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

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.”

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

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

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.

{ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ }

Mars wist bijna alle sporen van de Phoenix-lander uit

Caroline Kraaijvanger

25-02-2018 om 01:15 geschreven door peter

Wetenschap komt met nieuwe manier om aliens te vinden

Caroline Kraaijvanger

Bronmateriaal:

25-02-2018 om 01:08 geschreven door peter

25-02-2018 om 00:57 geschreven door peter

25-02-2018 om 00:42 geschreven door peter

25-02-2018 om 00:31 geschreven door peter

25-02-2018 om 00:16 geschreven door peter

A Top-Secret US Military Base Will Melt Out of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Planners thought it would stay buried in ice forever.

24-02-2018 om 23:54 geschreven door peter

Scientists say space aliens could hack our planet

New paper argues that extraterrestrials might beam 'contaminated' messages our way.

LIKE THREATENING NEANDERTHALS

Related

Discovery of alien life might not bring the response you'd expect

A DANGEROUS GIFT

24-02-2018 om 23:42 geschreven door peter

Neanderthals were artists just like humans, and even understood symbolism

Essentially human

Artistic thinking

24-02-2018 om 23:32 geschreven door peter

New study links ancient cave drawings and the origin of language

Sound + pictures = language

24-02-2018 om 23:17 geschreven door peter

US air force jets ‘battle mystery UFO in dogfight' over skies above Area 51 military base

24-02-2018 om 22:57 geschreven door peter

Oude necropolis ontdekt in zuiden van Egypte - HLN.be

24-02-2018 om 22:29 geschreven door peter

Shining UFO is spotted over remote northern Norway and 'EXPLODES into two' as stunned onlookers watch before 'fading into dust'

RELATED ARTICLES

24-02-2018 om 18:57 geschreven door peter

Norvège : Ovni photographié et filmé à Bardufoss le 22 février 2018

24-02-2018 om 18:40 geschreven door peter

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

SECURETEAM 10 CONTROVERSY

RELATED ARTICLES

THE SR-72 HYPERSONIC PLANE

24-02-2018 om 18:32 geschreven door peter

24-02-2018 om 16:44 geschreven door peter

24-02-2018 om 16:44 geschreven door peter

WE JUST BEAMED A SIGNAL AT SPACE ALIENS. WAS THAT A BAD IDEA?

24-02-2018 om 16:33 geschreven door peter

Is het allereerste bewijs van een legendarische Bijbelse profeet gevonden? Deze archeologen denken van wel

Engel van God

Eerste

24-02-2018 om 16:16 geschreven door peter

24-02-2018 om 16:04 geschreven door peter

MUFON’s New Social Network