Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
02-05-2018
Russian Mars probe 'Phobos 2' sent back images of a 20-mile-long cylindrical shaped object, before losing signal
Russian Mars probe 'Phobos 2' sent back images of a 20-mile-long cylindrical shaped object, before losing signal
Phobos used to be one of two moons that surround Mars, and it has been thought of as being something of a mysterious object. It was once said that Phobos must be hollow and this led to the question of whether it was a huge space station that had been hollowed out.
Russia launched two satellite probes that were unmanned in July 1988. These were Phobos 1 and 2 and headed in the direction of Mars. Their chief intention was to investigate the mysterious moon of the planet but was said to be lost while making their way there just two months later. It was said that Phobos 1 was lost due to an error with radio command. The reason for the loss of Phobos 2 has been intriguing, but it did manage to beam some information and images from Mars.
Things were going well with Phobos 2 until it came to align with Phobos. On March 28, the mission control center said they suddenly encountered communication issues with Phobos 2. It was said that Phobos 2 had not communicated with Earth as it had been scheduled to do so after it completed an operation going around Phobos, the Martian moon. So what was behind the loss of Phobos 2? Was it a malfunction as suggested?
Spindle Shaped Mysterious Object Picked Up In Photos
Boris Bolitsky, Moscow science correspondent, said that shortly before the loss of radio contact with Phobos 2 many images that were unusual had been sent back to Earth and were said to have shown features that were remarkable. A report said that the features were either on the surface of Mars or in the lower atmosphere. They were 20 to 25 kilometers in width and did not look like any geological formation that was known. They were said to be of a spindle type shape and were puzzling.
The surface of Mars had a dark and clearly defined shape on it that looked like a thin ellipse. This was different from the Phobos shadow that had been recorded some 18 years previously by Mariner 9. The ellipse seen in the photos showed an ellipse that had rounded points, with fuzzy edges that stood out against the surface. It was described as being something between Mars and the spacecraft as the surface could be seen below. Also stressed was the fact that the object could be seen by the infrared and optical camera. This is one of the reasons why it has not been said that the shape could have been the shadow of the moonlet. It was said that the photograph had been taken when the spacecraft was aligning with Phobos.
This brings about the question of just what collided with Phobos 2. Was it possible that the space probe might have been shot from space as it captured too much information? Another question is what the last frame captured show?
The chairperson of the equivalent of NASA in Russia said that an image seems to show an object that is an odd shape between Mars and the spacecraft. The photograph was shown to Colonel Dr. Marina Popovich, an astronaut and pilot from Russia with an interest in UFOs. Popovich gave information that is interesting at a UFO conference in 1991. Part of the information was said to be “the first ever leaked accounts of an alien mothership in the solar system”.
The last photograph that came from Phobos 2 showed a huge cylindrical spaceship around 20km in length and 1.5km in width hanging around close to the Martian moon. When the last frame was transmitted back to Earth the probe disappeared mysteriously, and the Russians said it had been destroyed.
The cigar-shaped spacecraft is said to be the penultimate frame that was taken by Phobos 2, and it is the object that cast the oblong shadow onto the surface of Mars in a photograph taken earlier.
Brian Crowley, the science writer from Australia, said that the convex cat’s eyeshadow, which due to the overhead solar inclination stopped a shadow being cast by the surface features of Mars and implies a shadow, was on the surface from something that was orbiting beyond Phobos 2. The spindle-shaped object is not consistent with a shadow that would be cast by the moon Phobos, as it is an irregular potato shape.
Another photo that was sent back by Phobos 2 was an infrared scan of the surface of Mars showing rectangular regions that were clearly defined. They seemed to be latticework of straight channels that resembled a city block. It was said that it might have been underground caverns too geometrically regular to be natural. The Russians have been pressed to release data that is more definitive, and they have released a television transmission that Phobos 2 sent during the last moments. However, they had not released the last frames, which were taken shortly before the spacecraft lost contact.
The final photograph that Phobos 2 took before it was said to have been shot out of orbit was tracked down.
This photograph was said to have been shown during a closed meeting between British and US officials.
We can only assume that it is not just NASA that suppresses photographs along with knowledge about planets; it seems that the Russian space program does too.
Phobos Chain Craters
An article was published in Astronomy magazine with the title Chain of Craters of Phobos. The author of the article talked about the many strange craters and grooves of Phobos. It was said that Viking had found a mystery in one of the most unexpected places, on one of two small Martian moons.
The mapping of Phobos by Mariner 9 revealed many craters and many investigators said that they were just rock chunks with scars of meteorite impacts. A few analysts noticed a puzzling feature, but as they did not have better data, there was little that could be said about it. A few crater pits looked as though they aligned in one or two chains. This was something unusual because crater chains on the moon were usually explained as being volcanic pits. They were said to be small eruption sites strung along fracture lines. However, Phobos was too small to be able to generate the heat along with the conventional volcanic activity.
Scientists are at a loss to be able to explain them. One of the last attempts to photograph Mars along with the Moons was by the Mars Observer of NASA, which was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force. However, NASA also lost contact with the spacecraft.
Could it be that someone or something does not want people capturing footage of whatever is on Mars or its Moons?
In recent years, the scientific community has closely followed the evolution of the Earth’s magnetic field, with some scientists finding clues of a sign of an incoming magnetic pole reversal (something which also spurred a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories). However, a new study reports that what we’re seeing now is probably not a precursor of a magnetic pole reversal.
The South Atlantic Anomaly.
Image credits: NASA.
The Earth’s magnetic field is crucial for life on the planet, serving as a shield against hazardous radiation from space, especially coming from the Sun. Since 1840, scientists have been consistently monitoring this magnetic field, and since then, the global strength of the magnetic field has decayed at a rate of about five percent per century. Following this continuous decrease, a significant anomaly has emerged, called the South Atlantic Anomaly.
This anomaly represents an area of an abnormally weak magnetic field — think of it as a dip in the Earth’s magnetic defenses. Here, protection from harmful radiation from space is reduced, which has several unfortunate consequences (for instance, satellites in the area are more likely to suffer from communication blackouts and passengers on flights around the area are subjected to more radiation).
Within the research community, some have interpreted this anomaly as a sign of an incoming pole reversal. If this were the case, it wouldn’t really be surprising — the Earth’s magnetic field is constantly changing, and the way which it changes also changes. As a result, in the Earth’s geological history, magnetic pole reversals have been quite common, and we know this by studying geological proxies — magnetic minerals in the rocks and sediments “record” the orientation and strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time of rock formation. By dating the rocks, we can know how the magnetic field evolved, and we have a pretty good idea on how this field evolved through the ages. However, we don’t really know when the next reversal will come.
Chrons
The Earth’s field has alternated between periods of normal polarity, in which the predominant direction of the field was the same as the present direction, and reverse polarity, in which it was the opposite. These periods are called chrons. The duration of chrons isn’t fixed, though the average time seems to be 450,000 years. The reversals themselves typically take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. However, the last one, which happened 780,000 years ago, happened very quickly — quite possibly in less than 100 years. It’s not really possible to predict these shifts.
Image via Wiki Commons.
Within their new study, scientists have reconstructed past changes in Earth’s magnetic field using paleomagnetic data from sediment cores and volcanic rocks from across the globe. They found a specifically good record for the time interval of 50,000 to 30,000 years before the present, including two magnetic dips that are similar to the South Atlantic Anomaly.
Neither of them led to a magnetic pole reversal, and as a result, the team concludes that the current anomaly is also unlikely to lead to a pole reversal. While this doesn’t rule out the possibility of a magnetic pole reversal at some point in the near future, it makes it much less likely. Monika Korte, co-author of the study, explained:
“Based on our observations of the past 50,000 years we conclude that the South Atlantic Anomaly cannot be interpreted as a sign for the beginning of a reversal of the poles. Times of the past that, unlike the beginning of the Laschamp excursion, showed patterns of the magnetic field like today were not followed by a pole reversal. After some time the anomalies disappeared.”
Richard Holme, Professor of Geomagnetism at the University of Liverpool and co-author, concludes:
“There has been speculation that we are about to experience a magnetic polar reversal or excursion. However, by studying the two most recent excursion events, we show that neither bear resemblance to current changes in the geomagnetic field and therefore it is probably unlikely that such an event is about to happen.
“Our research suggests instead that the current weakened field will recover without such an extreme event, and therefore is unlikely to reverse.”
The paper, `Earth’s magnetic field is probably not reversing’ has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) doi:/10.1073/pnas.1722110115.
There are easily a dozen ways the age of humans could come to an end. At this point, an antibiotic-resistant plague, sea level rise, and global famine are all equally plausible ways for humans to get wiped off the face of the Earth. Fortunately, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we might be able to cross one possibility off the list: magnetic pole reversal.
In a paper published Monday, an international team of researchers provides evidence that the current disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field does not indicate that it’s about to reverse polarity, contrary to what some experts have recently suggested. Over the past few months, several scientists have expressed concernabout magnetic field weirdness happening in Earth’s magnetic field above the region between Chile and Zimbabwe — referred to as the South Atlantic Anomaly — speculating that it might lead Earth’s magnetic field to reverse entirely. But by examining past historical periods when magnetic conditions were similar to those today, the new study’s authors show the South Atlantic Anomaly most likely won’t result in an excursion — a partial pole change that’s usually accompanied by a reduction in field strength — or even a full reversal. Phew!
Researchers say magnetic field anomalies, like the one occurring over Africa right now, happened in the distant past but didn't turn into full reversals or excursions.
In these scenarios, over the past tens of thousands of years, they explain, anomalies like we’re seeing now usually resolved on their own, without major consequences. Sure, what’s happening now may seem unusual on the scale of centuries, but on the scale of millennia, they seem less strange. To reach this relieving conclusion, the authors examined other periods throughout Earth’s geological history in which similar weakening of the magnetic field showed up. In a couple notable instances, centered at 49 thousand years ago and 46 thousand years ago, anomalies appeared in Earth’s magnetic field, but they eventually resolved. The researchers say that our current conditions are close enough to these historical situations that we can safely say thiscurrent anomaly should resolve itself in a similar way.
“This suggests that the current weakened field will also recover without an extreme event such as an excursion or reversal,” write the study’s authors. Cue a wave of relief: If either of these events actually occurred, the consequences on Earth would be significant. While we don’t fully know what would happen, both events would likely affect satellite communications, animal migration, and our level of protection from solar winds. Most noticeably, our compass needles will point to Antarctica as “north.”
Of course, these events happen over thousands of years, so we can’t yet say for sure whether they’re right. But if geological history is any indication, we’re better off worrying about other more probable causes of our demise.
Nonetheless, the South Atlantic Anomaly has caused communication issues for satellites that pass through it, so even if a reversal or excursion probably won’t kill us, we’ll need to deal in some way with the strange reality of a changing magnetic field.
Mysterious light captured in China is not extraterrestrial spaceship
Mysterious light captured in China is not extraterrestrial spaceship
The mysterious light was spotted over several cities in China, cities, including Beijing, Taiyuan, Zhengzhou, and Qingdao. Baffled residents believed that the light could be UFO or extraterrestrial spaceship, but Chinese Academy of Science clarified saying it's neither of them.
A beam of mysterious light spotted over several parts in China baffled residents with some claiming that it could be a UFO or extraterrestrial spaceship. However, Chinese Academy of Science has clarified dismissed the claim that it is a UFO and said it is noctilucent contrail caused by an aircraft.
The mysterious light spotted Friday, April 27, created a buzz on Chinese social media platforms. Photos and videos of the light over Beijing went viral. Residents were confused and some even joked that it could be a massive torch.
"Bizarre scene appeared in the sky over Beijing. Have you seen it?," a post on Chinese social media Weibo read. The post, which was shared by the user the Beijing things Beijing people don't know, also had several photos of the mysterious light.
Another user, hang kong wu yu, took to Weibo to say that the light was observed in several cities, including Beijing, Taiyuan, Zhengzhou, and Qingdao.
Beijing Evening News had initially reported that the light could have been caused by the launch of a Beidou satellite. The launch happened Friday in Taiyuan city. And now People's Daily China has clarified that the UFO seen over the night sky in Beijing was nothing but a noctilucent contrail.
"The alleged "#UFO" seen in the sky above northern China on Friday evening was a noctilucent contrail, possibly caused by aircraft engine exhaust or air pressure changes, says the Chinese Academy of Science, warning the clouds as a sign of #globalwarming," the tweet reads.
Last December, a similar incident was recorded on camera in the US when SpaceX rocket was launched. Residents of Southern California and Arizona were baffled by the mysterious light over the sky. It was later revealed that the light was caused because of the launch of SpaceX rocket.
People's Daily,China✔@PDChina
ET, is that you? A #mysterious light was seen Friday night by many residents in different northern Chinese cities, leading some to speculate about a possible extraterrestrial spaceship sighting, although the cause is still being investigated pic.twitter.com/FTPEEdn7hx
People's Daily,China✔@PDChina
The alleged "#UFO" seen in the sky above northern China on Friday evening was a noctilucent contrail, possibly caused by aircraft engine exhaust or air pressure changes, says the Chinese Academy of Science, warning the clouds as a sign of #globalwarmingpic.twitter.com/QJrgnuJRdO
Unlike in the USA where secret government cover-ups are responsible for creating hit TV shows, UFO conspiracies aren't popular in China. And yet, when UFOs do suddenly appear in the Celestial Kingdom as they did Friday night, a distinct lack of official information has made the unlikely existence of "little green men" to be the most comforting possibility to hope for.
The unidentified flying object appeared over Western Beijing and throughout parts of northeastern China Friday night and was witnessed by multiple residents.
Photos and videos (1, 2) of the UFO show a bright cone-shaped funnel leading a cork-screw "tail" behind it. The light was seen shining downward, then sharply altered course, and then finally disappeared.
Although it was widely seen, not much is actually known about it. With no official reports explaining the phenomenon, we're left with just a few facts that we can be sure of.
According to Yu Jun, editor-in-chief of the Guokr science website, we know the object was located high up in the atmosphere since it was seen across a wide area below. Because of its high altitude, the object was illuminated by sunlight that reached beyond the Earth's shadow.
And yet, further facts only serve to obfuscate the UFO's true nature.
With no launches made from the Taiyuan rocket center in Shanxi last night, it's not likely that the UFO was a satellite launch especially when considering its acute change in trajectory, said Yu. Additionally, online conjecture that this was a Beidou satellite can be ruled out since they are exclusively launched from the Xichang satellite launch center located in Western Sichuan province, reported the Beijing News.
With no official word from Chinese state media to explain last night's UFO, it wouldn't be right to make any baseless speculations. And yet, with China's airspace so highly restricted, it's not likely for this thing to be there unless it was authorized.
What does it all mean? We don't know, but if it turns out to be aliens who have come to Earth to perform their annual anal probe tests, then we can relax. After all, flying saucers are the least of Beijinger's worries when it comes to the city's list of airborne threats that include air pollution, sandstorms, flying catkins, and killer bees.
The Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to investigating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in all 50 states and more than 40 countries through a decentralized network of state chapters and local field investigators. While the organization’s mission is promoting UFO research and discovering “the true nature of the phenomenon,” the most hoped for scenario is, of course, extraterrestrial first contact (unless government Disclosure comes first). Imagine an alien race finally comes to Earth and this is the man they meet.
The Facebook post by MUFON's former State Director for Pennsylvania that prompted outrage and resignations.
JOHN VENTRE / FACEBOOK
That’s John Ventre. He was, until recently, MUFON State Director for Pennsylvania and oversaw field investigations of the most compelling of the state’s approximately 600 annual UFO sightings. You may have seen him on History Channel's UFO Hunters or Anderson Live. Ventre wrote this on his personal Facebook page in response to a post from a popular alt-right account characterizing Netflix’s Dear White People as promoting “white genocide.” He railed against affirmative action and interracial couples.
“Everything this world is was created by Europeans and Americans,” Ventre said in the post. “F’ing blacks didn’t even have a calendar, a wheel or a numbering system until the Brits showed up.” He further alluded to pseudoscientific race science, which has found purchase in the mainstream right, spread by prominent conservative think tank figures like Charles Murray, who wields unjustified extrapolations from existing IQ data to argue against improving living standards for the poor.
Ventre’s comments have kicked off a wave of anger and resignations across MUFON, most recently UFO researcher Dr. Chris Cogswell.
Cogswell was named Director of Research for MUFON in January, but announced his resignation from the organization on Twitter in April. “When I first joined MUFON, taking on the Director of Research position, I believed this issue [with Ventre] had been dealt with,” Cogswell said. But on April 13, Cogswell learned of Ventre’s “continued role within MUFON as an active member” after Ventre emailed him about preparations for the 2018 MUFON Symposium in Cherry Hill, NJ. “Within six hours of finding out I had resigned. My internal conscience would not let me continue,” he said.
MUFON boasts nearly 4,000 members and 500 investigators across a coalition of just-the-facts data collectors, alien abductees, far-thinking engineers, conspiracy theorists, ancient alien pseudohistorians, religious visionaries and ufology enthusiasts of every possible stripe. If MUFON is successful, who would the first aliens actually meet? An organization representative of the full spectrum of human experience, or a club of aging white men?
It’s a question MUFON is currently struggling to answer, with Ventre’s post a crisis point in the organization’s ongoing evolution.
MUFON Executive Director Jan Harzan initially responded to Ventre’s post in a since-deleted message to the MUFON News page, disclaiming the organization’s responsibility for a Facebook comment “many found offensive.” Instead of condemning Ventre’s words, Harzan blamed the controversy on “the new social media world we now live in” and called for an open dialogue, writing, “There is no justice in hate, no matter what side of the fence you are on. On that we can all agree.”
MUFON Executive Director Jan Harzan's response to the Ventre post, since deleted.
MUFON
After a deluge of angry responses, punctuated with pushback from MUFON Director of Communications Roger Marsh—who, in between arguing in the comments “white supremacist” is a “pretty heavy label” for Ventre, instead pointed out Ventre’s “real” personality defects, including “serving cheap food at his mansion”—MUFON deleted the post and comment field. Harzan’s rhetorical question, “Who is worse, the persons posting, or the haters hating?” is still derisively cited by UFO bloggers.
Director of Communications Roger Marsh, making a rambling defense of Ventre in the comments beneath MUFON's first response.
MUFON
“It’s almost comical, in a field where there’s so much leeway given to extreme out-of-the-blue, wacky ideas, you would still think there would be kind of a baseline of, well, this is right or wrong,” Cogswell told Newsweek.
Another professed goal of MUFON is applying their UFO research toward “improving life on our planet.” According to Harzan, meaningful UFO discoveries and disclosures could mean we’re only “20-30 years from being out in space, like Star Trek.” But Star Trek is more than spaceships, it’s also an egalitarian ideal.
Scientific optimism has always been a key component of ufology and MUFON's mission.
"AMAZING STORIES" MAGAZINE, ZIFF-DAVIS PUBLISHING CO. / PUBLIC DOMAIN
“I felt justified because you’re talking about a hate crime of white genocide and I blasted black culture. I apologized the next day,” Ventre told Newsweek, alluding to a since-deleted apology also made to his Facebook page. Comparing the possibility of white genocide to The Purge, Ventre professed to be unaware of the term’s origins in neo-Nazism as reference to a demographic decline white supremacist groups use to portray prejudice as self-defense, guarding the white race against multiculturalism.
“I don’t hate anybody, I apologized for what I said. It was in a fit of anger, it was one time in my entire life,” Ventre said, mentioning his multiracial grandson and a black man from his gym for whom he arranged a job interview. “I’m feeling like because I’m a 60-year-old white man I’m getting totally unfairly attacked here.”
By the end of May 2017, Ventre was removed from his state directorship, but MUFON’s response didn’t stop a wave of researchers from distancing themselves. In July, board member and Washington State Director James Clarkson stepped down, citing both Ventre’s post and MUFON’s association with deep-pocketed donors like J.Z. Knight.
Knight preaches to tens of thousands of followers through her Lemurian warrior persona Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old spirit who leads “spiritual drinking games” while accusing Jewish people of paying their way out of the gas chambers and disparaging Mexicans, homosexuals and “organic farmers.” Like Knight, Ventre was also a high-tier “Inner Circle” donor to MUFON.
“Remaining in MUFON in any capacity is morally unacceptable,” former MUFON State Director James Clarkson.
Asked for comment after the Cogswell resignation, Clarkson told Newsweek, “There are many excellent state organizations, but money and power have corrupted the top. Same old story.”
Current and former MUFON members, including Cogswell, have described Ventre’s ongoing involvement in the Pennsylvania chapter. Despite the events of last year he continues to serve as a treasurer and conference coordinator, albeit without a title. Ventre denied having an official position, but clarified both his ongoing involvement in planning the Symposium and day-to-day operations. “People ask me questions, I help them. I’m helping Jan [Harzan, Executive Director] with the Symposium. I wanted him to know I am friends with all these people,” he said. “Nothing locally has changed for me.”
Harzan disputes that characterization. “He’s strictly a volunteer, he attends the local chapter meeting and he volunteers his time,” he said.
“It wasn’t a condemnation. It was a demotion,” UFO researcher and author of Somewhere in the Skies Ryan Sprague told Newsweek. “It’s clear that there’s a problem. And that problem stretches beyond one man’s racist rants.”
Even a cursory look around MUFON reveals views similar to Ventre’s. Steve Hudgeons Jr., MUFON’s Director of Investigations, has shared hundreds of far-right memes on his own Facebook page with anti-immigrant, anti-trans and anti-Muslim sentiments.
“I think some people in their minds have this view of old hippies with crystals," former MUFON Director of Research Dr. Chris Cogswell.
“Demographically, in my experience, MUFON is old; 55 and up for sure,” Cogswell said. "There is a pretty good percentage of ex-military, ex-law enforcement people who are very serious about this investigation stuff.” This can lead to radically different approaches for how UFO sightings are investigated or perceived. Where Ventre sees occult connections, citing alien abductions interrupted by the abductee calling upon Jesus, Cogswell might argue for a more data-driven approach. “Wouldn’t it be great if in five years Ancient Aliens was off TV and we had more serious investigations?” he asked.
The combination of demographicslikely to align with far-right viewpoints, and the overlap between UFO researchers and conspiracy theorists, produces an environment that Sprague and others argue can be toxic to minorities.
“MUFON is composed of civilian researchers and investigators from all around the country and in all walks of life,” Sprague says. “But when remarks such as Ventre’s become public, it is extremely disheartening to know someone like that is in a position to work directly with ethnically diverse and often vulnerable witnesses of UFO events.”
Racism isn’t the only outcome of MUFON’s disinterest in combating prejudice. Erica Lukes, former MUFON State Director for Utah, describes an organization unwilling to adequately address sexual harassment. (Harzan told Newsweek MUFON has a sexual harassment policy for the Symposium and other conferences, but it's not available online).
In 2016, Lukes appeared on California MUFON Radio, hosted by Lorien Fenton, to discuss both her particular experiences and the wider issue of sexism within ufology. “One of the things that I really feel there’s a big disconnect in MUFON and in ufology, totally together, is the fact that women out there can be very vulnerable at all these events,” Fenton said in discussion with Lukes. MUFON leadership quickly objected to how the organization was characterized.
When Lukes, who also has a radio show, shared her intention to have Fenton as a guest the backlash intensified. An investigator with MUFON’s rapid-response Star Team called her to unleash a barrage of abuse. “He proceeded to call me ‘a fucking whore,’” Lukes said.
Lukes reported the abuse to MUFON’s board, including Harzan and Marsh. “I was crying, this was very awkward for me, but they refused to take any action even though this was a person representing MUFON and I was a State Director.”
“It is a male-dominated field, but that doesn’t mean anybody should be subject to that kind of abuse and bullying, especially when an organization exists like MUFON to set the standard,” Lukes said. She ultimately left MUFON and founded her own organization called Unexplained Utah. “This situation is demeaning and demoralizing. We have to get more women involved and we have to see more women in the field.”
Members of MUFON and the wider ufology community are united by incidents both mysterious and beautiful, sometimes frightening. Almost everyone contacted for this article had stories of ineffable encounters that changed the course of their lives. In Utah, Erica Lukes saw orange orbs of light hovering along a ridgeline, breaking apart or melding like cells on a slide. UFO researcher and co-founder of KGRA Radio Lorin Cutts described to me a craft hovering above him on a railway station platform, causing dogs to bark and projecting a heat he could feel on his face.
A model of the UFO that crashed in Kecksburg, PA, created for an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries."
Many shared cases that stuck with them, using shorthand like Kecksburg, or even citing MUFON case numbers, like Case #74282, the Canadian Barbell UFOs. Harzan called it “one of the best cases I’ve personally seen in 30 years.” Lukes described her investigation of American Airlines Flight 434, pilots of which saw a mysterious object over Utah. But a shared sense of awe and curiosity only has so muchpower to unite. If MUFON hopes to be a unifying organization, one ready for whatever strange future comes our way, iit will have to first secure a baseline of dignity and safety for all its members.
Last year’s news that the Pentagon was running a secret $22 million-dollar UFO program took the UFO community by storm. It turns out that the New York Times article which broke the story, and Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars UFO project, seems to have gotten one key fact wrong; the name of the program itself.
The UFO research community has become quite excited and agitated in the last few days over a recent revelation made by UFO researcher Paul Dean.
According to Dean, he was contacted by an anonymous tipster in “a senior defence program leadership role” who aided him in discovering that the now infamous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the famous $22 million-dollar UFO hunting Pentagon program, is a loose in-house ad hoc term, and actually part of a larger military program aimed at the study of advanced weaponry. In other words, there is no formal AATIP.
Dean learned that the actual name of the program, of which AATIP was a part, is the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP). Why does this matter? It turns out that after the original story broke, hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests were made seeking information on AATIP. However, since there formally is no AATIP, those FOIA requests began to come back with letters stating that no information existed regarding the program. This all begs one question. How did the New York Times and DeLonge’s To the StarsAcademy (TTSA) get this wrong?
I asked Dean what he thought about such an error in reporting,
Whether the New York Times was told about the original name, being Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, but evidently chose not to publish it, is unknown to me.
Researcher Roger Glassel has attempted, on several occasions, to contact To the Stars and the writers of the New York Time’s article concerning their documentation for the UFO information and videos they’ve released so far. A critical concern his article raises is that neither To the Stars, nor the writers of the NYT article, seem interested in sharing the paperwork used to gain access to their information.
Furthermore, Glassel points out the obvious elephant (or UFO) in the room. If the Department of Defence did release these videos to DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy via FOIA requests, then has To the Stars been lying about the program’s name the entire time? Or, if To the Stars was truly looking under the AATIP rock, it would have found nothing, so where are these videos coming from?
Dean has similar concerns. When To the Stars released its three videos, the so-called “Tic-Tac” video, the “Gimbal” footage, and the “Go-Fast” video (above), it did not release how it managed to gain access to this information. Dean writes,
…the manner of how these audio-visual records were declassified, processed, released, whatever has been open to some debate.
However, according to Dean’s anonymous contact, the Department of Defense did release the footage, and that To the Stars’ employee and former intelligence man, Luis Elizondo, did use FOIA documents to gain access to the videos and be able to publicly release them. Strangely, the Department of Defense has been rather coy regarding the release of these videos and has denied releasing them. Dean’s contact stated that somehow “corners were cut” and the DoD’s Public Affairs people had their “noses put out of joint” because of it. Perhaps the individual or individuals within To the Stars who asked for this information were able to sidestep a few hurdles due to their connections?
…although it could be partially true, nothing is ‘official’ yet — and at the root — only muddies the water, it does not help to clean it up.
Dean himself has stated that he is reserving judgment for now and waiting for more information to arrive via his most recent batch of FOIA requests seeking information on AAWSAP. This has not stopped the Ufological speculation mill to already begin grinding out some wild rumours.
Some researchers are claiming that the program was not named purposefully due to some wild conspiracy, suggesting that the various high-level players in To the Stars are engaged in an active disinformation campaign, similar to the infamous MJ-12 documents or the counter-intelligence operation run by the Air Force and intelligence agent Richard Doty. Others are claiming that To the Stars wants to have a complete hold on the information and keeping the program’s name quiet would allow for them to ensure only they can access the data.
Regardless of where one stands, the only thing anyone can agree on is that the UFO community seems to thrive on the chaotic nature of the enigma. On forums and social media platforms, Ufological charges of conspiracy and hidden agendas are already being laid, and lines of allegiance seem to be forming. UFO “experts” and “gurus” are already posting their personal stance on the matter. Various UFO podcasts and radio shows are already covering the story, often spinning their speculative yarn without any real data or evidence. It just feels good to pick a side and yell. Conclusions are already being made and the evidence has yet to be totally presented. Indeed, Dean and Glassel have found a skeleton in a closet, but no one actually knows who owns the closet, nor the identity of the dead guy inside it. This will require some detective work and plenty of patience and diligence.
As for Paul Dean, he will let those overzealous UFO pundits duke it out while he patiently and diligently checks his mailbox on a daily basis. Only time will tell if his anonymous source is right, and if he is, you can guess how the UFO community will react.
At the end of the day, there is only one way to really establish the truth behind this confusing acronymic swap. When you make an FOIA request, make sure you ask for the #1 Ufologist recommended brand of exotic military grade weaponry research, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program.
Over at his UFO Conjectures blog, Rich Reynolds has a new article titled “It’s time to eliminate the term ‘ufology.'” Rich says: “Like a lot of past ‘ologies’ – astrology, graphology, demonology, et al. – ufology has served its purpose, as the identifier of an interest, by dolts, in UFOs. It’s time to deep six the sobriquet.” Basically, Rich suggests that we should do away with the term “Ufology.” Well, he does admittedly have a point.
It’s doubtful that the term “Ufology” (and “UFO” too) will completely vanish from popular culture anytime soon. But, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to revamp things. After all, Ufology is, in essence, the study of unidentified flying objects. But, no-one can doubt that the subject encompasses much more than that. And, many of those “other things” have very little to do with what passes for mainstream Ufology. If (unlike me) you are an adherent of the theory (and a theory is all it is) that all we are dealing with is metal ships from another solar-system then, yes, Ufology is not a bad term to use. But, there is far more to Ufology than just an alien equivalent of NASA paying us occasional visits. I’ll explain what I mean.
Like it or like it not, Ufology encompasses a lot of things that the very old guard (in particular) squirm about when it comes to matters relative to UFOs. I often see such squirming when I’m lecturing on the Men in Black phenomenon. For example, there are cases of MIB turning up not when people have seen a UFO, but when they have been dabbling with Ouija-boards. There are cases where the MIB won’t enter a person’s home until they are invited in (shades of vampire legends). And witnesses report falling sick after being in close proximity to the MIB. Time and again I have had people tell me that the MIB are from “the government.” They’re not. But, for those who fly the flag of Ufology, the “secret agent” angle sits well in what passes for Ufology, and has done so for decades. But, I can say for sure, issues relative to vampire parallels and Ouija-boards don’t sit well with a lot of people who like the “U word.” Why? Such issues embarrass and annoy them. Too bad.
What about synchronicities? I get a lot of them, some very weird, and often in relation to the UFO phenomenon. How about those alien abductees who have apocalyptic dreams of the future? Again, I have seen well-known UFO researchers – usually those who got into the scene in the 1960s and 1970s- get embarrassed and defensive when it comes to issues that border on the supernatural. Why? Again, because it doesn’t go down well with what they want Ufology to be – and what it implies. And, also how it impacts on them as ufologists too.
Of course, there’s also the tiresome ego angle to deal with. I have seen more than a few saucer-seekers loudly and pompously state that they are Ufologists – solely because they like being in a scene which allows them to be part of an “ology” and to be an “ologist.” Just like an archaeologist or a biologist. Well, no actually, not at all. Being someone who investigates UFO cases (and that includes me) does not make a person an “ologist.” It makes us people who investigate weird shit.
It’s much the same with Cryptozoology. Yes, it may be exciting for some to scream “I’m a cryptozoologist!”(I’m sure I’ve done that a few times…) But, really, people like me are – in the eyes of many – monster-hunters, and I don’t have a problem with that term. As I know, though, there are some in the field of strange creatures who won’t touch the term, “monster hunter.” Nope. They need that “ology/ologist” fix, and particularly so when dealing with the media.
I don’t think it’s absolutely vital for the word “Ufology” to be replaced with another one. But, I do think something else might rid us of some of the pomposity in the field, which would not be a bad thing at all. And that something just might allow the scene to expand further into alternative realms of research and not be so tied to just the word “UFO.”
At 8:30 pm on January 23, 1974, a number of people living near the Berwyn mountains in the north of Wales reported seeing a UFO. A fireball streaked across the sky, appearing to crash into the mountains. This was immediately followed by a loud boom and shaking of the earth, leading witnesses to reasonably assume the sound had come from the fireball that, only seconds earlier, looked like it was about to cause a very loud noise in the Welsh countryside. An RAF team was dispatched to investigate and official reports indicate that they found no crash site of any sort—in stark contrast to the Gwynedd police department whose recorded logs mention “a large explosion in the area and a large fire in the mountainside.”
In 2010, official Ministry of Defense documents were released that many news outlets claimed disproved any claims of UFO sightings. The official explanation: a meteorite burning up in the atmosphere happening, coincidentally, at the exact same time as a probable earthquake or landslide. That’s a doozy of a coincidence. Also, the “large fire” was actually just the flashlights of poachers in the mountains.
Unsurprisingly, many were unconvinced of this official explanation, and a new piece of the mystery has reportedly just surfaced. UFO researcher Russ Kellet has just released a maphe says was given to him by five witnesses on which they recorded the flight path of the “flying saucer” and the subsequent flight path of RAF jets chasing after it.
Meteors are common. Meteors happening at the same time as unreported earthquakes are less common.
According to Russ Kellett, the five friends, four of whom served together in World War Two, jumped into a car and raced to the mountains after the UFO came down:
“The five saw a strange object and got out to have a look, but the military were there and told them to leave. They moved to a better position and started to take photos.”
It’s unclear if Kellett means that they photographed the “strange object” or if they were taking photographs to accurately mark the area on the map where the UFO came down. So far no photographs have been released alongside the flight path map.
Kellett says he was given the map after a talk he gave on the Berwyn mountain UFO incident “around the late 1990’s, or early 2000’s.” According to Kellet:
It was very strange and I was a little bit spooked. I’ve carried the map around for a long time as part of my research. ‘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.
The Berwyn mountain range where the alleged UFO crash took place.
The Berwyn mountain incident has not gotten less mysterious with age. The strange thing about the “Welsh Roswell” UFO sighting is the sheer number of inconsistencies between the official report and witness reports, including the official logs of the Gwynedd police. According to the Ministry of Defense, the RAF search and rescue team that was scrambled in response found no sign of wreckage and concluded that no impact ever occurred. Strange then, that multiple witnesses and a police log reported a fire on the mountainside at the exact time and location of the nonexistent impact. If Kellett is to be believed, too, the five responsible for the map witnessed a much more in depth investigation of the mountain, including seeing a “strange object.”
Also odd is the conclusion that, although none was recorded, the sound and shaking reported was definitely due to an earth tremor or landslide that happened at the exact same time as the UFO came down. Ministry of Defense investigations also report five other UFO sightings around 10pm that same night.
Without jumping to conclusions—if the MoD is, indeed, being shady about this, it could easily have been a crashed military plane and not necessarily an alien spacecraft—it seems safe to say, that despite the best efforts to curb public speculation, the Berwyn Mountains incident remains a mystery 45 years later.
I found an alien city (non reflective black material) inside a what looks like a crater, but is actually alien made to hide it. At the center of the city is a glowing orb. The city is made of massive black tunnels the move in every direction but they very in size from 2km wide to a few hundred meters wide. Below this mass of black structures is more of the city, which is sealed underground. Ever hear the story of Atlantis and how at the center of the city was a great diamond which was the power source for the entire culture? Perhaps Atlantis never sank, but instead flew to another planet, where we see it now. Scott C. Waring
Friday night on "Ancient Aliens," Podesta very seriously reflected on the Clinton campaign’s pro-alien declassification platform.(Andrew Harrer/Via Bloomberg)
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).
Podesta has long been in avid pursuitof the truth about UFOs, memorably reassuringthe 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
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?
"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 severalreports 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.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BIZARRE SCIENCE FUTURISTIC PIG BRAINS CAN BE KEPT ALIVE OUTSIDE THE BODY. HUMAN BRAINS MIGHT BE NEXT.
PIG BRAINS CAN BE KEPT ALIVE OUTSIDE THE BODY. HUMAN BRAINS MIGHT BE NEXT.
In a step that could change the definition of death, researchers have restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours.
The feat offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab in stunning detail. But it also inaugurates a bizarre new possibility in life extension, should human brains ever be kept on life support outside the body.
The work was described on March 28 at a meeting held at the National Institutes of Health to investigate ethical issues arising as US neuroscience centers explore the limits of brain science.
During the event, Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
Reached by telephone yesterday, Sestan declined to elaborate, saying he had submitted the results for publication in a scholarly journal and had not intended for his remarks to become public.
Since last spring, however, a widening circle of scientists and bioethicists have been buzzing about the Yale research, which involves a breakthrough in restoring micro-circulation—the flow of oxygen to small blood vessels, including those deep in the brain.
“These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was among those briefed on the work. “It’s at the extreme of technical know-how, but not that different from preserving a kidney.”
Hyman says the similarity to techniques for preserving organs like hearts or lungs for transplant could cause some to mistakenly view the technology as a way to avoid death. “It may come to the point that instead of people saying ‘Freeze my brain,’ they say ‘Hook me up and find me a body,’” says Hyman.
Such hopes are misplaced, at least for now. Transplanting a brain into a new body “is not remotely possible,” according to Hyman.
Brain in a bucket
The Yale system, called BrainEx, involves connecting a brain to a closed loop of tubes and reservoirs that circulate a red perfusion fluid, which is able to carry oxygen to the brain stem, the cerebellar artery, and areas deep in the center of the brain.
In his presentation to the NIH officials and ethics experts, Sestan said the technique was likely to work in any species, including primates. “This is probably not unique to pigs,” he said.
The Yale researchers, who began work on the technique about four years ago and are seeking NIH funding for it, acted out of a desire to construct a comprehensive atlas of connections between human brain cells.
Some of these connections probably span large regions of the brain and would thus be traced more easily in a complete, intact organ.
Sestan acknowledged that surgeons at Yale had already asked him if the brain-preserving technology could have medical uses. Disembodied human brains, he said, could become guinea pigs for testing exotic cancer cures and speculative Alzheimer’s treatments too dangerous to try on the living.
The setup, jokingly dubbed the “brain in a bucket,” would quickly raise serious ethical and legal questions if it were tried on a human.
For instance, if a person’s brain were reanimated outside the body, would that person awake in what would amount to the ultimate sensory deprivation chamber, without ears, eyes, or a way to communicate? Would someone retain memories, an identity, or legal rights? Could researchers ethically dissect or dispose of such a brain?
The “brain in a jar” scene from the 1983 comedy The Man with Two Brains. Though fodder for jokes, as brain-preservation technology advances medical ethicists are taking it seriously. STREAMLINE | “THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS” (1983)
Also, because federal safety regulations apply to people, not “dead” tissues, it is uncertain whether the US Food and Drug Administration would have any say over whether scientists could attempt such a reanimation procedure.
“There are going to be a lot of weird questions even if it isn’t a brain in a box,” said an advisor to the NIH who didn’t wish to speak on the record. “I think a lot of people are going to start going to slaughterhouses to get heads and figure it out.”
Sestan said he was concerned about how the technology would be received by the public and by his peers. “People are fascinated. We have to be careful how fascinated,” he said.
Comatose state
It’s well known that a comatose brain can be kept alive for at least decades. That is the case with brain-dead people whose families elect to keep them attached to ventilating machines.
Less well explored are artificial means of maintaining a brain wholly separated from its body. There have been previous attempts, including a 1993 report involving rodents, but Sestan’s team is the first to achieve it with a large mammal, without using cold temperatures, and with such promising results.
At first, the Yale group was uncertain if an “ex vivo” brain to which circulation was restored would regain consciousness. To answer that question, the scientists checked for signs of complex activity in the pig brains using a version of EEG, or electrodes placed on the brain’s surface. These can pick up electrical waves reflecting broad brain activity indicating thoughts and sensations.
Initially, Sestan said, they believed they had found such signals, generating both alarm and excitement in the lab, but they later determined that those signals were artifacts created by nearby equipment.
Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns.
The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated.
However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t get [any] signal.”
Sestan told the NIH it is conceivable that the brains could be kept alive indefinitely and that steps could be attempted to restore awareness. He said his team had elected not to attempt either because “this is uncharted territory.”
“That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” Sestan said, although he expressed concern over how the technique might be used by others in the future. “Hypothetically, somebody takes this technology, makes it better, and restores someone’s [brain] activity. That is restoring a human being. If that person has memory, I would be freaking out completely.”
Brain experiments
Consciousness isn’t necessary for the type of experiments on brain connections that scientists hope to carry out on living ex vivo brains. “The EEG brain activity is a flat line, but a lot of other things keep on ticking,” says Anna Devor, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, who is familiar with the Yale project.
Devor thinks the ability to work on intact, living brains would be “very nice” for scientists working to build a brain atlas. “The whole question of death is a gray zone,” she says. “But we need to remember the isolated brain is not the same as other organs, and we need to treat it with the same level of respect that we give to an animal.”
Today in the journal Nature, 17 neuroscientists and bioethicists, including Sestan, published an editorial arguing that experiments on human brain tissue may require special protections and rules.
They identified three categories of “brain surrogates” that provoke new concerns. These include brain organoids (blobs of nerve tissue the size of a rice grain), human-animal chimeras (mice with human brain tissue added), and ex vivo human brain tissue (such as chunks of brain removed during surgery).
They went on to suggest a variety of ethical safety measures, such as drugging animals that possess human brain cells so they stay in a “comatose-like brain state.”
Hyman, who also signed the letter, says he did so reluctantly, because he thinks most of the scenarios are exaggerated or unlikely. It’s hardly possible a tiny brain organoid will feel or think anything, he says.
The one type of research he thinks may call for quick action to set up rules of the road is Sestan’s unpublished brain preservation technique (which the Nature editorial did not discuss). “If people want to keep human brains alive post mortem, that is a more pressing and realistic problem,” says Hyman. “Given that it is possible with a pig brain, there should be guidelines for human tissue.”
How Would Humanity React If We Really Found Aliens?
How Would Humanity React If We Really Found Aliens?
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
An invasion of Earth by alien flying saucers is a trope of science fiction. But what if aliens really did find us?
Credit: Ana Aguirre Perez/Shutterstock
If aliens reach out to us, what would happen first?
It's a question that has puzzled science-fiction fans and scientists alike for decades, and we already may have a hint of how people will react. On Oct. 30, 1938, a dramatized version of the 1898 H.G. Wells novel "The War of the Worlds" played on the CBS Radio system across the United States. The story details how Martians attacked Earth.
The radio broadcast caused a reaction when people mistook it for a real radio report, but accounts vary as to how much of a reaction there was. Some accounts describe nationwide panic, while others say not very many people actually listened to the broadcast. The promise of alien life stars in Episode 1 of "AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which debuts on AMC tonight. Still, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher Duncan Forgan told Space.com the "War of the Worlds" broadcast may be instructive to think about as SETI scientists worldwide update their "first contact" protocols. [E.T. Etiquette: How Should Humanity Interact with Alien Life?]
"If you pick the right science fiction — the hard science fiction — it's placed in the best possible educated guesses about what will happen," said Forgan, who is a research fellow at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He explained that "hard" science fiction refers to science fiction that emphasizes accuracy (think the 2015 movie "The Martian," for example).
If researchers find a signal today, Forgan said, one of the things they will have to manage is a public used to getting constant news updates on Twitter and other forms of social media. It's something Forgan and his colleagues are already working on. The International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee created a post-detection protocol in 1989 that was slightly updated in 2010; a new update is starting soon and should be finished in a few years, Forgan said.
Scientific work
Famed directors James Cameron and Ridley Scott talk aliens in "AMC Visionaries: James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction," which premieres on AMC on April 30.
Credit: AMC
For the most part, scientists assume alien contact would happen through a signal purposely sent toward Earth. The "acid test" is to make sure the signal is verified by multiple observatories, said SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak. "It would take a while to verify, and then the people who like to think about these matters say you would have a press conference and announce this to the world," he said, but he added that wouldn't work unless everyone in the project were sworn to secrecy. In this era of news leaks, he said that situation is very unlikely to hold.
So, scientists try instead to stick to a protocol that includes informing the public. The 2010 IAA protocol is only two pages and covers facets such as searching for a signal, handling evidence and what to do in the case of a confirmed detection.
If the evidence gets out to the public while the scientists are still analyzing the signal, Forgan said they could manage the public's expectations by using something called the Rio Scale. It's essentially a numeric value that represents the degree of likelihood that an alien contact is "real." (Forgan added that the Rio Scale is also undergoing an update, and more should be coming out about it in May.)
If the aliens did arrive here, "first contact" protocols likely would be useless, because if they're smart enough to show up physically, they could probably do anything else they like, according to Shostak. "Personally, I would leave town," Shostak quipped. "I would get a rocket and get out of the way. I have no idea what they are here for."
But there's little need to worry. An "Independence Day" scenario of aliens blowing up important national buildings such as the White House is extremely unlikely, Forgan said, because interstellar travel is difficult. (This feeds into something called the Drake Equation, which considers where the aliens could be and helps show why we haven't heard anything from them yet.) [The Father of SETI: Q&A with Astronomer Frank Drake]
WHAT DO ALIENS LOOK LIKE? - Computer Animated Alien Life In Outer Space
Early SETI work
To find a signal, first we have to be listening for it. SETI "listening" is going on all over the world, and in fact, this has been happening for many decades. The first modern SETI experiment took place in 1960. Under Project Ozma, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope (located at Green Bank, West Virginia) at two stars called Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. He scanned at a frequency astronomers nickname "the water hole," which is close to the frequency of light that's given off by hydrogen and hydroxyl (one hydrogen atom bonded to one oxygen atom). [13 Ways to Find Intelligent Aliens]
In 1977, The Ohio State University SETI's program made international headlines after a project volunteer, Jerry Ehman, wrote, "Wow!" beside a strong signal a telescope there received. The Aug. 15, 1977, "Wow" signal was never repeated, however.
There have been many, many projects since then. As a taste: The SETI Institute was founded in 1984; while it may be the most famous of the SETI projects, there are many other independent SETIs at universities and institutions worldwide that have done work over the decades. One of the center's major initiatives was Project Phoenix, which scanned nearby, sun-like stars. Currently, the SETI Institute, in collaboration with other institutes, is working on a concept called the Allen Telescope Array, which has dozens of radio dishes in northern California.
In 2015, the well-known physicist Stephen Hawking and many other researchers launched Breakthrough Listen, a project that will scan 1 million Milky Way stars and 100 nearby galaxies for extraterrestrial life.
Space-based SETI
While searches of alien messages aren't ongoing in space, there have been efforts to communicate with any beings that may come across our spacecraft.
The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes flew by Jupiter (and in Pioneer 11's case, Saturn) to eventually make their way out of the solar system. Before their launches in 1972 and 1973, respectively, a Pioneer plaque was mounted on board each spacecraft. It shows the form of the human body and where the Earth is located in the galaxy.
The twin Voyager probes launched in 1977 to examine the outer solar system. Voyager 2 reached interstellar space in 2012, while Voyager 1 is still at the edge of the solar system. Each of the spacecraft includes two golden records with sounds recorded on Earth, ranging from whale calls to music to the word "hello" in many languages. The record also has diagrams of the human body and where our solar system is located.
Scientists also transmitted a radio message from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico in 1974. The so-called Arecibo Message includes such things as the numbers 1 through 10; the atomic numbers of elements such as hydrogen and oxygen; information about DNA; and diagrams of a human body, the Earth and our solar system.
In a related field, the study of exoplanets has accelerated in recent years with the Kepler mission, which has found more than 2,000 confirmed exoplanets alone, as well as other observatories on the ground and in space. Scientists are now trying to characterize which of these planets may be the most habitable. Atmospheric studies and more detailed looks at star activity will be some of the activities scientists undertake with future telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in 2020.
WETENSCHAP & PLANEET De Europees-Russische sonde ExoMars heeft foto’s van ijsvlaktes aan een kraterrand op de Rode Planeet naar de Aarde gestuurd. Op één van de beelden is een 40 kilometer lange doorsnede te zien, zo heeft ESA meegedeeld. Het zijn de eerste foto’s van de verkenner sinds die een nieuwe baan op 400 kilometer hoogte draait.
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.
De beelden van een camera moeten helpen de mogelijke bronnen van de gassen op het oppervlak van de planeet te vinden.
EPAEen van de foto's van de Europees-Russische sonde ExoMars.
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.
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?
Nearly 60,000 UFO sightings MAPPED: Does this finally prove mystery link to US military?
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.
UFO MAP: Nearly 60,000 sightings have been plotted across the US.
Sightings recorded by the US-based National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), an independent organisation that logs and investigates such cases, have been charted on a map of North America.
Data analyst Adam Crahen plotted all 58,828 reports received by NUFORC for the US from 1995 to 2014 on a map of the US.
The impressive end result shows swathes of green UFO reports spread out across the vast country.
However, it has been suggested the most dense areas for sightings coincide with US military installations.
Alex Hollings, a retired US duty marine, now writes for Sofrep.com, a news and intelligence service provided by former special operations veterans.
He wrote: "When laying that same map of reported UFO sightings over a US map showing the locations of all military installations, an interesting trend starts to emerge.
It’s not as unlikely as you may think. Military aircraft are often mistaken for Unidentified Flying Objects in US skies because their shape and behaviour don’t adhere to the norms we’re accustomed to.
Alex Hollings
"Many of the regions that seem to show a high frequency of UFO reports coincide with the locations of military installations.
"For the conspiracy minded, this might mean our alien visitors have taken a particular interest in what our military is up to.
"Others might be inclined to conclude many of these supposed UFO sightings may be nothing more than misidentified military aircraft."
Conspiracy theorists have developed many claims about UFO and US military links.
The most far-fetched of which suggests intelligent aliens have arrived on Earth and been hidden away in top-secret US military installations away from public view.
There, they help military scientists reverse engineer their flying saucer technology, in return for being allowed to abduct a small number of human beings for their own experimentation.
Another slightly less outlandish claim suggests that aliens are not working with the military as above, but so-called black projects are underway at secret bases, such as Area 51 in Nevada.
There, it is claimed, experts try to reverse engineer UFOs that have been recovered after "crashes" in order to produce the most hi-tech spy craft ever built on Earth.
Many claim these "spy craft" being tested are then mistaken for alien UFOs.
Mr Hollings believes the real reason so many UFOs are see near military installations is more straight forward.
He added: "It’s not as unlikely as you may think. Military aircraft are often mistaken for Unidentified Flying Objects in US skies because their shape and behaviour don’t adhere to the norms we’re accustomed to.
"Sometimes, these sightings are the result of the testing of never before seen platforms, but others, it’s simply a matter of military aircraft not exhibiting the same behaviour seen from commercial aircraft above our heads.
"A bright light flying low over a rural region and moving in a seemingly unusual manner could be Martians… but it could also be a Blackhawk in the distance. Most people don’t have a lot of experience identifying either, through no fault of their own.
"Is this a reasonable explanation for nearly 60,000 sightings spread out over a 19-year span?
"Maybe not, but the next time you look to the sky and think you may see an inbound flying saucer, it might be worth doing a quick search to see how far you are from the nearest air national guard base. The answer may surprise you."
Groups like NUFORC and the larger, but similar US organisation the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), readily accept the about 95 per cent of the thousands of reports they receive can be explained by natural phenomena and misidentified aircraft built by humans.
The other around five per cent are said to remain a mystery.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
, is that you? A 
