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

However, perhaps the first question to ask is why people are so fascinated by the idea of alien life — particularly alien invaders, Shostak suggested. This preoccupation with an unseen extraterrestrial threat may be an echo from our distant past, when early humans learned that survival frequently depended on being able to imagine and prepare for attacks from predators or enemies that you couldn't see, he said.

What we now know about the universe suggests that it's very unlikely that humanity is the only form of life in it.

"Work from the last 20 years shows that there are planets all over the place," Shostak said. In fact, NASA announced yesterday (June 19) that the Kepler Space Telescope mission has discovered 219 more exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our sun), bringing the total of planets discovered by Kepler to 4,034, Space.com reported.

Most stars — 70 to 80 percent of them, by some estimates — probably host planets, Shostak added. With an estimated 100 billion stars in our galaxy, that gives us around 1 trillion planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Data from Kepler suggests that about one in five of these planets is Earth-like — rocky and capable of supporting liquid water and possibly life, "so now you have 100 billion planets in our galaxy that are sort of like Earth," Shostak said.

And with recent studies hinting that there may be as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, that adds up to a lot of planets that might host some form of life.

When you look at it that way, "saying, 'I don't believe in aliens' is a daring position to take," Shostak said.

Signs of life

There are three methods most commonly used by scientists to search for alien life, according to Shostak. The first is straightforward enough — and is also the one that's most popular with sci-fi writers: "Just go out and find it," he said. This includes missions to send spacecraft to destinations such as Saturn's moon Enceladus, where probes would sample water vapor from surface plumes to see if they hold anything interesting. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens]

SETI astronomer Seth Shostak explains the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life, at the Future Con panel "Are We Looking for the Wrong Aliens?"

Credit: M. Weisberger/Live Science

The final method — and the one practiced by Shostak and his SETI Institute colleagues — is eavesdropping on radio signals that an alien civilization might broadcast.Another method is to image distant planets with very large space telescopes capable of detecting enough detail to provide scientists with data about their atmospheres. Big telescopes — such as the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch in October 2018 — could allow astronomers to analyze the spectrum of light surrounding a far-off planet for evidence of atmospheric oxygen or methane, both of which are known to sustain life on Earth.

"That's how you find intelligent life," Shostak said.

Alien A.I.?

All of these parameters offer scientists a reasonable range of variables for discovering life — but only as long as that life is "the soft, squishy kind, like us," Shostak said. However, a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization could theoretically have advanced far beyond that, creating forms of artificial intelligence housed in machinery, which simply don't have the same requirements as organic life.

"Machines live forever, and they can go anywhere — they don't care about oceans and atmospheres," Shostak said.

With that view, many of the factors that are currently thought to be indicators of life on other worlds, such as liquid water and a breathable atmosphere, are rendered irrelevant. As such, researchers would need to identify other signals to pinpoint which planets might harbor aliens, Shostak said.

But Shostak also offered reassurances, telling the Future Con attendees that at least they won't need to worry about scientists or the government concealing the news when alien life finally does appear — the story would be too big for them to hide it for long, he said.

"Will we all start singing 'Kumbaya' and just get along when that happens? I don't think so," Shostak said at Future Con. "But it'll change things. Forever after, you will know — as amazing as you are — that you're not the only miracle, you're not the only kid on the block. And I think that'll be very interesting to learn."

Original article on Live Science.

One of the most gruesome, sinister, and completely intriguing of phenomena connected to the phenomenon of UFOs is that of the dark world of cattle mutilations. By some accounts, for some reason, it seems that whatever is behind these strange lights in the sky also has a liking for targeting various livestock for some impromptu surgery and mutilation, often ending up with carcasses that show a variety of strange features such as almost selectively missing organs, strangely precise cuts, a lack of deterioration, and no rotting stench pervading the area. This is all quite horrifying enough, but what if it was not a cow, horse, or some other beast of burden, but rather a human being? That would be sinister indeed, wouldn’t it? Well, there have indeed been such cases, where people have been found to vanish under mysterious circumstances only appear later showing all the hallmarks of cattle mutilations, sending them into the annals of unexplained mysteries.

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of an apparent case of mysterious, inexplicable human mutilation occurred in Brazil in 1988. At the the Guarapiranga Reservoir was found the body of a man that was in a very strange state indeed. Although it was determined that the person had been dead for several days, there was no smell when it should have been redolent with the stench of decay, no noticeable decomposition, and there was no sign that the body had been fed upon by scavengers or even insects. Upon his body were found to be numerous smooth round holes, and the man’s lips, eyes, tongue, and ears had been cut away with expert precision, not torn or ragged in any way. Other tissue and organs had been removed as well for reasons unknown, and there were other anomalies in addition to all of this. The coroner tasked with examining the body would later say of it:

Although the victim had been dead for 48 to 72 hours there was no sign of being eaten by animals or starting to rot, as would be expected. There was no smell. Bleeding from the wounds had been minimal. The lips and flesh from the face had been cut away. The eyes, ears, and tongue had been removed. Neat round holes, one to one and a half inches in diameter, had been made on the shoulders, arms, head, stomach, and anus and tissue and muscle had been extracted. The holes had not been made through which extensive digestive organs had been extracted. The scrotum, but not the penis had been removed, and all pubic hair had disappeared. The rectum had been cored out. Despite these devastating mutilations, there was no sign that the victim had been bound or had struggled in any way.

The mysterious body was photographed and the pictures shown to a Dr. Goes Rubens, who concurred that it was all very odd indeed, and seemed inexplicable by normal definitions. It was also pointed out by an associate of Rubens that the mutilations on display with the mysterious body had many of the same hallmarks of the more well-known cattle mutilations, such as a lack of decomposition, organs seemingly selectively removed, precision, almost surgical cuts, and anomalous holes bored into the corpse. It appears that the dead man was never identified and his strange death has from then on had many questions surrounding it. Who or what did this to him? Why was there no decomposition? Why were some organs missing and not others and why had they been removed so cleanly and precisely? Why had those holes been made in the body? Why hadn’t the victim struggled or shown signs of being detained? What happened to him and who was he? We will probably never know.

Perhaps even more bizarre still is the 1956 case of Air Force Sergeant Jonathan Lovette. In March of that year, Lovette and a Major William Cunningham, both of the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, ventured out into the desolate desert scrub to collect fallen debris from a recent missile test at the White Sands Missile Test Range, and at one point Lovette went off behind a dune. A few moments later, Cunningham reportedly heard Lovette scream out in terror, and he ran to investigate. What he saw next would cause him to scream as well.

According to Cunningham, after going over a ridge he was met with the sight of a large, silvery disk-shaped object hovering around 15 or 20 feet in the air, which had a long, snake-like object trailing from it. To his horror, he saw that this appendage was wrapped around the leg of Lovette and in the process of pulling him towards the strange craft. At this point, Cunningham would report that he had been somehow inexplicably paralyzed, wanting to take action but unable to move as he watched his friend get pulled and reeled into the object, after which it sped off at breathtakingly great speed. As soon as it was out of sight, Cunningham found himself released from whatever had kept him frozen there.

White Sands, New Mexico

After radioing Missile Control and telling them what had happened, he was told that they were indeed picking up a radar signature moving rapidly, but that they were not able to tell what it was. Security forces and soldiers immediately descended upon the area, and a massive search began, which would go on for 3 days without finding a single trace of the missing man. In the meantime, it was suspected that Lovette had been the victim of foul play and that Cunningham was responsible, his wild story simply a cover, and he was detained. On the third day of the search, after meticulously scouring 100 square miles of the landscape, Lovette’s body was found around 10 miles from where he had gone missing, and his corpse was in a horrifying state.

Besides being completely drained of every drop of blood, there was no sign of vascular collapse, meaning he had not died of bleeding to death and was very unusual for someone who had been drained of so much blood. An incision had been made in Lovette’s lower jaw, through which his tongue had been removed, a cut which extended from the tip of the chin all the way down to his larynx. His anus and genitalia had been expertly removed “as if from a plug,” and his eyes had been taken out smoothly. The body showed no signs of decomposition, despite being estimated to have been lying out there in the desert heat for one or two days, and most oddly of all there were found to be dead scavengers nearby that had apparently died after trying to feed on the body. None of it made any sense at all, and still doesn’t.

This particular incident has its origins in an alleged report called Grudge/Blue Book Report 13, which is mysterious in many ways in and of itself. The manual in question was supposedly analyzed by an information analyst for the U.S. Air Force and former Green Beret named Bill English, and is allegedly dated 1953-1963. Upon the cover is apparently written the code AFSN 2246-3 and the words “Top Secret Need Yo Know Only, Crypto Clearance 14, or above, Required” stamped on it in red ink. Since it is unknown if this document ever really existed or not, and the information given by Bille English is only preserved in his own notes and his memory of what he read, it is unknown if the report is real or whether the Lovette case ever really happened in any sense at all, and so it remains shrouded in mystery.

Just as creepy is the case of a 56-year-old miner named Zingmund Adamski, who vanished without a trace while out shopping for groceries near his home in Tingley, near Wakefield, England, on June 5, 1980, at around 3:30 PM. On June 11, his dead body turned up atop a 12-foot high pile of coal at around 3:45 PM in the town of Todmorden, around 20 miles away from where he had gone missing. The discovery was odd, since that morning the coal yard reported that there had certainly been no body there and no suspicious activity, so it had basically just appeared out of nowhere. Adamski was purportedly wearing a suit but missing his shirt, watch, and wallet, yet other than that his clothing seemed to be in rather pristine condition, although they seemed to be improperly fastened, as if put on by someone who did not know what they were doing.

Although not as badly mutilated as the other cases, Adamski’s body nevertheless showed some oddities that are hard to explain. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death had been a heart attack, but this was not known for sure, and strangely although he had been missing for 5 days he only had one day of beard growth. He had been well-fed and taken care of, but what was strange was that there were some weird burns marks on his neck and shoulders that were of an unknown origin, with some unidentified gel or lotion spread across them. There was no evidence that he had sought any sort of medical treatment from the area’s hospitals and the cause of the burns and the composition of the gel could not be determined by forensic scientists. James Turnbull, the coroner who dealt with Zigmund’s death, said of the condition of the body, “The question of where he was before he died and what led to his death just could not be answered.”

All of these things posed a variety of questions. First, if he had died of a heart attack, then why had he found himself at the top of that pile of coal? This is even more mysterious considering that there were no signs that anyone had climbed up the pile at all, suggesting that the body had been placed there from above. Also, since he had been taken care of and had died only recently, then where had he been for nearly a week before his dead body was found?

The case was so strange that it attracted the attention of a UFO researcher, strangely named George Adamski, who believed that Zigmund had been in fact abducted by aliens, possibly accidentally, and this theory was further bolstered by claims made in the following days by police officer Alan Godfrey, who had been the officer who had originally found the body and who claimed to have seen a diamond-shaped UFO in the area 6 months later. Godfrey claimed that this UFO had abducted him, leaving him in his patrol car with 30 minutes of lost time. There were also alleged cattle mutilations around the region at the time, which were thought to have been perhaps related to Adamski’s disappearance and subsequent death. Considering that the region has been known for quite sometime as a UFO hotspot, does this mean that Adamski was indeed abducted by a UFO? It is hard to say, but the circumstances of his disappearance, the condition of his body, and the weird clues surrounding it all have made it oft-discussed and debated.

What happened to these people? How can we explain their strange and sinister disappearances and the odd condition of their corpses? Is there a rational explanation to be found here or are we forced to look to, shall we say, more mysterious explanations? Cases such as these serve as a splinter upon the mind, begging to be removed and put into rational explanation, yet they continue to defy such efforts. What is going on here? What is behind such things? Is it sick individuals, the work of scavengers, or forces from beyond our world and understanding? It is hard to say for sure, and such accounts only serve to deepen the mysteries behind the UFO phenomena and this weird, weird world we live in.