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

Montage of our solar system. Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Artists’s concept (montage) of our solar system.

Image via NASA/JPL.

Remember those Styrofoam models of the solar system we made in elementary school? The solar system is even cooler than that! Here are 10 things you might not know.

1. The hottest planet isn’t closest to the sun.

Many people know that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, well less than half of the Earth’s distance. It’s no mystery, therefore, why people would assume that Mercury is the hottest planet. We know that Venus, the second planet away from the sun, is on the average 30 million miles (48 million km) farther from the sun than Mercury. The natural assumption is that, being farther away, Venus must be cooler. But assumptions can be dangerous. For practical consideration, Mercury has no atmosphere, no warming blanket to help it maintain the sun’s heat. Venus, on the other hand, is shrouded by an unexpectedly thick atmosphere, about 100 times thicker than Earth’s atmosphere. This in itself would normally serve to prevent some of the sun’s energy from escaping back into space and thus raise the overall temperature of the planet. But in addition to the atmosphere’s thickness, it is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas. The carbon dioxide freely lets solar energy in, but is much less transparent to the longer wavelength radiation emitted by the heated surface. Thus the temperature rises to a level far above what would be expected, making it the hottest planet. In fact the average temperature on Venus is about 875 degrees Fahrenheit (468 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt tin and lead. The maximum temperature on Mercury, the planet closer to the sun, is about 800 degrees F (427 degrees C). In addition, the lack of atmosphere causes Mercury’s surface temperature to vary by hundreds of degrees, whereas the thick mantle of carbon dioxide keeps the surface temperature of Venus steady, hardly varying at all, anywhere on the planet or any time of day or night!

New Horizons captured this image of Pluto on July 25, 2015, when the spacecraft was 280,000 miles (450,000 km) from the planet.

Image via NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

2. Pluto is smaller in diameter than the U.S.

The greatest distance across the contiguous United States – from Northern California to Maine – is nearly 2,900 miles (about 4,700 km). Thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015, we now know that Pluto is 1,473 miles (2,371 km) across, less than half the width of the U.S. Certainly in size it is much smaller than any major planet, perhaps making it a bit easier to understand why, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union changed Pluto’s status from major planet to dwarf planet.

3. George Lucas doesn’t know much about asteroid fields.

In many science fiction movies, spacecraft are often endangered by pesky asteroid fields. In actuality, the only asteroid belt we are aware of exists between Mars and Jupiter, and although there are tens of thousands of asteroids in it (perhaps more), they are quite widely spaced and the likelihood of colliding with one is small. In fact, spacecraft must be deliberately and carefully guided to asteroids to have a chance of even photographing one. Given the presumed manner of asteroid creation, it is highly unlikely that spacefarers will ever encounter asteroid swarms or fields in deep space.

4. You can make volcanos using water as magma.

Mention volcanoes and everyone immediately thinks of Mount St. Helens, Mount Vesuvius, or maybe the lava caldera of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Volcanos require molten rock called lava (or magma when still underground), right? Not really. A volcano forms when an underground reservoir of a hot, fluid mineral or gas erupts onto the surface of a planet or other non-stellar astronomical body. The exact composition of the mineral can vary greatly. On Earth, most volcanoes sport lava (or magma) that has silicon, iron, magnesium, sodium, and a host of complicated minerals. The volcanoes of Jupiter’s moon Io appear to be composed mostly of sulfur and sulfur dioxide. But it can be simpler than that. On Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Neptune’s moon Triton, and others, the driving force is ice, good old frozen H₂0! Water expands when it freezes and enormous pressures can build up, just as in a “normal” volcano on Earth. When the ice erupts, a cryovolcano is formed. So volcanoes can operate on water as well as molten rock. By the way, we have relatively small scale eruptions of water on Earth called geysers. They are associated with superheated water that has come into contact with a hot reservoir of magma.

Artist's concept of water volcano on Enceladus.

Artist concept of water volcano on Enceladus.

Via NASA/ David Seal.

5. The edge of the solar system is 1,000 times farther away than Pluto.

You might still think of the solar system as extending out to the orbit of the much-loved dwarf planet Pluto. Today we don’t even consider Pluto a full-fledged planet, but the impression remains. Still, we have discovered numerous objects orbiting the sun that are considerably farther than Pluto. These are Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) or Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The Kuiper Belt, the first of the sun’s two reservoirs of cometary material, is thought to extend to 50 or 60 astronomical units (AU, or the average distance of the Earth from the sun). An even farther part of the solar system, the huge but tenuous Oort comet cloud, may extend to 50,000 AU from the sun, or about half a light-year – more than 1,000 times farther than Pluto.

6. Almost everything on Earth is a rare element.

The elemental composition of planet Earth is mostly iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, sodium, and aluminum. While such elements have been detected in locations throughout the universe, they are merely trace elements, vastly overshadowed by the much greater abundances of hydrogen and helium. Thus Earth, for the most part, is composed of rare elements. This does not signify any special place for Earth, however. The cloud from which the Earth formed had a much higher abundance of hydrogen and helium, but being light gases, they were driven away into space by the sun’s heat as the Earth formed.

7. There are Mars rocks on Earth (and we didn’t bring them here).

Chemical analysis of meteorites found in Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, and elsewhere have been shown by various means to have originated on Mars. For example, some contain pockets of gas that is chemically identical to the Martian atmosphere. These meteorites may have been blasted away from Mars due to a larger meteoroid or asteroid impact on Mars, or by a huge volcanic eruption, and later collided with Earth.

8. Jupiter has the biggest ocean of any planet,

albeit made of metallic hydrogen. Orbiting in cold space five times farther from the sun than Earth, Jupiter retained much higher levels of hydrogen and helium when it formed than did our planet. In fact, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium. Given the planet’s mass and chemical composition, physics demands that way down under the cold cloud tops, pressures rise to the point that the hydrogen must turn to liquid. In fact there should be a deep planetary ocean of liquid hydrogen. Computer models show that not only is this the largest ocean known in the solar system, but that it is about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) deep – roughly as deep as the Earth is around!

9. Even really small bodies can have moons.

It was once thought that only objects as large as planets could have natural satellites or moons. In fact the existence of moons, or the capability of a planet to gravitationally control a moon in orbit, was sometimes used as part of the definition of what a planet truly is. It just didn’t seem reasonable that smaller celestial bodies had enough gravity to hold a moon. After all, Mercury and Venus have none at all, and Mars has only tiny moons. But in 1993, the Galileo probe passed the 20-mile wide asteroid Ida and discovered its one-mile wide moon, Dactyl. Since then moons have been discovered orbiting many other minor planets in our solar system.

10. We live inside the sun.

Normally we think of the sun as being that big, hot ball of light 93 million miles (150 million km) away. But actually, the sun’s outer atmosphere extends far beyond its visible surface. Our planet orbits within this tenuous atmosphere, and we see evidence of this when gusts of the solar wind generate the Northern and Southern Lights. In that sense, we definitely live inside the sun. But the solar atmosphere doesn’t end at Earth. Auroras have been observed on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and even distant Neptune. In fact, the outer solar atmosphere, called the heliosphere, is thought to extend at least 100 A.U. That’s nearly 10 billion miles (16 billion km). In fact the atmosphere is likely teardrop shaped due to the sun’s motion in space, with the “tail” extending tens to hundreds of billions of miles downwind.

This artist’s concept puts solar system distances in perspective. The scale bar is in astronomical units, with each set distance beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance. One AU is the distance from the sun to the Earth, which is about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers. NASA’s Voyager 1, humankind’s most distant spacecraft, is around 125 AU. Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bottom line: The solar system is cool. Here are 10 things you might not know.

Born just a couple of years before the 20th century began, Truman Bethurum was a man who had problems keeping a regular job. He was also someone who was hardly a success when it came to the matter of marriage. He was married and divorced twice and spent his old age with his third wife. Bethurum also happened to be one of the more well-known of the so-called “Contactees” of the 1950s. Bethurum claimed that while working as a maintenance mechanic on a new stretch of Nevada highway in the early 1950s, he met an über-babe from the stars named Aura Rhanes. She was the captain of the star-ship which descended before Bethurum on Mormon Mesa, in Nevada’s Moapa Valley. The home-planet of the ETs was Clarion, about which Bethurum learned a great deal. And Bethurum didn’t just meet with his space-chick once, but on more than a dozen occasions.

Bethurum’s entertaining experiences increased, as did his relationship with the flirty Captain Rhanes. For a significant period of time, Bethurum and Rhanes had clandestine meetings, usually late at night. They generally occurred in isolated desert locations in Nevada, where, after Rhanes’ huge ship landed, the pair had long and deep conversations about the state of the Earth, the Soviet threat, and the captain’s home world – to which she promised to take Bethurum, one day. While Bethurum did not explicitly say so, there are a few nuggets of data in Bethurum’s collective work that suggest on a couple of occasions the pair might have had just about the closest and most intimate encounters of all. It’s hardly surprising, then, that many UFO researchers outright dismiss Bethurum’s story as a hoax, or as a fantasy born out of Bethurum’s unhappiness with his private life.

I don’t think that Bethurum had real encounters with a genuine, hot, space captain from some faraway world. But, I don’t think it was just a case of Bethurum fantasizing or spinning a significant number of yarns to entertain the UFO enthusiasts of the 1950s. Remember that when Bethurum got that new work contract in Nevada, and he began talking about encounters with aliens (and one alien in particular…), his second marriage was already on the rocks. Clearly, he was looking for something (or, more correctly, someone) new.

It should be noted that a number of Bethurum’s encounters with the curvy captain occurred late at night and while he was out in the desert and just after taking a snooze. This latter point of Bethurum dozing off before Aura appeared is important, because his own words strongly suggest that he was in a hypnagogic state when he encountered the woman-who-probably-never-was. Psychonautwiki note of hypnagogia that it “…is the experience of transitioning from wakefulness to sleep. During this state, one usually experiences visual, auditory or tactile hallucinations, or sleep paralysis…Exceptionally, longer-lasting auditory hallucinations can also be heard, such as music. Some people report hearing very loud noises, like crashes, gunshots or explosions…”

Bethurum’s own words show that just before he woke up, and right before Captain Rhanes put in her appearances, he would often hear words spoken in a kind of “mumbling” fashion. Sometimes he could understand the words, but on other occasions he was unable to figure out what the voices were saying. This issue of strange mumbling is a classic aspect of hypnagogia. It’s worth noting too that Bethurum’s job in Nevada involved shift-work. Sometimes, he worked from the late afternoon/early evening and through to the early hours of the morning (when the Nevada heat was more tolerable than during the height of the day). Disturbed sleep (which Bethurum must have had to at least a certain degree) can make hypnagogia worse. Or, from Bethurum’s perspective, much better! On this matter of disturbed sleep, Mental Health Daily state: “Those that work night shifts or have an inconsistent sleep schedule may be more prone to hypnagogic hallucinations prior to bed.”

Although over the years I have admittedly swung back and forth on the matter of what really happened to Bethurum, I would suggest that, probably, the entire series of encounters occurred while Bethurum was in a hypnagogic state – a state in which Bethurum could have his ideal woman. With one marriage over and another one all but finished, Bethurum’s subconscious conveniently filled in the gaps and gave Bethurum exactly what he wanted. From his perspective, it was a beautiful woman from the stars. But, just like his relationships in the real world, even the one he had with super-hot Aura didn’t last. She finally bid him goodbye, climbed aboard her UFO and headed back to Clarion.

Bethurum’s story of how he almost (or may have..) nailed an extraterrestrial was told in 1954, in the pages of Aboard a Flying Saucer, which is a fine and entertaining romp filled with innuendos and suggestive snippets. But, Bethurum was not done. Other publications surfaced, such as 1957’s The Voice of the Planet Clarion; 1958’s Facing Reality (which, clearly, Bethurum never did), and The People of the Planet Clarion, which was published in 1970, one year after his death.

One of those who helped Bethurum on his 1970 book, The People of the Planet Clarion, was an artist named Columba Krebs. It’s notable that Krebs observed, and stated, that Bethurum had an overwhelming obsession with Rhanes, even years after she dumped him. He longed for her to return. She never did. But, it could be argued that such was Bethurum’s need to still have Aura in his life, he almost managed to achieve that – albeit in a very weird way.

In 1961, Bethurum married for a third time. And it all took place at the annual, California-based Giant Rock Space Convention, which was organized each year by fellow-Contactee, George Van Tassel. Bethurum’s new wife (and final wife, I should stress) was named Alvira Roberts. Maybe it’s all just a coincidence, but I find the name of wife number three to be very intriguing. Both “Aura” and “Alvira” begin with the letter “A.” Both first-names end with an “A” too. “Rhanes” and “Roberts” both begin with “R” and both end with “S.” Bethurum may have been missing Aura Rhanes to such an extent that he chose to marry someone whose name – to a degree – reminded him of the woman who he loved, but who he could never be with – because she never really lived.

Obsession, fantasy, yearning and failure, and all wrapped up in a saga filled with flying saucers and disturbed sleep patterns.

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