only 30 metres off the ground.”
The drone that Mowbray flew remotely was equipped with a still camera and video.
He explained that devices such as this are already in use in the mining sector for exploration photography.
“Amazon, even uses them to make deliveries,” Mowbray remarked.
They cannot be flown near airports, or intrude in the flight path of airborne crafts. Drones cannot be flown beyond visual contact of its operator.
He pushed a button on the control device strapped to his chest and the four rotators started to turn and as they gathered speed, the pizza shaped white disk began to wobble and list as it surely started to gain altitude.
Two feet. Four Feet. Six feet.
The crowd stood and watched murmuring at what they were experiencing.
Ten feet. Straight up. 20 feet and as it reached its apex, Mowbray shifted the lever and the disk turned and took off away from the crowd way above the tree tops and into the low overhanging clouds.
'Oooh's and 'ahh's were heard.
Followed by hardy hand clapping. This was amazing.
“Will I get my pizzas delivered by drones,” someone joked.
“Forget about pizza delivery, can I take one of those to work and beat the ground level traffic,” another person said.
“It looks like a UFO,” a third person remarked especially as the tiny red lights came into view as the disk spinning way above the crowd for about 10 minutes before Mowbray returned the craft to earth with a gently, soft touchdown.
“In terms of the curricular use of drones, we have a lot of geography teachers interested in using drones because of they can be combined with geographical location technology and satellite imaging to produce some fascinating topographical images for teaching geography,” Mowbray remarked.
“In math classes, it can be used to teach coordinate geometry,” indicated Mowbray.
“It also be used in athletics training by being able to track a cross country runner or a track runner and the Phys Ed department can analyze the running technique to help improve the runner’s performance,” added Mowbray.
“The Ministry of Natural Resources is using drones to monitor our natural resources by doing tree and moose counts.,” he said. “Also, drones were being used in construction projects, such as at the new dam construction near Latchford, Ontario to see how the project was progressing, and to determine if the construction was meeting the specifications of the design.”
Doug Shearer, the Chair of DSBONE thanked Mowbray for the demonstration.
“This is a sample of where the Board and our schools are going with technology in our educational programs,” Shearer said.
Mowbray agreed with Shearer’s assessment on the importance of educating children on the latest technology.
“It’s important to bring the teaching of technologies like robotics and drone technology into our schools, because as one study pointed out, by 2035 up to 45 per cent of our current jobs will no longer exist,” said Mowbray. “If we don’t provide our children with education in high tech we will be doing them a huge disservice.
"We are going to introduce curriculum to teach technology to all of our students in all of our schools,” he said.
Mowbray said the drones are really new,” he said. “They are not in the schools yet.”
The first step is to teach the Innovation Coaches at each school across the school board and then introduce them into the individual schools.
“We hope to get them into the school this spring to whet their appetites and take it form there,” Mowbray said.
Meanwhile he pointed out that robotics is being taught at each DSBONE school from senior kindergarten to grade 12.
In 1952, the U.S. Army asked Duke University to help them develop a program to determine if dogs were psychic. Specifically, they wondered, could dogs use extrasensory perception (ESP)? To this end, researchers carried out a series of 48 tests on a beach in Northern California to see if dogs could locate underwater explosives. At first, the results pleased the scientists, who concluded that there was “no known way in which the dogs could have located the under-water mines except by extrasensory perception.”
Let us pause for a minute before going further. A dog’s olfactory capabilities are 40 to 50 times greater than those of a human; its hearing is four times stronger. Judging them by human metrics, dogs literally have extrasensory perception. This does not mean, however, that they are psychic or paranormal. And sure enough, further tests failed to deliver any supernatural results. A follow-up program was deemed an “utter failure,” and researchers noted a “rather conspicuous refusal of the dogs to alert.”
This experiment is only one of the strange stories—many of them recently declassified—in Annie Jacobsen’s Phenomena: The Secret History of the U. S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. As with her previous books on Area 51, Operation Paperclip (the secret project to bring Nazi rocket scientists to the U.S. after the war), and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the Defense Department), this one begins with the fallout of World War II and the extreme measures the military-industrial complex took to unlock and weaponize psychic abilities in the early days of the Cold War. Spanning over 50 years, Jacobsen’s tale takes us from the immediate postwar years to the CIA’s experiments in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Defense Department, she tells us, began its own experiments in the 1980s and ‘90s, before their final incarnation, Project Stargate, was finally decommissioned in 1995.
Although Jacobsen’s book demonstrates an alarming pattern of government activity, the phenomena themselves are what makes her book so fascinating, and often troubling. “My intention … for this book, she writes, “was not to prove or disprove anyone or any concept, but to report objectively on the government’s long-standing interest in ESP and PK phenomena.” That being said, she cuts these charlatans a great deal of slack while subtly undermining their critics, creating a reading experience that’s alternately frustrating and exhausting. And while she couldn’t have predicted this before finishing the book, Phenomena arrives at the beginning of a presidency that is thriving on conspiracy, distortion of fact, the discrediting of reliable sources, and outright paranoia. With the President of the United States quoting the National Enquirer as a legitimate news source, we’re in desperate need of a thorough account of the overlap between the government and the occult—but given our current climate, such a book also requires greater moral clarity.
The quest for extrasensory perception, an outgrowth of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Spiritualist movement, had begun in the 1930s, mainly with Duke University’s parapsychology experiments, conducted by J. B. Rhine. But in the wake of World War II, the US government began looking for ways to influence and control human behavior, and, in addition to traditional psychological tactics, attention increasingly turned to parapsychology, as well.
In the early 1950s, the Defense Department tasked Henry “Andrija” Puharich with locating mushrooms that they believed might unlock psychic powers (a project the CIA was also working on, under the codename Project MKULTRA). During this time Puharich was also researching faith healers, though much of his early research is still classified by the Atomic Energy Commission. Eventually, Puharich began exploring ESP and psychokinesis or PK (the ability to move objects with one’s mind), and began researching test subjects who appeared to have psychic potential.
Already well underway in period immediately after World War II, this paranormal research was greatly accelerated after a woman named Ninel Kulagina appeared on Russian TV, beginning in the 1960s, moving objects with her mind. Kulagina’s feats may well have been staged (U.S. analysts couldn’t tell for sure), but she spooked them nonetheless, leading to a joint intelligence assessment by the Defense Department on the “Soviet psychoenergetic threat.” Because much of this still remains classified, it’s not always clear how high up these directives went, or who exactly was aware in all cases of how much energy was being spent on this nonsense. The picture that does emerge, though, is a Cold War government terrified that the Soviet Union was developing an edge in any technology, be it normal or paranormal, and one willing to throw money just about anywhere so long as it meant staying ahead of the Russians.
Threat of an “ESP gap” led to a staggering number of bizarre programs in the ensuing years. In addition to the mine-sniffing dogs and mushroom research, there were lengthy and repeated attempts to prove that humans could communicate telepathically. When the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the North Pole by traveling under the polar ice caps, a sailor onboard was attempting to send ESP messages using Zener cards (the ubiquitous black and white cards with simple images—a square, a circle, a plus, a star, and a set of wavy lines—to a receiver at a Westinghouse facility in Friendship, Maryland. (One report stated a success rate of 75 per cent; once it hit the press, though, the Navy claimed it all was a hoax.)
One of the most popular and long-running experiments concerned “remote viewing.” Individuals would sit in locked rooms and attempt to see events from far away. Sometimes these individuals were natural psychics, but as the program grew the Defense Department attempted to prove that ability could be developed in otherwise normal individuals. Much of this was focused on military intelligence gathering, but one researcher, Ed Dames, used taxpayer money to direct supposed psychics to look for evidence of UFOs, to locate the lost city of Atlantis and the Ark of the Covenant, and to watch gladiator games in ancient Rome.
When Marine Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins was kidnapped by Hezbollah in 1988, the Defense Department brought in Dames, along with psychics Angela Dellafiora and Paul Smith, to see if they could remotely locate where he was being held. While other agencies were working through traditional surveillance and intelligence-gathering mechanisms, Dellafiora told her handlers that Higgins was still alive and confidently pointed to a bare patch of desert on a map of Lebanon where she said he was being held. She then said he was being moved constantly, that he was being held “on water,” and that something about his “feet would be a clue to investigators.” Subsequent reports would reveal that Higgins was already dead; Hezbollah would later release a video of Higgins’s corpse with a noose around his neck, though investigators determined he’d been killed much earlier, his body kept on ice for months.
Dellafiora’s claims are typical of the kind of “evidence” that runs through Phenomena. She provided no actionable intelligence and was wrong about the most salient question of whether or not Higgins was still alive. But researchers determined he hadn’t been hanged because of the position of his feet in the video (pointing outwards, rather than down, as would have been the case had he been hanged), and her reference to Higgins being “on water” could be taken to refer to the ice his body was kept on—so all of this could somehow taken as a sign of success. For decades, researchers used half-successes like this to justify their attempts to prove individuals could see events far away and provide useful intelligence. Jacobsen offers a few cases of surprising success, which might lead one to believe there is something to remote viewing, but, without any sense of how many failures accompanied these successes (judging by the length of the programs, they must have numbered in the thousands), it’s hard to gauge whether or not these were just random luck.
Unlike dogs sniffing for land mines, humans see only what they want to see. Reading through Jacobsen’s cavalcade of experimenters and government officials, the recurrent theme is one of longing: a longing for something greater, something beyond the everyday, something more wonderful. Their stories are of ordinary individuals with promising careers who fell to the siren song of pseudoscience; men like Dale Graff, who had an out-of-body experience while saving his wife from drowning in Hawaii in 1969. The experience led him to give up his PhD in aeronautical engineering because “he believed there were pursuits beyond the confines of orthodox science that had greater significance and should be taken on.” Graff would go on to be a leading researcher of remote viewing projects at the Air Force, chasing false positives and statistical noise in search of proof that psychic powers existed.
Or, even more dismaying, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth astronaut to set foot on the moon, a man who saw magisterial vistas the rest of us can only dream of. And yet, during his first night aboard Apollo 14, while he was supposed to be getting necessary sleep, he was obsessing about ESP, attempting to transmit Zener card images to a friend in a Chicago apartment. While the Apollo 14 mission was a success, the Zener card experiment was a failure. That didn’t stop Mitchell from choosing ESP over NASA: He quit the agency and set out to prove to the world that ESP was real. Mitchell’s time on the moon is the kind of thing that millions of school kids dream of doing some day; it’s a dream that spurs young men and women to study science and go into STEM careers. That someone with such a rare and fantastic opportunity would walk away from it to promote nonsense of charlatans is staggering, and speaks for the strange psychological desperation in so many of Jacobsen’s subjects.
Ultimately, Jacobsen herself shares this longing. Her first book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Military Base, hinged on a revelation that the aliens at Roswell were in fact genetically-altered humans, created by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at the behest of Joseph Stalin in order to trigger a War of the Worlds-style panic. She based this claim on one anonymous source whose account has never been corroborated or substantiated elsewhere. As with Area 51, one should proceed with caution in Phenomena before accepting any of the evidence for the supernatural presented here.
Uri Geller bending a spoon in 1964.Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Her discussion of the spoon-bending parties of Jack Houck is a good case in point: Houck was an aerospace engineer who believed that “the ability to bend metal had something to do with one’s belief system. Perhaps psychokinesis was not a so-called paranormal superpower but an ability to harness the energy force the Chinese called qi that was latent in all people.” Houck held parties at his house with a “high-energy environment of excitement,” with people holding spoons and shouting “Bend!” According to Houck, in one 1981 party “nineteen out of the twenty-one spoons bent,” a careful use of the passive verb tense to suggest that they did this somehow of their own accord. Jacobsen goes on to write that:
Houck watched hundreds, then thousands of average Americans suspend their disbelief and bend metal without physical force. Yes, it’s likely some percentage of the guests cheated. But hundreds of them bent hacksaw blades, silver-plated serving spoons, and five-sixteenth-inch steel rods that are physically impossible to bend by hand.
Perhaps. A Youtube video of one of Houck’s party shows a tent-revival-esque atmosphere and a lot of people physically bending spoons by hand while shouting “Bend!” If you Google “spoon bending,” you’ll yield far more tutorials from magicians and sleight-of-hand experts on how to do this simple stage trick than you will videos purporting to capture the real thing. (As for the hacksaw blades and steel rods—well, any stage magician will tell you a few audience plants can go a long way; after all, Houck was out to make money from this schtick.) Penn and Teller are among many magicians who’ve debunked Houck’s spoon bending, though they’re not mentioned here.
And then there’s Uri Geller, who looms large in these pages. A former Israeli paratrooper, Geller rose to fame in the late 1960s, performing stage shows that he insisted were not staged and that demonstrated, instead, a real magic that he himself did not fully understand. After becoming famous for the same spoon bending sham that Houck favored, Geller was approached by Andrija Puharich in the summer of 1971, with an offer to come to the United States to further test his powers in a laboratory setting. Geller worked with Puharich, the astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and others in the development of the Defense Department’s remote viewing labs, before going on to make millions “dowsing” for oil corporations in the 1980s. (Most recently, he’s brought his spoon-bending talent to a Kellogg’s cereal ad campaign). While magicians like James Randi repeatedly demonstrated the ways in which Geller’s supposed feats could be easily staged, he continued to dazzle his government handlers.
Some of this material, including Geller’s antics, was already covered in Jon Ronson’s 2004 The Men Who Stare at Goats, and though Phenomena is far more comprehensive and detailed, in many ways Ronson’s remains the better book. This is in part because Ronson’s bullshit detector is more finely tuned and he better captures the simultaneously hilarious and deeply horrific nature of his material. Ronson also recognizes that the ultimate aim of much of this government research was to harm and kill people: His light-hearted tone takes a deep nose dive in the book’s final chapters as he discusses Project Artichoke—a mind control program in the CIA that used, among other techniques, hypnosis, isolation and forced drug dependency followed by rapid withdrawal—and the death of Frank Olson.
Olson was a bacteriologist who became involved in Project Artichoke and, in 1953, was dosed with LSD against his knowledge. A few days later, he fell out of a thirteen-story Manhattan hotel window; the CIA has maintained it was suicide, though his family has spent decades arguing it was murder. In contrast to Ronson, though, Jacobsen tends to treat the CIA and the Department of Defense as wacky and endlessly intriguing bureaucracies, and not two agencies who have as one of their primary purposes the killing of human beings.
Reading Jacobsen’s book in the Trump era makes one wonder if her hands-off reportage of obvious bullshit is not only irresponsible, but actively harmful. As skeptic Martin Gardner told Time magazine in 1973, “Belief in occultism provides a climate for the rise of a demagogue. I think this is precisely what happened in Nazi Germany before the rise of Hitler.” It is one thing to describe the stupid nonsense government researchers believed, but quite another to give the reader the impression that any of it has merit.
Or maybe something else is at work here. When ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, which eventually became DARPA, the same agency Jacobsen profiled in her Pulitzer-nominated Pentagon’s Brain) researchers evaluated Geller’s supposed feats, they found loose laboratory controls, skewing of data, and bias of researchers influencing the outcomes. There is serious doubt, concluded the ARPA report, “that Geller’s accomplishment transcends the range of activities that a skillful magician can perform.” The CIA, on the other hand, was not interested in whether or not Geller was genuinely paranormal, but “rather whether his capabilities are exploitable by CIA.”
Which is to say: The odds of the government harnessing psychic phenomena may be slim, but it may be in the government’s interest to continue to promote this belief, as the idea itself may have powerful psychological impacts on America’s enemies—or even its own populace. Perhaps Jacobsen’s sources had reasons for helping her believe in the impossible.
Route 66 Casino Hotel has unveiled its new Area 66, which features a 20-foot tall flying saucer.
(Courtesy of Route 66 Casino Hotel)
An unidentified flying object has made its way into Route 66 Casino Hotel’s gambling floor.
The area, now known as Area 66, features a number of brand-spankin’-new slot games. The area was inspired by Area 51, the top-secret military base that has spawned stories of UFO landings and alien folklore. Area 66 was created to “increase awareness and anticipation” for some of the newest slot machines in the country, according to a Route 66 news release.
A giant flying saucer stands more than 20 feet tall. The bottom of the UFO contains an “extraterrestrial” language. The “out of this world” experience has lights that are beamed up into the ceiling dome that features images of aliens. The rotating flying saucer display was created by Electrick Gizmos and Display Systems, which worked closely with Route 66 casino management to have the idea come to fruition.
Route 66 aims to keep its gambling floor fresh with new slot machines. Area 66 slot machines will be replaced regularly with new, exclusive machines to make Route 66 the first to market with 18 new games every 90 days. The evolution of the gambling floor will continue throughout 2017, according to the news release.
For Route 66 promotions and other information, call 352-7866 or visit rt66casino.com.
SAN FELIPE CASINO: Get in on the end of April’s hot seat drawings from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 29. Make plans to have a fun Cinco de Mayo with Al Hurricane and Al Hurricane Jr., as well as special guest Tanya Griego, on May 5. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 at the Player’s Club or online at holdmyticket.com. This is a 21 and older event. Also in May, enjoy Hot Seat Loyalty Play from 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, May 2, May 16 and May 30 and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. May 8 and May 22. The Hot Seat Cash promotion will be held Fridays in May from 7 to 10 p.m. There also will be a Cinco de Mayo drawing between 4 and 7 p.m. on May 5.
For more information on San Felipe Casino, call 867-6700 or visit sanfelipecasino.com.
SANTA ANA STAR CASINO: The brand-new Cantina Rio at Santa Ana Star Casino will celebrate its grand opening beginning at 11 a.m. on May 5. The party will feature specials, half-off appetizers, giveaways, prizes and live music by ¡Revíva! and mariachis. The restaurant, which has already had its soft opening, serves American classics, New Mexican favorites and desserts. Hand-crafted cocktails, beer and wine also are available.
Cantina Rio is open from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays and from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays. Cantina Rio will have live music from 9 p.m. to midnight Fridays and Saturdays, with The DCN Project performing tonight and Saturday.
125 Years of Progress takes you inside The Daily Progress' archives every day in celebration of our 125 years serving Charlottesville and the rest of Central Virginia.
Could this brief article that ran in the April 28, 1899 edition of The Daily Progress be the first record of a UFO sighting?
“On Wednesday evening, the residents on West Main Street were very much exercised over a mysterious light which appeared in the northeast. It seemed, according to the best information we could get, to be located just over that notable clump of trees on the Dunlora farm. It was in size apparently as large as a hogshead, round in form, with a slight elongation at the lower edge. It did not flash like a flame, and remained of the same size, neither moving from its position not increasing nor diminishing.
One gentleman said he watched it for more than an hour, and it did not change in any manner. Many persons assembled on the bridge to see the mysterious luminary but none could furnish anything approaching an explanation of it. It was sufficiently elevated to preclude the idea that it was a house afire, even if the other characteristics of such an event had been present. Every theory as to the strange visitor has fallen through, and yet it remains a mystery apparently unsolved.”
In that same edition, another unusual brief appeared.
“In excavating for a foundation in the city, the workman came across the tooth of an animal, at a depth of 14 feet from the surface. The tooth was 12 inches long and 2 ½ inches in diameter. It was broken by a pick, but was fixed together again, and will serve as a basis for investigation. It evidently belonged to some antedeluvian animal.”
PORTAL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION? Stunned onlookers fear 'wormhole' opened up above them
PORTAL TO ANOTHER DIMENSION? Stunned onlookers fear 'wormhole' opened up above them
STUNNED onlookers were left in awe after this "scientifically impossible" rainbow appeared in the skies - leading to theories of it being a portal to another dimension.
It was filmed by Anne Elle Salikala, over Pagadian City, Zamboanga, in the Philippines, who uploaded it to Facebo.
The stunning sight led to claims it was anything from a wormhole - a theoretical portal to another dimension, to aliens, or other paranormal phenomenon.
The footage has been uploaded to UFO and conspiracy theory websites and YouTube channels.
Scott C Waring, editor of ufosightingsdaily.com, blogged: "The colours are scientifically impossible for them to occur in clouds, however for a cloaked UFO its very possible.
"The easiest and most relaxing way a UFO can come close to a human community is by making itself appear as a cloud.
YouTube
The stunning colours were filmed and uploaded to social media.
"At this time there is a small chance that the odd position of the sun and the eyewitness will allow them this rare look at a UFO observing them back. "This is a magnificent alien craft we are looking at here."
Mr Waring provided no evidence to back up his outlandish claims, but there is a long-running conspiracy theory that some UFOS can conceal themselves by producing a cloud-like substance around them.
One viewer posted: "What is that? It looks like some sort of wormhole opening up."
Robots and new technology take the stage in battle against invasive species
Robots and new technology take the stage in battle against invasive species
Asian carp, wild goats and lionfish among those targeted
In this artist rendering provided by Robots in Service of the Environment, a new robot that hunts the dangerous and invasive lionfish made its debut in Bermuda in April. It stuns lionfish with an electric current and then the fish is vacuumed into a container alive and it can later be sold for food. The robot caught 15 lionfish in 48 hours of initial testing. Handout photo courtesy of Robots In Service of the Environment.
(Robots in Service of the Environment via Associated Press)
A robot zaps and vacuums up venomous lionfish in Bermuda. A helicopter pelts Guam's trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the U.S. Midwest.
In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins.
"Critters are smart — they survive," said biologist Rob "Goose" Gosnell, head of U.S. Department of Agriculture's wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. "Trying to outsmart them is hard to do."
Invasive species are plants and animals that thrive in areas where they don't naturally live, usually brought there by humans, either accidentally or intentionally. Sometimes, with no natural predators, they multiply and take over, crowding out and at times killing native species.
'We have totally new tools that were just unthinkable a few years ago.'
- PieroGenovesi, scientist
Now, new technology is being combined with the old methods — weed pulling, trapping and pesticides. Finding new weapons is crucial because invasive species are costly — $314 billion per year in damages in just the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India and Brazil. It's also one of the leading causes of extinction on islands, such as Guam, according to Piero Genovesi, an Italian scientist who chairs the invasive species task force for an international organization.
"We have totally new tools that were just unthinkable a few years ago," Genovesi said.
Case in point: There are companies that now market traps for wild pigs that are triggered by cellphones.
"There's enough activity that there's starting to be an industry," said University of California, Santa Cruz research biologist Bernie Tershy.
Lionfish
A new underwater robot is targeting the stunning but dangerous lionfish, which has spread over the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and up the U.S. East Coast as far north as New York's Long Island, with its venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. With no natural predator in the Atlantic, the voracious aquarium fish devour large amounts of other fish including key commercial fish species such as snapper and grouper. The robot is the creation of Colin Angle, chief executive officer of iRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new nonprofit to turn automation into environmental tools.
In this artist photo provided by Robots in Service of the Environment shows the first day a new robot was used to hunt dangerous and invasive lionfish in Bermuda. It stuns lionfish with an electric current and then the fish is vacuumed into a container alive and it can later be sold for food.
(Dr. Philippe Rouja/Robots in Service of the Environment via Associated Press)
The robot, called Guardian LF1, uses what Angle says is a gentle shock to immobilize the lionfish before they are sucked alive into a tube. In its first public outing this month, the robot caught 15 lionfish during two days of testing in Bermuda. Top chefs competed in a cook-off of the captured lionfish. Lionfish go for nearly $10 a pound and Angle is hoping to get the price of the robot down from tens of thousands of dollars to about $500.
"What's next?" Angle said. "Our ambition is much larger than lionfish."
Brown tree snakes
A few decades ago, native birds started disappearing from the Pacific island of Guam, baffling scientists until they found that non-native brown tree snakes were eating all the birds and their eggs. The snakes, which live in the trees, had no natural enemies and just trapping them wasn't working, Gosnell said. The snakes did prove to have one enemy: the painkiller acetaminophen, a generic form of Tylenol.
Newly designed aerial bait cartridges containing dead mice are seen here with 80-mg acetaminophen tablets and a biodegradable streamer-like cartridge.
(USDA/APHIS Wildlife Services via Associated Press)
So biologists came up with a plan: Use a painkiller pill glued to dead fetal mice as bait. The mice are put in tubes, and dropped by helicopter in batches of 3,000. The mice pop out, and the whole contraption dangles in the trees. It's still experimental, but it will soon go to more regular use. There is one problem, however. Using dead fetal mice as bait is expensive and they have to be kept cold. But biologists are working on a solution: mouse butter. A new bait mixture smells like mice to snakes, but minus the expense and logistical problems.
Asian carp
U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials are using souped-up old technology to catch Asian carp, a fish that's taken over rivers and lakes in the Midwest and are making their way towards the Great Lakes. They use a specialized boat — the Magna Carpa — with giant wing-like nets that essentially uses electric current as an underwater Taser to stun the fish, said biologist Emily Pherigo. At higher doses, the fish are killed and float to the surface. In just five minutes, they can collect 500 fish, and later turn them into fertilizer. Using electro-fishing was written about as a possible conservation technique back in 1933, said biologist Wyatt Doyle.
Asian carp, jolted by an electric current from a research boat, jump from the Illinois River near Havana, Ill.
(John Flesher/Associated Press)
Wild goats
On the Galapagos islands, wild goats were a major problem. In less than five years, scientists wiped out tens of thousands with sterile "Mata Hari" females. Biologist Karl Campbell of the nonprofit Island Conservation introduced specialized female goats that researchers sterilized and chemically altered into a permanent state of heat, to lure the male goats into fruitless goat sex. Santiago Island, once home to 80,000 goats, is now goat free and larger Isabella Island is getting close, he said.
And now, Campbell and others are going one step further: Tinkering with the genes of mosquitoes and mice to make them sterile or only have male offspring. That would eventually cause a species to die off on an island because of lack of females to mate with. There are worries about regulating and controlling this technology, along with actually being able to get it done, so it is years away, Campbell said.
SETI Scientists Could Survey a Million Star Systems by 2037, Lawmakers Are Told
SETI Scientists Could Survey a Million Star Systems by 2037, Lawmakers Are Told
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer
The Allen Telescope Array, part of the SETI Institute, searches star systems for signs of alien communications.
Credit: Seti Institute
The search for intelligent life in the universe will see rapid advancements over the next two decades, thanks largely to improvements in computing power that could make it possible to survey at least a million star systems, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.
Shostak discussed the state of SETI efforts (SETI stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence) during a hearing Wednesday (April 26) before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He was on Capitol Hill with three other scientists to testify on the subject of advances in the search for alien life.
Seth Shostak, senior astornomer at the SETI Institute.
Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty
"This experiment will only succeed if we can look at about a million or so star systems," Shostak told the committee. "That would have taken thousands of years with the current technology. Thanks to improvements, mostly in computers, that is speeding up by orders of magnitude. Over next 20 years we will be able to look at about a million other star systems."
How likely is it that scientists will find signs of life in those million star systems? Shostak's response reflected both an optimistic and a realistic outlook: "I bet everyone a cup of coffee that we will find something," he said, before quickly adding, "I may have to buy a lot of coffee."
Shostak has said previously he thinks signs of intelligent life will be found by 2040.
The improvements that will so greatly advance scientists' ability to search for signs of intelligent beings in the universe are largely twofold, Shostak said. First, as computer processors continue to follow Moore's law, computer processors will steadily get smaller, cheaper and faster. Thus, SETI scientists will be able to write computer software that simultaneously sifts through data collected by radio antennas as the antennas capture signals from multiple star systems.
"Instead of looking at one star at a time, which is what we've done … you could look at tens, hundreds, even thousands of stars at a time with enough computer-processing capability," he said. "And of course that capability is coming down the pipe."
The second improvement Shostak noted is that SETI scientists are working on using machine learning in their search for extraterrestrial communication signals. Now, scientists program computers to search for "one kind of pattern" in the radio data that could indicate an artificially created radio signal, he said. But that approach is extremely limiting — like a person who can hear only one note while listening to a symphony. Machine learning could "broaden the kind of thing [we] can recognize" in the radio signals, which would "speed up the search," he said.
Shostak also discussed the SETI Institute's efforts to search for artificial radio signals among the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, the discovery of which was announced in February. The seven planets orbit a single red dwarf star, and all of them orbit closer to the star than Mercury orbits the sun. As many as three of the seven planets could be habitable, according to Adam Burgasser, a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the team that discovered the seven planets. Burgasser also appeared before the committee with Shostak.
The short distance between the worlds in the TRAPPIST-1 system means that if life emerged on one planet, it could have been spread to the other planets via meteoroids. What's more, if intelligent life formed there, it would have likely colonized the other planets, so the SETI scientists are looking for communications sent between planets.
"This could be a mini federation of planets, if you will," he said. "We are using our Allen Telescope Array to look at the Trappist-1 system and we … wait for planets to line up and then see if there's any difference in the amount of radio radiation coming our way. Because at that point, you're looking down a communication pipeline between these planets."
The other three panelists focused mainly on efforts to search for "simple life" in the universe, meaning life-forms that aren't identified based on their technology. Scientists are now eager to study the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system using telescopes set to come online in the next five to 10 years. Those telescopes could find chemical signatures of life in the atmospheres of those planets. The TRAPPIST-1 planets, Burgasser said, are just a few examples of recently discovered, potentially habitable planets located relatively close to Earth, that will provide excellent subjects for those studies.
"This and other recent discoveries represent the beginning of an era of exoplanet exploration that, in the next five to 10 years, will allow us to identify truly habitable worlds and possibly life beyond Earth," Burgasser said. "These transformative advances, addressing one of humanity's most persistent questions — 'Are we alone?'— are fully achievable through a diverse portfolio of research programs led by U.S. scientists and supported by federal funding to NASA, [the National Science Foundation] and other science agencies."
The four members of the panel as well as the committee members also discussed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope, set to launch in 2018, could analyze the atmospheres of some alien planets in greater detail than any current telescopes. Beyond JWST, the panelists mentioned the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is expected to identify hundreds to thousands of new planets around other stars, Burgasser said. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and large ground-based telescopes set to come online in the 2020s, will also improve the study of exoplanet atmospheres, the panelists said.
"Our generation is the first in human history to know that there are worlds beyond our solar system. Will the next generation know whether life exists on those worlds?" Burgasser said. "We have the opportunity and the responsibility to continue our nation's legacy of discovery so that our children and grandchildren can search for life in new ways."
Californians have reported more close encounters with the third kind than any other state in the US, new research has shown.
A recently published book found that of the more than 120,000 reports of unidentified objects seen from 2001 to 2015, 16,000 of the sightings originated in the The Golden State.
The authors of the book 'UFO Sightings Desk Reference', have suggested that the warm weather could have something to do with it – people spend more time outside, which provides them with more chances to spot a UFO.
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A recently published book has revealed that out of more than 120,000 reports of unidentified objects seen from 2001 to 2015, 16,000 of the sightings originated in the The Golden. Pictured is an alien rock sculpture built in Romoland, California
TOP 10 STATES TO SPOT A UFO
1. California
2. Florida
3. Texas
4. Washington
5. Pennsylvania
6. New York
7. Arizona
8. Illinois
9. Michigan
10. Ohio
'Since 1969 the government has claimed no interest in the subject, and the press and media either ignore or ridicule any mention of UFOs,' reads the book's synopsis.
'Yet citizen scientists and non-governmental organizations have continued to this day the research into this important subject: this book seeks to make the hardest data available accessible to the general public, as well as other UFO researchers.'
Although California reigns supreme in sightings, the book highlights that people have claimed to have spotted 'alien spacecraft' all over the US.
'We found that UFOs were sighted in every county in the United States,' explained 'UFO Sightings Desk Reference' co-author Cheryl Costa, who is a former military technician and aerospace analyst, told CBS in an interview.
'Every county had at least one sighting sometime in the past 15 years.'
'We think a great deal of it has to do with California's weather,' said Costa.
Costa explained that people spend a lot of time outdoors because of the mild climate, which gives them more opportunities to see 'UFOs'.
From 2001 to 2015, Californians reported 15,836 sightings and a majority of them were in the Bay Area: 159 in Marin County, 327 in San Francisco County, 188 in San Mateoo County, 518 in Alameda County and 569 in Santa Clara County
CALIFORNIANS MISTAKE NAVY MISSILE TEST FOR UFO
The Navy conducted missile tests off the coast on February 14, 2017, leading Californians who spotted the mysterious white light in the sky to believe they had seen a UFO.
Several people from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles spotted the light and captured the incident in photographs and videos that were later circulated online.
But the Navy issued a statement revealing they had conducted two missile tests off the coast of California early that Tuesday morning, ABC reported.
Videos of the missile test, many of which were filmed on the road, show a bright point in the sky with a beam of light radiating below it.
In one video, a woman could be heard exclaiming 'It's E.T!' while others took to social media to declare they had seen an alien spaceship.
But the Navy issued a statement saying two Trident II D-5 missile test flights were launched at sea at 3.30am PST and 6.20am, CBS reported.
All missile test flights were conducted from sea, flew over the sea, and landed in the sea. At no time did the missiles fly over land,' the statement said.
'All missiles are tracked from multiple sources from launch until final impact in the ocean. The missiles were not armed.'
Costa and her wife Linda Miller Costa, who is a librarian at Le Moyne College and a former librarian at the National Academy of Sciences, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, and she also co-wrote UFO Sightings Desk Reference, gathered data from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the National UFO Reporting Center for the book – both sites let users share their alleged extraterrestrial sightings.
The book is a collection of incidents from real witnesses who claimed the truth is out there and the duo has added research to back up their beliefs.
The authors of the book 'UFO Sightings Desk Reference', have suggested that the warm weather could have something to do with it – people spend more time outside, which provides them with more chances to spot a UFO.
From 2001 to 2015, Californians reported 15,836 sightings and a majority of them were in the Bay Area: 159 in Marin County, 327 in San Francisco County, 188 in San Mateoo County, 518 in Alameda County and 569 in Santa Clara County.
In New York County, the authors reported 426 sightings from 2001 to 2015, which came second to Suffolk County with 554, The NY Times reported.
Interestingly enough, The District of Columbia was found to have 154 incidents and Wyoming, which only has 5.8 people per square mile, had 337.
And some of the sightings were not UFOs but fireballs falling from the sky, which made up nearly 8 percent of Indiana's 230 sightings and less than 5 percent of Colorado's 157.
But the duo found that Los Angeles County in California had more sightings than 40 other US states combined.
Altogether, the Costas collected '121,036 eyewitness reports from the two combined national data bases,' they wrote in the book.
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Rainbow UFO Over Philippines Is Seen By Neighbourhood, April 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Rainbow UFO Over Philippines Is Seen By Neighbourhood, April 2017, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 27, 2017 Location of sighting: Pagadian City, Zamboanga, Philippines News source:
http://news.abs-cbn.com/trending/04/26/17/viral-pastel-hued-clouds-appear-in-zamboanga-del-sur This UFO was recorded by Anne Elle Salikala of Facebook, who personally witnesses the is glowing iridescent UFO hovering over a cloud near her home. The colors are scientifically impossible for them to occur in clouds, however for a cloaked UFO its very possible. As a matter of fact, I once saw a tiny baseball size UFO just 2 meters from me with the exact same colors, so I know first hand. The easiest and most relaxing way a UFO can come close to a human community is by making itself appear as a cloud. At this time there is a small chance that the odd position of the sun and the eyewitness will allow them this rare look at a UFO observing them back. This is a magnificent alien craft we are looking at here. Scott C. Waring
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.