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 ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
05-06-2018
Vreemde ‘graancirkels’ ontdekt. Zijn de aliens geland in Italië?
Vreemde ‘graancirkels’ ontdekt. Zijn de aliens geland in Italië?
Een Italiaanse boer ontdekte onlangs een aantal vreemde ‘graancirkels’ in zijn weiland. Ze waren van de ene op de andere dag ontstaan.
De formaties zijn verschenen in de Italiaanse gemeente Romano di Lombardia. Ze zijn erg vreemd omdat ze geen specifiek patroon lijken te vormen.
De boer die de mysterieuze formaties ontdekte, Giovanni Spinosa, vertelde aan nieuwssite Giornale di Treviglio dat hij de avond ervoor niets bijzonders had gezien in het weiland naast zijn huis.
Tekeningen
Giovanni Spinosa
Toen zijn vrouw opstond merkte ze dat er iets niet klopte. “We keken uit het raam en zagen dit soort tekeningen,” zei de boer.
Spinosa moest gelijk denken aan graancirkels, omdat er enkele jaren geleden in de buurt een aantal van zulke formaties waren verschenen.
De man zei niet te weten hoe de formaties zijn ontstaan. Waarschijnlijk kan wel worden uitgesloten dat het de wind geweest is, aldus de boer.
Gebogen
Spinosa zei verder dat de graanhalmen niet gebroken, maar gebogen waren. Voor graancirkelonderzoekers is dit een aanwijzing dat het om een authentieke formatie gaat.
Graancirkels die achteraf door mensen gemaakt blijken te zijn, bevatten doorgaans gebroken halmen.
Dit doet vermoeden dat de krachten die achter de klassieke graancirkels zitten, ook actief zijn geweest in het weiland van Spinosa.
That 'UFO' is just the solar disc (of the Sun) reflected through glass.
Scott Brando
The glowing subject then appears to move behind the sun, before a blinding light blocks the camera view, in what some suggested was an explosion or take-off manoeuvre, by an enormous alien craft.
When the camera is re-focussed, the orb appears to suddenly flit away.
Some viewers were convinced it was a UFO and some sort of craft.
One said on YouTube: "I saw something that looked very similar around this time last year.”
Another claimed it was just swamp gas, which is caused by rising methane from a pond.
However, in fact there was nothing actually there, and it was simply a reflection of the Sun.
We sent the footage to Scott Brando, a sceptic, who runs debunking website ufoofinterest.org.
He said: "That 'UFO' is just the solar disc (of the Sun) reflected through glass.
He said the apparent object suddenly disappeared as the camera zoomed in and the glass was "likely removed."
Mr Brando pointed us to an article by a fellow debunker, who showed how almost identical footage said to show a "second Sun" was caused by glass in front of the camera lens.
Mick West, administrator of the Metabunk.org website, said: "A popular video claims to show an object in the sky that resembles a 'second sun'.
"However analysis of the video proves that what is shown is an offset lens reflection of the Sun itself.
"There is nothing else in the sky. The effect is also not a sun-dog, an atmospheric reflection, or a mirage. It's just a reflection happening at the camera.
"We can see this quite clearly if we stabilise the video so the background is fixed.
"We can then see the reflection moving with the camera motion. Notice how the small movements of the reflection are in sync with the large movements of the lens flare.
"Offset lens reflections occur when a flat piece of glass, such as a filter, is in front of the camera, but is tilted slightly away from the plane of the camera, either accidentally, or deliberately.
"When combined with a second flat optical surface, like the protective cover of a cell-phone camera, or a second filter on a larger camera, you get a fainter reflection of the sun offset from the actual sun in the direction of the tilt."
He then simulated the same effect by attaching a glass slide to his phone with a rubber band.
Almost seven decades ago, visitors to the Long Range Weapon Establishment at Salisbury in Adelaide's north would have seen something that was, at the time, quite amazing.
Pointing skywards, in all its dubious glory, was a Nazi V-2 rocket of the kind that, in the final months of World War II, brought a late wave of destruction to London, Norwich, Paris and Antwerp.
Mounted on its carrier known as a Meillerwagen, this particular V-2 towered above its new owners. Black and white photos from the time reveal a strikingly formidable object.
Ominously elevated, it looks ready to launch — perhaps for the moon, perhaps for Mars.
The rocket had arrived in Adelaide months earlier, when it was off-loaded at Outer Harbor in October 1947.
It was not the first V-2 to be sent to Australia — in March, a ship carrying another had docked at Fremantle. That rocket had also passed through Adelaide en route to Melbourne, and was then transported to Sydney.
The story of how they ended up Down Under is an intriguing one that involves science, politics and Cold War anxieties.
Australia's two V-2s are currently in storage at an Australian War Memorial (AWM) facility in suburban Canberra.
"When they came out [to Australia] flocks of people crowded to view them and see these Nazi terror weapons," said Shane Casey, senior curator of military heraldry and technology at the AWM.
One is mostly complete. Its components were seized after the war and put together as part of Operation Backfire, a mission by the Allies to capture and test German military technology.
"When the Allies conquered Germany, they found largely disassembled rockets or rockets ready to be assembled," Mr Casey said.
The Meillerwagen trailer accompanying the V-2, which was used to raise the rockets onto launch pads, is one of the few surviving examples of the technology.
The other V-2, which left London's docks aboard the vessel Karamea in February 1947, is today in bits, which are themselves in disrepair. It was shipped to Australia primarily as a museum piece, and little is known about its origins.
"There was some confusion as to whether it was destined for the Australian War Memorial or whether it was destined for the RAAF at Woomera. There seems to have been some dissension in official channels about that."
In 1948, the media was invited to view the more complete V-2 at Salisbury, where scientists had been inspecting it for design clues. That work was part of efforts to develop a local rocket program for defence — a project that also included the Woomera range.
At some point over the next few years, it was painted with a different colour scheme. The trail goes cold until 1954, when the rocket was put on display at a Salisbury school and at the Mallala air show.
On October 3, 1942, a prototype V-2 rocket became the first human-made object to reach space. The missiles were the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, a German scientist of aristocratic background.
Von Braun is a controversial character, and he continues to fascinate historians. A member of the Nazi Party, he would later play a leading role at NASA, overseeing the Saturn rocket program that enabled the Apollo missions to the moon.
Even a generous biographer would concede von Braun was a morally dubious human being. Undoubtedly clever and apparently very charming, he was also a committed German nationalist and a member of the SS. He was unconcerned by the fact his V-2s were built by concentration camp inmates, thousands of whom died during construction.
The first V-2 attacks occurred in September 1944. Over the next six months, thousands of civilians were killed by the missiles, with Antwerp and London bearing the brunt.
One V-2 came to Earth in Southborough in Kent, near a house belonging to David Bowie's grandparents, and it is interesting to speculate whether the recurring themes of rocketry and space travel in Bowie's work owe their inception to that episode. (In 1977, he released a track referencing the missiles, called V-2 Schneider).
Von Braun was in the grip of a belief that in his day made him exceptional, but is today commonplace among technophiles — that there is an imperative for humans to conquer space. Unable to make rockets for peaceful purposes, he was instead happy to design them to kill people.
"Our V-2 is significant from a technological point of view, in the progression of humanity through rocketry and its desire to achieve immortality in space," Mr Casey said.
"The V-2 is really a baby Saturn V [the rocket used in the Apollo 11 mission]. The Saturn V was a liquid-fuelled rocket as well and used very much the same elements in its combustion chamber.
"But we're also very aware of the fact that [the V-2] was a weapons system developed by one of the most heinous regimes on Earth.
"On a regular basis, people suspected of sabotage were executed, and they would leave the bodies on overhead cranes."
At the end of the war, von Braun began working for the Americans, migrating in 1945.
In addition to his work, he became a populariser of scientific ideas. (In 1947, he wrote a novel about colonising space and, in a spooky coincidence, named his fictitious leader of Mars 'Elon'.)
His self-reinvention from Nazi villain to NASA hero is a testament to the man's slipperiness. But he was never able to shake his shady past. When he visited Australia in 1962 to deliver lectures to students, not everyone was in a welcoming mood.
The newspaper Tribune reported on "rising concern" among parents at the thought of a Nazi teaching their children.
"Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available... a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose."
Hoyle may have been unaware that, two years earlier, American engineers in New Mexico had used a captured V-2 to take a photo of the Earth's surface. But that image showed only a portion of the planet.
It took another two decades for Hoyle's wish to be properly granted. In 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took the photo now known as Earthrise. It is a stunning image, depicting the planet rising above the horizon of the moon.
The Saturn V rockets that helped Major Anders and others into space were designed at the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama, under the direction of Wernher von Braun.
Australia's V-2s have not lost their "wow" factor, Mr Casey said, and continue to shock visitors because of their size and scale.
"I can remember one instance where a woman had been the victim of a V-2 rocket attack, and when she was confronted with the rocket up-close it was almost an overwhelming experience for her," Mr Casey said.
Conservation work will begin on the more complete rocket next year in the hope of putting it back on permanent display.
Mr Casey said tests would also be carried out on the Meillerwagen for urea, a compound found in urine. Slaves working in secret underground facilities built the V-2s and it's believed that, in an act of resistance, they relieved themselves on the machines in an attempt to weaken them, disrupting the V-2 program.
The story of the V-2 starkly demonstrates the double-edged nature of technological progress: rockets that were used as missiles inspired rockets that have helped us get to the moon.
As von Braun allegedly said, "science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently."
My previous article was titled “..the ‘others’ are far more advanced than we are.” It was focused on the work of a National Security Agency employee named Lambros Callimahos. He was a man who had a deep interest in the matter of extraterrestrial life and its implications for us – good, bad or somewhere in between. The article began as follows: “Of the many and various UFO / extraterrestrial-themed documents and papers that have surfaced under the terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, one of the more interesting ones is Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It was written back in the 1960s (specifically in 1965) by a man named Lambros D. Callimahos. He was a cryptologist with the National Security Agency. On September 23, 1965, Callimahos took part in a panel-style debate on the subject of his paper at a conference on military electronics in Washington, D.C.”
It’s worth noting that three years later, Callimahos wrote another paper on extraterrestrial life and UFOs. His 1968 paper was titled UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions. He stated: “It is the purpose of this monograph to consider briefly some of the human survival implications suggested by the various principal hypotheses concerning the nature of the phenomena loosely categorized as ‘UFO.’ UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions focuses its attention for the most part on five central issues: (a) All UFOs are hoaxes; (b) All UFOs are hallucinations; (c) All UFOs are natural phenomena; (d) Some UFOs are secret earth projects; and (e) Some UFOs are related to extra-terrestrial intelligence.”
In relation to point “a,” Callimahos said: “…the fact that UFO phenomenon have been witnessed all over the world from ancient times, and by considerable numbers of reputable scientists in recent times, indicates rather strongly that UFOs are not all hoaxes…” When it came to hallucinations, Callimahos had a few key thoughts: “People, of course, do hallucinate. Although groups of people hallucinating is rare, it has been known to happen. Machines have their own form of hallucination; the radar, in particular, ‘sees’ temperature inversions. But a considerable number of instances exist in which there are groups of people and a radar or radars seeing the same thing at the same time; sometimes a person and a gun camera confirm each other’s testimony. On occasion, physical evidence of a circumstantial nature was reported to have been found to support witnessed sightings. A continuing high percentage of reports of unusual aerial phenomena are being reported by people in responsible positions in science, government and industry. The sum of such evidence seems to argue strongly against all UFOs being hallucinations.” He added: “Many UFOs have been reported by trained observers to behave like high speed, high performance, high altitude rockets or aircraft.”
As for the matter of at least some UFOs really being secret weapons, rather than extraterrestrial craft, Callimahos told his readers: “…[the] U.S. Air Force re-entry vehicle and an often publicized Canadian ‘saucer’ project leave little doubt as to the validity of this hypothesis. Undoubtedly, all UFOs should be carefully scrutinized to ferret out such enemy (or ‘friendly’) projects. Otherwise a nation faces the very strong possibility of being intimidated by a new secret ‘doomsday’ weapon.”
Callimahos also had fairly dire warnings for those who might think that an encounter with aliens would be overwhelmingly positive in nature. It’s important to note that he wasn’t talking about aliens attacking us and taking over the planet and trying to wipe us out – in The War of the Worlds or Independence Daystyle. Rather, Callimahos was talking about something else; something that was no less potentially hazardous, though. He spelled it out in eye-opening and concise fashion:
“If ‘they’ discover you, it is an old but hardly invalid rule of thumb, ‘they’ are your technological superiors. Human history has shown us time and again the tragic results of a confrontation between a technologically superior civilization and a technologically inferior people. The ‘inferior’ is usually subject to physical conquest. Often in the past, a technologically superior people are also processors of a more virile or aggressive culture. In a confrontation between two peoples of significantly different cultural levels, those having the inferior or less virile culture, most often suffer a tragic loss of identity and are usually absorbed by the other people.”
Could a worldwide encounter with aliens lead to our downfall, possibly in the way that Lambros Callimahos warned of fifty years ago? Maybe it really could…
A British man has filmed what he says is evidence of a UFO flying over the city of Leeds. James Goldman, 30, who lives in Leeds, describes the object as a glowing ball of white light that moved silently and “with absolute purpose.” The video, which was taken with a smartphone camera as the strange object passed over the city, shows an object similar to the “orbs” that appear in purported pictures of ghosts and spirits. Apparently basing their comparison exclusively on the basic shape of the object, the Daily Mirror compares this UFO to the Death Star from the Star Wars series.
Speaking to Daily Mirror, where you can see his footage of the UFO, Goldman says the object “a round bright white lit ball slightly metallic in nature” he estimates the object to have been flying at an altitude of 300 meters and at speed of 200 kph, or 124 mph. Whether he is any good at estimating speed and height is uncertain, so those numbers should taken with a grain of salt. Goldman does say he “couldn’t believe such an object would fly so low.”
“It definitely wasn’t a plane and it was too low to be a satellite. I know what drones look like and it just wasn’t a drone either. I doubt it was a military craft because they wouldn’t be flying something like that over a populated area.”
The UFO was filmed over Leeds, UK.
From the footage, the UFO has the same sort of look as the orbs claimed to be evidence of ghosts. Orbs generally show up only in the pictures themselves. There aren’t many cases of people seeing paranormal orbs with the naked eye. That this UFO appears like one may be due to the camera’s zoom, which tends to make everything a bit less identifiable, but there is a eerie non-physical quality to the way it looks. Goldman says it was better in person:
“It was much clearer with the eye than what the camera has captured. After I stopped recording it continued to move at a 45-degree angle upwards and disappeared into the distance. It didn’t blink out suddenly or anything like that, it just petered out into the distance.”
Unfortunately, with the shaky camera and no real frame of reference, it’s hard to see the object moving with the same sort of “absolute purpose” that Goldman attributes to it.
This isn’t the first time someone has claimed to see a white orb shaped UFO. The phenomenon has been reported in a handful of places including Moscow and Antarctica. Last year, there was discussion of whether some orb shaped UFO sightings could be explained by Google Loon balloons.
Artist’s rendition of orb UFOs
While the object in the video is nowhere near the world destroying monstrosity of the Death Star, it wouldn’t be the first time that Star Wars was responsible for a false UFO report. Early this year a a misidentified Stormtrooper-shaped helium balloon was responsible for a viral video of an alleged humanoid UFO sighting. I’d much prefer a Death Star shaped balloon to the real thing, personally.
Mars Cubesats Make History with Deep-Space Maneuver
Mars Cubesats Make History with Deep-Space Maneuver
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior
An artist's illustration of one of NASA's Mars Cube One (MarCO) cubesats. The twin MarCOs are the first cubesats to complete a trajectory correction maneuver, firing their thrusters to guide themselves toward Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Two tiny NASA explorers have notched another spaceflight first.
Over the past week, both MarCO-A and MarCO-B have been firing their onboard thrusters to refine their course toward Mars, NASA officials said. No cubesat had ever performed such a trajectory-correction maneuver before. Earlier in May, one of the twin MarCo cubesats snapped its first space photo, which showed the Earth as seen from a distance of 620,000 miles (1 million kilometers). [Launch Photos: See NASA's InSight Soar Toward Mars]
Both spacecraft have also aced some important communications tests since liftoff, said John Baker, program manager for planetary smallsats at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the $18.5 million MarCO mission, which is designed to lay the foundation for future exploration missions by small, inexpensive probes.
"Our broadest goal was to demonstrate how low-cost cubesat technology can be used in deep space for the first time," Baker said in a statement. "With both MarCOs on their way to Mars, we've already traveled farther than any cubesat before them."
The MarCo cubeats are nicknamed "Wall-E" and "Eva" after the adorable (but fictional) robots from Disney's animated film "Wall-E." Their name is inspired by the titular robot, which uses a fire extinguisher to fly through space in the film. The MarCo probes use the compressed gas R236FA, which is commonly used in fire extinguishers, for propulsion.
MarCO-A's trajectory-correction maneuver went smoothly, but MarCO-B's was smaller than expected because of a leaky thruster valve, mission team members said. Both cubesats will need to perform additional engine burns to get to Mars, and MarCO-B's future maneuvers will need to compensate for the unplanned nudges imparted by the leak.
"We're cautiously optimistic that MarCO-B can follow MarCO-A," MarCO project manager Joel Krajewski, also of JPL, said in the same statement. "But we wanted to take more time to understand the underlying issues before attempting the next course-correction maneuver."
If all goes according to plan, the twin cubesats will fly by Mars on Nov. 26, the day that InSight touches down on the Red Planet. MarCO-A and -B will try to relay data from InSight's entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence back to Earth, but success in that regard isn't critical — NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe will do this job as well.
The MarCO mission will end shortly thereafter. InSight, on the other hand, will spend nearly two Earth years monitoring "marsquakes" and characterizing the heat flow beneath its metallic feet, gathering data that should help scientists better understand how rocky planets such as Mars and Earth form and evolve.
What Has NASA's Curiosity Found on Mars? We'll Find Out Thursday
What Has NASA's Curiosity Found on Mars? We'll Find Out Thursday
By Tariq Malik, Space.com Managing Editor
NASA will hold a press conference Thursday, June 7, 2018, to announce a new discovery on Mars from the Curiosity rover. Here, Curiosity snaps a selfie while perched on Vera Rubin Ridge on Mars in February 2018.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently found something intriguing on Mars, and the space agency will unveil the discovery Thursday (June 7).
The space agency revealed few details about what will be announced Thursday, but the "live discussion" will feature "new science results from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover," according to a NASA announcement. Why all the secrecy? "The results are embargoed by the journal Science until then," NASA wrote in the statement.
According to NASA, Thursday's Mars science discussion will be hosted by Michelle Thaller, the assistant director of science for communications in the agency's Planetary Science Division. Presenters will include:
Paul Mahaffy, director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland
Jen Eigenbrode, a research scientist at the Goddard center;
Chris Webster, a senior research fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California;
Ashwin Vasavada, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at JPL. (Mars Science Laboratory is the full name of the Curiosity rover's $2.5 billion mission.)
The Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars since it landed in August 2012. The rover recently began drilling into the Martian surface for the first time in 18 months. It is steadily climbing Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) mountain in the center of a region known as Gale Crater.
Visit Space.com Thursday for complete coverage of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity announcement.
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him@tariqjmalik.
In the 1950s, Colonel Ross Dedrickson was responsible for maintaining the inventory of the nuclear weapon stockpile for the AEC, and for accompanying security teams checking out the security of the weapons, among many other duties.
As his obituary states:
He was assigned to the US Atomic Energy Commission. A long service with the Energy Commission between 1950-1958 included, contract administration duties at Nevada test sites, Pacific Nuclear Test Area west of Hawaii, nuclear weapon manufacturing and quality assurance in Albuquerque, and inspection of nuclear and non-nuclear facilities throughout the country. He served with the 5th Air Force in Japan and later as a ranking Colonel, Officer in Charge of the Pacific Unified Command (TM)s alternate “command and control center” in Hawaii. In 1962, he was transferred and served as Deputy for Material for the 832 Air Division at Canon Air Force Base, Clovis, New Mexico. He retired from the USAF in 1964.
He is one of hundreds of military whistleblowers with verified backgrounds to have been brought forth by Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project. His testimony about UFOs — specifically about UFOs and nuclear weapons — can be corroborated by a wealth of information and evidence that’s now available within the public domain. (To read more about a few of these encounters, click here.) Many of these whistleblowers have made multiple appearances at the National Press Club in an effort to get this information out to the world, with the most recent example being the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, which took place a few years ago.
With such a professional background, working in the places he has worked, it’s safe to infer he was privy to sensitive information on a number of subjects. This isn’t just a random high-ranking military whistleblower talking about a random issue. There are many whistleblowers and documents clearly outlining a decades-long relationship between UFOs and nuclear storage facilities and test sites.
You can read more about that in the article linked below:
In the interview below, Dedrickson explains how the American government tried to detonate a nuclear weapon on the moon, but were prevented from doing so.
As far as the mainstream goes, it’s public knowledge that a declassified report by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center from June 1959 shows just how seriously they considered the plan, called Project A119. In general, they wanted to investigate the capability of weapons in space, as well as gain further insight into the space environment and the detonation of nuclear devices within it.
As far as the information below, that probably goes deeper into the Black Budget.
It’s interesting how the world is so into television shows like Stranger Things, which depicts the Department of Energy and their involvement with otherworldly creatures and other strange facts, yet so willing to ignore a high ranking American Colonel who held very sensitive positions at the Department of Energy for years, at a time when all of this nuclear development was really hot. He is the real deal and it’s interesting to ponder what he might really know.
“I also learned about incidents involving nuclear weapons, and among these incidents were a couple of nuclear weapons sent into space were destroyed by the extraterrestrials. . . . At the very end of the 70s and the early 80s, we attempted to put a nuclear weapon on the moon and explode it for scientific measurements and other things, which was not acceptable to the extraterrestrials. They destroyed the weapon before it got to the moon.” (source)
I know, reading the title would instantly have a ‘non believer’ click the X button on the top righthand corner of the screen, and that’s fine, but the truth remains. And that truth is the fact that “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.” Those are the words of Luis Elizondo, who is one member of the To The StarsAcademy, a manwith a long career within the U.S. Department of Defense, who recently retired from the Pentagon, and was a director of the “Ariel Threats Identification Program.”
Does it mean the footage below is real? No, but the source is interesting and myself as well as many other UFO researchers in the field, would tell you that it might be one of the few authentic ones out there where occupants of these ‘UFOs’ are seen. The US government has now released UFO footage, more on that below.
Through To The Stars, the U.S. government has been, and will continue to release footage they’ve collected over many years of UFOs that perform maneuvers which defy, as Elizondo states, our understanding of aerodynamics. They’ve released some pretty amazing ones so far that come with actual electrooptical data and radar tracking reports. Keep in mind, as stressed by Elizondo and various documents that’ve been released prior to this disclosure, that military encounters with UFOs have occurred many times. There are many examples and reports to choose from and I recently wrote an article about an incident which occurred with the Chilean Air Force.
What’s interesting about the recent mainstream coverage is that they released actual video footage and to be honest, it’s quite discouraging that UFO footage has to be released by the U.S. government in order for it to be considered ‘real.’ Sure, there are still many out here who are going to call it fake, which means one thing, there are a group of defense officials making fake videos, putting them out in the public, and saying they’re real or, it’s actual authentic footage.
To contemplate the first one is just as intriguing to contemplate the second, but in my mind, there is no doubt that these are indeed real, and we don’t need these videos to come out to prove that.
The story as to what they are, however, will most likely be controlled by some ‘powerful people’ who oversee governments. Who knows what spin they will put on it via mainstream media, but right now we are currently seeing ‘official disclosure.’
This is the first time we’ve seen media ‘owned by the establishment’ present the UFO topic in a credible way, which is peculiar for multiple reasons. They told the truth, yet there still seems to be some misinformation with regards to the materials that have been collected in association with these UFOs, as pointed out by the New York Times. You can read more about that here where I go into a deeper discussion and provide details about what the New York Times did not elaborate on.
This is why the footage below is also intriguing. Elizondo admitted that this type of thing has happened thousands of times and the ‘unofficial’ reports and sightings from citizens of the world have never been considered credible, when some of them very well could be. But we didn’t need Elizondo, again, we’ve had evidence, and even physical evidence of these crafts for a long time.
Whether or not they are alien is a completely different question and discussion.
The footage below comes from Dr. Roger Leir, a Doctor of Podiatric medicine, and arguably the best known individual with regards to extracting alleged alien implants. He has performed more than fifteen surgeries that removed sixteen separate distinct objects. These objects have been investigated by several prestigious laboratories, including Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico Tech, and many others. Unfortunately, he passed away in March 2014, but his legacy lives on.You can watch a video of him at the Citizens hearing on disclosure in 2013, here.
In the film below, you will see what appears to be two beings inside of a UFO. Filmed by multiple film crews in Turkey, it made headlines there. It’s known as the Kumburgaz, Turkey UFO incident, and involves several witnesses who live in the local village. The video was analyzed by the Scientific and Technology Research Board of Turkey(which is sponsored by the government). They concluded and vouched for its authenticity.
In conclusion, even though a detailed analysis of the footage is conducted, it might still remain unidentified. Hence, other reference objects need to be recorded in the same frame with the disputable object and further shootings need to be done by ourselves with special equipment in the same location and conditions.
Accordingly, the term “UFO” (Unidentified Flying Object) which has been used for these sort of dubious objects can also be used for these objects. But, this definition does not mean that these objects are from extraterrestrial (flying saucer etc.) origin.
The incidents were dramatic. Apparently, for several days disc, metallic spheres, round, and oval shaped unknown craft visited the Sea of Marmara just off the coast of Kumburgaz, Turkey.
It also so happens that Dr. Lier was there as well and had a powerful camera on hand. Below is a snippet from one of many interviews he’s given describing the experience,
“We’re standing on an elevated deck, which has nothing between us and the water. It was a rather warm night and there was a very very bright full moon. The camera we were using had a 300 mm lens and an electronic doubler. In other words we were able to push or close in on the object 600 times magnification. We started by looking at the moon… the moon was very bright and under these circumstances it’s just the absolute worst time to look for UFOs because the light from the moon pollutes the surrounding sky it’s like, you know, trying to film something at night in the sky in the middle of the city…But anyway…We saw a little bright dot to the left and below the moon and then after getting our focus on the moon we moved the camera over to this little bright light and then started to zoom in on it… and when we got probably 3 quarters of the way from magnification and we’re looking through the view finder and we’re also recording this on the monitor, we see that this light is not a plane. It’s not from a star, it’s not a helicopter, it has a shape to it, which was cylindrical in the front, and then it would turn time to time and you could see that it was probably crescent shaped…And as we pushed on what we considered the front of the object, now that’s when we were so startled by…we just couldn’t believe what we were seeing…This was a craft that had, whatever you choose to call it…Viewing ports, windows, whatever, three, one big one in the front and one towards each side and the craft externally was being lit by the moon…So you could see that it was a shiny… sort of metallic material. What you could see through these ports was light that was emanating from the internal portion of the craft and standing there in these portals were some of these beings….They knew we were there filming them it, was like “oh hello, go ahead film away.”
Whether it be a former Chairman of the Royal Navy telling us that “there is a serious possibility that we are being visited, and have been visited by people from outer space,” a former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater telling us that “I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified,” or an Apollo 14 astronaut saying that“there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered,” we have no shortage of high-ranking insiders attesting to the reality of this phenomenon.
General Carlos Cavero told the world in 1979, “everything” has been “in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world.” On a global scale, “the nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon” and there is “an international exchange of data.” (source)
Global Paradigm Shifts & The Human Psyche
The thing about global paradigm shifts and human beliefs is that there seems to be a general accepted version of reality. Many people are happy, raising families, enjoying life, and not really worrying about the planet. And that’s ok, as long as it doesn’t turn into a hatred for activists because that seems to be common. The point is, it can be terrifying, belief destroying, and destructive for some to even consider the possibility that this type of thing is real. Our first response, that I believe has been programmed into us, is fear.
It’s natural to fear the unknown, but where is the line drawn between not being concerned and completely denying a reality?
At what point does something become a reality? What is ‘reality’ is often what’s presented to us by a small group of people, and that’s far from a conspiracy theory.
Why don’t we question what’s happening in our world? Perhaps the planet is more important than we are, Earth has been extremely patient with us and is calling for us to change our ways!
What does this have to do with ET’s? I don’t know, but it’s not all scary stories out there. Just take a look at this one with regards to UFOs and their relationship with nuclear weapons, where the objects deactivated nuclear missiles. This has happened multiple times worldwide, and it’s quite mainstream knowledge. You can read more about it here.
Based on my research, it seems ‘they’ have been here for a very long time, if there was any real ‘invasion threat’ type of scenario in the works, it would have already happened.
However, a fake alien invasion scenario could be in the works too, who knows? You can read more about that in detail here.
The UFO/extraterrestrial phenomenon forces us to expand our minds, think outside the box, perhaps show a little more intelligence and come up with more educated guesses with regards to why ‘they’ might be visiting us, and have been. Alien invasion is one of countless possible explanations. Use your imagination 🙂 I don’t feel there is any type of sinister intentions with the majority of races that could be out there, but with some, there most probably is as well. Who knows.
The topic leaves no area of humanity untouched, and in the greater scheme of reality, it’s probably one very small tiny truth, that doesn’t even represent the tip of the ice berg 🙂
Twee wezens in een UFO vastgelegd. Deze beelden zijn authentiek bevonden door de Turkse overheid
Twee wezens in een UFO vastgelegd. Deze beelden zijn authentiek bevonden door de Turkse overheid
Tussen 2007 en 2009 werden in het Turkse Kumburgaz vreemde objecten vastgelegd in de lucht. De UFO-waarnemingen haalden het nieuws en werden zelfs onderzocht door het aan de Turkse staat verbonden onderzoeksinstituut Tübitak.
Het overheidsinstituut concludeerde dat de beelden authentiek waren. De objecten bleven na een gedetailleerde analyse nog steeds ongeïdentificeerd.
Dit betekent echter niet per definitie dat de objecten buitenaards zijn, aldus het onderzoeksinstituut.
Implantaten
Dagenlang verschenen schijf-, bol- en ovaalvormige objecten boven de Zee van Marmara, net voor de kust bij Kumburgaz.
De Amerikaanse onderzoeker Roger Leir, die in 2014 overleed, was in Turkije getuige van één van de objecten.
De arts claimde geavanceerde implantaten in lichamen van zijn patiënten te hebben gevonden die zouden zijn ingebracht door niet-menselijke wezens die de aarde in de gaten houden.
Helder licht
Gedurende zijn onderzoek ontdekte dr. Leir dat er een programma bestaat dat bedoeld is om het menselijk ras te bestuderen of te manipuleren.
In een interview dat hij gaf over zijn ervaringen in Turkije zei Leir dat hij onder de maan een helder licht zag.
Toen hij inzoomde met zijn camera kwam hij al snel tot de ontdekking dat het geen vliegtuig, helikopter of ster was.
Wezens
Het object had de vorm van een halve maan. Over de voorkant van de UFO zei hij: “We konden niet geloven wat we zagen. Dit vaartuig had ramen: één grote aan de voorkant en één aan beide zijden.”
In het schip zag hij naar eigen zeggen een paar wezens staan. “Ze wisten dat wij aan het filmen waren,” zei Leir.
The Mystery Of The Six Pyramids Of Tenerife, Spain
The Mystery Of The Six Pyramids Of Tenerife, Spain
No matter where people look, there are pyramids scattered across the globe.
And while Europe isn’t that famous for being home to ancient pyramids, the truth is there are quite a few scattered across the European continent.
Whether Pyramids around the globe are the result of an ancient global blueprint of structures or the teachings of an ancient civilization that predates popular ancient civilizations like the Ancient Egyptians or the Maya is a mystery.
For some reason, ancient cultures around the globe, all decided to build massive pyramids, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
One of the Pyramids of Tenerife.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
In Europe pyramids are scarce, so every time we write about a pyramidal structure in Europe we try to learn as much as we can about those structures.
The Pyramids of Tenerife—and Historical landmark in Guimar, Canarias
While many were unaware of this fact, Spain has pyramids. However, the mystery structures scattered on a Spanish Island have not been recognized as such by the mainstream archeologists.
The Canary Islands, more specifically Tenerife, features up to 6 pyramids that according to many researchers are aligned astronomically and built, presumably, by a mysterious culture that has long since disappeared.
Explorer Thor Heyerdahl, and the Pyramids of Guimar
On the Island of Tenerife, there is a region called Guiamar the mystery pyramids are located. Today, these incredible structures are part of the Ethnographic Park which was created by explorer Thor Heyerdahl with the financial support of Fred Olsen.
Heyerdahl was the man who, after reading a newspaper report about the pyramids, moved to Tenerife to explore the Pyramids. He lived in Tenerife for the rest of his life.
The Pyramids of Tenerife are believed to be aligned astronomically.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
The Norwegian explorer drew connections between the mysterious pyramids on Tenerife, and other similar stepped pyramids he had encountered across the globe.
Heyerdahl believed that such pyramids may have been built by an ancient civilization that had the ability to perform trans-oceanic voyages, and may be the missing link between ancient Egyptian and American Pyramids.
Thorugh his research and study of the Pyramids, Heyerdahl was convinced that the so-called Guanches, inhabitants of the island of Tenerife before the Castilian conquest, may have built those Pyramids initially.
Mainstream scholars disagree, with everything
Mainstream scholars, on the other hand, disagree with the ancient Pyramid theory and say that the alleged structure arent pyramids at all, but are piles of volcanic rocks that farmers erected when preparing their land for cultivation.
A side view of the Pyramids of Tenerife.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.
According to mainstream scholars, the alleged pyramids are cultivational terraces and were built sometimes in the nineteenth century, based on ceramics discovered in the excavations carried out by archaeologists from the University of La Laguna.
But there are those who disagree with the findings of mainstream scholars
One of those people was Philip Coppens, a man who visited the pyramids himself and found out that:
“On one plaza between two pyramids, archaeologists excavated into the structure, but stopped at a level they associated with the 18th century – and which was between 50 and 150 centimeters underground. From this, the mistaken conclusion was reached that they had dug down all the way to the bottom, and had realized the oldest layer was two centuries old. Nothing can be further from the truth.”
So, the question here is… why did they stop after digging only 150 centimeters? What was it that convinced them there was nothing noteworthy to be found if they had dug any deeper than that?
A sacred alignment?
The idea that the structures on Tenerife are more than just cultivational terraces has long existed among researchers and authors.
Heyerdahl and his flowers believed the six majestic pyramids of Tenerife were built following an intricate pattern and alignment which was created for ceremonial purposes.
Mainstream scholars disagree that these structures are Pyramids. Image Credit: Shutterstock
In 1991, researchers from the Canary Institute of Astrophysics Juan Antonio Belmonte Avilés, Antonio Aparicio Juan, and César Esteban López demonstrated how the longer sides of the terraces at Güímar were intricately placed in position to mark the direction winter and summer solstices.
Guanches—the builders of the Pyramids of Tenerife?
So, who built these astronomically aligned structures, if it wasn’t farmers?
According to many authors, the enigmatic structures were built by the so-called Guanches people.
The Guanches are a mystery as no one really knows how the white-skinned people came to live on islands so close to the African Continent.
Some archaeologists and anthropologists argue how the Guanche people are descendants of the Berbers from North Africa, and most likely Libya.
However, legends contradict that theory and suggest the Guanches are more than just descendants from the Berbers, and that they are the original inhabitants of Atlantis, and survived the cataclysmic events of the disappearance of the city/continent of Atlantis. The Guanches, aka Atlanteans, only survived because as Atlantis ‘Sank’, they were on the peaks of the mountains which we today refer to as the Canary Islands.
While today myths and history have merged on the Island of Tenerife, the truth is that there are many other structures on Tenerife that resemble Pyramids. The six pyramids at Guimar are just some of the many structures that we can find on Tenerife today. The Village of Santa Barabara has several other Pyramids that until this day have been ignored by experts.
This new crop circle is super detailed and incredibly precise. The circle just appeared in Ackling Dyke, Nr Sixpenny Handley, Dorset. This is the most beautiful formation discovered this year so far!
Alien apocalypse: Can any civilization make it through climate change?
Alien apocalypse: Can any civilization make it through climate change?
UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
IMAGE: A CASE STUDY OF THE INHABITANTS OF EASTER ISLAND SERVED IN PART AS THE BASIS FOR A MATHEMATICAL MODEL SHOWING THE WAYS A TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED POPULATION AND ITS PLANET MIGHT... view more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER ILLUSTRATION / MICHAEL OSADCIW
In the face of climate change, deforestation and biodiversity loss, creating a sustainable version of civilization is one of humanity's most urgent tasks. But when confronting this immense challenge, we rarely ask what may be the most pressing question of all: How do we know if sustainability is even possible? Astronomers have inventoried a sizable share of the universe's stars, galaxies, comets, and black holes. But are planets with sustainable civilizations also something the universe contains? Or does every civilization that may have arisen in the cosmos last only a few centuries before it falls to the climate change it triggers?
Astrophysicist Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, is part of a group of researchers who have taken the first steps to answer these questions. In a new study published in the journal Astrobiology, the group--including Frank, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, a senior computational scientist at Rochester, Martina Alberti of the University of Washington, and Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry--addresses these questions from an "astrobiological" perspective.
"Astrobiology is the study of life and its possibilities in a planetary context," says Frank, who is also author of the new book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, which draws on this study. "That includes 'exo-civilizations' or what we usually call aliens."
Frank and his colleagues point out that discussions about climate change rarely take place in this broader context--one that considers the probability that this is not the first time in cosmic history that a planet and its biosphere have evolved into something like what we've created on Earth. "If we're not the universe's first civilization," Frank says, "that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilization like our own progresses."
As a civilization's population grows, it uses more and more of its planet's resources. By consuming the planet's resources, the civilization changes the planet's conditions. In short, civilizations and planets don't evolve separately from one another; they evolve interdependently, and the fate of our own civilization depends on how we use Earth's resources.
In order to illustrate how civilization-planet systems co-evolve, Frank and his collaborators developed a mathematical model to show ways in which a technologically advanced population and its planet might develop together. By thinking of civilizations and planets--even alien ones--as a whole, researchers can better predict what might be required for the human project of civilization to survive.
"The point is to recognize that driving climate change may be something generic," Frank says. "The laws of physics demand that any young population, building an energy-intensive civilization like ours, is going to have feedback on its planet. Seeing climate change in this cosmic context may give us better insight into what's happening to us now and how to deal with it."
Using their mathematical model, the researchers found four potential scenarios that might occur in a civilization-planet system:
Die-off: The population and the planet's state (indicated by something like its average temperature) rise very quickly. Eventually, the population peaks and then declines rapidly as the rising planetary temperature makes conditions harder to survive. A steady population level is achieved, but it's only a fraction of the peak population. "Imagine if 7 out of 10 people you knew died quickly," Frank says. "It's not clear a complex technological civilization could survive that kind of change."
The population and the temperature rise but eventually both come to steady values without any catastrophic effects. This scenario occurs in the models when the population recognizes it is having a negative effect on the planet and switches from using high-impact resources, such as oil, to low-impact resources, such as solar energy.
Collapse without resource change:The population and temperature both rise rapidly until the population reaches a peak and drops precipitously. In these models civilization collapses, though it is not clear if the species itself completely dies outs.
Collapse with resource change: The population and the temperature rise, but the population recognizes it is causing a problem and switches from high-impact resources to low-impact resources. Things appear to level off for a while, but the response turns out to have come too late, and the population collapses anyway.
"The last scenario is the most frightening," Frank says. "Even if you did the right thing, if you waited too long, you could still have your population collapse."
The researchers created their models based in part on case studies of extinct civilizations, such as the inhabitants of Easter Island. People began colonizing the island between 400 and 700 AD and grew to a peak population of 10,000 sometime between 1200 and 1500 AD. By the 18th century, however, the inhabitants had depleted their resources and the population dropped drastically to about 2,000 people.
The Easter Island population die-off relates to a concept called carrying capacity, or the maximum number of species an environment can support. The earth's response to civilization building is what climate change is really all about, Frank says. "If you go through really strong climate change, then your carrying capacity may drop, because, for example, large-scale agriculture might be strongly disrupted. Imagine if climate change caused rain to stop falling in the Midwest. We wouldn't be able to grow food, and our population would diminish."
Right now researchers can't definitively predict the fate of the earth. The next steps will be to use more detailed models of the ways planets might behave when a civilization consumes energy of any form to grow. In the meantime, Frank issues a sober warning.
"If you change the earth's climate enough, you might not be able to change it back," he says. "Even if you backed off and started to use solar or other less impactful resources, it could be too late, because the planet has already been changing. These models show we can't just think about a population evolving on its own. We have to think about our planets and civilizations co-evolving."
Summer vacation season has arrived in Scotland, which means it’s time for tourists to point their cellphones at Loch Ness and claim that every log, fish, boat wake and bubble is proof of the Loch Ness monster. However, the latest video accepted by the Official Register of Sightings at Loch Ness was not taken by a tourist standing on the bank of the loch but by an Irishman sitting at home watching the live feed from the official Loch Ness CCTV livecam. Not only did he see something that looked monsterish, he took a video of the video which showed the anomaly for a long (by Nessie sightings standards) ten minutes. Is this the real deal or just another seal?
“I just click in now and then for 20 minutes–it’s better than watching Coronation Street.”
Sometimes you don’t see anything, but it’s still better than “Coronation Street.”
Eoin O’Faodhagain, who should win the title for Best Name for a Nessie Spotter, also has the best method for spotting Nessie – he sits at home in Drumdoit Castlefin, County Donegal, watching the live 24/7 feed from a video camera pointed at Urquhart Bay – a well-known location for Loch Ness monster sightings. Eoin was tuned in on April 30th when he saw something that prompted him to reach for his recording device and watch what might happen next. He was pleasantly surprised at what he saw. (Watch for yourself here.)
“It was very unusual, it was certainly something big–it dived down and up again and dived and disappeared. It was not a boat and not a log.”
Well … “unusual” is definitely an appropriate word for a video of a video feed that “shocked” O’Faodhagain and got Gary Campbell, the Keeper of the Official Register of Sightings at Loch Ness excited.
“As far as Nessie footage goes this is a feature film. Normally you only get videos of one of two seconds.”
The fact that the video-of-a-video-feed is blurry, probably due to Eoin magnifying what he captured on his phone, doesn’t seem to bother Campbell. He points out the one obvious truth – that the object is moving and appears to be bobbing in and out of the water – and speculates that it’s no more than 20 feet long. Despite the fact that a 20-foot log could do the same thing, he says:
“It is unexplained.”
Would searching by kayak be better?
Campbell wields his “unexplained” like many use “unidentified” – that word alone doesn’t make it a ‘creature’, let alone a living creature or Nessie. Hopefully, the Loch Ness DNA testing expedition will dip their ladles into the waters where this video was shot and come up with a better explanation. In the meantime, it is entered in the annual “Best Loch Ness Monster sighting of 2018” sponsored annually by the Inverness Courier.
Yes … there’s still another big unanswered question. Did anyone think to look back at the actual feed from April 30th? Are they not saving it? Wouldn’t it be more clear than the video-of-a-video?
Start monitoring the Loch Ness CCTV feed and keep your cellphone handy. Eoin O’Faodhagain is right – it beats watching “Coronation Street.”
There can be no doubt that any alleged encounter with creatures from another world is already by definition profoundly bizarre. Such reports really cover the full spectrum of the odd and of high strangeness, with these accounts reliably stirring debate, wonder, and awe. Yet there are some cases that go even beyond this, to fully catapult themselves into the furthest reaches of the extreme fringe of the bizarre, hovering out beyond all attempts to comprehend or explain them. Here are some of the stranger.
Certainly one of the more downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point he allegedly heard a high pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he would come across a very strange sight indeed.
There in the brush stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature, as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:
You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.
As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship.
For years Frederick took this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or what? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.
Vegetable men are weird enough, but there are other encounters with unidentified, often humanoid creatures that are every bit as bizarre. On the evening of November 17, 1974, something beyond normal was witnessed by several motorists along a lonely stretch of road on Bald Mountain, in the U.S. state of Washington. The first of the witnesses was a man named Ernest Smith, would say of the the entity he caught in his headlights thus:
It was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up…The thing gave off this green, iridescent light.
Another couple driving by at the time by the name of Mr and Mrs Roger Ramsbaugh also claimed to have seen the creature and its ethereal glow. Interestingly, just three days previous there had been a report of a UFO crashing to earth in the region, perhaps suggesting a connection. The researcher and author Jim Brandon also mentioned in his book Weird America that at the time Lewis County Sheriff William Wister had led an investigation into the reports, but that he had been shut down by the Air Force and NASA, after which teams of men had been brought in to search the area, which Brandon would describe as “a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia.” What could this creature have been? Was it just a newspaper hoax on a slow news day? Who knows?
If none of this has been weird enough for you, then how about floating, disembodied alien brains? In August 17, 1971, there was a perhaps even stranger alien encounter from Palos Verdes, California. Witnesses John Hodges and Pete Rodriguez were allegedly headed to their car at 2 AM when they saw off through the trees a faint, mysterious glow emanating from beyond. They got into their car, switched on the headlights, and their suspended in the beams of light from their vehicle were what were described as two large, blueish entities that looked just like disembodied human brains, hovering right in the middle of the road and surrounded by clouds of vapor that seemed to cling to them. The larger one of the “brains” was described as having a prominent red spot like an eye set within it, and this is the one that began to move towards the vehicle for purposes unknown.
The two terrified men understandably got out of there as fast as they possibly could, and it was later noticed that they had 2 hours of missing time. In 1976, Hodges would undergo hypnotic regression after years of being plagued by nightmares and wondering what had happened to them out on that lonely road. Under hypnosis, Hodges revealed that he had dropped Rodriquez off at home and arrived at his own house to find the larger brain waiting for him there, which had then telepathically spoken to him. He claimed that he had then been taken into the brains’ ship to some sort of “control room,” where it was revealed that they were merely telepathic tools being used by other aliens, this time more akin to the “grey” aliens typically described in more mainstream reports, although in this case they stood over 7-feet tall.
These master aliens then apparently claimed they were from a place called “Zeta Reticulii,” and showed Hodges various images of nuclear war and destruction as they explained that the human race had grown too powerful for its own good. He was also shown another planet that had been completely destroyed by another race that had met the same fate, and was admonished that humankind would be the “instruments of their own fate,” telling him, “Take the time to understand yourselves. The time draws near when you shall need to!” Hodges then says that he felt a potent buzzing sensation in the back of his head and found himself back in his own car.
In the years after, he became convinced that these aliens had implanted him with what he called a “translator cell,” and that he received frequent telepathic communications from them through this device, in which they made dire predictions such as an apocalyptic war in the Middle East and the future widespread use of nuclear weapons. Many of the prophecies given by the aliens have turned out to have not come to pass, which sort of raises an eyebrow even further than it already is. Whether you think this story and its “space brains” has any truth to it at all or not, you have to admit it is a damn strange tale all the same.
The United States certainly does not hold the monopoly on such mind-bending weird cases, and almost as absurd as floating brains is a case involving basically floating, sentient bags of jelly, which were apparently witnessed on December 20, 1958 in Sweden. On this day, 25 year-old Hans Gustafsson and 30 year-old Stig Rydberg, were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over. As they walked about outside the vehicle they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby.
The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe thus:
They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.
Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench like “ether and burnt sausage.” It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.
By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.
Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The to witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in find physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was.
This particular case of what are commonly referred to as the “Domsten Blobs” was also covered by Steiger in his book Strangers from the Skies, with the author himself referring to the outlandish monsters as “terrible flying jelly bags.” It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.
Moving over to England we have the weird case that appeared in Fortean Times in the summer of 1988. The incident occurred near Birmingham in the West Midlands, where on January 4, 1979, a Jean Hingley was out working in her garden. At some point she looked up to see a glowing orange sphere appear to hover over her home, which gradually changed to white and inexplicably caused her dog to collapse to the ground, seemingly paralyzed. Things got even stranger still when some tiny, “fairy-like” entities suddenly came buzzing from down out of the sky to enter the house. The article would describe these beings thus:
They were about 3.5 ft tall, and dressed in a silvery tunic with six silver buttons down the front. They had large eyes like ‘black diamonds’ with a glittering lustre, set into wide white faces with no nose to speak of and a simple line for the mouth. Their heads were covered by transparent helmets like ‘goldfish bowls’, surmounted by small lights. Their limbs were silvery-green, ending in simple tapering points with no apparent hands or feet. They had large oval ‘wings’ which looked as if they were made of thin, transparent paper covered with dozens of glittering multi-coloured dots, like ‘braille dots’. Each ‘being’ was surrounded by a halo, and numerous very thin streamers hung down from their shoulders. They hovered and flew about the room with their ‘arms’ clasped in front of their chests, while their ‘legs’ hung down stiffly. Their wings didn’t flap like those of birds, but seemed to be for display and merely fluttered gently or occasionally folded inwards like a concertina. Their expression – “like a dead person’s face” – never changed during the encounter, which lasted for about an hour.
These creatures apparently spoke in unison in a low, gruff voice, and would occasionally emit a laser-like beam of light from their helmets, which had the effect of dazzling the witness and creating a burning sensation. The creatures were also quite mischievous and troublesome, knocking objects over, shaking the Christmas tree, jumping on the sofa, banging on walls, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They would continue this cavorting, occasionally stunning Hingley with their enigmatic laser weapons, until they were called to attention by a sudden beeping noise coming from the garden. The creatures then flitted back outside, oddly carrying with them pieces of mince pie they had pilfered from the kitchen, and entered the large orange craft that had been hovering over the house earlier, which was now sitting upon the ground and sported portholes and two long antenna-like structures that glowed blue.
When the craft was gone, Hingley claimed that she had been incapacitated by an inexplicable pain, and when she snapped out of it she realized that there was a tiny burn mark in her forehead. An inspection of the area turned up what appeared to be 8-foot long tracks like the tracks of a tank’s treads, and additionally it was found that various electrical appliances in the home had been mysteriously fried by some unknown force. What were these fairy-like beings and what did they want? It is unknown.
Another account first came to public attention in an 1968 issue of Flying Saucer Review, and comes from nearby France, where in 1962 a business man was driving along a rural road in Var on a dark and rainy night. As he drove along the desolate stretch of road peering through the torrent of rain, the witness allegedly noticed a group of figures huddled in the middle of the road as he rounded a bend. He at first took these to be people, perhaps in need of help, but would soon find out that these were no human beings. The witness would explain:
My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered with some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car. Terrified, I wound up my window, accelerated like a mad man, and the stopped 150-meters [approximately 500-feet] further on. I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object, which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road. On reaching it [the UFO], these ‘birds’ were literally sucked into the underpart of the machine as if by a whirlwind. Then I heard a dull sound (clac!) and the object flew off at a prodigious speed and finally disappeared.
What were these bizarre bird-like beings? Since no one has seen anything like it it is anyone’s guess. Finally, we leave Europe to come to the South American country of Venezuela, and a very harrowing and strange report from November of 1954. On November 28, 1954, two witnesses by the names of Gustavo Gonzales and José Ponce were driving a truck from Caracas to Petare, Venezuela, when in the early morning hours they came across an enormous glowing orb floating about 6 feet above the ground in front of them. Perhaps unwisely, the men stopped the truck and got out to investigate, upon which they noticed several small, 3-foot high humanoids covered in bristly hair that seemed to be gathering rocks to bring aboard their craft.
Gonzales and ponce approached and decided to try and grab one of the creatures, which turned out to be a bad idea. The small, vaguely ape-like being was apparently vastly strong, effortlessly flinging them off and then proceeding to viciously claw at them. When Gonzales fought back by stabbing it with a knife, his weapon was found to have no effect on it at all. The struggle continued until one of the other creatures put an end to it all by firing off a stunning beam of bright light that knocked the two men to their knees, whereupon the odd beings entered their ship and shot off into the night. Medical examination would show that Gonzales did indeed have a nasty looking scratch mark on his body, and the two men were found to be completely sober. Making the whole case even more bizarre was a report from another witness who also claimed to have seen the creatures and to have even seen the struggle between them and the two witnesses.
These are some of the most outrageous, perplexing, and even downright absurd reports of alien encounters there are, and we are left to wonder just what in the world is going on here. These are singularly peculiar cases that have no other parallel in the sightings records, and which lurk on the very fringes of the weird. What could these creatures be and where did they come from? Why haven’t they been seen more often? Are these hallucinations, illusions, hoaxes, or lies? No one really knows, and these extremely odd encounters continue to serve to stir the imagination.
The ongoing saga of the mystery booms being heard across the United States continues, and possibly taken a turn for the spooky. Over the past year, unexplained explosions and booming noises have been shaking homes and terrifying residents in many rural parts of the continental U.S. While the vast majority of these anomalous booms are left unexplained, the FBI has taken a particular interest in mysterious explosion noises recently heard across rural Pennsylvania just north of Philadelphia. Does this mean some sort of sleeper cell terrorist group might be practicing with improvised explosives?
Let’s hope not.
Given the craters found alongside rural roads, though, who knows? To add more mystery and a healthy dose of conspiracy to these recent booms in Pennsylvania, though, news reports suggest the ever-elusive and ominous Men in Black might now be on the case, doing what they do best: creeping out bewildered eyewitnesses. Is there more to this case than meets the eye?
Speaking to The Intelligencer, a newspaper covering the Upper Bucks County area of Pennsylvania where these mystery booms took place, residents described the “kinda spooky” experience they had following one of the recent unexplained booms. One resident who asked that her name not be used claims two eerily-familiar-sounding and unidentified agents of some kind showed up at her door unannounced, questioning her in a somewhat threatening manner:
Two men in dark suits and dark car were banging on our front door and back door at the time until I answered. I could see they had badges under their coats, but they didn’t identify themselves. It was unnerving. Then they left.
What should be made of the appearance of the MIB? Is there more to this case than some backwoods paramilitary group or “lone wolf” testing explosives on the side of empty highways? Were these Men in Black merely men who happened to be wearing black working on behalf of an undisclosed organization like the NSA or CIA, or is something spookier afoot in rural Pennsylvania? As with all things MIB, we’ll likely never know.
In the search for great names for bands, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detectors has been available since the 1990s without any takers. That may change this week with the news that this odd device was used to discover a particle that should not exist – the sterile neutrino … a particle that can allegedly pass through matter and not interact with it (and another great band name if your bass drum isn’t big enough for the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detectors logo). Unfortunately, the experiment could not be replicated until recently which scientists using a new device appear to have proven its existence. Is it possible? Here’s the real question … is it band-name-worthy?
“That would be huge; that’s beyond the standard model; that would require new particles … and an all-new analytical framework.”
That’s Kate Scholberg, particle physicist at Duke University, commenting in LiveScience on the announcement, published in arXiv.org, of the possible discovery of the sterile neutrino by scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. It took the invention of another device — the MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment) instrument which was built solely to find the allegedly massless neutrinos – to discover the sterile neutrino (the other three are the electron, muon, and tau neutrinos) and then potentially blow the Standard Model of physics to smithereens by proving that neutrinos are not massless but, well, smithereens that can still pass through matter without interacting with it. This sounds like something dark matter might do. Are the sterile neutrinos dark matter?
As described in Quanta Magazine, the MiniBooNE sounds like something invented at a summer picnic by guys tired of firing their shotguns at empty beer cans. MiniBooNE shoots a beam of muon neutrinos at a giant tank filled with oil. Before hitting the oil, some of the muons change (by oscillation) into electron neutrinos which flash when they collide with oil molecules. While this happens rarely, it can be predicted reliably … which caused oscillation among physicists when the total number of hits was slightly higher than predicted.
One possible explanation is that heavier sterile neutrinos – called “sterile” because they never interact with anything but other neutrinos – exist and are also changing into electron neutrinos. The increase in mass measured on the other side of the oil barrel by the MiniBooNE indicates that the sterile neutrinos may not only exist but are not massless as previously theorized. And, if their mass is heavy enough, they could be good candidate for being dark matter.
Or not.
“It’s clear there’s something to be understood, and I certainly hope it’s a fourth neutrino. That said, this would be the first discovered particle beyond the Standard Model, so the threshold for the evidence is obviously very high.” For now, he said, “I am taking a slight wait-and-see approach.”
Skeptics like Neal Weiner, a New York University theoretical physicist interviewed by Quanta, point out that more proof is needed before tossing the Standard Model out the window, especially because other similar experiments have not been able to replicate the results of MiniBooNE.
“I’m very excited about this result, but I am not ready to say ‘Eureka!’”
Janet Conrad, a neutrino physicist at MIT and a member of the MiniBooNE team, agrees, which is why she’s moving from MiniBooNE to ISODAR — an ISOtope Decay At Rest experiment which is being designed to “definitively address these physics topics using a well-understood, high-intensity 8Li β-decay-at-rest antineutrino source coupled with a massive detector such as KamLAND that has good inverse-betadecay identification capabilities with high efficiency.”
Eureka?
It’s nice to know there’s research money being spent on particle physics and, if the sterile neutrino has really been discovered, these experiments destroying the Standard Model of Particle Physics do not blow us to smithereens in the process.
They are also a great band name generator, as The Smithereens have proven. While ISODAR may not fit a band, it sounds like a great name for a Star Wars villain.
How could you devise a message for intelligent creatures from another planet? They wouldn’t know any human language. Their ‘speech’ might be as different from ours as the eerie cries of whales or the twinkling lights of fireflies. Their cultural and scientific history would have followed its own path. Their minds might not even work like ours. Would the deep structure of language, its so called ‘universal grammar’ be the same for aliens as for us? A group of linguists and other scientists gathered on May 26 to discuss the challenging problems posed by devising a message that extraterrestrial beings could understand. There are growing hopes that such beings might be out there among the billions of habitable planets that we now think exist in our galaxy. The symposium, called ‘Language in the Cosmos’ was organized by METI International. It took place as part of the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. The Chair of the workshop was Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguist from Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
What is METI International?
‘METI’ stands for messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence. METI International is an organization of scientists and scholars that aims to foster an entirely new approach in our search for alien civilizations. Since 1960, researchers have been looking for extraterrestrials by searching for possible messages they might send to us by radio or laser beams. They have sought the giant megastructures that advanced alien societies might build in space. METI International wants to move beyond this purely passive search strategy. They want to construct and transmit messages to the planets of relatively nearby stars, hoping for a response.
One of the organization’s central goals is to build an interdisciplinary community of scholars concerned with designing interstellar messages that can be understood by non-human minds. More generally, it works internationally to promote research in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and astrobiology, and to understand the evolution of intelligence here on Earth. The daylong symposium featured eleven presentations. It main theme was the role of linguistics in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.
METI International
This article
This article is the first in a two part series. It will focus on one of the most fundamental issues addressed at the conference. This is the question of whether the deep underlying structure of language would likely be the same for extraterrestrials as for us. Linguists understand the deep structure of language using the theory of ‘universal grammar’. The imminent Linguist Noam Chomsky developed this theory in the middle of the twentieth century.
Two interrelated presentations at the symposium addressed the issue of universal grammar. The first was by Dr. Jeffery Punske of Southern Illinois University and Dr. Bridget Samuels of the University of Southern California. The second was given by Dr. Jeffery Watumull of Oceanit, whose coauthors were Dr. Ian Roberts of the University of Cambridge, and Dr. Noam Chomskyhimself, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chomsky’s universal grammar-For humans only?
Universal grammar
Despite its name, Chomsky originally took his ‘universal grammar’ theory to imply that there are major, and maybe insuperable barriers to mutual understanding between humans and extraterrestrials. Let’s first consider why Chomsky’s theories seemed to make interstellar communication virtually hopeless. Then we’ll examine why Chomsky’s colleagues who presented at the symposium, and Chomsky himself, now think differently.
Before the second half of the twentieth century, linguists believed that the human mind was a blank slate, and that we learned language entirely by experience. These beliefs dated to the seventeenth century philosopher John Locke and were elaborated in the laboratories of behaviorist psychologists in the early twentieth century. Beginning in the 1950’s, Noam Chomsky challenged this view. He argued that learning a language couldn’t simply be a matter of learning to associate stimuli with responses. He saw that young children, even before the age of 5, can consistently produce and interpret original sentences that they had never heard before. He spoke of a “poverty of the stimulus”. Children couldn’t possibly be exposed to enough examples to learn the rules of language from scratch.
Chomsky posited instead that the human brain contained a “language organ”. This language organ was already pre-organized at birth for the basic rules of language, which he called “universal grammar”. It made human infants primed and ready to learn whatever language they were exposed to using only a limited number of examples. He proposed that the language organ arose in human evolution, maybe as recently of 50,000 years ago. Chomsky’s powerful arguments were accepted by other linguists. He came to be regarded as one of the great linguists and cognitive scientists of the twentieth century.
Universal grammar and ‘Martians’
Human beings speak more than 6000 different languages. Chomsky defined his “universal grammar” as “the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages”. He said it could be taken to express “the essence of human language”. But he wasn’t convinced that this ‘essence of human language’ was the essence of all theoretically possible languages. When Chomsky was asked by an interviewer from Omni Magazine in 1983 whether he thought that it would be possible for humans to learn an alien language, he replied:
“Not if their language violated the principles of our universal grammar, which, given the myriad ways that languages can be organized, strikes me as highly likely…The same structures that make it possible to learn a human language make it impossible for us to learn a language that violates the principles of universal grammar. If a Martian landed from outer space and spoke a language that violated universal grammar, we simply would not be able to learn that language the way that we learn a human language like English or Swahili. We should have to approach the alien’s language slowly and laboriously — the way that scientists study physics, where it takes generation after generation of labor to gain new understanding and to make significant progress. We’re designed by nature for English, Chinese, and every other possible human language. But we’re not designed to learn perfectly usable languages that violate universal grammar. These languages would simply not be within the range of our abilities.”
If intelligent, language-using life exists on another planet, Chomsky knew, it would necessarily have arisen by a different series of evolutionary changes than the uniquely improbable path that produced human beings. A different history of climate changes, geological events, asteroid and comet impacts, random genetic mutations, and other events would have produced a different set of life forms. These would have interacted with one another in a different ways over the history of life on the planet. The “Martian” language organ, with its different and unique history, could, Chomsky surmised, be entirely different from its human counterpart, making communication monumentally difficult, if not impossible.
Convergent evolution and alien minds
The tree of life
Why did Chomsky think that the human and ‘Martian‘ language organ would likely be fundamentally different? How come he and his colleagues now hold different views? To find out, we first need to explore some basic principles of evolutionary theory.
Originally formulated by the naturalist Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution is the central principle of modern biology. It is our best tool for predicting what life might be like on other planets. The theory maintains that living species evolved from previous species. It asserts that all life on Earth is descended from an initial Earthly life form that lived more than 3.8 billion years ago.
You can think of these relationships as like a tree with many branches. The base of the trunk of the tree represents the first life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago. The tip of each branch represents now, and a modern species. The diverging branches connecting each branch tip with the trunk represent the evolutionary history of each species. Each branch point in the tree is where two species diverged from a common ancestor.
Evolution, brains, and contingency
To understand Chomsky’s thinking, we’ll start with a familiar group of animals; the vertebrates, or animals with backbones. This group includes fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including humans.
We’ll compare the vertebrates with a less familiar, and distantly related group; the cephalopod molluscs. This group includes octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. These two groups have been evolving along separate evolutionary paths-different branches of our tree-for more than 600 million years. I’ve chosen them because, as they’ve traveled along their separate branch of our evolutionary tree, each has evolved it own sort of complex brains and complex sense organs.
The brains of all vertebrates have the same basic plan. This is because they all evolved from a common ancestor that already had a brain with that basic plan. The octopus’s brain, by contrast, has an utterly different organization. This is because the common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates lies much further back in evolutionary time, on a lower branch of our tree. It probably had only the simplest of brains, if any at all.
With no common plan to inherit, the two kinds of brains evolved independently of one another. They are different because evolutionary change is contingent. That is, it involves varying combinations of influences, including chance. Those contingent influences were different along the path that produced cephalopod brains, than along the one that led to vertebrate brains.
Chomsky believed that many languages might be theoretically possible that violated the seemingly arbitrary constraints of human universal grammar. There didn’t seem to be anything that made our actual universal grammar something special. So, because of the contingent nature of evolution, Chomsky assumed that the ‘Martian’ language organ would arrive at one of these other possibilities, making it fundamentally different from its human counterpart.
This sort of evolution-based pessimism about the likelihood that humans and aliens could communicate is widespread. At the symposium, Dr. Gonzalo Munévar of Lawrence Technological University argued that intelligent creatures that evolved sensory systems and cognitive structures different from ours would not develop similar scientific theories or even similar mathematics.
Evolution, eyes, and convergence
Now lets consider another feature of the octopus and other cephalopods; their eyes. Surprisingly, the eyes of octopuses resemble those of vertebrates in intricate detail. This uncanny resemblance can’t be explained in the same way as the general resemblance of vertebrate brains to one another. It’s almost certainly not due to inheritance of the traits from a common ancestor. It’s true that some of the genes involved in the building of eyes are the same in most animals, appearing far down towards the trunk of our evolutionary tree. But, biologists are almost certain that the common ancestor of cephalopods and vertebrates was much too simple to have any eyes at all.
Biologists think eyes evolved separately more than forty times on Earth, each on its own branch of the evolutionary tree. There are many different kinds of eyes. Some are so strangely different from our own that even a science fiction writer would be surprised by them. So, if evolutionary change is contingent, why do octopus eyes bear a striking and detailed similarity to our own? The answer lies outside of evolutionary theory, with the laws of optics. Many large animals, like the octopus, need acute vision. There is only one good way, under the laws of optics, to make an eye that meets the needed requirements. Whenever such an eye is needed, evolution finds this same best solution. This phenomenon is called convergent evolution.
Life on another planet would have its own separate evolutionary tree, with the base of the trunk representing the appearance of life on that planet. Because of the contingency of evolutionary change, the pattern of branches might be quite different from our Earthly evolutionary tree. But because the laws of optics are the same everywhere in the universe, we can expect that large animals under similar conditions will evolve an eye that looks a lot like that of a vertebrate or a cephalopod. Convergent evolution is potentially a universal phenomenon.
The eye of a fish (left), which is an aquatic vertebrate, and that of a cephalopod mollusc like the octopus (right) are almost identical, but the two evolved independently. Their remarkable similarity is due to convergent evolution. The common ancestor of fishes and cephalopods did not have a well developed eye, nor do some molluscs that are not cephalopods. This sort of eye is called a camera eye, because its layout is similar to a camera with the lens at the front, and the light sensing retina at the back (Credit: Jerry Crimson Mann public domain, evolution diagram is by the author).
Not just for humans anymore?
Taking apart the language organ
Jeffrey Punske, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chomsky and some of his colleagues started to look at the language organ and universal grammar in a new way. This new view made it seem like the properties of universal grammar were inevitable, much as the laws of optics made many features of the octopus’s eye inevitable.
In a 2002 review, Chomsky and his colleagues Marc Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch argued that the language organ can be decomposed into a number of distinct parts. The sensory-motor, or externalization, system is involved in the mechanics of expressing language through methods like vocal speech, writing, typing, or sign language. The conceptual-intentional system relates language to concepts.
Bridget Samuels, Postdoctoral fellow, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland at College Park
The core of the system, the trio proposed, consists of what they called the narrow faculty of language. It is a system for applying the rules of language recursively, over and over, thereby allowing the construction of an almost endless range of meaningful utterances. Jeffrey Punske and Bridget Samuels similarly spoke of a ‘syntactic spine’ of all human languages. Syntax is the set of rules that govern the grammatical structure of sentences.
The inevitability of universal grammar
Chomsky and his colleagues made a careful analysis of what computations a nervous system might need to perform in order to make this recursion possible. As an abstract description of how the narrow faculty works, the researchers turned to a mathematical model called the Turing machine. The mathematician Alan Turing developed this model early in the twentieth century. This theoretical ‘machine’ led to the development of electronic computers.
Their analysis led to a striking and unexpected conclusion. In a book chapter currently in press, Watumull and Chomsky write that “Recent work demonstrating the simplicity and optimality of language increases the cogency of a conjecture that at one time would have been summarily dismissed as absurd: the basic principles of language are drawn from the domain of (virtual) conceptual necessity”. Jeffery Watumull wrote that this strong minimalist thesis posits that “there exist constraints in the structure of the universe itself such that systems cannot but conform”. Our universal grammar is something special, and not just one among many theoretical possibilities.
Ian Roberts, Professor of Linguistics, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Cambridge University
Plato and the strong minimalist thesis
The constraints of mathematical and computational necessity shape the narrow faculty to be as it is, just like the laws of optics shape both the vertebrate and the octopus eye. ‘Martian’ languages, then, might follow the same universal grammar as human languages because there is only one best way to make the recursive core of the language organ.
Through the process of convergent evolution, nature would be compelled to find this one best way wherever and whenever in the universe that language evolves. Watumull supposed that the brain mechanisms of arithmetic might reflect a similarly inevitable convergence. That would mean that the basics of arithmetic would also be the same for humans and aliens. We must, Watumull and Chomsky wrote “rethink any presumptions that extraterrestrial intelligence or artificial intelligence would really be all that different from human intelligence”.
This is the striking conclusion that Watumull, and in a complementary way, Punske and Samuels presented at the symposium. Universal grammar may actually be universal, after all. Watumull compared this thesis to a modern, computer age version of the beliefs of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who maintained that mathematical and logical relationships are real things that exist in the world apart from us, and are merely discovered by the human mind. As a novel contribution to a difficult ages-old philosophical problem, these new ideas are sure to stir controversy. They illustrate the depth of new knowledge that awaits us as we reach out to other worlds and other minds.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato as imagined by the Renaissance painter Raphael. Plato maintained that mathematical and logical truths existed objectively, apart from our mind and were merely discovered by humans. Jeffery Watumull, Ian Roberts, and Noam Chomsky’s view of the narrow faculty of language are a modern day version of Plato’s views, in which necessary mathematical, logical, and computational relationships determine the structure of the language faculty, and universal grammar. Since the same necessary relationships would influence the evolution of the language faculty of aliens, alien languages, they contend, are likely to have the same universal grammar as human languages.
Universal grammar and messages for aliens
What are the consequences of this new way of thinking about the structure of language for practical attempts to create interstellar messages? Watumull thinks the new thinking is a challenge to “the pessimistic relativism of those who think it overwhelmingly likely that terrestrial (i.e. human) intelligence and extraterrestrial intelligence would be (perhaps in principle) mutually unintelligible”. Punske and Samuels agree, and think that “math and physics likely represent the best bet for common concepts that could be used as a starting point”.
Watumull supposes that while the minds of aliens or artificial intelligences may be qualitatively similar to ours, they may differ quantitatively in having bigger memories, or the ability to think much faster than us. He is confident that an alien language would likely include nouns, verbs, and clauses. That means they could probably understand an artificial message containing such things. Such a message, he thinks, might also profitably include the structure and syntax of natural human languages, because this would likely be shared by alien languages.
Punske and Samuels seem more cautious. They note that “There are some linguists who don’t believe nouns and verbs are universal human language categories”. Still, they suspect that “alien languages would be built of discrete meaningful units that can combine into larger meaningful units”. Human speech consists of a linear sequence of words, but, Punske and Samuels note that “Some of the linearity imposed on human language may be due to the constraints of our vocal anatomy, and already starts to break down when we think about signed languages”.
Overall, the findings foster new hope that devising a message comprehensible to extraterrestrials is feasible. In the next installment, we will look at a new example of such a message. It was transmitted in 2017 towards a star 12 light years from our sun.
References and further reading
Allman J. (2000) Evolving Brains, Scientific American Library
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WATCH: Unidentified Object Flying in Australian Skies Perplexes Witnesses
WATCH: Unidentified Object Flying in Australian Skies Perplexes Witnesses
Video footage of a UFO spotted in the southern city of Hastings, Australia, May 31 has viewers online pondering whether an alien had been spotted or some new top secret government craft accidentally observed by civilian eyes
The daytime footage, which was captured by Junelyn Bitalac after she dropped off her mom at work, shows a strange object flying in the sky not far from HMAS Cerberus, a Royal Australian Navy base in Victoria, on Australia's southern coast.
"I dropped my mom to work that day and on my way home saw this strange object flying in the sky. So I pulled over on the side of the road and took a video of it. Can anyone please tell me what this is?" Bitalac wrote in the description of her YouTube video.
The video gained widespread popularity after being shared on the Secureteam10 YouTube channel, which reports UFO sighting news. So far, the clip has been viewed more than 444,000 times.
Many users were quick to share their theories about what the mysterious black object floating in the sky could be.
"Most likely a secret governmental black project craft," one YouTube user wrote.
"Obviously some sort of experimental aircraft, possibly military," another noted.
Others were less adventurous with their speculations.
"Right next to the military base — must be a drone," another viewer wrote.
That search has generally focused on places more or less like Earth — rocky planets in the "habitable zone" of their host star, that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface. Jupiter-like planets don't seem like good candidates in this regard, because they have no discernible surface. But the rocky moons of such gas giants may be a different story, study team members said. [How Habitable Zones for Alien Planets and Stars Work (Infographic)]
"There are currently 175 known moons orbiting the eight planets in our solar system," study co-author Stephen Kane, an associate professor of planetary astrophysics at UCR and a member of UCR's Alternative Earths Astrobiology Center,said in a statement.
Could exomoons provide the correct environments for life?
Credit: Jay Friedlander/Britt Griswold/NASA/GSFC
"While most of these moons orbit Saturn and Jupiter, which are outside the sun's habitable zone, that may not be the case in other solar systems," Kane added. "Including rocky exomoons in our search for life in space will greatly expand the places we can look."
The research team pored through the databases of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,700 known exoplanets to date. They flagged 121 gas giants that appear to orbit in the habitable zone.
No exomoons have yet been confirmed. But if any of those huge exoplanets have natural satellites — which seems likely, given how common moons are in our own solar system — they could be especially promising abodes for life, study team members said. For example, potential lifeforms on their surfaces could tap energy coming directly from their star, and light reflected off their parent planet as well.
"Now that we have created a database of the known giant planets in the habitable zone of their star, observations of the best candidates for hosting potential exomoons will be made to help refine the expected exomoon properties," study lead author Michelle Hill, an undergraduate student at the University of Southern Queensland who is working with Kane, said in the statement.
"Our follow-up studies will help inform future telescope design so that we can detect these moons, study their properties, and look for signs of life,” added Hill, who will join UCR's graduate program in the fall.
The new study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. You can read a copy of it for free at the online preprint site arXiv.org.
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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 73 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.
