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
Mysterious Radio Blasts from a Distant Galaxy Draw Attention of Alien Hunters
Mysterious Radio Blasts from a Distant Galaxy Draw Attention of Alien Hunters
By Calla Cofield, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's impression of the Greenbank Telescope in West Virginia receiving signals from fast radio burst FRB 121102. The object was observed by the Breakthrough Listen project.
Credit: Danielle Futselaar/UC Berkeley
Repeating bursts of radio waves coming from a distant dwarf galaxy probably aren't signals from an extraterrestrial civilization, but that hasn't stopped a group of E.T. hunters from investigating this peculiar phenomenon.
In August, scientists with the $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative began observing an object known as FRB 121102. The object is one of less than 40 known examples of a fast radio burst (FRB), an incredibly bright flash of radio waves. Scientists don't yet know what causes FRBs, which is why they took a particular interest in FRB 121102. While all other observed FRBs are single explosions of radio waves, this one was releasing bright flashes of light over and over again.
A new study, co-authored by scientists with Breakthrough Listen, reveals the conclusions of those August observations: nearly 100 percent of the light from FRB 121102 is polarized, meaning the orientation of the light waves are all in the same direction. Most radiating objects in the universe produce unpolarized light, so the uniformity of light from FRB 121102 could help scientists narrow down the type of object or environment that might be producing those flashes. (You can read our full story here.)
"As far as the FRB121102 goes, I don't think there is any slight possibility that [the pulses] are from an extraterrestrial intelligence," Vishal Gajjar, a scientist with Breakthrough Listen, said yesterday (Jan. 10) during a news conference at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
The primary reason for Gajjar's skepticism is that the object is in a dwarf galaxy about 3 billion light-years away from Earth. A civilization trying to contact another civilization probably wouldn't bother to create such a powerful signal, simply because the time it would take to receive a reply would be prohibitively long. For example, the radio waves from FRB 121102 took 3 billion years to reach Earth — the civilization that sent the message might very well be dead and gone by the time it received a reply!
But Gajjar said Breakthrough Listen is also interested in investigating unexplainable phenomenon in the universe, even if those phenomena are naturally occurring.
Polarized light
One explanation for the polarized light coming from FRB 121102 could be the presence of a very strong magnetic field, according to a statement from the University of California, Berkeley, where the Breakthrough Listen laboratory is based. The only known place in the universe with such strong magnetic fields is in the vicinity of a massive black hole — such as the supermassive blackholes thought to lie at the centers of most galaxies — that has gas and dust falling into it, according to the statement. The authors of the paper hypothesize that the source of the radio waves could be another highly magnetized object, known as a magnetar, that lies near a massive black hole. A magnetar is a type of neutron star, an incredibly dense nugget of material about the size of a city, that forms when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses.
If this is, in fact, the source of FRB 121102, Gajjar said that's another reason to suspect that the signal is natural, not artificial: An environment with such an extreme magnetic field wouldn't be very habitable because of the extreme conditions it would create, he told Space.com in an interview.
The polarization of light from FRB 121102 was also observed by a group of scientists using the William E. Gordon Telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Breakthrough Listen used the Greenbank Radio Telescope in West Virginia, coupled with a massive computing system that consists of 32 computing nodes, each taking in 1 gigabyte of data per second. In an hour, that adds up to the equivalent of 18,000 DVDs, Gajjar said at the news conference.
The huge computing backend allows the researchers to capture a wide range of radio frequencies simultaneously, providing a more complete picture of the irregular pulses coming from FRB 121102.
The Breakthrough researchers observed the FRB in some of the higher-frequency radio waves emitted by the FRB, where they found pulses of light that lasted for between 0.00003 and 0.009 seconds in duration. Those incredibly short pulses can be used to indicate the size of the object emitting them, and, according to the paper, the object could be as small as 10 kilometers across, or the typical size of a neutron star, according to the statement. The researchers say they plan to study the repeating FRB in even higher frequencies than what was reported in the paper, which could potentially help them narrow down the possible sources of the burst even further, according to the statement.
At the news conference, the paper's authors said there are many other hypotheses that could explain FRBs. It is unclear yet if the peculiar behavior of FRB 121102 is unusual among all FRBs or just among those that scientists have been able to observe, they said, but there are new radio telescopes coming online soon that will be able to scan for these events and help researchers learn more about them.
Recently, Breakthrough Listen scientists have also studied the space rock 'Oumuamua that scientists believe came from another solar system, and "Boyajian's Star," which has mystified astronomers with its strange flickering.
Editor's note: This article previously stated that the dwarf galaxy is 3 billion miles away from Earth; it is 3 billion light years away.
Water may be widespread on the moon after all – new research
Water may be widespread on the moon after all – new research
Water on the moon is widespread across its surface and appears to be present at all times of the lunar day, according to a new analysis of two lunar missions.
The new evidence contradicts previous research suggesting water was confined to certain areas and depended on lunar days. “We find that it doesn’t matter what time of day or which latitude we look at, the signal indicating water always seems to be present,” said Joshua Bandfield, a senior research scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of a new study published in Nature Geoscience.
“The presence of water doesn’t appear to depend on the composition of the surface, and the water sticks around,” he added. It’s hoped the results will lead to a greater understanding of the origins of the moon’s water and offer insight into how it could be used as a resource.
It’s not yet clear how accessible the water supply is but if it is convenient to reach it could be used as a drinking water for future explorers or converted to use for rocket fuel, NASA said in a statement.
Water, water, everywhere, but is there a drop to drink? Data from 2 lunar missions finds evidence that the Moon’s water is widely distributed across the surface. If the Moon has enough accessible , it could be an essential resource to future explorers: http://go.nasa.gov/2EPwxX3
Earlier studies suggested that more water was detected at the moon’s polar latitudes and that the strength of the water signal waxes and wanes according to the lunar day. However, these analyses depended on remote-sensing instruments which were challenged by the mixture of reflected and emitted light. For this latest examination, Bandfield and his team created a new model to incorporate temperature information for more accurate results.
Their results showed widespread and relatively immobile water indicating that it may be present primarily as hydroxyl (OH), a more reactive relative of H2O that is made of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom. It also suggests that any H2O present on the moon isn’t loosely attached to the surface.
“By putting some limits on how mobile the water or the OH on the surface is, we can help constrain how much water could reach the cold traps in the polar regions,” said Michael Poston, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Discussions are still continuing among researchers about what exactly these new findings reveal about the source of the moon’s water. One theory is that the water is created by the solar wind hitting the lunar surface; however, the team hasn’t ruled out the possibility that the moon itself could be the source. It is conceivable that the water could be slowly released from deep inside minerals, where it has been locked since the moon was formed, NASA stated.
“Some of these scientific problems are very, very difficult, and it’s only by drawing on multiple resources from different missions that are we able to hone in on an answer,” said NASA scientist John Keller.
It was 1945, and science fiction writer Ray Palmer was working as the editor of a popular pulp fiction magazine called Amazing Stories. A diminutive fellow with a hunchback, Palmer had suffered a near-crippling accident early in life that broke his spine, and the resulting unsuccessful surgery stunted his growth. Thus, at the age of 35, Palmer had grown to a mere four feet in height.
It was on an afternoon during the year in question that Palmer happened upon an odd letter in the office slush pile. The letter was from a man who claimed he had managed to decipher a secret, coded ancient language, of which evidence could still be discerned from modern writing. Palmer wrote back to the author, a Mr. Richard Sharp Shaver of Pennsylvania, seeking clarification on the unusual matter. This prompted a long, rambling letter from Shaver, who claimed to learn of this, and other mysteries of our world, after psychically overhearing the communications of beings living in extensive caverns below ground.
Shaver was no great writer himself, if this grandiloquent offering was any indication, though Palmer saw potential nonetheless. From it, he began to construct an outline based on Shaver’s missive, and shaped it into a decent fantasy story, which eventually saw publication under the title, “I Remember Lemuria.”
Thus, the Shaver Mystery was born.
Initially intended to be read and enjoyed only as fiction, Shaver’s weird ramblings would inspire Palmer and the publishers of Amazing Stories to continue publication of “Shaver Mystery” stories for several years, during which the readership of the magazine reportedly increased by thousands. Throughout the period which saw the publication of stories based on his odd, rambling mythos, Shaver had always maintained that his “communications” with inner-earth dwellers were real and that the stories of cavern systems inhabited by strange beings beneath the Earth were based on fact.
Following the publication of the novella “I Remember Lemuria,” Palmer professed that letters his publication recieved–usually numbering less than fifty or so each month–were now close to 50,000. Equally impressive had been that many of these fan letters detailed strange experiences, expounding on the exploits of these deep-Earth denizens Shaver claimed to have met.
Among the letters Palmer received had been the story of a woman who, claiming to have served as a medical specialist in France during the Second World War, entered the sub-basement of an old building via an elevator. A cavernous opening existed in the lowest portion of the building, and upon her discovery of the entrance to an underground realm, the woman was captured by a group of monstrous creatures. She claimed to have been held prisoner by these beings for an indefinite period, after which she was finally discovered and released by a group of benign, human-like saviors. (An apparent nod toward this story was later featured in the works of science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who wrote in a short story titled, “The Elevator People” that, “There are five hundred buildings in the United States whose elevators go deeper than the basement.” Ellison, however, was a vocal critic of the Shaver Mystery stories and had at one time badgered Palmer about his insistence on publishing them.)
Much like the story above outlines, Shaver categorized these subterranean inhabitants into two different groups: a monstrous, evil group called Deros (meaning “detrimental robots”), and their good-natured counterparts the Teros, who were nearly identical to humans in appearance.
Palmer himself had begun to wonder about the circumstances surrounding all this insanity, and Shaver’s claims that the events related in his letters to Amazing Stories were true. His curiosity finally prompted a visit to Richard Shaver’s home in Pennsylvania. After a late-evening coffee session, Palmer was led upstairs and shown to the spare bedroom, where throughout the evening he claimed, to his astonishment, to hear five individual voices of men, women, children, and even an “old gruff man.” According to Palmer, he was terrified to hear a discussion that pertained to the dismemberment of a human woman someplace four miles away–and presumably four miles down. Discussing the experience with Shaver the following morning, the strange host claimed he had asked the “beings” to “go easy on him (Palmer),” and Palmer, finally growing in his conviction regarding the Shaver Mystery himself, was able to get a night’s sleep uninterrupted.
This would be only one of many strange stories Palmer would recount, and though Richard Shaver’s own sanity would later come into question on many occasions, the prolific interest in his visions of an inner-Earth struggle would continue, inspiring a generation of devotees and researchers that included Timothy Green Beckley, who had known Palmer personally. Of his own discovery of Richard Shaver’s visions of conflict in a subterranean world, he admits being “chilled to the bone,” by the stories as a young reader, saying it was “stuff that nightmares were made of, and I was intrigued just as Ray Palmer had been.”
Palmer’s convictions about Shaver’s ideas would come and go over the years. After leaving Amazing Stories, the former editor was still under contractual obligations that prevented him from launching a competing publication. He did, however, do so anyway under a pseudonym, which led to the appearance of FATE, a magazine which, at the time, was mostly devoted to the burgeoning interest in flying saucers that followed pilot Kenneth Arnold’s observation of a group of objects over Mount Rainier, Washington in 1947.
Initially, Palmer had been convinced that the appearance of flying saucers might prove to be a vindication for Shaver’s claims, supposing that the seemingly advanced aircraft might actually belong to the subterranean dwellers discussed in his stories. With the founding of FATE, Palmer hoped in part to be able to get to the bottom of the saucer mystery, but after a few years, he left the operation which continued under the publication of his partner, Curtis Fuller.
Ultimately, what was Palmer to make of Shaver and his stories? Like many, it seemed by the 1970s that he had become disillusioned with Shaver and his claims, even noting in 1971 that during periods Shaver claimed to have lived underground amidst the warring factions of Deros and Teros, that he had instead been hospitalized in a mental institution.
The stories, of course, were purely imaginary, supplemented perhaps by the ramblings of a once disturbed mind; but in their heyday, the stories of Richard Shaver saw a kind of success and popularity that was nearly unrivaled in the science fiction genre.
UFO Fleet Caught On Video Moving Underneath a Passenger Jet
UFO Fleet Caught On Video Moving Underneath a Passenger Jet
Online community on UFOs has been debating about the video showing an inexplicable fleet of UFOs recorded on video from a plane. The footage was initially sent to US-based Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), which keeps a global database of UFO sightings, for investigations and it went viral after several UFO and conspiracy theory websites shared it.
The video was allegedly shot above Taiwan. It shows apparent eight bright circular orbs flying slowly just beneath the plane. According to the report from an unnamed witness, they were on the aeroplane of Eva Airlines from Vancouver, Canada to Taipei, Taiwan when they saw bright lights flying underneath. They saw around eight UFOs flying under the plane.
They managed to get a slow-motion video of the UFOs until they were asked to shut down their camera as part of a landing policy.
Many online viewers of the video thought it was a fleet of UFOs moving beneath the plane.
The video was recorded in October 2014, but only recently it has been shared online.
Sceptics believe those are just reflections of small lakes as the plane appears to travel over mountains. Some even say that they are only ships in the sea as they are not moving and not above the clouds. Others suggest they are oil rigs as the plane is leaving them behind, which means they are either slower or stationary.
However, many firmly believe that those are evidence of UFOs.
Le phénomène extraterrestre et OVNI selon le scientifique Jacques Vallée…
Le phénomène extraterrestre et OVNI selon le scientifique Jacques Vallée…
…Une supercherie organisée par les gouvernements et par un système de contrôle “interdimensionel”
Voici quelques citations des livres du Dr. Jacques Vallée, docteur et expert dans plusieurs disciplines dont l’astrophysique, l’informatique et les mathématiques. Un scientifique qui s’est intéressé à l’ufologie tout au long de sa carrière professionnelle et qui, comme d’autres hommes de science, arrive à la conclusion que le phénomène “extraterrestre” fait partie d’un système de contrôle “interdimensionel” organisé en une hiérarchie d’entités spirituelles (qui s’approche de celui décrit dans Éphésiens 6:12) qui, par la psyché humaine ou l’inconscient collectif, manipulent l’humanité.
Comme plusieurs chercheurs et auteurs, il ne croit pas que ces entités sont “nos frères de lumière” et qu’elles vont nous envoyer un Messie Sauveur, mais il affirme que ces êtres surnaturels s’apparentent plutôt à des esprits démoniaques qui n’ont que pour seul objectif de tromper l’humanité. Vallée conclut que l’intrusion “extraterrestre” (interdimensionelle) est sinistre et prédatrice, que les “messagers” ou “contactés” sont tous manipulés et trompés.
Selon Vallée et d’autres scientifiques dont John Keel, J. Allen Hynek et le psychiatre Carl Jung, le phénomène ovni n’est pas d’origine extraterrestre, mais « il apparaît plutôt commeun effet interdimentionnel qui manipule les réalités physiques hors de notre propre continuum espace-temps », et plus loin il écrit, « mon hypothèse est qu’il existe un niveau de contrôle de la société qui fonctionne comme un régulateur de l’évolution de l’homme, et que le phénomène ovni doit être considéré sur ce plan » (extraits de «Autres Dimensions, Chronique des contacts avec un autre monde »).
Jacques Vallée croit que les théories physiques et cosmologiques actuelles n’arrivent pas à expliquer l’action d’un tel système. Il croit que les ovnis sont une réalité physique possédant une masse, une inertie, un volume, et des paramètres physiques mesurables, mais qu’ils agissent dans des dimensions inconnues de notre propre environnement.
Selon Jacques Vallée, le phénomène “extraterrestre” est entretenu telle une supercherie par nos élites parce qu’il a une profonde et décisive influence sur nos croyances et nos orientations spirituelles. Il croit que l’humanité est volontairement trompée de la façon suivante :
1°) la négation officielle qui s’exerce par une pression sur les témoins pour les décourager de témoigner;
2°) dès qu’un témoin parvient à expliquer ce qu’il a vu, il y a fabrication par les autorités, de toute une panoplie d’explications fantaisistes n’ayant aucun rapport avec le phénomène;
3°) le phénomène ovni contient un mécanisme pour s’expliquer lui-même. Il induit dans l’esprit des témoins une fausse interprétation de lui-même, pour nier, en quelque sorte, son existence. Il ne chercherait donc pas le contact, mais tenterait plutôt d’exercer un contrôle sur l’humanité.
Le Dr Vallée en est venu à penser au cours de ses recherches échelonnées sur de nombreuses années, que les ovnis ne devaient pas être d’origine extraterrestre mais plutôt provenir d’une autre dimension, dimension identifiée par lui comme étant celle ou vivent les êtres que l’on trouve dans tous les folklores. Il écrit dans son livreConfrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact : “J’ai indiqué dans le Collège Invisible (groupe informel de scientifiques, précurseur de la Royal Society) que la structure des histoires d’enlèvements était identique à celle des rituels d’initiation occulte. Plusieurs années auparavant, j’avais déjà montré dans [le livre] “Visa pour la Magonie” que les contact avec les extraterrestres n’était qu’une extension moderne de la vieille tradition du contact avec une conscience non humaine prenant la forme d’anges, de démons, d’elfes et de Sylphes”.
Vallée reconnaît la réalité physique des ovnis, qu’il s’agit de phénomènes naturels inconnus, voire impliquant une autre dimension, mais il lui accole aussi une dimension sociologique obscure. Après avoir travaillé quelques années pour des institutions gouvernementales (NASA et pour le “Projet Blue Book”), il croit qu’il y a manipulation gouvernementale en ce qui concerne les ovnis, l’existence extraterrestre et tout ce qui entoure la divulgation d’une vie extraterrestre (“Disclosure project”). Selon Vallée, les gouvernements poursuivent des études psycho-sociologiques qui visent à expérimenter le contrôle de la psyché des foules (l’inconscient collectif). Il qualifie les chercheurs actuels, particulièrement ceux du CUFOS et du MUFON, comme des “amateurs diligents”!
Voici la transcription d’une entrevue avec Jacques Vallée:
Il me semble de plus en plus évident que la Bible pourrait nous révéler que la “grande apostasie” (perte de la foi) qui doit se produire à la “Fin des temps” sera causée par l’arrivée de ceux que l’on appelle les “extraterrestres”, et de l’Antéchrist, d’où la “puissance d’égarement”….
* Je me dissocie de la vue “prétribulationniste” du texte “La Grande tromperie de Satan”, cette théologie étant à mon avis biaisée. Toutefois, elle ne change en rien l’exhortation à la prudence et au discernement. Les croyants (la bonne semence) ne peuvent être “enlevés” (moissonnés) avant les habitants de la terre (l’ivraie) puisqu’il est écrit:
Les serviteurs lui disent : Alors, veux-tu que nous allions arracher l’ivraie ? Non, dit le maître : en arrachant l’ivraie, vous pourriez aussi déraciner le blé. Laissez-les pousser ensemble jusqu’à la moisson, et à ce moment-là je dirai aux moissonneurs : Ramassez d’abord l’ivraie, faites-en des bottes pour la brûler ; ensuite, ramassez le blé et mettez-le dans mon grenier. Matthieu 13: 24-30
Explique-nous la parabole de l’ivraie dans le champ. Il [Jésus] leur répond : “Celui qui sème le bon grain, c’est le Fils de l’homme; le champ, c’est le monde; le bon grain, ce sont ceux qui suivent ma Parole; l’ivraie, ce sont les méchants; l’ennemi qui l’a semée, c’est le diable; la moisson, c’est la fin du monde; les moissonneurs, ce sont les anges. A la fin du monde, ce sera la même chose: comme à la moisson on arrache d’abord l’ivraie pour la brûler, le Fils de l’homme enverra ses anges; ils ramasseront, pour les renvoyer dehors, tous ceux qui font le mal […] Alors les justes brilleront comme le soleil dans le Royaume de Dieu leur Père. Entendez bien, si vous avez des oreilles ! Matthieu 13: 36-43
WEERNIEUWSOok in Sint-Petersburg is het momenteel bijtend koud. Het kwik zakte er tot onder -20 graden Celcius en dat zorgde vrijdagnacht voor een speciaal weerfenomeen.
Inwoners van de Russische stad deelden op sociale media verschillende foto’s van lichtzuilen die er de nachtelijke hemel kleurden. Het spektakel duurde ongeveer een halfuur. Sommige internauten vermoedden dat het om noorderlicht ging, maar daar had de lichtshow niets mee te maken. De zuilen ontstaan wanneer licht gereflecteerd wordt op in de lucht zwevende ijskristallen. Als dat gebeurt door zonlicht spreken we van zonnezuilen. In Sint-Petersburg lagen kunstmatige lichtbronnen aan de basis. Ofwel: lichtvervuiling met een magisch kantje.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
Strange Blue Rays of Light in the Sky over Hawaii
Strange Blue Rays of Light in the Sky over Hawaii
A very rare light pillar was captured on the night of February 13/14, 2018 by the Gemini skycam facing south from the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Frankie Lucena who was checking the skycam came across this rarely seen event in this part of the world.
Blue Ray of Light Hawaii.
Light pillars usually occur in cold climates, so to see them this far south is indeed very rare. But not only the strange light pillar appeared over Hawaii, even stranger are the three blue rays of light that suddenly came out of nowhere.
The rare light pillar in Hawaii could be a natural phenomenon, like the amazing light pillar at sunrise photographed by our reader from Coventry in the UK on February 14, 2018. Thanks.
Light Pillar UK.
But what about the blue rays of light?
Blue Ray of Light and Light Pillar Hawaii.
Lightning, maybe but these blue rays of light are completely different from the specific lightning strikes as we know.
Blue rays of light at 0.35 sec and 036 sec in the video.
Mars wist bijna alle sporen van de Phoenix-lander uit
Mars wist bijna alle sporen van de Phoenix-lander uit
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Alleen de lander, zijn hitteschild en parachutes getuigen nog van de landing die bijna 10 jaar geleden plaatsvond.
De Phoenix-lander zette in mei 2008 voet op Mars. En dat zorgde voor behoorlijk wat beroering op de stoffige planeet. Dat blijkt onder meeruit onderstaande foto die de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter twee maanden na de landing van Phoenix maakte. De donkere vlekken zijn plaatsen waar de landende Phoenix stof heeft weggeslingerd. De lander zelf zie je linksboven, rechtsonder zijn de parachutes en het hitteschild van de lander neergekomen.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona.
Inmiddels is het bijna tien jaar geleden dat Phoenix geland is en zijn de sporen die deze op Mars naliet, eigenlijk allemaal verdwenen, zo blijkt uit een nieuwe foto, opnieuw gemaakt door de Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (zie hieronder). De plekken waar stof was weggeslingerd, zijn opnieuw met stof bedekt. En eigenlijk getuigen alleen de lander, zijn hitteschild en parachutes nog van de spannende missie die zich hier een decennium geleden voltrok.
Afbeelding: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona.
Phoenix landde op misschien wel één van de spannendste plekken op Mars: de noordpool. Hoewel de rode planeet vandaag de dag koud en droog is, bevinden zich op de noordpool net onder het oppervlak behoorlijke hoeveelheden waterijs. Phoenix kreeg de opdracht om dat ijs op te zoeken. En dat lukte. Eind juli 2008 maakte NASA bekend dat de lander water had ontdekt in de Marsgrond. Een primeur. Want hoewel orbiters de aanwezigheid van dit water al suggereerden, was Phoenix de eerste die het water daadwerkelijk aanraakte.
De missie van Phoenix zou oorspronkelijk drie maanden duren, maar werd na afloop verlengd. Uiteindelijk zou de lander in totaal vijf maanden actief zijn op Mars. Langer kon deze door zonne-energie aangedreven lander het niet uithouden: hij was niet ontworpen om de donkere arctische winter te overleven.
Wetenschap komt met nieuwe manier om aliens te vinden
Wetenschap komt met nieuwe manier om aliens te vinden
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Gluren in de buitenaardse ionosfeer.
De afgelopen jaren zijn er duizenden exoplaneten ontdekt en aardig wat van die planeten lijken geschikt voor leven (zoals wij dat kennen). Maar herbergen ze het ook? Dat is natuurlijk de grote vraag. Op dit moment proberen onderzoekers deze te beantwoorden door te zoeken naar een cruciaal element voor leven (zoals wij dat kennen): water. Maar er is een betere aanpak, zo stellen Amerikaanse onderzoekers in het blad Nature Astronomy. Ze stellen voor om de focus te verleggen naar de ionosfeer van exoplaneten. Dat is het dunne, bovenste laagje van de atmosfeer en het kan prima verraden of er ver daaronder, op het oppervlak van de planeet, leven is.
O+ Het idee ontstond toen onderzoeker Michael Mendillo de ionosferen van planeten in het zonnestelsel vergeleken. Het is al jaren bekend dat er grote verschillen zijn tussen de ionosferen en dat met name die van de aarde zich sterk onderscheidt: in de meeste ionosferen zijn gecompliceerde, geladen moleculen te vinden die voortkomen uit koolstofdioxide of waterstof, maar die van de aarde is vrij simpel en voornamelijk gevuld met een specifiek type zuurstof: O+. “Ik begon te denken, waarom is onze ionosfeer zo anders dan die van de andere zes (Mercurius heeft geen atmosfeer, red.),” vertelt Mendillo. Zijn onderzoeksteam zocht het uit en ontdekte dat het alles te maken heeft met de aanwezigheid van groene planten en algen op aarde.
ZOEKEN NAAR LEVEN
Op de afbeelding hierboven zie je een artistieke impressie van LHS 1140b: misschien wel de beste plek om naar tekenen van leven buiten het zonnestelsel te zoeken. Nieuwsgierig welke planeten nog meer goede kanshebbers zijn voor die titel? Klik hier!
De rol van planten De meeste planeten in ons zonnestelsel hebben wel wat zuurstof in hun lagere atmosfeer zitten, maar de aarde heeft er heel veel van. Dat komt doordat veel organismen op het oppervlak al heel lang (zo’n 3,8 miljard jaar) aan fotosynthese doen en licht, water en CO2 omzetten in zuurstof. “Verwijder alle planten op aarde en de zuurstof in onze atmosfeer zal in een paar duizend jaar verdwijnen,” vertelt onderzoeker Paul Withers. De zuurstof die al deze planten produceren, blijft echter niet nabij het oppervlak hangen; overtallige zuurstofmoleculen stijgen in de vorm van O2 op. Wanneer het op zo’n 150 kilometer hoogte komt, wordt het door UV-licht uiteengerukt en blijven enkele zuurstofatomen over. Die stijgen verder op, de ionosfeer in, waar nog meer UV- en röntgenstraling van de zon leidt tot een overvloed aan O+.
Biomarker En die overvloed aan O+ is dus een direct gevolg van leven op onze planeet en is daarmee een prima biomarker. Een biomarker is eigenlijk niets anders dan een molecuul dat wijst op de aanwezigheid van leven. Veel van de biomarkers die nu gebruikt worden – zoals de aanwezigheid van water – suggereren alleen dat er leven mogelijk is. Maar de ionosfeer kan ons veel meer vertellen, benadrukt Mendillo. “Waarom komen we niet met een maatstaf waarbij de ionosfeer de biomarker is, niet alleen van mogelijk, maar van daadwerkelijk leven?”
Minder aannames De nieuwe aanpak kan de zoektocht naar buitenaards leven volgens Mendillo een impuls geven, doordat we minder aannames hoeven te doen over wat buitenaards leven nodig heeft. Op dit moment richt de zoektocht zich voornamelijk op planeten die rond M-klasse sterren cirkelen en zich in de leefbare zone bevinden (en dus in theorie water kunnen herbergen). Dat is logisch, want het leven zoals wij dat kennen, kan niet zonder water. Maar onduidelijk is nog hoeveel water een planeet nodig heeft om leven te kunne herbergen. “Als we alleen de Middellandse Zee hadden gehad, zou dat dan genoeg zijn geweest? Hebben we de Stille Oceaan nodig, maar de Atlantische Oceaan niet? Als je kijkt naar de ionosfeer hoef je dat niet te weten.”
Er moeten wel twee belangrijke kanttekeningen bij het voorstel van Mendillo en collega’s geplaatst worden. Zo gaan ze ervan uit dat het leven op andere planeten in grove lijnen werkt zoals het leven op aarde (en dus aan fotosynthese doet). Daarnaast hebben we op dit moment de instrumenten niet om een ionosfeer op een exoplaneet te detecteren. Maar dat laatste is een kwestie van tijd, zo denken de onderzoekers.
Scientist Warns; Mankind Must Prepare To Defend Itself Against An Attack From Space
Scientist Warns; Mankind Must Prepare To Defend Itself Against An Attack From Space
According to a Russian scientist, our civilization has to prepare to repel an attack from space.
No, we won’t be fighting aliens yet, but potential alien civilizations aren’t the only threat to humanity.
According to Konstantin Sivkov, a member of the Russian Missile and Artillery Academy and a senior captain of the Russian Army, we need to create weapons to defend Earth against doomsday asteroids.
According to a military officer from Russia, mankind must develop a weapon capable of repelling potentially dangerous asteroids and comets, in order to save mankind.
Image credit: Shutterstock.
In an article published by the newspaper VPK News, the Russian senior captain has suggested that the international community needs to work on a weapon that has the ability to repel potentially dangerous celestial bodies.
The scientist believes that the threat represented by asteroids for humanity deserves the creation of an international weapon to combat them.
“In the face of the danger of the extinction of the human being as a biological species, all our geopolitical conflicts are like a children’s fight in a sandbox over a toy,” he compared.
Konstantin Sivkov, a member of the Russian Missile and Artillery Academy suggests international conflicts are incomparable to a threat from outer space.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.
The expert proposes to destroy asteroids with rockets that have self-guided thermonuclear warheads and to create “a system of regular or omnidirectional control of the space that surrounds the Earth” for the detection of dangerous asteroids.
Furthermore, Sivkov has stated that the proposed system has to be controlled by a “scientific council”, while businessmen, politicians, soldiers and “representatives of any military structure” that produce “cannibalistic theories about the reasonable reduction of the population” do not have to be involved in the decision-making process in this regard.
Humanity must work together and help create a defense system to protect our planet and ensure our existence.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.
The expert believes that the project that he has recently proposed is, in fact, a possible goal, since despite the high costs of the project “only 25-30% of the current US military budget would be needed”.
Considering that US military expenditures for the fiscal year 2018 constitute, according to the approval of the Trump Administration, 700,000 million dollars, the initiative of Sivkov would come out to the international community much cheaper: just about 210,000 million dollars.
Taking into consideration that several countries would participate in the program, the project turns out to be relatively cheap. But then again, who can put a price on the survival of the human race?
Researchers Make Discovery Of Biblical Proportions After Unearthing 2,700-Year-Old Seal
Researchers Make Discovery Of Biblical Proportions After Unearthing 2,700-Year-Old Seal
Researchers believe they may have found the direct evidence of the Prophet Isaiah on a 2,700-year-old clay seal discovered in Jerusalem, which bears the signature of the ‘Biblical Figure.’
According to researchers, the Hebrew script located on the clay seal reads: ‘Belonging to Isaiah the prophet,’ according to a new article in Biblical Archeology Review.
If this is indeed true, it would be the first ever evidence of the existence of Isaiah outside of the Bible. Furthermore, this would be the oldest reference to the prophet outside the Bible.
If researchers are able to confirm that the seal impression was for the Prophet Isaiah, it ‘would be the first archaeological and the earliest extra-biblical reference to the prophet Isaiah ever discovered,’ Robert Cargill, an archaeologist, and professor of classic and religious studies at the University of Iowa told Live Science.
In the article, titled ‘Is This the Prophet Isaiah’s Signature?’ author, archaeologist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Eilat Mazar suggests that the ancient Hebrew inscription appearing in the damaged clay seal of 1.2 centimeters could have read “Belonging to the prophet Isaiah.”
The seal is believed to read: Belonging to Isaiah the prophet.
Image Credit: Ouria Tadmor, Eilat Mazar)
‘We appear to have discovered a seal impression, which may have belonged to the prophet Isaiah, in a scientific, archaeological excavation,’ said Mazar.
A Great discovery, open to interpretation?
If the interpretation of the characters of the 2,700-year seal is correct, it would be the first reference to Isaiah outside of the Bible. The Hebrew prophet is described as a counselor to the Jewish king Hezekiah, who ruled between the late eighth century and the early seventh century BC.
This important piece of history was recovered by archaeologists during excavations at the Ophel, an archaeological site between the ‘City of David’ and the ‘Temple Mount’.
The location of the discovery, near Temple Mount.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
The Hebrew Bible tells us that Isaiah’s call to prophecy roughly coincides with the beginning of the westward expansion of the Assyrian empire. According to the Torah, the Prophet Isaiah lived 700 years before Christ.
The name of Isaiah (‘Yesha’yahu’ in Hebrew) is visible on the seal. However, the damage to the seal means that archaeologists are not sure whether it refers to the biblical prophet Isaiah or another person with the same name that lived during that period.
As noted by Mazar, the clay seal, or bullae, was one of the 34 discovered during the excavations carried out by Mazar at the base of the south wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
The seals, or bullae, were recovered in small Iron Age waste pits (1200-586 B.C.), outside the wall of what Mazar describes as a royal bakery, razed during the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.
Mazar further noted that the word ‘nvy’ was also visible on the seal, but archaeologists are uncertain as to what meaning the word may bear, suggesting that it could be a personal named making reference to another Isaiah, and not the prophet.
My Precious—Ancient Ring That Inspired Tolkien’s The Hobbit Found In The U.K.
My Precious—Ancient Ring That Inspired Tolkien’s The Hobbit Found In The U.K.
The ring that inspired Tolkien in writing the trilogy of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’, exists and has behind its steps a mysterious story full of curses dating from Roman times.
During the Rule of the Roman Empire over Britain, elite citizens of the time flaunted their status by wearing peculiar rings.
Now, after looking at a set of Brancaster rings, which scientists have dated to the fourth and fifth centuries, researchers have found numerous clues about their owners, who lived during the last days of Roman rule over Britain.
As noted by the University of Newcastle, a Brancaster ring is a type of signet ring with a characteristic square or rectangular bezel, inscribed with characters or text. The rings are named after the Roman Fort and Norfolk village where the first example was discovered in the mid-19th century.
My Precious: This is the ancient gold ring, believed to have inspired JRR Tolkien
Image Credit: National Trust/PA
Experts discovered that the metal used in their construction, just as the images imprinted on them give off numerous details about their owners, who were members of high society in Britain.
One of the rings, in particular, the cursed Silvianus Ring is believed to have been the source and inspired J.R.R. Tolkien as he was writing the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The so-called Silvanius ring was discovered near Silchester, in Hampshire, England, in 1785. The Ring belonged to a member of a Roman high society called Silvianus but was stolen by a person named Senicianus, upon whom Silvianus called down a curse: ‘To the god Nodens: Silvianus has lost his ring and promises half its value to Nodens. Among those named Senecianus, let none enjoy health until he brings it back to the temple of Nodens.’
In a recent archaeological mission, experts from the universities of Oxford and Newcastle have gathered 54 rings that exist in the United Kingdom and cataloged them all for the first time. Most of the 54 rings were made from silver and only a small number of gold.
Image Credit: Portable Antiquities Scheme
In addition to being used as jewelry, the rings were used in ancient times with wax to seal letters and other important documents.
The various rings are unique, mostly made of precious metal and engraved with different designs. Some bare the symbol of soldiers, lovers, and even emperors.
However, some rings feature evidence of incredible Roman Art, as experts have discovered that some rings have intricate designs such as dolphins and mythical sea creatures, as well as sea griffins which have been found frequently in Roman Art.
Speaking about the Rings, Dr. James Gerrard, senior lecturer in Roman archaeology at Newcastle, said: ‘The fifth century was a period of major upheaval and marked the start of the transition from Roman Empire to Anglo Saxon Britain. These rings and their inscriptions provide a glimpse of what Britain was like during these years and give an insight into the dress, beliefs, ideologies and education level of the elite at the time.
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.
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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.