What kind of natural disaster do you fear the most? Hurricane? Flood? Tornado? Mudslide? Solar flare? Zombie apocalypse? Elections? Your answer probably depends in part on where you live, how much news you watch and what was the last disaster movie you saw. A new survey polled Americans on which natural disaster they feared the most and the shocking (was it lightning?) answer defied the odds and blew away (wind storms?) the competition. The natural disaster Americans fear the most is …

Not so fast. While you’re thinking about which type of disaster YOU fear the most, let’s look at the survey. It was conducted by Sperling’s Best Places, which is run by Bert Sperling, the “Guy Who Picks The Best Places” who has lived in Florida, California, Alaska and Oregon and since 1999 has run a free site where he provides and categorizes data on thousands of metropolitan areas, cities and neighborhoods. The Sperling site has a comprehensive database that allows users to rank places in a wide variety of ways in order to help people find a preferable place to live and help city officials improve their quality of life, fix problems and move their locations up the lists.

If the “Most feared natural disasters in America” list was based strictly on number of deaths from 1974 to 2004 (a survey by University of South Carolina researchers), the answer would be heat or drought (3,906), followed by severe weather (thunderstorms – 3,762), winter weather (3,612), flooding 2.788), tornadoes (2.317), lightning (2,261), coastal storm surges (456), hurricanes (304), geophysical disasters (earthquakes – 302), mass movement (land and mudslides – 170) and wildfire (84).

The numbers historically and worldwide show a different pattern. Since 1900, the deadliest natural disasters worldwide are the 1931 China floods (1,000,000–4,000,000), the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (280,000), the 1920 Haiyuan (China) earthquake (273.400), the 1970 Bhola (Bangladesh) cyclone (250,000-500,000), then 1976 Tangshan (China) earthquake (242,000–655,000), Typhoon Nina (China) (229,000) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (160.000). The list continues with weather and earthquakes in the majority, but the nearest to the U.S. is the Haitian quake of 2010.

However, this survey is not about facts but fears. The Wichita Eagle reported that, while a variety of weather-induced disasters dominate the death list in the U.S., Sperling’s Best Places found that 21.1 percent of Americans fear earthquakes more than any other natural disaster, followed (but not closely) tornadoes (17.6 percent), wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, droughts, wind and hail.

“Earthquakes worry us for a number of reasons, thanks to their violent nature and the psychological terror of the earth moving beneath our feet. They strike quickly and without warning. Storms, on the other hand, are tracked by meteorologists and can be prepared for or avoided by evacuation.”

They also kill more people by the hundreds of thousands in poor areas because of poor construction, poor rescue and evacuation plans and poor emergency care. That’s not the case in earthquake-prone areas in the U.S. like California, which has been planning for the big one since the last big one. However, human-induced earthquakes from fracking are becoming more common in Oklahoma, Kansas and other states with high levels of usage of this natural gas extraction technique. While this may make quakes more predictable, these areas are better prepared for tornadoes and weather than geophysical disasters.

Is news of catastrophic earthquake and earthquake-induced tsunami destruction around the world causing Americans to have an unnatural fear of quakes at home? Is the increase in fracking-induced quakes causing it? Is it just the unpredictability of quakes?

Have you changed your mind about moving to Kansas, Oklahoma or anyplace near Yellowstone?

“We’re from the government and we’re here to help protect you from asteroids and space debris.”

If that doesn’t make you feel better, this might … or might not. As soon as NASA announced it plans to blow up dangerous incoming asteroids with a nuclear HAMMER, Russia countered with its own plan to destroy them with a giant laser beam. Meanwhile, a private company says it is developing a spacecraft armed with a giant harpoon that will shoot and haul in large and dangerous pieces of space debris. Would this work on an asteroid? When it comes to guarding us from space dangers, do we trust the public sector or the private sector. Or are we doomed either way?

If it seems like there’s a monthly announcement that we just missed getting hit by an asteroid that no one saw coming, you’re not far off. While NASA and other space organizations are tracking many large Near Earth Objects (NEO), more are slipping through the telescopic cracks. And even if they know it’s coming straight at us, no one has demonstrated how they’re going to protect us, despite Hollywood’s best attempts to come up with good ideas starring Bruce Willis. NASA hears your concerns and recently presented a paper with the National Nuclear Security Administration on how it could nuke and destroy the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu, which is scheduled to become a Really Near and Maybe Direct Hit Object in 2135.

The nuclear asteroids beater will be called HAMMER (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response) but it would be the asteroid doing the hammering. The plan, published in Acta Astronautica, is for launching a number of 9-meter-long nuclear projectiles into the space in front of Bennu but far enough away from Earth that we (well, our future we’s) are safe when Bennu crashes into the nukes and disintegrates. Just in case, the nukes can also be detonated from Earth. It’s expected to take 7.4 years from the “go” signal to the “goodbye Bennu” conclusion, so it’s a good thing we have time … unless another big asteroid shows up unexpectedly.

Fortunately, Russian scientists at ROSATOM (the Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation) and MIPT (the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) are already blowing up asteroids with lasers. You probably haven’t seen huge flashes of light in the sky because so far they’ve only been able to destroy tiny (10 mm/.4 inch) model asteroids in a lab. Their paper, published this week in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, describes how much laser power it would take to destroy a 200-meter-wide asteroid – that’s smaller than Bennu but ten times wider than the Chelyabinsk asteroid whose atmospheric explosion alone injured 1,000 people. A laser with the power of 3 megatons of TNT should do it. However, they don’t have anything near that yet.

Maybe we need to talk to Airbus, which announced it is testing (at its space center in Stevenage – pictures here) a 3ft (95 cm) missile attached to a cable that can be fired from its mothership at 55 mph using 1,500 G of force to travel 100 feet and penetrate a chunk of space debris and then be reeled in with said debris attached. The tough part is figuring out where to hit the debris so the harpoon sticks. Airbus has a target in mind – the 8-ton Envisat weather satellite which stopped working in 2012. Another test is scheduled for later this year and this space harpoon could be ready soon after that.

Unfortunately, the harpoon is probably far too small for asteroids.

We’re doomed.

We live in an age where reliance on computers, machines, and artificial intelligence is becoming stronger and more commonplace, inescapable to the point that society would cease to function as we know it without these things. As we progress on into the future there is every indication that these artificial intelligences will continue to evolve to the point that they equal us and perhaps even surpass us. Far from strictly the realm of science fiction, this is almost a certainty at the rate we are progressing, and it is at the stage now where we are learning that we are perhaps unprepared for what we will encounter in this hazy, unexplored domain lying before us. At least one group of researchers has realized that we are approaching a time when we will be faced with advanced AI in a realistic human form, and they have gone about testing how we will deal with this through a bizarre series of experiments in which computers basically possess humans.

When we talk to someone, how does their appearance and demeanor affect how much we listen to what they actually say? This was one of the questions that drove a group of British researchers at the London School of Economics to start a truly bizarre experiment to create what they call an “echoborg.” It sounds quite sinister, and perhaps the future implications of it might be, but the main premise involves simply using a chatbot with relatively advanced AI in one room, and a living breathing volunteer in the other, who wears an earpiece attached to the bot and simply repeats everything that comes through, essentially becoming the computer’s mouthpiece. In a sense, the human becomes “possessed” by the AI, and it is every bit as surreal as you might imagine.

Researchers wanted to know if the appearance of an AI would affect how it was perceived, and got the idea for the experiment from the 19th Century play, Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the very smart and witty, but physically unattractive De Bergerac uses his handsome but not very bright rival Christian as a mouthpiece, feeding him what to say and do in order to woo the beautiful object of his desire, Roxanne. The psychologist Stanley Milgram picked up on this idea and tried to explore it through experiments using what he called “cyranoids,” which were people who were told and dictated what to say or do through earpieces by a person in another room. In this manner the cyranoid then talks to someone who is unaware that the one really speaking is a completely different person. The idea was to see whether the physical perception of the person someone was talking to could shape the way they interacted with them, and it resoundingly did.

Interestingly, it was found that whole conversations could go by without the person ever realizing that the one in front of them was not who they were really talking to. It is indeed rather a creepy concept, but Milgram took it even further by trying extreme combinations of people, such as an old man speaking through a child, a man speaking through a woman, and vice-versa. In every case it was found that people were actually shockingly poor at determining if an imposter was speaking through the person they were talking through, and just went along with whatever they said no matter how much of a disconnect there was between what they were hearing and who was saying it. Even when people in the experiment were made aware of the fact that the speaker was not who they appeared to be, the illusion nevertheless still had an effect on their perceptions of what was being said. In short, the physical form of the speaker had a great power over the conversation, and there was the sobering realization that appearance seemed to be more of a factor in people’s perceptions of the speaker than the content of what they actually said.

It was these experiments that led to the work on echoborgs, which take it all a step further still by making the third party not a real person at all, but rather an artificial intelligence. They wanted to know what would happen if someone were to talk to a computer speaking by way of a human go-between, basically a human body with a robot mind for all intents and purposes. Would it change the way they interacted with or accepted the AI? Would anyone even realize they were talking to a computer at all? A researcher on the project by the name of Kevin Corti explained of the unusual project:

Most of the time we encounter AI today, it’s in a very mechanical interface. This was a way of doing it so that people actually believe they are encountering another person. We are very long way away from a perfectly human interface, but we can leapfrog that and put the machine mind in a human body, to see what happens.

And what happens is fairly weird indeed, with the experiments using the echoborgs yielding some surprising and intriguing results. In cases where the subject speaking to the echoborg is unaware that they are talking to a computer, it seems that they are poor at catching on to the charade, it they even figure it out at all. They continue talking despite any quirks or inconsistencies in the contents or flow of communication, and even after whole conversations don’t realize that anything is amiss or that they are basically chatting to a chatbot. Corti said of this remarkable phenomenon:

The vast majority of participants never picked up that they were speaking to the words of the computer program. They just assumed the person had some problem, where their social inhibitions had been diminished. Never for a minute did they think they were talking to a hybrid.

On the other hand, when the subject is told that they may or may not be talking to an AI, similar to the Turing Test, they are much more wary and readily able to discern the computer from the real person. In this case there was a set of expectations to be met in the mind of the subject for being human, and they were less forgiving and more suspicious of odd sentence patterns or strange things said. This could have repercussions on how we deal with sophisticated AI in the future, when we are likely to have more and more human-looking androids. It seems that with a human we are able to be very forgiving with idiosyncrasies and oddities in conversation, but we are primed to be very critical and even dismissive of what an AI says. When confronted with the fact that they had been speaking with an AI, most people were deeply uncomfortable, repulsed even, with the thought that they had been speaking with an AI through a human being deeply unsettling on an almost primal level. Corti said of this and its impact on our future dealings with robots, no matter how human they look, thus:

We might have AI’s intelligent beyond belief but our knowledge of them being non-human might limit our desire to interact with them in a human way. As artificial intelligence starts to get close to pass for human, it’s not just uncanny, it’s awkward. There’s a kind of awkward valley.

If this can happen with the relatively crude AI and chatbots we have now, imagine how it will be when artificial intelligence advances to the point where it can effectively and perfectly emulate a human being. How can we expect to approach, react to, and interact with these entities? Will we accept them and converse with them, or will we be instinctively repelled away, their existence just as alien as something from another world? These are things that we don’t have the answers for at the moment, and which Corti and his research group are trying to probe at the edges of. This seems to be a very real challenge facing us as we move on into a new world of ever more advanced robots and AI, and how people think of these intelligences they are interacting with will have a big part to play in how they are integrated into society as a whole. Another researcher on the project named Alex Gillespie has said of their experiments looking into this:

I think it really gets us ahead of the curve. If you look at history, we think it’s powered by technology – but it’s not. It’s public opinion. They will decide if these things are on the streets as police officers, so a huge amount of work needs to be done to see how we relate to it.

It is certainly a complex and challenging problem we are facing as we move on into new, uncharted realms of technology for which there is no historical precedent. As we approach an age when AI will be advanced to the point that it is indistinguishable from a human and the appearance of these machines approaches a close approximation of us, these are important things to think about. After all, how would you feel talking to a machine? How would you feel after being confronted with a human serving as a mouthpiece for one, as in the echoborg experiments? Would you be filled with wonder and awe, or a sense of unease or disgust? It seems that the time will come when we speak with AI on a regular basis, but how we will deal with that and react to it is a road foggier and less defined. The implications of this advance into ever more human machines presents a conundrum for us on just what being human is. We are in uncharted waters here, and we will likely not know the repercussions of our inexorable push into the frontiers of technology until we reach that point.

In December 2017, the Tom DeLonge-fronted To The Stars Academy (TTSA) released two videos it claimed showed U.S. military aircraft encountering unidentified aerial phenomenon. Around the same time, The New York Times released a report detailing a massive Pentagon program aimed at collecting evidence of UFOs and related phenomenon. The videos became mainstream news for a while, prompting warnings from veteran UFO researchers about trusting these “official” sources.

Things got more interesting earlier this month when TTSA released a third video they claimed showed yet another encounter between an F/A-18 and a fast-moving object flying above the ocean off America’s east coast. While these videos have become some of the most talked-about pieces of UFO evidence in recent history, a wide range of sources from across the web are raising doubts about their authenticity. A research academy fronted by a former pop-punk singer wouldn’t lie to us, would it?

Of course not.

In a reddit post titled “Buckle up boys – you’re about to get learnt”, user Blu3Skies lays out evidence claiming that TTSA’s latest two video releases could be hoaxes. The post was submitted to the r/ConspiracyII forum, which split off of r/Conspiracy after it became flooded with, uh, let’s call it “political” content. In the post, Blu3Skies cites the fact that the heads-up display overlaid on top of both videos seems to display the same PRF code, or pulse repetition frequency, a unique numerical identifier assigned to specific aircraft for specific sorties:

Why would 2 F18s have matching PRF codes on different coasts even if at different time frames? They wouldn’t. Plain and simple. For years I used the same PRF code overseas without it ever changing once as did every major air asset I worked with. As a military aviator I find this fishy as f*** now- something doesn’t add up here.

Other reddit users noted that those codes could have been altered after being declassified to make them appropriate for public release. They are clearly spliced together from longer pieces of footage, after all, implying that there could be still much in the videos concerning flight formations or capabilities theDepartment of Defense doesn’t want known. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense issued a terse, informationless statement in the way only the DoD can, stating merely “The Department of Defense did not release those videos. I cannot confirm their authenticity. I don’t have any additional info to provide.”

Of course, the possibility remains that these videos could be hoaxes altogether, designed to raise just enough public interest to justify…well, something. Political news outlet The Hill ran an editorial this week claiming that the “only thing Defense’s UFO probe proves is power of political favors.” The authors point out that the main recipient of the Pentagon’s $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program was none other than UFO-obsessed aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. The Las Vegas-based Bigelow just so happens to be a major campaign contributor to Nevada senator and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid who was instrumental in securing funding for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program. Was this Pentagon-funded program merely a way to return the favor to a major source of funding using taxpayer dollars? It’s possible, and happens all the time.

Bigelow also wants to put inflatable hotels in space over the next ten years.

Other skeptics and analysts have weighed in claiming that based on their appearance, the objects are most likely balloonsor flocks of birds misidentified by pilots in the moment. Given the grainy and somewhat indistinct infrared footage in the videos, it’s difficult to tell exactly what the objects are. These claims make me wonder, though: would we be able to recognize and identify truly anomalous phenomenon we’ve never encountered the first time we saw them, or would our minds reach for familiar experiences and objects like balloons to help us make sense of them? 

One of the most likely explanations for the release of these videos and the increased attention unidentified aerial phenomena are receiving in the mainstream press is that someone or perhaps something here on Earth has developed technological capabilities which have surpassed those of the West. Could China or Russia have developed next-generation propulsion methods unlike anything we’ve ever seen? If so, calling them UFOs and raising public support for increased funding in aerospace research is a great way to boost military spending without frightening the public or coming off too militaristic. Then again, these videos could be evidence of new American air technology unbeknownst to the public released by the DoD’s as a means of rattling their sabers in a public setting. 

But maybe, just maybe, these videos could be proof of something truly anomalous and mysterious. Could there be unknown extremely advanced civilizations living deep within the Earth or under the seas operating sophisticated aircraft up here on the surface? Or could we actually be witnessing contact with superior extraterrestrial civilizations? Could these be evidence of some unknown type of matter or energy passing through Earth as it zooms through the universe? Who knows. With so little to go on, any guess is as good as any. But it’s going to take a lot more than a few short videos to convince the public of whatever is happening here.

Astronomers at the Parkes Observatory in Australia have observed the brightest fast radio burst known to science. The signal was detected first on March 1st, then again on March 9th and 11th, with the March 9th signal breaking the record for strongest known deep space radio signal. All three of the signals have a high signal-to-noise ratio and their orientation is not thought to be vulnerable to interference from terrestrial sources – meaning they have a powerful, localized origin. Scientists recently detected a “rapid fire” burst coming from a separate radio source just a few months ago. Could this strange pattern of radio bursts lend credence to the theories that these signals might be attempts at intergalactic communication?

While it’s far too tempting to believe (or maybe just hope) that these signals could be transmissions sent by distant alien civilizations, astronomers are much more cautious. The prevailing theory of many astronomers at the moment is that these radio bursts are caused by neutron star emissions or perhaps released by stars with powerful magnetic fields being ripped apart by black holes. Still, there is much room for speculation given how little we actually know about FRBs. Will astronomers ever crack the mystery of these unexplained deep space radio signals?

A radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory.

Unfortunately, we’ve only known about these fast radio bursts for ten years or so, and their rarity and unpredictability means data is scarce; only 33 confirmed FRB sources are currently known to astronomers. Even if these new signals didn’t break the record for signal strength, the detection of three separate fast radio bursts in one month is pretty unusual on its own. Could this have been an attempt at getting our attention? It surely worked.

However, it could also be that astronomers are merely getting better at detecting and identifying them, and all the recent attention FRBs have gotten means astronomers are likely searching for them much more carefully. Still, every new discovery puts us closer to discovering the truth of these mysterious radio signals. Which most likely will be a banal astrophysical phenomenon which further beats into our caveman skulls the fact that we’re desperately alone out here in the vacuum of space.

Merriam-Webster.com defines self-awareness as: “An awareness of one’s own personality or individuality.” That certain applies to us. But, it may not apply to the Men in Black. Indeed, I have more than a few reports on file which suggest the MIB are completely lacking in self-awareness. But, how could that be? Let’s take a look. First and foremost, it’s important to note that the MIB are not regular people. They may well not be people at all. In fact, I seriously doubt they are. The Men in Black movie-trilogy presented the MIB as agents of government. They’re not. The overwhelming majority of witnesses describe the MIB as looking very weird. They are pale, gaunt and cadaverous. They have bulging eyes that are semi-hidden by sunglasses. And they have the ability to control minds. But, there is something even stranger: it’s that lack of full self-awareness.

Peter Beckman is a man who had an encounter with a pair of Men in Black in the late 1960s. It was a mind-bending experience which led Beckman to say the following of the MIB who appeared on his doorstep, late one night, in Carmichael, California. He says of the encounter, which involved a friend of his too, Stephen Leeson:

“They were pale and sickly; their clothes hung real loose and they looked as though they might expire at any moment. They appeared to have either trouble breathing, or trouble even being.  I don’t believe they said a thing. If they did, it has disappeared from memory. Very odd, indeed. I recall that, as I was waiting for them to speak, my mind was racing; should I try humor or invective?  My general impression is that they were kind of confused, but just ever so slightly amused by the situation. It was as though they were waiting for us to speak. Their physical attitudes seemed to be waiting for some sort of answer, although no questions were asked.”

The entire affair seems to have been dominated by a degree of missing time and a sense of unreality. Indeed, both Peter and Stephen  were on mescaline at the time – and both experienced the MIBs in the very same way. All of this suggests an altered state and a connection between the mescaline and the Men in Black, who clearly didn’t have full awareness of why they were there. Or even who or what they were. Curious, to say the least.

Film-maker Sean Kotz prepared a paper on the MIB for me a few years back. Its title: “Observations and Theories on the MIB Phenomenon.” Sean wrote: “One of the things that makes the Man in Black phenomenon so fascinating is the general social oddity of encounters. In everything from displaced fashions, to mechanical grammar and outdated expressions, to trying to drink Jello or fixating on ash trays and ink pens, the MIB seem just a little off.” Sean also said of the MIB: “They will stand or sit rigidly and seem unaware of social protocols, missing cues to sit down or relax.”

A few years back I interviewed a woman named Tina Vincent, who had an encounter with a Man in Black in the fall of 1989, while living in Minnesota at the time. After seeing a large, black, triangular-shaped UFO over her home late one night, Tina was soon visited by a tall and thin Man in Black. And, after knocking on her door very early the next morning, the MIB entered Tina’s home and warned her not to talk about her sighting of the previous night. Notably, Tina said she got a feeling that the gruesome figure in black seemed to be speaking as if he had memorized the words. She felt that the MIB didn’t actually know what it/he was saying. Rather, she explained, it was as if the words that came from the MIB’s mouth had been carefully learned by an actor. The word “programmed” popped up in my interview with Tina.

When it comes to the Men in Black, cases like these abound. There is no doubt that, at times, the MIB struggle to get their words out. They lack a full awareness of what is going on around them. But, they are very good at issuing threats – as if, as Tina noted, they were working to some kind of programming. Biological robots? Something akin to “The Agents” in The Matrix movies? Or, something else entirely? There are few, if any, hard answers.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }