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...
22-05-2018
Top Secret UK Project Reveals the Real-Life X-Files On UFO Mysteries
Top Secret UK Project Reveals the Real-Life X-Files On UFO Mysteries
The UK’s Ministry of Defence former official has new revelations regarding a secret government UFO study done during the 1990s.
The Mod commissioned a defence contractor in 1996 to produce a comprehensive report on UFO sightings in the UK. The report was conducted amidst a vast public interest in UFOs with the popularity of the X-Files TV series and the 50th anniversary of the famous Roswell Incident.
The report carefully avoided using the term UFO as it described sightings as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
The report analysed a database of sightings between 1987 and 1997 through code-named Project Condign, and it was delivered to officials in 2000. Found in the study “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in the UK Air Defence Region” was that a variety of known phenomena, both natural and human-made could explain the sightings. It noted the incidence of relatively rare natural events. The report said there was no proof to associate the phenomena with any particular nation.
The Project Condign has been compared to a U.S. air force initiative to investigate UFOs dubbed as Project Blue Book, which was ended in 1969.
A journalist and author Nick Pope claimed he was part in setting up the study as a former MOD UFO investigator with his counterpart in the Ministry’s Defence Intelligence Staff. He explained via an emailed statement that they set up the study because they had done very little trend analysis in their decades-long UFO sighting investigations on a case-by-case basis. He revealed that Project Condign was aimed to rectify it and serve as a proper intelligence assessment that would look into the patterns in data they already had.
He added that they were looking everything together about UFOs, including the assessment of what they were dealing, what are threats, and what are the opportunities.
In 1993, initial discussions about the study started, according to Pope, who already not part of it when the work on the report itself began.
According to Pope, the study itself was highly confidential and extremely sensitive as the Mod consistently told the public, the media, and the parliament that UFOs were of limited interest and no defence significance. He explained that they decided to make the study highly classified to avoid exposure to an internal position on the phenomenon that was not the same from public opinion.
It was only in 2006 that the report entered the public domain through a Freedom of Information request from academic Dr David Clarke. The author of the report has been kept secret.
Clarke, a principal research fellow at the Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, obtained a new set of unseen documents recently, which have put Project Condign into the spotlight once again. According to the record, the Mod officials had overworked to reduce their commitment to investigating UFO sighting reports. Base on the findings, Project Condign, had made the foundations for the Mod to begin scaling back its operations on UFOs. Since 1967, the DI55 department of the Ministry secretly collected data on potential UFO sightings and closed at the end of 2000. In 2009 the MoD’s UFO Desk closed.
Pope found the final report of Project Condign disappointing. He said that the report looked like a conclusion-led study using a data to support a personal opinion. However, he acknowledged the challenges in compiling a confidential report such as this one.
Pope said that those involved in an intelligence study like Project Condign don’t reach out to the experts on the subject matter outside the intelligence community, which is the problem. He explained that consultation with other scientists and academics would have been helpful.
The discussion of novel military applications that could be supported by a greater understanding of the UFO phenomenon has surprised the former Mod employee. He said it was primarily a reference to weaponisation, including a directed energy weapon’s construction.
Mod explained in a statement that all its historical UFO-related files have either been released or are soon to be released to the National Archives of the UK. It added that the MOD maintains to have no opinion regarding extraterrestrial life existence or otherwise and does not investigate UFO sightings.
The book describes incidents where towns were left ‘burned out’ by UFOs – but which have somehow been covered up by the mainstream media.
Even Hollywood stars may have fallen victim, with Carole Lombard thought to have been bumped off in a UFO-related killing (and some UFO fans claim JFK and Marilyn Monroe were bumped off for ‘knowing too much’.
Not only that, but UFO researchers have been murdered (possibly by aliens, or by their allies in government), and a bunch of celebs have been bumped off, too.
UFO expert Nigel Watson, who contributes a chapter to the book, says, ‘Fortunately, death by UFO is a very rare event. Most instances have occurred in remote places and might be due to secret government testing or rumours that have grown into ‘facts.’
Quite a lot going on on this cover
‘Some ufologists believe that the propulsion systems of UFOs are so deadly to humans and that you should keep your distance if you see one landing nearby. Like most things in the UFO subject there are no solid facts to support the idea hundreds of people have been killed by alien spacecraft, nonetheless this won’t stop the speculation!
Are UFO researchers being bumped off?
Max Spiers Rex
It’s almost the perfect conspiracy theory – that the government is actually killing off anyone who gets too close to the truth about UFOs.
But some people seriously believe it – and point tohttps://metro.co.uk/ a grisly catalogues of supposed ‘accidents’ and ‘suicides’ as proof.
As long ago as 1971, researcher Otto Binder claimed that at least 137 UFO investigators had died under mysterious circumstances during the 1960s.
Recently, many believed that conspiracy theorist Max Spiers (pictured) was killed by sinister forces, after he ‘vomited black liquid’.
But the figures might be deceptive: there are a huge number of UFO believers, ‘researchers’ and authors, most of whom have lived normal lives.
Nigel Watson says, ‘Certainly, several UFO researchers have died in unusual circumstances or have committed ‘suicide’ but they are a very small number compared to the number of UFO researchers who have spoken openly about UFOs for decades and have never been troubled by MIB or alien murder squads.’
You may also be interested in Part One of this two-part UFO series, where we cover other striking encounters with UFOs that landed, crashed, and buzzed by Earth landmarks.
1. UFO LANDING IN RENDLESHAM FOREST, UK
“I’ve gone on record saying Rendlesham might be the turning point in history that leads to the explanation of the UFO phenomenon.” —Nick Pope, UK Ministry of Defense
It was December 1980, and on a US military base in England, a security patrol observed a strange light descending into nearby Rendlesham Forest, and assumed one of their aircraft must have gone down.
Re-creation of the Craft that Landed in Rendlesham Forest
Sergeants John Burroughs and James Penniston were dispatched to investigate, and instead of a downed plane, they discovered a strange craft with glowing yellow and blue lights, approximately nine by six feet in size. Static electricity seemed to be emanating from it. The men stood and stared at the object for about 10 minutes, finally deciding that it did not appear to be a threat. They moved closer and observed strange hieroglyphic markings on the side of the craft.
Suddenly, an explosion of light from the ship knocked both men down; “I thought I was going to die that night,” Penniston said later. Penniston got up and touched the craft; it felt smooth and warm.
The men stayed near the UFO for 45 minutes until it began to rise through the trees, then shot into the night so quickly that Penniston later wrote in his log book, “Speed: Impossible!”
The next morning, investigators found deep, triangle-shaped impressions in the ground where the craft had been sighted. Tests showed high levels of radiation.
The ship returned for two consecutive nights; on the final night, it was witnessed by nearly 60 people.
2.THE KECKSBURG UFO CRASH
At first, they thought it was some kind of crazy meteor. The fireball that streaked across skies over Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in 1965 dropped metal debris and caused sonic booms. Eyewitnesses in the small town of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania saw the UFO crash into a forest, followed by blue smoke that rose from amongst the trees. They called authorities.
Reproduction of What Witnesses Saw Near Kecksburg, PA
Meanwhile, a few brave individuals ventured into the woods to see what had crash-landed. They found the object partially buried in the ground; it was bronze in color and metallic, about the size of a car, shaped like an acorn. The witnesses noticed strange markings on its surface that resembled Egyptian hieroglyphs. Jim Romanesky, one of the observers, said that the UFO was completely seamless, almost as if it had been made of liquid metal that was poured into a mold.
When the military arrived, they cordoned off the area, detaining and removing everyone from the forest. Witnesses saw them load the object onto a flatbed truck and remove it; when an official report was issued, it said that “absolutely nothing” had been found—case closed.
3. PHOENIX LIGHTS
Phones at the police station were ringing off the hook, UFO reporting agencies were inundated with calls, the news media were receiving a flurry of reports, people were standing in the streets and pointing at the sky: there were strange lights hovering over the city of Phoenix! Thousands of people saw the Phoenix Lights that March day in 1997, including police offers, military personnel, and Arizona governor Fife Symington; eye-witnesses said that the lights appeared to be part of a massive black V-shaped craft that moved slowly and silently as it passed over their rooftops.
The first reports of the UFO came from Henderson, Nevada, where witnesses said the craft was drifting along in a southeasterly direction; it passed over other towns until it appeared over Phoenix. Air traffic controllers at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport could see the lights through their window but registered no sign of anything on radar.
The local Air Force base denied that any activity had taken place that night—then later changed the story and said that the lights had been aircraft flares they’d dropped between 9:00 and 10:00 PM that night. Problem is, the UFO lights had appeared over Henderson, Nevada just before 8:00 PM and over Phoenix just after 8:30 PM.
4. UFO OVER O’HARE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
“I am still in absolute wonder and amazement at what I saw that afternoon.”
—Eye-witness to the O’Hare UFO
It had been a normal afternoon at busy O’Hare International when airport employees began to notice something strange in the sky.
A Strange Disc Hovers Over O’Hare International Airport
On November 7, 2006, a metallic, saucer-like craft appeared above the airport and hovered over Gate C-17. A ramp employee was the first to see it as he helped a jet, flight 446 bound for North Carolina, push back to prepare for takeoff. Chatter on two-way radios alerted a dozen other employees, ranging from pilots to supervisors, who all ran to see the disc hovering in the sky.
The UFO lingered over the airport for about two minutes, then, as witnesses described, shot straight up at an incredible velocity and vanished, leaving a clear, sky-blue hole in the clouds.
The Federal Aviation Administration first denied they had any evidence of the matter. When a local reporter discovered a recording of an FAA official discussing the sighting with a United Airlines employee, the FAA changed the story: it was just a weather phenomenon, and there was no need for further investigation.
SPITTING IMAGE Simulated collisions between two moonlets can lead to oddly shaped moons (bottom row) that closely resemble some of Saturn’s moons (top row; from left to right: Pan, Atlas and Prometheus).
IMAGES: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE; SIMULATIONS: A. LELEU, M. JUTZI AND M. RUBIN/NATURE ASTRONOMY 2018
A space ravioli. A planetary baguette. A cosmic Kaiser roll. Some of Saturn’s moons have shapes that are strangely reminiscent of culinary concoctions.
Adrien Leleu , a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and colleagues developed computer simulations that let the scientists virtually smack together similar-sized moonlets at various speeds and angles. The team found that, at low angles and relative speeds of tens of meters per second (roughly equal to a car on country roads), impacts can create offbeat shapes that look like the misfits around Saturn.
Head-on collisions result in a flattened moon like Pan, which resembles an empanada (SN Online: 3/10/17). An impact angle of just a few degrees leads to an elongated satellite such as Prometheus, which looks like a French loaf.
Many moons
A variety of moon shapes could result from two moonlets coming together at different angles and speeds, according to computer simulations. Dark areas are original moonlet surfaces, whereas in the light areas the surface has been ejected or contorted. Speeds are relative to the escape velocity, the speed at which ejected material escapes the gravity of the combined moonlets.
A. LELEU, M. JUTZI AND M. RUBIN/NATURE ASTRONOMY 2018
Not all run-ins create a weird looking moon. At higher angles, for example, moonlets might hit and run. Or they could form highly elongated rotating moons that subsequently break apart.
Leleu and collaborators focused on the smaller moons of Saturn that orbit within the planet’s rings. But the team also found that a similar collision between two larger moonlets could also account for the odd shape of Iapetus (SN Online: 4/21/14), a more distant walnut-shaped moon with a pronounced ridge along its equator that has puzzled scientists since the belt’s discovery. Other speculative origins for the ridge include volcanoes, plate tectonics or ring debris that rained down on the moon.
“After the Wright Brothers proved 117 years ago that powered, sustained, and controlled flight was possible here on Earth, another group of American pioneers may prove the same can be done on another world.”
Excitement has been building for NASA’s next rover mission to Mars, scheduled to launch sometime in 2020. Although it looks a lot like the current Curiosity rover, its mission will be to search directly for possible evidence of past life. Curiosity, on the other hand, is studying the ancient habitability of Gale Crater on Mars, which we now know used to hold a lake or series of lakes, focusing more on geology than biology.
And now the upcoming 2020 mission just got even better – NASA has approved the inclusion of a tiny drone-like helicopter to accompany the rover!
This is something never done before, and assuming it’s successful, will be the first time that Mars has been robotically explored by something other than an orbiter, lander or rover.
Artist’s concept of the Mars Helicopter, which will be sent to Mars along with the 2020 rover.
The Mars Helicopter will be a small, drone-like autonomous rotorcraft, designed specifically for Mars’ very thin atmosphere; it will provide a unique and exciting new way to see the Martian landscape as never before – a bird’s-eye view, if you will.
And of course, it’s just very cool. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine commented:
NASA has a proud history of firsts. The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling. The Mars Helicopter holds much promise for our future science, discovery, and exploration missions to Mars.
Having a helicopter would be useful in scouting out sites for further investigation by the rover. Being up in the air is a definite advantage. You can get a better overall view than from the ground or even from orbit.
The Mars Helicopter will be a first test of this kind of technology. Weighing under four pounds (1.8 kilograms), and with a body the size of a softball, the concept has already gone through four years of design, testing and redesign. Operating in Mars’ thin atmosphere isn’t as easy as on Earth, so the twin, counter-rotating blades will need to spin at almost 3,000 rpm, 10 times faster than a conventional helicopter. On the Martian surface, the atmosphere is equivalent to an altitude of 100,000 feet (30,000 meters) on Earth, so the helicopter needs to be able to fly in those conditions.
By comparison, the highest altitude record for a helicopter on Earth is 40,000 feet (12,000 meters).
Artist’s concept of the helicopter on Mars’ surface. After deployment, it’ll make a short first test flight, and then longer flights to different locations on Mars.
Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL, said:
To make it fly at that low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be.
The Mars Helicopter also includes solar cells to charge its lithium-ion batteries and a heater to keep it warm. The 2020 mission provides a perfect opportunity to test this first attempt at Mars aviation. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said:
Exploring the red planet with NASA’s Mars Helicopter exemplifies a successful marriage of science and technology innovation and is a unique opportunity to advance Mars exploration for the future. After the Wright Brothers proved 117 years ago that powered, sustained, and controlled flight was possible here on Earth, another group of American pioneers may prove the same can be done on another world.
NASA will conduct a 30-day flight test campaign of the helicopter. For the first flight, it will climb to about 10 feet (3 meters), and then hover for about 30 seconds. If all goes well, it will take gradually longer flights, up to a few hundred meters. Zurbuchen said:
The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future explorers. We already have great views of Mars from the surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from a “marscopter,” we can only imagine what future missions will achieve.
The 2020 rover itself will be the most sophisticated ever sent to Mars so far. While other rovers have focused on geology and habitability, this one is designed to look directly for evidence of past microbial life on the red planet, with updated instruments, and will be the first life-focused mission since the Viking landers in the 1970s. It will also take rock and soil samples which will be preserved in small tubes, to be sent back to Earth at a later date and test technologies which could be used for future human missions.
The rover will launch in 2020 and land in February 2021. Meanwhile, NASA’s newest Mars mission, the InSight lander, was launched on May 5 and will land later this year. InSight will stay in one place, however, using a wide range of instruments to study the composition of the interior of Mars, to help scientists learn how the planet formed and evolved.
View larger. | Mars 2020 rover is similar in design to the Curiosity rover, but will focus on searching for evidence of past microbial life. The helicopter, now approved, will serve as a scout.
Bottom line: Mars’ atmosphere is thin. In order to stay aloft, the planned softball-sized Mars Helicopter – which will accompany the Mars 2020 mission – will have twin, counter-rotating blades that’ll bite into Mars’ thin air at about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth.
Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is a documentary filmmaker and contemporary artist. He launched his series Extraordinary Beliefs in 2015 and since then has created several compelling documentaries on various paranormal phenomena, mostly centered around UFO and alien abduction themes. Jeremy has been able to gain access to witnesses few others have had the opportunity to interview and shares their stories in an engrossing and intimate manner, careful not to steer his audience but to allow them to make up their own minds.
In this interview, we discuss another exciting project in which Jeremy has gained unprecedented access to extraordinary events. What has been dubbed the “Skinwalker Ranch” in the Uintah Basin of Utah, is a location where many types of paranormal phenomena have been reported for decades. The site gained worldwide notoriety with the 2005 bookHunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah co-authored by investigative journalist George Knapp and scientist Colm Kelleher. Since then very few have gained access to the ranch. Jeremy has been able to work with George Knapp to create a documentary with footage that has never been seen by the public of an investigation by Bigelow Aerospace’s Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) division. It has recently been revealed this investigation was funded in part by the Department of Defense.
According to a ranking member of the U.S. House Science Subcommittee on Space, the recent revelation the Pentagon investigated UFOs piqued his interest. He says he suggested to the head of the subcommittee and the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that hearings be held on the matter. A fellow politician and an advisor to the White House on space agree that it is a subject that should be taken seriously.
The comments were made during an event held by Politico launching their weekly space news briefs. Politico Defense Editor Bryan Bender moderated panel discussions with his fellow Politico reporter Jaqueline Klimas. Bender was familiar with the UFO topic and the Pentagon study because he had authored an article that was posted within hours of The New York Times posting their storybreaking the recent big UFO news.
Reps. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.) and Mary Lynne Dittmar, president and CEO, Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, speak during the POLITICO Space Launch Event.
(Image credit: Politico)
The UFO question came up in a panel with Ami Bera (Democrat, California), ranking member of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Space, Randy Hultgren (Republican, Illinois), a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and Mary Lynne Dittmar, CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. Dittmar is also an advisor for the president’s space council, a group that advises the White House on space policy.
Bender asked the group if given the recent UFO news whether the topic should be taken more seriously or if it is just “sci-fi stuff.”
Bera answered first stating that he thought the topic was credible, so much so that he spoke with the head of the space subcommittee and the head the of the overall committee on science, space, and technology suggesting a hearing the matter.
Hultgren and Dittmar agreed unidentified aircraft should be something that is taken seriously and investigated.
You can read more about their comments in my story on Den of Geek here.
China on track to the first-ever landing on the ‘dark side’ of the moon
China on track to the first-ever landing on the ‘dark side’ of the moon
China has made plans to launch a satellite Sunday with an ambitious goal of being the first nation to land on the ‘dark side’ of the moon.
The mission involved in the satellite launch is known as Change-4. The satellite, known as the Queqiao relay satellite, will be launched to Lagrange L2 Point where it will be able to communicate with the Earth and the far side of the moon. This is important regarding phase 2 of the mission, which is landing on the moon at a destination furthest away from Earth.
China Plans to be the First Nation to Land on the Dark Side of the Moon
Here's the launch trajectory, taking the Queqiao Chang'e-4 relay sat to the second Earth-Moon Lagrange point via a lunar swing-by, and reaching it's destination in around 8-9 days.
This is significant because we never get to view this side of the moon due to the moon being tidally locked to Earth. This tidal lock is important because it prevents direct communication. Change-4 is anticipated to change this.
Queqiao was developed by the Chinese Academy of SpaceTechnology (CAST). Communication will be attainable for Queqiao on both the moon and the Earth at an orbit in between 65,000km and 80,000km beyond the moon. This location is desired because it is considered a gravitationally stable spot in orbit.
The Netherlands Chinese Low-Frequency Explorer (#NCLE) successfully passed the last assessment by the Chinese space agency! The instrument will be launched on board the Chinese Chang'e 4 relay satellite to a position behind the Moon in May. @RadRadioLab@isis_space
Queqiao, weighing in at 425kg, will be put in the position roughly six months before its’ landing mission to test its’ functionality. Additionally, Queqiao will be carrying the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer with a purpose of finding radio signals from the early days of our universe.
Queqiao is scheduled for a May 21st lift off at 5 am eastern standard time. The launch window consists of three days. The lander and rover for the Change-4 mission were initially manufactured at the same time as the Change-3 spacecraft that landed on the moon in 2013. This was done intentionally so a backup mission for Change-4 could be initiated in case issues arise.
Change-4 is the fifth mission for China. If everything works out with the mission, China plans to put people on the lunar surface within the next twelve years.
This footage was captured on the 20th of May 2018. It was captured by a drone that carried a 4K camera. The object seems to flying over a populated area. The object looks like a small silver disc that is hoovering above the area. The camera operator only noticed the object after he reviewed the footage.
It’s long been said that “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” How long? The quote is attributed to French playwright Charles-Guillaume Étienne in the early 1800s. The saying in French is “On n’est jamais servi si bien que par soi-même,” which translates literally to the more cumbersome “One is never served so well as by oneself.” Two hundred years later, the saying resonates stronger than ever, and now it’s becoming a driving force in the world of UFOs (see Tom DeLonge). Politico, the Washington DC-based political journal, recently began a website called POLITICO Space, a “weekly must-read briefing on the policies and personalities shaping the second space age.”
To launch POLITICO Space, Politico Defense Editor and Space writer Bryan Bender held an announcement panel discussion in mid-April. Joining him were fellow space Jaqueline Klimas, President and CEO of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration Mary Lynne Dittmar and US Congressional Representatives Ami Bera (Democrat, California) and Randy Hultgren (Republican, Illinois). This was no space junket — Dittmar is an advisor President Trump on space policy and Bera and Hultgren are members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
When you’re doing things yourself, you don’t let the opportunity to question space heavyweights and policy makers pass you by, so Bryan Bender referred to the Pentagon UFO revelations of last December and hit them with both barrels of his photon torpedo launcher:
“You hear these reports. We have been hearing them for decades from many credible people. Other countries take it more seriously. They have government researchers who, in the open, not in secrecy, try to explain the unexplainable. Should we be doing more? Or is this just crazy sci-fi stuff that is a waste of time?”
Talk about a loaded question! It would have been easy to deflect it (after all – they’re politicians) and move to what they really want to talk about (campaign donations), but Representative Bera gave a straightforward and unexpected answer.
“I’ve actually talked to the chairman of the subcommittee, Brian Babin, as well as Lamar Smith, the chairman of the full committee. I said we ought to have a hearing on this, right? We ought to bring some folks in. Look, if you want to boost our C-SPAN ratings, a lot of people would be really interested. We don’t know what these phenomena are. Obviously, it’s important enough to allocate some funds and we ought to talk about what we can talk about.”
Bera said the magic word … “funds.” Spending money shows he’s serious. And he wants to put it on TV, which should get the president interested. Republican Hultgren agrees.
“It definitely piques interest. It gets people engaged.”
We’re already piqued and engaged — it’s time for Congress to catch up. Will government money really get allocated and spent on opening up secret files and getting new UFO research started? Will the discussions be held out in the open on C-SPAN? (Would they get more viewers on Netflix?)
Representatives Bera and Hultgren have committed and they name-dropped Brian Babin and Lamar Smith – both Republicans from Texas. Smith is retiring so Babin better get onboard. He doesn’t have to worry about the 2018 election because his only opponent is the Green Party candidate (which in Texas means he’s running unopposed). Will they follow through? Expect POLITICO to keep reminding them.
And a special thanks to POLITICO Space for reminding us once again:
“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
Areas in the US Where You’ll Most Likely See A UFO
Areas in the US Where You’ll Most Likely See A UFO
One of the most bizarre reported UFO sightings took place in North Carolina, which has had 7,570 reported sightings of unidentified flying objects since 1940. So odd that some of the UFO sightings inspire conspiracy theories of secret military experiments that have been going on in the state.
But what could be the chances to spot a UFO right now in either of Carolinas?
Statisticians at Casino.org had finally figured that out. They divided the reported sightings in each year throughout the past 78 years into the overall population.
It turns out that North Carolina has had a 1 in 135,000 chance of seeing a UFO after stepping out the door. Meanwhile, South Carolina faces a 1 in 117,300 chance with its 4,285 sightings, according to Casino.org.
When it comes to the number of actual UFO reports, North Carolina is one of the top 10 states with several reports recently in Lake Norman area and Charlotte, says National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Wash.
However, the calculations done by Casino.org are not based on the number of actual UFO reports as they are based on the population of the state. The smaller the community, the higher the odds.
One of the examples of Casino.org calculations is California, which has had 23,419 reported sightings, but with its vast population, people have a 1 in 168,700 chance of seeing a UFO in the state.
Among the 50 states in the Casino.org list, North Carolina was ranked at 16 and South Carolina at 21.
People are most likely to see a UFO in Wyoming, Vermont, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska.
So, were aliens busier on earth in the 40s and 50s, or are they just better covered up now? Here's a graph to help you see just how common UFO sightings have been in the US for the last 80 years.
ESA ziet heftige laserstralen uit ruimtenevel schieten
ESA ziet heftige laserstralen uit ruimtenevel schieten
Caroline Kraaijvanger
Het wijst erop dat in het hart van de nevel wat verborgen zit.
Wie denkt aan aliens, heeft het mis. Volgens ESA ontstaat de laseremmissie doordat in deze planetaire nevel niet één, maar twee sterren te vinden zijn.
Miernevel Astronomen ontdekten de laseremissie met behulp van ruimtetelescoop Herschel. De emissie is afkomstig uit het hart van de Miernevel. Dit is een planetaire nevel die ontstaan is nadat een ster de handdoek in de ring heeft gegooid (zie kader).
Wanneer een niet al te zware ster (zoals onze zon bijvoorbeeld) door zijn brandstof heen is, stoot deze zijn buitenste lagen de ruimte in. Zo ontstaat rond de kern van de ster – die aangeduid wordt als een ‘witte dwerg’ – een vaak spectaculaire planetaire nevel.
Gas De laseremissie die Herschel heeft opgemerkt, suggereert dat rond de witte dwerg die zich in het hart van de planetaire nevel bevindt, veel gas te vinden is. De dichtheid van dat gas zou zo’n 10.000 keer hoger liggen dan in de twee ‘kwabben’ van de Miernevel. Dat is op het eerste gezicht vreemd: het gebied nabij een witte dwerg is doorgaans vrij leeg, doordat de stervende ster zijn buitenste lagen van zich heeft afgeduwd en gas dat daarbij is achtergebleven al spoedig op de witte dwerg terug zal vallen. “De enige manier waarop gas dicht bij de ster kan blijven, is door er in een schijf omheen te draaien,” vertelt onderzoeker Albert Zijlstra. De laseremissie wijst er dan ook op dat in de Miernevel zo’n gasschijf te vinden is en Herschel kijkt tegen het randje van die schijf aan. “Die oriëntatie versterkt het lasersignaal,” aldus Zijlstra.
De Miernevel. Afbeelding: NASA, ESA & Hubble Heritage Team
(STScI / AURA).
Niet alleen De aanwezigheid van de schijf wijst er sterk op dat de witte dwerg in de Miernevel niet alleen is: de stervende ster moet bijna wel deel uitmaken van een dubbelstersysteem. “Want het is moeilijk om uitgestoten gas in een omloopbaan te dwingen, tenzij er een tweede ster is die het gas in de juiste richting duwt.” Het is astronomen nog niet gelukt om de tweede ster te spotten. Maar ze denken dat de massa die de stervende ster afstaat door die tweede ster wordt afgevangen en vervolgens in een schijf wordt gedwongen waarin het lasersignaal gegenereerd wordt.
Hoe het ook precies zit: het is een spectaculaire ontdekking. In de ruimte hebben onderzoekers op verschillende golflengtes en onder specifieke omstandighden nog maar enkele malen sterk gefocuste straling ontdekt. En er zijn slechts een paar kosmische ‘infraroodlasers’ bekend.
Bronmateriaal:
"" - Afbeelding bovenaan dit artikel: NASA, ESA & Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)
UFO spotters looking out over the Forth Valley in central Scotland where unexplained sightings are said to be frequent.
(Credit: Colin McPherson/Sygma/Getty Images)
In 2017, several news organizations revealed the existence of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a U.S. government funded investigation into unidentified flying objects from 2007 to 2012. This secret $22 million program, however, was not the first of its kind. In fact official government UFO studies began in the 1940s with Project Sign providing some of the most credible videos of aerial phenomenon to date. The 2017 revelation that the U.S. government was actively researching UFOs reignited world interest in UFOs and aliens. Let’s revisit five of the most believable UFO sightings of the 21st century.
1. The Lights Above the New Jersey Turnpike (2001)
It takes a lot for motorists to stop alongside a highway to look towards the sky, but on July 14, 2001, drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike did just that. For around 15 minutes just after midnight, they marveled at the sight of strange orange and yellow lights in a V formation over the Arthur Kill Waterway between Staten Island, New York, and Carteret, New Jersey. Cataret Police Department’s Lt. Daniel Tarrant was one of the witnesses, as well as other metro area residents from the Throgs Neck Bridge on Long Island and Fort Lee, New Jersey near the George Washington Bridge. Air traffic controllers initially denied that any airplanes, military jets or space flights could have caused the mysterious lights, but a group known as the New York Strange Phenomena Investigators (NY-SPI) claimed to receive FAA radar data that corroborated the UFO sightings of that night.
An image taken from a video released by the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program of a 2004 encounter near San Diego between two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets and an unknown object. (Credit: U.S. Department of Defense via The New York Times/Redux)
2. The USS Nimitz Encounter (2004)
On November 14, 2004, the USS Princeton noted an unknown craft on radar 100 miles off the coast of San Diego. For two weeks, the crew had been tracking objects which appeared at 80,000 feet and plummeted to hover right above the Pacific Ocean. When two FA-18F fighter jets from the USS Nimitz arrived in the area, they first saw what appeared to be churning boiling water in an oval shape underneath the surface. Then, in a few moments, a white Tic Tac-like object appeared above the water. It had no visible markings to indicate an engine, wings, or windows, and infrared monitors did not reveal any exhaust. Commander David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight of Strike Fighter Squadron 41 attempted to intercept the craft, but it accelerated away, reappearing on radar 60 miles away—it moved three times the speed of sound and twice the speed of the fighter jets. This encounter was one of the stories reported along with the news of AATIP.
3. O’Hare International Airport Saucer (2006)
Flight 446 was getting ready to fly to North Carolina from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, when a United Airlines employee on the tarmac noticed a dark grey metallic craft hovering over gate C17. That day, November 7, 2006, a total of twelve United employees, and a few witnesses outside the airport, spotted the saucer-shaped craft around 4:15 p.m. The witnesses say it hovered for about 5 minutes before shooting upward where it broke a hole in the clouds, enough that the pilots and mechanics could see the blue sky. The news report became the most read story on Chicago Tribune’s website to that date and made international news. However, because the UFO was not seen on radar, the FAA called it a “weather phenomenon” and declined to investigate.
4. The Stephenville Sightings (2008)
The small town of Stephenville, Texas 100 miles southwest of Dallas, is mostly known for its dairy farms, but in the evening of January 8, 2008, dozens of its residents viewed something unique in the sky. Citizens reported seeing white lights above Highway 67, first in a single horizontal arc and then in vertical parallel lines. Local pilot Steve Allen estimated that the strobe lights “spanned about a mile long and a half mile wide” traveling about 3,000 miles per hour. No sound was reported. Witnesses believed the event was reminiscent of the Phoenix Lights sightings of 1997. While the U.S. Air Force revealed weeks later that F-16s were flying in the Brownwood Military Operating Areas (just southwest of Stephenville), many townspeople didn’t buy that explanation, believeing that what they saw was too technologically advanced for current human abilities.
5. East Coast GO FAST Video (2015)
Leaked in 2017 along with the news of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was a video that revealed an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unidentified flying vehicle. Seen along the East Coast on a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod, the craft was similar to that spotted off San Diego in 2004: It was a fast-moving white oval about 45-feet-long without wings or exhaust plume. The pilots tracked the object at 25,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean as it flew away and simultaneously rotated on its axis. Whether the vehicle was a product of another country’s technology or alien airship remains a mystery.
For more, watch the season premiere of Ancient Aliens Friday, April 27 at 9/8c on HISTORY.
Weird Space Rock Provides More Evidence for Mysterious 'Planet Nine'
Weird Space Rock Provides More Evidence for Mysterious 'Planet Nine'
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
The potential orbit of Planet 9, illustrated with the existing orbit of several trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
Credit: R. Hurt/JPL-Caltech
The solar system just got a bit stranger. As astronomers continue their ongoing quest to find the elusive Planet Nine, a team found a space rock that lends credence to the idea that a huge super-Earth planet really exists in the outer reaches of our solar system.
The newfound asteroid, called 2015 BP519, adds to a growing body of evidence about little worlds in the solar system being perturbed by something big. Astronomers detailed its discovery and description in a new paper, adding that the bizarre angle of its orbit gives more weight to the idea that a big planet is out there — somewhere — tugging on the asteroid's path around the sun.
"We also consider the long term orbital stability and evolutionary behavior within the context of the Planet Nine hypothesis, and find that 2015 BP519 adds to the circumstantial evidence for the existence of this proposed new member of the solar system," read the abstract of the paper, which is available now on preprint website Arxiv and has been submitted to The Astronomical Journal. [How Astronomers Could Actually See 'Planet Nine']
Following up on the discovery,Quanta Magazine recently published an articlesurveying several astrophysicists who specialize in studying small worlds, including the discoverers of 2015 BP519. While not everybody agreed that Planet Nine was responsible for the strange orbit, the overwhelming majority agreed the new discovery gives more credence to the idea. "The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do," lead author Juliette Becker, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, told Quanta. (You can look at the object's orbit onlinehere.)
It's not the first time Planet Nine was blamed for pushing an object around. Back in 2014, before Planet Nine was officially hypothesized, astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo noticed orbital irregularities in several small bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. These included dwarf planet Sedna, a newfound object called 2012 VP113, and several other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
Then, in January 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown saw more evidence of TNOs with perturbed orbits. They were the ones who first gave "Planet Nine" a name, size and distance. They suggested that the mysterious planet could be 10 times more massive than Earth, located 600 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, which is 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.)
A possible ninth planet in the solar system, known as Planet 9, is illustrated orbiting far beyond Neptune's orbit (shown as a ring around the sun).
Credit: Tom Ruen.nagualdesign/ESO
A flood of studies followed about TNOs and how Planet Nine might have affected their orbits; the following summary is just a sampling. Not all teams were enthusiastic, with one group from the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS) cautioning that many of these surveys could be just observational bias.
But astronomers persisted, with Sheppard and Trujillo discovering at least two new TNOs possibly affected by Planet Nine. Another study showed Planet Nine perhaps influenced the tilt of planets in our solar system. And in 2017, astronomers from the University of Madrid in Spain found peculiarities in the orbits of 22 "extreme" TNOs that orbit the sun that could also be explained by a large, distant body exerting gravitational influence. (These TNOs never get closer to the sun than Neptune — which is 30 AU away, orbiting the sun in a rough circle — and have an average distance of at least 150 AU.)
By October 2017, Batygin said, there were at least five different lines of evidence that suggest the existence of the planet. "If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet Nine does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them," he said in a statement.
The Alien Observatory: "Signals of Extinct Extraterrestrial Civilizations --Echo Throughout the Milky Way"
The Alien Observatory: "Signals of Extinct Extraterrestrial Civilizations --Echo Throughout the Milky Way"
“The signals will be from the civilization as it was,” said Frank Drake, creator of the famous Drake Equation. “It is not a remote possibility — it is a high probability — that signals we receive will be from a "civilization that no longer exists.”
If signals from an alien civilization ever reach Earth, odds are the aliens will already be dead. In an effort to update the 1961 Drake Equation, which estimates the number of detectable, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, physicist Claudio Grimaldi and colleagues calculated the area of the galaxy that should be filled with alien signals at a given point in time.
“If the civilization emitted from the other side of the galaxy, when the signal arrives here, the civilization will already be gone,” says physicist Claudio Grimaldi, of the Federal Polytechnical School of Lausanne in Switzerland.
The team, reported Science News and Mercury News, which includeed Frank Drake (now a professor emeritus at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., and the University of California, Santa Cruz), assumed technologically savvy civilizations are born and die at a constant rate. When a civilization dies out and stops broadcasting, the ghostly signals it had sent continue traveling like concentric ripples on a pond.
Electromagnetic signals (blue circles) from alien civilizations shown in the image above will continue traveling through the Milky Way even after the aliens are gone. The appearance of a doughnut hole represents when a civilization dies out.
Scientists gathered at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California this past March to chart new approaches to answering the question: are we alone? The conference, titled “Decoding Alien Intelligence”, sought to broaden perspectives and expand the methodologies applied in the effort to detect extraterrestrial technology:
“New tools are available that can enable this approach and help us decipher the evolutionary and probabilistic nature of advanced alien life,” said organizer and SETI Institute Director Nathalie Cabrol. “We can build a new roadmap that is multidisciplinary, that opens the toolbox.”
A recently released update to the Drake Equation – a framework for discussing the probability of intelligent life existing beyond Earth – is receiving a fair bit of media buzz. The Drake equation was developed during the outset of the modern SETI field to act as a framework for the scientific community to discuss the probability of advanced extraterrestrial life. The probabilistic argument was devised by pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Dr. Frank Drake, who participated in the new study.
According to the study, if advanced aliens exist on the furthest edge of the galaxy from us, any signals traveling at the speed of light will not reach us for quite some time. Any signals that do reach our planet will likely be vestiges of a long dead civilization.
“The signals will be from the civilization as it was,” said Drake. “It is not a remote possibility — it is a high probability — that signals we receive will be from a civilization that no longer exists.”
There’s the chance that it’s still alive “but no longer be transmitting,” Drake said. “Or it may have changed in a very big way, such as migrating from the planet to escape its expanding star.”
Senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, still sees the value in collecting such a message: “To me, it is like finding a bottle on a beach with a note in it,” said Shostak. “It may be that whoever put the note in is long gone. But at least you know there’s somebody on the other side of the world.”
It’s important to remember that determining the longevity of a potential alien race based on the still-developing example of our own survival has a limited value, as SETI Institute's Andrew Fraknoi points out: “Until we know more about our longevity, it is pure guesswork,” he said. “Every year we don’t destroy ourselves, we add one more year to what we know civilizations can do.”
If the civilization lasted less than 100,000 years — the time it takes light to cross the galaxy — then the odds of the signals reaching Earth while the civilization is still broadcasting are vanishingly small, the researchers reported February 27 at arXiv.org. Humans, for example, have been transmitting radio waves for only about 80 years, so our radio waves cover less than 0.001 percent of the Milky Way.
Surprisingly, the team also calculated that the average number of E.T. signals crossing Earth at a given time should equal the number of civilizations currently transmitting — even if the civilizations we hear from aren’t the same ones presently broadcasting. Grimaldi is now working on a paper about what it means that we’ve found none so far.
China is taking its first steps towards the dark side of the Moon.
Image credits NASA / JPL.
The Chinese space agency is paving the way for its unmanned Moon landing. On Monday, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation launched a Long March 4C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The launch, which delivered relay satellite Queqiao (Magpie Bridge), wasn’t broadcasted but went smoothly, says state news outlet Xinhua.
To boldly go
“The launch is a key step for China to realize its goal of being the first country to send a probe to soft-land on and rove the far side of the Moon,” Zhang Lihua, manager of the relay satellite project, told Xinhua.
Roughly 25 minutes after the launch, the 425kg Queqiao spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage and aimed toward a halo orbit of the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2. It will spend the next six months undergoing tests to ensure that all onboard systems are running smoothly in preparation for its mission — relaying messages between ground control and the dark side of the Moon.
If Queqiao proves itself reliable, China will move forward with the launch of the Chang’e 4 spacecraft, scheduled for later this year. The mission — humanity’s first attempt to land on the far side of the Moon — will also include a rover intended to explore any areas of interest around the landing site.
Because the Moon’s body lies between Earth and the landing site, Queqiao will need to fly overhead and beam messages between the rover and mission control.
Apart from this, Queqiao will also carry two onboard instruments: a Dutch radio antenna, intended for the study of celestial radio signals blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, and a large-aperture laser angle reflector to measure the range between Earth and the spacecraft.
Queqiao should reach its L2 halo orbit in about eight days — fingers crossed for the little guy.
If you’ve been following the science news, you’re probably aware of the new study claiming octopuses come from outer space. “Octopuses are from space, scientists say” was one of the catchy headlines published in Australia, while The Express wrote that“Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago”. These aren’t two cherry-picked instances, the internet was abuzz with variations on the same theme. Unfortunately, however, this is almost certainly not the case. Let’s see what really happened.
What the study says
The new study, penned by over 30 researchers, essentially rehashes the theory of panspermia — the idea that life on Earth emerged in outer space, hitching a ride on meteorites or other objects that crashed into Earth at one point, something often referred to as the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of cosmic biology.
The research starts from the Cambrian Explosion an event approximately 541 million years ago, during an age called the Cambrian period. The Cambrian Explosion was an age of extreme diversification of life, during which most major animal phyla started to emerge. The study’s authors question whether that happened naturally, with just the elements existing on Earth.
“One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events,” the study reads.
Cartoonish depiction of life in the Cambrian. Alien-like? Sure! Alien? Probably not.
Image credits: Rice University.
In other words, what they’re saying is that life didn’t just emerge on its own, it was “seeded” from life-bearing comets that pummeled our planet at various times throughout history. These comets could have brought a myriad of novel life-forms from other planets, including viruses. This is one of the main assumptions of the H-W thesis — that small bodies such as asteroids and comets can protect the “seeds of life”, including DNA and RNA. So far, so good; this is a plausible idea, that has been investigated since the 1970s and continues to be analyzed by various groups. There’s not much evidence to say that it did happen, but with what we know so far, it might have happened.
Then, the authors make a big leap: if you’re not convinced by the panspermia theory, you need not look farther than the octopus. Octopuses have very complex nervous systems and big, specialized eyes — two unprecedented features.
“A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus,” the study continues.
This is where it starts to get thorny. Cephalopods, the group in which octopuses belong, did emerge in the Cambrian — the fossil records clearly suggest so. But the early cephalopods were Nautiloids, a very diverse group of creatures which exist to this day. But Nautiloids look completely different to octopuses, and they don’t share many of their impressive features. In fact, octopuses didn’t emerge until the Devonian, 323 million years ago. This means that there’s a window of over 200 million years from the Cambrian explosion to when the first true octopuses emerged, which is plenty of time to selectively develop specialized features (there are studies which say octopuses developed a bit earlier, but not significantly in this context).
Artistic depiction of Orthoceras — an early nautiloid.
Furthermore, when the octopus genome was mapped in 2015, it was shown that the nervous system genes split from the squid’s only around 135 million years ago — again, long after the Cambrian explosion. In all practicality, the evolution of the octopus was never really regarded as a mystery requiring additional explanation. This is an ancient group with some remarkable features, but these features didn’t appear in the earliest creatures, developing gradually over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
Occam’s Razor
Instead, what the new study suggests is that fertilized octopus eggs hitcher a ride aboard an icy comet and crashed into the sea at the onset of the Cambrian explosion. Alternatively, researchers write, an extraterrestrial virus infected a population of early squid, causing them to evolve in this unusual way. The genes responsible for the octopus evolution, they say, don’t appear to have come from their ancestors.
“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral nautilus to the common cuttlefish to squid to the common octopus are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form,” the study, published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, claims.
“It is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”
Again, this is technically possible. It might have happened. But that doesn’t mean it did. Occam’s razor suggests that the simpler explanation is usually the better, and this is probably the case here — there’s no reason to go and speculate about extraterrestrial origins.
It’s noteworthy that in his review of the paper, medical researcher Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland, concedes that there’s a lot of evidence that plausibly aligns with the H-W thesis, such as the curious timeline of the appearance of viruses — and yet, herein lies the problem: plausibility does not mean probability. Basically, just because something can happen doesn’t mean it did. The new paper goes to great lengths to prove that it could happen, and to open some interesting discussions. Make no mistake, this is not an amateurish study published in a predatory journal. However, the scope of the paper is oversold, and as Ken Stedman, a virologist and professor of biology at Portland State University, told Live Science, the authors didn’t carefully review existing literature, and they make extremely speculative claims.
Of course, mainstream media was all over this. The idea that life on Earth came from outer space is terribly appealing — particularly when we’re talking bizarre creatures like octopuses, and everyone gasped at the idea of an alien octopus. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case. Octopuses are fascinating creatures, and I hope we can cherish them even if they’re not aliens.
Journal Reference:
Steele et al. “Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?”, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004
The immigrant in case is an asteroid. Currently nestled in Jupiter’s atmosphere, it’s the first interstellar object that resides in our solar system.
Images of 2015 BZ509 obtained at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBTO) that established its retrograde co-orbital nature. The bright stars and the asteroid (circled in yellow) appear black and the sky white in this negative image.
Credit: C. Veillet / LBTO.
Not a tourist
Last year, a different asteroid made headlines after it became the first interstellar object we’ve found in our solar system. But that was just a tourist, a passer-by — whereas this new asteroid, given the catchy name 2015 BZ509, is here to stay.
We’ve seen the object for quite some time, but its origin was only now explained. All the planets (and most of the other objects) in our solar system rotate around the Sun in the same direction — but 2015 BZ509 is different: it moves in the opposite direction, something called a ‘retrograde’ orbit.
“How the asteroid came to move in this way while sharing Jupiter’s orbit has until now been a mystery,” explains Dr Fathi Namouni, lead author of the study. “If 2015 BZ509 were a native of our system, it should have had the same original direction as all of the other planets and asteroids, inherited from the cloud of gas and dust that formed them.”
Image of stellar nursery NGC 604 (NASA/HST), where star systems are closely packed and asteroid exchange is thought to be possible.
Credit: NASA / Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI).
Namouni and his colleagues used the current orbit of the asteroid to extrapolate its whereabouts and movement 4.5 billion years ago — during the early age of our solar system, when planets were still forming. They found that even then, 2015 BZ509 was moving the same way — meaning that it couldn’t have possibly formed in our solar system, and instead came from somewhere else.
In other words, 2015 BZ 509 emigrated from its parent star and settled around the Sun in a similar environment.
“Asteroid immigration from other star systems occurs because the Sun initially formed in a tightly-packed star cluster, where every star had its own system of planets and asteroids,” comments Dr Helena Morais, the other member of the team. “The close proximity of the stars, aided by the gravitational forces of the planets, help these systems attract, remove and capture asteroids from one another.”
The finding isn’t just remarkable in itself, but also sheds some important light on how our solar system form, and perhaps, how life itself emerged. Understanding exactly how and when 2015 BZ509 arrived and settled in the Solar System provides clues about the Sun’s original star nursery, and about the potential enrichment of our early environment with components necessary for the appearance of life on Earth.
The article “An interstellar origin for Jupiter’s retrograde co-orbital asteroid”, by F. Namouni & H. Morais, was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters (2018), in press (DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly057).
In the school scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s terrifying 1963 classic, The Birds, a flock of black birds rapidly multiplies, steadily filling a spooky, silent playground. Imagine that, but multiply it by thousands and whip it into a swirling funnel hundreds of feet high. That’s what an intrepid photographer captured in the stormy sky over a placid countryside in an otherworldly photo posted to Reddit’s r/WTF thread this week. The photo has been dubbed by at least one useras a “birdnado.”
Unlike the premise of Sharknado, however, this is not a flock of birds unwittingly swept up into an actual tornado. Rather, it’s far more likely to be a flock of thousands of starlings flying together in a formation known as a murmuration.
Starlings, birds common to North America and Europe, are famous for forming immense flocks, sometimes containing up to 4 million individuals. Despite their otherworldly appearance, murmurations form naturally through an oddly specific organizational mechanism that scientists laid out in a 2013 PLOS Biologypaper.
This "birdnado" is likely a flock of starlings forming a 'murmuration'.
Murmurations, the scientists write, are made possible by an individual starling’s ability to track the movements of exactly seven of their neighbors at any one time while flying in a flock. In the past, scientists had already determined that flock formation is beneficial for birds for a number of reasons, like easing the amount of energy required to travel and offering protection from predators. But the nature of how a flock forms — and stays together — was not clear. The team, focusing on starlings, knew that the birds had to strike a “balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.”
The starlings in this birdnado manage to stay together because focusing on only the six or seven individuals in their immediate vicinity allows them to optimally “manage uncertainty” in highly uncertain environments. In other words, if a random disturbance causes the flock to shift suddenly, the flock will be optimally cohesive if every member pays attention to only the movements of its six or seven closest neighbors.
The birdnado may not be an actual natural disaster, but it can certainly be considered a storm — especially to the people who have to clean up the copious amounts of shit they’re known to leave behind. As Inversereported previously in an article on murmuration, starling guano has proven to be especially hard to deal with in Rome, where they are known to pass through:
The biggest issue is that they poop everywhere, covering streets, buildings, Vespas, and trees with thick layers of foul guano. Since the starlings feast in the copious olive groves outside of Rome, their poop is also especially oily.
Fortunately, in this apocalyptic photo, the birdnado seems to be forming over some desolate-looking fields. It’s scary-looking stuff, but fortunately, it’s far less threatening than actual tornados — though the mess it leaves in its wake likely smells far worse.
Scientists have reported the discovery of a “Trans-Neptunian object” whose orbital movements are highly unusual. Researchers suggest this strangely behaving rock could be orbiting a larger planet in deep space, bringing astronomers one step closer to finding Planet Nine.
A team of astronomers representing 35 universities and institutions announced the detection of the mystery rock this week, dubbed 2015 BP519, and have observed its eccentric orbital stability with new insight. The researchers published their dynamical analysis this week and describe the mystery rock within the context of the Planet Nine Hypothesis. The published data suggests that 2015 BP519 “adds to the circumstantial evidence for the existence of this proposed new member of the Solar System.”
The team, led by Juliette Becker of the University of Michigan, discovered 2015 BP519 by using data from the Dark Energy Survey, an ongoing project that seeks to map parts of space beyond what is known. The team had not expected to find orbiting objects in the data, let alone an object that orbits at a different angle than the known eight planets in the Solar System.
Trajectory of 2015 BP519 over its measured four-opposition arc. Red dots along the trajectory indicate points at which it was observed by the Dark Energy Survey
Whereas the known planets move along the same orbital plane due to the sun’s gravitational pull, Becker’s team says 2015 BP519 is tilted 54 degrees from that plane. This could mean that the object is influenced by a separate gravitational pull, such as a giant “ghost planet” that 2015 BP519 orbits much like a planet’s moon.
Astronomers have been searching for Planet Nine since early 2016, when astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown from the California Institute of Technology found a group of distant objects orbiting the sun at an axis different from the known planets. These Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) created eccentric orbital patterns, leading Batygin and Brown to suggest they were being pulled by something much larger than Earth and lurking somewhere farther from the sun than Neptune.
Becker’s paper expounds on these concepts and presents new data to support the Planet Nine Hypothesis, but will still need to be peer-reviewed and formally published. While the strange orbital behavior of 2015 BP519 may not confirm the existence of Planet Nine just yet, it offers a glimpse of how little is known about deep space and will serve as an asset to the scientists actively looking for the contested ghost planet.
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...
Druk op onderstaande knop om je bestand , jouw artikel naar mij te verzenden. INDIEN HET DE MOEITE WAARD IS, PLAATS IK HET OP DE BLOG ONDER DIVERSEN MET JOUW NAAM...
Druk op onderstaande knop om een berichtje achter te laten in mijn gastenboek
Alvast bedankt voor al jouw bezoekjes en jouw reacties. Nog een prettige dag verder!!!
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.
