Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
25-02-2018
INSIDE ROBERT BIGELOW'S DECADES-LONG OBSESSION WITH UFOS
INSIDE ROBERT BIGELOW'S DECADES-LONG OBSESSION WITH UFOS
GETTY IMAGES
IN 1994, A Mormon family bought a 480-acre plot in in Utah’s Uintah Basin, thinking they’d get back to the land. But this particular land was weird. It came with too-large-thrice-over wolves that refused to die by bullet, cattle with their reproductive organs sucked clean out, and a multitude of UFOs, as they told the Deseret News in 1996. It was driving them bonkers.
Robert Bigelow saw their story. Today, the Nevada businessman is known for founding Bigelow Aerospace, which spun off a business to sell its expandable space habitats just last Tuesday. But in 1995, he had also founded something called the National Institute for Discovery Science, an organization built to research paranormal phenomena. Soon after reading the newspaper story, he took Skinwalker off the family’s hands, and his institute set up shop.
That, at least, is the story told in Hunt for the Skinwalker, a book that I downloaded in audio form one Friday night in January. Bigelow deactivated the National Institute for Discovery Science in 2004, after years of failing to capture the supposedly supernatural. But as the world recently discovered, he didn’t give up the cause. In December, a New York Times story revealed that Bigelow Aerospace had conducted a study on UFOs—for the Pentagon. I’d been interested in Bigelow’s anomalistic dealings since that article came out; thus, the audio book.
The Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program officially ended in 2012. But similar work continues today—involving people from both the defunct Defense Department program and Bigelow’s dismantled paranormal enterprise. They have become part of a for-profit company: To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, which launched in October 2017 to research and reverse-engineer UFOs, among other goals.
Bigelow has gotten his fingers into lots of private UFO pies. Even before Skinwalker, he helped initiate the UFO Research Coalition, which puts his UFO-hunting career at about 24 years old. Bigelow is not officially involved with To The Stars. But its aims, and its team, seem to line up with his past and his people. So I set off to try to understand that past.
ALL EIGHT HOURS and 42 minutes of audiobook downloaded, I got in my car at 5 a.m. the next day with my sister. Pointed toward Skinwalker Ranch, hoping for context and maybe something strange, we sped through the Rockies, trying to beat the ski traffic and a snowstorm. All the while, the staid voice of the book’s narrator described the alleged happenings at Skinwalker.
As my sister and I journeyed down I-70, the book’s authors—George Knapp, a journalist, and Colm Kelleher, former deputy administrator of Bigelow’s institute—presented the paranormal tales almost as matters of fact. Kelleher has a PhD in biochemistry, but his mindset was often anti-scientific. He took coincidences as meaningful; he aw-shucksed every time an “anomalous phenomenon” mysteriously evaded the cameras. The supposed point of Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science was to get away from that kind of softness.
About four and a half hours and several hundred milligrams of caffeine in, I listened to a description of how instrument-bearing institute investigators witnessed a growing yellow light—or maybe a tunnel—from which a faceless black creature maybe emerged. I needed a break. Pausing the book, I pulled over at Rio Blanco Lake, a rare bit of water with an assemblage of red picnic tables. The lake, frozen, stretched to the scrub-covered buttes on the far shore. It was peaceful.
Then came the noises. Great metallic twangs, or thwangs, or something, that seemed to start here, no there, and rush across the landscape as if carried on an invisible wire.
They sounded like trebly light sabers. They sounded like alien spaceship chatter. Like maybe someone had pulled the power lines taut for miles and then plucked them with a giant finger.
“What is it?” I kept saying, deeply unnerved—not because I thought it was inexplicable but because I couldn’t explain it.
And then the lake’s ice cracked, the break spreading fast like a faultline in an action movie. The frozen water heaved itself into a new position.
With that, the noises explained themselves and stopped. We stood in the silence for a few seconds.
“That’s probably the weirdest thing that will happen all day,” my sister eventually said.
WE CONTINUED ON our way toward Skinwalker Ranch, where Bigelow’s people had, for years, tried to find that weirdest thing, every day. Researching UFOs seems a bit like gambling: You mostly lose, or break even, but the promise that you might hit jackpot is powerful. “The thing about UFOs that makes them so mysterious is that they disappear,” says historian Greg Eghigian, who is researching the global history of UFO sightings and alleged alien contact. “Not that they appear.” You just have to keep looking and hope they come back.
Toward the end of the book, the authors let us know that Bigelow abandoned studies at Skinwalker in the early 2000s. But he didn’t stop looking: In 2007, he got that Pentagon contract—some $22 million to study advanced aerial threats, including some that remain allegedly unidentified.
Around the same time, in 2008, Bigelow created a new company: Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace.
Archived versions of the Bigelow Aerospace Careers webpage say it “focuses on the identification, evaluation, and acquisition of novel and emerging future technologies worldwide as they specifically relate to spacecraft.” (Blair Bigelow, vice president of corporate strategy at Bigelow Aerospace, declined to comment.) Colm Kelleher—co-author of the Skinwalker book—was the company’s deputy administrator, according to his LinkedIn page.
Around the same time Bigelow created the new company, he also hitched a star to the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit that collects and investigates user-submitted reports of UFOs, according to MUFON’s executive director Jan Harzan. “If we were able to fund you so you could put investigators on the ground faster,” Harzan recalls Bigelow offering, “could you get better data on some of these reports?” Together, MUFON and Bigelow supported investigators’ fact-finding expeditions, and shared data—though for less than a year.
But that didn’t stop Bigelow from collecting UFO reports outside of the MUFON collaboration. The FAA, for instance, used to suggest pilots report UFO sightings directly to Bigelow Advanced Aerospace Space Studies. Christopher Rutkowski, who coordinates the Canadian UFO Survey, says Bigelow approached him at a MUFON conference in 2009. “He asked me to help him in his UFO-related efforts by alerting him and his team to any 'good' Canadian cases that needed onsite investigations,” he says. One of Bigelow’s people checked in with Rutkowski every few months following, for a year or two.
That person doesn’t call now. The FAA doesn’t instruct pilots to report to Bigelow. The Pentagon program is over. There’s no more MUFON collaboration. The National Institute for Discovery Science is kaput. So where’s a guy to get a bunch of UFO reports?
The newest answer might be To The Stars Academy—and its newly-launched “Community of Interest.” On this site, you can currently view two videos of alleged UFOs—the same footage embedded in the Times story about the Pentagon program—as well as a video interview with a Navy pilot who says he witnessed one of those events and a written report of the same encounter. In the future, the site aims to amass and analyze many more reports of anomalies.
Although a representative from To the Stars claims no affiliation with Bigelow, the overlap between its team and Bigelow’s is inarguable: Hal Puthoff, who was on the board of the National Institute for Discovery Science, is now the vice president of science and technology at To The Stars. Kelleher is now To The Stars’ biotech consultant. And Elizondo, who was reportedly in charge of the Pentagon program that contracted Bigelow’s company, is now To The Stars’ director of global security and special programs.
And if the gathered reports are public, Bigelow could check them out, same as anyone else. If Bigelow is as committed to ufology as his last two decades of work have suggested, he could do worse than striking a deal with this group.
WHEN MY SISTER and I arrived at Skinwalker Ranch (now owned not by the institute or Bigelow but by the mysterious Adamantium Real Estate (whoever that nerd is), we were numb to the claims of its strange happenings. To be clear, I don’t really believe in much. Not God, or miracles, or magical beasts. I don’t believe that anything “defies” the “laws of physics.”
I do believe that we probably misunderstand some laws of physics, that our knowledge is, in some cases, incomplete, or even drop-dead wrong. I believe there are things in the universe we don’t get yet, that our scientific explanations haven’t caught up to. But I also believe that they can. Anyway, I’d driven all the way to the Uintah Valley, and I was sure going to try to look for something strange in the sky. We found a legal gravel pull-off that looked down on the semi-martian land of Skinwalker, and stared at the sky, waiting.
I added an extra layer to my clothes, blew hot air into my gloves, and found a nearby rock suitable for sitting, surrounded by broken glass and scattering of half-smoked cigarettes. And so my sister and I sat, mock-gasping at the lights from low-flying planes.
And then the clouds, which had hung low all day, began to clear. The stars—some of them perhaps supporting life that almost certainly has not come here, but, you know, maybe—were crisp and clear. I turned Hunt for the Skinwalker back on, my phone’s speaker pulsing from my pocket.
We scanned the skies; we listened to the tall tales.
“It’s good out here,” I said to my sister. “But you were right about that ice.”
“What?” she said.
“That it was the weirdest thing that would happen all day.”
About 60 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the US designed a network of top-secret mobile nuclear launch sites buried in the Greenland ice sheet to prepare for possible war with the Soviet Union. At Camp Century, which was part of Project Iceworm, soldiers lived in the ice, which enclosed the base so it wouldn’t be completely buried in snow.
Camp Century was shut down in 1967, and the site was abandoned as Project Iceworm wound down. Back then, military planners assumed the hazardous stuff buried at Camp Century—including diesel fuel, PCBs, and some radioactive coolant—would stay locked up in the Greenland ice sheet, essentially forever. But now Greenland is warming because of climate change. Dangerous contaminants threaten to re-emerge from the ice, potentially putting people in Greenland and maybe as far away as Arctic Canada (400 km offshore) at risk.
Nuclear reactors at Camp Century in Greenland.
Image: US Army/Wikimedia Commons
Camp Century isn’t the only US military installation abroad that’s increasingly threatened by climate change. A Pentagon report from earlier this year, for example, noted that half of all US bases worldwide could be at risk. But Project Iceworm is a useful case study, argues Jeff Colgan, associate professor of political science and international studies at Brown University, who’s studied this in detail. That’s partly because the question of who should take responsibility for Camp Century has become such a political hot potato. According to him, at this point it isn’t clear exactly who is responsible for cleaning it up.
Over the phone, Colgan described the secondary effects of climate change—like the release of dangerous substances, or infrastructure damage—as its “knock-on effects.” (He pointed to the release of hazardous materials in Texas after Hurricane Harvey as another example.) “It creates a whole new type of politics, and it’s becoming more important in a variety of ways.”
Colgan is author of a new paper in Global Environmental Politics that views the impact of climate change on military bases as not just an environmental problem, but as a political and diplomatic one.
Project Iceworm goes to show just how politically complicated these situations can be. Camp Century was the result of a legal treaty between Denmark and the US, since Greenland was a Danish colony at that time.
Thermal drill at Camp Century, used to drill through the Greenland ice cap.
Image: CRREL Researcher/Wikimedia Commons
Motherboard contacted the US State Department to inquire about Camp Century, and was referred to the US Department of Defense. A Defense Department spokesperson then referred our query to the government of Denmark.
The Danish foreign ministry, which handles relations with the US and Greenland, referred Motherboard to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), an independent research institution under the Danish Ministry of Energy, Utilities and Climate. In a follow-up phone call, a ministry spokesperson said decisions around the cleanup would be made once the science is settled.
“It’s not a high priority. In fact it’s a barely known [issue] in Washington,” Colgan told me. “The only people who are really agitated [are in] Greenland, and they don’t have a lot of leverage.”
Scientists aren’t ignoring the problem. In 2016, a high-profile paper in Geophysical Research Letters predicted that Camp Century’s site could see primarily melting conditions by the year 2090, and described in detail all the hazardous stuff buried there. “It caused quite a reaction from scientists and the political system,” Flemming Christiansen, deputy director general of GEUS, told Motherboard in a phone interview, and it spurred them to study the site further.
GEUS has been monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for years, and is now tracking the Camp Century site specifically. In the summer of 2017, Christiansen said, a weather station was installed there, and scientists used radar last year to map what is locked up under the ice. (The map should be available later this year.) Climate data from Camp Century is publicly available online, although it will take some time to begin to notice longer-term trends.
Politicians, meanwhile, have yet to sort out exactly what to do about the threat posed by climate change to military installations abroad, each one governed by what Colgan calls “ad hoc” arrangements. Colgan noted that the US Pentagon, at least, does seem to appreciate the dangers of climate change. Of the hundreds of US bases overseas, “it’s unclear how many of them are at the frontlines of climate change, like Greenland,” he said, adding that other sites, like low-lying Pacific islands, are also certain to be impacted.
Meanwhile, Camp Century is melting out. “If there is something coming to the surface, you would like to know when this will happen,” Christiansen told me. Scientists are working on that part. Now it’s up to governments to come up with a plan.
New paper argues that extraterrestrials might beam 'contaminated' messages our way.
by Seth Shostak
Scientist are worry about hackers from outer space.
Education Images / UIG via Getty Images
With all the news stories these days about computer hacking, it probably comes as no surprise that someone is worried about hackers from outer space. Yes, there are now scientists who fret that space aliens might send messages that worm their way into human society — not to steal our passwords but to bring down our culture.
How exactly would they do that? Astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John Learned argue in a recent paper that our telescopes might pick up hazardous messages sent our way — a virus that shuts down our computers, for example, or something a bit like cosmic blackmail: “Do this for us, or we’ll make your sun go supernova and destroy Earth.” Or perhaps the cosmic hackers could trick us into building self-replicating nanobots, and then arrange for them to be let loose to chew up our planet or its inhabitants.
Mind you, making a small star like the sun go supernova would be a mind-boggling trick — one that would impress astrophysicists (if any were left). As for the nanobots, I figure the aliens need only wait a century or two, and we’ll make the little devils ourselves, without any help.
LIKE THREATENING NEANDERTHALS
It’s indisputable that space aliens, if they do exist, might not be friendly. But it’s hard to think of things that we could do for agile, technically sophisticated aliens that they couldn’t accomplish more easily on their own. Imagine modern humans threatening Neanderthals with nuclear war unless they washed our cars. Would that make any sense?
The astrophysicists also suggest that the extraterrestrials could show their displeasure (what did we do?) by launching a cyberattack. Maybe you’ve seen the 1996 film “Independence Day,” in which odious aliens are vanquished by a computer virus uploaded into their machinery. That’s about as realistic as sabotaging your neighbor’s new laptop by feeding it programs written for the Commodore 64.
In other words, aliens that could muster the transmitter power (not to mention the budget) to try wiping us out with code are going to have a real compatibility problem. The Stuxnet virus that took out Iran’s enrichment centrifuges was designed to target a contemporary bit of software: the Windows operating system.
If these nasty aliens are more than 40 light-years away, they won’t know that we have personal computers, let alone which operating system they should target. If they’re more than 80 light-years away, they won’t know that we have computers of any kind.
Maybe they’ll try to disable our abacuses.
A DANGEROUS GIFT
It’s worth remarking that today’s SETI experiments — in which large antennas are used to search for signals from alien societies — are largely impervious to any of this chicanery. SETI receivers integrate incoming signals (which is to say, they average them) over seconds or minutes. That would turn any message into digital goo, and no pernicious content would remain. Yes, that’s a technical point, but I think it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever have computers susceptible to Klingon code.
Yet there is a way that messages from space might be disruptive. Extraterrestrials could simply give us some advanced knowledge — not as a trade, but as a gift. How could that possibly be a downer? Imagine: You’re a physicist who has dedicated your career to understanding the fundamental structure of matter. You have a stack of reprints, a decent position, and a modicum of admiration from the three other specialists who have read your papers. Suddenly, aliens weigh in with knowledge that’s a thousand years ahead of yours. So much for your job and your sense of purpose.
If humanity is deprived of the opportunity to learn things on its own, much of its impetus for novelty might evaporate. In a society where invention and discovery are written out of the script, progress and improvement would suffer.
Then again, aliens would likely have real trouble transmitting knowledge to us. In movies, extraterrestrials often communicate with us in colloquial English. But a real message from space is likely to be no more understandable than a digital TV signal would be to Guglielmo Marconi. An alien transmission is unlikely to be a Trojan horse — but it would at least tell us that there’s someone outside the gates.
As early as 64,000 years ago, Neanderthals in today’s Spain were creating impressive cave paintings, showing that they were just as artistic and creative as humans.
The ladder shape composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (center left) dates to older than 64,000 years and was made by Neanderthals.
But they might have also shared something else with our ancestors, something which we consider fundamentally human: our ability to understand symbolism.
“The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human”, says Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.“Artefacts whose functional value lies not so much in their practical but rather in their symbolic use are proxies for fundamental aspects of human cognition as we know it.”
A team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Spain, and France analyzed carbonate samples from three cave sites in Spain: La Pasiega (north-eastern Spain), Maltravieso (western Spain) and Ardales (south-western Spain).
All three caves contain spectacular red or black cave paintings depicting animals, dots and geometric signs, as well as hand stencils, handprints and engravings.
These aren’t necessarily new findings, but for the first time, researchers have been able to prove that they must have been made by Neanderthals, since they were the only ones around when the cave paintings were made.
Three hand stencils (center right, center topm and top left). One has been dated to at least 66,000 years ago and must have been made by a Neanderthal.
Image credits: H. Collado.
The team used a dating technique that isn’t commonly employed in anthropology: Uranium-Thorium dating. This dating technique relies on analyzing the isotopic content of the two elements and dating the sample by calculating the decay of Uranium 234 into Thorium 230. The technique is widely used to date calcium carbonate materials such as stalactites or corals, but was only recently implemented to anthropology thanks to technological advancements. Radiocarbon technique, which is currently much more common, isn’t able to date back far enough.
The team dated the paintings to 64,000 years ago — 20,000 years before humans modern humans arrived in Europe. This means that Neanderthals were the artists behind the paintings.
“Our dating results show that the cave art at these three sites in Spain is much older than previously thought”, says team member Alistair Pike from the University of Southampton. “With an age in excess of 64,000 years it predates the earliest traces of modern humans in Europe by more than 20,000 years. The cave art must thus have been created by Neanderthals.”
“Dating cave art accurately and precisely, but without destroying it, has so far been difficult to accomplish”, adds Hoffmann. “Thanks to recent technical developments we can now obtain a minimum age for cave art using Uranium-Thorium (U-Th) dating of carbonate crusts overlying the pigments.”
Artistic thinking
This is the first time any evidence of a Neanderthal cave painting has been found — until now, this artform had been considered human and human alone. There has been some evidence that Neanderthals used body ornamentation around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, but some researchers believed that they learned the idea from humans, a theory which was almost impossible to disprove. The only way to clearly show that Neanderthals came up with the idea on their own was to date their work to before they met humans — and that’s exactly what this study does.
Perforated shells have also bee found in cave sediments, dating to between 115,000 and 120,000 years.
Image credits: J. Zilhão.
Joint lead author Dr. Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton, said:
“This is an incredibly exciting discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed.
“Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa – therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals.”
Neanderthals also dyed and decorated marine shells. Perforated shells were found in sediments in Cueva de los Aviones and date to between 115,000 and 120,000 years, indicating that their artistic practices can be traced even further back.
It’s also significant that this is not a one-off accident — paintings were found in three caves 700 km apart, indicating a long-standing tradition passed on from generation to generation. It’s quite possible that many other similar works of art still exist, but we just haven’t found them yet.
“This is certainly just the beginning of a new chapter in the study of ice age rock art”, says Gerd-Christian Weniger of the Foundation Neanderthal Museum Mettmann, one of the leaders of the Ardales excavations.
It’s intriguing to think about it, but this is convincing evidence that humans and Neanderthals shared the same artistic sense and the same ability for symbolic thinking. Neanderthals weren’t the brutes they’re often portrayed as — they were thinkers and artists just like our ancestors.
But this also raises an even more exciting possibility: since both humans and Neanderthals shared creative abilities, it’s possible that they both inherited them from a common ancestor. If this is the case, we might have to look even further — much further — down in history to find where these abilities first appeared.
“According to our new data Neanderthals and modern humans shared symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable”, concludes Joao Zilhao, team member from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona and involved in both studies. “On our search for the origins of language and advanced human cognition we must therefore look much farther back in time, more than half a million years ago, to the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.”
The paper, U-Th dating of carbonate crusts reveals Neandertal origin of Iberian cave art, is due for publication in Science on Friday, 23 February 2018. DOI: 10.1126/science.aap7778.
Humans first emerged 200,000 years ago but didn’t figure out how to use language until 100,000 years ago, scholars think. Now, an intriguing new study suggests that cave drawings had an important role to play in the evolution of language by familiarizing our ancestors with symbolism.
The Chauvet Cave paintings, dated at 30,000 to 28,000 BC, were once thought to be the oldest cave drawings. Here, we can find more than 1,000 paintings depicting lions or mammoths of unmatched sophistication.
Credit: DRAC Rhone-Alpes, French Ministry of Culture.
Our species has had a knack for art from its humble beginnings. To this day, you can still find ancient cave art on virtually every continent except Antarctica. In some places, like South Africa, there are over a million drawings made inside caves. Drawing such as those found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where there are 35,400-year-old depictions of a babirusa, or pig-deer, once common in these valleys. The spectacular lions and rhinos of Chauvet Cave, in southeastern France, are commonly thought to be around 30,000 to 32,000 years old, and mammoth-ivory figurines found in Germany correspond to roughly the same time.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, researchers from MIT argue that places Chauvet or Sulawesi acted like hotspots for language generation by offering the perfect environment to translate acoustics into drawings.
“Our research suggests that the cognitive mechanisms necessary for the development of cave and rock art are likely to be analogous to those employed in the expression of the symbolic thinking required for language,” says Cora Lesure, a linguist at MIT and one of the study’s authors.
Sound + pictures = language
Lesure and colleagues that the brain uses the same cognitive functions to transfer acoustic sounds to pictures as language. Linguists often frustratingly say that language doesn’t fossilize but it can leave artifacts — cave drawings, for instance. And in this context, our early ancestors used cave drawings less as means of artistic expression, as Picasso or van Gogh would, but rather more as a means of communication.
“Cave art was part of the package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level cognitive processing,”says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics at MIT. “You have this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some mental representation and externalizes it as a visual.”
“I think it’s very clear that these artists were talking to one another,” Miyagawa says. “It’s a communal effort.”
In some caves, 90 percent of the drawings involve hoofed animals which could have been used to replicate the sound of hoofbeats. Many such drawings were found to be made in chambers where echoes and reverberation create sounds similar to hoof beats. On the other hand, drawings of felines, dots, and handprints were etched in quiet cave chambers. Such drawings could have been part of stories or rituals — scenarios that display properties of language like “action, objects, and modification.” Miyagawa suggests that“acoustically based cave art must have had a hand in forming our cognitive symbolic mind.”
At this point, this is still speculative work but what Miyagawa or Lesure are doing is starting a discussion with potentially huge ramification. The MIT linguists hope to inspire more work and further scrutiny of the syntax etched on the walls of ancient caves around the world. Hidden in these drawings are stories that reveal content that might one day lead us to the origins of language. In this respect, the holy grail would be finding cave art older than 100,000 years.
US air force jets ‘battle mystery UFO in dogfight' over skies above Area 51 military base
US air force jets ‘battle mystery UFO in dogfight' over skies above Area 51 military base
UFO SEEKERS/GOOGLE MAPS
MYSTERY: Two USAF jets were filmed near another unidentified craft over Area 51
UFO seekers spotted the fighter planes 'hurtling towards the triangular object' above a desert area in Nevada
By Jeff Farrell
This is the mysterious moment two US air force jets are seen "dogfighting" with an unknown craft in an area where there are believed to be UFOs.
The fighter planes are seen zipping through the sky in an apparent routine training mission over the top secret military base Area 51 in a desert area in Lincoln County, Nevada.
UFO seekers Tim Doyle and Tracey Su camped out some 12 miles away to snap pictures and videos of activity over its skies and didn't see anything unusual when the military aircraft soared above.
But when they later combed through their photos they spotted the third craft which they described as a "triangular" object which appeared to be battling the US fighter jets.
UFO seekers Tim and Tracey head out on their mission near Area 51 to hunt for alien craft
(Image: Youtube/thirdphaseofmoon)
A local sheriff pursues the two UFO hunters and questions why they are camped out near the top secret US military base(Image: Youtube/thirdphaseofmoon)
Area 51 is at the centre of the so-called Roswell incident, where scientists are said to have examined alien being who crash-landed in New Mexico
(Image: Youtube/thirdphaseofmoon)
Their sighting piles more weight on the countless conspiracy theories that the top secret base is a hub of interactions between earthly beings and aliens.
The site is at the centre of the so-called Roswell incident where US scientists are believed to have examined aliens who apparently crash landed their flying disc into a ranch in an area in New Mexico.
Tim and Tracey camped out just outside Area 51 and filmed and snapped the comings and goings and activity in the sky there.
Tim camps out at night after setting up his equipment including camera, videos and computers to monitor the surrounding area and skies
(Image: Youtube/thirdphaseofmoon)
Tim and Tracy's UFO hunting equipment includes drones they use to hover over the desert area
(Image: Youtube/thirdphaseofmoon)
The pair spot the unidentified third craft in the sky they say was dogfighting with two US fighter jets which are clearly seenImage: YouTube/thirdphaseofmoon)
"Welcome to area 51," said Tim in one of his videos. "We're in front of the most mysterious and secretive military installation in the entire world.
"We're just here to look for lights in the sky," said Tim, "and if they're here we're going to find them."
A narrator on the video, by YouTubeChannel thirdphaseofmoon , says: "These guys are taking a lot of risk bringing this information to you and we're sharing the evidence."
The pair filmed hours of footage over several days including the US fighter jets zipping through the sky, but didn't see it as unusual.
"When we got home and started reviewing the pictures we noticed a third object" in the sky, said Tim.
"What in the world is this? It's looks like some kind of triangular unmanned drone, because it's definitely too small to have a person inside of it.
"And after looking at the pictures it definitely looks like the crafts are interacting with each other. It's like a three-plane dogfight."
Tim and Tracey's remarkable footage on YouTube has already been seized upon by conspiracy theorists that it is proof there is UFO activity in Area 51.
Chuku Marrero posted: "I know they are real they are with us ... Nevada is the centre."
Lori Roberson1 wrote: "Ufo's been round for so many years."
The US government has never revealed the purpose of the site in a remote area in the desert in Nevada.
The CIA only admitted for the first time in 2005 that the military base, which is north-west of Las Vegas, even existed.
In de Zuid-Egyptische stad Minya is een oude necropolis ontdekt, zo heeft het Egyptische ministerie van Oudheden aangekondigd. De begraafplaats telt onder meer een gouden masker, 40 sarcofagen, een duizendtal beelden, sieraden en andere artefacten.
“Het is slechts het begin van een nieuwe ontdekking, en ik denk dat we zeker vijf jaar werk zullen hebben op de begraafplaats”, vertelde minister van Antiquiteiten Khaled al-Enany aan de verslaggevers op de plaats van de ontdekking.
De opgravingswerken begonnen in 2017, en onder meer teams uit München, Hildesheim en Egypte werkten in het gebied. “De ontdekking is belangrijk omdat ze verschillende aspecten van het leven van de oude Egyptenaren blootlegt”, zei al-Enany.
Egypte heeft de afgelopen maanden al een aantal ontdekkingen aangekondigd, waaronder verschillende graftombes in de zuidelijke stad Luxor. Het land probeert zijn toerisme weer aan te zwengelen, dat traditioneel een belangrijke bron van inkomsten is. De toeristische sector kreeg zware klappen door de onrust die volgde op de opstand tegen oud-dictator Hosni Moebarak in 2011.
A bright, white UFO has been spotted over a remote part of northern Norway.
The aircraft was seen by stunned onlookers in Bardufoss on Thursday afternoon. A short while later, it was seen again in 80 miles away in Tromsø.
It lingered until after sunset then exploded neatly into two parts before disappearing into dust, according to witnesses.
Perplexed locals shared photographs and videos of the structure as it hovered above them near the town of Tromsø on Thursday night.
Tarquin Millington-Drake of Frontier Travels told DailyMail.com how he witnessed the spectacle.
'We thought it was a chopper coming towards us - a very bright light which came over the mountain and headed toward us - then it turned and went past us.
Scroll down for video
The bright shining light appeared suddenly above Bardufoss in Norway on Thursday afternoon as stunned onlookers watched. Above is the view of it from Wolf Lodge where a group of tourists mistook it for a chopper
The stunning object appeared suddenly then 'turned' and went back over the valley as the group watched on in disbelief
Tarquin Millington-Drake watched from the Wolf Lodge (above) and said the light slowed dramatically as it eased away from them
Witnesses described how the object faded into 'dust' as it disappeared from view
'Then it seemed to explode but the explosion was very uniform and symmetrical like two butterfly explosions either side of the light.
'It then seemed to turn and go away but no longer as one bright light - just bright dust that faded,' he said.
Mr. Millington-Drake watched it from the Wolf Lodge, a remote hideaway in Bardufoss where guests have up-close experiences with wolves.
He and other guests were gathered around a fire outside waiting for the northern lights when the UFO appeared.
Stunning photographs from the lodge show the group watching, stunned, as the UFO hovered above them, far outshining the stars.
'We assumed it was some special event laid on but the luxury Wolf Lodge but when our hosts starting taking photos it became clear that was not the case.
'It veered away from coming directly from us and just went across the valley.
'By now we were all watching intently and then suddenly it seemed to explode with those butterfly shaped wings.
A video taken at the same site after dark captured the object as it faded, as described, from a bright light into what looked like dust
The sightings were in northeast Norway on Thursday
'It slowed dramatically, now the bright light was more subdued and the light from the explosion joined to form an amoeba-like circle of light which then seemed to turn away from us and then slowly faded totally.
'It seems nobody in Bardufoss knows what it was.
'There is a big military base there but still no definitive theories from anyone.'
So far the only explanation for the sighting is that it could have been Paz, a radar imaging satellite which was launched on Thursday from Elon Musk's Falcon 9.
Musk's Tesla launched it on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Defence. The }will orbit earth 15 times a day for five-and-a-half years taking photographs.
It was launched in California on Thursday along with two Musk's StarLink, two prototype satellites whose later versions will beam broadband internet anywhere in the world.
SpaceX, Musk's company which launched them, did not respond to DailyMail.com's requests for comment about the Norway sighting on Friday.
Norvège : Ovni photographié et filmé à Bardufoss le 22 février 2018
Norvège : Ovni photographié et filmé à Bardufoss le 22 février 2018
« Des OVNIS brillants sont observés dans le nord de la Norvège et « explosent en deux » alors que des spectateurs abasourdis les regardent disparaître en poussière « .
L’objet a été vu au-dessus de Bardufoss dans le nord de la Norvège jeudi après-midi en fin de journée.
Une lumière blanche et brillante a explosé en deux parties en forme de papillon puis s’est éteinte en « poussière ».
Les spectateurs stupéfaits l’ont d’abord confondu avec un hélico parce qu’elle est apparu rapidement.
Un témoin qui était dans une zone reculée des montagnes, a dit qu’elle est apparue soudainement, puis a «tourné» et disparu.
Une explication possible de l’observation fait référence a un satellite d’imagerie radar « PAZ » lancé jeudi !
Il a été lancé par la fusée Falcon 9 Space X d’Elon Musk jeudi en Californie avec deux autres.
Le satellite Paz appartient au ministère de la Défense espagnol et sera en orbite terrestre pendant 5 ans en prenant des photos météo.
Musk l’a lancé avec ses deux prototypes StarLink qui vont transmettre l’internet haut débit dans le monde entier.
Jennifer Smith Pour Dailymail.com
Cet Ovni a été observé également un peu plus tard à 80 miles à Tromsø.
Il a persisté jusqu’au coucher du soleil puis a explosé soigneusement en deux parties avant de disparaître comme de la poussière, selon des témoins.
Les habitants perplexes ont partagé des photos et des vidéos de la structure pendant qu’elle planait au-dessus d’eux près de la ville de Tromsø jeudi soir.
Tarquin Millington-Drake de Frontier Travels a raconté à DailyMail.com comment il a été témoin du spectacle.
« Nous pensions que c’était un hélicoptère qui venait vers nous – une lumière très brillante qui passait par-dessus la montagne et se dirigeait vers nous – puis elle tourna et passa devant nous. »
Tarquin Millington-Drake a regardé de Wolf Lodge (ci-dessus) et a dit que la lumière a ralenti de façon spectaculaire, puis s’est éloignée d’eux !
Des témoins ont décrit comment l’objet s’est évanoui en «poussière» alors qu’il disparaissait de leur vue.
« Alors il a semblé exploser mais l’explosion était très uniforme et symétrique comme deux explosions en forme de papillons de chaque côté de la lumière. »
« Il a ensuite semblé se retourner et s’en aller, mais non pas comme une seule lumière brillante – juste de la poussière brillante qui a disparu », a-t-il dit.
Lui et d’autres invités étaient rassemblés autour d’un feu à l’extérieur attendant les aurores boréales quand l’ovni est apparu. »
Is this the US Air Force's secret 4,600mph spy plane? Mystery 'hypersonic aircraft' is captured in Google Earth images of a Florida airbase, claims conspiracy theorist
Is this the US Air Force's secret 4,600mph spy plane? Mystery 'hypersonic aircraft' is captured in Google Earth images of a Florida airbase, claims conspiracy theorist
US Air Force is believed to be developing a spy plane that travels at 4,600mph
Secretive hypersonic plane is being developed by defence firm Lockheed Martin
Google Earth images show an object that looks similar to the artist's impression
Pictures were taken by UFO conspiracy theorists from SectureTeam10
Many have dismissed the latest footage, saying it just shows a high speed boat
The US Air Force is understood to be developing a spy plane that travels at more than 4,600mph (7,400km/h).
Now, a conspiracy theorist claims he has spotted an image of the mystery craft on Google Earth's view of Florida.
The satellite image appears to show an object similar to the artist's impression of the secretive hypersonic plane being developed by defence firm Lockheed Martin.
It comes a day after Lockheed Martin's secretive Skunk Works unit said it had already finished making the radical hypersonic update of the long-retired Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.
Scroll down for video
Images from Google Earth show an object that looks similar to the artist's impression of the secretive hypersonic plane being developed by defence firm Lockheed Martin
SECURETEAM 10 CONTROVERSY
SectureTeam10 is one of the most viewed YouTube channels, with over 785,000 people subscribing to its conspiracy videos.
But the channel has come under fire, as Lions Ground, a rival channel, claims that it has been intentionally fooling its viewers.
According to Lions Ground, SecureTeam10 has been raking in an estimated £600 ($745) a day by posting fake videos that 'outsmart UFO believers.'
Lots of people were sceptical of their latest claims, with many saying the footage showed a high speed boat.
The Google satellite images were compiled in a video by Tyler Glockner, known for uploading images of UFO sightings to his YouTube channel Secureteam10.
Whoever created the craft has a 'main foothold in designing aircraft engines that are widely used in civilian and military aviation', Mr Glockner claimed.
'What you're seeing is a very secretive object... I haven't been able to work out what it is', he said.
More than 400,000 people viewed the video which shows a series of screen shots from Google Earth.
'It is no public aircraft that has been disclosed', Mr Glockner claimed.
'You can see that this thing looks like a hypersonic aircraft or spacecraft'.
The shape is similar to the SR-72 hypersonic plane - which is set to be a strike and reconnaissance aircraft that tops Mach 6, writes Daily Star.
The strange footage was captured by Tyler Glockner, known for uploading images of UFO sightings to his YouTube channel secureteam10
US Air Force is understood to be developing a spy plane that travels at speeds of 4,600mph (7,400kmh) (artist's impression) and new footage could give a glimpse of the new craft
The shape is similar to the SR-72 hypersonic plane (pictured) - which is set to be a strike and reconnaissance aircraft that tops Mach 6
THE SR-72 HYPERSONIC PLANE
The US Air Force is understood to be developing a spy plane that travels at speeds of over 4,600mph (7,400kmh) and new footage could give a glimpse of the new craft.
The shape is similar to the SR-72 hypersonic plane - which is set to be a strike and reconnaissance aircraft that tops Mach 6.
The defence firm Lockheed Martin firm has been working on the project since the early 2000s.
Earlier this week reports suggested the radical hypersonic update of the long-retired Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane might have already been finished.
However, lots of people were sceptical of the claims, which many saying the footage showed a high speed boat.
The defence firm Lockheed Martin firm has been working on the project since the early 2000s.
However, many people were skeptical of the claims, with many saying the footage showed a high speed boat.
'It honestly looks like one of those racing jet boats', wrote YouTube user 'Kody Read'.
'It looks like a powerboat I live next to the ocean seen this shape before and it is next to swamp land and water', wrote another user 'Jamie Lynn'.
One user, called 'Leo Pokat' said it was a 'UPO - unimaginable parked object'.
Earlier this week reports suggested the radical hypersonic update of the long-retired Mach 3 SR-71 Blackbird spy plane might have already been finished.
Jack O'Banion, Vice President of Strategy and Customer Requirements, Advanced Development Programs for Lockheed Martin, let slip at a conference the unmanned aircraft has already been made.
More than 400,000 people viewed the video which shows a series of screen shots from Google Earth of the strange object
SectureTeam10 is one of the most viewed YouTube channels, with over 785,000 people subscribing to its conspiracy videos. Pictured is their latest Google Earth footage
The footage was taken from Palm Beach County Florida. Lots of people were sceptical of the claims, which many saying the footage showed a high speed boat
Speaking at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SciTech Forum, he showed a slide of a digital mockup of the craft, and said 'Without the digital transformation, the aircraft you see there could not have been made.'
Mr O'Banion also said the aircraft will have a 'digital twin' that knows every part on the aircraft.
'Talking about speed, you're talking about hypersonics, aircraft that operate above Mach 5,' he said.
Around 1100 or 1200 A.D., the largest city north of Mexico was Cahokia, sitting in what is now southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Built around 1050 A.D. and occupied through 1400 A.D., Cahokia had a peak population of between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cahokia was composed of three boroughs (Cahokia, East St. Louis, and St. Louis) connected to each other via waterways and walking trails that extended across the Mississippi River floodplain for some 20 square km. Its population consisted of agriculturalists who grew large amounts of maize, and craft specialists who made beautiful pots, shell jewelry, arrow-points, and flint clay figurines.
The city of Cahokia is one of many large earthen mound complexes that dot the landscapes of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys and across the Southeast. Despite the preponderance of archaeological evidence that these mound complexes were the work of sophisticated Native American civilizations, this rich history was obscured by the Myth of the Mound Builders, a narrative that arose ostensibly to explain the existence of the mounds. Examining both the history of Cahokia and the historic myths that were created to explain it reveals the troubling role that early archaeologists played in diminishing, or even eradicating, the achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations on the North American continent, just as the U.S. government was expanding westward by taking control of Native American lands.
Today it’s difficult to grasp the size and complexity of Cahokia, composed of about 190 mounds in platform, ridge-top, and circular shapes aligned to a planned city grid oriented five degrees east of north. This alignment, according to Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, is tied to the summer solstice sunrise and the southern maximum moonrise, orientating Cahokia to the movement of both the sun and the moon. Neighborhood houses, causeways, plazas, and mounds were intentionally aligned to this city grid. Imagine yourself walking out from Cahokia’s downtown; on your journey you would encounter neighborhoods of rectangular, semi-subterranean houses, central hearth fires, storage pits, and smaller community plazas interspersed with ritual and public buildings. We know Cahokia’s population was diverse, with people moving to this city from across the midcontinent, likely speaking different dialects and bringing with them some of their old ways of life.
View of Cahokia from Rattlesnake Mound ca 1175 A.D., drawn by Glen Baker (Image courtesy of Sarah E. Baires)
The largest mound at Cahokia was Monks Mound, a four-terraced platform mound about 100 feet high that served as the city’s central point. Atop its summit sat one of the largest rectangular buildings ever constructed at Cahokia; it likely served as a ritual space.
In front of Monks Mound was a large, open plaza that held a chunk yard to play the popular sport of chunkey. This game, watched by thousands of spectators, was played by two large groups who would run across the plaza lobbing spears at a rolling stone disk. The goal of the game was to land their spear at the point where the disk would stop rolling. In addition to the chunk yard, upright marker posts and additional platform mounds were situated along the plaza edges. Ridge-top burial mounds were placed along Cahokia’s central organizing grid, marked by the Rattlesnake Causeway, and along the city limits.
Cahokia was built rapidly, with thousands of people coming together to participate in its construction. As far as archaeologists know, there was no forced labor used to build these mounds; instead, people came together for big feasts and gatherings that celebrated the construction of the mounds.
The splendor of the mounds was visible to the first white people who described them. But they thought that the American Indian known to early white settlers could not have built any of the great earthworks that dotted the midcontinent. So the question then became: Who built the mounds?
Early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group—other than the American Indian—could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks. The impact of this narrative led to some of early America’s most rigorous archaeology, as the quest to determine where these mounds came from became salacious conversation pieces for America’s middle and upper classes. The Ohio earthworks, such as Newark Earthworks, a National Historic Landmark located just outside Newark, OH, for example, were thought by John Fitch (builder of America’s first steam-powered boat in 1785) to be military-style fortifications. This contributed to the notion that, prior to the Native American, highly skilled warriors of unknown origin had populated the North American continent.
This was particularly salient in the Midwest and Southeast, where earthen mounds from the Archaic, Hopewell, and Mississippian time periods crisscross the midcontinent. These landscapes and the mounds built upon them quickly became places of fantasy, where speculation as to their origins rose from the grassy prairies and vast floodplains, just like the mounds themselves. According to Gordon Sayre (The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand), the tales of the origins of the mounds were often based in a “fascination with antiquity and architecture,” as “ruins of a distant past,” or as “natural” manifestations of the landscape.
When William Bartram and others recorded local Native American narratives of the mounds, they seemingly corroborated these mythical origins of the mounds. According to Bartram’s early journals (Travels, published in 1928) the Creek and the Cherokee who lived around mounds attributed their construction to “the ancients, many ages prior to their arrival and possessing of this country.” Bartram’s account of Creek and Cherokee histories led to the view that these Native Americans were colonizers, just like Euro-Americans. This served as one more way to justify the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands: If Native Americans were early colonizers, too, the logic went, then white Americans had just as much right to the land as indigenous peoples.µ
Location of Cahokia, East St Louis, and St Louis sites in the American Bottom (Map courtesy of Sarah E. Baires)
The creation of the Myth of the Mounds parallels early American expansionist practices like the state-sanctioned removal of Native peoples from their ancestral lands to make way for the movement of “new” Americans into the Western “frontier.” Part of this forced removal included the erasure of Native American ties to their cultural landscapes.
In the 19th century, evolutionary theory began to take hold of the interpretations of the past, as archaeological research moved away from the armchair and into the realm of scientific inquiry. Within this frame of reference, antiquarians and early archaeologists, as described by Bruce Trigger, attempted to demonstrate that the New World, like the Old World, “could boast indigenous cultural achievements rivaling those of Europe.” Discoveries of ancient stone cities in Central America and Mexico served as the catalyst for this quest, recognizing New World societies as comparable culturally and technologically to those of Europe.
But this perspective collided with Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1881 text Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines. Morgan, an anthropologist and social theorist, argued that Mesoamerican societies (such as the Maya and Aztec) exemplified the evolutionary category of “Middle Barbarism”—the highest stage of cultural and technological evolution to be achieved by any indigenous group in the Americas. By contrast, Morgan said that Native Americans located in the growing territories of the new United States were quintessential examples of “Stone Age” cultures—unprogressive and static communities incapable of technological or cultural advancement. These ideologies framed the archaeological research of the time.
In juxtaposition to this evolutionary model there was unease about the “Vanishing Indian,” a myth-history of the 18th and 19th centuries that depicted Native Americans as a vanishing race incapable of adapting to the new American civilization. The sentimentalized ideal of the Vanishing Indian—who were seen as noble but ultimately doomed to be vanquished by a superior white civilization—held that these “vanishing” people, their customs, beliefs, and practices, must be documented for posterity. Thomas Jefferson was one of the first to excavate into a Native American burial mound, citing the disappearance of the “noble” Indians—caused by violence and the corruption of the encroaching white civilization—as the need for these excavations. Enlightenment-inspired scholars and some of America’s Founders viewed Indians as the first Americans, to be used as models by the new republic in the creation of its own legacy and national identity.
During the last 100 years, extensive archaeological research has changed our understanding of the mounds. They are no longer viewed as isolated monuments created by a mysterious race. Instead, the mounds of North America have been proven to be constructions by Native American peoples for a variety of purposes. Today, some tribes, like the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, view these mounds as central places tying their communities to their ancestral lands. Similar to other ancient cities throughout the world, Native North Americans venerate their ties to history through the places they built.
Around 1100 or 1200 A.D., the largest city north of Mexico was Cahokia, sitting in what is now southern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Built around 1050 A.D. and occupied through 1400 A.D., Cahokia had a peak population of between 25,000 and 50,000 people. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Cahokia was composed of three boroughs (Cahokia, East St. Louis, and St. Louis) connected to each other via waterways and walking trails that extended across the Mississippi River floodplain for some 20 square km. Its population consisted of agriculturalists who grew large amounts of maize, and craft specialists who made beautiful pots, shell jewelry, arrow-points, and flint clay figurines.
The city of Cahokia is one of many large earthen mound complexes that dot the landscapes of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys and across the Southeast. Despite the preponderance of archaeological evidence that these mound complexes were the work of sophisticated Native American civilizations, this rich history was obscured by the Myth of the Mound Builders, a narrative that arose ostensibly to explain the existence of the mounds. Examining both the history of Cahokia and the historic myths that were created to explain it reveals the troubling role that early archaeologists played in diminishing, or even eradicating, the achievements of pre-Columbian civilizations on the North American continent, just as the U.S. government was expanding westward by taking control of Native American lands.
Today it’s difficult to grasp the size and complexity of Cahokia, composed of about 190 mounds in platform, ridge-top, and circular shapes aligned to a planned city grid oriented five degrees east of north. This alignment, according to Tim Pauketat, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, is tied to the summer solstice sunrise and the southern maximum moonrise, orientating Cahokia to the movement of both the sun and the moon. Neighborhood houses, causeways, plazas, and mounds were intentionally aligned to this city grid. Imagine yourself walking out from Cahokia’s downtown; on your journey you would encounter neighborhoods of rectangular, semi-subterranean houses, central hearth fires, storage pits, and smaller community plazas interspersed with ritual and public buildings. We know Cahokia’s population was diverse, with people moving to this city from across the midcontinent, likely speaking different dialects and bringing with them some of their old ways of life.
View of Cahokia from Rattlesnake Mound ca 1175 A.D., drawn by Glen Baker (Image courtesy of Sarah E. Baires)
The largest mound at Cahokia was Monks Mound, a four-terraced platform mound about 100 feet high that served as the city’s central point. Atop its summit sat one of the largest rectangular buildings ever constructed at Cahokia; it likely served as a ritual space.
In front of Monks Mound was a large, open plaza that held a chunk yard to play the popular sport of chunkey. This game, watched by thousands of spectators, was played by two large groups who would run across the plaza lobbing spears at a rolling stone disk. The goal of the game was to land their spear at the point where the disk would stop rolling. In addition to the chunk yard, upright marker posts and additional platform mounds were situated along the plaza edges. Ridge-top burial mounds were placed along Cahokia’s central organizing grid, marked by the Rattlesnake Causeway, and along the city limits.
Cahokia was built rapidly, with thousands of people coming together to participate in its construction. As far as archaeologists know, there was no forced labor used to build these mounds; instead, people came together for big feasts and gatherings that celebrated the construction of the mounds.
The splendor of the mounds was visible to the first white people who described them. But they thought that the American Indian known to early white settlers could not have built any of the great earthworks that dotted the midcontinent. So the question then became: Who built the mounds?
Early archaeologists working to answer the question of who built the mounds attributed them to the Toltecs, Vikings, Welshmen, Hindus, and many others. It seemed that any group—other than the American Indian—could serve as the likely architects of the great earthworks. The impact of this narrative led to some of early America’s most rigorous archaeology, as the quest to determine where these mounds came from became salacious conversation pieces for America’s middle and upper classes. The Ohio earthworks, such as Newark Earthworks, a National Historic Landmark located just outside Newark, OH, for example, were thought by John Fitch (builder of America’s first steam-powered boat in 1785) to be military-style fortifications. This contributed to the notion that, prior to the Native American, highly skilled warriors of unknown origin had populated the North American continent.
This was particularly salient in the Midwest and Southeast, where earthen mounds from the Archaic, Hopewell, and Mississippian time periods crisscross the midcontinent. These landscapes and the mounds built upon them quickly became places of fantasy, where speculation as to their origins rose from the grassy prairies and vast floodplains, just like the mounds themselves. According to Gordon Sayre (The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand), the tales of the origins of the mounds were often based in a “fascination with antiquity and architecture,” as “ruins of a distant past,” or as “natural” manifestations of the landscape.
When William Bartram and others recorded local Native American narratives of the mounds, they seemingly corroborated these mythical origins of the mounds. According to Bartram’s early journals (Travels, published in 1928) the Creek and the Cherokee who lived around mounds attributed their construction to “the ancients, many ages prior to their arrival and possessing of this country.” Bartram’s account of Creek and Cherokee histories led to the view that these Native Americans were colonizers, just like Euro-Americans. This served as one more way to justify the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands: If Native Americans were early colonizers, too, the logic went, then white Americans had just as much right to the land as indigenous peoples.µ
Location of Cahokia, East St Louis, and St Louis sites in the American Bottom (Map courtesy of Sarah E. Baires)
The creation of the Myth of the Mounds parallels early American expansionist practices like the state-sanctioned removal of Native peoples from their ancestral lands to make way for the movement of “new” Americans into the Western “frontier.” Part of this forced removal included the erasure of Native American ties to their cultural landscapes.
In the 19th century, evolutionary theory began to take hold of the interpretations of the past, as archaeological research moved away from the armchair and into the realm of scientific inquiry. Within this frame of reference, antiquarians and early archaeologists, as described by Bruce Trigger, attempted to demonstrate that the New World, like the Old World, “could boast indigenous cultural achievements rivaling those of Europe.” Discoveries of ancient stone cities in Central America and Mexico served as the catalyst for this quest, recognizing New World societies as comparable culturally and technologically to those of Europe.
But this perspective collided with Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1881 text Houses and House-life of the American Aborigines. Morgan, an anthropologist and social theorist, argued that Mesoamerican societies (such as the Maya and Aztec) exemplified the evolutionary category of “Middle Barbarism”—the highest stage of cultural and technological evolution to be achieved by any indigenous group in the Americas. By contrast, Morgan said that Native Americans located in the growing territories of the new United States were quintessential examples of “Stone Age” cultures—unprogressive and static communities incapable of technological or cultural advancement. These ideologies framed the archaeological research of the time.
In juxtaposition to this evolutionary model there was unease about the “Vanishing Indian,” a myth-history of the 18th and 19th centuries that depicted Native Americans as a vanishing race incapable of adapting to the new American civilization. The sentimentalized ideal of the Vanishing Indian—who were seen as noble but ultimately doomed to be vanquished by a superior white civilization—held that these “vanishing” people, their customs, beliefs, and practices, must be documented for posterity. Thomas Jefferson was one of the first to excavate into a Native American burial mound, citing the disappearance of the “noble” Indians—caused by violence and the corruption of the encroaching white civilization—as the need for these excavations. Enlightenment-inspired scholars and some of America’s Founders viewed Indians as the first Americans, to be used as models by the new republic in the creation of its own legacy and national identity.
During the last 100 years, extensive archaeological research has changed our understanding of the mounds. They are no longer viewed as isolated monuments created by a mysterious race. Instead, the mounds of North America have been proven to be constructions by Native American peoples for a variety of purposes. Today, some tribes, like the Mississippi Band of Choctaw, view these mounds as central places tying their communities to their ancestral lands. Similar to other ancient cities throughout the world, Native North Americans venerate their ties to history through the places they built.
WE JUST BEAMED A SIGNAL AT SPACE ALIENS. WAS THAT A BAD IDEA?
WE JUST BEAMED A SIGNAL AT SPACE ALIENS. WAS THAT A BAD IDEA?
In a valley eight miles southeast of the Norwegian city of Tromsø, a radar antenna has just transmitted a short bit of radio programming to potential alien listeners: some specially composed electronic music and a tutorial about geometry and the use of binary numbers.
This isn’t the usual approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Ordinarily, scientists engaged in SETI use such antennas with the hope of hearing a signal that would have been broadcast tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years ago. So far, no dice. But at least SETI offers the chance of short-term success. It’s like a slot machine that’s been stubbornly ungenerous despite having been fed a ton of quarters. There’s always a chance the next coin will trigger a jackpot. SETI could succeed before tomorrow.
That’s not true with the Tromsø transmission. It’s an example of active SETI, or what some scientists call METI (for messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence). The idea is simple: Send a signal that would alert aliens we’re here, and listen for a reply.
Obviously, patience is required. The Tromsø broadcast was beamed to one of the nearest star systems believed to have an Earth-like planet. The target, GJ 273, or more familiarly Luyten’s Star, is a runty red dwarf located 12 light-years from our solar system. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, we’ll have to wait more than two decades before looking for a reply.
Despite the lack of immediate gratification, Doug Vakoch, founder of the San Francisco-based nonprofit METI International, has argued that if we really intend to prove that humans have cosmic company, we need to step up to the plate and take the initiative. He envisions the Tromsø transmission as a first step down a yellow brick road that eventually leads to signaling thousands or millions of star systems.
Trying to find aliens by pinging only one star system is a long shot. But although the broadcast from Norway is unlikely to provoke a response by any Luytenians, you can be sure it will provoke plenty of Earthlings.
That’s because METI is controversial. To begin with, what do you say to someone you’ve never met, and who’s a member of a different species? This has been batted about at more than a few conferences, and much of the conversation centers on whether we should show our bad side. Do we tell aliens that we engage in war, threaten our environment, and chow down on other critters? Personally, I don’t get too exercised about these discussions. Such concerns — while of great importance to us — are likely to be mere curiosities to the aliens.
But the aspect of METI that really inflames people (including some in the SETI community and even celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking) is the possibility that sending signals skyward may expose us to an existential danger. Suppose Luytenians do exist, and they’re unfriendly. If we tip our hand with a broadcast — no matter what its content — they might respond with a fleet of interstellar missiles to take us out. Bummer.
Frankly, it’s hard to think of any credible reason why aliens would do this. But why take the chance? My answer is twofold. To begin with, we’ve been broadcasting into space with high-powered transmitters (radar and TV) for more than a half-century now. Sure, those signals aren’t easy to detect out there in space — at least for someone with our level of technology. But for a society a century or two ahead of us, it would be trivial. And if the aliens are not at least that advanced, they simply won’t have those interstellar missiles.
So that’s point one, and it’s a doozy. Our hand has already been tipped.
But there’s something else, often lost in the discussion. Limiting strong transmissions skyward will straitjacket our descendants, not just in their efforts to do active SETI but for many other projects that might require beamed radio signals. If we want to map the outer regions of our solar system (to locate errant comets), we’ll need to use radars that are much more powerful than the ones we have today. If we envision having interstellar probes, signaling will be needed to keep in touch.
Let’s face it, it’s impossible to know what our great-great-grandchildren will find interesting or worthwhile to do. But telling them to never, ever aim a transmitter skyward is akin to telling them to never colonize Mars because, after all, there may be some indigenous microbes under the soil and it’s their planet.
Personally, I hope the Luytenians get in touch.
Dr. Seth Shostak is a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
Is het allereerste bewijs van een legendarische Bijbelse profeet gevonden? Deze archeologen denken van wel
Is het allereerste bewijs van een legendarische Bijbelse profeet gevonden? Deze archeologen denken van wel
Archeologen denken het eerste buitenbijbelse bewijs te hebben gevonden voor het bestaan van de Bijbelse profeet Jesaja. Het gaat om een stuk van een kleizegel die in 2009 in Jeruzalem is gevonden.
Het fragment is zo’n 2700 jaar oud en werd gebruikt voor sluitzegels voor documenten.
Volgens de Israëlische archeoloog Eilat Mazar is het waarschijnlijk, maar niet zeker dat tekens op het zegel verwijzen naar de profeet.
Engel van God
Jesaja staat centraal in het naar hem genoemde Bijbelboek. Hij zou koning Hezekiah van Judea hebben aangespoord om het Assyrische leger te blijven bestrijden tijdens het beleg van Jeruzalem.
Volgens de Bijbel moest het Assyrische leger zich terugtrekken nadat het leger grotendeels door een engel van God was vernietigd.
Assyrische geschriften vermelden op hun beurt dat het leger zich terugtrok nadat een flinke som losgeld was betaald.
Eerste
“Dit is wellicht de eerste archeologische en de vroegste buitenbijbelse verwijzing naar de profeet Jesaja ooit,” reageerde professor Robert Cargill van de Universiteit van Iowa.
“Het zegel is helaas deels beschadigd, waardoor het erg moeilijk zal worden om het met de profeet Jesaja te identificeren,” voegde hij toe.
Apollo 15 Video Shows Sound In Space, But Sound In A Vacuum Is Impossible!!! UFO Sighting News Video.
Apollo 15 Video Shows Sound In Space, But Sound In A Vacuum Is Impossible!!! UFO Sighting News Video.
Date of sighting: Feb 2018 Location of sighing: Earths Moon Mission: Apollo 15 When Streetcap1 finds something, you can bet your life that its got some juicy meat to it. He found an Apollo 15 mission video with audio that lets you hear the astronaut hammering! Thats impossible in the vacuum of space! Awesome find by Streetcap1. I've known him for over 5 years and can vouch for him. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan Streetcap1 states:
This is from Apollo 15 NASA footage. If you did Physics at school or college you will know that sound cannot travel in a vacuum. Yet we can hear the Astronaut's Hammer Strokes in this clip. Space is a vacuum = No Air. Quote ' In Space no-one can hear you scream.' All Astronaut communication is through headset radio. Vibrations cannot travel through the vacuum even to the astronaut's radio, so the hammer strokes should be silent, yet we can hear them! Conclusion: Either there is Air on the Moon or NASA faked the Apollo 15 program. SC1.
Something quite out of the ordinary occurred in the skies over Oregon on October 25th, 2017. A mystery aircraft was flying in daylight hours among the steady stream of airliners that traverse from south to north, between locales in California and Nevada and cities like Portland and Seattle and beyond. The incident began, at least as best we can tell, around 4:30pm near the California-Oregon border and resulted in multiple pilot eyewitnesses, recorded air traffic control audio, and eventual confirmations from both the FAA and North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) that it did indeed occur.
The first inklings of the story came to me shortly after the incident occurred from friends of mine in the aviation world. Sparse on details at the time, it sounded like it was probably just another one of the often misconstrued incidents that happen in the skies around the US everyday—ones where aircraft with inoperable radios or transponders stray into areas they shouldn't. And sometimes these occurrences result in local fighter jets paying the wayward aircraft a visit at the direction of NORAD. But days after initially blowing off the incident, it later began to seem that there was indeed more to the story than just than another "NORDO" private aircraft or lackadaisical pilot.
I came upon one Reddit thread that was of particular interest that seemed to not only corroborate the strange account, it also added critical details. The post was supposedly penned by a pilot who says they were in the sky over the Northwest in the early evening when the incident occurred, with the post coming shortly after the incident. The entry by Reddit user "Duprass" reads:
"Just landed in Seattle coming from the bay area. Beginning over Southern Oregon we kept overhearing Seattle Center attempting to track an airplane with no transponder who wasn't talking. A handful of crews were able to track it visually, best they could tell it was between FL350-370 [35,000-37,000 feet], northbound. Nobody close enough to see the type.
Last we heard it was over the Willamette valley northbound and some fighters, perhaps out of PDX [Portland International Airport], were scrambled to go take a peek. Center had trouble tracking it on primary radar.
Strange! My theory is they were running drugs to Canada. No news yet, not that I could find.
**Update 0500z. Called SEA ARTCC. The gentleman I spoke with said that they initially got alerted to the aircraft from Oakland Center who was painting it on primary [illuminating it with radar, but without transponder information]. For whatever reason they couldn't track it themselves on primary, and that's when I overheard them using airline aircraft to track it visually. The last airplane to see it had to descend into Portland and lost sight of it. The fighters were scrambled out of PDX but flew around for a while and did not find it. And that's that."
Air traffic control audio recorded over at LiveATC.com of Seattle Center Sector 14 is available from the time of the incident and it corroborates much of this information. You can listen to the entire series of exchanges here starting at around the 20 minute mark and through to the first part of the next time interval recording that can be found here.
The audio is fantastic as it illustrates that there were many communications between various jet crews and Seattle Center whose controllers tried to track the aircraft as it made its way north towards the Willamette Valley. The aircraft was not able to be tracked on radar nor did it show up on crews' digital traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS), but it was clearly there, although never quite close enough to positively identify what its exact type was.
ADRIAN STUDER/GETTY IMAGES
The activity seems to have begun in the far reaches of Northern California, around Mt. Shasta, and continued on into Southern Oregon, past Crater Lake and up through the Willamette Valley (Stock Photo).
The back and forth between air traffic control and various airline pilots lasted for roughly half an hour. Recordings from other Seattle Center Sectors, such as those closer to Portland (namely 42 and 46) are not readily not available and it's very possible—if not probable based on other reports—that the incident continued up the Willamette Valley. We did review PDX approach and tower exchanges from a half hour before to two hours after the event occurred and didn't find anything that stood out, although it was unlikely we would have as aircraft have descended when using those frequencies.
After reading this account and listening to the audio it was clear that the incident was worth looking into on a much deeper level, and that's what we did, inquiring with the 142nd Fighter Wing based at Portland International Airport, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the FAA about the odd ordeal.
NORAD's reply was quick and clear. An incident involving multiple airline crews, air traffic control, and F-15Cs from the 142nd Fighter Wing based out of Portland did occur. According to the limited information NORAD supplied, airliner pilots were asked by FAA air traffic controllers to help track and possibly identify a "white aircraft" traveling in the flightlevels nearby—roughly between 35,000 and 40,000 feet based on the radio recordings. NORAD also said that the incident did result in F-15s from Portland being scrambled to investigate, but by the time they got up and "looked around" the mystery aircraft couldn't be found.
SEATTLE ARTCC
Seattle Center sector map.
A quick note on the fighter jet aspect of this story—the 142nd Fighter Wing operates F-15Cs upgraded with the most capable air-to-air radar set in the world (AN/APG-63V3) and Sniper advanced targeting pods for long-rang visual identification. Their pilots are some of the best in the world and are highly trained in the homeland air defense mission. The fact that they "didn't find anything" is surprising to say the least. Maybe this was due to the nature of the aircraft being searched for, or the possibility that they launched long after it was first sighted, or that we simply aren't being told the whole story.
As for the F-15's launch time, it seems that this mystery aircraft was moving fairly fast—at least at the same speed of the airliners around it or greater. It's also worth noting that Oakland Center, which controls airspace to the south of Seattle Center's responsibilities, could have been trying to track the aircraft before the communications began on Seattle Center's frequencies if the object emanated from farther south. We have reviewed the PDX air traffic control audio up to two hours after the first radio traffic began regarding the mystery aircraft between Seattle Center and airliner pilots and we did not readily hear the tower clear the F-15s for launch. As such it's not clear when exactly the fighters took to the skies in search of this unidentified aircraft or why they were launched so late if that was the case.
It is also possible, albeit somewhat unlikely, that a fighter patrol could have been diverted if they were already airborne. Also, once in the air the F-15s are capable of traversing the entire state of Oregon in just a matter of minutes if need be, so if they were launched promptly it seems unlikely they wouldn't have been able to intercept the aircraft being pointed out by commercial pilots over Southern Oregon.
The FAA wasn't as forthcoming as NORAD, taking nearly a week and multiple emails to respond to our initial inquiry, only to say simply that they have nothing further to add to the description of events I provided to them. As such, they did acknowledge that the events occurred, but did not expand upon them. The 142nd Fighter Wing did not respond to our inquiries.
Clearly there had to be some level of after-action investigation into this event. Having an unidentified aircraft that doesn't show up on radar flying among civilian air traffic in the flight levels for extended periods of time isn't something you just brush off, especially considering the current global security situation and the circumstances that have existed since 9/11.
WASHINGTON MILITARY DEPARTMENT
Western Air Defense Sector (WADS), which goes by the callsign "Bigfoot," keeps a close watch on airspace over the Northwest and directs alert fighters and fighter patrols to targets of interest on short notice.
One of the Reddit posters with the handle "The Flying Beard" from the same thread, who supposedly is an air traffic controller, claims to have some inside knowledge of the event, stating:
"...Was just going to post about this actually. I was working an adjacent sector and was helping to coordinate some of the military stuff. They ended up launching F15s off of PDX to try and find it but no joy... [posts one of the audio clips linked above]... The crazy thing is, we didn't have a primary target or a mode C intruder, and it was out running 737s abeam it.
Also, (cue conspiracy theory) our QA department was working on this today, and got a call from the commander of the 142FW at PDX and was basically told to knock it off, and we know nothing.
A couple guys at work seem to think it may have have been this plane [unlikely, and that's an article I wrote] based of the description, and also the 'lack' of military interest. FWIW, I think the FAA is pursing this at higher levels. From a safety standpoint, if the military is running super secret test stuff in the NAS [National Airspace], that's bad. If I were one of the pilots that had a sighting, I'd definitely be filing a NASA form and any other official reports that you can...
...If the ‘aircraft’ continued on its presumed heading/course altitude, the F15s were sent the wrong way. The last known position was around the EUG area heading North around 750kts and the fighters went South when they launched ~25-30 min after the first report in the Shasta area...
...The time of day made it hard. All the guys on the east side couldn’t see it due to the setting sun and the North bound traffic on the west side was pretty sparse. I guess ZOA [Oakland Center] had a good primary/mode C on the guy for a bit in the RBL [Red Bluff Municipal Airport] area. It was initially heading SW and it made a pretty sharp turn to the North. Way harder/faster than what a commercial aircraft could handle at that speed/altitude without ripping the wings off."
We have no way of confirming this poster's information, although based on past Reddit posts their occupation description seems accurate, and their account certainly does add to the story if true.
We have filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the FAA and NORAD, as well as other federal parties involved in the incident. Hopefully we will find out more eventually as to what really went on that day so we can provide a more complete picture for our readers.
TYLER ROGOWAY/AUTHOR
An F-15C belonging to the 142nd Fighter Wing blasts out of Portland International Airport on a typical rainy day in the Northwest. Portland Air National Guard Base (PANG), which is co-located across from PDX's passenger terminals, is seen in the background. The 142nd's Eagles cover the airspace from northern California to the northern tip of Washington State and sometimes beyond. Two primary fully armed jets are always on quick reaction alert (QRA) and can launch within a few minutes of the klaxon howling. An armed spare jet is also usually available as well as one armed with a full magazine of 940 20mm cannon shells.
In the meantime, I would suggest reading the Reddit threadrelated to the event after listening to the air traffic control audio yourself. In it, some say it could have been a smuggling aircraft or even a secret military airframe. It seems odd that a smuggler would fly in broad daylight in an area they know they will be spotted, not to mention the question of how they stayed off the FAA radar scopes.
When it comes to a secret military aircraft, flying such an asset among jetliner traffic in daylight, albeit it was around sunset time, certainly seems like an odd choice for a secretive program, but that doesn't make it impossible. There are vast and remote training ranges that could be taken advantage of in Alaska for clandestine aircraft programs, and it is a long flight to get there. Still, the idea that U.S. military would willingly fly an aircraft through a major air traffic route at common jet operating altitudes without radio, transponder, or even radar contact would be highly concerning if true.
Amongst all the questions that remain, one thing is certain, an unidentified white aircraft was indeed flying over Oregon on that day in October, and the USAF and the FAA are both willing to admit that the event occurred. In the Air Force's case, the fact that they are even willing to tell us that they couldn't catch or even find the unidentified aircraft with their sensor-packed and fast F-15s is interesting to say the least. On the other hand they may not be sharing the entire story with us.
Whatever the case, we'll keep you updated on this white flying mystery of sorts and the circumstances surrounding its presence over Oregon when, or should I say if, new information becomes available.
0
1
2
3
4
5
- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
FBI CONFIRM ALIENS EXIST – RELEASED DECLASSIFIED UFO DOCUMENTS & FILES – WHO IS THE REAL THREAT TO EARTH?
FBI CONFIRM ALIENS EXIST – RELEASED DECLASSIFIED UFO DOCUMENTS & FILES – WHO IS THE REAL THREAT TO EARTH?
EDIT (April 2013): The FBI have recently published a blog post confirming that they never investigated the claims made in the now-famous Hottel memo. The FBI also made it clear that the memo is not related to the Roswell incident of 1947 in any way, the document relates to a completely seperate incident which remains unexplained to this day.
Additionally, recent attention has been drawn to the FBI document which confirms that a UFO exploded above Utah (see video below). Dr. Bruce Maccabee has studied the FBI files extensively and concludes that there is an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race, … and just in time for Sirius and CHOD (Citizen’s Hearing On Disclosure).
There’s been a whole lot of buzz going on in the UFO and alien community over the past few years with UFO sightings and public interest increasing tenfold over the past ten years. First the UK’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) decided to carry out a phased release of their official UFO documents leading up to 2012, NSA then made their files public and accessible online and now the FBI have started releasing their documents too.
FBI Documents – UFO’s & Aliens
Although there’s some interesting information there, controversy has arisen particularly in relation to a document written by FBI special agent Guy Hottel in 1950 who claimed to have received information from a US Air Force investigator about a UFO found in New Mexico. The document claims that three bodies about three feet tall, dressed in a very fine metallic cloth and bandaged up in a way similar to the method that test pilots use were recovered from the crash.
Whilst many people are claiming that this document proves the existence of extraterrestrial life and it IS an official FBI document it has been suggested (decades ago) by Bruce Maccabee that the document could also relate to a hoax originally perpetrated by Silas Newton. Officially there is no explanation for the document and the FBI have placed it under the perhaps appropriate subcategory Unexplained Phenomenon (See edit at beginning of article).
However, the document was actually presented as evidence to Dr Steven Greer for the purpose of the Disclosure Project, a non-profit organization that has collected over 120 hours of witness testimony from government and military officials, astronauts, pilots, etc who have all confirmed their will to testify under oath before congress that what they are saying about the UFO phenomena is the truth.
* See the official explanation by Sergeant First Class Clifford Stone, for the Guy Hottel memo, in the column to the right.
One document contained within the FBI files provides a detailed illustration of a flying disc which is, rather coincidentally, identical to the several discs that can be seen on the Youtube video of NASA’s infamous tether overload incident. The disc even had the triangular notch in it – after NASA told us that the anomalies on the video footage were most likely ice or dust particles. When this excuse didn’t fly too well they claimed they were camera anomalies – NASA gave two different conflicting explanations.
Alien UFO SightingsALIENS DID IT!!
FBI Documents – Cattle Mutilation
The FBI also released documents in relation to cattle mutilations which have been strongly attributed to alleged UFO and alien activity whereby organs and blood had been removed with surgical precision. Several theories have been put forward to explain the cattle mutilation phenomenon such as other animals feeding on the carcass while it’s fresh, biological warfare experiments and even satanic occultism which was rife throughout the prison system. However, there remains absolutely no evidence to this day, even though cattle mutilations still take place. What we do know is that many of the animals seem to have been dropped from a great height and black helicopters are often seen. Some kind of belt, harness or strap was also found at one of the cattle mutilation sites which may have been used to either lift up or release the cow(s). It’s not only animals that are being mutilated though, there are actually also many human mutilations taking place too.
NSA Documents – Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
Contained within the NSA’s archive is a document which appears to relate to 29 encoded messages received by extraterrestrial intelligence. Whilst this document stormed the internet amongst believers who claimed it also proved the existence of intelligent alien life, several skeptics came to the conclusion that the document is, in fact, just a staff training exercise. However, government whistleblowers have come forward to say that signals, such as the ‘wow signal’ have been received and documented numerous times by Harvard University but have been ignored because there were no furthers anomalies when those regions were scanned again. Harvard University confirmed with researchers that the claims were genuine.
MoD Documents – Unexplained
Whilst the Ministry of Defense’s documents hold witness testimony but seemingly very little else information on the subject, former MoD employee Nick Pope believes that between 5-10% of sightings cannot be explained in conventional terms and that more investigations are required in the interest of national security.
Pope also claims to have had a close-up photograph of a UFO on the wall of his office when he worked for MoD. In a UFO documentary entitled The Day Before Disclosure Nick Pope attempted to debunk several incidents before going on to state that an extraterrestrial presence is undoubtedly and unequivocally engaging the human race.
* Nick Pope investigated UFO reports during his time working for MoD.
In addition, the MoD confirmed that they found evidence of the existence of MJ-12 under a secret stamp but could attain no further information on the subject. The MJ-12 documents were also confirmed by Stanton Friedman’s interview with Charlette Mann, who confirmed that her grandfather was involved in a UFO crash retrieval involving alien bodies as early as 1941. Mann claimed her grandfather had told her that he had seen unusual small bodies that either had as skin, or were covered in, some kind of material that looked like aluminium tin-foil. Is it just a coincidence that the Guy Hottel memo also describes the same details?
Despite this new information the Majestic-12 documents remain labelled a ‘hoax’ by the FBI yet the Guy Hottel memo has not been labelled a hoax. It has been confirmed by other government whistleblowers, such as Command Sergeant Major Robert O’ Dean, that Majestic-12 is now called PI40 and that there are now 36, or possibly more, members.
Note: information regarding this evidence seems to be rapidly disappearing from the internet.
The Disclosure Movement
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, stated that certain freedoms could be accessed if a protective layer of secrecy could be stripped away. He also stated that him and Buzz Aldrin were being watched by someone much more technologically advanced than us all the time that they were on the moon and that there was no question of a space station before later denying ever saying it.
In addition, Edgar Mitchell (the 6th man on the moon) says he knows we have been visited and that extraterrestrial life exists. There are over four-hundred government and military officials that took part in Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project plus several more who are not taking part but are taking part in the disclosure movement.
Edgar Mitchell has confirmed that he met with high-up government officials at the Pentagon who confirmed that the extraterrestrial presence is real, an alien spacecraft really did crash at Roswell in 1947 and the government has been covering up the evidence for decades. When questioned as to who was keeping the information secret the government officials stated that they did not know but it was obviously a transnational covert group who operate amongst the highest echelons of government.
Command Sergeant Major Robert O’ Dean confirmed that this meeting had taken place in a basement room of the Pentagon nicknamed ‘the tank’. According to Colonel Philip J Corso’s books, The Day After Roswell and Dawn Of A New Age, and according to Corso’s testimony, it was in the basement of the Pentagon that Corso gained access to the Roswell file.
Robert O’ Dean had Cosmic Top Secret Clearance (38 levels above top secret) and claims that, whilst working for NATO, he saw a classified document entitled The Assessment which explained the UFO/EBE presence in great detail and theorized that the extraterrestrials have been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that man’s evolution may have even been a result of intervention by the extraterrestrials who are apparently knowledgeable on the subjects of genetic engineering and cloning.
Remote Viewing
In addition to the above, the FBI have many more documents relating to the alleged UFO/EBE presence including one document containing insightful information that a remote viewer had channeled during the time of the remote viewing experiments. The information seems to corroborate that from other official government whistleblower testimony, including that of Lt. Colonel Philip J Corso.
Corso (and many others) claim that the extraterrestrials have developed technology that interfaces with coherent thought and that they wore head-bands which allowed them to become an integrated part of their spacecraft – in other words, they navigated their spacecraft simply by thought.
“A very serious situation may develop at any time with regard to the ‘flying saucers’. If one of those should be attacked, the plane will almost certainly be destroyed. In the public mind this might create near panic and international suspicion.”
The memo also states:
1. Parts of the discs carry crews, others are under remote control.
2. Their mission is peaceful. The visitors contemplate settling on this plane.
3. These visitors are human-like but much larger in size.”
Eventually the document states:
4. They are not excarnate Earth people, but come from their own world.
5. They do not come from any ‘planets’ as we use the word but from an etheric planet which interpenetrates with our own and is not perceptible to us.
6. The bodies of the visitors, and the craft also, automatically materialize on entering the vibratory rate of our dense matter.
7. The disks possess a type of radiant energy, or a ray, which will easily disintegrate any attacking ship. They re-enter the etheric at will, and so simply disappear from our vision, without trace.
8. The region from which they come is NOT the ‘astral plane’ but corresponds to the Lokas or Talas. Students of esoteric matters will understand these terms.
9. They probably cannot be reached by radio, but probably can be by radar, if a signal system can be devised for that.”
Could the fact that the aliens allegedly communicate by telepathy and use thought to control their craft be the real reason for the remote viewing experiments in order to find out where the visitors were from?
Despite the fact that the public were told there was no conclusive evidence to suggest that remote viewing was useful, Nick Pope claimed that he had seen surprisingly successful remote viewing experiments being carried out first-hand himself.
Weaponization Of Space
Whilst the Disclosure project offers very little actual smoking-gun evidence (even over 10 years later), we need to remember that there are plans for the weaponization of space which Dr. Greer and all other participants of the Disclosure project seem to oppose. There is over 120 hours of highly compelling testimony from massively prestigious, highly reputable and credible government witnesses, people who we have trusted (and who have earned our trust) to have their fingers on the nuclear trigger; people such as Dan Salter, NRO (National Reconnaissance Office)who claims to have direct knowledge of a worldwide organization called ACIO (Advanced Contact Intelligence Organization) that was set up specifically to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.
As noted as part of Disclosure project testimony, when Mikhail Gorbachev was asked on CNN whether they should stop using weapons in space Mikhail’s wife stepped in and said “No, I don’t think we should ban nuclear weapons in space because of alien spacecraft!”.
Her statement is ambiguous and can be taken either way.
Did she mean that alien spacecraft are being used to propose an opposition to the weaponization of space? Or did she mean that we need to keep nuclear weapons as defense against alien spacecraft?
Many officials testified to the fact that UFO’s had been shutting down equipment at secret nuclear installations and that they are concerned that we may take nuclear weapons into space, in which case, the aliens may need to retaliate.
It was also claimed that the aliens are concerned that we may be on the brink of destroying ourselves – Earth is a precious resource for the extraterrestrials who are interested in Earth’s magnetic field which they can use to maneuver and stay aloft according to Wang Sichao of China’s Purple Mountain Observatory who confirmed that the observatory had observed ET craft on numerous occasions.
So, are the aliens a threat to us or are we a threat to the aliens?
Finding the Arks of Noah and the Covenant are still on many bucket lists but you may soon be able to cross off “evidence of the existence of Isaiah.”
“We appear to have discovered a seal impression, which may have belonged to the prophet Isaiah, in a scientific, archaeological excavation.”
In a statement in the Biblical Archaeology Review (with photos), archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar announced that she and her team of researchers found a portion of a 2,700-year-old stamped clay seal at what was once the location of a royal bakery near the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem. No, there’s no mention of the bakery in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, but there’s plenty about Isaiah – an entire book bearing his name and believed by scholars to have been written by one person, most likely named Isaiah, who is regarded by both Jews and Christians as one of the leading religious prophets.
The Temple Mount
However, like today, there were probably a lot of Isaiahs around. The biblical Isaiah was noted for counseling and aiding King Hezekiah in his quest to protect the Kingdom of Judah from an Assyrian invasion during the 8th century BCE. That link plays an important part in determining if this seal belonged to the prophet Isaiah, according to Dr. Mazar.
“We found the eighth-century B.C.E. seal mark that may have been made by the prophet Isaiah himself only 10 feet away from where we earlier discovered the highly-publicized bulla of King Hezekiah of Judah.”
That bulla or clay seal was also discovered by Mazar in 2015. It’s close proximity to the seal of Hezekiah might have sealed the identity of the new seal … if it were whole and undamaged. Unfortunately, there’s some missing pieces to the seal and the story. While it definitely has an inscription that reads l’Yesha’yah[u] (Belonging to Isaiah), the next line has some characters missing.
“Because the bulla has been slightly damaged at the end of the word nvy, it is not known if it originally ended with the Hebrew letter aleph, which would have resulted in the Hebrew word for ‘prophet’ and would have definitively identified the seal as the signature of the prophet Isaiah.”
Dr. Eilat Mazar
While Dr. Mazar feels pretty strongly that close counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and biblical seals, others aren’t so sure. The Times of Israel reports Israeli epigrapher (one who studies inscriptions) Dr. Haggai Misgav thinks that the seal would have been tied to a “sack of goods” that was not important enough to carry a notation that the owner was a prophet.
“But as always there is no shortage of those who jump on the finds with cries of, ‘Hurray, we have proven the Bible.’”
Perhaps he would believe the seal’s authenticity if it was on a sack of bagels and challah from the royal bakery.
UFOs Shoot Past NASA Satellite Observing Our Sun, Feb 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFOs Shoot Past NASA Satellite Observing Our Sun, Feb 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 18, 2018 Location of sighting: Earths sun Found by Streetcap1 of Youtube, these UFOs shot past the SOHO NASA satellite that observes the sun. The UFOs are in a half disk shape and are traveling in the direction of the front of the disk. There are two of them, but because they travel so fast, it appears to be more. Cool catch.
Een Polar Vortex is een lagedrukgebied in de hoogte dat zich rond de Noordpool bevindt. Het is er ALTIJD. Soms is dit syteem sterk en soms is het zwakker. En dat heeft zo zijn gevolgen voor het weer op verschillende plaatsen op Aarde.
De voorbije dagen werd de Polar Vortex te pas en te onpas gebruikt om het koude weer van deze week te verklaren. Af en toe werden zaken verklaard die mijn tenen deden krullen. Vandaar deze tekst met objectieve informatie over de Polar Vortex en zijn rol.
De Polar Vortex was de voorbije dagen nagenoeg overal in de media aanwezig. Experts en weeramateurs sleurden dit fenomeen er te pas en te onpas bij om de winterprik waarin we beland zijn, te verklaren.
Maar wat is die Polar Vortex nu precies en wat is het verband met het koude weer? Hier komt de waarheid en het enige wat men moet weten over de Polar Vortex.
Wat is een Polar Vortex?
Een Polar Vortex is een lagedrukgebied in de hoogte dat zich rond de polen bevindt. Er zijn er dus twee, eentje aan de Noordpool en een tweede aan de Zuidpool en ze zijn er ALTIJD. De noordelijke Polar Vortex roteert in tegenwijzerzin rond de Noordpool. Hij bevindt zich in het midden en het bovenste deel van de troposfeer en strekt zich uit tot in de stratosfeer. Daaronder bevindt zich een immens pakket koude lucht.
De grens tussen deze koude lucht en vochtigere subtropische lucht wordt gevormd door het polair front. Daarboven bevindt zich de straalstroom, die rondom de planeet stroomt op een hoogte van 9 tot 12 km. Als de straalstroom in de richting van de evenaar meandert, noemen we dat een trog. Als hij poolwaarts meandert, vormt hij een rug. Op grondniveau vormen zich hogedrukgebieden onder een rug en lagedrukgebieden met storingen onder/in de buurt van een trog.
De Polar Vortex varieert in kracht. In een sterke fase is doorgaans één centrum te herkennen, waarrrond de arctische lucht roteert in een relatief nauw gebied. Meestal is de Polar Vortex echter zwakker dan dat. Er zijn dan verscheidene wervels te vinden, meestal aan de randen van de Polar Vortex. Soms is de Polar Vortex heel zwak. De organisatie van het systeem is dan ver te zoeken en de verschillende wervels kunnen zich dan makkelijker verspreiden, weg van de Noordpool.
De sterkte van de Polar Vortex heeft een belangrijke invloed op de straalstroom. Rond een sterke Polar Vortex stroomt de polaire straalstroom redelijk rechtdoor, met eerder flauwe bochten. Als de Polar Vortex echter zwak is, dan vertoont de straalstroom meer meanders en bovendien wordt de amplitude tussen een rug en een trog dan vaak uitzonderlijk groot. De rug strekt zich dan extra ver naar het noorden uit en in de troggen kunnen zelfs afgesneden kernen ontstaan.
Van een sterke Polar Vortex met een redelijk strakke straalstroom naar een zwakke Vortex met een zeer meanderende straalstroom
De circulatie kan soms zelfs de vorm gaan aannemen van een Griekse hoofdletter omega. Zo’n situatie kan dagen- tot zelfs wekenlang aanhouden. Afhankelijk waar men zich bevindt in de omega, krijgt men dan een lange periode mooi of slecht, warm of koud weer. De extreme koude die men eerder deze winter in grote delen van de Verenigde Staten heeft gekend, is exact op dezelfde manier ontstaan. De Amerikanen zaten toen lange tijd in zo’n diepe trog, of als men wil, in een zuidwaartse bult van de Polar Vortex. West-Europa bevindt zich deze week net ten oosten van zo’n rug. Aan de grond bevindt zich een hogedrukgebied tussen Groot-Brittannië en het noordwesten van Rusland. Langs de zuidelijke flank ervan wordt droge, maar zeer koude lucht, afkomstig vanuit het Russische binnenland, in onze richting getransporteerd.
De circulatie in de top van de troposfeer volgens de Deutscher Wetterdienst, met daarin de omega-configuratie
Wat is de Polar Vortex niet?
De Polar Vortex is niet iets nieuws. De term bestaat al sinds de 19de eeuw, maar is recent in de Verenigde Staten en nu dus ook bij ons in de aandacht gekomen. Het fenomeen Polar Vortex bestaat natuurlijk al veel langer.
Het is geen zichtbaar weerfenomeen zoals een onweer, sneeuwval of een storm. Het is een systeem in de bovenlucht, dat eventueel wel kan verantwoordelijk zijn voor die zichtbare weertoestanden.
Waardoor wordt de Polar Vortex beïnvloed?
Allerlei factoren bepalen de sterkte van de Polar Vortex. Zo vertoont dit fenomeen een jaarlijkse variatie, waarbij hij typisch op zijn zwakst is in de zomer en sterk in de winter. Daarnaast kan de Polar Vortex ook versterken of verzwakken door allerlei verstoringen in de atmosfeer, dichtbij of veraf. De populairste verstoring is de Sudden Stratospheric Warming, waarbij de circulatie van de Vortex kan vertragen of tijdelijk zelfs kan omkeren door een plotse opwarming van de stratosfeer. Maar ook zelfs El Niño/La Niña zou de Polar Vortex naar verluidt beïnvloeden.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.