NASA Study Makes Search For Exoplanet Life Easier By Studying Water Vapor

20-10-2017 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

Might ET be buried under too much ice to phone Earth? That’s what planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has concluded may be delaying our contact with alien civilizations. Most extraterrestrial creatures are likely deep inside their home planets, in subsurface oceans crusted over in frozen water ice, according to a new proposal at this year's American Astronomy Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Provo, Utah. The hypothesis could explain the lack of signals from other technologically advanced civilizations, a conundrum known as the Fermi paradox.

It’s only recently that astronomers have come to appreciate how common oceans are in our solar system; evidence for them can be seen on several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, and even distant Pluto. These worlds all have water ice as a major component of their crusts, which forms towering mountains and cracked canyons on their surfaces but melts into liquid water at lower depths. Hydrothermal vents on these ocean beds might pump nutrients into their surroundings, similar to ecosystems at the bottom of Earth’s oceans. Such nurseries for life—shielded from space by a thick ice shell—might even be more productive than our own exposed environment.

And should living organisms on icy ocean worlds evolve into intelligent creatures, they probably wouldn’t know the night sky as well as us humans. Perhaps the equivalent of their “space program” would simply be boring through to the frozen surface of their planet, Stern suggests. His proposal wasn’t based on new evidence, but for the first time links up the prevalence of icy ocean worlds with the lack of alien signals.

The idea is intriguing, says psychologist Douglas Vakoch, president of the San Francisco, California–based Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence, though he believes there’s no need to invoke the Fermi paradox. Biochemical indications of life are simply hard to detect remotely, he says, and it will likely take new telescopes and techniques to find them. If they don’t find us first, says Stern, it could be because they decide long-distance communication isn’t worthwhile, especially if they think everybody else is trapped in their own little icy bubbles. 

{ http://science.sciencemag.org/ }

20-10-2017 om 23:34 geschreven door peter  

My Experience Photographing UFOs

Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography!

Imagine this; you’re out shooting and you capture some really beautiful landscape shots or you’ve just taken a bunch of portraits and the sun was perfect, the lighting was in just the right place, the colors and composition were immaculate and you’ve never had sharper photos in all your life. The excitement is so intense that you just can’t wait to get home and get the photos on the computer and start working on them so you can enjoy your new masterpieces. You set aside the entire evening so you can be undisturbed and you wait anxiously while the photos are downloading into your software and then you pull up the first photo and that’s when you see them. To your surprise you stare at first, then you think “did I get them in every shot?” So, you cull through your photos and see them in just about every photo where the sky was in the frame. At this point you simply can’t believe what you are seeing! Then it finally hits home … “I’ve just captured a bunch of UFOs!”

That’s right, UFOs! Unidentified Fuzzy Orbs that appear where the sky is or where any bright part of the photo might be. In this photo, I’ve circled one of them but you should be able to see several all around the sky. At first, you start wiping your screen because maybe it’s a bit of dust that found its way onto your computer monitor. Then you realize every shot has the exact same pattern of dark orbs and you have the revelation that there must be some dust on your camera lens. If that’s the case, you can breathe more easily and give the lens a good cleaning before heading out for your next shoot.

For those of you with a point and shoot or fixed lens camera, that may be where the problem exists. Something got stuck to the front of the lens and it appeared in the shots as very large, faint, but noticeable orbs or smudges. However, those with removeable lens cameras may have to go a couple steps further to find the culprits.

First, you should understand that you can tell almost exactly where the dust is by the size and shape of your UFOs. If they are very large dark or light spots in your image then it’s most likely on the front of the lens. If the dark spot is clearly circular but still large and very soft then it will likely be on the back element of the lens, where the lens attaches to the camera. If the spot is a small, hard, very defined circle, then the dust is inside the camera and stuck to your sensor.

Dust on the lens is the easiest to take care of. Simply remove the lens and give both elements a wipe with a lens cleaning cloth. Dust on the sensor is a different animal all together. The sensor is extremely sensitive and does not like to be touched by anyone or anything. To access the sensor on a DSLR with a mirror, you must lock the mirror in the up, or open, position and you’ll see the sensor directly behind it. On a newer mirrorless camera, the sensor is right there when you remove the lens.

Most of the time, a puff of air will remove the dust and you’ll be good to go. Don’t use a canned or compressed air solution like you would on a computer. You don’t want to blast air onto the sensor. Instead, you can pick up a sensor cleaning kit on the Internet that will include a rubber ball with a small tube and brush on it that will allow you to squeeze a small puff of air and direct it onto the sensor. Never blow on it with your mouth because your breath will carry moisture that can damage the sensor or make the problem worse. Also, when cleaning your sensor like this, hold the camera above you with the sensor and the camera opening pointing down so all the dust that you dislodge will fall out and down. If you put the camera on the table so your looking down into the camera body while cleaning, then you’re just going to be blowing the dust around inside the camera body and it won’t fall out.

You can check to see if any dust remains by holding the camera in front of a light source and tilting the camera from side to side and up and down to see if you see anything on the shiny sensor. In the event a puff of air didn’t do the trick, you can use a cleaning swab and special cleaning fluid to “wipe” the sensor clean. I put “wipe” in quotes because you want to do this with the most delicate touch. Typically, you would wipe the top half of the sensor with one continuous wipe, then wipe the bottom half using the other side of the swab. Not a cotton swab! Do the Internet search for camera sensor cleaning kit and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Never, ever, ever use paper towels, toilet paper, facial tissues, or anything else that can come apart or leave more dust behind. These will all scratch your sensor and your lens if you use them.

Now check to see if you got rid of all the dust. Put your camera in aperture priority mode, set the ISO to the lowest number and turn off auto ISO and auto focus. Set the aperture to the highest number and aim the camera at the clear sky or, if indoors, aim it at a white sheet of paper or even your computer screen with a blank white screen. Zoom your lens, or move close enough so the white fills the entire frame and make sure your camera is completely out of focus. Now, take a picture. Look at the picture in the viewfinder and see if you can see any of those UFOs floating around in the shot. If so, you need to go back in. If not, you’re in great shape!

Until next week, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.

{ http://www.post-journal.com/news/ }

20-10-2017 om 23:24 geschreven door peter  

20-10-2017 om 23:18 geschreven door peter  

OVERTUIGEND BEWIJS VOOR BUITENAARDS LEVEN OPGEDOKEN ( VIDEO )

Buitenaards leven is precies wat het zegt; leven ergens in de kosmos, buiten de planeet waar wij met z'n allen bivakkeren. 

En als wij mensen niet de constructie hebben gebouwd op asteroïde 433, Eros, wie heeft het dan wel gedaan? 

Er zwerven talloze kleine planetoïden of asteroïden door ons zonnestelsel en van de meeste weten wie niet eens dat ze bestaan. Als ze in de buurt van de aarde dreigen te komen, dan schrikken we even wakker, maar verder is het de ver van mijn bed show.

Er is echter een asteroïde die wel ooit de aandacht heeft getrokken van onderzoekers op aarde.

(433) Eros is een kleine, ongebruikelijk langwerpige, planetoïde, die de aarde betrekkelijk dicht kan naderen in zijn sterk elliptische baan met een gemiddelde afstand van 218 miljoen km van de zon. Hij werd in dezelfde nacht (13 augustus 1898), onafhankelijk van elkaar, ontdekt door twee astronomen, in Berlijn en Nice.

Eros is in 2001 bezocht door de ruimtesonde NEAR Shoemaker die op 12 februari van dat jaar een landing uitvoerde met een snelheid van 6 km/h, nadat de ruimtesonde een jaar lang foto's maakte van Eros. 

Echter, voordat NEAR Shoemaker uiteindelijk terechtkwam op het oppervlak van Eros maakte deze ook de nodige foto's van deze planetoïde:

En het is op één van die foto's dat er iets heel merkwaardigs te zien is. De meningen zijn nogal verdeeld over wat het precies is, maar dat het geen rots is zoals NASA ons op de mouw wil spelden, is duidelijk. 

Volgens NASA is het object dat duidelijk zichtbaar is op het oppervlak van Eros, een rots met een doorsnede van ongeveer 45 meter. Wat het verder wel moge zijn, weten wij ook niet, maar wel dat het geen rots is en iets dat door intelligente wezens moet zijn gebouwd.

Uit de verzamelde gegevens van Eros blijkt dat hier sprake is van een planetoïde die tot wel 20.000 miljard kilo aan kostbare grondstoffen kan bevatten die op aarde zeldzaam zijn. Denk dan bijvoorbeeld aan goud of platinum en als dat zo is, dan kan datgene wat je op de foto ziet heel goed een bepaalde constructie zijn die door intelligente wezens daar ooit is geplaatst als onderdeel van de mijnbouw die daar misschien ooit heeft plaatsgevonden.

Bovenstaande constructie is niet natuurlijk en dus zijn er bij de bouw daarvan intelligente wezens betrokken geweest.

Het bezoek van NEAR Shoemaker is het eerste dat de huidige beschaving op aarde heeft gebracht aan dit stuk ruimterots. Het is natuurlijk heel goed mogelijk dat eerdere beschavingen op aarde dusdanig ver gevorderd waren, dat ook zij in staat waren om constructies te bouwen op een planetoïde.

Of het waren intelligente wezens van andere planeten dan de onze. Hoe dan ook, met deze foto van een intelligent gemaakte constructie op een planetoïde is overtuigend aangetoond dat er leven bestaat buiten onze aarde. Buitenaards leven dus.

De originele foto bevindt zich nog steeds op de NASA website en is hier te vinden.

Tyler van Secureteam heeft bovenstaande foto ook ontdekt en in zijn video geeft hij nog meer voorbeelden van constructies op andere hemellichamen die absoluut door intelligente wezens gemaakt moeten zijn.

Hoelang blijft de bevolking nog doorlopen met de door de mainstream media aangebrachte oogkleppen? 

En van het buitenaardse willen we lezers nog even herinneren aan een zeer aardse aanbieding van Orjana deze week:

{ http://niburu.co/ }

20-10-2017 om 23:10 geschreven door peter  

Calling Tom DeLonge! Before you get too far along with your fundraising campaign in the U.S., you may want to take a quick trip to Brazil to see what’s going on near Sao Paulo where news is slowly leaking out about an alleged UFO landing in early October that seems to have been covered up by the Brazilian media until now.

Santos e Regiao is blaring the headline “Residents report alleged landing of ‘flying saucer’ on the coast of SP” and reporting that residents of Peruíbe, a coastal city west of Santos and southwest of Sao Paulo, allegedly saw a bright light around dawn on October 7 and found vegetation smashed to the ground as if a large craft had landed on it. The impression – measuring 13 by 2 meters (42.6 by 3.6 feet) – was not an elaborate geometric design like a crop circle (or in this case, rectangle) but was nonetheless cordoned off immediately by local officials to “avoid agglomerations that would hamper the work of the researchers.”

(Santos e Regiao )

Agglomerations? That would be ‘crowds of curious onlookers’ who would trample the site and everything else around it before investigators had a chance to do their jobs. Investigators like Saga Susseliton Souza, who claims to have 35 years experience in UFO investigations and had this to say after viewing the area:

“We looked at it in the last few days and we already noticed that it was something that was not made by a human. It was a UFO, really, that landed there in circular movements, so the vegetation was just crumpled.”

(Santos e Regiao)

Saga noted that electricity went out in the neighborhood at the time of the sighting and those living close to the ‘landing’ site reported “nausea and malaise.” The city was justified in keeping out “agglomerations.” When the “landing” was finally revealed by the media, around 100 people showed up to check things out. That’s probably just the beginning. Santos e Regiaoreports that Peruíbe is a hotbed for UFO activity, with 79 reported sightings listed on the UFO Hunters web site since 1998.

(Santos e Regiao)

With that many sightings, it’s not surprising that the city hosts an annual Ufological Meeting of Peruíbe (Santos e Regiaoreports over 1000 people attended in 2012) and is committed to ufology tourism. A survey of sightings made in 2010 found that most pass through eight points in the city where residents have seen UFOs, landing marks, lights and “luminous beings”

(Santos e Regiao )

It’s not clear if the latest ‘landing’ is at or near one of these points. Nor is it clear why it was not revealed for 10 days. However, Peruíbe officials seem committed to investigating and promoting UFO sightings and alien encounters, with the intent of making their city a center for what they call “Ufotourism.”

Hear that, Roswell?

{  http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-10-2017 om 23:01 geschreven door peter  

20-10-2017 om 18:35 geschreven door peter  

Newsweek special edition covers UFOs and the search for aliens in a positive light

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas -

Newsweek recently released a special edition magazine titled Life Beyond Earth? The Mission to Find the Answer, and while one might expect it to be dominated by stories about NASA’s search for extraterrestrial microbes, or the SETI Institutes search for extraterrestrial radio signals, instead it is full of information about topics such as UFO investigations and alien abductions. That may make some of our readers cringe in fear of ridicule, but the stories are balanced and largely treat the topics positively.

The magazine has a lot of pictures. Some of them are rare pictures in remarkable condition. The kind of pictures writers like me search hours for, so that is why this excited me so much. Some of the pictures were even provided by OpenMinds.tv. With so many pictures, the stories are short, but cover a large variety of topics.

The stories range from ancient alien type topics to the Mars rover. What is exciting is that the UFO and alien stories are mixed in with the conventional science based stories, treating them all equally. There is also diversity within the topics. For example, their coverage of alien abduction covers experts who describe more positive experiences, and those who do not. More popular cases such as Betty and Barney Hill, the first alleged abduction to receive media coverage, and Travis Walton, are also included.

Photo of Travis Walton (right) with Jillian Björgin in the Newsweek Special Edition.

(Credit: Newsweek)

As an example of the tenor of the stories, when dealing with abduction they include a 1993 study from the Journal of Abnormal Psychology which found people claiming to be abducted by aliens to be as intelligent and prone to fantasy as the general public.

Another interesting aspect of the magazine is a section on how UFOs and aliens have influenced art. From wild comic books in the 1950s, to blockbuster movie and TV shows, like the X-Files, today.

Yvonne Smith (upper left), Reuben Langdon (lower left) and Alejandro Rojas – Me (right) in Newsweek Special Edition.

(Credit: Newsweek)

The magazine even recommends resources for more information, including books, and a particular interesting podcast called Open Minds UFO Radio. You will have to check the podcast out.

Open Minds UFO Radio in Newsweek Special Edition.

(Credit: Newsweek)

You should also check out the magazine. It is on the shelves in every grocery store, so it is easy to find.

{ http://www.openminds.tv/ }

20-10-2017 om 18:23 geschreven door peter  

That may sound like a strange – even bizarre – question to ask. But, stay with me. There’s absolutely no doubt that something very strange happened on the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. There is intriguing witness testimony which supports the idea that people were warned not to talk about what they knew – as in ever. There were, allegedly, death threats made too. Tales even exist of people being murdered to prevent the truth of Roswell from surfacing outside of the secret world of government. But, that was then – seventy years ago. What about now? That’s the important question. It’s a question which gets to the heart of the title of this article.

Whenever elements of the U.S. Government, such as the GAO (the Government Accountability Office) or the Air Force have anything to say about Roswell, Ufologists typically scream “Lies!” “Disinformation!” I saw this, and still remember it, when back in the 1990s the Air Force published its reports on Roswell. One surfaced in 1994 and was soon followed by a massive report in excess of 1,000 pages in length. The Air Force concluded that, most likely, what came down on the Foster Ranch was a huge “Mogul” balloon array, designed to monitor for early Soviet atomic bomb tests. Then, in July 1997 – which was the 50th anniversary of Roswell – the Air Force published another report on Roswell. This one was on the controversial matter of the bodies found at Roswell – which the Air Force suggested were probably crash-test dummies. Ufology was in a state of uproar, pointing figures at what it considered to be a bunch of liars. But, those same ufologists were wrong.

I don’t think that a Mogul balloon came down on the ranch – at all. Nor do I think that the bodies were mere dummies. But, I don’t think the government/Air Force lied. I think they genuinely went looking for answers, but couldn’t find anything solid, and – as a result – came up with what they truly considered to be a viable answer. Or answers. I am of the opinion that when, in the 1990s, the Air Force and the GAO came out with their reports on Roswell, they had less answers than did Ufology.

Within Ufology there is an (almost required) assumption that if what the government states about UFOs doesn’t accord with what Ufology wants to hear, then it must be a lie. Not so. A careful and close read of the combined Roswell reports of the USAF and the GAO makes it very clear that officialdom’s theories were simply that: theories. The Air Force openly admitted there was no definitive proof that dummies or Mogul balloons were the cause of all the fuss. The Air Force admitted that crash-test dummies were not used in the area until the early 1950s. Their theory was that the witnesses to the dummies got the years wrong, confusing the fifties with 1947. The Air Force also admitted that while it found thousands of pages of documents on Mogul – and in numerous military archives – not a single such document confirmed that it was a Mogul balloon that came down in Lincoln County.

In my view, if the USAF was lying, we would have seen a far more robust, well-constructed cover-story that addressed every avenue and plugged every hole. But, the reports do not do that. Instead, they show that the USAF tried to come up with what they thought were probably the answers, but couldn’t prove it. Then, there’s the matter of one of the key military/intelligence figures in Roswell: Sheridan Cavitt. Certainly someone who knew exactly what happened at Roswell, he took the truth to the grave with him. When, in the early 1990s, the Air Force was busily trying to figure out what the hell happened at Roswell, Cavitt was still alive. The Air Force contacted him and plans were made for a face-to-face interview. It happened in May 1994, in Cavitt’s own home.

Department of the Air Force Seal

The Air Force told Cavitt that, in their minds, the Roswell debris was very likely from a vast Mogul array – which might have explained the huge debris field found on the Foster Ranch. Cavitt, though, was having none of it. He firmly told the Air Force that what he saw and handled was a regular, tiny weather-balloon and nothing else. End of story. This caused the Air Force some big problems: they were pretty sure that Mogul was the answer. But, the one still-living man that just about everyone in the know said was on-site back in forty-seven was denying the Mogul scenario. As I see it, had the Air Force been engaged in conspiracy and lies – and knew what happened at Roswell – they would have had Cavitt on-board to help uphold and bolster their theory. After all, Cavitt was there. He saw what it was that came down. And he knew the truth. But, he chose to direct the Air Force to nothing stranger than a weather-balloon. For me, this is evidence that the USAF was genuinely looking for answers, but their primary guy (who they had their hopes on) was skillfully steering them away from what he knew – and doing so with something as simple as a weather-balloon. Cavitt knew the truth. The Air Force didn’t know the truth. And that’s just how Cavitt wanted it. Whether Cavitt was acting alone, or some deeply hidden cabal ordered him to try and keep the Air Force away from the truth, is an issue that still requires an answer.

All of this leads me to believe that neither the GAO nor the USAF knew the truth of Roswell. I’m sure that is still the case, today. But, how could that be? How could there be so many books written on Roswell, but the Air Force can’t find any solid data? Well, if aliens crashed (which I don’t believe) then it’s not impossible that over the years and decades the truth has been buried so deeply that not even elected officials and high-ranking members of the military can get close to the truth.

There is another possible scenario too; a theory which I think is far more likely. My recent book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, suggests that Roswell was a dark and disturbing example of “human experimentation,” which was born out of the likes of the controversial Operation Paperclip. It’s entirely possible – as several sources told me – that all of the incriminating data and files were destroyed decades ago, chiefly to protect the guilty parties who crossed the line in big-time fashion.

This latter possibility may provide a viable reason why the government knows less than we do: if the files are all gone – relegated to the furnace – then, today, there is nothing to find. That may explain why such a monumental event has seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth. The result? The military came up with Mogul balloons and crash-test dummies; honest attempts to find the truth of an event that has been completely eradicated – apart from in the depths of old, fading memories of even older people. So, yes, the chances are that we, the UFO research community, really do know more than the government itself knows about Roswell. Of course, the same community doesn’t want to hear that all of the Roswell material is long gone: burned and shredded. They don’t want to hear that because it implies that finding the truth may be completely impossible. Which is very probably the case.

Just because the Air Force published reports concluding that down-to-earth things caused all the monumental fuss, doesn’t mean they lied. It means they failed to solve something which is very possibly now unsolvable. Why? Because there is nothing left to find, that’s why. And there was nothing left to find when all the controversy about balloons and dummies was afoot back in the nineties.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-10-2017 om 17:58 geschreven door peter  

This could ruin a lot of good science fiction movies … and create interesting plots for the next generation of them, not to mention influencing how humans deal with space aliens when they first encounter each other (assuming they haven’t already). A timely article by The Daily Galaxy reviews the study “Alien Minds” by Susan Schneider where the professor and author discusses her theory that our first meeting with an extraterrestrial will be with a billion-year-old robot. Wait, what?

“I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be postbiological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence.”

Susan Schneider is an associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy Cognitive Science Program at the University of Connecticut. “Alien Minds” has been presented at NASA and the 2016 IdeaFestival in Kentucky and was published in The Impact of Discovering Life Beyond Earth. It is her response to the question: “How would intelligent aliens think? Would they have conscious experiences? Would it feel a certain way to be an alien?”

“I actually think the first discovery of life on other planets will probably involve microbial life; I am concentrating on intelligent life in my work on this topic though. I only claim that the most advanced civilizations will likely be post biological.”

Schneider’s theory is based on three components or “observations.” In her “short window observation,” she presents the idea that a civilization or species that can conquer long-distance space travel is already very close to moving from biological to artificially-intelligent beings. An example of this “short window” is the relatively brief 120 years it took humans to go from the first radio signals to cell phones.

Some of those species will be much older than us, which is Schneider’s “the greater age of alien civilizations” observation – one accepted by many. And not just a few generations older but billions of years beyond us, making them far more advanced and intelligent. How much more?

Schneider’s last observation is that any species that can travel to Earth will be intelligent enough to develop robots that they can upload their brains to. The robots would probably be silicon-based for speed of ‘thinking’ and durability, making them nearly immortal.

Should we fear these superintelligent robots from other galaxies? Schneider thinks we may not have a chance to. If they’re so much further advanced than we are, why would they bother dealing with is in the first place? Or, as she so bluntly puts it in an interview with UConn Today:

“Would you really cross the universe to interact with an ant?”

That’s a relief … I guess. However, she leans to the side of caution when the discussion turns to sending signals into space to proactively contact any life forms listening.

Like the philosopher that she is, Susan Schneider leaves herself an out: there may not be any other species – superintelligent or lower – at all:

“The universe could be a lonely place, we still do not know the conditions that created life on this planet.”

Will our first ET encounter be with a billion-year-old superintelligent robot? Just to be on the safe side, repeat after me:

“Klaatu barada nikto”

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-10-2017 om 16:45 geschreven door peter  

Let’s get the obvious out for the way first … Trans-Neptunian Resonance would be a GREAT name for a prog-rock band. Now, what is it and why does a team of astronomers in Michigan believe it can definitively prove the existence of Planet 9?

Part of the name should sound familiar to star-gazers and Planet 9 searchers. Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) are the dwarf planets, sub-planets and big rocks that circle the Sun beyond the average orbital distance of Neptune. The odd synchronous alignment the outermost TNOs have was the first indication to astronomers that there might be another planet causing it.

However, one puzzling aspect of the TNOs was that their alignment would depend on them being a billion years old or more, but any objects hurtling around the solar system for that long would have either collided with another planet, plunged into the Sun or spun off into space. Why are they still there?

That was the starting point for the Planet 9 simulations done by University of Michigan Department of Astronomy doctoral student Juliette Becker. In her paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Becker describes the two computer models she and her team used in her attempt to prove the existence of Planet 9. In the first, they created various versions of a Planet 9 to see which would best keep the TNOs in place instead of flying away or into the Sun.

“From that set of simulations, we found out that there are preferred versions of Planet Nine that make the TNO stay stable for longer, so it basically increases the probability that our solar system exists the way it does.”

Interesting but boring. The second set of simulations was based on the idea that the TNOs could be knocked out of their orbit, but instead of leaving the solar system or flaming into the Sun, they simply moved and became locked into another stable orbit with a different aligning “resonance” – a process the team calls “resonance hopping.” Again, they found versions of a Planet 9 that would stabilize the TNO after hopping and “confine it in a different resonance.”

This theory sounds much more pleasant and harmonic that the smashing, bashing and ultimately Earth-colliding images of Planet 9 or Nibiru we hear about from both astronomers and doomsday theorists. So, which one is correct?

“The ultimate goal would be to directly see Planet Nine — to take a telescope, point it at the sky, and see reflected light from the sun bouncing off of Planet Nine. Since we haven’t yet been able to find it, despite many people looking, we’re stuck with these kinds of indirect methods.”

Let’s hope your Ph.D. doesn’t depend on direct definitive proof, Ms. Becker. Otherwise, you’ll be back playing drums for Trans-Neptunian Resonance.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

20-10-2017 om 16:38 geschreven door peter  

JAXA discovers 50 km cavern beneath the Moon’s surface - Artificially or natural created?

The Japanese space agency JAXA has announced the discovery of a cave hidden beneath the lunar surface.

 

Illustration of an opening/cavern.

Using a radar sounder system that can examine underground structures, the orbiter initially found an opening 50 meters wide and 50 meters deep.

The enormous cavern in the Marius Hills area on the near side of the moon stretching for about 50 kilometers exists beneath the moon’s surface.

It offers a possible protected site for future underground lunar bases and could provide shelter from cosmic radiation and menacing temperatures, while water or ice could be used as fuel, JAXA said.

It is widely believed the moon was rocked by large-scale volcanic activity until about 1 billion years ago whereby the cavern, likely created by volcanic activity, has not collapsed, reports asahi.com

According to The Hollow Moon hypothesis, the Moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space which is supported by countless pieces of evidence from astronomers and NASA scientists who reveal that some 3-5 kilometers down there appear to be dense layers of metal have led that scientific experts, including NASA investigators believe that the Moon is hollow with a shell about 32 kilometers thick.

Image credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Could it be possible, given the huge interest in this enormous cavern to use it as a future underground base, that the cave rather than created by volcanic activity, as the official statement reads, actually is an artificially created entrance that leads to an already existing enormous underground lunar base built by an extraterrestrial race in the past?

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

20-10-2017 om 16:23 geschreven door peter  

Cassini's Final Days Produced a Burst of Fresh Science

20-10-2017 om 12:52 geschreven door peter  

Black Holes: Facts, Theory & Definition

Black holes are some of the strangest and most fascinating objects found in outer space. They are objects of extreme density, with such strong gravitational attraction that even light cannot escape from their grasp if it comes near enough.

Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity. The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler, and the first one was discovered in 1971. 

There are three types: stellar black holes, supermassive black holes and intermediate black holes.

Stellar black holes — small but deadly

When a star burns through the last of its fuel, it may collapse, or fall into itself. For smaller stars, up to about three times the sun's mass, the new core will be a neutron star or a white dwarf. But when a larger star collapses, it continues to compress and creates a stellar black hole.

Black holes formed by the collapse of individual stars are (relatively) small, but incredibly dense. Such an object packs three times or more the mass of the sun into a city-size range. This leads to a crazy amount of gravitational force pulling on objects around it. Black holes consume the dust and gas from the galaxy around them, growing in size.

According the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "the Milky Way contains a few hundred million" stellar black holes.

Supermassive black holes — the birth of giants

Small black holes populate the universe, but their cousins, supermassive black holes, dominate. Supermassive black holes are millions or even billions of times as massive as the sun, but have a radius similar to that of Earth's closest star. Such black holes are thought to lie at the center of pretty much every galaxy, including the Milky Way.

Scientists aren't certain how such large black holes spawn. Once they've formed, they gather mass from the dust and gas around them, material that is plentiful in the center of galaxies, allowing them to grow to enormous sizes

{ https://www.space.com/ }

20-10-2017 om 12:24 geschreven door peter  

Newfound Bus-Size Asteroid Will Zoom Safely By Earth Today (19/10)

20-10-2017 om 11:58 geschreven door peter  

The RB-47 radar visual multiple witnesses cases, July 17, 1957:

An Air Force Boeing Stratojet reconnaissance jet RB-47, equipped with electronic countermeasures gear and manned by six officers, was followed by an unidentified object for a distance of well over 700 miles, and for a time period of more than one hour, as it flew from Mississippi, through Louisiana and Texas and into Oklahoma. The object was, at various times, seen visually by the cockpit crew as an intensely luminous light, followed by ground-radar and detected on ECM monitoring gear aboard the RB-47. Of special interest in this case are several instances of simultaneous appearances and disappearances on all three of those physically distinct observation channels, and rapidity of maneuvers beyond aircraft possibilities.

In this file:

	The case summary.
	Case study by James E. McDonald.
	Case story by James E. McDonald for the UFO committee of the AIAA.
	About the RB-47.
	References.

Case summary:

On board an RB-47H aircraft equipped with sophisticated electronic countermeasures equipment, including three electronic intelligence (ELINT) stations over the Gulf of Mexico.

The crew consisted of:

Major Lewis D. Chase, pilot, Spokane, WA
Capt. James H. McCoid, copilot, Offutt AFB
Capt. Thomas H. Hanley, navigator, Vandenberg AFB
John J. Provenzano, No. 1 monitor, Wichita, KS
Capt. Frank B. McClure, No. 2 monitor, Offutt AFB
Capt. Walter A. Tuchschner, No. 3 monitor, Topeka, KS

These six men were on a training and test exercise in an RB-47H electronic countermeasures reconnaissance aircraft. The RB-47, while originally developed as a bomber, was also used extensively as a reconnaissance aircraft. One was shot down by the Soviet Union while on such a mission in 1960.

This particular mission began at Forbes AFB, Topeka, Kansas as an exercise including gunnery exercises over the Texas-Gulf area, navigation exercises over the open Gulf, and Electronic Countermeasures exercises on the return trip across the south-central U.S. The men participating were soon to depart for Germany and duty there. It should be noted that the ECM equipment was not radar. It did not emit a signal and then pick up reflected echoes off of an object. Rather, it detected electromagnetic signals that were actually emitted by an object itself. The purpose of this was to detect and locate enemy radar installations. On this aircraft, the #2 monitor consisted of a direction finder with antenna on the lower rear of the aircraft, and the #1 monitor consisted of a direction finder with antennas on each wingtip of the aircraft. The #3 monitor was not involved in the events of July 17, because its range did not include the frequencies involved.

The first contact with the unknown was before 4:00 AM CST. The first two parts of the mission had been completed, and the aircraft was just leaving the airspace over the Gulf of Mexico near Gulfport, Mississippi, when Frank McClure, on the #2 ECM monitor, detected an airborne signal to the right rear of the aircraft, out over the Gulf of Mexico. The signal was of a type usually confined to ground-based radar installations. It was at 2800 megacycles, a common frequency for S-band search radar. McClure at first thought that his scope must be 180° out of alignment and that he must be picking up a ground-based radar station in Louisiana, which would actually be to the left front of the aircraft. As he watched, the signal moved up the scope, as it would if the scope was 180° out of alignment. However, he was amazed to see that, after it had moved up the scope on the right-hand side of the aircraft, it then crossed the path of the RB-47 and proceeded to move down the scope on the left-hand side. In other words, whatever was emitting the signal flew a ring around the RB-47, which was flying at approximately 500 miles per hour. Even if the scope was 180° out of alignment, the signal source still moved completely around the aircraft, which no ground radar could do. McClure said and did nothing at this time, not mentioning the signal to the other crewmembers. The signal faded as they flew north.

The RB-47 made a scheduled turn to the west over Jackson, Mississippi and the crew was preparing to begin a series of simulated ECM operations against Air Force ground radar units, when suddenly the pilot, Lewis Chase, saw a light coming in from the left, at approximately the same altitude as the RB-47. At first he thought it was another plane, but it was only a single white light, closing fast. He gave the command to prepare for evasive maneuvers, but the light flashed across from left to right so fast that no such action could have been taken. It then blinked out at a point to the right front of the aircraft. Both Chase and Copilot James McCoid observed this. At this point, approximately 4:10 AM CST, they were approximately over Winnsboro, Louisiana.

Chase told the other crewmembers what he had seen, and McClure now told him about his earlier signal reading. At 4:30 AM, McClure set his scope to detect signals near 3000 mcs again, and he detected a strong signal at the same location in relation to the RB-47 that Chase had last seen the light. He and Provenzano checked the alignment of the #2 monitor by tuning in on known ground radar installations and found it to be in perfect working order. At 4:30 AM, Provenzano tuned his own monitor, #1, to 3000 mcs, and found that his equipment detected a signal at the same location. What's more, he and McClure found that the signal was staying in the same position, keeping pace with the RB-47, which was still flying at 500 miles per hour. This meant that it was not a signal from a ground-based radar.

By this time they had reached the Duncanville, Texas area. At 4:39, Chase spotted a huge light to the right front of the RB-47 an about 5,000 feet below the aircraft's 34,500 feet altitude. The weather was perfectly clear. At 4:40, McClure reported two signals, at 40° and 70°. Chase and McCoid reported seeing red lights at those locations. Chase contacted radar Station Utah at Duncanville, Texas and requested permission to abandon his flight plan and pursue the lights, which he received. At 4:48 AM, radar station Utah requested the position of the signals that McClure was receiving, and they immediately confirmed that their radar had detected the objects at the same location.

As the RB-47 attempted to pursue, the object appeared to stop suddenly. Chase could see that they were gaining on it, and they over shot it. At 4:52 it blinked out, and simultaneously vanished from McClure's scope and the ground radar! Chase put the aircraft into a port turn, and the object suddenly blinked on again, simultaneously reappearing on McClure's scope and the ground radar at 4:52! They began to close to within 5 miles of the object, when it suddenly dropped to 15,000 feet and then blinked out again, once again vanishing from the scopes and ground radar. At 4:55, Chase radioed Utah radar station that they had to break of pursuit and continue with their scheduled flight plan due to low fuel. At 4:57 McClure picked up the signal again, and at 4:58 Chase made visual contact again. As they headed into Oklahoma, McClure continued to receive a signal, now from the rear of the aircraft, until it finally faded as they neared Oklahoma City. The Director of Intelligence, 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, stated in his report that he had: "...no doubt the electronic D/F's coincided exactly with visual observations by aircraft commander numerous times, thus indicating positively the object being the signal source."

What can be detected on ECM direction finding devices, can be seen visually, and can be detected on ordinary ground-based radar all at the same time? What can be detected by all the sensors and can also fly rings around a jet travelling at 500 miles per hour?

Project Bluebook said that the sightings in Dallas - Fort Worth area were an ordinary jet airliner. They actually simply confused or voluntarily confused the case with a totally different incident implying a quasi-collision between civilian flights 966 and 655 of American Airlines, which flew above Texas at more than 1000 kilometers away from the RB-47. They couldn't explain the abrupt, simultaneous disappearance and reappearance of the object from radar screens, ECM scopes, and visual detection. They also couldn't explain the events that occurred over Mississippi and Louisiana. They couldn't explain how the Utah radar station could not have told an airliner from an unknown.

Above: Blue Book file card for the case.

The Condon Committee toyed with several explanations, but found none to be satisfactory, finally classifying this case as unknown. In fact, Condon's radar case specialist Gordon L. Thayer said that the Blue Book explanation that the case was due to airliners was "literally ridiculous." The self proclaimed UFO debunker Philipp Klass, not discouraged by his previous ridicule explanation of UFOs as plasmoids which was pointed at as typical pseudoscience wishful thinking by Dr. McDonald, considered that the electronic tracks were due to anomalous radar wave propagation and that the visual sighting was first a meteor, then the star Vega and finally the other planes from American Airlines cited by Blue Book; the long demonstrated ridicule of this explanation apparently did not came up to his mind. Ufologist Brad Sparks, a specialist of aeronautics, responded point by point in a paper in Jerome Clark's UFO Encyclopedia and demonstrated how Klass' interpretation was based on the erroneous interpretation of the data and overall nonsensical.

Map by the crew:

This is the flightpath of the RB-47 (dotted line) and of the UFO (plain line), drawn on their formal report by the captain of the crew.

PROFESSOR JAMES MCDONALD:

The following study is excerpted from "Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations" American Association for the Advancement of Science, 134th Meeting, General Symposium, Unidentified Flying Objects, by James E. McDonald, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, December 27, 1969.

About the RB-47:

The B-47 "Stratojet" was the first all-jet operational bomber in the Air Force and was the backbone of the Strategic Air Command bomber fleet in the 1950s. It was a medium range bomber that could be refueled in flight manufactured by Boeing Aircraft Company (primary), Douglas and Lockheed. It had 6 General Electric J-47-GE-25 turbojet engines, a maximum speed of 600 miles per hour, and a range of 4000 miles. The RB-47E was the photomapping, weather and electronic reconnaissance version of the B-47 and was also one of its best versions; it first flew July 1953. It was designed to check weather along projected bombing routes, photograph enemy installations and monitor defensive radar systems during the period 1954 to 1964. It was used in missions above North Korea, China, and also over the Soviet Union for the most sensitive reconnaissance missions of the Cold War.

References:

• Project Blue Book case file #10073, National Archives and Record Administration (NARA, www.nara.gov), Washington D.C., files of 1957.
• ""Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects" by James McDonald Submitted to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on July 29, 1968.
• "AIAA Committee Looks at UFO Problem", AIAA UFO Subcommittee, Astronautics and Aeronautics, p. 12, December 1968.
• "Optical and radar analyses of field cases" by Gordon D. Thayer, 1969, in "Final report of the scientific study of unidentified flying objects" aka "The Condon Report", by Edward U. Condon and E.P. Dutton et al., New York, Library of Congress Catalog No. 73-77914, 1969.
• "Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations", by James E. McDonald, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 134th Meeting, General Symposium, Unidentified Flying Objects, by James E. McDonald, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, December 27, 1969, reprinted in "UFOs, a scientific debate", edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1972.
• "Meteorological Factors in Unidentified Radar Returns", paper Presented at the 14th Radar Meteorology Conference American Meteorological Society November 17-20, James E. McDonald The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona, 1970.
• "The RB-47 UFO Case - A New Explanation", self-published article by Philipp Klass, 1971, reprinted in his book "UFOs Explained", Random House, New York, ISBN 0-394-72106-3, 1974.
• "UFO Encounter I Sample Case", case selected by the UFO Subcommittee of the AIAA Astronautics and Aeronautics, July, 1971, pp. 66-70. Dr. James E. McDonald.
• "UFOs: A Scientific Debate", edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, "a collection of evidence and opinion from both sides", Norton publisher, ISBN 0-39300-739-1, 1974
• "RB-47 radar/visual sighting", article by Gordon D. Thayer, in the book "The encyclopedia of UFOs", edited by Ronald D. Story, Doubleday and co, New York, 1980.
• "UFOs: An insider's view of the official quest for evidence", by Roy Craig, University of North Texas Press, Denton, Texas, ISBN 0-929398-94-7, 1995.
• "The UFO Book", by Jerome Clark, pp. 505-509, Visible Ink, New York, ISBN 1-57859-029-9, 1998.
• "L'affaire du RB-47", by Dominique Weinstein, in "OVNI USA", hors série VSD magazine, pp 32-33, July 2001.
• "Les OVNIS et la défense - A quoi doit-on se préparer", book by association Cometa, pp. 40-44, Editions du Rocher, ISBN 2-268-04592-7, France, 1999.

{ https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/news.htm }

20-10-2017 om 11:43 geschreven door peter  

A Giant Cave on the Moon Could Host Lunar Settlers

A pit on the moon’s surface. 

(Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)

Turn-of-the-century science fiction posited the existence of aliens living deep beneath the surface of the moon.

Someday, those subterranean creatures could very well be us.

New data from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has uncovered a 30-mile-long tunnel under the moon’s surface, likely the relic of long-ago lava flows. Though the existence of lava tubes isn’t something new, this latest find appears to be both mostly intact and sufficiently large enough to potentially serve as a habitat for future lunar settlers.

Lava tubes, underground caves created by volcanic activity, could provide protected spaces large enough

Life Underground

According to radar data from the agency’s SELENE lunar orbiter, publishedThursday in Geophysical Research Letters, the chasm is less than 330 feet beneath the surface and around 300 feet wide—dimensions that could comfortably house inhabitants. Other lava tubes were hinted at by the presence of “skylights,” or areas where the roof of the tube has collapsed, exposing it to the surface above. It’s not yet known how many such skylights exist for this cave.

Lava tubes formed billions of years ago when the moon was still geologically active and molten rock gushed from beneath the surface. Vast lava plains today still mark the moon’s surface, and tunneling through them are channels where lava once ran. In some cases, the lava subsided, leaving a hollow chamber behind. These are similar to the lava tubes found on Earth, and many still exist on the moon.

In fact, the moon’s lower gravity means that the tubes are potentially much larger than on Earth, as they won’t collapse under their own weight as easily. Research in 2015 reported that tubes up to three miles wide could theoretically be possible on the moon, large enough to hold a moderately-sized city.

Caverns tucked into bedrock offer a few key protections for humans living in space. They provide crucial cover from harmful radiation given off by the sun and other cosmic sources, something that Earth’s magnetic field takes care of here. The surrounding rock also serves as an insulator against temperature swings that take the moon’s surface from hot enough to boil water to less than -200 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of a single day. Finally, it also offers some protection from the small meteorites that periodically bombard the moon, although larger collisions are still a worry.

Next generation orbital space craft could use radar to locate these tunnels, created under the

Gimme Shelter

The prospect of housing astronauts beneath the surface on other planets has been brought up before, such as in 2014 when a NASA probe got hints of lava tubes beneath the moon’s surface. Both China and Russia have announced plans to put a colony on the moon in the next few decades, and the US could be ramping up to make a return there as well. A lunar base would be a convenient staging point for longer missions to Mars and beyond, in addition to an important proof-of-concept for living on other worlds.

There are still a few challenges to be worked out though, most pressing of which is the question of supplies. Constantly shuttling food and water to the moon would be difficult, so settlers would need their own sources of sustenance. The moon likely contains water ice which could be converted into drinking water and even fuel, but food production would require off-world agriculture. There are a few models for this, based largely on hydroponics, but it’s a task that hasn’t been seriously attempted yet.

Nevertheless, if we manage to seal off a lunar cave, as some have suggested, by installing thick glass or metal shields across any openings and pump it full of air, it could be possible. A system of mirrors could funnel sunlight down below, and lunar settlers could live and farm relatively comfortably. The same idea could work on Mars as well; the Red Planet also has caves, in addition to water ice reserves.

Children will be born on the moon 'in a few decades', with whole families joining Europe's lunar colony by 2050, a top space scientist has claimed. Professor Bernard Foing, ambassador of the Esa-driven 'Moon Village' scheme (concept art pictured), made the comments this week

Cave by cave, humanity could spread across the solar system.

20-10-2017 om 01:59 geschreven door peter  

1: Brian Cox: purple slime

Cox suggests that life in the universe is likely abundant. Intelligent life, however, is another matter.

In his 2015 book Human Universe (written with Andrew Cohen), Cox writes there is a sense of “chemical inevitability” to life in the universe. But he adds that complex life on Earth only arose after the emergence of eukaryotes – cells containing organelles.

Research suggests eukaryotes developed as a result of one primitive cell – called a prokaryote, like a bacterium – absorbing another, two billion years ago. (Mitochondria and chloroplasts are descendants of independent prokaryotes that entered symbiotic relationships with larger cells.)

The advent of eukaryotes on Earth was a vanishingly unlikely development. Cox calls it an “evolutionary bottleneck” and thinks it so unusual that it might have happened only once in the universe.

“One can easily imagine that the 20 billion Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way could all be covered in prokaryotic slime,” he writes. “A living galaxy, yes, but a galaxy filled with intelligence? … I’m not so sure.”

2: Chandra Wickramasinghe: bacteria

Together with the late Fred Hoyle, mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist Wickramasinghe developed the astrobiological theory known as panspermia, which holds life on Earth was catalysed arrived as microbes travelling through space on meteors and interstellar dust.

He suggests that microbial life may have landed during the Hadean period, four billion years ago, when lots of smallish meteorites smacked into the planet.

In a paper published in August 2017, he suggests ET might also have been deposited on the moon. Recent evidence indicating the presence of water, he says, “reopens the possibility that microbial life might exist close to the lunar surface”.

3: Paul Davies: indescribable

In a 2016 paper, The “Hard Problem” of Life, written with Sara Imari Walker, astrobiologist Paul Davies begins with a well-known problem. Given that all life on Earth arose from a single common ancestor, we have no way of knowing what aspects of it are law-like – found in all life, across the universe – and which are specific only to our own biosphere.

It follows that life elsewhere need not involve Earth-like biology or chemistry. Indeed, write Davies and Walker, it is possible that it “will not ultimately be reducible to known physical principles”.

The pair suggests that the true essential for life is information – which somehow “calls the shots”.

Those things that we assume to be fundamental – replication and metabolism – might be features only of “Earth-like” biologies. There is a risk that should we ever encounter ET, we might not recognise it because we lack “a general-purpose set of criteria for identifying it”.

4: Chris Hadfield: oddly familiar

The retired commander of the International Space Station thinks the bizarre 500 million year-old soft-bodied fossils found in Canada’s Burgess Shale hold some clues.

“It’s so wildly different to the life we’re used to,” he says. “There was such wild experimentation through the four billion years of life on Earth.”

We might find life on Mars, or Enceladus, or Europa, he notes, and it might look like an organism that died out during a mass extinction down here.

“But I might have that completely wrong,” he adds. “Some of the strange examples they came up with on Star Trek might be a better representation.”

5: Jason Wright: highly skilled builders and engineers

Wright, an astrophysicist at Penn State University in the US, suggests we need to be looking for the things ET builds.

He suggests focusing the search for intelligent ET on exoplanets. Rather than look for traces of biology, though, we should look for technology.

We should search for giant machines, which are likely to be “be detectable by their waste heat in the mid-infrared.”

Such structures, he says, could include enormous energy-collectors (known as Dyson spheres), satellites and defensive shields.

Looking for them, he notes, need not be expensive. The search can “piggyback on work likely to happen in the future, anyway, as natural anomalies are discovered in the course of exoplanetary science.”

6: Neil deGrasse Tyson: not huge, and hopefully paying attention

In his book Death By Black Hole (2005), Tyson says microbial life is possibly humming away throughout the universe.

Intelligent life, on the other hand, is likely to be very scarce. However, the Copernican Principle – they key idea that we and our planet are not special – implies it must be around somewhere.

He says ET must be limited to a maximum size. It could not be as big as the solar system –10 light years across. Even assuming nerve impulses at the speed of light “if it wanted to scratch its head, then this simple act would take 10 hours to accomplish.”

Tyson hopes that some intelligent ETs are sending out messages into the cosmos, rather than, like us, scanning in the hope of hearing an alien transmission. If not, he writes, “everybody would be listening, nobody would be receiving, and we would collectively conclude that there is no other intelligent life in the universe.”

This article appeared in Cosmos 76 - Spring 2017 under the headline "Cosmologists and ET"

{ https://cosmosmagazine.com/ }

20-10-2017 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

Also: Check out county's previous close encounters, from a famous spaceman to its own possible Roswell Incident

A glowing light beams brightly through the darkness as it appears to slowly glide across the Cumbrian night sky.

The striking sight causes at least one person on the ground to pause, wonder - and film the object as it cruises above.

Posting on YouTube, identifying themselves by the title Space Bound, the spotter poses the question: Is this a UFO?

See the video here:

{ http://www.timesandstar.co.uk/news }

20-10-2017 om 01:15 geschreven door peter  

UFO sighted over Alton in the early hours of Tuesday morning, part of small area flap of sightings

by Cory Davenport, Staff Writer

ALTON - A strange aerial object was sighted by a group of friends talking on the back deck of a building on Langdon in Alton.

Altonian Ian Whitmore said he sighted the object after midnight Tuesday morning with a group of a few friends. He said it appeared in the southeastern sky, toward the Clark Bridge. Whitmore said he noticed a light in his periphery, but ignored it for as long as a half hour before realizing it was not similar to any plane, planet, star or other atmospheric phenomenon of which he was familiar.

"I was sitting around chatting with some friends and had noticed the light in the sky from my peripheral view, but ignored it for probably 20-30 minutes, until it finally struck me that the light wasn't budging, so it wasn't a plane like I had assumed," Whitmore said in a Facebook message. "We observed it flash red and blue very intensely for another 20 minutes until we decided to look up what the light is."

Whitmore said the unidentified flying object was like "a cop car in the sky." He said it was formless at times, but appeared to be circular. He said it emitted bright flashes of red and blue lights, like "cartoon stars." Whitmore and his friends, being logical skeptics they said, began researching astronomical and meteorological phenomena to find the source of the object.

"After using several sources that utilized Hubble telescope/NASA data, we concluded that the object was not identified currently as a planet or star," he said. "We watched it flash at that rate for several hours by the time it was all said and done. It flashed more intensely in random spurts, but at every moment, remained much brighter and larger than anything else in the sky."

The object was stationary for that entire time, Whitmore said, which would mean it existed within the confines of Earth's atmosphere, not bound by its rotation through the cosmos. The duration of the object's stationary hovering also discounts a suspicion of Whitmore's friend the object was a drone. Most commercial-use drones would have to have recharged batteries to sustain that amount of flight time. Whitmore also said the object was far away.

"However, it was clear this was something that was quite far away," he said. "My final thoughts were that it was either an unidentified star out there in supernova or something; or perhaps something even stranger. The phenomenon was not visible from the exact location the next night at any point. We looked thoroughly."

Calls to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) of Illinois were answered with the assertion the Riverbend area is a hot spot for such activity. He said three reports from Illinois were entered within a few days of Whitmore's sighting.

The night before, a sighting was reported from Hamel, Illinois, which lasted for hours as well. The following is a witness report from the MUFON live sighting map.

On the night of October 15, 2017 at roughly 8:35pm cst my girlfriend and i were driving down Fruit Road in between Edwardsville and Hamel, Illinois in Madison County, 30 minutes outside of St. Louis. we noticed one larger-than-star-sized light in the sky glowing orange and witnessed it remaining motionless in the night sky for roughly 15 minutes before we pulled over on a Frontage Road that parallels Interstate 55. the objects where roughly north/north east of or position when we stopped the car. once parked a second object, appeared in the sky that looked similar but may or may not have been associated with this phenomenon. we began to photograph and film the anomalous floating object in the sky and shortly after recording the original object began to move, at first in an eastward direction and then south east towards our vehicle until it flew directly over head. at this point we witnessed but did not record the previously homogeneous orange glow reveal itself to be a constant orange glow followed by a series of successive lights that flashed in an ordered pattern, appearing to be on the same craft. over the course of the next 3 hours multiple orange glowing objects appeared from the same point on the horizon only follow a similar pattern of hovering then flying in various directions but not necessarily in the same direction as the ones before it. over all 4-5 craft were observed.

Another report from Fenton, Missouri was reported to MUFON on Oct. 15. That report described a different object than either of the Illinois reports.

I was taking our dog for a walk on Sennawood Dr. to Fabick Lane in Fenton, Missouri when at approximately 10:00-10:15pm my dog started barking. I looked up and witnessed a large, dark craft which was long like a cylinder over the treeline with 3-4 emerald to pine green iridescent but non-flashing lights underneath moving from what I believe is the south west to the north east of where I was standing. it appeared to be under a mile away and I witnessed a faint, almost non noticeable beam protruding from the back of the craft but not illuminating the trees, I could see a shadow from the craft on the tree tops but no light hitting them. I did not hear any sound coming from it and my phone shut off and restarted on its own. the object appeared to be moving at about 20-30 mph until it stopped in the distance, then I lost view of it.

A call to NASA regarding the incident was not returned.

Reporter Cory Davenport can be reached via call or text at (618) 419-3046 or via email at cory@riverbender.com.

{ https://www.riverbender.com/ }

20-10-2017 om 01:11 geschreven door peter