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

Brent Swancer

It is a dark night and the landscape leaps out of the pitch blackness into the beams of the car’s headlights, everything else just an indistinct blur of greys and half-glimpsed shapes, perhaps frosted by moonlight, perhaps not. The trees crowd around the road in the passing light as well, seeming to reach their flickering tendrils and fingers outwards overhead, and there is a sense that anything could be crouched or lurking out in the gloom out there beyond this illuminated patch. Then up ahead something lurches, scurries, or skitters out of the murk, something the likes of which you have never seen disgorged from the forest into your lights and possibly your nightmares. As your mind struggles to make sense of what you have just seen and comprehend it, the thing is gone just as suddenly as it appeared, swallowed back up by the night. What was it? Where did it go? You don’t know, and there was no way for you to have possibly taken a picture.

Such reports are commonplace in cryptozoology, sightings made by people driving along at night minding their own business are numerous to the point that it is almost cliché. There was a time when such chance encounters with strange mystery creatures along the remote roadways of our world would have been nothing more than a scary yarn, with nothing to show for it, and confined to our imaginations, yet in more modern times the increasing use of dashboard mounted cameras in vehicles of all kinds has brought some of these strange, passing sightings into the light and captured them on video for all to see. No longer are such reports the realm of mere pure speculation, doubt, and wonder.

Perhaps one of the more well-known such pieces of mysterious footage was captured in 2009 in Lumpkin County, Georgia, in the United States. In the footage a Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Office deputy is driving along a lonely road in the Frogtown area at night bantering back and forth with a local named Mary Scott, who was along for the ride as a part of a Citizens Law Enforcement Academy program. As the two make their way through a dark landscape illuminated only by the vehicle’s headlights something runs across the road in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. It is hard to see in the unenhanced version of the footage, and can take several viewings to catch, but it is something large and dark in color, seemingly bipedal, and very fleet of foot, and it is odd enough to elicit a shout of surprise from the deputy and genuine amazement from Scott, who also saw it. The two then turn the car around to go back and look for whatever it was, and Scott would later say of the odd encounter:

We were going about 55 mph on a curvy road. It was really late-after midnight, I think. We hadn’t passed any other cars, and this thing came out of nowhere. The officer hit the brakes and we both jumped out. We looked on both sides of the road but didn’t see anything, and we looked at each other kind-of like, ‘You saw that, didn’t you? I saw that.’

The officer can be seen in the footage getting out of the car and shining his flashlight around into the wilderness, but they are unable to figure out where the thing went or just what exactly it is they had just seen. The two can be heard speculating that it might just be some teenagers messing around, but they don’t seem to really believe that, and they continue to express bewilderment. They would later take a look at the dash cam footage they had captured and that was when things got decidedly more mysterious. The bizarre figure indeed seems to run on two legs, is quite fast, and does not appear to be of human proportions, although it is only visible for a fraction of a second. Upon seeing the strange footage Scott became convinced that they had witnessed something truly out of the ordinary, saying of the review of the footage “We were both just shocked. It was really tall, and it really looked like the pictures you’ve seen of Bigfoot.” Bigfoot or not, the reactions of the two witnesses certainly seem genuine and they seem to be convinced that they saw something weird.

When the footage was uncovered and posted on the Internet it immediately went viral, and there was intense speculation on what it could be. Was it a misidentified known animal, Bigfoot, a hoax? Debate and discussion swarmed about the footage, and all manner of cryptozoologists, paranormal investigators, and curiosity seekers came pouring into the area, to the point that Sheriff Stacy Jarrard decided to launch his own investigation into the strange sighting. Jarrard claims that he went interviewing residents of the area looking for any helpful testimony and apparently found it in two students at North Georgia College & State University, who he claims acted very nervous in his presence and allegedly eventually admitted that one of them had dressed up in a gorilla suit and prowled about as a prank on the night in question. It seemed like case closed, or was it?

Skeptics of these claims say that no hoaxers have officially stepped forward to publically claim responsibility for such a prank, and the picture that Jarrard said he took of the boys with the actual gorilla suit has yet to materialize, with Jarrard supposedly refusing all requests to release the elusive photo. It has also been pointed out that the area was very remote and that no one lived in the immediate vicinity, making it odd that the boys would be out there trouncing about in their suit on the off chance that someone would actually happen by. It also seems rather ill-advised to do so in the first place, as in this day and age and with armed people running around and hunters about it seems like wandering around the forest in a gorilla suit is just asking for trouble. I can see using a suit to make one’s own fake video, but the deputy was seemingly not in on this, and walking around pranking unknown people with a gorilla suit in Bigfoot country being the death wish it is, it seems foolish at best. Does anyone really do this?

Adding to the whole odd affair, a 2011 Animal Planetdocumentary group also investigated and confirmed that no teenagers had lived anywhere near the area at the time, making it strange that they should be there, and interestingly when other sheriff’s department personnel were interviewed none of them had any knowledge of Jarrard’s supposed investigation. It seems the only source we have for any of Jarrard’s “investigation” is Jarrard himself, which is a bit suspicious and has led to the idea that he is the one pulling a fast one, possibly to keep people from coming in to snoop about. A BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) statement on the matter reads:

None of the other sheriffs had heard about this story that Jarrard told to a reporter. It seems he came up with the story to quell any fear that local people might have about a monster in the woods, and to prevent hunters from going to look for one.

As far as anyone knows, the two boys might not even exist, and if they do the only one they have admitted a hoax to is Jarrard himself. There has also been quite a bit of analysis done on the video clip by those who claim that the creature seen in the footage seems to be moving much faster and more fluidly than what would typically be expected of a teenager in a gorilla suit, with one estimate saying the thing appears to move at about 10 meters (40 feet) in 1.4 seconds. However, obviously this is hard to determine because whatever it is can only very briefly be seen, and even with enhancements made to the footage it is indistinct, blurry and undeniably hard to make out. It is certainly dark, probably bipedal, and man-sized or larger, but it is difficult to glean much else from the video, meaning that the footage will remain inconclusive, with those watching it divided as to what exactly it shows. You can see the dash cam footage here, with enhancements at the end.

A very similar piece of weird dashboard camera footage that has made the rounds emerged in 2016, and comes to us from Russia’s icy Kazhakstan border, in an area between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains called the Republic of Bashkortostan. The video features two men driving at night along a snowy road in what appears to be a rather isolated and remote area, and they are chatting away in Russian about, well I’m not exactly sure as I cannot speak Russian but it seems like just friendly banter. Around 45 seconds into the video they are noticeably shocked when a large figure lumbers across the road ahead right into the beams of the car’s headlights.

The two startled men chatter away in the universal language of befuddled shouts of amazement and fear, and frantically stop the car and reverse to see if they can figure out what the strange creature was, but whatever it is they saw is gone by then. The witnesses claim that the area they were in is very remote, the weather had been inhospitable and frigid at the time, and that it would be unlikely that someone would have been out there pulling pranks on such a night. They have also dismissed the idea that they may have seen a bear or some wild animal, with driver Vadim Gilmanov stating:

I mean it could have been someone’s cruel prank. But on the other hand, who else could dash out so quickly in the middle of the night? In the middle of nowhere.

As with the Lumpkin footage the creature, hoaxer, or whatever it is, is visible only very briefly, and is not clearly defined. It could be practically anything, but the clip is oddly intriguing nonetheless. You can see it here. Staying with the bizarre humanoid theme we come to what is perhaps one of the most talked about pieces of footage in recent days, this time not from a car’s dash cam but from a helmet cam worn by a biker in Indonesia in 2017.

The footage comes from the helmet camera of one of a group of off-road motocross bikers tearing along a dirt road surrounded thick jungle and high grass near Banda Aceh, north of Sumatra Island. At one point one of the riders loses control of his bike and falls, and it soon becomes obvious why, as it appears that a peculiar figure has scurried out of the wilderness onto the road to startle the rider into crashing his bike. The rest of the bikers slow down to see that the unidentified creature is short, no more than 4 or 5 feet tall, bald, and half naked, holding some sort of pole or spear, and looks to be a humanoid of some kind, but before anyone can get a good look it sprints off at a surprising speed.

A still from the strange footage showing the humanoid

The group immediately gives chase on their motorcycles but the humanoid runs along the road very quickly and then loses them by veering off into the high grassland, prompting the pursuers to stop their bikes and look for it on foot but all they can find is the strange pole it had been carrying discarded upon the ground. The creature itself is nowhere to be seen despite all frantic attempts to locate it by the puzzled witnesses. The strange footage set the Internet on fire when it was first released, baffling all those who saw it. What was this diminutive little humanoid and where did it come from? No one really knows, but there have been theories. One is that this could be actual footage of an Indonesian cryptid hairy hominid called the Orang Pendek, which is reported from Sumatra and is also claimed to be only around 3 to 5 feet tall, but the lack of any apparent body hair at all on the subject of the footage makes it look more like a human than a hairy ape man of any sort.

Considering its similarities to a human being and its small stature, there has also been the idea that this could be a member of a previously thought to be a lost tribe of mysterious pygmies called the Mante, who are only known through two that were supposedly captured in the 17th century to be presented to the Sultan. There are other tribes present in the region as well, although none that really resemble what was seen in the footage. Of course there has also been the idea that this was all a hoax, but in the end despite millions of views and constant discussion, debate, and analysis of the footage it remains a total mystery. You can see it here.

The Orang Pendek

Whatever it was or wherever it went, I’m sure it wanted its stick back. Speaking of that stick, one thing I wonder about with this case is what happened to it? It seems to me that this is a major piece of evidence that was actually retrieved and could hold profound clues as to what or who we see in the footage. If the design and any markings on the stick were consistent with other tribes of the area, then that would pretty much settle everything, and if it is a new kind of pygmy or hominid then this artifact could offer all sorts of interesting insights, yet I cannot find any information at all as to what has become of it or if it was ever seriously studied. So where did the stick go? Did the bikers keep it? Did they just throw it away? It seems to be just as big a mystery as the little humanoid itself.

Adding to all of the dash cam videos of purported hairy humanoids is one that is purported to show a mysterious canid creature of some sort roaming about in South Texas. In 2008, Texas Sheriff deputy Brandon Riedel was out in his patrol car training a new deputy in DeWitt County in a rural area near the city of Cuero when they came across a bizarre creature trotting along the side of the road near a fence line. The mysterious animal looks to be a canine of some sort, and has short front legs with longer back legs, a hairless body, a long, thin snout, and a skinny, rat-like tail. Reidel would say of the bizarre sighting:

I’ve been patrolling these back roads for a long time and I never run across anything like this. We were out checking fence lines and we came around the corner and we saw this running down the road. You need to record something like this because it’s not every day you find something that looks like this running around out in the middle of the county. It just doesn’t look like your average coyote or dog or anything.

A still from the Cuero Chupacabras dash cam video

The sighting and the footage generated a huge amount of interest at the time, particularly since the area where it was taken was going through a spate of sightings of strange, hairless dog-like creatures roaming the region that had gained the nickname “The Cuero Chupacabras,” which were said to sometimes kill pets or livestock and frighten people at night. There has been a lot of speculation as to what the creature in the dashcam footage and the Cureo Chupacabras could be, including that they are just coyotes or dogs with some skin condition such as mange, which can cause the hair to fall out to dramatically alter their appearance, or that they are hybrids of coyotes, wolves, and dogs or even aliens or really Chupacabras. Whatever the thing is in this footage, it is certainly creepy and a bit unsettling as well in a way. You can see it featured in a news report here.

It seems that as more and more people use cameras and the technology becomes more readily available we can expect more of such pieces of mysterious footage. After all there are fewer and fewer excuses for people to use the old excuse of “if only I’d had a camera.” Almost everything we witness today can now be captured in photos and on videos, and there are fewer ways for these mysteries to escape being seen and analyzed by the masses. There are few shadows to hide in anymore. Vehicles are not much different, as more and more utilize dash cams to catch everything that happens on the road. This might not be the best way to capture video evidence of strange creatures, since the very nature of these circumstances makes the sightings fleeting at best, and it is perhaps no surprise that by the time the vehicle turns around to get a better look the creature is long gone, yet it certainly does add a tool to the photographic chronicles of the world of the mysterious and will no doubt keep us wondering.

Getty Images

An Inside Look

If you’ve ever landed in the emergency room with a broken bone, fallen and hit your head, or been pregnant, then you already know how important medical imaging technology can be. If you’ve been diagnosed with appendicitis, a stroke, or any kind of tumor, those scans may have saved your life.

While medical imaging technology has given us the power to “see” inside the body, the tools of tomorrow will be more powerful still. The science behind this technology has evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few decades, but in order to apply those innovations to medical equipment, researchers need support.

If progress in this area has been slow, it hasn’t been for lack of ideas — it’s been a lack of funding. Now, there are signs that this might be changing, and researchers can already envision the implications of giving medical professionals better ways to see in the body. To do so would change more than the future of medicine: It would irrevocably change how we see ourselves.

Sight Unseen — Today

For centuries, the only way to see inside the body was through exploratory surgery, which has always come with risks — like an infection, hemorrhaging, and so on

Then, in 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays, giving physicians a tool that could let them “see” the human skeleton without a single incision. And X-rays were only the beginning. Computed tomography (CT) scans take several X-rays and combine them to form a composite image, providing a more detailed internal view of organs, tissues, and bone. Positron-emission tomography (PET) scans identify changes at the cellular level: After a patient ingests a radioactive tracer, the scan tracks it as it moves through the body. This can be helpful not just for diagnosing a disease, but monitoring one that may progress, like metastatic cancer.

While these scans are essential to the practice of medicine, they aren’t without risk — even a simple X-ray exposes patients to a small dose of ionizing radiation, which can build up and pose health risks over time. So medical professionals do their best to use the scans sparingly.

In some cases, medical professionals can use other imaging techniques that don’t require any radiation at all. Ultrasounds, for example, use high-frequency sound waves to produce images of organs within the cavities of the body. They’re useful to help doctors diagnose conditions like ovarian cysts and gallstones. Inserting a catheter or gastrostomy tube becomes easier when the technician can guide them in via ultrasound. Of course, ultrasounds are most often associated with pregnancy, as they are used to construct real-time images of the fetus.

The downside, however, is that the images that ultrasounds produce aren’t particularly high-quality. The lack of detail means that, while an ultrasound might be able to detect a structure on or near the ovary, differentiating between a malignant tumor and a simple cyst usually requires imaging at a higher resolution or even a biopsy. The quality of the ultrasound image also varies depending on the skill of the sonographer, which could make the images less reliable, which could be a life-threatening issue.

While collectively these techniques have informed how doctors treat patients, there’s one technique that stands out above the rest: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The MRI can provide a glimpse at the tissues and organs of the entire body, and it’s one of the best ways to take images of the brain.

First developed in the 1970s, MRIs use a combination of radio waves and magnetic fields to render images of our internal organs, soft tissues, bones, ligaments, and cartilage. The human body is full of proton-containing water molecules which will align when exposed to a magnetic field. They flip-flop at different rates depending on what tissues of the body they happen to be in. That’s how the MRI generates an image in which organs are (more or less) distinct from one another.

While MRIs are useful for finding abnormalities in blood flow within the brain, a close relative, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can provide insights into the activity of cells in the brain.

And that, we suspect, is where many of the unsolved mysteries of the human body begin.

Much More to See

Research into medical imaging technology receives less attention than you might expect, even though patients benefit greatly (and very often their lives depend upon) this research. Less than two percent of grants from the National Institutes of Health are awarded to academic radiology departments, Richard Ehman, a diagnostic radiologist and director of the Mayo Clinic Advanced Medical Imaging Technology lab, told Futurism.

As it stands today, modern medical imaging methods are extremely useful for clinicians, so rather than devising new techniques, most researchers’ energies have been dedicated to refining existing techniques. In an interview with Nature, Roderic Pettigrew, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging said that today’s MRI machines are so specific that they can “track the diffusion of water molecules in the brain with such precision that you can compute their trajectories along fibre pathways,” giving physicians more information to better diagnose, monitor, and treat a number of neurological conditions.

The most cutting-edge MRI machines are found in research facilities, but that’s not what you’d find at your local hospital. As healthcare systems struggle under pressure to cut costs without compromising the quality of patient care, entire radiology departments languish and lag. Replacing an MRI machine is pricey, so it’s easy to understand why hospitals are using older models. Some US hospitals still use film.

“Most physicians would have a hard time imagining how they would take care of patients without these tools,” Ehman, of Mayo, said. While it’s unlikely that any Western medical practitioners lack the capability to take basic images of the body, complacency and a lack of research attention to new imaging techniques have hampered innovation. Stagnation is preventing us from seeing more.

And there is so much more to see.

Image Credit: Getty Images

All the Better to See You With

Over the past 30 years, the design of MRIs has evolved to be faster, quieter, and more powerful — in large part because computer processors have gotten faster. Their evolution is far from over, and a team at the University of California Berkeley has set out to prove it. The team, composed of physicists and engineers, was recently awarded a $13.43 million BRAIN Initiative from the National Institutes of Health to develop the next generation of fMRI, dubbed the NexGen 7T, by 2019.

A MRI machine’s strength is measured in Teslas (T), which indicates the power of a magnetic field. When the magnetic field of our body (the tissues of which contain positively-charged water molecules) interacts with the magnetic field of the MRI, the tissue gives off a signal. The higher the power of the external magnet, the higher the intensity of that signal — and in turn, the higher the resolution of the images the MRI produces. Today, the world’s strongest MRI machines (which are generally isolated in research facilities and academic medical centers) are somewhere between 7T and 10T. Those that are most routinely used for patient care are much less powerful, clocking in at either 1.5T or 3T. Machines of that resolution are decently fast and accurate, good enough for most routine diagnoses: at 3T, an MRI can detect very small lesions in the brains of patients with multiple sclerosis, which a less powerful machine could miss.

But what if MRIs could allow us to go deeper, to see more — and to do so with breathtaking clarity? What could we glean about the progression of a neurodegenerative disease like multiple sclerosis (MS) if we could see nerves lose their protective myelin in real-time? If we could see the structures of the brain in greater detail, what could we learn about depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, or autism? If we could clearly see every nook and cranny, down to the axons and neurons, could observe the brains’ many processes as they happened, could we finally solve what some philosophers have called the “hard problem of consciousness?”

To inch us closer to doing so, researchers at UC Berkeley will need to achieve “a total redesign of nearly all of the [MRI] scanner components, not just an incremental change,” team lead David Feinberg said in the press release announcing the grant.

Another pair of researchers from UC Berkeley recently devised a way to make MRIs more safe and effective for children — a longstanding problem in the field. A physicist, electrical engineer, and a radiologist teamed up to create 3D-printed, flexible coils that fit onto garments. The resulting images were also remarkably crisp, which would benefit adults, too. Now the team is working with GE to further develop its design, possibly making up part of the next generation of MRI coils.

The applications for advanced imaging techniques go beyond our current uses. As Ehman noted, there are a number of measurements clinicians need to assess through the course of diagnosing and treating their patients. One example is that of measuring pressure within the human body. Getting these readings can require invasive, uncomfortable procedures, such as a spinal tap, that come with their own risks. As medical imaging once cut down the need for surgery, perhaps one day it could eliminate the need for needles, gauges, cuffs, and catheters.

Better imaging could also help us see elements of our own biology we never even knew existed. Invariably, more answers lead to more questions. And that will likely inform the path of medical research for decades to come.

Image Credit: Getty Images

Other innovations in medical imaging may be a bit more dazzling to the average patient. At Massachusetts General Hospital, physicist Matthew Rosen is leading research into the clinical tools that are often paired with MRI machines, such as contrast dyes. His team is developing synthetic, biocompatible nanodiamonds that could replace contrast agents that are traditionally metal-based.

“Nanodiamonds have the potential to revolutionize the field of molecular imaging,” Rosen said in a press release, adding that their tiny size could enable radiologists to track any process at the cellular and subcellular level.

The team has only conducted lab-based tests and haven’t yet figured out how to best introduce the nanodiamonds into the human body (possible routes, as with any tracer, would include ingestion, infusion, or injection), according to a study Rosen and his team published in Nature Communications in March. There’s a long way to go before patients will have the option of taking a shot of medical-grade bling.

Technological progress made over the past century has transformed how we work, how we socialize, and how we date. The same goes for medicine, and for medical imaging in particular. That progress seems poised to continue — advanced computing, artificial intelligence, automation, and deep learning will improve medical technologies involved in everything from scans to surgery.

“I think that, in the future, we may look back at this time and it will seem that we were making very limited use of our best imaging technologies,” Ehman said (there are many complex reasons for this, he noted, including limited federal funding and the challenges of implementing new healthcare technologies). But Ehman remains hopeful that, despite these challenges, the future of medical imaging technology will transform medicine once again. Perhaps we can’t count on a renaissance, but having crystal clear vision will no doubt supply a few answers — and we should stay eager to be dazzled by them.

Disclaimer: the editor of this piece was a recipient of the Mayo Clinic’s 2017 journalist residency for surgery, which connected the author to sources quoted in this piece. The residency was paid for by the Mayo Clinic; however, neither the clinic nor any of its affiliates have editorial review privileges.

{ https://futurism.com/ }

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