John Podesta on 'Ancient Aliens': Hillary Clinton would have declassified UFO information

by Emily Jashinsky

Hillay Clinton’s campaign chairman was on cable television Friday night peddling conspiracy theories about extraterrestrial life forms, and nobody seems to have noticed.

In fairness, I didn’t really believe it until I saw it either. But there he was, John Podesta, speaking gravely over a foreboding soundtrack, lending his very earnest insights to “Ancient Aliens” on The History Channel. ( Don’t tell Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa ).

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Podesta has long been in avid pursuit of the truth about UFOs, memorably reassuring the public during Clinton’s 2016 campaign he’d “convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can, so that people have their legitimate questions answered.”

John Podesta

✔@johnpodesta

Tune in to The History Channel tonight at 9pm ET for the season premiere of Ancient Aliens #TheTruthIsOutThere

1:53 AM - Apr 28, 2018

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And so it came to be, this former White House chief of staff and counselor to the president sat before “Ancient Aliens” cameras and unloaded enigmatic observations like, “The government seems to be completely unaccountable to the American public,” and “I've had a number of members of Congress, members of the U.S. Senate say to me, ‘Keep going at this. I'm really interested in it, but I can't say anything about it.’"

Behold this surreal exchange, wherein Podesta very seriously reflects on the Clinton campaign’s pro-alien declassification platform.

NARRATOR: Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, is well-known for his interest in UFO and extraterrestrial encounters, and according to him, so is she.

PODESTA: Secretary Clinton, likewise, was also kind of interested in the topic, and during the course of the campaign said that, if elected, she would have ordered a more thorough declassification review …

NARRATOR: Many believe that had Clinton won, there would have been a seismic shift from the government's long-held policy of secrecy concerning UFO investigations to a new policy of full disclosure.

PODESTA: The system of regulation that creates our secrecy system — what's top secret, what's confidential, these lower levels of classification — that's regulated and has been since the Truman administration by executive order of the president. The president sets forward the general rules of classification, and some presidents have been more forthcoming, wanted less secrecy, some have tightened the reins and wanted more secrecy. It makes a difference.

That provided an opening for another of the episode’s commentators to claim, “The CIA and the Pentagon, they were worried about Hillary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, all the statements she was making, winning the presidency, and going to the Pentagon and basically saying, ‘You are going to give me the information I need to disclose the extraterrestrial presence or I’m gonna fire every single one of you.’”

Which, in turn, set up another expert nicely to insist with dramatic flair: “John Podesta was trying to get ready to open up that we're not alone in the universe. All of that crashed when a different person became president of the United States.”

“November 8, 2016: Donald Trump was elected as America's next president,” the History Channel’s narrator intones. “There would be no disclosure of the secret UFO files.”

So, was Trump’s election really secured by scheming puppetmasters in Russia? Or were those strings perhaps pulled from a little further out of this world by aliens hoping to shield their species from exposure to our planet at this strange moment in time?

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

01-05-2018 om 01:47 geschreven door peter  

By Matt Blitz

SETI INSTITUTE

"James Cameron's Story of Sci-Fi" launches tonight on AMC at 10 PM Eastern. The first episode of this six-part series focuses on aliens and how they've been portrayed in science fiction.

Here in the real world, scientists have spent more than a half-century actively listening to the sky and searching for E.T. This is their story.

---

“Are we alone in the universe?”

Humans have been pondering this question since medieval times, and probably long before. But for most of history, people had little more than low-tech telescopes and highly active imaginations with which to explore the idea that there’s life out there in the cosmos. Not anymore.

“After a millennia of asking the priests and philosophers what we should believe about life somewhere else, we suddenly have the tools,” Jill Tarter told Popular Mechanics. “We can explore instead of believe.”

As the former director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, Tarter has led the painstaking search for life beyond Earth. Even though such a discovery would deeply transform society as we know it, SETI operates on a shoestring budget.

"It has had this... 'giggle factor,’” says Stephen Garber, a policy analyst in the NASA History Division and author of several reports about NASA’s decades-long flirtation with SETI. “It [gained] this bad reputation...It was...an uphill battle for members of Congress to think it was a worthwhile science."

Of course, great scientists throughout history have been ignored, disregarded, and laughed at while trying to find answers to humanity's greatest questions. Will SETI scientists fine their vindication?

The Search Begins

Astronomer and SETI founder Frank Drake (middle) at the National Radio Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

GETTY IMAGESMICHAEL ROUGIER/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION

In 1960, 29-year-old radio astronomer Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, lead humanity’s first organized search for interstellar radio transmissions. Fulfilling a dream he had since he was an eight-year-old living in Chicago, Drake pointed the observatory’s 85-foot radio telescope at two far-flung stars—Tau Ceti in the constellation Cetus and Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus. These stars are some 66 trillion miles away from Earth and about the same age as our sun. He called it Project Ozma, in honor of the fictional queen of Oz.

For six hours a day over the next two months, Drake and his team listened on a single frequency (1420 MHz) for signs of intelligent life. The hope was to hear a succession of uniform pulses or perhaps a numbering system, like a series of prime numbers. And, early on, they did.

FOR SIX HOURS A DAY AND OVER THE NEXT TWO MONTHS ON A SINGLE FREQUENCY, DRAKE AND HIS TEAM LISTENED FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE.

The team stumbled across a strong, periodic, pulsating signal. Excited, they investigated further, but discovered that the signal was actually Earth-based, thought at an altitude thought impossible for modern aircraft to reach. Soon the rest of the world discovered what Drake and his team had heard—a U-2 spy plane had been shot down by the Soviet Union.

Undeterred, Drake still pondered the otherworldly. Using this first experiment and a few other calculations, Drake conjured a formula for figuring out the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life contacting Earth. He called it the Drake Equation.

Drake's famous formula takes the number of stars born per year in the Milky Way that could conceivably host life-sustaining worlds, and multiples that by variety of factors including the fraction of stars that could have planets, the conditions for life, and the probability that the society is advanced enough to communicate beyond its own planet. Finally, that number is multiplied by a predicted average lifetime of advanced societies.

Drake’s equation.

UNIVESITY OF ROCHESTER

Drake admitted later that he was amazed that the equation became “one of the great icons of science because it didn’t take any deep intellectual effort or insight on my part.” His intention was simply to take a big idea and boil it down so that even beginners could understand what’s required to create advanced lifeforms.

Nonetheless, Drake concluded that more than 10,000 societies brimmed with intelligent life and were capable of reaching out to Earth. “[Drake’s estimate] of 10,000 galactic communicative societies is just as good today as it was in 1961,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute and author of the book Confessions of an Alien Hunter. “We still can’t make an [exact] calculation, [but it’s] an informed guess.”

NASA Joins the Hunt

The Australian Parkes telescope, an instrumental telescope during the NASA Apollo 11 mission.

SETI INSTITUTE

Around the same time, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison from Cornell University theorized that aliens would contact us via electromagnetic waves and over the frequency of 1420 MHz. The reason: That is the emission frequency of hydrogen, which, as any advanced species would know, is the most abundant element in the universe. The hydrogen hypothesis was just the beginning of a flood of ideas about how to find E.T.

In 1966, astrophysicist Carl Sagan speculated in his book Intelligent Life in the Universe that perhaps extraterrestrials had already come to Earth at some point in the planet’s history. Then five years later, during the apex of Apollo mania, NASA published the fateful Project Cyclops report.

Led by John Billingham and Bernard Oliver, the report laid out a bold and ambitious plan about how public funding could greatly enhance the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. One of the most prominent recommendations was doing away with big, self-contained radio telescopes and replacing with an array of radio telescopes in order to increase the total collecting area and thereby improve the sensitivity. A large number of small antennas not only cost less than one big one, but could be configured to look at many different spots in the sky simultaneously.

The report also offered that while 1420 MHz was perhaps the most likely frequency to meet our cosmic neighbors, it wasn’t the only place that a signal could be heard. It suggested stretching the search from 1000 MHz to 10,000 MHz with particular attention being paid to 1420 MHz to 1666 MHz, where the neutral form of hydroxyl radiates. This area on the dial that was coined the “water hole” due to the abundance of hydrogen and hydroxl—which together make water.

In the end, Project Cyclops never came to be. While the report did recommend starting with “minimum systems” and making additions until making contact or “until a new and superior technology was discovered,” the grand ambitions and the hefty price tag—with estimates reaching between $6 to $10 billion—were too much for Congress to approve.

“HERE WAS AN OLD QUESTION THAT HUMANITY HAD BEEN ASKING FOREVER AND I WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE AND HAD THE RIGHT SKILLS.”

The report admits that there needed to be immense buy-in to make the project worthwhile, “to justify such an effort, which may require billions of dollars and decades of time, we must truly believe that other intelligent life exists and that contact with it would be enormously stimulating and beneficial to mankind.”

Regardless of its demise, Project Cyclops became a sacred text for those who truly believed in SETI. Tarter read the report while she was a graduate student at Berkeley. She was a computer programmer at the time and was the only one who knew how to program the PDP-8, the outdated computer that analyzed voltage signals from Berkeley's telescope at Hat Creek, a telescope in search for anything that’s particularly non-human.

Reading the report would change her life.

“Here was an old question that humanity had been asking forever and I was in the right place and had the right skills,” says Tarter, who also got her PhD in astrophysics, “this was a big question I could work on... and maybe help find an answer, too.”

SETI as Science

Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico.

SETI INSTITUTE

While denied billions of dollars to extend humanity's search in the galaxy, Project Cyclops showed that there was an appetite for government-funded SETI research. By the late 1970s, NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena both had established SETI programs. Tarter worked on these programs and but the Cold War UFO craze made things difficult.

“Our early years... were dedicated to distancing ourselves from that pseudoscience,” says Tarter, “and showing that this was a rigorous scientific exploration.” They did this by simply approaching it the way it would have for any other science: writing lots of papers, proposals, giving presentations, and lobbying to be in prestigious reports.

This included the 1977 “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” report, written by many who were involved in Project Cyclops, in which it attempts to persuade the world that SETI was timely, feasible, prudent, and could be done at a lower cost (though it never proposes even an estimated dollar amount). The report even threw in some red terror by highlighting the advances the Soviets were making in the field, a powerful political motivator at the time.

Jill Tarter, project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, stands on the Arecibo Complex in Puerto Rico, 1992.

GETTY IMAGESACEY HARPER

NASA reports also advocated for “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence [to] be supported and continued at a modest level as a long-term NASA research program.” While not government supported, much attention was paid to Sagan and Drake's 1974 collaborative effort to send out a binary message to our possible cosmic pals using the Arecibo Observatory telescope in Puerto Rico, at the time the world's largest single-aperture telescope.

Tarter says it took awhile, but due to these projects they eventually had enough support from outside of the government to establish the non-profit SETI Institute in late 1984 with Tarter was one of its founders.

“Suddenly, all of this money was freed up to actually do science, build instruments, and figure out how to observe,” says Tarter. At the same time, the Planetary Society, co-founded by Carl Sagan, also began listening to the sky, not to mention many other teams doing the same across the world.

In 1988, NASA headquarters formally endorsed SETI research and, with an increase in federal funding, started building out needed hardware and training. It culminated in the 1992 Columbus Day announcement of a ten-year, $100-million SETI program called “High-Resolution Microwave Survey," which would focus on targeted searching and all-sky surveying.

While this was certainly a win for scientists, Congress wasn’t so happy. During the 1991 budget debate, Congressmen Silvio Conte made the case for all of those who didn’t want to believe. “We cannot spend money on curiosity today when we have a deficit,” the Congressman said, saying one could spend “75 cents to buy a tabloid [with reports of aliens] at the local supermarket.”

“WE CANNOT SPEND MONEY ON CURIOSITY TODAY WHEN WE HAVE A DEFICIT.”

Two years later, Congress cut off federal funding of SETI. On September 22, 1993, Senator Richard Bryan proposed a last-minute amendment to kill the agreed-upon $100 million program, saying SETI had not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and there was no guarantee they ever would. The money, he believed, was being wasted, and the majority of the Senate agreed.

This was all during a time of immense budget cuts measures and SETI wasn’t the only scientific project shut down or deeply defunded. Earlier that year, funding was cut for a NASA-led space station and, in October 1993, Congress shelved plans for a Texas-based particle accelerator, which could have discovered the Higgs particle years earlier.

“We’ve been able to be more aggressive and bold than we might have been,” says Tarter, relating how the cuts affected SETI. “[But] if we have had level and sustained funding over that period, we would have been able to attract the best and brightest of the younger generation.

"We might have had some breakthroughs that we haven’t.”

Narrowing the Search

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI.

NASA/DAVID C. BOWMAN

In the two plus decades since the split, privately-funded SETI programs have popped up across the country. While few in number, the SETI Institute, Harvard and Berkeley all have well-known programs. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen funded the Allen Telescope Array at California's Hat Creek Radio Observatory, which went online in 2007, and internationally, China is also searching the skies.

“It’s actually a better way to do science so you all are not duplicating the same ideas others have,” says Shostak.

The biggest technological changes over the past few decades were faster equipment, more sensitive receivers, the increased importance of optical searching, and the ability to monitor millions of channels at once.

Shostak says SETI monitors about 70 million channels all at once, so if our extraterrestrial friends want to reach out, we have a better chance of hearing them.

"I BET EVERYBODY...THAT WE WOULD FIND INTELLIGENT LIFE WITHIN TWO DOZEN YEARS...NOT MICROBES. I’M TALKING ABOUT ALIENS."

It’s thanks to this improved tech as well as NASA’s help that we now know more about our potential cosmic neighbors. Although in an unofficial capacity, NASA has helped SETI discover more about our potential cosmic neighbors in the past 25 years. Although expected to run out of fuel in the next few months, the nine-year-old Kepler Mission successfully confirmed over 2,300 previously unknown planets in our galaxy. Thirty of those planets are potentially in the habitable zone, meaning they are similar size and in a temperature region where liquid water could pool on the surface.

In other words, those 30 planets could be candidates for intelligent life and are perfect targets for SETI’s radio telescopes. “These are all candidates,” says Shostak, “They are like lottery tickets. Most are bad, but maybe not all.” NASA’s newly launched TESS will continue where Kepler left off in an ongoing search for “Goldilocks” planets.

“I bet everybody...that we would find intelligent life within two dozen years," Shostak says. "Not microbes. I’m talking about aliens.”

But what exactly would first contact look like? Shostak says it would be nothing like what we see in the movies.

It would probably be in the form of a radio bleep or a narrow band signal coming from a star system. Anti-climatically, it would takes hours, if not days, for numerous tests to be run to confirm it was in fact legitimate. If the signal was determined to be extraterrestrial, we would probably immediately start looking for more.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

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The entire world would likely get involved, pooling equipment, expertise, and money to help with the search. NASA would get back into the SETI game overnight, and we would try to figure out if it was a message.

“It would be the biggest astronomical research project of all time,” he says.

For now, we appear to be alone in the universe, but the nature of scientific reason would suggest otherwise.

“If we are alone, then we are a miracle,” says Shostak. “That’s usually a  assumption in science.”

• AMC's Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction premieres Monday April 30 at 10/9c on AMC.

{ https://www.popularmechanics.com/ }

01-05-2018 om 01:26 geschreven door peter  

550 years ago, the Chimu people may have killed 140 children to appease their gods

BY BRUCE BOWER 

SACRIFICIAL STARE  Discoveries at the site of the largest known mass sacrifice of children included this shroud-covered youngster lying next to a llama and a rope that was used to lead the llama. The Peruvian site dates to around 1450.

GABRIEL PRIETO/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

A hellishly unprecedented scene — what anthropologists suspect is the largest known child sacrifice — has been unearthed on a bluff overlooking Peru’s northern shoreline.

Around 550 years ago, members of the Chimú empire ritually killed and buried at least 140 children, ages 5 to 14, and 200 young llamas, says a team led by Gabriel Prieto of the National University of Trujillo in Peru and John Verano of Tulane University in New Orleans.

“There are no other examples of child sacrifices anywhere in the world that compare to the magnitude of this Chimú event,” Verano says. The discovery was announced April 26 by National Geographic in Washington, D.C.

Except for a few incomplete skeletons, excavated children and llamas displayed cuts on their breast bones and dislocated ribs indicating that their chests had been sliced open. Three adults buried nearby on the bluff, including two women with violent head wounds, may have participated in the sacrifice.

Radiocarbon dating, mainly of ropes left around the llamas’ necks, puts the event at around 1450, shortly before the Inca conquered the Chimú in 1470.

A dried mud layer covering some of the sandy graves possibly resulted from flooding caused by massive rains. Agricultural crises triggered by repeated flooding might have led Chimú leaders to sacrifice children to their gods, Verano suggests.

KILLING PLEA Children’s bodies lay in sandy pits at a Peruvian site where researchers say 140 youngsters were ritually sacrificed around 550 years ago, possibly to appease gods thought to be responsible for devastating floods.

GABRIEL PRIETO/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

01-05-2018 om 00:55 geschreven door peter  

Hundreds of mysterious, ancient structures discovered in Saudi Arabia

GIGANTIC ancient structures have been discovered in the middle of the desert. An Australian man went searching for their meaning.

Matt Young@MattYoung

IN THE 1920s, during the early days of flight, Royal Air Force pilots crossing the Middle East noticed something bizarre across barren landscape of Syria, eastern Jordan and Saudi Arabia’s desert.

The giant structures, which covered the land in their thousands, looked like intricately carved stone wheels, only visible from the sky. Some are pendants. Rings. Others are known as “kites”.

Flt Lt Percy Maitland documented the mysterious structures in 1927 for the archaeological journal Antiquity, but they remained largely a secret until the 1970s when Dr David Kennedy, a retired archaeologist at the University of Western Australia, spotted some of them while surveying photographs from Jordan.

“They really dominate the landscape, suggesting a lot of effort was put into constructing these over a huge area,” Dr Kennedy said in 2011 of “The Works of the Old Men,” of which the structures are called.

A “gate” at Samhah, which are more than 1,200 feet long

Picture: David Kennedy - Source:Supplied

A bullseye.

Picture: David Kennedy - Source:Supplied

Dr Kennedy has been busily studying some of the sites, measuring 70 metres wide, in Jordan from above in planes or helicopters, but its neighbour, Saudi Arabia, has always just been out of his reach. The problem with fully unlocking these secrets for Dr Kennedy was gaining permission to visit the country.

Fast forward to 2017, and Dr Kennedy is using a far simpler method to discover the world’s hidden secrets; Google Earth.

In the past 10 years Google Earth has been particularly helpful for probing archaeologists keen to track every inch of the Earth, but notably in the Saudi region.

More than 400 previously undocumented structures — or “gates” as they are called — have been uncovered using the technology, and Dr Kennedy is particularly pleased.

“We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there’s a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped,” he told the New York Times.

“You can’t see them very well from the ground level, but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully.”

As with other Gates, this aerial photo from Samhah reveals that the bars are not slender walls but a double line of stones with an infill of smaller stones.

Picture: David KennedySource:Supplied

In this low oblique view, a gate is clear and plainly overlain by a bullseye pendant surrounded by lava. The latter is still quite high and its wall is surprisingly thick. 

Picture: David Kennedy - Source:Supplied

Last month, Dr Kennedy received an invite to investigate the structures from above. Two hundred sites in all across the Harrat Khaybar and Harrat Uwayrid regions. Gates. Kites. Triangles. Bull’s eyes. Keyholes. They were all there. And more vivid than Google Earth.

“From 500 feet, you can see the vital details of structures that are invisible in the fuzzy image on Google Earth,” he said.

“Once you get out in the desert areas, where you wouldn’t expect to find much at all, they are absolutely littered with archaeological sites.

“We’re now discovering now is exactly the same in Saudi Arabia.”

A group of pendants.

Picture: David Kennedy - Source:Supplied

But what does it all mean? Is there a connection between all these structures? According to Dr Kennedy, the structures are anything but random; in fact, they are quite deliberate.

“We could see immediately they were much more complicated than they appeared on Google Earth,” Dr. Kennedy told the New York Times.

“They are much more sophisticated than I was prepared for.”

To this day much of the conclusions are still speculation at best, but they are thought to date back as far as 9000 years ago and used by nomadic tribes as traps for hunting and farming.

Dr Kennedy thinks tribes would herb gazelle into the structures where hunters could trap and kill them.

“Essentially there was no escape,” said Dr. Kennedy.

The keyholes, on the other hand, could have been used as tombs or ritual buildings to bury the dead.

But the challenge for experts now, is to study them on the ground. And radio carbon testing to sure of time periods. It could be decades until we find the real answer — until then, the Arabian secrets remain buried in the sand.

A gate intersecting with a bullseye.

Picture: David KennedySource:Supplied

— Share your story: youngma@news.com.au

{ http://www.news.com.au/ }

01-05-2018 om 00:33 geschreven door peter  

30-04-2018 om 23:53 geschreven door peter  

How Would Humanity React If We Really Found Aliens?

30-04-2018 om 23:14 geschreven door peter  

Ruimtesonde fotografeert ijsvlaktes op Mars - HLN.be

Bron: Belga

Ook met prominente Belgische inbreng, via het NOMAD-instrument van het Belgisch Instituut voor Ruimte-Aëronomie, zal de ExoMars speuren naar gassen die meer kunnen leren over mogelijke geologische of biologische activiteit op onze buurplaneet, zoals methaan.

Lees ook

Deze man heeft ‘bewijs’ voor buitenaards leven op Mars gevonden

De beelden van een camera moeten helpen de mogelijke bronnen van de gassen op het oppervlak van de planeet te vinden.

Het eerste luik van het Europees-Russische project ExoMars werd in maart 2016 met een Russische Proton-M gelanceerd. De “orbiter” (TGO) kwam in oktober van dat jaar in een baan rond de Rode Planeet, de landing van de dochtersonde Schiaparelli mislukte. Volgens ESA draait de TGO nu een nieuwe, bijna cirkelvormige, baan rondom Mars. In 2020 moet het tweede luik van ExoMars starten. Het houdt in het bijzonder een robotjeep in.

SELECTIE VIDEO'S PETER 2011

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

30-04-2018 om 22:24 geschreven door peter  

The Oumuamua cigar-shaped interstellar asteroid may not have been a space ship disguised as an asteroid, but the root of that idea – using a hollowed-out space object to travel between stars – is getting serious scientific consideration … and the concept actually sounds feasible. Should Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos be spending their money on corralling a comet?

“In light of our insatiable appetite for exploration, it is inevitable that the human species will ultimately travel outside of the known solar system. It is the next step in human evolution. My research concerns solutions that unite the biological, technological and social dimensions. And it is about spaceships that evolve during their journey.”

Well, it would be nice to get humans beyond the orbit of the Moon first, but it’s always good to think big and that’s what Angelo Vermeulen is doing. He’s the founder of the Delft University of Technology Starship Team (DSTART) and the Evolving Asteroid Starships project, which is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) on designing a regenerative life-support system called MELISSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative).

“MELiSSA, short for Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative, is an artificial ecosystem to recover food, water and oxygen from waste (faeces and urine), carbon dioxide and minerals. The laboratory will help in the development of technology for a future regenerative life support system for long-duration human space exploration missions, for example to a lunar base or to Mars.”

To Mars … and beyond. In an announcement, ESA revealed the goal of DSTART is to “perform advanced concepts research for a resilient interstellar space vehicle, to be constructed from a hollowed-out asteroid.” While it sounds like the asteroid is just a big vehicle, it’s also a supplier of minerals and more to MELISSA, which is a giant self-sustaining, self-evolving, closed-loop life support system … and more. The details will be revealed at the first joint AgroSpace-MELiSSA workshop on May 16-18 in Rome. The topics will include:

Organic wastes processing and refinery
Edible biomass production
Food quality, processing and human nutrition
Physical, chemical and microbial contaminants
Flight experiments and space technology demonstrators

While they haven’t captured and hollowed out an asteroid yet, the MELISSA teams have successfully demonstrated sealed, closed loop, life-support systems for algae on the International Space Station and for rats at Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona – that one has a bioreactor powered by light and oxygen-producing algae to keep rats alive and producing carbon dioxide and waste to keep the algae alive to produce … you get the idea.

What will it take to take these tiny ecosystems to the scale of an asteroid? The first simulation will be on display at the May AgroSpace-MELiSSA workshop. How close are we to capturing an asteroid to test it on? OSIRIS-REx is on its way to Bennu to pick up a 30 foot (9 meter) in diameter chunk and drag it to the Moon, where it will be placed in orbit for future missions with astronauts to analyze.

Thirty feet doesn’t sound like a big space ship, but Oumuamua was only 230 by 35 meters (800 ft × 100 ft) and it managed to travel between stars. Is the MELISSA idea crazy enough that it just might work? Or should space engineers stick with trying to build conventional space ships?

To put it another way … would you rather live for years inside a rock or the Enterprise?

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-04-2018 om 22:00 geschreven door peter  

Nearly 60,000 UFO sightings MAPPED: Does this finally prove mystery link to US military?

UFO investigators have mapped nearly 60,000 flying saucer sightings in the USA with staggering results that could show why there is an alleged link between UFOs and the military.

30-04-2018 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

UFO Sighting Video Apparently Reveals A Secret Alien Base In Russia

Footage shows a strange light beneath the clouds captures from a plane window. The bright light reportedly travels over a vast empty part of Russia.

The light remains utterly still like it is coming from a fixed area on the ground as the jet speeds up over the top.

The video was uploaded to a YouTube account Stan on April 22. The video went viral and gained popularity on different conspiracy channels.

YouTube user thirdphaseofmoon shared the footage on his profile, stating on the title that “Russia probably doesn’t want you to see this.”

He said the light was seemed out of the middle of nowhere and emitted a strange bright orange glow. It could be a crashed UFO or UFO experiments that were happening, he added.

The video has gained popularity with more than 6,000 hits just a few hours after he uploaded it.

UFO enthusiasts were quick to give their speculation about the strange light.

Many viewers think that the light is very unusual as it is too concentrated and uniformed. Others speculate that it could be a UFO below the clouds. Some claim that Russia has a vast UFO base. However, many others offer a simple explanation saying the light is a lens flare or a natural weather event.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

30-04-2018 om 21:19 geschreven door peter  

Airplane passenger films strange rotating phenomenon when flying over China’s Xi’an - Take a look!

While on a flight the airplane passenger noticed strange lights for about 20 minutes and at some point the lights seem to be rotating before disappearing into the clouds below.

The event happened on April 12, 2018 – The lights are not connected to each other and it seems they are floating free in the sky.

The airplane passenger who reported the strange phenomenon to Mufon case 91673 states:

• Astigmatism lasts about 20 minutes
• Constant astigmatism
  
• Astigmatism will rotate
• It feels strange
• Into the cloud disappearsµ

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.be/ }

30-04-2018 om 21:11 geschreven door peter  

The Canadian UFO Fragment Was Proven Authentic

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

30-04-2018 om 01:40 geschreven door peter  

Multiple UFOs & strange purple Beams of Light filmed over Arizona

A strange video on YouTube is getting a lot of attention for showing multiple UFOs and weird purple beams of light in the skies over Arizona.

The footage was recorded on a panoramic 360-degree live camera feed recently.

Commenters on the video hint evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, while others think the strange sky phenomenon is a clandestine HAARP project.

NOTE: 

• That purple beam is what used to be referred to as a ROD, they turned out to be bugs of some kind that fly to fast for the cameras processing ability.
• The Purple Rods, swirls, beams might very well be moths, insects. The patterns strongly suggest moths from the way that moths and butterflies have been studied in labs using high-speed cameras. And the UFO's definitely could just be local air traffic. Is this in or near Phoenix, Arizona? Then it could be air traffic from Sky Harbor...or a small, local, municipal airport.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

30-04-2018 om 01:34 geschreven door peter  

Sophisticated laboratories aboard probes like the Curiosity Rover and the upcoming Insight Mars Lander can tell us much, but samples of Martian soil in terrestrial laboratories would open new worlds of exploration for scientists. To that end, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) just revealed a bold plan to retrieve soil samples from the surface of the red planet and transport them back to Earth.

In a statement of intent released last week, the two agencies outlined their proposal, which would require multiple missions and some tricky maneuvering in orbit around Mars.

“There is no question that for a planetary scientist, the chance to bring pristine, carefully chosen samples of the Red Planet back to Earth for examination using the best facilities is a mouth-watering prospect,” said David Parker of the ESA. “Reconstructing the history of Mars and answering questions of its past are only two areas of discovery that will be dramatically advanced by such a mission.”

The Mars 2020 rover, which has already begun assembly at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, will land on Mars via a rocket-powered sky crane. It will collect about 30 soil samples in small test-tube-sized containers and place them in a location for later retrieval.

The next mission will utilize a “fetch rover” to collect the samples and then return to its lander, which will launch the small payload into orbit using a Mars Ascent Vehicle. Such a launch has never been done before, and it will require extensive coordination between the agencies to pull it off.

Finally, a third spacecraft launched from Earth will rendezvous with the Mars Ascent Vehicle and retrieve the samples. Upon returning to Earth, a module containing the samples will enter the atmosphere and land somewhere in the U.S.

All the details of the cooperative venture haven’t been finalized; a more complete proposal will be submitted by the two agencies later this year.

Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA speculated that this mission could finally answer the question about whether there was ever life on Mars. “A sample would provide a critical leap forward in our understanding of Mars’s potential to harbor life,” he said. “I look forward to connecting and collaborating with international and commercial partners on tackling the exciting technological challenges ahead — that would allow us to bring home a sample of Mars.”

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• The Opportunity rover just celebrated 5,000 ‘sols’ on the Martian surface

{ https://www.digitaltrends.com/ }

30-04-2018 om 01:24 geschreven door peter  

North Wales X File special - Berwyn Mountains 'UFO crash' map revealed

Does the old chart shed light on what really happened in 1974 'Welsh Rosewell' incident?

The red dot shows where the incident is said to have happened. Black dotted lines leading to dot from the west show the alleged path of RAF jets and UFO. Black dotted lines from the north show jet flight path

A map claiming to chart show a UFO crashed in one of North Wales’ greatest mysteries has been revealed for the first time.

Russ Kellett has spent years researching the 1974 Berwyn Mountains incident.

Now he has come forward with an old map which allegedly shows the flight paths of RAF jets and a flying saucer - with some theorists claiming the latter crashed.

On the map pictured below the red dot shows where the incident is said to have happened. Black dotted lines leading to dot from the west show the alleged path of RAF jets and UFO.

Black dotted lines from the north to the red dot show the flight path jets are said to have taken.

Mr Kellett claims the document was given to him by five men who witnessed the incident and undertook their own investigations afterwards.

“The five saw a strange object and got out to have a look, but the military were there and told them to leave,” Mr Kellett said.

“They moved to a better position and started to take photos.

“They were all friends and four were in the military during World War Two.

“Afterwards they started doing their own research and the map is a result of what they found out and shows the flight paths.

“When I was giving a talk in Bala to a packed audience around the late 1990s, early 2000s, I was given a package by them after and there were these maps in them which they had drawn up based on what they had found out from their research.

“It was very strange and I was a little bit spooked.”

Dubbed the Welsh Roswell, at about 8.30pm on January 23, in 1974, people reported hearing a huge bang, earth tremors were felt amid claims of a brilliant light in the sky above the mountain range.

At the time families in the villages of Llandderfel and Llandrillo were settling down to watch TV when an explosion was heard and the ground shook which measured 3.5 on the Richter scale.

Police arrived in the area and a RAF search and rescue team was scrambled from Anglesey.

There were even claims other military personnel arrived at the site.

Documents seen by the Daily Post showing numerous calls on the night were put into Gwynedd police who logged “a large explosion in the area and there is a large fire in the mountainside.”

One witness who saw on object on the hillside said in a statement at the time: “Saw bright red light, like coal fire red. Large perfect circle. Like a big bonfire.”

• North Wales X-Files: What was the strange object in the sky over Conwy which left witnesses baffled?

However, sceptics maintain the activity can be explained by a meteor shower, an earthquake and poachers on the mountain side, triggering the noise and lights.

“I’ve carried the map around for a long time as part of my research,” said Mr .

“I’m getting older now and just wanted to put it out there to see what people make of it and if there was anybody else who could shed light on what happened.”

{ https://www.dailypost.co.uk/ }

30-04-2018 om 01:07 geschreven door peter  

Prohodna, The Bulgarian Cave And The Eyes Of God

If we travel through the north of Bulgaria, and its Lovech province, we’ll find there is a beautiful gorge called Iskar, very close to the village of Karlukovo, and in it, piercing a mountain of limestone, we find the so-called Eyes of God.

It’s a fascinating cave that’s perfect for photography lovers, but also those who want to witness first hand, the so-called Eyes ofGod.

The region where the cave is located has been subject for millennia to karstic action, that is, the chemical weathering produced by water on certain types of soluble rocks, that have shaped the landscape and dug underground galleries and natural grottos producing a characteristic landscape, unlike any other anywhere in the world.

The Prohodna Cave.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

While we find many other caves, in this article we take a look at the Prohodna cave, which is up to two hundred and sixty-two meters long and happens to be the largest in Bulgaria.

The cave has two entrances which lie opposite one another, known respectively as the Small Entrance and the Big Entrance.

The caves of the Geological Park of Iskar-Panega, are one of the most extensive karst regions of the country. It is believed to have arisen in the Quaternary Era, and it is a true paradise for caving enthusiasts since it is home to hundreds of caves.

Another view of the eyes of God. 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Prohodna is one of the most accessible caves in Bulgaria.

But the cave is special. It’s different.

Also known as Oknata, the mysterious cave is unique as it contains a fascinating feature in the ceiling of its middle chamber.

And… another view of the Eyes of God.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The cavern contains enormous cavities, one next to the other with two massive almond-shaped openings at the top, given the viewer from below an appearance almost as if the cave was looking down, through a pair of mysterious eyes.

According to experts, the ‘Eyes of God’ formed through erosion, let in light into the cave.

While the cave is a popular tourist destination today, experts have found traces of prehistoric habitation in the cave, which testify that humans lived in the cave during the Neolithicand Chalcolithic.

The entrance of Prohodna cave can be seen even from the National cave house.

Image Credit:Wikimedia Commons.

The most fascinating time to visit the cave is at night when the sky is clear and the moon is full. Then, with a bit patience and luck, you can see the moon through the two cavities on the ceiling of the cave.

When rainwater enters both holes and falls down the walls of the cave; locals often say then that God’s Eyes Are Crying.

As noted by sendeirsmoeurope.com, the “eyes” of the Prohodna cave have a hypnotic effect and watch them for a while from inside the cave is very relaxing.

Featured image credit: Reddit.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

29-04-2018 om 23:28 geschreven door peter  

These Are The Rare Ancient Maps, Used By Ancient Explorers To Travel The Earth

These are the rare ancient charts used by ancient navigators to explore the Earth, and they are about to be sold in an auction in London and could sell for millions.

Thousands of years ago, explorers used whatever maps they could find to travel to places no one else had been.

Many explorers, including Cristopher Columbus, used rare maps to navigate Earths’ ocean and travel to different continents.

These maps have a mighty history behind them, as many of them were used by some of the most influential explorers from our history books.

Curiously, as noted by the MailOnline, many of these ancient charts are about to go on sale in an auction house in London, UK, and experts warn they could sell for millions, as people will recognize their incredible value.

The auction in London will feature around 400 maps. Among the hundreds of maps is a 1472 ‘T-O’ map, considered the first printed atlas of the planet, displaying how Earth was arranged, according to Christian beliefs.

The map seen here below is one of several ancient charts created by famed geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus.

An ancient Chart created by famed geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus.

Image Credit: Sotheby’s

The map was published in an atlas from 1482 and is considered by experts as one of the earliest global maps ever created.

The map is especially known for being the first map to make use of latitude and longitude. According to experts, the origins of this map date back to the known world in the 2nd Century and, according to the MailOnline, it could sell for £80,000 ($110,000). The map shows three sections which are a representation of the world’s oceans and are believed to indicate the belief the Earthwas spherical, and not flat.

The ancient chart shows the Mediterranean separating Europe from Africa, and the Red Sea and the River Don separating both from Asia. In addition to offering an extremely detailed map of our planet, the map also features the sons of Noah on Each Continent.

This sensational ancient map was created by Peter Goos in 1666.

An Italian artist called Francesco Berlinghieri helped create the map and providing ‘considerable artistic appeal’ with the addition of the 12 wind-heads surrounding the ancient chart. This map is believed to have played a crucial role in Cristopher Columbus’ accidental ‘discovery of the new world.’

Although it is noteworthy to mention that Columbus was NOT the first explorer to reach to American Continent, and he didn’t have to discover anything, as the continent was long inhabited by different cultures. If anything, Columbus ‘introduced’ America to the rest of the world.

This map depicts the world from an unusual point of different view. We see the planet from the poles. This ancient chart was created by Cornelius De Jode, a cartographer from Antwerp in the 1500’s.

Image Credit: Sotheby’s

Speaking about the auction, and the different ancient maps, Cecile Gasseholm, Sotheby’s specialist, told MailOnline:

“Ptolomy made his calculations on the size of the Earth when creating the map with regards to dimensions of the world.”

“The measurements were widely taken as gospel for centuries and into the middle ages. Christopher Columbus, when he set sail in 1492 from the Spanish port of Palos, used these calculations to inform his navigation. To his dismay and later great reward, they turned out to be wildly inaccurate and resulted in the Spanish colonization of the Americas.”

Source: MailOnline

For more about the maps, visit Sotheby’s.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

29-04-2018 om 23:04 geschreven door peter  

ASTRONOMERS SEARCH FOR ALIEN MEGASTRUCTURES IN SATELLITE DATA

The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has been helping map the billions of stars in the Milky Way, and a group of astronomers is using the spacecraft’s stunning new star catalog to search for signs of highly advanced alien civilizations.

A team of scientists from Sweden’s Uppsala University and the University of Heidelberg in Germany combed Gaia’s first data release of a billion stars from September 2016. They then cross-referenced it with observations from the Australia-based Milky Way-watching RAVE project looking for differences in how far away the two observatories place certain stars.

Simply put, the Gaia data shows how far away a star is by watching it move across a background of far more distant stars, an effect called parallax. RAVE data, on the other hand, estimates the distance of a star based on the properties of its brightness. So the scientists looked for stars observed by both Gaia and RAVE where the data seemed to disagree on the distance of a star.

The idea is that the disparity in distance measurements by the different instruments could be explained by the presence of a partial Dyson sphere, a structure that envelopes or partially envelopes a star to harvest its energy.

Science fiction has long envisioned huge alien megastructures like planet-size artificial spheres or rings or swarms of energy-collecting spacecraft. They’ve also been floated as a possible explanation for the strange dimming and re-brightening behavior of the now famous Boyajian’s Star, also known as Tabby’s Star or KIC 8462852.

Cross-referencing the data sets revealed a handful of stars in Gaia data that may possibly be circled by such alien megastructures. However, upon closer examination, the team determined that errors in the data could account for differing measurements in the case of all but one star named TYC 6111-1162-1.

The researchers used a third observatory to take a closer look at the star. They didn’t find evidence of alien megastructures, but instead of an unseen companion star, which could also account for the discrepancies in measurements. 

While they haven’t discovered advanced aliens just yet, the team maintains that their method of searching for possible Dyson spheres is still sound. They say the search will become even easier with future releases of Gaia data, which will provide both types of distance measurements for many stars. 

“We estimate that Gaia Data Release 3, currently scheduled for late 2020, should allow the technique to be applied to samples of (about 1 million) stars,” they write in a report uploaded to Cornell’s Arxiv repository of scientific papers.

Meanwhile, the second Gaia Data Release dropped on Wednesday, with a fresh batch of 1.7 billion stars to check for ambitious alien construction projects. If anyone finds anything, please notify Elon Musk. He’s always looking for fresh inspiration. 

• Crowd Control: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers.
• Solving for XX: The tech industry seeks to overcome outdated ideas about “women in tech.”

Source www.cnet.com

Also published on Medium.

{ http://alien-ufo-sightings.com/ }

29-04-2018 om 22:46 geschreven door peter  

XS-1: DARPA's Experimental Spaceplane

29-04-2018 om 22:16 geschreven door peter  

Time travel cracked? Secret code in ancient Mayan calendar ‘reveals’ time portals

A SELF-titled archaeologist has shockingly claimed to have cracked the secret code of an ancient calendar to reveal a “divine” time travel map.

By Joy Basu 

The Mayan Tzolkin calendar has often been at the forefront of conspiracy theories and doomsday predictions but Timothy Alan has now claimed it also contains the secrets of time travel.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

29-04-2018 om 20:43 geschreven door peter