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

There are no concrete answers for what happened on Edwin Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago.

Kneeling on his living-room floor, Edwin Fuhr reaches beneath a TV cabinet decorated with angel statues and family photos to insert a VHS tape into his video cassette recorder.

It shows Fuhr smoking a cigarette as he looks over a collection of photos scattered on a kitchen table. They’re intriguing images of strange circular patterns on a field — remnants of Fuhr’s sighting of what he believes were UFOs. Interviews with Fuhr are all over the Internet, but not this one, circa 1988.

A province away, at his Winnipeg home, retired Mountie Ron Morier also has a keepsake from the time when he and Fuhr and a small Saskatchewan town became an international sensation. “UFO Incident: Langenburg, Sask. Sept 1, 1974,” reads the cover of Morier’s black binder.

Lifting that cover feels like opening a secret document that should be stamped “classified” in bold, red letters. It contains a police report, newspaper clippings, faded photographs and letters from scientists with the Canadian government.

Morier jokingly calls it his X-File, a fitting nod to the sci-fi TV show that often focused on aliens, UFOs and the paranormal. It’s a treasure trove any UFO aficionado would covet.

**The cover of Ron Morier’s file containing his RCMP report and other memorabilia pertaining to Edwin Fuhr’s 1974 UFO sighting near Langenburg, Saskatchewan.**

A business card in the binder bears the name Dr. J. Allen Hynek, hinting at just how seriously the “incident” was taken. One of the UFO field’s most famous researchers, Hynek worked as a scientific consultant for a U.S. government initiative called project Blue Book, investigating UFO phenomena. Hynek weighed in on the Langenburg event in the media, even reportedly sending a representative to study the site, about 230 kilometres northeast of Regina.

First told before the World Wide Web or even VHS tapes, Fuhr’s story today endures in corners of the Net dedicated to UFOs and extra-terrestrial life. A video interview with him on YouTube five years ago had a resurgence in popularity after taking off on the website Reddit. It’s had more than 20,000 views.

And yet, some of the story’s most interesting parts remain strictly analog, existing only in the possession of two men forever linked to the strange event.

There are no concrete answers for what happened on Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago. Just a tantalizing story told by a Saskatchewan farmer, and the RCMP officer who believed him.

A close encounter of the second kind

Seeing a UFO up close is an incredibly rare experience. Most people just see lights in the sky, but Fuhr got closer.

Around 10:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1974, the then 36-year-old was swathing his fields when he saw five saucer-shaped objects on the edge of a slough.

Thinking they were duck blinds and that someone was playing a joke on him, Fuhr got off of his swather for a closer look, but still kept at least 15 feet back. He says the saucers were hovering a foot off the ground and rotating at a high rate of speed. Their surface looked like highly-polished steel.

Fuhr stopped, backed up and got on his swather. He sat there for the next 15 minutes watching them hover, too scared to move.

“They had me in a trance,” says Fuhr, now 79. “I didn’t even know what to do, cause I sat there and I thought, ‘Well gee whiz.’ ”

According to Fuhr, the objects then took off — emitting a grey vapour from underneath — and disappeared into the sky. They made no sound. The objects flew away so fast that they were gone “like that,” says Fuhr, clapping his hands.

He waited a few more minutes to make sure they were gone, then walked to the edge of the slough where he saw five ring patterns in the field. The grass in the centre of each circle was standing, while the grass surrounding that was flattened in a clockwise circle.

With no idea what he had just seen, Fuhr headed home home for lunch. His wife Karen and his parents could tell something was wrong.

“When he came in he just sat there,” remembers Karen. “All of the sudden we asked him, ‘Is there something wrong?’ And … well then he started telling us.”

The Langenburg incident came at the tail end of a golden age for UFO sightings, when reports of seeing physical craft had tapered off.

Even more tantalizing, the Langenburg UFOs — if that’s what they were — had left behind a physical trace, the circles. This classifies the sighting as a close encounter of the second kind.

**Edwin Fuhr indicates where multiple flying saucers landed on his farm in Langenburg, Saskatchewan in September, 1974. (Photo by Don Healy, Regina Leader-Post) Don Healy /Regina Leader-Post**

**Edwin Fuhr, left, and his wife Karen at the site of his 1974 UFO encounter on July 26, 2017.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post**

Investigating the landing site

Later that night, Ron Morier, then a 27-year-old RCMP constable, got a phone call at the Langenburg detachment.

Fuhr’s brother-in-law Carl Zorn asked if the police had fielded any UFO reports. Zorn had heard of Fuhr’s experience in a phone call. Although the cop and the in-law were skeptical, both men thought there was little reason to think Fuhr would make up such a tale.

“He’s the last guy in the world that would. I mean he was a teetotaller. He’s a churchgoer, a very quiet, shy man,” says Morier.

He decided to check it out. Being an RCMP officer in small-town Saskatchewan in the 1970s, he had time. Morier and his colleagues provided what he wistfully refers to as “gold-plated policing.” No job was too small.

“Back in those days, anytime anybody approached us about anything, we responded,” says Morier.

**A photo that Ron Morier took of the crop circles in Edwin Fuhr’s farm near Langenburg in 1974.**

The next day, he checked out the markings in Fuhr’s field. What caused them? Morier still doesn’t know to this day.

Five circles fit with the same five objects Fuhr saw. Morier’s report says the flattened portion of the circles was approximately 18 inches. The total diameter of two of the circles was 12 feet, while the other three were 10.5 feet.

There was no physical evidence in the area that would indicate someone had driven in and made the circles.

“Whatever made those impressions in his slough there came from the sky and left the same way,” says Morier.

Fuhr was the only person at the farm who saw the UFOs. Despite how fantastic the story was, Morier could not come up with a reason why this quiet farmer would make it up.

“He is a responsible person, and his information is considered reliable,” wrote Morier in his report.

He doesn’t think Fuhr was seeking fame, or even wanted his brother-in-law to tell police about it.

“Why would he want thousands of people coming to his little place there and trampling all over his yard and his fields and all of that?” asks Morier.

The fire in the field

Once the story got picked up by the media, thousands of people flocked to Fuhr’s farm. He says cars were lined up “bumper to bumper” along the road from his farm to Langenburg.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

It was harvest time, and people were literally getting in the way of the family’s work. Tourists, UFO enthusiasts and onlookers from all over were trying to get to the site and to Fuhr.

“They were chasing us down in the middle of the field,” he recalls, saying some drove right in front of his combine.

“My brother was getting upset and dad was getting upset,” says Fuhr. “I said, ‘What the heck am I supposed to do?’ ”

He says a plane carrying Australians who wanted to see the site even landed on a field adjacent to his farm.

Hoping to deter onlookers, Fuhr’s father finally set fire to the grass surrounding the slough where the circles were. It didn’t help though, as markings were still visible on the ground. Fuhr thinks they may have been made by legs stretching out from the UFOs.

The phone at the family’s home was also tied up with people from all over the world calling Fuhr. He says one call came from the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. The two-hour conversation, Fuhr says, involved Armstrong telling Fuhr that astronauts saw UFOs when travelling through space, but were told not to divulge that to the public.

“He said ‘It’s real all right.’ ”

Asked about the possibility of people making crank calls, Fuhr says the conversation convinced him it was indeed Armstrong.

Fuhr never began turning people away, or refusing to pick up the phone. He shrugs, and says he accepted that people were interested.

“I couldn’t do nothing about it. You know how people are,” he says. “Once the public finds out there’s something out there, they’ll all come out and see.”

A farmer made famous

Fuhr and his wife now live a quiet life in a bungalow in Langenburg. He retired from farming in 1989 and runs a landscaping and snow blowing business. To keep his mind occupied, Fuhr does carpentry in his spare time.

And he also enjoys reading books about UFOs.

Some of those books even mention Fuhr’s story, one of North America’s most famous UFO encounters. It was even featured on a History Channel documentary about UFOs. A cheesy dramatization of the sighting was made, with an actor playing Fuhr sitting on what looked more like a backhoe than a swather.

The setting for the video is a poor backdrop for Saskatchewan, with hills and trees in the background rather than fields. When the actor playing Morier arrives on scene, he’s wearing the stereotypical red serge, dress uniform of the RCMP — definitely not what he wore for daily duties.

Fuhr still gets the odd phone call from people curious about his encounter. He’s taken no pains to make himself hard to find, and is happy to oblige anyone who calls and wants to hear the story he’s told countless times.

“To me, it don’t matter. I’ll talk to anybody. If they want the story, I’ll tell them the story.”

He’s friendly, funny, welcoming — and still in surprisingly good spirits about the attention.

The land where the sighting happened still gets its share of visitors. It’s now farmed by Fuhr’s nephew, who tells those searching for the famous site that he has no idea what they’re talking about.

“He doesn’t want nothing to do with it,” says Fuhr.

Edwin Fuhr, a retired farmer, recalls his a close encounter with several UFOs while swathing in his field in the 1970s. His story made international news and is one of the most documented UFO cases in history Canadian history. TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

The most he ever got for sharing his story was a complimentary breakfast from CTV when visiting the studio for an interview. And that’s all right with him. Asked about ever making money from his story, he tilts his head, ponders the prospect, but then shrugs it off.

“To me it don’t matter. It’s out, the story’s out long already.”

Fuhr doesn’t give much thought to his status as a UFO celebrity. “If I had to think about all that I think I’d go bananas,” says Fuhr.

He is so humble about the experience, he doesn’t even like to take credit for it. “It was not my doings. It’s somebody from outer space that’s doing it, not me,” says Fuhr. “I’m a spectator just as well as all the rest are.”

Saskatchewan’s own Fox Mulder

After the Langenburg incident, Morier took his share of ribbing from his colleagues, who sometimes called him Mulder, after the X-Files investigator.

But it never negatively affected his career in the RCMP, which was extensive.

Morier became a composite artist and also trained to reconstruct the facial features of unidentified deceased people using sculpting techniques. During the rise of the computer, he worked on the RCMP’s initiative to begin doing composite sketches digitally.

**A photo of Ron Morier from circa 1974.**

After retiring from the RCMP with 27 years of service, he travelled all over the U.S. while working as a consultant on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. His last job was teaching at the Northwest Law Enforcement Academy in Winnipeg for 14 years.

Morier occasionally grants interview requests from the media or UFO researchers. But he knows they will inevitably lead to more phone calls.

“I don’t know why I do it cause I know it’s going to come back and bite me in the ass again,” he says.

Years ago, Morier was contacted by an engineer from Japan who wanted to learn more about the sighting. While the subject is a hotbed for conspiracy theories, every person who reached out to him seemed legitimate.

“I didn’t talk to any kooks, I don’t think.”

Morier has never tried to hide from the event. If anything, he’s preserved it with his binder.

“I’m a bit of a collector that way. I’ve got lots of old reports and stuff,” says Morier.

One of the most precious items in the binder is a handwritten letter from the National Research Council to Fuhr. Dated Oct. 4, 1974, just over a month after Fuhr’s sighting, the letter explains how scientists have been unable to find any evidence that aliens landed in Fuhr’s farm, and asks for more samples.

The NRC says it no longer possesses any research on the Langenburg incident. Only one brief record acknowledging Fuhr’s sighting exists at the Library Archives of Canada.

Morier has no ill feelings about the Langenburg incident, or its persistence to keep popping up in his life. He still has fond memories of policing the small community.

“To be honest with you it was the best time of my life,” says Morier.

**A page from Ron Morier’s RCMP report on Edwin Fuhr’s UFO sighting near Langenburg in 1974.**

I want to believe

Fuhr is convinced what he saw that day was extraterrestrial.

Over the years, he has taken an interest in the subject of UFOs, and is well read on the subject. He refers to government cover-ups, Roswell and popular theories that aliens may be concerned about global conflicts on Earth.

No scientific investigation has ever found evidence that alien craft landed at Fuhr’s farm. There were no other witness reports. The truth comes down to Fuhr.

Whether his recent YouTube interview, or footage from the old VHS interview in 1988, most of the details are remarkably similar. The fact he has kept it so consistent over the years is one of things that makes it so compelling for Winnipeg-based science writer Chris Rutkowski.

“You’d think that after all these years he might want to embellish the story, but he tends to tell the same story over and over again. The story as of late hasn’t developed into glowing green goo and aliens with almond-shaped eyes and that type of thing,” says Rutkowski, who publishes an annual survey on UFO reports in Canada. “It’s a very straight story, so it’s compelling to think that this probably really did happen as he describes it.”

But is it proof enough?

**A more recent photo of Ron Morier, who now resides in Winnipeg, Man.**

**(Photo courtesy Ron Morier)**

“I guess the assumption is if it’s not ours, whose is it? But on the other hand we just don’t have the proof to make that quantum jump to say this definitely was proof of alien visitation in Langenburg,” says Rutkowski.

The story was compelling enough to be taken seriously by the federal government. Grass and soil samples were sent to the upper atmosphere research branch of the National Research Council, but no conclusions could ever be drawn.

The scientists were intrigued by a black substance found as a precipitate, especially in a sample that was taken from one of the rings that appeared to be burned. The sample was sent to Simon Fraser University for x-ray fluorescence analysis, but no conclusions could be drawn.

Fuhr doesn’t really care who believes or doesn’t. People have been telling him since the 1970s that it was all in his head.

“I had a guy from Quebec come out, and he figures I was smoking pot,” says Fuhr.

But to this day, Morier still believes Fuhr is being honest about what he saw.

“Why would he just out of the blue make this up?’” says the former officer.

The media ran with Morier’s findings, and in some cases used them as confirmation that flying saucers had landed. A headline from a newspaper in Newfoundland read “RCMP officer convinced UFOs were real.”

While Morier believes Fuhr to be truthful, he doesn’t believe in UFOs or little green men. The uncertainty of the Langenburg incident frustrated Morier because as intriguing as it was, it didn’t yield any answers.

“It bugged me a little that it didn’t confirm or not confirm that they do exist,” he says. “I still don’t know.”

Morier notices Fuhr seems more outspoken in his interviews now than the quiet farmer he knew. He commends him for sticking to his story.

“Good on him. He’ll never know and we’ll never know I guess,” says Morier.

“But boy that would’ve been quite an experience that day to see what he saw.”

mmelnychuk@postmedia.com

Choosing Sides

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don’t agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall.

How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community?

Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve — processes typically performed in the human brain. Digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri , along with Tesla’s Autopilot, are all powered by AI. Some forms of AI can even create visual art or write songs.

There’s little question that AI has the potential to be revolutionary. Automation could transform the way we work by replacing humans with machines and software. Further developments in the area of self-driving cars are poised to make driving a thing of the past. Artificially intelligent shopping assistants could even change the way we shop. Humans have always controlled these aspects of our lives, so it makes sense to be a bit wary of letting an artificial system take over.

Image credit: Silver Blue/Flickr

The Lay Of The Land

AI is fast becoming a major economic force. According to a paper from the McKinsey Global Institute Study reported by Forbes, in 2016 alone, between $8 billion and $12 billion was invested in the development of AI worldwide. A report from analysts with Goldstein Research predicts that, by 2023, AI will be a $14 billion industry.

KR Sanjiv, chief technology officer at Wipro, believes that companies in fields as disparate as healthcare and finance are investing so much in AI so quickly because they fear being left behind. “So as with all things strange and new, the prevailing wisdom is that the risk of being left behind is far greater, and far grimmer, than the benefits of playing it safe,” he wrote in an op-ed published in Tech Crunch last year.

Games provide a useful window into the increasing sophistication of AI. Case in point, developers such as Google’s DeepMind and Elon Musk’s OpenAI have been using games to teach AI systems how to learn. So far, these systems have bested the world’s greatest players of the ancient strategy game Go, and even more complex games like Super Smash Bros and DOTA 2.

On the surface, these victories may sound incremental and minor — AI that can play Go can’t navigate a self-driving car, after all. But on a deeper level, these developments are indicative of the more sophisticated AI systems of the future. Through these games, AI become capable of complex decision-making that could one day translate into real-world tasks. Software that can play infinitely complex games like Starcraft, could, with a lot more research and development, autonomously perform surgeries or process multi-step voice commands.

When this happens, AI will become incredibly sophisticated. And this is where the worrying starts.

AI Anxiety

Wariness surrounding powerful technological advances is not novel. Various science fiction stories, from The Matrix to I, Robot, have exploited viewers’ anxiety around AI. Many such plots center around a concept called “the Singularity,” the moment in which AIs become more intelligent than their human creators. The scenarios differ, but they often end with the total eradication of the human race, or with machine overlords subjugating people.

Several world-renowned sciences and tech experts have been vocal about their fears of AI. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously worries that advanced AI will take over the world and end the human race. If robots become smarter than humans, his logic goes, the machines would be able to create unimaginable weapons and manipulate human leaders with ease. “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate,” he told the BBC in 2014. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Elon Musk, the futurist CEO of ventures such as Tesla and SpaceX, echoes those sentiments, calling AI “…a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” at the 2017 National Governors Association Summer Meeting.

Neither Musk nor Hawking believe that developers should avoid the development of AI, but they agree that government regulation should ensure the tech does not go rogue. “Normally, the way regulations are set up is a whole bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years, a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” Musk said during the same NGA talk. “it takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad, but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.”

Hawking believes that a global governing body needs to regulate the development of AI to prevent a particular nation from becoming superior. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently stoked this fear at a meeting with Russian students in early September, when he said, “The one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.” These comments further emboldened Musk’s position — he tweeted that the race for AI superiority is the “most likely cause of WW3.”

Musk has taken steps to combat this perceived threat. He, along with startup guru Sam Altman, co-founded the non-profit OpenAI in order to guide AI development towards innovations that benefit all of humanity. According to the company’s mission statement: “By being at the forefront of the field, we can influence the conditions under which AGI is created.” Musk also founded a company called Neuralink intended to create a brain-computer interface. Linking the brain to a computer would, in theory, augment the brain’s processing power to keep pace with AI systems.

Other predictions are less optimistic. Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at SETI believes that AI will succeed humans as the most intelligent entities on the planet. “The first generation [of AI] is just going to do what you tell them; however, by the third generation, then they will have their own agenda,” Shostak said in an interview with Futurism.

However, Shostak doesn’t believe sophisticated AI will end up enslaving the human race — instead, he predicts, humans will simply become immaterial to these hyper-intelligent machines. Shostak thinks that these machines will exist on an intellectual plane so far above humans that, at worst, we will be nothing more than a tolerable nuisance.

Image source: Max Pixel

Fear Not

Not everyone believes the rise of AI will be detrimental to humans; some are convinced that the technology has the potential to make our lives better. “The so-called control problem that Elon is worried about isn’t something that people should feel is imminent. We shouldn’t panic about it,” Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates recently told the Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg went even further during a Facebook Live broadcast back in July, saying that Musk’s comments were “pretty irresponsible.” Zuckerberg is optimistic about what AI will enable us to accomplish and thinks that these unsubstantiated doomsday scenarios are nothing more than fear-mongering.

Some experts predict that AI could enhance our humanity. In 2010, Swiss neuroscientist Pascal Kaufmann founded Starmind, a company that plans to use self-learning algorithms to create a “superorganism” made of thousands of experts’ brains. “A lot of AI alarmists do not actually work in AI. [Their] fear goes back to that incorrect correlation between how computers work and how the brain functions,” Kaufmann told Futurism.

Kaufmann believes that this basic lack of understanding leads to predictions that may make good movies, but do not say anything about our future reality. “When we start comparing how the brain works to how computers work, we immediately go off track in tackling the principles of the brain,” he said. “We must first understand the concepts of how the brain works and then we can apply that knowledge to AI development.” Better understanding of our own brains would not only lead to AI sophisticated enough to rival human intelligence, but also to better brain-computer interfaces to enable a dialogue between the two.

To Kaufmann, AI, like many technological advances that came before, isn’t without risk. “There are dangers which come with the creation of such powerful and omniscient technology, just as there are dangers with anything that is powerful. This does not mean we should assume the worst and make potentially detrimental decisions now based on that fear,” he said.

Experts expressed similar concerns about quantum computers, and about lasers and nuclear weapons—applications for that technology can be both harmful and helpful.

Definite Disrupter

Predicting the future is a delicate game. We can only rely on our predictions of what we already have, and yet it’s impossible to rule anything out.

We don’t yet know whether AI will usher in a golden age of human existence, or if it will all end in the destruction of everything humans cherish. What is clear, though, is that thanks to AI, the world of the future could bear little resemblance to the one we inhabit today.

SpaceX's BFR: met een raket naar de andere kant van de wereld

Bronmateriaal:

30-09-2017 om 12:06 geschreven door peter

Bronmateriaal:

30-09-2017 om 11:53 geschreven door peter

EX NASA ASTRONAUT & PRINCETON PHYSICS PROFESSOR SAYS HIS COLLEAGUE, CARL SAGAN, “FUDGED” EVIDENCE OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL BEINGS

Sagan’s Close Colleague

What He Said Carl Sagan Did

30-09-2017 om 11:36 geschreven door peter

CLEAR FOOTAGE OF MULTIPLE UFOS RECORDED & SEEN BY DOZENS OF PEOPLE IN FLORIDA (VIDEO)

30-09-2017 om 11:18 geschreven door peter

What Could They Be? Here Are the Images

More Strange Oddities on the Moon

30-09-2017 om 11:07 geschreven door peter

Ongewone structuren op achterkant maan kunnen zijn gemaakt door aliens. Dit onderzoek is hier pas over verschenen

‘Muren’ of ‘torens’

Interessante antwoorden

Onbekend mechanisme

Intelligente wezens

30-09-2017 om 10:54 geschreven door peter

30-09-2017 om 10:47 geschreven door peter

Strange Light Anomaly that looks like a hologram appears in the Sky

30-09-2017 om 10:29 geschreven door peter

There are no concrete answers for what happened on Edwin Fuhr’s farm 43 years ago.

A close encounter of the second kind

Investigating the landing site

The fire in the field

A farmer made famous

Saskatchewan’s own Fox Mulder

I want to believe

30-09-2017 om 01:29 geschreven door peter

30-09-2017 om 00:59 geschreven door peter

30-09-2017 om 00:42 geschreven door peter

30-09-2017 om 00:29 geschreven door peter

UFO caught on tape over Saddle Brook, New Jersey 28-Sep-2017

30-09-2017 om 00:09 geschreven door peter

UFO flying over El Salvador 28-Sep-2017

29-09-2017 om 23:57 geschreven door peter

Triangle formation in the sky above France 20-Sep-2017

29-09-2017 om 23:54 geschreven door peter

Artificial Intelligence Is Our Future. But Will It Save Or Destroy Humanity?

Choosing Sides

The Lay Of The Land

AI Anxiety

Fear Not

Definite Disrupter

29-09-2017 om 23:47 geschreven door peter

Elon Musk is Officially Sending Humans to Mars in 2024

IN BRIEF

ONE ROCKET TO RULE THEM ALL

MISSION TO MARS

29-09-2017 om 23:36 geschreven door peter

False encounters: Four of the most outrageous alien hoaxes ever – or were they REAL?

'UFO' hovers in the night sky before disappearing

NASA live stream cuts out after floating grey object spotted

UFO-like figures appear in the sky over the Dominican Republic

29-09-2017 om 22:43 geschreven door peter

UFO Festival getting set to land to mark 50th anniversary of Shag Harbour incident

29-09-2017 om 22:09 geschreven door peter

'My family were abducted by aliens and I can prove it!' Woman blasted as she makes bold claim on This Morning

29-09-2017 om 21:32 geschreven door peter

MUFON’s New Social Network