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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
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...
03-03-2018
Zo zagen de eerste sterren in ons universum eruit
Zo zagen de eerste sterren in ons universum eruit - HLN.be
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETHet duurt 8 minuten en 20 seconden voor het licht van de zon onze aarde bereikt. Hoe groter de afstand, hoe langer het duurt, wat betekent dat je met een telescoop letterlijk terug in de tijd kunt kijken. En nu hebben astronomen voor het eerst een glimp opgevangen van het eerste licht in ons universum.
Dat ons universum ontstond met de big bang weten we allemaal, maar wist je dat er daarna niet meteen licht was? De eerste 180 miljoen jaar (ongeveer) bestond alles uit een mengsel van waterstof en helium, en was het donker en koud. Pas toen de eerste planeten ontstonden, die een ultraviolet licht uitstootten, viel er iets te zien. Astronomen van de Arizona State University hebben dat licht nu voor het eerst kunnen opvangen met behulp van een radio-antenne.
De antenne in kwestie is niet veel groter dan een koelkast en kostte ‘maar’ 5 miljoen dollar, een peulschil in vergelijking met de peperdure Hubble-telescoop. Twee jaar geleden kon het ding, dat opgesteld staat in een Australische woestijn, een zacht radiosignaal opvangen, waarna de wetenschappers het jarenlang analyseerden. In het resultaat van dat onderzoek, gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Nature, vertellen ze nu dat het radiosignaal afkomstig is uit de periode van de eerste planeten.
Onze eigen oorsprong
De wetenschappers zijn enorm trots op hun ontdekking, omdat het een periode van ons universum is waar we weinig tot niets van afweten. Sommigen vinden het ontstaan van de sterren belangrijker dan de Big Bang, aangezien wijzelf ook opgebouwd zijn uit ‘sterrenstof’ en we dus letterlijk naar onze eigen oorsprong kijken. En dat is niet het enige opmerkelijke aan deze vondst, want het zou ook de bevestiging van donkere materie kunnen zijn.
Het radiosignaal wees immers duidelijk op het bestaan ultraviolet licht 180 miljoen jaar geleden, maar bevatte daarnaast ook enkele vreemde eigenschappen. Zo konden de onderzoekers afleiden dat de waterstof tussen de eerste planeten een stuk kouder was dan eerst werd aangenomen. “We gingen altijd uit van tien graden boven het absolute nulpunt, maar het bleek maar om vijf graden te gaan.” Voor de leken, dat is -268 graden Celsius.
Een van de theorieën is dat de waterstof tussen de sterren afgekoeld werd door zwarte materie. Die materie is nog steeds een raadsel voor de wetenschappelijke wereld. We weten uit het bestuderen van de zwaartekracht dat 27 procent van het universum eruit bestaat en dat het niet opgebouwd is uit ‘normale’ deeltjes, maar veel verder is nog niemand gekomen. Als de radiogolf het bestaan van die materie kan bevestigen, is dat een enorme stap vooruit. “Als dit nieuws bevestigd kan worden, verdient deze ontdekking een Nobelprijs”, klinkt het. “In de kosmologie is donkere materie het belangrijkste dat er is.”
WETENSCHAP Twee Belgische wetenschappers hebben op Antarctica zo’n 30.000 tot 50.000 micrometeorieten verzameld. Dat zijn erg kleine deeltjes van een meteoroïde. De oogst overtreft de stoutste verwachtingen, en is belangrijk om ons zonnestelsel beter te begrijpen.
De twee wetenschappers, Matthias Van Ginneken van de ULB en Steven Goderis van de VUB, trokken voor hun onderzoek naar de Belgische Princess Elisabethbasis, en prospecteerden er het Sør Rondane-gebergte op zoek naar meteorieten met een diameter kleiner dan 2 mm.
“We hadden erg veel geluk met het droge, heldere, maar koude weer op de Zuidpool”, zegt Goderis. “Daardoor konden we onafgebroken op het terrein. Soms moesten we door het ijs kappen om bij de gesteenten te komen. In andere gevallen namen we ijsstalen die we smolten en waarin we dan de micrometeorieten konden oogsten. Uiteindelijk verzamelden we veel meer materiaal dan we voorop hadden durven stellen. Op zowat alle plekken die we vooraf hadden aangestipt voor onze bemonstering, waren hoge concentraties micrometeorieten te vinden.”
‘Uiteindelijk verzamelden we veel meer materiaal dan we voorop hadden durven stellen’
VUB-wetenschapper Steven Goderis
Zonnestelsel
Micrometeorieten zijn erg belangrijk voor het begrijpen van ons zonnestelsel. Ze bevatten andere informatie en zijn soms anders samengesteld dan de grotere meteorieten die we kennen uit onze musea. Daardoor kunnen ze leiden tot het ontdekken van nog onbekende asteroïden. Het onderzoek moet inzicht geven in de moederlichamen, waarvan de micrometeorieten afkomstig zijn. Verder hopen de wetenschappers meer duidelijkheid te krijgen over de oorsprong en het transport van kosmische stof in de binnenste delen van het zonnestelsel, en over de fysicochemische veranderingen die plaatsgrijpen bij hun doorgang door de atmosfeer. Jaarlijks komt naar schatting 40.000 ton buitenaards materiaal op onze planeet terecht.
Micrometeorieten zijn erg belangrijk om ons zonnestelsel te begrijpen
“We gaan proberen om de ouderdom van onze micrometeorieten te bepalen aan de hand van zogenaamde cosmogene nucliden”, zegt Goderis. “Een nuclide, een zeldzaam en specifiek type atoom of zijn nucleus, wordt gekarakteriseerd door een welbepaald aantal protonen en neutronen. Wanneer gesteentenmateriaal blootgesteld wordt aan kosmische straling, worden in de loop van soms tienduizenden jaren cosmogene nuclides gevormd. Dat gebeurt als de hoogenergetische straling interageert met de kern van een atoom. Daarbij worden door bepaalde atomen protonen en neutronen afgestoten. Door die zeldzame nuclides te tellen per gewichtseenheid, kan je de duurtijd van blootstelling en zo dus de leeftijd van het gesteente bepalen.”
Collectie
Al sinds 2009 hebben drie Belgisch-Japanse wetenschappelijke expedities meteorieten teruggebracht uit Antarctica. Dat resulteerde in een Antarctische meteorietcollectie van meer dan 1.200 goed bewaarde fragmenten, geconserveerd in het Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen, een van de grootste collecties in Europa. Met de laatste expeditie wordt de Belgische collectie micrometeorieten op slag ook een heel pak rijker.
“We gaan nu de 105 kilogram verzameld sediment met micrometeorieten in detail bestuderen en de micrometeorieten stuk per stuk bekijken in onze laboratoria aan de ULB en de VUB”, zegt Goderis. “Het materiaal dat we meebrachten bevat misschien ook wat interplanetair stof, de fijnste fractie extraterrestrisch materiaal, dat misschien van nog andere reservoirs in het zonnestelsel afkomstig is. Verder gaan we onderzoeken hoe het komt dat er dergelijke concentraties aan buitenaards materiaal kunnen ontstaan op Antarctica en welke mechanismen er aan de basis liggen van die accumulatie.”
‘We gaan onderzoeken hoe het komt dat er dergelijke concentraties aan buitenaards materiaal kunnen ontstaan op Antarctica’
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CLOSE ENCOUTER OP DE LEUSDERHEIDE ( VIDEO )
CLOSE ENCOUTER OP DE LEUSDERHEIDE ( VIDEO )
Als wij in Nederland een Roswell zouden hebben, dan is daar maar één plaats die daarvoor in aanmerking komt en dat is de voormalige vliegbasis Soesterberg.
Er zijn meerdere getuigen geweest van spectaculaire UFO waarnemingen in de jaren zeventig en nu is er het verhaal van de dame die aan het paardrijden was enkele kilometers van Soesterberg toen....
Het jaar 1979 was voor UFO liefhebbers bijzonder in ons land. Want toen gebeurde er iets heel spectaculairs op de voormalige vliegbasis Soesterberg.
Maar, eerst gaan we nog even iets verder terug en wel naar het jaar 1977, toen er ook iets gebeurde dat beschreven staat in een eerder artikel:
Misschien wel de belangrijkste UFO-interceptie case in Nederland betreft een poging tot onderschepping door een F-4 op vliegbasis Soesterberg. In augustus 1977 werd een schotelvormig object waargenomen boven de vliegbasis, waarna een F-4 Phantom van het Amerikaanse 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron werd ingezet om de UFO te onderscheppen. Het vliegtuig was uitgerust met een compleet wapenarsenaal, wat erop wijst dat het niet ging om een routinevlucht. De F-4 crashte uiteindelijk in de Noordzee.
Daarna volgt het jaar 1979 en weer een deel uit een eerder artikel:
Op 3 februari 1979 werden door meerdere militairen UFO's boven vliegbasis Soesterberg waargenomen. Dit voorval is uitgegroeid tot de Roswell-case van Nederland. Al vanaf 1964 zijn tientallen meldingen gedaan van objecten die boven de basis zijn gezien. Ook heeft Niburu bij monde van vele getuigen te horen gekregen dat via EMP's bepaalde onderdelen van de basis werden uitgeschakeld die verbonden waren met het nucleaire arsenaal. Rond 1990 heeft de VPRO hier op de radio aandacht aan besteed.
Eerder zond de VPRO, ook via de radio, een reconstructie uit van wat er die dag in februari 1979 gebeurde:
De VPRO, die kort na het incident een tip ontving, besloot verhaal te halen bij de luchtmacht. Dit leidde tot een fascinerende reconstructie waarin maar liefst tien getuigen vertellen over hun waarneming, hun angst en de ridiculisering die volgde wanneer ze erover spraken. Ook de officiële verklaring van de luchtmacht, luchtspiegelingen, wordt in de reconstructie door de wachtcommandant en zijn personeel weggelachen. Op de vraag waarván het dan een weerspiegeling zou zijn grapt een deelnemer: “Van een ufo verderop!” De reconstructie werd op 27 april 1979 uitgezonden in het radioprogramma Expres VPRO en is hieronder te beluisteren.
Dan, rond diezelfde tijd heeft een dame op haar paard een soort Close Encounter, enkele kilometers verwijderd van de vliegbasis.
Op een namiddag in februari 1979 reed Josie Zwinenberg, toen 21, met haar paard vlakbij militair oefenterrein Leusderheide. Het object dat zij hier doodstil boven een bosrand zag hangen zou ze nooit meer van haar netvlies krijgen. Toch gingen er jaren voorbij voordat Josie haar verhaal zou delen.
Ze begint haar verhaal als volgt:
Het was in de namiddag bij daglicht. Rond vier à vijf uur, zo’n twee uur voor zonsondergang, voor de schemer. We zouden de Leusderheide op gaan. Dus bos, veel bomen en dan heb je een haakse bocht waar je het ruiterpad op komt. En dat loopt loodrecht naar de Leusderheide. Dus ik ga de bocht om, het ruiterpad op en daar was het. Pal voor me. Het was er al, het hing al in de lucht.
Later heeft ze een tekening gemaakt van het object wat er ongeveer als volgt uit zag.
In de volgende video vertelt Josie Zwinenberg voor het eerst na al die jaren haar eigen verhaal.
Het verhaal van Josie krijgt nog een bizar vervolg in Ierland en wij raden eenieder aan om dat hier te lezen.
De waarneming speelde in 1991 en wanneer je het verhaal van de getuige leest, wordt duidelijk waarom dat nu pas naar buiten komt.
De getuige is anoniem en vertelt het volgende verhaal:
In de nacht van 17 februari 1991 liep ik de nachtdienstwacht op de militaire basis Soesterberg in Nederland.
Samen met een andere cadet kwam ik om 3.00 uur in de ochtend aan bij de centrale parkeerplaats en zie een grote cirkel in de lucht, recht boven ons. Het had geen bepaalde vorm, maar alleen felle lichten die langzaam tegen de wijzers van de klok indraaiden. De lichtpunten zelf roteerden niet, maar de kleuren (veranderden) op een soort vloeibare manier.
Ik schat dat het object ongeveer 30 tot 50 meter in doorsnee was. Het eerste dat wij beiden dachten, was dat het hier ging om een luchtschip, een Zeppelin, zo eentje als GoodYear heeft met lichtschermen aan de zijkanten.
Dat dit ding heel erg laag hing en heel stil, maakte dit alles echter vreemd, heel erg vreemd.
Na een paar minuten begonnen de lichten sneller rond te draaien en plotseling steeg het object op met een onvoorstelbare snelheid richting westen.
Een paar seconden later voelden we een harde wind die om ons hoofd blies, zoals dat gebeurt met bijvoorbeeld een helikopter.
Als er een manier zou zijn om de snelheid van dit ding te beschrijven dan zou ik dat doen, maar die is er niet. We hadden een onbelemmerd uitzicht van ongeveer 30 kilometer. Dit ding legde die afstand vanuit stilstand af in ongeveer een tiende van een seconde.
Ik ken de luchtvaart en ik heb zelf vliegervaring en daarnaast ben ik erg technisch. Door dit soort acceleraties zou een mens veranderen in een vloeibare stof.
Jarenlang is dit een onbesproken hoofdstuk geweest in mijn leven. Ik wilde niet over dit voorval spreken omdat direct na het incident de andere cadet en ik om onverklaarbare redenen heel erg ziek werden. Dagenlang hadden we hoge koorts en moesten we overgeven. De ziekte was zo erg dat het hele voorval mij getraumatiseerd heeft en ik er jarenlang niet over heb kunnen praten.
Tot zover het verhaal van de getuige.
Het verslag sluit natuurlijk naadloos aan op de eerdere UFO-waarnemingen boven de voormalige vliegbasis Soesterberg. Voor een uitgebreid artikel hierover verwijzen wij naar Ufo wijzer.
Sommigen kunnen zich misschien nog wel de reportage van RTV Utrecht herinneren over de waarnemingen uit 1979.
Een ding lijkt duidelijk en dat is dat er zich heel wat meer afspeelde rondom deze voormalige NAVO basis dan ons ooit verteld zal worden. En wie weet, misschien komen door bovenstaande wel meer getuigen naar voren.
Strange ball of light spotted in the night sky over Sweden
Strange ball of light spotted in the night sky over Sweden
On February 25, 2018 the owner of the Svensson Ranch in Sweden was out to give the horses hay and stayed out to take some photos of the moon and the pretty color of the indoor arena.
When the owner was on the other side of the houses she turned around and saw a ball of light hovering in the night sky.
Then, at some point a sphere can be seen above a ray of natural blue light pillars that is caused by ice crystals reflecting on the sphere that turns completely into a blue sphere.
An interesting footage; pay attention to the time stamps and the explanation of the owner of the ranch.
Are These Mysterious Ancient Maya Artifacts Evidence Of Ancient Alien Contact?
Are These Mysterious Ancient Maya Artifacts Evidence Of Ancient Alien Contact?
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Maya developed into one of the most influential ancient civilizations in Mesoamerica.
Occupying a territory from Mexico to El Salvador, the powerful Maya became one of the dominant forces in the region, creating massive cities, trading routes, and breathtaking temples and pyramids.
The Maya stood out in the American Continent due to their hieroglyphic writing, one of the few fully developed writing systems of the pre-Columbian American continent, as well as for its art, architecture, and systems of mathematics, astronomy, and ecology. They were one of the most developed ancient cultures in America.
The AncientMaya developed in the region that encompasses the southeast of Mexico, corresponding to the states of Yucatan, Campeche, Tabasco, Quintana Roo and the eastern part of Chiapas, as well as in most of Guatemala, Belize, the western part of Honduras and El Salvador.
This region is composed of the northern lowlands that encompass the Yucatanpeninsula, the highlands of the Sierra Madre that extends through the Mexican state of Chiapas, southern Guatemala to El Salvador, and the southern lowlands in the south.
The Mayan civilization developed sophisticated forms of art using both perishable and durable materials, including wood, jade, obsidian, pottery, carved stone monuments, stuccoes and finely painted murals.
The Mayans produced a great variety of architectural structures and left an extensive architectural legacy, which placed the Mayan civilization among the great pre-industrial civilizations of the world.
Mayan architecture also incorporated glyphic texts and various art forms.
The Mayan masonry architecture is evidence of the existence of artisan specialization in Mayan society, as well as a centralized organization and political means to mobilize a large workforce.
Long story short? The Maya were a civilization unlike any other in America.
And because of their extreme level of advancement, many researchers and ancient astronaut theorists have pondered whether it is possible that the ancient Maya obtained their advanced knowledge in engineering, astronomy, and mathematics from an otherworldly influence?
Mysterious artifacts, evidnece of ancient alien contact?
Over the years, numerous alleged artifacts said to have belonged to the ancient Maya civilization have been excavated in Central America.
More than six years ago, a stunning set of images made the news after a number of researchers claimed to have rediscovered long-lost ancient Maya artifacts depicting what appear to be spaceships, alien figurines, and star-maps.
Because of the nature of the claims, these artifacts were quickly labeled as a hoax, and the fuss behind the discovery vanished into history as one of the many hoaxed objects found around the globe.
Different artifacts have been discovered throughout the years. The first set of artifact (see below) were allegedly discovered in Calakmul, Mexico.
The site is located in the central/southern portion of the Yucatán Peninsula, in southern Mexico and includes the remains of the important Maya city Calakmul, set deep in the tropical forest of the Tierras Bajas.
Here are the alleged items that were supposedly carved by the ancient Maya, and are evidence of ancient alien contact:
The above artifacts, allegedly made by the ancient Maya have been heavily criticized by experts who maintain they are an elaborate hoax.
The first article I read when I started looking for information about these strange articles wasthis one from the Guardian. There is a lot of stuff that seems out of place here. The biggest mistake in the article is that they mention president “Álvaro Colom” and speak about him being Mexico’s president which is a mistake, he, in fact, is a Guatemalan politician who was the President of Guatemala from 2008 to 2012.
From there everything went downhill and the little belief I actually had was gone (you really cannot make a mistake like that, can you?).
The article also seems to mention several statements of high ranking officials from Mexico and Guatemala that discussed these artifacts, yet I have not been able to find transcripts or anything like that online.
I did, in fact, find the images of these artifacts and I must admit they seem impressive. From what I have read about the subject, there is little to none credible information, and the archaeological discovery itself is questionable.
But the above artifacts are not the only ones that have been found so far.
In fact, numerous other similar objects have been discovered throughout the years.
Here are a few:
Countless images of mysterious figurines are available across social networks.
FASCINATING FLOATING CITY SHAPED LIKE A MANTA RAY WOULD BE 100% SELF-SUSTAINING
FASCINATING FLOATING CITY SHAPED LIKE A MANTA RAY WOULD BE 100% SELF-SUSTAINING
French architect Jacques Rougerie has envisioned a giant floating city which bears a striking resemblance to a manta ray. He discusses his love for the ocean in an interview, where he calls himself a “mérien,” a term he coined which translates to “one belonging to the sea.” His dream is for like minded individuals to populate his City of Mériens, to conduct research on the surrounding ocean.
Rougerie describes his love for the sea in an interview with the radio station French Inter: “I feel very, very good underwater. I feel different. Another type of imagination is awakened in me as soon as I am underwater.” It is his hope others who share this awe and reverence will continue to study and protect Earth’s precious seas.
The U.S. government spent millions on a project dubbed the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which studied UFO phenomena. Many claim they found life outside of our planet.
MARK STEVENSON/STOCKTREK IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
When Project Blue Book, the infamous U.S. government program to study the possible threat of alien life, was shuttered in 1969, it signaled to most Americans that this danger was all but ludicrous. But in December 2017, The New York Times broke the story that the U.S. government had been secretly continuing the program.
According to unclassified documents, the government quietly spent nearly $22 million over about four years on a project dubbed the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Stuff They Don't Want You To Know wanted to find out more and invited ufologist Jeremy Corbell in with them to chat on the podcast How the Government Secretly Tracked UFOs — and also talk about what AATIP did and didn't find.
The AATIP began in 2007 and studied UFO phenomena, mainly because of the 2004 Tic Tac Incident. That's when several U.S. Air Force pilots witnessed unidentified flying objects off the coast of California — and documented them on video. These objects were unknown to the pilots, and behaved strangely, as if physics didn't apply — they were flying fast and rotating in unpredictable movements.
It seems that since then, the Pentagon has taken on investigating whether these objects can be identified and, if not, where they came from, and if they're a threat. However, when The New York Times story broke, the official word was that the program ended in 2012. But Luis Elizondo told CNN it's still ongoing — and he would know. Elizondo was the military intelligence official running the program from the Pentagon until he quit in October 2016 in protest that the government wasn't taking the threat of aliens seriously enough.
The project, which received $22 million in funding, wouldn't have even gotten that much if it weren't for retired Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada. He and fellow retired senators Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, got the program started. Most of the funding went to billionaire business owner Robert Bigelow's company, Bigelow Aerospace, which stored objects and alloys, and solicited research. Bigelow is a well-known believer in aliens. He told "60 Minutes" that he's "absolutely convinced" that not only are aliens real, they're also already living among us.
Bigelow's so convinced, he purchased property in Utah and transformed it into a compound dedicated to studying aliens. And it's not just any ranch — it's Skinwalker Ranch, an infamous place known for bizarre sightings that include everything from tall, slender humanoid forms and mutilated cattle to strange lights in the sky.
This story has everything. But it raises even more questions than it answers. Many UFO enthusiasts think this news is proof of life on other planets; why else would the U.S. government keep studying it? So what do Ben and Matt think? And what about ufologist Jeremy Corbell — what's his take? Do they think we're alone? You'll have to listen to the podcast to find out.
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UFO spotted shooting across the moon in SHOCKING footage
UFO spotted shooting across the moon in SHOCKING footage
GIANT triangular UFOs have been spotted circling the moon which has led alien hunters to believe that our lunar satellite is actually an extraterrestrial base.
UFO spotted shooting across the moon in SHOCKING footage
Conspiracy theorists were sent into a frenzy when “amateur astronomers” spotted what they believe is clear evidence of a UFO gliding across the moons surface.
Conspiracy YouTube channel Secure Team 10 posted a video which shows the shadow of a ‘craft’ flying over the moon.
The UFO itself is not seen but the narrator of the video believes that this is due to it being so close to the moon that one can only see its shadow from Earth.
The narrator of the video says: “You can tell that this is a shadow because you can see the shadow wrapping around the craters.
“You can tell that this is a shadow because you can see the shadow wrapping around the craters."
“This was emailed to me by not only an amateur astronomer, but a guy who was the CEO of a corporate jet fleet in Texas.”
Some believe that this is clear footage that a UFO.
Responding to comments below the footage, YouTube user TUFORC wrote: "People who think it was a bird or bug really don't understand what they are seeing or understand telescope or video camera focal points or depth of field.
"One other thing to note. A satellite traveling in earth orbit passes the entire moon in less than a second of time.
YOUTUBE
The shadow of the 'UFO'
“This UFO was viewed for at least six seconds over a small part of the moon surface.”
Another person believed that this is a sign of the end for humanity, writing: “The end is near, humans deserve it as well. It will let the worlds wildlife flourish as it should. The human race is too destructive to survive.”
However, some were not so convinced by its authenticity.
The Matt 222 wrote: “It doesn't make sense if the shadow is that dark and small the craft needs to be near to the shadow!!(near enough to see the whole craft)”.
Orion added: “It’s a ladybug crawling on the camera lens”.
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02-03-2018
Pilots report intruder ‘UFO’ spotted in broad daylight
Pilots report intruder ‘UFO’ spotted in broad daylight
Allison Yee
It was the bizarre sight that had pilots and air traffic controllers stumped.
Pilots report intruder ‘UFO’ spotted in broad daylight
Flying high above the ground over Crater Lake in Oregon, an unregistered aircraft was causing havoc as baffled pilots radioed in reports of an unidentified object flying outside registered flight plans.
On the ground, it was a similar situation, with radars alerting air traffic controllers to a mystery object in the air.
Pilots and air traffic officials noticed the suspicious flying object in the air last October.
Photo: Getty
Now audio obtained by blog The Drive has revealed an exchange between officials as they struggled to figure out the incident last October.
"You know that target south of the boundary there? The 0027 code moving very fast at 37,000?" a radar operator can be heard saying.
The object wa
s evident on radars, but wasn't responding to any attempts to communicate. Photo: Getty
"Oh, look at that thing,” replies a centre controller. “Huh, um and you don’t have anything on him?"
With the operator replying he didn’t, theSunreports sightings of the object continued for another 30 minutes, and saw another United Airlines flight calling in reports of a ‘large white plane’.
Fighter jets were dispatched to investigate - but the object disappeared.
Photo: Getty
Officials took the sightings seriously, with F-15 fighter jets later taking off from Portland International Airport in a bid to investigate and intercept the object.
However their search was futile as the flying object has mysteriously vanished.
"The fighter scrambled, they went out looking around a little bit but we, you know, we lost anybody having sight of the aircraft,” the Sun reports a FAA Seattle Center Official saying.
Many of us at work have tried to communicate some critically vital information up the management chain of command. But it always seems that either the big boss just never gets the message or the boss does get that information but it has been watered down and made palatable by somebody between you and the big boss.
So to ensure that the boss isn’t made unhappy by bad news, middle-level management and staff do their best to filter, spin and squash troubling information from ever reaching the big boss.
So what does this have to do with UFOs? Everything!
Let’s talk about responsibility.
Congress has authority over financial and budgetary matters, through the enumerated power to collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.
You would think that congressional representatives would be concerned about an issue that affects the defense and general welfare of the United States. Especially since Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war via the War Powers Clause.
From April 29 to May 3, 2013, Stephen Bassett of the Paradigm Research Group produced a “Citizen Hearing on Disclosure” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The public hearing was modeled after a congressional hearing that had 42 researchers and military/agency/political witnesses from 10 countries who testified for 30 hours over five days before six former members of Congress regarding UFO events, evidence confirming UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race. The hearing was filmed and webcast.
Paradigm sent DVDs of that hearing to every congressional representative on Capitol Hill. When congressional staffers were polled later for receipt of the DVDs, not a single staffer acknowledged that their office had received the DVDs.
In 2014, Paradigm launched the Congressional Hearing/Political Initiative, which focused on seeking hearings for the scores of military/agency/political witnesses who were ready to testify on Capitol Hill about UFOs and the extraterrestrial presence. Despite Bassett’s valiant lobbying efforts, congressional hearings never came about.
This was a clear example of a civilian group attempting to get the attention of Congress via lobbying. Too bad Paradigm didn’t have the vast financial resources of the National Rifle Association.
On a citizen activist level, this reporter’s own repeated efforts to arrange a meeting with a senior staff member from New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand was a frustrating and wasted effort. For the record, both senators were sent a copy of my book UFO Sightings Desk Reference, which contains eye-opening and pervasive data.
When I asked Schumer’s staff four months later if they had received my letter, they said no and stated that the letter probably got lost in the congressional mailroom. I pointed out that my letter had a 2 ½ pound book stapled to it!
To their credit, Sen. Schumer’s Syracuse staff did request another copy of my letter, and an additional copy of my book, which I personally delivered to them. The staffer told me he’d get it into the hands of the right people in the senator’s D.C. office. In eight months’ time I have yet to receive an acknowledgment of any kind.
Finally, I made a press request for commentary from Sen. Schumer in regard to the December mainstream media coverage of the Pentagon’s, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The senator’s media point of contact never returned my call.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s staff began shunning me upon the first mention of the term UFO and has never answered any letters or press queries.
So much for expecting my state’s U.S. senators to do their constitutional duty: providing for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.
But maybe it’s not the senators’ fault. Maybe their staffs and advisers seem to be functioning like characters from the Hans Christian Andersen 1837 story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as the couriers whofiltered, spun and squashed troubling information from ever reaching the emperor’s ears.
The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.
There was a Dec. 16, 2017, New York Times article about the Defense Department’s $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.
Former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo offered several statements in his Oct. 4, 2017, resignation letter to Secretary of Defense James Mattis with regard to that program, such as “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities. There remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”
On Feb. 20, I had a thoughtful and informative telephone conversation with Elizondo, who now works for To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. (The bulk of that interview will appear in a future article.) Elizondo told me that Secretary Mattis had yet to be shown Elizondo’s resignation letter.
I asked Elizondo about what he considered was the most frustrating part of his job? “Oh my goodness,” he replied, “the inability to tell senior leadership what was going on because of the hypersensitive nature and stealth posture in the department.”
Elizondo continued, “It’s important that people know that I served directly with Mattis and, in my opinion, he’s absolutely one of our greatest American treasures and assets. I was with him in Kandahar and I saw him literally save people’s lives. My experience with General Mattis is that he’s a man. Secretary Mattis is a man who wants more information, not less, and to not tell the emperor he has no clothes on, I think, it is a dereliction of duty.
“So my frustration was the resistance by senior leadership not wanting to inform the boss what we were doing because they were afraid it would compromise him in some way politically or worse. They were embarrassed because we didn’t have a solution. Keep in mind that the Department of Defense is an organization that likes to have solutions.
“So when you go to the boss and you tell him, ‘There’s this problem that we don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works and, even worse, there’s not a damned thing we can do about it,’ that’s not a good position to be in if you are in the military, as you can imagine. As a member of the Secretary of Defense staff, the last thing you want to tell the boss is that we have a problem that we don’t have a solution for.”
In a post-interview follow-up question I asked Elizondo if President Obama’s Defense secretaries, Robert M. Gates, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel and Ash Carter, were ever briefed on the existence and nature of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. I received no answer to my question.
In our system of government we constitutionally have the doctrine of civilian control of the military. Article II of the Constitution clearly establishes that the president is the commander-in-chief. Strategic decision-making is constitutionally in the hands of the civilian political leadership, rather than professional military officers.
So this is the frustration expressed by Elizondo, the inability to tell senior leadership what was going on. This suggests that his former Pentagon higher-level management is in clear violation of the Constitution: by not briefing the duly appointed civilian authority, in this case, the Secretary of Defense. Congress has the responsibility to hold hearings and get to the bottom of it all.
I suspect that the memo probably got lost in the congressional mailroom.
If you have a UFO sighting to report, use one of the two national database services: NUFORC.org or MUFON.com. Both services respect confidentiality.
Cheryl Costa is the 2018 recipient of the International UFO Congress, “Researcher of the Year” award.
Breakhead: On The Road
Cheryl’s future speaking engagements include:
May 19: Pine Bush UFO Farm, Pine Bush, N.Y.
June 3, 2 to 4 p.m.: DeWitt Community Library Central Library, 5110 Jamesville Road, DeWitt 13078
As if we needed more proof that we’re living in the strangest of times, Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge, a man who once wrote a (pretty great) song called “Dick Lips,” has proven himself to be a galvanizing force in the realm of extraterrestrial exploration. Sure, we all had a laugh when DeLonge quit the band and started crowdfunding for a spaceship, but then WikiLeaks revealedhe was chatting UFOs with high-ranking political consultant John Podesta and a New York Times report not only confirmed some of DeLonge’s previous ramblings on the subject, but also the legitimacy of some of those involved in his To The Stars Academy.
To listen to DeLonge speak on the subject is, to say the least, maddening. He’s articulate in outlining the aims of his academy, and his stories as to how he first came in contact with the government remain remarkably consistent, but, as so happens in this sprawling interview with Joe Rogan, it isn’t long before DeLonge starts spouting off about Greek culture and the lost city of Atlantis and we’re back to rolling our eyes.
If you’re in need of a primer on the whole situation, as well as a breakdown of the ambitious science-cum-entertainment plan of To The Stars,The Faderhas publisheda pretty exhaustive rundown. You’ll also read about the encounter that confirmed DeLonge’s belief in aliens and, surprise, it happened while he was camping near Area 51.
Probably the most revealing part of the piece, however, is the reaction from the greater UFO community, who aren’t surprised at all that DeLonge has been chosen as the effort’s mouthpiece. “It might seem odd to some people that Tom DeLonge has built up this impressive team of scientists and former government insiders, but it doesn’t surprise me,” says Nick Pope, who used to study UFOs for the British government. “People do get starry-eyed, especially if your whole career has been about secrecy and silence. A rockstar is the absolute antithesis of that, and so it’s appealing.”
The International UFO Congress’ Alejandro Rojas agrees. “[DeLonge is] able to get people to open up and talk with him. This is a cool guy you want to hang with and you want to be buddies with.”
You can even see the team’s starry eyes in their own quotes to The Fader. Luis Elizondo, who ran the government’s secret UFO investigation program that was the subject of the aforementioned Times article, says, “Forgive the cliché, but this is really a rockstar team.”
A man out in the foggy wilderness is being abducted by a U.F.O. with a bright beam of light.
C.J. BURTON/GETTY
People often mistake Kate Dorsch for someone who studies aliens. But Dorsch actually studies something else. A doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, she’s been researching UFO reports collected by the U.S. government.
The Air Force began compiling these accounts during the early stages of the Cold War as part of a program called Project Blue Book. In 1966, it hired the University of Colorado to further investigate stories of alien “encounters” by ordinary Americans. Project Blue Book ended three years later, and the American Philosophical Society eventually archived part of the project in Philadelphia.
Three years ago, Dorsch, a historian, dug through the archives. She found bags of dirt from where flying saucers purportedly landed and even a piece of foil that someone said fell off a UFO. In the process, she discovered another story—one about the struggle between the UFO “witnesses” and the scientists who didn’t believe them—a struggle that speaks to more recent debates over climate change and fake news.
In the archived accounts, Dorsch says, earnest believers in UFOs had trouble explaining what they saw—mysterious objects, bright lights and odd shapes in the sky. But the scientists involved in the project considered them crackpots and doggedly tried to negate the idea of flying saucers. Dorsch says she was struck by "how hard people work to...dissuade the gullible American public from believing in this.”
But inside those responses, Dorsch also saw scientists trying to figure out how to communicate to laypeople. In the documents, for example, academics offered UFO witnesses better ways to tell their stories: Can you use this chart to tell us how bright the light was? What coin best describes the size of the object?
Meanwhile, the observers urged the scientists to take them seriously. "I saw this thing. I'm a trustworthy person. I'm not a drunk,” Dorsch says many of these narratives indicate about the witnesses. “I'm educated. I'm an amateur astronomer.”
The rift between debunkers and believers has its roots in the evolution of science. For centuries, scientific discovery was about simple observation: taking notes, making predictions—things that anyone could do. By the mid-1900s, science had fractured into subfields, each with its own requirements for expertise. Soon, an individual’s knowledge was no longer an appropriate credential. Instead, people in the field judged one another based on the degrees they earned and the books they wrote.
That shift left people vulnerable to charlatans, people who fake their credentials and promote ideas that scientists consider incorrect. Snake oil is much more palatable when it’s sold by someone whose name is followed with MD. Dorsch points to guests on the TV show Ancient Aliens who call themselves doctors and have a list of published books attached to their names. "There are people who feel like they're not being listened to by bodies in the establishment,” she says, “and they're looking for someone to tell them that what they're feeling is real.”
The division over what constitutes authority, Dorsch says, means people need to pay more attention to where they get their facts. "Who you trust,” she says, “changes the information that you have.”
It also leads people to seize any opportunity to crush opposing viewpoints. Take, for example, minor quibbles among scientists about climate change. Newer, more accurate ways of measuring and modeling temperatures make it look as if the planet has warmed more slowly than scientists expected. That sparked debates among scientists, but it didn’t call into question the consensus about climate change. Yet some who were trying to disprove the consensus took the debate as evidence in their favor. Such a response "is a total corruption of exactly what the scientists were saying for decades," Dorsch says. "Once you set up criteria for what counts as fact, what counts as truth, someone will find a way to manipulate that."
The recent clashes over fake news and climate change denial bear a startling resemblance to the clash on display in the UFO archives. People don’t like authority figures telling them they’re wrong, and they don’t like being ignored. "What is essentially on trial is...the qualifications of expertise," Dorsch says. "It's only a matter of time before someone comes along and says, ‘I hear you.’”
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Local News Station Films Strange Objects over Milwaukee
Local News Station Films Strange Objects over Milwaukee
A still image taken from Fox6 News' video.
Fox6 News out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, captured video of a swarm of strange objects flying over the city early Tuesday morning. The video was shot from one of the news outlet's tower cameras at around 4:43 a.m.
A similar video was also recorded by Fox6 at approximately 5:27 a.m. on Wednesday, February 21st.
Amy DuPont, a correspondent for the news station, was on location when she was asked by producers if she was aware of any odd aerial activity. She reported a large flock of seagulls outside of the Milwaukee County Courthouse about 30 minutes after the video was recorded.
"About 30 minutes later we were sitting in our truck here outside of the Milwaukee County Courthouse and we heard them, birds," DuPont said. "There are just a huge flock of seagulls here this morning."
Light reflecting off of seagulls is sometimes used to explain UFO sightings, since the birds are said to be relatively reflective; something Fox6 is using to explain the unusual aerial phenomenon.
However, this explanation hasn't satisfied local investigators.
"Seagulls they say, but I’m not convinced unless they can explain why the camera is interpreting them like that, and what is illuminating them," said Milwaukee fortean investigator Allison Jornlin.
Illinois Mutual UFO Network State Director Sam Moranto shared similar concerns.
"At night [seagulls] like to catch thermals and go higher than normal, but they are low flying birds," Moranto said. "What gets me is the speed and apparent size. We can reasonably assume that they are flying over the brightly lit area. That's some distance away. These whatever-they-are seem to be clipping along. Very interesting for sure."
So far, no report has been filed with MUFON by any eyewitnesses.
If you witnessed these objects, please contact us here at The Singular Fortean Society on our contact page, or email us at info@singularfortean.com.
Archaeologists exploring the word’s biggest flooded cave in Mexico have discovered ancient human remains at least 9,000 years old and the bones of animals who roamed the earth during the last Ice Age.
A group of divers recently connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet, a discovery that could help shed new light on the ancient Maya civilization.
The Yucatan peninsula is studded with monumental relics of the Maya people, whose cities drew upon an extensive network of sinkholes linked to subterranean waters known as cenotes.
Researchers say they found 248 cenotes at the 347-kilometer cave system known as Sac Actun, near the beach resort of Tulum. Of the 200 archaeological sites they have discovered there, around 140 are Mayan.
Some cenotes acquired particular religious significance to the Maya, whose descendants continue to inhabit the region.
Apart from human remains, they also found bones of giant sloths, ancient elephants and extinct bears from the Pleistocene period, Mexico’s Culture Ministry said in a statement.
The cave’s discovery has rocked the archaeological world.
“I think it’s overwhelming. Without a doubt it’s the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” said Guillermo de Anda, researcher at Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH).
De Anda is also director of the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM), a project dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula.
According to the INAH, water levels rose 100 meters at the end of the Ice Age, flooding the cave system and leading to “ideal conditions for the preservation of the remains of extinct megafauna from the Pleistocene.” The Pleistocene geological epoch, the most recent Ice Age, began 2.6 million years ago and ended around 11,700 years ago.
This is what an ancient, watery Venus might have looked like.
NASA
In his 1954 novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagined seas filled with life and underwater cities on our neighboring planet. It wasn’t long, however, before we discovered what really lurks beneath Venus’s thick cloud cover. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States' and Soviet Union's spacecraft found a dense, toxic atmosphere on Venus full of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid. On the surface, temperatures were hot enough to melt lead, and the crushing pressure was akin to that found in Earth’s deep oceans.
All of this means that Venus is violently hostile to life. Even so, the planet is so similar to our own celestial body in size, makeup, and location that it’s often referred to as Earth’s twin. And in its distant past, it may have been even more Earthlike—scientists now believe that Venus could have once held oceans and a gentler climate.
“People don’t really fully appreciate how similar these two planets are,” says Suzanne Smrekar, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We hear so much about Mars, and yeah, currently its surface temperature is like Earth's. But probably for most of its evolution Venus was much more like the Earth.”
Despite this similarity, it’s been nearly 30 years since the United States sent a mission to Venus. Smrekar and her fellow Venus researchers believe it’s high time we returned. Venus, they argue, can shed light on Earth’s history, what conditions a planet needs to become habitable, and whether the distant ones we are discovering beyond our solar system might have them.
“The quest to understand life in the universe involves not just the Earth, but the Earth’s twin,” says Stephen Kane, a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California at Riverside.
A world of difference
Billions of years ago, Venus and Earth formed relatively close together from similar materials.
Earth went on to become a wet, mild world ripe for hosting life. “You really need to have a way to create climate stability for life to get started,” says Michael Way, a physicist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. On Earth, plate tectonics, which cycles carbon in and out of the atmosphere, make that stable climate possible. When volcanoes erupt, they shoot carbon dioxide out from the planet’s interior. This greenhouse gas traps heat, keeping Earth toasty enough to support life. If carbon dioxide were allowed to build up, you’d get a hothouse like Venus. However, the Earth slowly recaptures carbon dioxide when it dissolves in rainwater, flows into the ocean, and is used to build carbonate rocks like limestone on the seafloor. As pieces of Earth’s outer shell shift and grind together, they carry carbon back into the mantle.
In other words, plate tectonics powers Earth’s thermostat. Our planet’s restless crust also recycles other nutrients, like phosphorus, that organisms need to survive. “The surface of the Earth is continually replenished by the plates moving underneath each other, Kane says. “Whereas Venus has essentially a single plate.”
While present-day Venus lacks plate tectonics, it may have behaved more like Earth in its early history. “Earth has been remarkably successful at keeping relatively clement climate conditions for at least the last 3.5 to 4 billion years,” Way says. Because the two planets are similar in so many ways, this suggests that Venus might have had a stable climate and oceans at some point as well, he says.
In fact, there is evidence of past water on Venus. Pioneer Venus, an American mission launched in 1978, measured a form of hydrogen called deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen. On Earth, this isotope is much less common than regular hydrogen. But on Venus, deuterium isn’t quite so rare in comparison to ordinary hydrogen, indicating that a great quantity of the lighter version of the element has vanished. “If you measure a big difference in these numbers it tells you that something has escaped from the planet, basically, and that something is water,” Way says.
Another clue came when Venus Express—an orbiter launched in 2005 by the European Space Agency—measured twice as much hydrogen as oxygen escaping from the planet’s atmosphere. This suggests that the elements had once been joined as water.
"Venus is absolutely fascinating because it’s a world that should be very similar to Earth and yet evolved very, very differently,” says NASA’s Lori Glaze.
Public domain
It’s not clear how much water Venus actually had on its surface; it could have been anywhere from a few yards deep across the entire surface to hundreds of yards or more, Way says. To figure out what ancient Venus might have been like, he and his colleagues used a series of computer models to simulate the planet’s atmosphere. They reported that Venus could have had a shallow ocean and surface temperatures similar to those on present-day Earth for several billion years, up until around 715 million years ago.
Venus rotates more slowly than the Earth, which could have helped make it more habitable. Because the Venusian day is so long, the sun heats parts of its terrain for months at a time. At that point, “Warm air rises rather forcefully and creates a planetary-scale cloud that blocks much of the incoming sunlight,” Way says. “That can provide you a shield basically to help you be close to your parent star without overcooking in essence or boiling off your oceans.” This cloud would unleash heavy rains, although they would be concentrated around the area directly facing the sun.
At some point, though, Venus’s fate diverged from that of Earth’s, and the planet wound up as an “uninhabitable hellscape,” Way and his colleagues wrote last month in a paper published to the arXiv. It’s not clear why this happened, Way says. One possibility is that Venus’s seas began to evaporate because the planet receives more solar energy than Earth. In the upper atmosphere, sunlight would have broken the water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen, which then fled into space. Without water to weaken the crust so it could break up, there could be no plate tectonics as we know it. Venus would have become hotter and hotter as water vapor and carbon dioxide built up in its atmosphere.
“It has undergone this runaway greenhouse and now it’s stuck there,” Kane says. “All the carbon is in its atmosphere, it has nowhere to store it because it has no liquid water oceans.”
Earthlings, take heed
The scorching, poisonous place Venus has become can actually give us a glimpse into our own planet’s history.
When the Magellan mission orbited Venus in the 1990s, it took radar images of the planet’s surface that revealed mountains ranges. These features resemble mountains and plains of cooled lava created here on Earth when pieces of crust were jostled about by the sluggish churning of the mantle beneath them, scientists reported in December at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans. Similar forces might be active on Venus; it’s possible that the planet’s intense heat warms its crust enough that small pieces can slightly detach from the mantle about six to nine miles down. Some of the plains surrounding Venus’s mountains had been deformed, suggesting that blocks of crust could have been moving about pretty recently.
This isn’t full-fledged plate tectonics—but it might be the first step in the process. We have little record of how plate tectonics kicked off billions of years ago on Earth, so the more recent activity on Venus might offer a few clues, Smrekar says.
A map of Venus’s surface based on imagery collected by Magellan, Pioneer Venus, and Venera 13 and 14 .
NASA
Our sister planet can help us understand present-day Earth as well, she says. Back in the 1970s, Venus proved key to our discovery that chlorofluorocarbons—chemicals used in hairspray, air conditioners, and other products—were a threat to the ozone layer. While creating computer models for the atmosphere of Venus, researchers at Harvard and MIT found that chlorine is really good at breaking apart oxygen compounds like ozone. Before long, another group at the University of California, Irvine, had realized that the extra chlorine we were pumping into our atmosphere might be doing the same thing on Earth.
Venus also offers a preview of our future. Over time, stars increase in luminosity. This means that the planets in their orbit will be bathed in more solar energy. For a planet with liquid water and an Earth-like atmosphere, that means a one-way ticket to Venusville. “Once you break a planetary atmosphere…[it's] almost impossible to unbreak,” Kane says. “Venus could be the eventual outcome of all atmospheric evolution.”
In fact, it “seems inevitable” that Earth will eventually follow Venus’s path, he says. “The Earth has a delicate balance at the moment; it won’t last forever.”
Jekyll or Hyde?
We’re getting better and better at discovering planets beyond our own solar system—including ones about the size of Earth. We can’t study the soil or atmospheres on these planets to find out if they might be amenable to life, though. “The planets that we’re studying around other stars are planets that we will never be able to go to, at least not in the next several hundred years,” Kane says. “Venus is very much a warning to us, because if we did not have Venus in our solar system…we may very well be far more cavalier in discovering Earth-sized planets around other stars and just assuming that they’re habitable.”
Instead, we realize that two worlds that look the same from a distance can in fact be the Jekyll and Hyde of rocky planets. “As we discover new planets, the only basis we have for comparison are the planets in our own solar system,” says Lori Glaze, a planetary volcanologist at NASA Goddard. “Being able to differentiate between an exo-Venus and an exo-Earth is going to be really important in how we go forward in our exploration.”
It’s possible that Venus’s proximity to the sun is the main reason why it turned out so differently from Earth. But there could be other, more subtle forces at work too, like Venus’s lack of a strong magnetic field. “We’ll need to take those into account because it could mean that we have evil Venuses hiding amongst the planets we find around other stars,” says Kane. On the other hand, if Venus’s slow rotation rate once helped it sustain habitable conditions, it would make sense to measure how quickly exoplanets rotate as well.
“There’s this great cosmic accident that we have in our solar system: two planets that are so similar in size and adjacent in the solar system yet they are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of their habitability,” Smrekar says. “If you really want to understand what makes a planet habitable, really the big question is, why are Venus and Earth so different?”
Planning a visit
Even though Venus is our closest neighbor, there’s a lot we don’t know about it.
The planet’s thick blanket of clouds makes it difficult to observe, although missions like Magellan and Venus Express have taken radar and infrared images of the surface. Those pictures revealed another challenge: The surface of Venus isn’t very heavily cratered, indicating that it hasn’t existed for long enough to get dinged up much. “Over the last billion years and perhaps over a much shorter time even, the surface of Venus has been completely reworked,” Smrekar says. Perhaps because the planet lacks plate tectonics, heat periodically builds up underneath the crust until the surface is melted. Because of this, much of the evidence for what Venus’s surface was like in its ancient past has disappeared.
Then there’s the fact that Venus’s extreme conditions destroy any lander that visits within a matter of hours. “It’s a very tough place to send missions; it’s expensive and it’s risky,” Way says. “Mars is much easier to deal with."
This means that funding is harder to secure for Venus than for the Red Planet. “Success begets success,” Smrekar says. “If you find an exciting discovery on Mars you want to follow up on that, and it’s been so long that we’ve had a mission to Venus that it’s hard to get over that hurdle.”
Still, Glaze says, “There’s getting to be quite a groundswell of support for Venus exploration.” Akatsuki, an orbiter launched by JAXA, Japan’s space agency, is currently gathering information about Venus’s climate. And last year, NASA scientists proposed two missions that would have sent probes directly into the planet’s atmosphere. The agency did not select either to advance in its New Frontiers program, but Smrekar, Glaze, and their colleagues are undeterred.
Smrekar would have led the Venus Origins Explorer (VOX) mission to investigate how present-day Venus behaves. It would have used an orbiter to map the planet’s surface and a probe to sample gases in its atmosphere. One of the questions Smrekar and her colleagues would have examined is whether Venus’s craters have been buried in lava flows, which would be a sign of recent geologic activity. They’d have also looked for chemical signatures of active volcanism, such as a thin coating of new minerals formed when lava flows are exposed to the atmosphere.
Another mission headed by Glaze—called Venus In situ Composition Investigations(VICI)—was awarded funding to hone its technology for future competitions. It would have sent two landers to visit highland plateaus that are older than the rest of Venus’s surface. These features might be similar to Earth’s continents, which are built from different kinds rock than its oceanic crust. VICI would have fired a laser into these rocks to vaporize a tiny bit of material, then measured the minerals present in both the plasma it had created and in un-vaporized rock. If Venus’s plateaus have a different composition than the rest of the surface, it could mean that water was involved in forming them.
A highland plateau on Venus.
NASA
During its sojourn, the spacecraft would also have measured gases like krypton and xenon. “Once they’re put into the atmosphere when a planet is forming it’s very hard to change them or remove them,” Glaze says. “They kind of remain there like little atmospheric fossils to tell us about what went into the original makeup of Venus’s atmosphere.”
She and her colleagues have built a full-scale prototype lander and tested its landing abilities here on Earth. The vessel is about 14 feet across and has a squat shape stabilizers that resemble spider legs to make it harder to tip over.
Glaze and her team are unfazed by Venus’s fearsome conditions. “We send things down to far deeper in the ocean [to] much, much greater pressures than we’re talking about on the surface of Venus,” she says. And most of the mission’s key measurements could be taken in under two hours—so by the time Venus’s scorching heat melts the lander’s electronics, they will likely have done their duty.
“Venus is hard to explore, sure, but it’s not like it hasn’t been done before 40 years ago,” Smrekar says. We haven’t sent a probe down into Venus’s poisonous skies since last century’s Venera, Vega, and Pioneer Venus missions. To know what to expect on the exoplanets are discovering far away, however, we’ll need to take another trip next door. “It’s incredibly important that we get back to Venus,” Glaze says.
Researchers were surprised by how much water vapor they found in a ‘hot Jupiter’ — three times more than on Saturn.
Credit: NASA, ESA.
Although NASA has already confirmed thousands of exoplanets — planets outsides our solar system — what’s perhaps most staggering is their sheer diversity. Take, for instance, WASP-39b, an exoplanet located about 700 light-years away with about the mass of Saturn but which could not be any more different. By studying it in great detail, astronomers might not only learn how it formed but how planets in our own solar system’s backyard came to be as well.
A water-rich planet on fire
With the help of NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers were able to peer inside WASP-39b’s puffy atmosphere right to its very core. By filtering the incoming light partly absorbed by the far-away planet into individual colors, scientists could dissect the composition of its atmosphere.
“This spectrum is thus far the most beautiful example we have of what a clear exoplanet atmosphere looks like,” said lead investigator Hannah Wakeford of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the University of Exeter in Devon, United Kingdom.
This is how they learned that WASP-39b contains three times more water vapor than Saturn does. This was exciting to learn and totally atypical for a “hot Jupiter” — a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but whose close proximity to the parent star results in high surface-atmosphere temperatures.
WASP-39b takes only four days to come full circle around its parent star. It’s about 20 times closer to its parent star than Earth is to the sun. It’s also tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its star, like the moon.
Being this close to its star, the planet’s day-side temperature hovers at a scorching 1,430 degrees Fahrenheit (776.7 degrees Celsius). And because the exoplanet’s atmosphere is circulated by powerful winds, the night-side of the planet is also just about as hot. Unlike Saturn, WASP-39b doesn’t have any rings. What’s more, it’s atmosphere is free of high-altitude clouds, which allowed Wakeford and colleagues to easily peer down to its depths.
“WASP-39b shows exoplanets can have much different compositions than those of our solar system,” said co-author David Sing of the University of Exeter in Devon, United Kingdom, in a statement. “Hopefully this diversity we see in exoplanets will give us clues in figuring out all the different ways a planet can form and evolve.”
Due to its high water content and hot proximity to its parent star, scientists are convinced WASP-39b must have formed very differently from Saturn. Most likely, it was bombarded by many icy bodies during its early history and, quite possibly, obliterated other planetary objects in its migratory path.
WASP-39b is truly a unique world, the likes of which we’ve yet to encounter. Scientists hope to learn even more about it once the much anticipated James Webb Space Telescopelaunches in 2019. The powerful instruments on board the space telescope will allow astronomers to study exoplanets in much greater detail and which are much farther away than currently possible.
“By calculating the amount of carbon and oxygen in the atmosphere, we can learn even more about where and how this planet formed,” said Wakeford.
Tardigrades are the most indestructible known complex organism on Earth, and perhaps the cutest of all microorganisms. Although they look like tiny space-bears, they can survive without water for 10 years, in extreme pressures and temperatures, and even in space. Forget cockroaches — tardigrades will outlive us all. Now, researchers from the Jagiellionian University in Poland have identified a new species in Japan. With this information, they were able to more precisely classify tardigrades within this taxonomic group based on their egg appearance.
The half-a-millimeter long critters are more diverse than you would think. There are about 1,200 known species, with about 20 new ones discovered each year.
The researchers sampled moss in a car park in Japan and examined it for tardigrades. From the samples, they isolated 10 individuals and started raising them in the lab.
“Tardigrades are very difficult to maintain in the lab, often because we do not know what to feed them, so M. shonaicus was a rare case where we can maintain the culture, where I succeeded to feed them algae as food. We later found out that they can also feed on rotifers. Many tardigrades are parthenogenetic, where only females exist and all offsprings are produced without mating. But Macrobiotus species, such as [the new species] M. shonaicus, often have two sexes, and require mating,” said co-author of the study Dr. Kazuharu Arakawa from Keio University, Japan.
They were luckily able to successfully breed the tardigrades in the lab and it was actually their eggs that made it clear that they are a new species. The eggs have a solid surface with flexible filaments attached. The individuals and the eggs were examined under phase contrast light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy for a closer look. The DNA was also sequenced for four molecular markers to confirm that this is a brand new species.
The surface of the tardigrade’s egg.
Image credits: Stec et al (2018).
It turns out that the larger taxonomic group to which these species belong—the Macrobiotus hufelandi complex— can be further split up into two clades (groups with shared characteristics): one group with filaments on the eggs and ones that have eggs that look like mushrooms or inverted goblets. This new species is placed in the same clade as species from Kenya (Macrobiotus paulinae), Ecuador (Macrobiotus polypiformis), Scotland (Macrobiotus scoticus), and Argentina (Macrobiotus kristenseni). It is the only known member of this species complex in Japan.
The new species of tardigrade–a rare video of a tardigrade defecating. Video credits: Kazuharu Arakawa/YouTube.
It may seem a bit odd that the tardigrades in Japan are most closely related to ones of South America, Africa, and Europe, but these little creatures are excellent at dispersing.
“Terrestrial tardigrades can enter an ametabolic state called anhydrobiosis as the surrounding environment dries, and the animals stay dormant until they are rehydrated by, for example, rain. The microscopic dried tardigrades are blown like specks of dust in the wind, so tardigrades can travel widely in this form. Some species are found worldwide, probably because they join the world’s ‘aeroplankton’ and establish wherever they land,” explained co-author of the study Dr. Kazuharu Arakawa from Keio University, Japan.
The new species is called Macrobiotus shonaicus and brings the number of tardigrade species in Japan up to 168. It isn’t not known for sure, but hypothesized that they have a wider distribution around the Shonai area in Japan after which they are named. There are likely to be even more species to be discovered, as researchers only searched in a car park and there are sure to be other locations with other new species.
HOW HUMANS MIGHT OUTLIVE EARTH, THE SUN…AND EVEN THE UNIVERSE
HOW HUMANS MIGHT OUTLIVE EARTH, THE SUN…AND EVEN THE UNIVERSE
Nuclear war. Runaway climate change. A global pandemic. Today our world faces all manner of existential threats. But scary possibilities like these are nothing compared to what astronomers say lies in store for Earth. Our planet’s ultimate destiny is to be baked, blasted, and eventually disintegrated.
There’s nothing we can do to prevent this cataclysm. Yet according to scientists who study the far future, including Yale University astronomer Gregory Laughlin, the prospect for life is, oddly, rather bright. Given technological advances and the continuing evolution of our species, humans should be able to survive — in some form — long after Earth has ceased to exist.
But our distant descendants are going to have to do some planet-hopping.
THE MULTIPLANET ERA The first major cosmic crisis will strike in about 1.5 billion years. At that point, according to projections by environmental scientist Andrew J. Rushby at the University of East Anglia in England, the brightening sun will set off what might be termed “super-global” warming. Earth will be heated until the oceans boil.
By then, though, will we care? We already have the technology to establish bases on the moon and Mars. So a billion and a half years from now, we’ll likely have colonized the whole solar system — and perhaps other star systems in our Milky Way galaxy.
As the sun grows hotter, other planets will become more appealing. Just as Earth becomes too toasty to sustain life, Mars will reach a temperature that makes it habitable. Cornell University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger has run models showing that the Red Planet could then stay pleasant for another 5 billion years.
About 7.5 billion years from now, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and switch to helium. That will cause it to balloon into an enormous red giant. Mars as well as Earth will be fried. On the other hand, the once icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn will have become tropical water worlds — prime real estate for human colonies. We could live there for a few hundred million years.
Jupiter’s moon Io is dotted with volcanoes heated by gravitational friction.
NASA/JPL/University Of Arizona
About 8 billion years from now, the flaring sun will make conditions intolerably hot all the way out past Pluto. “The exact dates depend on how much mass you estimate the sun will lose and how much planets will move,” Kaltenegger says. But the message is clear: Life will be impossible in our solar system.
THE STAR-HOPPING ERA Fortunately, Laughlin points out, there are 200 billion other stars in the Milky Way, most with planets of their own. Perhaps our descendants will have mastered near-light-speed travel. Even with current technology, however, interstellar travel is conceivable on the kind of timescales we’re talking about.
The fastest spacecraft built to date, Voyager 1, is racing away from the sun at 38,027 miles per hour. At that speed, it would take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star. But future humans might build interstellar arks, giant ships on which generations of travelers would live and die before delivering colonists to a new destination. Such star-hopping colonists could spread across our entire galaxy before Earth overheats, even assuming no advances in rocketry.
At first, those voyagers might choose to set sail for planets around midsize, yellow stars similar to our own. That will take care of us for quite a while, since sunlike stars last 12 billion years before they fizzle. As one star ages and dies, we can move on to the next. We’ve got time.
Fifty billion to 100 billion years from now, though, all of the raw material for new stars will be used up. The last generation of sunlike stars will burn out, and humans will need a new kind of place to live.
It turns out that we have better options than yellow stars like our sun. The Milky Way is dotted with red dwarfs, cooler and dimmer than our sun but built to last. “For the next 10 trillion years, the red dwarfs are just coming into their own,” Laughlin says.
And so planets around red dwarf stars may be our homes until about 15 trillion years from now, when they too will expire.
THE GRAVITATIONAL ERA Red dwarfs will be the last generation of stars. Once they die, the universe will go dark — literally. Even so, Laughlin doesn’t see this as the end of the line for life. Instead, we will enter what he calls “the gravitational era.”
Illustration depicting the end of life on Earth, after the Sun turns into a red giant.
Science Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo
In this dark future, we might build enormous space power plants around black holes, lowering masses toward them to harvest their gravitational pull “like the weights pulling down in a grandfather’s clock,” says Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott. Or we might tap the internal heat of planets to generate energy: The gravitational interaction between celestial bodies creates friction, which can keep planets hot inside even without any starshine.
Don’t picture cave dwellers huddling around geothermal heaters. Trillions of years of evolution will have long since transformed us, Laughlin says. Perhaps we will have merged with our computers. Perhaps we won’t even have a physical form. The only thing our descendants will definitely have in common with us is the essential spark of life: not flesh and blood necessarily but information.
“That’s the most important lesson from thinking about the far future universe,” Laughlin says. “We’re being naïve when we think of life only in terms of Earthlike planets and carbon-based life.”
Information-based life can keep going almost forever. The gravitational era that begins around 15 trillion years from now could continue for quintillion years and beyond, Laughlin estimates. A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes. It is trillion times as long as the entire history of our hominid line on Earth.
WILL THE UNIVERSE DIE BEFORE WE DO? Still, even this near-eternity is not the same as eternity. At some point, life runs into the physical limits of matter itself.
Physics theories suggest that sometime between 10^34 (1 decillion) and 10^64 (1 vigintillion) years from now, the protons found in the nuclei of all atoms will decay. That means black holes will be the only organized form of matter in the universe. Future humanity can’t have any physical form at this point.
At 10^100 years — 10 duotrigintillion years A.D. — even black holes will evaporate. There will be no energy or structures of any kind — just a cold, eternal mist of farflung particles. This really is the end point for life.
Or maybe not. Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, one of the founders of modern cosmological theory, is exploring a model in which the universe goes through endless cycles of creation. His latest version, developed with Anna Ijjas of Columbia University, suggests that the universe could experience a new Big Bang well before the final black hole apocalypse.
If it does come, a new Big Bang would wipe away all traces of this universe — unless we can find a way to leapfrog into the next cosmic cycle. Current physics offers no guidance here.
Then again, we have quite a while to ponder the problem.
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Do you see what I see? Researchers harness brain waves to reconstruct images of what we perceive
Do you see what I see? Researchers harness brain waves to reconstruct images of what we perceive
Don Campbell
A new technique developed by neuroscientists at U of T Scarborough can, for the first time, reconstruct images of what people perceive based on their brain activity gathered by EEG.
The technique developed by Dan Nemrodov, a postdoctoral fellow in Assistant Professor Adrian Nestor’s lab at U of T Scarborough, is able to digitally reconstruct images seen by test subjects based on electroencephalography (EEG) data.
“When we see something, our brain creates a mental percept, which is essentially a mental impression of that thing. We were able to capture this percept using EEG to get a direct illustration of what’s happening in the brain during this process,” says Nemrodov.
For the study, test subjects hooked up to EEG equipment were shown images of faces. Their brain activity was recorded and then used to digitally recreate the image in the subject’s mind using a technique based on machine learning algorithms.
It’s not the first time researchers have been able to reconstruct images based on visual stimuli using neuroimaging techniques. The current method was pioneered by Nestor who successfully reconstructed facial images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in the past, but this is the first time EEG has been used.
And while techniques like fMRI – which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow – can grab finer details of what’s going on in specific areas of the brain, EEG has greater practical potential given that it’s more common, portable, and inexpensive by comparison. EEG also has greater temporal resolution, meaning it can measure with detail how a percept develops in time right down to milliseconds, explains Nemrodov.
“fMRI captures activity at the time scale of seconds, but EEG captures activity at the millisecond scale. So we can see with very fine detail how the percept of a face develops in our brain using EEG,” he says. In fact, the researchers were able to estimate that it takes our brain about 170 milliseconds (0.17 seconds) to form a good representation of a face we see.
This study provides validation that EEG has potential for this type of image reconstruction notes Nemrodov, something many researchers doubted was possible given its apparent limitations. Using EEG data for image reconstruction has great theoretical and practical potential from a neurotechnological standpoint, especially since it’s relatively inexpensive and portable.
In terms of next steps, work is currently underway in Nestor’s lab to test how image reconstruction based on EEG data could be done using memory and applied to a wider range of objects beyond faces. But it could eventually have wide-ranging clinical applications as well.
“It could provide a means of communication for people who are unable to verbally communicate. Not only could it produce a neural-based reconstruction of what a person is perceiving, but also of what they remember and imagine, of what they want to express,” says Nestor.
“It could also have forensic uses for law enforcement in gathering eyewitness information on potential suspects rather than relying on verbal descriptions provided to a sketch artist.”
The research, which is published in the journal eNeuro, was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and by a Connaught New Researcher Award.
“What’s really exciting is that we’re not reconstructing squares and triangles but actual images of a person’s face, and that involves a lot of fine-grained visual detail,” adds Nestor.
“The fact we can reconstruct what someone experiences visually based on their brain activity opens up a lot of possibilities. It unveils the subjective content of our mind and it provides a way to access, explore and share the content of our perception, memory and imagination.”
For as long as we have looked up at the stars and wondered about what lies beyond that vast, black void between us there has been the yearning to set out and explore the reaches of our planet, solar system, and beyond. We as a species have spent vast quantities of money and time towards this end, and yet at this moment we are confined to a relatively small region around our own planet. Yet throughout the years there have been those who have claimed to have actually managed what we desire, and have reportedly managed to travel between planets. Whether it be by space ship, teleportation, or other mysterious means, such bizarre reports claim that free travel amongst the cosmos is not only possible, but that it has already happened. Here are some of the weirder of these.
Perhaps the most common way that people have claimed to have been whisked off around the solar system is the old-fashioned way; aboard some sort of alien spacecraft. One early account of this type was the deeply odd story of a Dana Howard, who in 1936 allegedly made contact with a towering, 8-foot tall, golden haired woman from Venus who called herself Diane. Howard claims that the Venusian took her aboard a spaceship, described as being gem-studded and translucent, and she was flown off to the distant Venus. There she found inhabitants of ethereal physical beauty, who manipulated life essences to heal themselves and had teleportation technology. Howard would even claim to have married a Venusian and to have had children living there. She went on to describe Venus and its people in great detail over the years in numerous books, including My Flight to Venus (1954), Diane: She Came From Venus (1956), Over the Threshold (1957), and Vesta, the Earthborn Venusian (1959), all of which were purportedly helped along by the occasional visits from the mysterious Diane.
Another apparent traveler to Venus was Howard Menger, who in the 1950s claimed to have had frequent contact with extraterrestrials from when he was a child, and to have made several trips out into the solar system aboard UFOs over the years. He reportedly went to Venus, with its groves of huge redwood-like trees, as well as to the Moon, which apparently had advanced domes and hover trains, and Saturn, where he would claim he had originally been born as a man named Sol du Naro, who had been romantically involved with a woman from Venus. According to Menger, while on Saturn he had learned that he had died and then had his consciousness beamed into 1-year-old Howard Menger, after which he had grown up as an Earthling. Menger wrote several books about his completely bonkers tales, and made quite a splash in UFOlogy at the time. Making it all even weirder is that he would later claim that none of it had happened at all, and that it was all an illusion implanted into his mind during CIA mind control experiments. Again, whether any of it is real or not, it sure is a wild ride.
Venus
Even more well-known is the tale of Polish immigrant George Adamski, who in 1952 apparently made contact with a Nordic-looking Venusian named Orthon in the Mojave Desert. Adamski would then allegedly make numerous trips to both Venus and the Moon aboard a giant bell-shaped spacecraft. The people of Venus were said to have blonde hair, blue eyes, and to be very beautiful, and the moon was described as having forests, cities, and mountains, as well as lights that glittered in the air like “millions of fireflies.” Although Adamski’s stories are mostly accused of being cheap knock-offs of pulp science fiction stories, he has nevertheless gone on to become one of the more well-known UFO contactees.
Such claims of strange travels around the solar system were not done aboard any sort of space craft, but rather through supposed mental powers, psychic projection, or other mystical means. One of the earliest and weirdest of such reports is the case of the Swedish philosopher, inventor, scientist, and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed that in 1774 he had had a potent spiritual awakening. During this time, he said he gained the power to open his mind to speak with angels or demons, and to make psychic journeys, an ability which he used to travel across Heaven, Hell, and to other parts of the solar system, not through the power of any technology, but through the power of God.
Swedenborg claimed that he had been guided along on this journey by God and angels, and that he saw many wondrous things in other parts of our universe. Among his many detailed accounts, some of the more interesting are what he claimed to have seen in our solar system. He said that he had visited Mars, the Moon, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus, and that each of these places had their own unique civilizations. The Martians were described as being totally without body hair and wearing tree bark for clothing. They apparently lived in a peaceful Utopian society where there was no crime or war. On Venus there were two races of people, a benevolent, peaceful tribe, and another dedicated to violence, war, and thievery. Saturn had its humble people who lived simple lives and buried their dead by covering the bodies with leaves, and the Moon had a race of stout dwarves with booming voices. The people of Mercury were said to wear tight-fitting clothing and to be stern and serious deep thinkers and philosophers, while the population of Jupiter were jovial jokesters and liked to walk about on their hands.
All of these things were explained in meticulous detail in Swedenborg’s writings of his experiences, and although it seems pretty obvious now that there are no such beings as far as we know on any of these planets, at the time it was eaten up by those who followed him and it captured the imagination. He would spend the rest of his life trying to fulfill what he saw as his mission from God to reform Christianity, and he would publish a total of 18 tomes to this effect, the most well-known being his book The Heavenly Doctrine. Did he see any of this at all, perhaps existing in an alternate dimension or reality, or is this all the ramblings of a delusional mind?
In the late 19th century we have the account of the Denton family of England, who were claimed to have the power of psychometry, which means they could basically hold or touch an object and divine facts about it. In the case of William Denton and his family, they could see past events in vivid detail simply from touching historical objects or fossils, and some of them even claimed to have used this power to project themselves to other parts of the solar system. Denton’s son claimed that he had visited Venus and seen numerous strange and wondrous animals, as well as massive trees shaped like mushrooms and water that was “heavy but not wet.” Other members of the family and Denton himself supposedly visited Mars, which had yellow-haired people with four fingers who possessed fantastical flying machines, as well as Jupiter, whose inhabitants apparently had large blue eyes, long flowing blonde hair, and the ability to float through the air at will. Although the Dentons could have very well been attention seeking cranks, it is all very outlandish and entertaining nevertheless.
In the early 1900s there was also the purported 1906 psychic journey of a Sackville G. Leyson, who happened to be the president of the Society for Psychical Research at the time. Through astral projection, Leyson said he had managed to travel to Mars, of which he gave a quite detailed description. According to Leyson, the landscape was perpetually shrouded in red clouds and mist, and there was an odd substance like snow that often fell, but which was not cold and made the ground soft. He said that the planet was populated by two different races of beings with vastly different physical appearances. One was a race of hulking giants covered in hair, who towered over him and had a single eye in the middle of their foreheads, elephant-like ears, the nose of a lion, and who lived in rock huts aboveground. There was also claimed to be a smaller race of dwarves, who only came up to Leyson’s knees. These diminutive creatures supposedly live in underground lairs, had webbed hands and feet, a fish-like face with no nose, bulbous eyes on the sides of their heads, and the ability to scale sheer walls like an insect. It is widely believed that this report was likely a piece of creative journalism, but it is certainly strange enough to warrant mention.
In more modern times we have far-out tale of Ingo Swann, who was allegedly a psychic with the power of remote viewing, which basically entails being able to witness things happening in different locations far away from the person’s actual physical body. In this case it was far away indeed, because Swann would claim that in a remote viewing experiment along with fellow psychic Harold Sherman they had managed to project all the way to Mercury and Jupiter to make observations of these places before the U.S. had even launched its Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10 space probes to explore these regions of the cosmos. While at Mercury, Swann claimed that he had discovered the planet had a thin atmosphere, a magnetic field, and solar winds, and that its sky was painted with constantly shifting lights akin to the Aurora Borealis.
He also claimed that Mercury had a primitive form of plant life like a sort of lichen, which covered the rocks on the surface. Shockingly, when the Mariner 10 did a flyby of the planet 3 weeks later, it found that indeed Mercury was very much as Swann had described it, although the probe was not close enough to be able to verify the presence of lichen on the surface. It had previously thought that Mercury had no magnetic poles or any atmosphere at all, but Swann had apparently seen this first, and the Mariner 10 findings backed this claim up somewhat.
Concerning Jupiter, Swann described it as a frigid place with a noxious, poisonous atmosphere possessing a myriad of colors like a “giant fireworks display.” He also said that he had seen vast, raging tornadoes on the surface, as well as ferocious winds far stronger than any on Earth, and he claimed the planet also had strong magnetic forces and a 30,000-foot-high mountain range. Eight months later the Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter and saw that many of these predictions were all strikingly true. It was impressive enough that former American astronaut Edgar Mitchell was reported as saying:
He described things and gave details that were not known to scientists before the Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10 satellites flew by and got the information. These are things that Mr. Swann couldn’t have guessed or read about. His impressions of Mercury and Jupiter cannot be dismissed.
Pioneer 10
Another who praised Swann’s findings was former scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who said “His impressions of Jupiter, along with his experience with Mercury, most certainly point the way to more experimentation.” It seems all very impressive, but it has over the years become apparent that the story was played up to be a lot more amazing than the actual facts. One of the problems is that only the things that matched up with what was found by the space probes were apparently reported on, when in fact there were many other details that were flat-out wrong and just not mentioned. Indeed, renowned science fiction author Isaac Asimov found that half of Swann’s observations were wrong, and that the other half could have been lucky guesses based on information already available on planets in science books of the time. Even more damning still was an assessment made by famous astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, Carl Sagan, who at one point said after looking through the whole case:
Recently, two courageous American mystics made an “astral projection” trip to Jupiter, describing the nature of the planet prior to the arrival of the Pioneer 10. I was asked to examine the accuracy of their account. If their reports had been submitted in my elementary astronomy course, they would have received grades of “D.” These reports were not better than what can be extracted from the worst popularizations of planetary astronomy; they were filled with the most obvious misunderstandings both about Jupiter and Pioneer 10. There is no evidence that any mystic has done better in guessing the nature of the planets than he could do without his mystical powers but with the ability to read the better elementary astronomy books.
Ouch. It appears that the very few things the two remote viewers had happened to stumble upon as correct were played up in news reports and a legend was born. It is important to note that in later years Swann did not stop making claims of the weird. In the 1970s he began trying to establish psychic connections with plants, and through this he claimed that he had learned of an impending ecological disaster through mental images projected into his mind by the plants. He wrote of these efforts and other various psychic pursuits in his 1975 book To Kiss Earth Good-Bye. Considering the time-frames involved coinciding with heavy drug culture and the damning skepticism against him, whether any of this planetary travel was achieved through the use of mind powers or the tripping of balls is left open to speculation and interpretation.
In more recent reports we have yet another Mars story and those bases. In 2014, a man only known as Captain Kaye came forward to claim that he was a whistleblower for a military base on Mars. Kaye said that he had spent 17 years on the Red Planet in a program called “The Mars Defense Force,” which had the purpose of protecting the solar system from invading alien races, and which has a colony on the planet called Aries Prime. Eyebrows might be raised even more than they are when hearing that Kaye explains that Mars has a completely breathable atmosphere and a balmy, pleasant climate. According to Kaye, military personnel at the base were ordered to retrieve an alien artifact at a cave on Mars, and this resulted in a catastrophic battle that would see around 1,000 soldiers lose their lives. It has since been determined that Kaye’s real name is Randy Cramer, and that he is a vocal advocate of the idea that the U.S. faked the moon landings in order to cover up the work being done on Mars, so make of that what you will.
These are truly outlandish claims to be sure, seemingly ripped straight from a science fiction story, and perhaps they are just that: science fiction. After all, we have no evidence at all of any of this other than these, let’s be honest, rather implausible claims. However, some of these have gone on to be discussed and debated, and they do go to show that we will probably always have stories like these of people supposedly breaking out of the confines of our planet to reach out towards the stars. Whether real or not, such reports serve to capture the imagination, and illustrate our fascination with the universe beyond what we know
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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 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
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