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

Each week we uncover the most interesting and informative articles from around the world, here are 10 of the coolest stories in science this week.

Sea pickle invasion

Pyrosomes fished out of the water along the Oregon coast range in size from a few inches to more than 2 feet (0.6 meters) long.

Credit: Hilarie Sorensen/University of Oregon

The waters off the Oregon coast are mysteriously awash with strange, jelly-like creatures that look like translucent slugs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Each pickle-like creature is, in fact, a colony made up of individual zooids that join to create a hollow, tube-like structure that has one closed end and one open end. (A zooid is a small, multicellular organism that makes up part of a colonial animal, and can arise from another zooid by budding or dividing.) [Read more about the alien invaders.]

Strange deaths

**A female great white shark that was missing its liver.**
**Credit: Marine Dynamics**

Orca whales have claimed the life of another great white shark by eating its liver and leaving it for dead, making it the fourth such gristly death in less than two months.

No one saw the sharks' last moments, but their injuries indicate that orcas, also known as killer whales (Orcinus orca), were the culprits, the researchers said. [Read more about the dead sharks.]

Lab-grown parts

A sun-shaped viral replication center within sea turtle skin tissue. Re-creating sea turtle skin in the lab allowed scientists to observe how a tumor-associated herpesvirus replicates in three-dimensional tissue.
**Credit: Thierry Work/USGS**

Dr. Frankenstein, eat your heart out: Scientists have grown the pebbly green skin of sea turtles in the lab for the first time ever.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and the U.S. Endangered Species Act list green sea turtles as threatened or endangered throughout their ranges worldwide. [Read more about turtle skin.]

Dangers of fireworks

The image on the left shows the man's left eye shortly after the explosion. The yellowish spots are fragments from the firecracker embedded in his cornea. The image on the right is a CT scan of the man's head. The arrows point to firecracker fragments, which appear as bright white spots, embedded in both eyes.
**Credit: The New England Journal of Medicine © 2017**

With July Fourth just around the corner, it's important to keep an eye out for eye dangers: A man in India suffered severe eye injuries after a firecracker exploded close to his face, according to a new case report.

The doctors were able to remove the firework fragments from the man's left eye, though Dr. Jagat Ram, a professor of ophthalmology at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in India who treated the man, said removing all of the fragments took several sessions. [Read more about firecracker injuries.]

Coffee with a side of what?

How do you take your iced coffee? For some people in the United Kingdom, an investigative report from the BBC has sparked concerns that the drink may come with an unwanted add-in: a dash of fecal bacteria.

The sample size was very small, and all three coffee chains told the BBC that they are looking into the problem. [Read more about the caffeinated scare.]

Carved skulls

**Researchers have discovered seven skull fragments from three different skulls, each marked with deep cuts like this one made shortly after death.**
**Credit: German Archaeological Institute (DAI)**

Fragments of three carved human skulls have been uncovered at a mysterious ritual site in Turkey.

Now, Göbekli Tepe has become a little bit more fantastic with the discovery of skull fragments carved with long, deliberate lines from the forehead to the back of the head. These discoveries reveal the existence of a "skull cult" in ancient eastern Anatolia, Gresky told Live Science. The ritual markings on these skulls are unlike those seen in any other civilization, though. [Read more about the ritual skulls.]

Weird creature

**An artist's reconstruction shows Macrauchenia patachonica, which lived in South America during the last ice age.**
**Credit: Jorge Blanco**

An odd extinct mammal that lived in South America during the last ice age had a long neck like a llama's, three-toed feet like a rhino's and what may have been a tapir-like trunk. This peculiar combination of traits fueled a mystery lasting nearly two centuries about how to classify the bizarre beast.

Macrauchenia fossils are fairly plentiful, but paleontologists nonetheless struggled to understand the creature because its combination of features was so unusual, said study co-author Ross MacPhee, curator in the mammalogy department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. [Read more about the ancient mystery.]

Marriage and animals

That "squeee!" you feel when you look at pictures of cute puppies or bunnies might be good for your love life. A new study finds that looking at baby-animal photos may increase couples' levels of satisfaction with their relationships.

In the study, the researchers looked at 144 married couples who had been married for less than five years. The participants' average age was 28. Around 40 percent of the couples had kids, the researchers said. [Read more about animals and matrimony.]

New liquid water

Liquid water exists in two different forms, new research reveals. Here, an illustration of the water molecule in front of an X-ray pattern from high-density amorphous ice, created by creating high pressures and low temperatures.
**Credit: Mattias Karlén**

Liquid water comes in two forms — low density and high density, scientists have found.

Water is essential for life (at least on Earth). And wherever liquid water exists — whether it's in icebound lakes or scalding hydrothermal vents — tiny microbes have been found. That is why scientists have been excited by the possibility of salty water flows and other evidence of ancient water on Mars — it means there may well have been life early on in the Red Planet's history. [Read more about the strange liquid.]

How eclipses work

**The Hinode spacecraft captured this stunning image of the maximum solar eclipse on May 20, 2012, which darkened the sky in parts of the Western United States and Southeast Asia, according to NASA.**
**Credit: Hinode/XRT**

If the sun were just a little bit bigger or the moon a bit farther away, total solar eclipses may never occur. But they do, and it turns out this celestial phenomenon that has changed human history, and our perspective of the universe, may be a sheer coincidence.

Such a nearly perfect match wasn’t always the case, however. Because the distance between the moon and the Earth is slowly changing, solar eclipses looked very different millions of years ago — and they will again, tens of millions of years in the future. [Read more about solar eclipses.]

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In recent weeks, the release of a trove of once-classified British UFO documents has managed to arouse controversy, both for the information contained therein, as well as the fact that the documents have had a somewhat limited readership: following their release by the Ministry of Defense, the files were not disclosed in an easily-searchable digital format, evoking cries of suppression, and even conspiracy from eager potential readers worldwide.

Fortunately, news agencies in the UK have been following up, with featured articles appearing every few days that detail elements contained within the files, often dealing with hair-raising encounters kept quiet by the MOD for decades.

One of the most recent reports to come to light deals with an unusual, Cold-War era incident that occurred in October 1982. It involved an American RC-135 spy plane that, while monitoring Soviet military operations, came under some kind of surveillance by a large, unidentified and brightly-lit aircraft.

The USAF base detailed in the report was located at RAF Troodos on Cyprus, and discussed an incident involving an unidentified aircraft which lasted close to 90 minutes.

According to the report, two US Navy F-14 fighters were involved, as well as an RAF Phantom, which had been diverted to join the F-14s in pursuit of the aircraft over Cyprus. The object was observed by the pilots of the American crew streaking away toward the African coast; the intercepting pilots did not report seeing the object.

According to the Sun, “Radar film, tapes and transcripts of the distress call were also analysed by intelligence officers – but removed from the files.”

Reports of similar encounters between military aircraft and unidentified objects are rife throughout UFO literature, having been disclosed in government documents by a number of countries around the world. The UK has a long history of similar incidents, which include an event that occurred in 1956 at Lakenheath-Bentwaters (not to be confused with the later RAF Bentwaters incident, otherwise known as the “Rendlesham Forest Incident”).

Apart from the reports themselves, we are left with considerations about what, precisely, these kinds of incidents represent. Within the broader UFO narrative, a number of hypotheses emerge, which range from skeptical interpretations of the incidents as being pure misidentification of prosaic phenomena, to secret military operations and, yes, the long-held idea of alien visitors.

Different theories, ranging from the thought-provoking, to the downright absurd, have emerged over the years pertaining to UFO sightings. A listing of these might include the following; note that these are arranged in no particular order, and taking into full account that some are highly improbable, while some are, at very least, far less likely than others:

Extraterrestrial visitors
Unexplained Natural Phenomena
Secret technologies developed by the U.S. or other world superpowers
A so-called “Breakaway Civilization”
Time travelers from the future
“Cryptoterrestrial” hidden denizens of Earth
Interdimensional visitors
Psycho-social phenomenon and misperception/misidentification
Evidence of a hologram-like “Matrix” reality, in which UFOs are the operators
A form of artificial intelligence of unknown origin

An open-minded collection of ideas such as this takes into account a number of very creative concepts, borrowed largely from science fiction. Though in truth, this has been the case since the inception of the modern UFO phenomenon beginning shortly after WWII, where such ideas began to be appended to the subject in an effort to try and account for the seemingly unexplainable.

In other words, the fact that no simple explanation exists for the “how, why and what” associated with these alleged aircraft has inspired a lot of imaginative thinking over the years, which, of course, isn’t to say that something like “extraterrestrial visitors” can be ruled out entirely. Rather, it is to drive home the point that in the absence of a clear explanation for UFOs, a division of thought has seemingly occurred, where one end of the broader spectrum favors the otherworldly, while the other proposes that simple things have been blown out of proportion, and that no such “phenomenon” exists at all.

These two “primary arguments” will inevitably continue to be appended to the UFO situation, especially with the release of new material like the MOD’s current batch of files. However, if there is truly anything we can glean from new data like this (even if it is decades old by the time we see it), perhaps it is that between the two extremes, there is something which might logically account for why government agencies have had such a long history of encounters with phenomena they can’t explain… and which, at times, has warranted military responses, like with the 1982 Cyprus incident.

A multitude of reports like these, often involving what are described as being clearly tangible objects, and seemingly of technological origin, do remain unexplained. Beyond any filtration through overt belief or skepticism (which often requires a certain level of illogic in order to bend the phenomena to fit the parameters of the interpreter), we are left with a plethora of data that does suggest that something unusual is occurring… whatever that is. Logically, this would appear to stand, even if only a handful of these reports remain viable after cold, hard, skeptical analysis.

So what is our “estimate of the situation”? As with virtually all rational attempts to draw conclusions about the UFO phenomenon, we are left with too many holes in the data to know anything for certain, apart from the fact that something exists, which is seemingly technological, and which cannot be accounted for based solely on knowledge of technologies and aircraft on the civilian level. In our opinion, evoking the paranormal in order to account for these objects requires a logical leap, whereas overconfidence in the skeptical dismissal of every UFO incident, despite the data, represents equally illogical behavior.

Somewhere in between these two “universes of belief”, a more likely, and logical, solution may exist; these aircraft are obviously capable of operating in Earth’s atmosphere, and are seemingly highly-adaptable to earthly circumstances. In equal measure, these objects appear to display an interest in earthly happenings, often interacting with military aircraft; this would seem to suggest that the technologies in question are being operated with an interest in things of a political nature, rather than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, etc. Perhaps this is a significant clue to the ultimate nature of the more tangible UFO incidents that have turned up over the years.

At the end of the day, the same old conundrums keep turning up: we need more physical evidence to back up the claims of tangible objects. Conversely, if these things are “ours”, then whoever is in-the-know isn’t talking… and the likelihood that those with a “need to know” would (or could) keep so quiet, and for so long, seems almost as unlikely as space aliens, dimensional visitors, or time travelers.

If there is something tangible at work here, then there must be some kind of solution too, right? In the long run, solving the UFO mystery may require some creative thinking, paired with a willingness to keep our ideas in check, and not get ahead of ourselves with our theories.