Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
13-07-2018
NASA's Big Astronaut Trash Problem
NASA's Big Astronaut Trash Problem
By Chelsea Gohd, Space.com Staff Writer
This space trash disk was made by heating and compressing a sample example of trash that astronauts could produce. These disks are being tested for possible use in shields guarding against space radiation.
Credit: NASA
As we explore and reach farther out into the cosmos, what will we do with all of our trash?
For astronauts aboard the International Space Station, storage space is extremely valuable and limited — but even astronauts have garbage. In addition to taking up precious space, this garbage creates potential physical and biological health and safety hazards for the astronauts. On the space station, astronauts currently squeeze their garbage into trash bags and, for temporary periods of time, store up to 2 metric tons of trash on board. They then send the trash out on commercial supply vehicles, which either reach Earth or burn up in reentry.
But what will happen to these tons of trash when astronauts are much farther from Earth? The farther we travel into the solar system, the more complicated it will be to effectively manage and dispose of trash. NASA thinks that the key to this big space-trash problem could be addressed with technology that compacts and processes trash, according to a new statement from the agency. [Gallery: Visions of Deep Space Stations for Exploration]
This space trash disk was made by heating and compressing a sample example of trash that astronauts could produce. These disks are being tested for possible use in shields guarding against space radiation.
Credit: NASA
In an effort to ensure astronaut safety and find an improved trash solution, NASA has sent out a call to U.S. companies to create prototype compactors and trash-processing systems. The agency is looking for innovative designs that could not only compact trash but also remove hazardous components, and process and remove pieces that could then be repurposed or recycled.
Resources are limited on the space station, and they would become even more so on a deep-space mission with no resupply. So, NASA is hoping that this technology will also be able to help astronauts reuse materials more effectively.
Proposals that look to fill this void will have a variety of NASA technologies to inspire them. Previously, NASA scientists designed a heat melt compactor, which recovers water from trash using heat transfer and compacts the trash; and "trash to gas" technologies, which convert trash into methane gas that could be used as a rocket propellant. Researchers have even developed trash-compacting technology that could help astronauts turn trash into a space radiation shield.
A Russian cargo ship drifts from the International Space Station after undocking in 2007. NASA has sent out a call for U.S. companies to develop a new and improved way to deal with trash in space for future, deep-space missions.
Credit: NASA TV
The search for the next great trash solution will occur in two parts, according to the statement. First, NASA will select companies that will go on to create a concept for a system that compacts and processes trash. In this first phase, the companies will go through design reviews with NASA and complete ground demonstrations of their prototype. In the second phase, the companies will build a flight unit that could be tested on the space station by 2022.
NASA has been very public about its intention to not only revisit the moon, but also push farther out into the solar system and explore deep space. Effective trash-processing and -compacting technology will maximize space on future spacecraft, increase crew safety and make the most of the limited resources on board.
It took three of the world’s largest radio telescopes to get a better picture of what the YE5 asteroid looked like, but when NASA finally caught a glimpse of the planetoid, the agency was shocked. While working to improve NASA’s asteroid detection and tracking capabilities, scientists discovered that YE5 is a double asteroid, a rare instance of two equal-mass objects orbiting each other.
The near-Earth asteroid was first discovered by the Morocco Oukaimeden Sky Survey in late 2017, but its properties remained a mystery for months. On June 21, YE5 came within 3.7 million miles of Earth, giving scientists an opportunity to get up close and personal with the asteroid. It was then that NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) first learned YE5 was a binary asteroid, making it the fourth equal-mass binary near-Earth asteroid ever detected. NASA released the rare footage of the phenomenon on Thursday.
Artist's concept of what binary asteroid 2017 YE5 might look like. The two objects showed striking differences in radar reflectivity, which could indicate that they have different surface properties.
To collect images of the binary asteroid, NASA scientists at the GSSR teamed up with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and researchers at the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) in West Virginia. These two observatories were able to create a bi-static radar configuration in which Arecibo transmits the radar signal and Green Bank receives the return signal.
Initially, these observations revealed two distinct lobes that appeared to be joined. It wasn’t until a later rotation that scientists could identify a gap between them. By June 26, both Goldstone and Arecibo had independently confirmed that YE5 does consist of two separate objects that revolve around each other every 20 to 24 hours.
Scientists estimate that among near-Earth asteroids larger than 650 feet, about 15 percent are binaries with one larger object and a much smaller satellite. However, equal-mass binaries like YE5 are much rarer, as this is only the fourth scientists have been able to document. It might be awhile before NASA can collect more details on YE5’s physical attributes, seeing as it won’t come within that close proximity to Earth again for another 170 years.
Footage from this brief encounter with YE5 is not only rare but important for scientists to better understand binary systems and their formations. In the short span of time that YE5 came within 3.7 million miles of Earth, NASA was able to collect radar and optical observations to estimate both densities in the double asteroid, giving scientists clues to its internal structure and earliest formation. YE5’s binary nature was more than a surprise to scientists, but a game changer for how scientists will investigate double asteroids.
Image copyrightBBC / THOMAS SCHEIDLImage captionRon Mallett built a device that illustrates principles he believes could be used to build a time machine
Travelling in time might sound like a flight of fancy, but some physicists think it might really be possible. BBC Horizon looked at some of the most promising ideas for turning this staple of science fiction into reality.
Ron Mallett has a dream: He wants to travel in time.
This isn't mere fantasy - Mallett is a respected professor of physics.
"I think of myself as being an ordinary person with a passion, and my passion is the possibility of time travel," he says.
Prof Mallett has wanted to build a time machine for most of his life. His passion, he explains, can be traced to a tragic event early in his life.
Ron's father, a heavy smoker, died of a heart attack at the age of 33 - when Prof Mallett was just 10 years of age. Ron was devastated and withdrew into his books.
Image captionRod Taylor starred in the 1960s adaptation of HG Wells' classic novel, The Time Machine
"The cover caught my attention, but it was when I read the inside, and it said: 'Scientific people know very well that time is just a kind of space and that we can move forward and backwards in time, just as we can… in space'.
"When I read that I said: 'This is wonderful!'."
Prof Mallett explains: "If I could build a time machine, then I could go back into the past and see my father again and maybe save his life and change everything.
Image captionProf Mallett's father Boyd inspired his love of science and reading
Time travel may sound far-fetched, but scientists are already exploring several mysteries of nature that could one day see Ron's dream fulfilled.
Albert Einstein thought the three dimensions of space were linked to time - which serves as a fourth dimension. He called this system space-time, and it's the model of the Universe that we use today.
But Einstein also thought it was possible to fold space-time, creating a shortcut between two distant locations. This phenomenon is called a wormhole, and it can be visualised as a tunnel with two openings, each emerging at different points in space-time.
Wormholes might exist naturally in the cosmos; indeed, scientists in Russia are trying to use radio telescopes to detect them. But using wormholes for time travel won't be straightforward.
Image copyrightALAMYImage captionArtwork: A wormhole can be thought of as a kind of tunnel creating a shortcut between separate points in space-time
The nearest ones could be many light-years away. And even if you could get to them and then survive the journey through them, there's no guarantee where you'd end up.
But some physicists have speculated that we might be able to conjure up bespoke wormholes at some point in the future - though we currently have no idea how.
Physics also predicts that wormholes would have a habit of collapsing, crushing whatever's inside them. If a time machine is ever to exploit them, we'd have to find a way to stop this inconvenient feature.
The mysterious phenomenon of dark energy might provide a solution. In the 1990s, astronomers found that the expansion of the Universe was speeding up, rather than slowing down as might have been expected.
"Something out there is having an 'anti-gravity' effect - it's pushing rather than pulling. We don't know what that is, but it makes up most of the Universe. We call it dark energy," says Prof Tamara Davis, a cosmologist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Image captionProf Tamara Davis says wormholes might offer a way of travelling in time
A wormhole will only work for time travel if its "mouth" can be held open for long enough that it allows something to travel through it. That requires something called negative energy, which doesn't really exist in the everyday world.
But the dark energy that permeates the cosmos fits the bill - if we can figure out what it is, we might be able to prop open a wormhole long enough to go in one end and out the other.
"We don't know whether we are able to make a wormhole, whether that's technically within our capabilities… But who knows what a future human civilization is going to be able to do," says Prof Davis.
"Technology has advanced so rapidly that maybe space and time themselves are something that can come under our control."
Wormholes exist at the more speculative end of physics, offering one approach to travelling in time. But Ron Mallett has another.
He has drawn up plans for an actual time machine, and his concept was inspired by a book he read at age 12 about Albert Einstein's equations.
Prof Mallett has built a table-top device that illustrates principles he thinks could be used to build a real, working time machine. First, lasers are used to generate a circulating beam of light. The space inside this "ring laser" should become twisted, "like stirring a cup of coffee", the University of Connecticut professor explains.
Image captionProf Mallett's theoretical work suggests our normally linear timeline could be twisted into a loop
Because space and time are intimately connected, warping space should also warp time. Prof Mallett's theoretical work has shown that, given enough laser intensity in a small enough space, it should be possible to alter the normally linear timeline we all inhabit.
"If space is being twisted strongly enough, this linear timeline is going to be twisted into a loop. If time all of a sudden is twisted into a loop that allows us the possibility of travelling into the past," says Ron Mallett.
However, in order to make it work, the concept would require vast amounts of power and a way of shrinking everything to a microscopic scale.
But once we have a time machine, using it successfully will require a detailed understanding of time itself.
The generally accepted view is that the Universe is an unchanging "block" of space-time; this idea arises directly from Einstein's equations.
"What's important about the model is the idea that the past, present and future are all equally real. So you can think of everything that ever did exist, does exist or will exist as all somehow being out there in space-time," says Dr Kristie Miller, director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, Australia.
"The dinosaurs are all out there somewhere in the past doing dinosaur stuff, we're all here now and all of the future is out there somewhere in space-time too."
Image copyrightSPLImage captionThe "block" theory of space-time arises directly from Albert Einstein's equations
One way to visualise the block model is to think of other places in time as being like other places in space: "We are here in Sydney, but there are other people located in Singapore and London. Those places are perfectly real, it's just that we aren't at them," says Dr Miller.
This is good news for the budding time traveller, because it suggests there is nothing to stop us from swapping where we are now for some other place and time.
But, importantly, it also implies that the past, present and the future are already written, so that if we were to travel back in time, we wouldn't be able to alter it. To take an oft-quoted example, we shouldn't be able to kill someone's grandparent so that their descendant will cease to exist in the future.
The block model treats our everyday concept of time as an illusion, a way that humans rationalise reality. But Prof Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, disagrees. He believes that the passage of time is a real and fundamental phenomenon.
Image copyrightBBC / EUAN SMIT
Image captionProf Lee Smolin believes the concept of time passing may be a real one, rather than an illusion created by humans
"Time travel is probably impossible," he says. "If what's real is the present moment and the past is only real in the sense that there are memories and records of it in the present, and the future is still to exist… there's nowhere to go."
His colleague Prof Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute, thinks the weird world of quantum physics could be crucial to answering this question.
This area of physics emerges at very small scales, where the rules of classical physics we learnt about in our school textbooks break down. For example, in the quantum world, it might be possible for a particle to be in many places at once.
"I think it's clear to me that there is some probability of us going backwards in time," he says. "In quantum physics, nothing is impossible - particles travel through walls!"
Prof Turok explains that time travel remains a distant hope because "no one really has any plausible idea of how to go backwards in time right now". But he adds: "One should never say never, because some clever person will come along and tell you how to break the rule."
We kunnen een echte tijdmachine bouwen. Professor legt hier uit hoe tijdreizen werkt
We kunnen een echte tijdmachine bouwen. Professor legt hier uit hoe tijdreizen werkt
Sommige natuurkundigen zijn van mening dat tijdreizen echt mogelijk is. Eén van hen is Ron Mallett, een gerespecteerde professor.
Mallett heeft een droom: hij wil een tijdmachine bouwen. De natuurkundige van de Universiteit van Connecticut haalde zijn inspiratie uit het boek The Time Machine van HG Wells.
In dat boek staat: ‘Wetenschappers weten dat tijd een soort ruimte is en dat we vooruit en achteruit in de tijd kunnen gaan, net zoals in de ruimte’.
Wormgat
“Als ik een tijdmachine kon bouwen, zou ik naar het verleden gaan om mijn vader te zien en misschien zijn leven te redden en alles te veranderen,” zei Mallett tegen de BBC.
Albert Einstein dacht dat de drie ruimtelijke dimensies gelinkt waren aan de tijd, die fungeert als een vierde dimensie. Hij noemde dit systeem ruimtetijd.
Einstein dacht ook dat het mogelijk was om ruimtetijd te vouwen, waardoor je in een oogwenk van de ene plek in het heelal naar de andere zou kunnen reizen. Dit fenomeen wordt ook wel een wormgat genoemd.
Wormgaten komen mogelijk van nature voor in de kosmos. Russische wetenschappers speuren ernaar met behulp van radiotelescopen.
Tegelijkertijd
Sommige natuurkundigen stellen dat we in de toekomst zelf wormgaten kunnen creëren. Je kunt alleen tijdreizen via een wormgat als je de ‘mond’ lang genoeg open kunt houden. Daar heb je negatieve energie voor nodig, die niet zomaar voorhanden is.
Donkere energie in het heelal kan een wormgat theoretisch gezien lang genoeg openhouden om door de tijd te reizen.
Mallett heeft al plannen gemaakt voor een werkende tijdmachine, maar daar heeft hij wel grote hoeveelheden energie voor nodig.
Het universum wordt gezien als een ‘blok’ ruimtetijd, waarbij het verleden, heden en de toekomst tegelijkertijd bestaan.
Dinosaurussen
Dus alles wat ooit bestond, bestaat en zal bestaan, bevindt zich in de ruimtetijd, stelde dr. Kristie Miller van de Universiteit van Sydney.
“De dinosaurussen doen ergens hun ding, wij zijn nu hier en de toekomst bevindt zich ook ergens in de ruimtetijd,” zei ze.
Je kunt het volgens haar als volgt zien: jij bent hier in Nederland, maar er zijn ook mensen in Londen en Singapore. Die plekken bestaan ook, maar jij bent daar nu niet.
Er zullen de komende tijd weer veel mensen vertrekken richting Frankrijk en wie weet kunnen ook zij straks vreemde zaken waarnemen boven de Franse velden.
Terwijl Israël grote plannen heeft om volgend jaar een ruimtevaartuig op de maan te laten landen, duiken er beelden op van een grote vloot schepen die vanaf de maan vertrekt.
De Fransman Sebastien Monnet is op 9 juli 2018 samen met zijn vrouw op pad wanneer ze wat vreemde zaken waarnemen in de lucht.
De opname is gemaakt in de buurt van Lyon en voor zover wij dit kunnen beoordelen lijkt hij echt te zijn.
Monnet maakte eerst een grapje tegen zijn vrouw en zei: kijk, daar zijn een stel UFO’s, maar begon toch maar te filmen.
Later besefte hij dat het helemaal geen grap was, maar dat daar echt een drietal objecten in de lucht hingen. In het commentaar dat Monnet zelf onder de video heeft geplaatst zegt hij dat hij er op een gegeven moment tegen het einde van de video rechtsboven een Mirage te zien is van de Franse luchtmacht.
Van Frankrijk gaan we naar onze maan, waar ook de meest wonderlijke zaken gebeuren.
Wat te denken van een vloot ruimteschepen die de maan lijkt te verlaten?
Ze schijnen ook hitte af te geven, waardoor het dan solide objecten moeten zijn.
In het tweede deel van de onderstaande video zie je vier UFO’s die de maan naderen en daar daadwerkelijk lijken te landen.
Bekijk hier de beelden en oordeel zelf of het een vloot ruimteschepen is of iets anders.
Of dit soort opnames echt zijn of niet weet je natuurlijk nooit zeker, maar iets dat wel zeker is, is dat Israël nog dit jaar een missie naar de maan gaat ondernemen.
Het is zoals ze zelf zeggen om onderzoek te doen, maar zeker weten doe je (ook) dat nooit, want voordat je het weet hebben we een centrale bank op de maan.
Just recently, I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the matter of sex with robots. The article was prompted by a long-lost (or, I assumed it was long-lost) interview I did years ago with the late Mac Tonnies. Well, I have now found another interview I did with Tonnies, but on a completely different issue. This one – specifically the original audio version, which finally surfaces again – was undertaken the year before he died. The subject: Tonnies’ theories which led to the 2010 publication of his book, The Cryptoterrestrials. Tonnies suggested that alien abductions, the abilities of the assumed ETs to breathe our air, and their concerns about nuclear war were all due to one fact: the aliens were from right here. And not from faraway worlds.
Tonnies told me a great deal in the interview (portions of which he related to me, verbatim, down the phone direct from his original Word document, parts of which were taken from his blogging days): “After devouring countless books on the UFO controversy and the paranormal, I began to acknowledge that the extraterrestrial hypothesis suffered some tantalizing flaws. In short, the ‘aliens’ seemed more like surreal caricatures of ourselves than beings possessing the god-like technology one might plausibly expect from interstellar visitors. Like [UFO researcher] Jacques Vallee, I came to the realization that the extraterrestrial hypothesis isn’t strange enough to encompass the entirety of occupant cases. But if we’re dealing with humanoid beings that evolved here on earth, some of the problems vanish.”
Tonnies continued: “I envision the cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.”
During the course of his research into the Cryptoterrestrial theory, Tonnies spent a great deal of time addressing the matter of alien abductions. For those who aren’t fully aware of the nature of the phenomenon, a bit of background data is required. Regardless of whether people believe or don’t believe in the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon, there is no doubt that the vast majority of people have heard of it. It was, however, a phenomenon that was pretty much unknown until September 19, 1961. Yes, there were a few, earlier cases, but, for the most part, they were not publicized until after September 19. So, what, exactly is so significant about that particular date? The answer is that it was the date of a now-historic UFO event which occurred to a married couple from New Hampshire. They were Betty and Barney Hill.
Such was the phenomenal reaction to the story of Betty and Barney Hill, it prompted author John Fuller to write a book on the subject, titled The Interrupted Journey – an appropriate title, indeed – and which was published in 1966. Since then, the alien abduction phenomenon has grown and grown and spread like wildfire. We may never know for sure how many people believe they may have been kidnapped and experimented on by black-eyed, dwarfish beings from far away galaxies. After all, not everyone wants publicity – and particularly so not publicity of a very controversial type. In that sense, there may be as many silent abductees as there are publicly visible ones.
To demonstrate the sheer level of experiences on record, it is worth noting that after Whitley Strieber’s 1987 alien abduction-themed book, Communion, was published Strieber and his late wife, Anne received letters from the public in no less than six figures. Other books, such as Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time and Dr. John Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos, have added to the controversy and given it more publicity. But, what if there was a far more down to earth explanation for the alien abduction phenomenon? That question brings us back to Mac Tonnies:
“I regard the alleged ‘hybridization program’ with skepticism. How sure are we that these interlopers are extraterrestrial? It seems more sensible to assume that the so-called aliens are human, at least in some respects. Indeed, descriptions of intercourse with aliens fly in the face of exobiological thought. If the cryptoterrestrial population is genetically impoverished, as I assume it is, then it might rely on a harvest of human genes to augment its dwindling gene-pool. It would be more advantageous to have us believe we’re dealing with omnipotent extraterrestrials rather than a fallible sister species. The ET-UFO mythos may be due, in part, to a long-running and most successful disinformation campaign.”
Tonnies then turned his attention to the claims of Antonio Villas Boas, a Brazilian lawyer who claimed that, in 1957, as a young man and while living on his family’s farm at the time, he was abducted onto a UFO and had sex with a surprisingly hot-looking space-babe. Tonnies said of Villas-Boas’ story:
“After intercourse, the big-eyed succubus that seduced Antonio Villas Boas pointed skyward, implying a cosmic origin. But the mere fact that she appeared thoroughly female, and, moreover, attractive, belies an unearthly explanation. Further, one could argue that the clinical environment he encountered aboard the landed ‘spacecraft’ was deliberately engineered to reinforce his conviction that he was dealing with extraterrestrials. If cryptoterrestrials are using humans to improve their genetic stock, it stands to reason they’ve seen at least a few of our saucer movies. As consummate anthropologists, they likely know what we expect of ‘real’ extraterrestrials and can satisfy our preconceptions with a magician’s skill. Their desire for our continued survival, if only for the sake of our genetic material, may have played a substantial role in helping us to avoid extinction during the Cold War, when the UFO phenomenon evolved in our skies; much to the consternation of officialdom.
“Commentators regularly assume that all the Contactees [a term for those who claimed encounters with human-like aliens, chiefly in the 1950s] were lying or else delusional. But if we’re experiencing a staged reality, some of the beings encountered by the Contactees might have been real and the common messages of universal brotherhood could have been a sincere attempt to curb our destructive tendencies. The extraterrestrial guise would have served as a prudent disguise, neatly misdirecting our attention and leading us to ask the wrong questions; which we’re still asking with no substantial results.”
Tonnies told me, when word got out that he was working on his book, The Cryptoterrestrials: “The cryptoterrestrial theory has met with mixed reactions. Some seem to think that I’m onto something. Most UFO researchers are, at best, extremely skeptical. Others think I’m parroting John Keel’s ‘superspectrum’ [Keel was the author of the acclaimed 1975 book, The Mothman Prophecies], a variation on the ‘parallel worlds’ theme that in turn shares memes with Jacques Vallee’s ‘multiverse.’ Both ideas suggest that we somehow occupy dimensional space with our ‘alien’ visitors, doing away with the need for extraterrestrial spacecraft while helping explain the sense of absurdity that accompanies many UFO and occupant sightings. Keel and Vallee have both ventured essentially ‘occult’ ideas in cosmological terms; both the ‘superspectrum’ and the ‘multiverse’ require a revision of our understanding of the way reality itself works. But the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is grounded in a more familiar context.”
He explained: “I’m not suggesting unseen dimensions or the need for ufonauts to ‘downshift’ to our level of consciousness. Rather, I’m asking if it’s feasible that the alleged aliens that occupy historical and contemporary mythology are flesh-and-blood human-like creatures that live right here on Earth. Not another version of Earth in some parallel Cosmos, but on Earth. While I can’t automatically exclude the UFO phenomenon’s ‘paranormal’ aspects, I can attempt to explain them in technological terms. For example, I see no damning theoretical reason why ‘telepathy’ and ‘dematerialization’ can’t ultimately be explained by appealing to cybernetics, nano-technology and other fields generally excluded from ufological discourse.”
Finally, there was this from Tonnies: “The cryptoterrestrial hypothesis manages to alienate champions of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and those who support a more esoteric, ‘inter-dimensional’ explanation. It offers no clear-cut reconciliation. It does, however, wield explanatory potential lacking in both camps.”
Personally, I thought that Tonnies’ theory was well-argued (he admitted, however, that it was just his”meditation on” the scenario). But, the idea of some kind of ancient race hiding from us, living deep underground, and passing themselves off as ETs, stretches matters to the absolute extreme. Could it really be??? I say “No.”
As vast and empty as it is, the universe is actually full of radio signals. Not necessarily the ones we tend to think of when we hear the word “radio,” but radio waves nonetheless. Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation similar to light or X-rays, but just with a much longer wavelength. Radio waves can be generated from a variety of naturally occurring sourcesout in space, making them one more way for us to understand our mysterious universe.
Still, these deep space radio waves offer a fascinating glimpse into our solar system and beyond. Just this week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a series of audio recordings generated from radio waves beaming back and forth between Saturn and its moon Enceladus, a prime candidate for possible life in our solar system. The audio recordings are quite eerie and somewhat unsettling, sounding like something out of a David Lynch film soundtrack or like a slowed-down Brian Eno album.
Recordings of these radio waves were taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
In reality, the audio file was actually extremely sped up from 16 minutes to 28.5 seconds as the wavelengths of these radio waves are quite long. They’re not audible from anywhere in the airless vacuum of space nor from either Enceladus or Saturn; they have to be converted into audio by scientists the same way a radio receiver converts radio waves into Katy Perry here on Earth.
The University of Iowa’s Ali Sulaiman was one of the researchers who published a study of these radio waves. According to a JPL press release, Sulaiman says these radio waves are among the first known radio “duets” between a planet and one of its moons:
Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn, and we know it is a continuous source of energy. Now we find that Saturn responds by launching signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of miles away
Naturally occurring intergalactic radio waves previously made headlines throughout 2017 as several deep space sources were observed to send out powerful rapid fire bursts, leading to a flurry of speculation that these bursts might be an attempt at communication on behalf of an intelligent alien race.
Discovering alien communications via radio is a common theme of science fiction.
However, further observations revealed these fast radio bursts are likely caused by an exotic type of neutron star with an “extreme magneto-ionic environment” or some other astronomical gobbledygook.
Drone Caught A Fastwalker Speeding Over Trollstigen Norway
Drone Caught A Fastwalker Speeding Over Trollstigen Norway
On July 1, 2018 a drone accidentally recorded a UFO or more likely a fastwalker moving at an incredible speed over Trollstigen, Norway.
“Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.
Usually these objects are observed in space and it is assumed that these objects only move in space but it is quite possible that fastwalkers also move in our atmosphere.
The Norway footage shows the possible fastwalker, which has the same resemblance to a fastwalker in space and it also moves at such an incredible speed that is not perceptible to the naked eye, in normal speed and in extra slow motion speed.
I added color to make it easier to see, because psychology says black and white photos often confuse the mind on first glance. I found this in the Mars Global Surveyor MOC images. This particular image seems to depict many trees on the Mars surface. These trees are similar to what you see when using Google Earth and looking over a forest, but this is Mars and it should be impossible, but here it is, right in front of us and with the link to the official NASA site as proof that it exists. Obviously there are large bushy trees on Mars. There is no geological formation that could explain these features. These are living, growing organisms on the surface of Mars. Now why would NASA want to hide trees? Because its a form of life and where there are trees, there are animals and insects. Thus, NASA finds this information to be athreat to national security, because other countries would race to get to Mars if they knew it was more habitable than once thought. NASA does not want competition to get to other plants. Did you hear NASA criticising Elon Musks SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket last week? They did saying it was just too small to be useful, but it didn't seem to discourage Elon Musk at all. Scott C. Waring
NOTE PETER2011:
I have decided to publish this article on my blog. I don't know if it's true or fake news, but as a forum ii try to give the most complete information as possoble. Judge yourself
Closest Ever To the Actual UFO As We Know It Caught On Video
Closest Ever To the Actual UFO As We Know It Caught On Video
UFO enthusiasts online claim that a video showing a glowing orb shooting across the Bolivia sky is the closest actual UFO they have seen.
The video starts with a sight of a small ball over the clouds as it seems to move away from the Earth. However, seconds into the footage, the bright orb apparently explodes, making a tail of super bright light as it somewhat falls to the surface.
Many viewers have praised the cameraman for uploading the video, calling it the closest thing to an actual UFO.
Others believe the video shows some sort of rocket but also does not.
Several others cannot decide if it is alien or not unless extraterrestrials use a field that requires an exhaust.
Conspiracy theorists have been uploading strange photos and videos that allegedly support their beliefs in the existence of intelligent alien beings.
But for some enthusiasts, nothing comes closest to the latest video when it comes to the level of evidence.
They say that the unidentified flying object in the video is the closest ever to the actual UFO.
WINSTON CHURCHILL'S X-FILES: Wartime PM ordered UFO PROBE but 'covered up results'
WINSTON CHURCHILL'S X-FILES: Wartime PM ordered UFO PROBE but 'covered up results'
WINSTON Churchill ordered a special team to investigate a strange rise in flying saucer sightings....but the results of the inquiry were covered up, claim conspiracy theorists.
Declassified documents have revealed the wartime leader built a special Whitehall team, known as the Flying Saucer Working Party, to look into a strange increase in UFO sightings.
An official report said the numerous sightings had earthly explanations, including the cause of strange objects over US capital Washington DC which were picked up by several military radar.
But, conspiracy theorists claim the report involved the cover up of a sighting in the UK by RAF staff.
The theory is fueled by an alleged deathbed confession by Churchill’s personal bodyguard who spoke of these bizarre events which involved two RAF pilots reporting encounters with mysterious aircraft, known as “foo fighters”, as WWII drew to an end.
Foo fighters was the term used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe UFOs and mysterious aerial phenomena such as balls of fire that followed fighter aircraft during battles in the skies over Europe and the Pacific.
Military chiefs assumed the foo fighters were really secret German weapons sightings, but they are said to have continued after the end of the war and even into modern times, causing many to dispute this.
So what triggered Churchill's involvement?
In July 1952, US Air Force fighter jets had to be scrambled on two consecutive weekends after radar detected several unidentified objects flying in a restricted zone over the White House – causing public panic.
Although in the US, Churchill wanted to know more and about any implications for the UK.
GETTY
Churchill ordered a UFO inquiry, but covered up some of the results, it is claimed.
On July 28, 1952, Churchill sent his Secretary of State for Air, Lord Cherwell, a memo, requesting investigations into what happened in the US and the wider issue.
The note, now called the “Churchill Memorandum,” the then PM wrote: "What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to?
“What can it mean? What is the truth?
“Let me have a report at your convenience."
Lord Cherwell launched the Flying Saucer Working Party to find answers.
The top secret group had actually been set up two years earlier to look into home grown UFO sightings.
NATIONALARCHIVE
The memo when Churchill asked for the UFO inquiry.
GETTY
Churchill allegedly had one of his famous outbursts over the need for secrecy
This should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the church.
Winston Churchill
It was unable to completely rule out “an aircraft of extraterrestrial origin, developed by beings unknown to us on lines more advanced than anything we have thought of”.
However, it explained it was more likely the sightings were down to normal aircraft, balloons, birds or other natural phenomena, optical illusions, deliberate hoaxes – or “psychological delusions”.
But years later, in 1999, Churchill's involvement in the great UFO debate resurfaced.
The grandson of a retired RAF officer wrote to the MoD, inquiring about an incident in which Churchill allegedly banned the reporting of a UFO encounter off the east coast of England.
The RAF officer – who was said to be Churchill’s personal bodyguard – had allegedly confessed on his deathbed that an RAF reconnaissance plane was returning from a mission over occupied Europe when it was shadowed by a “metallic UFO” off Cumbria.
It was claimed the crew took pictures of the object – which was said to “hover noiselessly” by the plane.
At the time, when the mysterious encounter was brought to Churchill's attention, he ordered that details remain classified for at least 50 years – and could only be released EVER following a review by a future PM.
NATIONALARCHIVE
A British Government report into flying saucer sightings.
Churchill was allegedly terrified that news of the possibility of aliens could destroy faith in God and cause unrest and mass panic.
The British bulldog is alleged to have shouted: "This should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic among the general population and destroy one's belief in the church.”
Conspiracy theorists claim the establishment must have since hidden or destroyed all records of the incident.
There is no record of the event, or Churchill's orders, and the MoD says all UFO files from before 1967 have been destroyed.
Jason Chapman, who has written several books on the Churchill Memorandum, said: “The MoD has demonstrated in the past that it is capable of covering up a great many incidents.
“I believe it is possible that a former high ranking military official would have knowledge of UFOs.”
The 46-year-old, who works for British defence contractor BAE Systems, said: “Someone, somewhere knows something.
“It’s definitely not our world leaders – such information is way above the pay grade of the Prime Minister.
“Perhaps sat at the back of the House of Lords there’s a retired general, a relic left over from the Cold War, who has information which could prove there’s a cover-up.”
United Kingdom X-Files | W. Churchill UFO Cover-Up | Calvine UFO FIles | Declassified UFO Documents
Shocking: Secret files reveal British spies spent years trying to catch UFO to build superweapons
Shocking: Secret files reveal British spies spent years trying to catch UFO to build superweapons
Declassified files reveal Govt was concerned Soviet Union of China had a UFO and were using its secret to develop super-fast warplanes.
After all these years, a report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages set to be released after being declassified.
A secret dossier has now emerged to reveal that British spies spent half a century to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons.
Declassified files reveal the Government was concerned that the Soviet Union of China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secret to develop super-fast warplanes.
The cache of documents reveal between 1947 to 1997, intelligence services ran two UFO desks - one was a public-facing desk where people could phone in sightings. The real work was carried out in the background by spies set to investigate.
A secret dossier reveals British spies spent half a century trying to catch a UFO so they could use its alien technology to build superweapons
(stock image)
The UFO desks ran until 1997 by which time word had come from Whitehall that security services 'investigating 'X files stuff such as alien abductions' had become a diversion from their main duties.
A review was ordered to confirm the desk should be shut down, but also to determine whether anything had been learned over the years which could be useful to military.
After all these years, a report called UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in the UK Air Defence Region is part of three files running to more than 1,000 pages set to be released after being declassified.
They were held back from the UFO records earmarked for transfer to the National Archives as part of the Open Government project from 2008 to 2013.
But earlier this year, a complete set of redacted copies was sent to Dr Clarke ahead of their release to the National Archives, which is imminent.
The documents reveal the RAF expressed great interest in finding an UFO to help them come up with an innovative way of beating enemies during the Cold War.
Declassified files reveal the Government feared the Soviet Union or China had impounded a UFO and were harvesting its secrets to develop super-fast warplanes
(stock image)
Another air force commander feared the enemy may have already seized a UFO, writing: 'Monitor all reports in case in the future the hitherto unknown/not understood underlying phenomena is being exploited by another nation.
'An actual - or potential enemy - could develop a flying device with the characteristics that these phenomena seem to have.'
Spies were given given tips on what to look out for when identifying foreign objects. The unnamed commander wrote particular attention should be paid to any aircraft behaving 'like a UFO'.
The Truth is out There: We Look to the Skies with UFO Expert James T. Abbott
The Truth is out There: We Look to the Skies with UFO Expert James T. Abbott
By The MALESTROM
Throughout the known history of the world, there have been accounts of strange sightings and happenings in our skies. From the ancient Indian Vedic texts that describe flying crafts to phantom ships seen in the air in Roman times and strange phenomenon observed over Basel, Switzerland in the 16th century. In more recent memory UFO sightings, often along with footage of varying quality, come to the fore in their thousands each year. Many of these accounts are rubbished and dismissed, usually without good explanation, however, when such accounts come from police officers or pilots, they inevitably carry more weight and as such are harder to ignore.
The study of these unidentified flying objects has become a fascination for many, one man, James T. Abbott, has spent decades researching the phenomenon. In his book The Outsider’s Guide to UFOs he looks at 40 of the most compelling cases from over the past 70 years. We spoke to him recently to talk about the changing attitude to the subject we’re seeing from governments, his hopes for pushing the boundaries of scientific research to get more answers and just what makes a credible UFO case.
The MALESTROM: Let’s start with your definition of the term UFO…
James Abbott: It’s quite simple really, a UFO is an unidentified flying object, that’s all we know about them. We don’t know what they are, we don’t know where they come from or whether they’re an atmospheric phenomenon or whatever, so we start from pretty well zero in relation.
TM: What sparked your interest in UFOs?
JA: I think it was Donald Keyhoe’s book The Flying Saucers Are Real, and then I went on to read Edward Ruppelt’s great book on unidentified flying objects and it expanded from there. It started as a hobby and then it got to the stage recently four or five years ago when I was getting a bit fed up of all the bickering that was going on in the general environment of UFOs, the ‘I saw something, no you didn’t, yes I did’ sort of thing. I think the more you look into it the more you find that it is a serious phenomenon, it’s not something that can be explained easily and there are some fairly compelling pieces of circumstantial evidence around the subject and it all builds up into what I would call an ‘a priori case’ for some deeper research to be done. Governments have tried of course, but they’ve tended to look at it from a defence point of view only.
TM: How are official attitudes to the subject changing?
JA: I think it’s very much undercover at the moment or under the surface, lets put it that way. There is the evidence that there is a slight change in official approaches to the subject, particularly in America of course with the Department of Defence releasing those videos and accounts from the US Navy fighters. That I think is a bit of an earthquake in the whole phenomenon because the Americans have generally not revealed anything at all of what’s being kept in secret vaults inside the Pentagon and the release of that video for me is quite telling. It says the United States government doesn’t know what these things are, haven’t got a clue and they’re saying effectively ‘look, here’s some evidence, see what you all think about it’ to see if someone can come up with some reason.
TM: What do you make of that UFO footage?
JA: I think it’s incredible footage, not only is the footage incredible but the statement by the pilot David Fravor is stunning, he effectively said he’d have like to have flown one of those things. If it was just electronic you might think it’s something the electronics were picking up and shouldn’t have done, but then we’re talking about state of the art kit here, these are F-18 fighter planes, so if they were being fooled by clouds or electronic discharges from the atmosphere then I think the Americans would have been a bit embarrassed and not released the footage.
TM: The concept of UFOs isn’t still generally excepted though is it?
JA: That’s right and the media don’t help of course, for understandable reasons, they have to protect themselves. It was interesting when USA Today ran the story on the US Navy sightings they had a picture of a little green man on the page with a caption by it reading ‘was this the pilot?’ So they always protect themselves by keeping their tongues very firmly in their cheeks. I think that’s fair enough, it’s not an easy subject to grapple with, it’s really pushing the boundaries of belief where you think there’s maybe something behind it that’s not of this planet. I suspect there are parts which are of this planet, and maybe parts that aren’t.
TM: It’s seriously naive for us to think that things outside of our field of perception don’t exist isn’t it?
JA: Oh, it’s incredibly naive. I don’t think a lot of people realise quite how far physics is uncovering an extremely weird universe we never believed would be possible and it’s just not logical, it’s not rational, we’re looking at Quantum physics where particles can be in two places at once, where particles can be entangled over incredible distances and communicate faster than the speed of light. Scientific American ran an article recently in which they were talking about the probability of black holes being two dimensional and about the universe expanding forever, all of these things are pushing science closer to the weirdness that is the UFO phenomenon.
TM: In your book, you look extensively at accounts, some very early, but there are even earlier ones back to the Indian Vedic texts and later, accounts of UFOs aren’t new are they?
JA: No it’s not new at all. The only problem with the stuff that’s pre late 19th century is there are very few ways we can sensibly interrogate it. We just have to take it as a possibility, as skeptics quite rightly say it could be anything. My view is we should be looking at modern stuff, even with the stuff over the last 70 years, there’s no way of actually getting at the truth of whatever might have happened, or what might not have happened. So Rendlesham 1980, what actually happened? Was there a landing? Was there something that landed in the woods that was seen and touched and walked around? Or was it somebody’s practical joke?
Photograph of Suffolk Police inspecting the supposed landing site in Rendlesham Forest
All of these things are not susceptible of proper scientific inquiry and what I think we need to do is have a primary scientific inquiry which starts from the point of view of saying there is an anomaly, there is a priority case for more research and therefore lets set something up. Bearing in mind of course that a lot of this stuff is going to be beyond current science, way beyond it. Even the atmospheric stuff, ten years ago we weren’t even close to understanding what upward striking lightning was, or blue jets, or sprites. Well, now science is taking those as real and saying these things can happen and they’re a danger to future hypersonic aircraft and all the rest of it. The bottom line is we simply have masses of stuff out there that we don’t understand and our current science can’t tell us a lot about it. We’re trying to get primary data but we need to push the boundaries of science as well.
TM: Just how much credible evidence do we have of these unexplained objects?
JA: It depends on your definition of credibility. If you take the police approach to this and you say I’m a policeman and somebody has just robbed a store, you’ve got one witness and the witness says the guy was seven foot tall with an athletic build with blonde hair. Well, the police might or might not believe one witness, but if twenty other witnesses come forward and say yes that’s exactly what he was like, a very weird bloke, and he did this and he did that, then the policeman starts to think right there’s something to that.
I think credibility depends on what you’re looking at and how you assess the evidence, so that’s why in the book I’ve taken 40 of what I consider to be the most credible cases, the ones that were cited by police officers, pilots and so on, that’s not to say that an 18-year-old waiter from the local hotel that has wandered outside one night and has seen a glowing globe in the sky doing weird things, that’s not to say he’s wrong, he might well be right, but I do think we should be starting with people who are trained observers who have seen things are reporting them in a dispassionate way.
Airline pilots do, military pilots tend to do. I mean going back to Farnborough in 1952 you’ve got Hubbard the test pilot who saw an object in the sky and got laughed out of town, he went on to be a very eminent guy but he never withdrew that claim, he said yeah that’s what I saw, and it was doing weird things. It was floating in the sky like a sycamore leaf he said. When guys like that are seeing things I believe that they’re credible.
TM: Do you think some of these UFOs are military testing?
JA: I’m absolutely certain that at some time over the last 70 years people have seen advanced aircraft of some sort and have got excited thinking they were looking at interplanetary crafts. It’s not that that’s impossible, it’s simply that in every single case that we look at that is not capable of being explained in any other way, logic seems to imply that all of them will have been some advanced aircraft. And the things that they are seen doing are not the type of things Earthbound aircraft can do. It’s exactly what Commander Fravor was saying about that US Navy sighting, it was doing things no Earthbound craft could possibly do, descending from 80,000 feet to 50 foot above the water in seconds and stopped dead, then went away just as quickly. Those sort of accounts from people who are used to seeing things in the sky also backed up by instrumentation and the USS Princeton’s own radars, they’re the ones that really make you think. We can’t keep ignoring all these things just because we laugh at little green men.
TM: Why do people see so many different shapes? Although there are many of the same reoccurring shapes like cylinders and orbs…
JA: That’s exactly the way people have seen things for at least 100 years. And each generation has described them in terms they understand best. In the late 19th century it was airships and then coming into WWII we had orbs and the foo fighters and so on, then after the war people saw discs in the sky, Kenneth Arnold spotted those things flying very strangely. Again if Kenneth Arnold was fooling everybody and wanted to make a story seem real about interplanetary spaceships why tell a story about things bouncing along like pebbles on a pond? The circumstantial evidence itself is pretty weak, but when you link all these things together, if you were a police officer you’d say, ‘yes it could well have been’.
Kenneth Arnold with a drawing of his UFO sighting
TM: You mentioned the word dispassionate earlier, many of these accounts are simply by people doing their civic duty and informing the authorities in a measured manner, like the case of Henry White in Clapham (1914)…
JA: Precisely. He saw something, they were in the middle of a very nasty war and he reported it. It could well have been ball lightning or whatever else the skeptics claim, the problem is with all of these explanations you have to be able to scientifically show how it exists for minutes at a time and so far they’ve been able to show ball lightning might exist and that it can exist for seconds, but nothing more than that.
Ball lightning
TM: I suppose the big problem with the view from the scientists perspective is they just don’t believe in the possibility of other life out there, again slightly nieve…
JA: It’s incredibly naive. For scientists to discount something just because it doesn’t fit into our current scientific paradigm is stupidity, not just naivety, that’s not what they’re supposed to do, scientists are supposed to say, ‘look here’s something we don’t understand, let’s try and understand it.’ If that means that whatever they’re trying to understand gets explained in natural terms as new meteorological or physical phenomenon then that’s fine by me, I’ve got no problem with that. If you can explain all these sightings in natural terms then that’s great, we can all go away and do our own day job, but at the end of the day, I think it’s incumbent on scientists to put their money where their mouths are.
They make a big deal about being dispassionate, about being objective, not being swayed by subjective arguments, but here is a phenomenon that I can show has been going on at least 70 years and with massive numbers of observations every year, more than 2 million since the turn of this century. And thousands of observations each year probably will be inexplicable in scientific terms and they turn their backs on it saying it can’t possibly exist. That’s the rocks from the sky issue.
TM: Which of your accounts of sightings have you found most interesting?
JA: I love them all, they’re all very compelling but I think the Lonnie Zamora one is particularly interesting because it also has a pathos and a tragedy to it in the sense that he was just an ordinary copper who was driving a car one day and saw a flash and as was his duty he went to investigate. What he saw was something that not only shook him to the core but made him a laughing stock for probably the rest of his life. The poor bloke was vilified by just about everybody apart from his very close friends. Now I find the Lonnie Lamora one very compelling, a lot is said by the reaction of people afterward. If they go around giving studio interviews at TV stations getting paid I tend not to be too convinced. But if they do not make money out of it, like the Trents and Charles Holt of the Rendlesham case their attitude tells a lot. They’re hurt, bemused, baffled and they say ‘yes I saw it, but please tell me what it was, if it wasn’t something incredibly weird then please tell me what it was.’ To be honest, that’s what scientists should be doing, they should be able to turn round and say ‘yes we understand that, it’s this.’ Or ‘no we don’t understand and we’re going to keep investigating.’ That to me is a respectful and proper way to do science.
Farmer Paul Trent’s famous UFO photo from over McMinnville, Oregon
TM: Have any recent cases caught your eye?
JA: The best one is the American Airlines one over Arizona recently where once again, and this is the point, sometimes airline pilots see things in the sky, but when other airline pilots in different planes see the same thing that’s when you start to sit up and notice. This case is particularly compelling on that basis. There are huge numbers of things, there was a lad in Exmouth last year who took a video of what appeared to be a triangular formation of lights over the city. He was a bus driver and he saw this object or thing in the sky, there’s a video online which is incredible really as you get a sense of his shock and surprise and he’s really annoyed at himself for not having a proper camera with him, he’s only got his cell phone. And the footage is convincing, it looks like what he said was happening and there were other witnesses that said the same thing.
Those sorts of sightings where people are seeing things and then being completely baffled by the whole thing, just as you’ve got hundreds of reports on UFO sights all over the world of people saying ‘I saw this, I don’t know what it was, please explain it to me’, they’re not talking about seeing little green men sticking their heads out of the window or being abducted by aliens, it’s ordinary people going about their everyday lives and they see things and then report them, to me that’s convincing, that’s a witness. They may be right, they may be wrong in that they’re seeing a natural thing like a planet, a star or so on but it really is incumbent on us to say these things are the following, this explains all of them.
And the fact that governments keep returning to this subject and keep setting up investigations like Condign back in the late 1990s in Britain, it means governments keep thinking there must be something to it, but what is it? And they set their scientists on it and they come back and say they can’t explain it. The Condign report came up with all sorts of possible explanations for UFOs, but the key word is ‘could’, it’s always ‘could be’, there’s never any lasting proof and there’s never a sense that they’ve covered all the possible options.
TM: The problem is there’s still such a stigma around the subject. You defined the term UFO very clearly at the start of this interview, but the mention of the word conjures up in many that people who believe in such things are crazy…
JA: I think that’s two generations of ridicule and general disbelief of the subject. I get it exactly the same if I tell a friend I’m interested in UFOs, they say ‘what! How on earth did you get into that?’ I have a very good friend who lives in Northern Island who read the book and she came back to me and said she hadn’t realised there was so much to it, she still didn’t know what there were and still had her doubts, but it does open the doors a little bit and I hope that’s what this book will do.
TM: What did you come across when researching probably the most famous UFO incident, the one that took place in Roswell? Did you find much credibility in that? There’s that credibility word again.
JA: I think the word credibility is a very important one, it’s all we’ve got at the moment until we get decent scientific results and information. Are the witnesses credible? Is what happened credible? What happened was incredible, but that’s UFOs if you look at all the stories. With Roswell, it comes down to a simple question. Why was that press release issued by Blanchard? It seems beyond the realms of belief that a mere career Colonel, who went on to become a General would issue a press release about flying saucers, effectively saying a disc had been recovered and that it would settle all the questions about what people had seen in the sky recently. That was a well-crafted press release, it mentioned discs six times. It did not mention balloons, it did not mention fragments of balloons or weather, it simply said a disc had been recovered. To me, that bit alone destroys virtually the whole of the Roswell story, because it means deliberately they set that hare running that this disc had been recovered, it was such a strange thing to do and set the whole world talking.
Roswell Daily Record newspaper detailing the flying saucer story
Normally if something actually happened and they recovered parts of what they thought to be an alien spaceship that would have gone straight undercover with no question about putting out press releases and if they did it would have read ‘no need to worry everybody, what crashed on that farm was actually a weather balloon, we have all the fragments now, you can all go back to sleep.’ That would have been the logical thing to do. For me, I think it was likely something else that they wanted to cover up with a colourful story that would take all the attention from the real thing. It could have just been a Mogul balloon that crashed, they were highly secretive at the time, spying on the Russians, and they may have just tried to deflect that with the flying saucers. I do believe Roswell was not about aliens, but probably more to do with the US government and what they were doing at the time.
TM: Going back finally to science, do you think we’ll ever see that sea change where the narrow perception field is widened and scientists accept that some of these things might be otherworldly?
JA: I think it’s already happening. If there is going to be a sea change I think it’ll be a gradual one that will take place over 30 to 50 years because the whole subject is so complex I don’t think anyone is going to go into a laboratory and suddenly find an answer to the whole thing. You’ve got organisations working all around the world but they’re badly underfunded and the process as it is is extremely slow. I think it’s important to note the Department of Defense release of these videos because it indicates they are willing to share at least some very important data that looks credible, so I suppose that represents a bit of a sea change, maybe we’ve stopped being worried that these things are secret Soviet weapons and the governments have convinced themselves that even if they are from a distant galaxy they’re no threat to us because they haven’t done anything to us ever. So if those to things are true that they’re not secret weapons and not a threat maybe we should start sharing information and look at them as a scientific anomaly and find out what they are.
The basic fact is we might learn a lot while doing so, it might expand our science. Luis Elizondo of the To the Stars Academy came to the conclusion that these things were real and were based on science we simply didn’t understand. He was talking about time warps, quantum physics drives, all kinds of things. I think even the scientists and advanced engineers are struggling at the boundaries of what they know and until we know more about the quantum world and the universe itself and how it operates, what dark matter is and how it interacts with gravity, if we can start to build our own knowledge then perhaps we’ll see possible ways in which these anomalies could be caused, they could be perfectly natural or they could be visitors from another galaxy.
Pluto and Charon Shine in Most Detailed Topographical Maps Ever
Pluto and Charon Shine in Most Detailed Topographical Maps Ever
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An image of the Tenzing Montes peaks on Pluto created with New Horizons data and released on July 10, 2018. The mountains range from about 1.8 miles to 3.7 miles (3 to 6 kilometers) above the dwarf planet's surface.
Credit: Paul Schenk/Lunar and Planetary Institute
New research showcasing the dramatic topography of Pluto and its moon Charon should help scientists better guess what forces have shaped them.
The New Horizons spacecraft flew past the two bodies almost three years ago, but scientists are still exploring the wealth of data the mission produced. In the case of the new maps, that means stitching together images taken by a pair of cameras
"This was one of the most complex yet most exciting planetary mapping projects I've had the pleasure to be involved with," Paul Schenk, a planetary geologist at Universities Space Research Association's Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas, said in a statement. "Every time new images came down, something new would be revealed."
The mapping project shows off the dramatic topography of both bodies and offers more accurate measurements of some of their most stunning features.
For example, the research has confirmed that the Tenzing Montes are the highest peaks on Pluto, boasting heights up to 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) above the nearby surface. That's the equivalent of Alaska's Denali mountain here on Earth, according to the team. It's also high enough that the scientists are more confident than ever that Pluto's surface is made of water ice — methane ice, for example, wouldn't be strong enough to hold up features that large.
Elsewhere on Pluto, the team identified possible locations where volcanic activity has shaped the dwarf planet's surface as well as a deep gash running more than 1,800 miles (3,000 km) around it, which scientists think shows the dwarf planet somehow extensively fractured earlier in its life.
The map of Charon shows an even more dramatic range of features, with even higher peaks countered by an abyss deeper than the lowest point on Earth.
A view of the surface of Charon released on July 11, 2018, uses data from the New Horizons spacecraft to show mountains on the left and a smoothed volcanic plain on the right.
Credit: Lunar and Planetary Institute/Paul Schenk
Because the process took advantage of the sun illuminating the harsh terrain, scientists have only been able to piece together the surfaces of Pluto and Charon that New Horizons flew over during their daytime — about 78 percent of Pluto and 45 percent of Charon.
That means both bodies are still hiding some secrets for their next robotic visitors, according to New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.
"I can’t wait to see the other side of Pluto revealed in detail by a future mission to orbit the planet," Stern said in the statement.
The new work was detailed June 11 and July 3 in a pair of articles published in the journal Icarus.
Nearby Alien Planet May Be Capable of Supporting Life
Nearby Alien Planet May Be Capable of Supporting Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
This artist’s illustration shows the potentially temperate planet Ross 128b, with its red dwarf parent star in the background.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
One of the nearest exoplanets to Earth may be a decent abode for life.
Ross 128b — which lies just 11 light-years from our planet — is likely a rocky and temperate world, a new study suggests.
"Although Ross 128b is not Earth's twin, and there is still much we don’t know about its potential geologic activity, we were able to strengthen the argument that it's a temperate planet that could potentially have liquid water on its surface," lead author Diogo Souto, of the Observatório Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, said in a statement. [10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]
Ross 128b has excited and intrigued astrobiologists since its discovery last year. The planet appears to circle in the "habitable zone" of its host star — that just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface. (Ross 128b circles a small, dim red dwarf star, so the habitable zone is quite close in; the planet completes one orbit every 9.9 Earth days.)
Initial estimates also indicated that Ross 128b has a minimum mass just 1.35 times that of Earth and therefore stands a good chance of being rocky, just like our own planet.
The new study will not dampen that enthusiasm. The researchers analyzed Ross 128b's parent star, known as Ross 128, using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), a spectroscopic instrument installed on a telescope in New Mexico.
"The ability of APOGEE to measure near-infrared light, where Ross 128 is brightest, was key for this study," study co-author Johanna Teske, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement. "It allowed us to address some fundamental questions about Ross 128b's 'Earth-like-ness.'"
The APOGEE data revealed the abundances of certain key elements in Ross 128, including carbon, oxygen, magnesium and iron. Because stars and their orbiting planets coalesce from the same massive cloud of raw materials, this information revealed some key characteristics about Ross 128b as well.
For example, the stellar abundances, combined with Ross 128b's known minimum mass, suggest that the planet's radius is less than 1.7 times that of Earth. That's the rough threshold beyond which worlds have a significant gassy envelope — meaning that Ross 128b is probably rocky.
In addition, the red dwarf's observed iron-to-magnesium ratio indicates that Ross 128b's core is larger than that of Earth, the researchers said.
The team also determined that temperatures at or near the "surface" of the star are around 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 degrees Celsius). The researchers used this information, along with Ross 128b's radius and orbital distance, to figure out how much stellar energy the planet receives — and, therefore, how hot it's likely to be.
The result? Ross 128b probably has an "equilibrium temperature" of about 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees C). This shouldn't be taken as gospel, however; planets' temperatures depend greatly on the composition and thickness of their atmospheres, and the nature of Ross 128b's air is a complete mystery.
Watching a plane’s wings detach isn’t something you want to see in today’s air travel. But that just might be where airplanes are headed, according to one tech CEO.
French entrepreneur Maurice Ricci is the CEO of Akka Technologies, and he has a pretty unique vision for the future of airplanes. And it happens to have a lot in common with the future of trains.
He thinks combining the two modes of transportation — creating a plane that can travel on the ground via tracks / a train that can fly through the air — will improve the passenger experience. According to an interview with Bloomberg, he even got a chance to pitch his flying train concept to Boeing, one of the biggest names in air travel.
THE PLANE.
Akka calls the plane/train hybrid Link & Fly. Late last year, it released a digitally rendered video of the concept in action. With its wings attached, the craft doesn’t look all that different from the planes soaring in and out of today’s airports. The primary difference is that the wings connect to one another over the plane’s cylindrical body, rather than connecting to each side of the plane separately.
Once on the ground, the body of the flying train separates from those wings and the cockpit, dropping onto a platform positioned on tracks. It’s then free to ride the rails. According to the Bloomberg report, passengers would board and disembark the craft at train stations, so they wouldn’t have to find alternate ways to travel to and from airports.
THE PURPOSE.
Akka might not be a household name, but the company is growing — just this year, its stock increased by 23 percent. It’s also been dabbling in forward-thinking transportation tech for more than a decade now. It had a concept for an autonomous car back in 2008 — a time when the idea was just starting to really seem viable.
In March, it announced a partnership with Microsoft and ICONIQ MOTORS to design an car capable of Level 5 autonomy by 2020. A few months later, it acquired PDS Tech, a staffing agency that connects big-names in the aerospace industry with engineering and R&D talent. One of those big-names? Boeing.
You probably won’t be able to hop aboard one of Akka’s futuristic planes any time soon, though. According to the Bloomberg piece, the company “[isn’t] banking on convincing a plane maker to necessarily build the entire ‘Link & Fly’ concept,” though Ricci does believe bits and pieces of the design might find their way into commercial aircraft in the future.
So the purpose behind this flying train video and pitch, then, is probably to draw attention to the company. And in that, they appear to have been successful.
While most people in Britain struggle to deal with the summer heat, aerial archaeologists are loving it: the hot weather is revealing archaeological features which are usually hidden.
These crop marks indicate the location of an ancient settlement.
Image credits: Toby Driver/RCAHMW.
It’s not usually this hot in the UK. While no records were really broken, overall temperatures were unusually high, often with serious consequences for ecosystems. But the heat had another unexpected consequence: it is revealing archaeological features.
“I’ve not seen conditions like this since I took over the archaeological flying at the Royal Commission in 1997,” aerial investigator Toby Driver from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) told Wales Online.
“So much new archaeology is showing it is incredible.”
Britain is riddled with archaeological features. Continuously inhabited since pre-Roman times, the country can boast a trove of archaeological remains, which are now being brought to light without any digging. The remains of former castles, forts, farms, mansions, and more are becoming visible — some of them dating back to the Iron Age, while others, like WWII air shelters, are much more recent structures.
A prehistoric or Roman farm.
Image credits: Toby Driver/RCAHMW.
Many of these were previously known to researchers but some are entirely unknown.
The reason these structures are popping up has a lot to do with water in the soils. The difference is that archaeological soil (soil that contains archaeological remains) often has different physical characteristics than its surrounding areas. For instance, it can be more compact or contain iron particles, which make it a bit harder for plants to survive.
A similar thing can happen if the soil is rocky — due to foundations or walls being buried under it, for example. Under heat stress, plants above these areas are more likely to wither away. Conversely, ancient ditches or moats that later get filled in with fresher soil can make it easier for plants to survive. Either way, archaeological features often cause a contrast i soil properties which can have visible effects on vegetation.
This kind of event is not exactly rare, but it’s not very common either. If archaeologists want to make the most out of this opportunity, time is of the essence: the window might close soon, and there’s a good chance that the marks will only remain visible for a week or two (depending on the weather conditions).
What will likely happen after these new features have been noted down is a geophysical survey — a non-invasive measurement of the subsurface properties which produce an even clearer evidence of buried archaeological structures. After that, archaeologists may decide to start digging and bring them to light.
LINDA HOWE: The idea that there was one or more non-human groups inspiring us is the truth. Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings. But what if it were true? Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history? And if so, where did they come from? And just who were the visitors?
Roswell, New Mexico.
This sleepy town in America’s Southwest was once best known for its large military airbase. But that changed in 1947 when a local rancher reported that a spaceship crashed on his property.
Several weeks later, the U.S.Army issued a press release confirming the existence of an alien craft. The next day, the military changed its story and announced that what they had found was a weather balloon. These conflicting reports sent shock waves around the world, and the name “Roswell” became a pop culture code word that forever links extraterrestrial visitation with enduring mystery.
NICK POPE: Speculation about why the Roswell crash would be covered up is difficult to pin down. Some people talk about this in terms of information that would be shattering to our worldview.
STEVEN GREER: Almost everyone’s heard about the so-called Roswell event, and one of the real implications of disclosure is that some of our most cherished myths about the origins of the human race and our history and archaeology would fall apart.
GEORGE NOORY: Something happened at Roswell, New Mexico a long time ago. People want the truth. I think there’s something in the human being itself that is striving, that is hungry for this knowledge in order to answer questions about our own existence. Today, public opinion polls indicate more than half the world’s population believes aliens have either come here in the past or are coming here now. But what is it exactly that makes so many people believe?
JONATHAN YOUNG: I do think looking upward makes sense. The universe is large. There are things out there we do not understand. There is probably intelligent life somewhere.
ROBERT BAUVAL: People tend to forget that we’re on a planet that’s four and a half billion years old. The presence of our civilization in that vast scale of time I mean, if I click my finger, it wouldn’t even be fast enough to say this is the time of our civilization. And to think that we’re the only ones in this vast period of time, to me, is absurd.
SARA SEAGER: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has over 100 billion stars. And in our universe, we think there are more than 100 billion galaxies. So if every star had a planet with intelligent life, how many alien civilizations would we have?
ERICH VON DANIKEN: If you take us as the crown of creation, or the top of evolution, we look at our self as the greatest, the biggest. We say, how incredible, uh, unique we are in the whole universe. We forgot to learn modesty.
JENNIFER HELDMANN: Each step that we take makes us a little bit less special. We used to think that we were the center of the universe, as humans, and then we realized, “Oh, all right, well, that’s not true.” And But we’re at the center of the galaxy, and, like, well, all right, so we’re like two thirds of the way out in a spiral arm. And then, well, at least our sun, you know, with this No. The sun is actually in the middle, and the earth goes around it.
So earth isn’t even the center of that system, and So, the more that we learn, we sort of, you know It’s a very humbling science. When man first landed on the moon, our perspective on the universe changed forever.
Houston, uh, the Eagle has landed.
BUZZ ALDRIN: We aliens who happened to go down the ladder on July were certainly part of a magnificent race. I just don’t think people have a grasp for what energy it takes to go from one star to another. This historic event raised the question: if humans can successfully navigate in space and explore other worlds, why couldn’t beings from other parts of the universe have done the same? And might they have already come to Earth hundreds, or perhaps, thousands of years ago?
VON DANIKEN: I think human past is more fantastic than we all believe. I have come to the idea that maybe extraterrestrials were on this planet.
The settlement served as the religious and cultural capital of the Nazca people. But sometime around 500 AD, the Nazca mysteriously disappeared, leaving Cahuachi to fall into disarray. Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka came to Cahuachi to study the ancient Nazca civilization. During a dig, he unearthed some of the most surprising and shocking artifacts he had ever seen. They were skulls with enormous, elongated craniums. Where did they come from? How did they get there? And were they human?
CHILDRESS: In Peru, we find these weird, elongated skulls. And they’re bizarre-looking. I mean, and-and these people look like aliens.
ROBERT SCHOCH: One may say, okay, aliens. But another aspect that we have to consider is that skull and cranial deformation, forming elongated heads is a practice that’s known throughout much of the ancient world. In 1870, the process of skull deformation was well chronicled by a German botanist and explorer named Georg Schweinfurth. While exploring the African Congo, he came in contact with a tribe called the Mangbetu. They routinely performed a ritual of cranial binding that allowed them to physically alter the shape of human skulls.
CHILDRESS: They took infants’ skulls and compressed them and bound them. And they forced the cranium out and elongate it. And in many cases, they doubled the size.
Elongated skulls found in Peru
SCHOCH: And a big question is why was this being done? It may have been a way to distinguish the elite, perhaps, from the everyday people.
May have been a social stratification type of issue. Something that also appeals to me is, that may have been a way to express physically and maybe try to achieve physically greater levels of consciousness or higher levels of mental ability.
TSOUKALOS: In my opinion, they did this in order to mimic the gods. And those gods were physical beings because if they were just a figment of our ancestors’ imagination, I don’t think that’s a compelling enough reason to expose your children to such a ritual to achieve that type of look. And in my opinion, these people were misinterpreted flesh-and-blood space travelers.
SCHOCH: Some people have suggested aliens had elongated skulls, and apparently, ancient peoples are mimicking those skulls. The old saying is that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Although there have been many images that attempt to depict what aliens might actually look like, one in particular has come to dominate the public perception. It, too, features an elongated cranium, and is associated with an extraterrestrial race that many refer to as the grays.
POPE: In terms of entities, one very common description are the so-called grays– three and a half, four feet tall, essentially humanoid, but, uh, very spindly with disproportionately large heads and huge black almond-shaped eyes. But would someone in a primitive society really want to replicate this look and deform their skull? Some archeologists have a different perspective. They point to artistic self- expression as an explanation of these customs.
ROBERT R.CARGILL: There are all kinds of people that either worship the body or use the body as art, be it a tattoo or a piercing of some sort, or tribes that, that put things in their ears or on their lips to try to, to try to grow parts of their body. Some societies, we know, practiced binding parts of the body, feet, or heads and try to make certain shapes, and this was done for whatever reason. We know today that this isn’t usually the most healthy thing to do, but it doesn’t mean people don’t do it. People are always trying to change their body to make it look a certain way. Whatever the explanation may be for these rituals, they are not just found in Peru and the African Congo. Skull deformation is a global phenomenon.
CHILDRESS: What’s really strange is that this is found all over the world, and this is something that archaeologists cannot easily explain because, for people on remote islands, for people in South America or Malta or in Africa to suddenly, independently do this cranial deformation like this seems incredible. I mean, this is something that had to be learned, something that was taught to them.
SCHOCH: We seem to have basic similarities, as if there was one civilization or at least one type of culture that was influencing people around the world. I find it more and more difficult to believe what I was taught as an undergraduate– that all these different cultures just coincidentally came up with the same concepts independently of each other.
Is it possible that individual societies around the world were influenced by similar events? And were they imitating real beings who visited from other planets? Some of the most compelling images of an elongated cranium can be traced to ancient Egypt and the depictions of one of its most controversial pharaohs.
Could it be that he too was mimicking the look of extraterrestrials? Or is there an even more outrageous explanation? Could he have been one of them?
Egypt.
Long before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or even settled along the Nile River, they spoke of an era called Tep Zepi, or the beginning of time. According to legends, Tep Zepi was when “sky-gods” descended from the stars to Earth on flying “boats,” and then turned mud and water into a new kingdom.
BAUVAL: The word “god,” according to the ancient Egyptian, is “netyro.” It means a being that came from the cosmos. They are very adamant about the fact that their gods had descended from the stars. They tell us that the god Osiris, who ruled with his consort and sister– the goddess Isis they were star gods, and in fact they identify them very clearly. Osiris was identified the constellation of Orion.
Isis was identified as the god to the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. There’s an interesting point about this– is that within the constellation of Orion is the so-called nursery of stars. The stars in our galaxy literally were born in that zone, and it’s really peculiar that the ancient Egyptians insist that the birth of star gods are in this constellation. They truly believed– they were very adamant about this– that their origins is in the sky.
SCHOCH: Something that we see around the world with ancient civilizations is that they had incredible knowledge of the stars, of the planets, of the heavenly motions. The average person in the ancient world had way more knowledge of what’s going on in the skies than a lot of well-educated people today. As ancient Egypt grew into a great civilization, its citizens believed their pharaohs were sons of Osiris and thus, living gods. Artwork and wall carvings depicted them as perfect humans, and while the people worshipped many different gods, the pharaoh stood above them all.
This basic Egyptian religious belief remained in force for nearly a thousand years until one pharaoh changed everything. Who was this heretic? His name was Akhenaten, and in every surviving depiction, he is shown with an elongated skull. Who was he?
According to Egyptian mythology, he too was descended from the gods who arrived on Earth at the time of Tep Zepi.
But why do so many still believe he actually came from the stars? In 1352 BC, Akhenaten ascended to the throne as the tenth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty. Almost immediately, he instituted a series of radical religious changes, including a ban on references to multiple gods.
BAUVAL: It’s a rather strange thing that he would want to do that in one sweep, but he ordered all the iconography of previous gods to be removed. He only allowed one emblem, which was a sun emblem, literally a sun disk with curious arms or rays pointing down.
TSOUKALOS: Why did he do this? Because according to his writings and his poems that were written about him later on, he was visited by one of those beings that descended from the sky, who told Akhenaten: “This is the way. I am your god.”
This sun god was known as Aten. Akhenaten claimed to be a direct descendent of Aten.
BAUVAL: Akhenaten, like any other pharaoh, regarded himself to be divine. He was a god. Not only himself believed himself to be a god, but the whole nation saw him as a god. Now, the definition of a god is that he was a descendant from these celestial beings. During his fourth year as pharaoh, Akhenaten ordered the construction of a new capital city. He called it Amarna and dedicated it to the sun. Akhenaten would spend the next ten years here, during which time he instituted changes in both art and culture, including how he himself would be publicly depicted.
CARGILL: In Egyptian iconography, Egyptian pharaohs are depicted as these triangular-shaped beings– these broad, strong shoulders and these very skinny waists. Now, we look at leaders today and we know that most leaders don’t have broad shoulders and skinny waists, but it was important to depict the Egyptian kings as having broad shoulders and skinny waists– very, you know– the epitome of what a king ought to look like.
BAUVAL: That’s exactly the opposite of Akhenaten. He shows himself perhaps as he really is a rather strange look. He has a very mystical look.
SCHOCH: If we take Akhenaten’s statues, for instance, literally, he was a very strange-looking character. Sort of combined, some people would say, feminine aspects with masculine aspects, may have had an elongated skull.
CARGILL: The change in royal iconography of Akhenaten showed him as he probably really was, with a misshapen head, with a potbelly, with a sunken chest, as opposed to the idealized iconography of traditional Egyptian artists that showed this big, strong pharaoh.
Akhenaten’s wife Queen Nefertiti and their children were also depicted as having elongated skulls. So why were Akhenaten’s and Nefertiti’s heads deformed?
Did they suffer from a genetic abnormality or did they deliberately alter their shape?
Some believe there could be yet another explanation behind their strange, otherworldly appearance.
CHILDRESS: They look like they’re different than other human beings.
TSOUKALOS: Is it possible that Akhenaten might have been an extraterrestrial hybrid?
CARGILL: Ancient alien enthusiasts look at Pharaoh Akhenaten of Egypt and say, “Ah, look at that long head. That looks like an alien gray. That looks like some kind of something that’s nonhuman, some hybrid between something else and something human.
Must be evidence of alien interference, alien reproduction with humans. Something like that.”
BETTY ANN BROWN: I’ve been to Egypt, and one of the most stunning things about seeing the archeological remains of ancient Egypt is that one unique pharaoh, Akhenaten.
TSOUKALOS: I mean, he’s got a very narrow, pointy face, high cheekbones, and a very elongated cranium.
CHILDRESS: The idea that they were either looking like extraterrestrials or perhaps had extraterrestrial DNA in them is a credible idea. Akhenaten ruled for 17 years. After his reign, Amarna was abandoned, and temples to the sun were destroyed. Images of Akhenaten were deliberately defaced.
Ancient Egypt swiftly returned to its old ways, worshipping many gods. Was this a rejection of Akhenaten’s radical religious belief system, or a cover-up of his alien identity?
BAUVAL: There’s been a lot of theories about why. Um, if I mean, the most extreme is that he somehow had some sort of extraterrestrial connection.
If one accepts that conclusion, then it would explain why he was literally put off the reign and, some say, put to death. Some Egyptologists believe Akhenaten was forced to abdicate and flee from Egypt with a group of his loyal followers.
In 1907, the actual body of Akhenaten was discovered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings by a British archeologist named Edward Ayrton. After unearthing Akhenaten’s mummified remains, he was able to confirm that, indeed, the ancient pharaoh’s skull was misshapen and elongated.
CARGILL: Some scholars argue that he suffered from some kind of physical abnormality; he suffered from a disorder that caused his face to appear to be long, or his head actually was longer. I think with Akhenaten we’re dealing with a physical deformation that wasn’t They just depicted him as he was: potbelly, sunken chest, long head. Akhenaten was succeeded by his son, Tutankhamen, who became the most renowned pharaoh of all time.
When his tomb was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, Tutankhamen was also found to have an elongated skull.
Could he have inherited alien genes from his father?
Today, much of Akhenaten’s life still remains a mystery. Did he really change Egypt’s entire belief system because, as some suggest, he was a celestial being?
If that’s true, might there be evidence of similar entities coming to Earth?
Perhaps more clues can be found thousands of miles away on the other side of the African continent.
Mali, in northwest Africa
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0
Deep in a remote valley live the Dogon people, who are the descendants of a nomadic tribe that settled here around 1000 AD. Just like Akhenaten’s followers, the Dogon had been forced to leave Egypt because of religious persecution.
SCHOCH: The Dogon claim a very long and ancient tradition, and in my opinion maintain some of the ancient Egyptian traditions and myths that have been carried on right into the present age. Parts of ancient Egypt may not have died. They were carried on, to this day, among the Dogon. But what exactly are their beliefs?
Dogon mythology holds that the sky god Amma created the first living creature known as Nommo. The legend also says that shortly after his creation, Nommo multiplied into several parts, one of which rebelled against Amma. Amma responded by destroying him and scattering his ashes throughout the world.
PETER FIEBAG (translated): According to the Dogons’ myths, a god gave them this knowledge. He descended from the sky in an arc, surfing on fire, landing in a storm.
TSOUKALOS: Still today, the Dogon celebrates a festival in the honor of Nommo and that visitation that occurred in the remote past. How do we know this? For this festival, they have wooden masks that date back to a very long time ago, when this festival began.
FIEBAG (translated): Dogon masks tell the mystic stories of their ancestors. This is a sculpture of the creator. They call him Amma. He is embracing the universe. This is how they pass on information from generation to generation, by stories carved in masks. But could Nommo have been a real person?
Some see eerie similarities between the Dogons’ legend and the story of the mysterious Pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten believed he was directly descended from the sun god Aten. Nommo was said to have been created by the sky deity, Amma.
Is it a coincidence that both cultures, although thousands of miles apart, shared mythical tales of beings coming from the skies? And both Nommo and Akhenaten were depicted with elongated heads.
Is it possible that these legends were based on real events?
FIEBAG (translated): The Dogons dwell in the central plateau region of Bandiagara.Their knowledge is centuries old, and their priests have been sharing it with chosen individuals only. In the 1920s, French anthropologist Grialue and ethnologist Dieterle visited the tribe and were invited to share their secrets.
But one secret stood out: the Dogon claimed that their god Amma came from a specific star in the Sirius constellation, the same place where the ancient Egyptians believed their god Osiris was born. This star, which modern astronomers refer to as Sirius B, the Dogon called Po Tolo. But what baffles experts is that the star is so far from Earth, it’s impossible to see with the naked eye.
BAUVAL: I was very intrigued by this, by the way. I mean, the Dogons should not have known about the existence of this star. Sirius is the second nearest star from our solar system. It’s eight light-years away. In fact, it’s not even visible with standard telescopes. It was first seen, literally seen, and photographed in the
TSOUKALOS: Modern science has corroborated that Sirius B does indeed exist. Problem is, the Dogon knew about this before modern science corroborated it. I mean, that’s spooky. Measurements taken with the Hubble telescope in B is what’s known as a white dwarf– or a partially rnt-out star with extremely dense mass. Although it is smaller in size than Earth, it’s estimated to weigh eight times as much as our sun. But how did the Dogon acquire this ancient knowledge of astronomy that seems to be centuries more advanced than that of modern science?
SEAGER: The mystery is, how did this story get passed on down generations if the story came from a time before astronomers knew there was a companion star to Sirius which can’t be seen with the human eye?
FIEBAG (translated): This is the Dogon symbol for Sirius. When you move it around, you can see an orbit around the center marked by Sirius A.Sirius B circles around it, so it is a circular system. This sign is practically an astronomic model that the Dogons could not have invented because only Sirius A is visible, and Sirius B and C are invisible.
However, their description of the orbit is correct. One assumption is that this god, Nommo, who brought them this knowledge, could have been an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Since the early 20th century, the tribe has been routinely studied and researched by anthropologists. This has led many modern historians to claim that the Dogon must have learned about astronomy from Westerners.
CARGILL: The Dogon’s mythology is so fluid that when science confirms something that they might have believed in antiquity, it might have just been sheer coincidence, or it could have been a conflation. That is, they heard Because it’s an oral culture, and because the mythology is so fluid, they heard something that someone said about this star in relation to another star, and they just grafted that in to their mythology. They grafted that into their religion. And then when some reporter, some subsequent reporter comes along and says, “What do you believe? ,” they say, “Well, we’ve thought this for millions of years.”
TSOUKALOS: When critics suggest that this knowledge was given to them by modern ethnologists, that’s simply incorrect because we know that the story goes back hundreds of years earlier than any modern ethnologist ever went there.
FIEBAG (translated): If it were ever proven that all this information is exactly correct, including the parts that are still being studied by astronomers, this would mean that the earth had visitors from outer space in prehistoric times.
BAUVAL: Either they inherited that knowledge, and the question is, from where? From a previous civilization, or from some sort of extraterrestrial civilization? Or it’s a coincidence. In my view, it is not a coincidence.
If the Dogon people really possessed this advanced astronomical knowledge, were their legends based on real events? The ancient Egyptians and Dogon were far from alone in their belief in gods or mystical beings that came from the sky.
Is there an explanation for similar myths shared by ancient cultures all around the world? And what does that reveal as to who these visitors may be? Perhaps the answer can be found, not in northern Africa, but here in the rocks and canyons of the American Southwest.
NOTE: This article is an edited version of episode one, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
In New Mexico lies the Pueblo of Zuni. Sheltered from the desolate high plains, this adobe city is home to the Zuni Indians, one of the oldest indigenous tribes in North America.
They have inhabited this land for almost 2,000 years, and have protected their secrets even longer.
CHRIS O’BRIEN: The Zuni are a very interesting culture in that they’re one of the few cultures that really have not opened up, uh, to the rest of the world about their star knowledge traditions. Most of this type of information is very closely held by the natives. And, um, I really find it very intriguing that this is the time period in history where now we’re starting to learn more and more about their star knowledge. Much of the Zuni people’s history is etched in the rocks in the New Mexico desert.
Tribal Elder Clifford Mahooty and archeologist Dan Simplicio have studied the Zuni’s secret history firsthand. They’ve collected stories passed down through generations that are rooted in the belief that the tribe’s creators and protectors are supernatural beings from the sky.
DAN SIMPLICIO: This one’s kind of interesting here. I would imagine it was created in the last century, but from this design, you can see the star figure. Celestial images oftentimes are depicted in a lot of our cultural petroglyphs. And this is one of ’em where it depicts the star. It could be the supernova of the crab nebula.
CLIFFORD MAHOOTY: Our Zuni mythology in the prayer system, in the ritualistic protocols, talk about these people that came over here, and told us how to actually live our lives as beings, sky people. If you listen to a lot of religious chants and songs and prayers, that’s all they talk about. They’re talking about space. They’re talking about out there in the universe where they came from.
So they depict it on a rock wall here. But the actual meaning of it is somewhere more profound and more complex than that. These drawings are thought to have been created around 1200 BC, yet they appear to depict modern space travelers and their vehicles.
SIMPLICIO: If you move back a little bit, you can see another figure here. It has a de. It has eyes. Uh, there’s something coming down
MAHOOTY: And a nose.
SIMPLICIO: Like a nose. There’s a nose, but it kind of flares out.
MAHOOTY: I think it was something to do with the ancient ones when they saw something. They took as much description of it to put in on there. Of course, it’s not going to be exactly what they saw, but that’s as best as they can do for something that they saw.
CHILDRESS: With all petroglyphs and things like that, I mean, they’re up to interpretation. Sometimes they are just doodlings of people. But other times, they may well be actual descriptions and depictions of some kind of god from outer space, some ancient astronaut. And when you go around, say like the Zuni Pueblo, I mean, that’s what they’ll tell you those petroglyphs e. Even the Zunis themselves call them the spacemen.
SIMPLICIO: This one seems to have two legs coming out like that. It has a, you know, broad diamond shape body. Um, there probably was a better head that chipped off here. Well, that’s very different-looking than humans are.
MAHOOTY: Now usually they’re called UFOs. But in the Zuni way, we’ve always been taught that they’re the keepers of the upper world, which means space. You know, they’re sky people. Beings that are of the extraterrestrial origin and this is still within our mythology and our religious practices today. Like most Indian tribes, the Zunis call these sky people kachinas.
According to the Zunis’ creation story, the kachina gods came down from the heavens to lead the Zunis to earth through a special portal.
MAHOOTY: The sipapu– that’s the entrance to the fourth world or the underworld. And that’s a representation of where the kachinas come and go. And so, according to the mythologies, the Zunis were brought forth into the world of light– which is where we are at today–by what I would interpret as extraterrestrial beings from the universe.
Every year, the Zunis participate in a ceremony known as the Shalako festival. Dressed in traditional costumes to represent the kachinas, the Indians celebrate the arrival of the gods on earth.
CHILDRESS: This is a figurine of kachina gods. And these guys are some gods from the sky who came down. Uh, they wear weird helmets.
TSOUKALOS: This one has a helmet as a head, and if you look at the whole body of it, it’s as if it wears some type of a suit. This one here also has the helmet and the visor.
CHILDRESS: For the Pueblo Indians, like the Zunis, these are their-their sky-gods that every year, they have special ceremonies. People put on these special costumes and masks to reenact the coming of the gods. They really look like ancient astronauts.
BILL BIRNES: If you look at the poetry and the legends and the stories from American Indian tribes in the Southwest, they have the legend of the star people. The star people came to Earth and seeded planet Earth, and they came on flying ships. If you speak to the elders, they will tell you that a lot of us believe in the existence of extraterrestrials.
STEVEN M.KARR: These are timeless traditions that have been passed on through the centuries from clan to clan, from family to family, from family member to family member. And it is an oral tradition. Native peoples did not have the written word. They had the spoken word. And culturally, the spoken word is still a significant component of their daily lives, and the ability to pass down the truth.
SIMPLICIO: I remember my grandparents talking about a craft that flew and had actually crash-landed on one of the mesas east of here. There’s no interpretation of what an aircraft is, so the closest thing that they could interpret as anything capable of flight is a bird or our masked kachina dancers.
MAHOOTY: We are very, very superstitious people. It’s always been in the history of Zuni that they have always been here even right here where we’re sitting right now, but you just don’t see them. They’re in a different frequency. And those are very, very sacred, and those are very, very secret.
They’re out there somewhere. For those who believe that ancient astronauts came to earth thousands of years ago, the prehistoric artwork provides more clues in what they claim is a growing body of evidence: from wall carvings and statues in ancient Egypt to tribal traditions and exotic masks in West Africa to petroglyphs in the American Southwest.
All thousands of years old, they seem to recount similar stories of visitors from the skies. Could the legends of alien beings visiting earth thousands of years ago have inspired more traditional beliefs?
Celestial beings coming down to Earth. Gods descending from the sky.
Can these events only be found in the ancient legends of the Zuni? Do similar accounts exist in other cultures and other religions across the world?
And if so, what is the explanation?
TSOUKALOS: We have to remind ourselves that our ancestors were highly intelligent. However, their technological frame of reference was different than our technological frame of reference, so they didn’t have the vocabulary with which to describe or with which to name certain things that they saw. So what did they do?
They used words that they were familiar with in their time, and so they tried to describe whatever they witnessed to the best of their abilities with their vocabulary. Ancient China also shared some of the same beliefs that can be found in Egyptian, Native American, and Dogon legends– that deities arrived from the stars.
According to Chinese mythology dating back to 3000 BC, when the god named Huang Di was born, there was “a radiance from the great star Chi.” Huang Di would later emerge from the belly of a fire-breathing dragon to become China’s first emperor.
YOUNG: The origins of the Han Chinese people start with a story of a great god looking down with empathy.
Here were people in poverty, in a beautiful, rich country, the landscape profound, but the people were suffering. He took pity and decided to come down.
TSOUKALOS: Huang Di arrived on planet Earth in a flying dragon. He had the power of flight. Huang Di could be anywhere within minutes, and he usually accomplished this by hopping on his dragon and flying somewhere.
YOUNG: Now this divine energy becomes human and is a great leader– the Yellow Emperor who rules and unites the people– and there is a period of great prosperity until his work is done. Huang Di brought order to the chaos, creating China’s first empire. He is seen as a cultural hero and is credited with the invention of the compass, acupuncture, and the standardization of Chinese writing. One of his greatest legacies is the Great Wall of China.
YOUNG: When the land is prosperous, he decides it’s time to go, and the great yellow dragon comes back and he gets back into the belly of the dragon and flies off forever.
TSOUKALOS: Now, were these dragons truly dragons in a biological nature? Or were they misinterpreted types of machines?
Because, as we all know, dragons are always correlated with spewing fire and a lot of smoke. Whenever we see a modern rocket take off, there is all this smoke, and sometimes the smoke is yellow and sometimes it’s red.
So it’s very bizarre how we have these correlations between the ancient times and modern times today.
YOUNG: Mythology is the effort to grasp what we can’t grasp, to understand what is beyond us. In the Eastern teachings, the dragons very often carry people, sometimes on their back or sometimes inside their bellies, so if we think of them as, as a poet’s effort to explain a vehicle that was strange to them, well, those sound like flying saucers.
So it might just be a problem with translation because, after all, it’s just a word. It’s trying to describe something that’s very difficult to grasp.
Another tale of celestial beings influencing civilization can be found, this time in what is now modern-day Iraq. The Babylonian legend of Enuma Elish dates back to the seventh century BC.
The text was first discovered in Austen Henry Layard while searching the ruins of the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. The story tells of how the first humans were created by an extraterrestrial re known as the Anunnaki.
TSOUKALOS: In the ancient texts of Sumeria, we have descriptions of these beings descending from the sky called the Anunnaki. The term “Anunnaki” means “those who from the heavens came.” It says, word for word, that these beings descended in flying vehicles from the sky, and we can find not only descriptions of the Anunnaki, but also depictions and we can see them in statues, in carvings, so it’s all very interesting to see that those beings looked like modern-day space travelers with weird suits.
Some of them wore wristwatches.
They had boots on and helmets and, above all, wings, and they were always described or depicted in floating above some “regular people.” So the question is: who were the Anunnaki? And according to the ancient astronaut hypothesis, they were space travelers who visited Earth in the remote past.
Similar themes can be found in the legends of Greek and Roman gods, which also describe events that some interpret as an extraterrestrial contact. Both cultures believed in powerful gods who lived in the heavens and often came down to Earth to interact with humans.
CHILDRESS: A well-known example is Zeus and the Greek gods, and they’ve come down from the sky and Mount Olympus, where they live in some mountain, and they’re bringing, really, civilization and sciences to mankind, but they have many human attributes, too, where, yeah, they, uh, they’re attracted to human women, uh, they want to have sex and children with as many of ’em as they can, and then they go back into the sky.
THOMAS BULLARD: These ideas of gods mating with humans are very commonplace, like Zeus in Greek mythology was always coming down, mating with mortals, and producing demigods like Hercules or Helen of Troy, who were exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally powerful, unusually gifted in every way. So, in other words, you were creating a better race in, in this sense.
TSOUKALOS: In the ancient astronaut opinion, the whole pantheon of gods that we have in ancient Greece consists of nothing else but flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials who were misinterpreted as being these divine creatures by our ancestors.
CREMO: There is a lot of evidence showing that we’re not alone in the cosmos and that our human civilizations on Earth have been interacting for long periods of time with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Belief in celestial beings interacting with humans is a cornerstone of several major religions. In fact, according to the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God created the first humans Adam and Eve. The Bible also contains other passages that describe strange interactions between “otherworldly” beings and humans.
CARGILL: People believe messengers of some sort come down from the heavens. You know, they came down and they had sex with humans, and this is where we produced giants, people like Goliath, so in a technical sense, they are alien. They’re gods or they’re angels; there’s some kind of superhuman thing.
Interpreting these Bible stories has also led to a certain amount of debate and controversy. While most see a single god directing and influencing mankind’s destiny, others argue that it is really a number of gods that are responsible.
TSOUKALOS: In the Old Testament, it says very clearly, “And then God created man in our own image.” Now, grammatically speaking, that sentence doesn’t make sense, because you have “God” and then you have “our image.”
Well, theologians suggest that, by “our,” what they meant is the Trinity, the Holy Trinity, so basically, if you were to change the word “god” to “gods,” then all of a sudden, the sentence makes sense– “and then the gods created man in our own image.”
CARGILL: So you have this reference– “let us create man in our image.” In several religious texts, specifically the Hebrew Bible, which Christians also accept, and in the Koran, which Muslims revere as holy, you have the reference to God in the plural, and it is incredibly interesting. But do all these religious scriptures that tell similar stories really point to the possibility that aliens have visited Earth throughout ancient history?
BIRNES: The fact is, the story of creation in our own Bible is the story of creation in cultures around the world. The story of the flood, the evolution of the human species, the development of language– all of this points to– in fact, the Bible says so– life on Earth came from contact with an extraterrestrial life form. That’s in the Bible.
That’s in ancient cultures around the world. So I believe the theory of ancient astronauts is true, and I believe there’s solid evidence there, and I believe the harder you try to refute that evidence, the more you wind up against a brick wall. That ancient astronauts visited us, visited Earth thousands upon thousands of years ago, and seeded the very civilization we have today. If the believers in the ancient astronaut theory are correct, then just who were these visitors?
And might cutting-edge astrophysics and biology help us to uncover their identity?
On March 18, 1965, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov stepped outside the Voskhod 2 and became the first human to walk in space. He spent 12 minutes and eight seconds outside his ship before returning. Leonov’s survival depended upon a protective suit that could keep him alive where there was neither atmospheric pressure nor oxygen. If we need spacesuits, would aliens traveling to Earth require the same protection?
Is that what we’re looking at in these ancient carvings and drawings?
TSOUKALOS: When critics ask, “Well, why would ancient astronauts have to wear astronaut suits like that we’re familiar with today?” the answer is very simple. Can we go through space without wearing a type of suit? Of course not. We would die. ‘Cause who says that whoever visited us in the remote past, that they could breathe in the atmosphere of planet Earth? So, it’s not farfetched to suggest that they did, in fact, wear some type of suit. Why might these images resemble modern astronauts?
If they are aliens, is it possible they are similar to humans? And could they have come from a planet just like Earth? At the turn of the 20th century, a group of British and German scientists considered this possibility.
They embraced a theory put forth by early Greek philosophers, that all life in the universe began in one specific place. This theory is called panspermia.
SEAGER: Panspermia is the theory that life formed in one place, and then got spread around to other places. In outer space in the medium between stars, we see molecules that are the building blocks of life. So it’s easy to get the building blocks of life to another planet. For example, if life formed on Mars, it could have come here to Earth, contaminated Earth, and then started life here.
Roughly 3.6 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, much like the conditions on Earth today. Biologists believe that because Mars cooled more quickly than other planets, life may have developed there first.
PAUL DAVIES: Mars is a better candidate for life during the early part of the solar system. Mars rocks are coming here all the time, and these have been knocked off Mars by asteroid and comet impacts. And we know that they could convey any Martian microorganisms to Earth. In August 1996, a team of scientists made a stunning announcement. A Martian meteorite found in Antarcticacontained evidence of fossilized life.
The four-pound rock, designated ALH 84001, showed the presence of carbonate globules excreted by microbes when they were alive on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. Earth was no longer alone. Life had existed elsewhere in the universe.
DAVIES: So this cross-contamination between Mars and Earth, which 20 years ago was regarded as a rather wild conjecture, is now pretty much accepted by the astrobiology community.
Astrobiologists studying the origin and evolution of life in the universe embraced the possibility that life on Earth began in outer space. Did modern-day scientists finally prove what ancient cultures have believed for centuries?
BAUVAL: The common myth or idea that the origins of humankind is from the stars is widespread. Ancient cultures have The ancient Egyptians, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Indians and so forth Uh, is intriguing, and it’s probably true. And I mean it from an astrophysical point of view. We do come from the stars. It’s a fact that life on earth has been seeded by the coming of a comet containing the life matter.
SCHOCH: I personally suspect there is life out there. In fact, I believe that we have evidence if nothing else, microbial evidence, for life extraterrestrially. But if life did land on Earth from outer space, was it by accident, or might it have been sent here on purpose? One mainstream scientist thought so. British geneticist Francis Crick is best known for his collaboration with James Watson. Together, they unraveled the structure of human DNA in 1953.
Less than ten years later, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work in genetics. In the 1960s, Crick became a proponent of panspermia theory and took it to a whole new level with an idea he called directed panspermia.
GRAHAM HANCOCK: Francis Crick hypothesized that somewhere, perhaps on the other side of the galaxy, there had been a civilization of advanced intelligent beings. And they had found that their planet was going to be destroyed. Perhaps a supernova was going to go off in their vicinity, and their planet would be sterilized of life. And he asked himself, “What would an intelligent civilization do in that situation?”
Um, well, first of all, they’d try to figure out if they could get out of there, if they could actually preserve their lives and the lives of their descendants. Perhaps crowd into spaceships and fly across interstellar space until they found a suitable planet to colonize. But could it actually be true?
Could we really be the descendants of an alien race that traveled here from another world?
POPE: The ultimate implication of some exobiological theories is actually that we ourselves are extraterrestrials, that life on earth arose because the organic material was brought here from elsewhere.
BIRNES: What if we’re the ones, the descendants of those who came from another planet? We weren’t created. We were brought here, seeded planet Earth as a colony from some other planet. So we’re colonists of another race. And that’s why the aliens look like us.
SCHOCH: In my opinion, it’s not unscientific to consider the possibility of ancient astronauts, alien intervention. We live in a huge universe. Now, bacteria versus humanoids– one may say, that’s a big difference, but in some ways, it’s not a big difference. Where you have life, you have the ability for that life to develop into what we consider civilization or intelligent beings. Is it just a coincidence that modern science and ancient alien theory have come to the same conclusion: that life on Earth came from the stars?
And if it’s possible that billions of years ago, an extraterrestrial race spread out across space, how would they survive in their new home? Could they really be our missing link?
For thousands of years, mankind has tried to depict alien beings who they believe came from the skies. Many of those creatures seem to share characteristics with humans. They often have two arms, two legs, fingers and a head just like we do. Biologists refer to this basic body shape as bilateral symmetry.
MICHAEL DENNIN: Bilateral symmetry is, very simply, you divide something down the middle into two parts, and lateral means up and down, and the two sides are an exact reflection of each other. If you fold the thing in half, all the parts line up.
RUSSELL TUTTLE: Being bilaterally symmetric allows you to be streamlined and to develop a head end, so you become cephalized.
And that certainly happened in vertebrates. Virtually, the mouth at the end of something and then you get progressive development, and that seems to have led to many, many advances.
DENNIN: So, when you look at it closely, you can see a lot of advantages coming in. Having the two arms and two legs to work together really gives you great mobility and balance and speed. Having eyes on two sides separated gives really improved vision in various ways.
Animals that are predominantly prey use their two eyes independently and get a huge field of view. Animals that are predominantly hunters have them more in the front and get really good depth perception, which you need if you’re gonna land on the animal you’re hunting.
If it is true that aliens resemble humans in their physical characteristics, might there also be genetic similarities? Could we even be related?
In 2003, the U.S.Government announced that the Human Genome Project had identified all of the nearly 25,000 genes in the human body. For the first time, scientists had a roadmap to the genetic make-up of humans.
In 2006, genetic researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz discovered an area of the genome they called HAR1 that appears to be unique to humans.
Scientists believe the HAR1 gene plays a critical role in the advanced development of the human brain, and is a key element that sets us apart from other animals.
But where did it come from?
Did humans develop this distinct gene naturally through evolution?
Or did it land here from another planet?
Francis Crick, the British scientist who helped discover the structure of DNA, believed that human genes could not have evolved by chance.
HANCOCK: Crick didn’t feel in that period of roughly formation of the planet down to the time when the planet could first support life, there was enough time for DNA to evolve by accident. It’s an enormously complicated molecule.
Crick gave this analogy: You would be more likely to assemble a fully functioning and flying jumbo jet by passing a hurricane through a junkyard than you would be to assemble the DNA molecule by chance in any kind of primeval soup in five or six hundred million years. It’s just not possible.
But if this molecule could not have evolved accidentally, how was it created?
Was it, as some believe, put there on purpose?
TSOUKALOS: The question should not be do the extraterrestrials look like us or what do the extraterrestrials look like, but do we look like the extraterrestrials? Because according to the ancient astronaut theory, a long, long time ago, extraterrestrials came here, and through a targeted mutation of our genes, we– quote, unquote– “became human.”
FIEBAG (translated): Possibly there is information in our DNA about whether human evolution was manipulated or not. The DNA is almost deciphered, yet we only understand five percent of the information it carries.
TSOUKALOS: Geneticists have determined that it only takes about five percent to clone a human being, and that that we have in our bodies is nothing more than what they refer to as “genetic junk.”
DENNIN: Why is everything there? And there’s probably parts of the DNA that don’t have an obvious current function. Maybe they’re left over from something that was used in the past, kind of like our appendix is left over. Could this “genetic junk” hold the key to the evolution of humans?
Some people suggest that decoding our DNA entirely will unlock startling information about our origins. But could it even prove that aliens played a role in our development thousands of years ago?
HANCOCK: If you hypothetically wanted to record an eternal message that could be decoded by a creature that had eventually evolved enough intelligence to decode it, the place to put that message would not be on some monument or in some text, which might be swept away, but actually on the DNA of the creature itself.(baby cooing) It’s recently been established that DNA is a recording medium of almost limitless power.It would be technically possible to record the entire knowledge of a civilization on the DNA in our bodies.All you’d need is a way to access that information.
VON DANIKEN: I think we have something, the whole humanity, in our genes. Somewhere in our genes, it is coded that extraterrestrials were here thousands of years ago. But the questions persist: If aliens visited Earth tens of thousands of years ago how did they get here?
When we look to the past for the answers, are we looking in the wrong place? Should we actually look forward to our future?
Scientists agree that the best chances of finding alien life will be on planets similar to ours, and descriptions of extraterrestrials seem to resemble humans in many ways. Some ancient astronaut theorists draw a surprising conclusion from these facts, suggesting that aliens might actually be human.
POPE: It is odd that many of the descriptions of aliens are effectively humanoid, and this raises an interesting possibility. One idea that’s been put forward is that, uh, these are not extraterrestrials at all, but they’re time travelers from the future.
NOORY: They could be us from a thousand, 2,000, 10,000 years from now. Let’s assume for a moment that planet if we all survive, that time travel was created. They’ve invented it. Just like the time machine of H.G.Wells’ day, they can go back, or they can go forward. So let’s assume 10,000 years from now we decide to come back to see us. Maybe they have changed physically. They look like the alien grays or whoever they may be.
BIRNES: It could well be that ancient astronauts might not be creatures from other planets at all, but time travelers from 2720 in a time machine. Time travel is an essential concept for science fiction, but would it be possible for flesh-and-blood humans to find a way to transport themselves through time with current technology?
Would this enable us to cover the vast distances of space?
PAUL DAVIES: If I could travel close to the speed of light, I could reach the year Have to get very close to the speed of light for that, but it’s doable, and we know that this isn’t a theory, this is this is real physics– we could demonstrate these time-warping effects. So you can reach the future quicker by traveling close to the speed of light.
The concept of time travel was first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905 when he published his Theory of Special Relativity.DENNIN: Ancient astronaut theory says that astronauts visited us a long time ago from somewhere else. The technology involved in doing that, we would assume would be similar to what we understand now.
I mean, we know special relativity is a law of physics. It holds anywhere in the universe. Ancient astronauts that would come all the way here can travel these large distances and not age that much, relative to their home planet. Because if you’re going close enough to the speed of light, you will have slowed down time enough that when you get back, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years could have passed.
One limitation of this method of travel is that because a spacecraft has mass, it theoretically cannot reach the exact speed of light. The resulting reduction in velocity would then dramatically increase the amount of time needed to cross the vast universe.
NOORY: Well, there are definitely many theories about how extraterrestrials got here, how their propulsion system got them to planet Earth. They’re surely not coming here the way we go out into space. They’d never get here. They are finding different ways. They have either developed a new form of propulsion, or they’re able to travel through– what I’ve always believed– wormholes throughout the universe. That would instantaneously put them here. The idea of wormholes was first proposed in longtime collaborator Nathan Rosen. They began to explore the possibility that space and time could literally be bent to create a time travel shortcut.
DENNIN: Wormholes have not been detected. They are a postulated structure in space that involve actually taking– if you want to think of a sheet of paper– bending it in half and connecting the two pieces that you get together. A wormhole is thought to do something like that. Space gets warped, and it connects between two different parts of space. You know, there’s predictions about what they would look like; there’s theories about them, but we haven’t detected one yet. You’re not actually ever traveling faster than the speed of light; you’re just cutting corners.
CHILDRESS: You don’t actually have to go light speed and travel for light-years to someplace. You literally go there through a wormhole and through hyperspace, and bang, you’re there.
DAVIES: If you can have a wormhole in space, then it can be turned, in principle, into a time machine. And so travel back in time as well as forward in time would then be possible. The problem is: where do you get your wormhole? Uh, it’s not inconceivable that wormholes were made in the Big Bang, coughed out along with everything else, and there might be one out there in the universe we could harvest or adapt to form a time machine.
DENNIN: If you end up discovering that you could make wormholes, then that increases the range that you can explore in space and that increases the likelihood of having two civilizations at the same time with the right technology to communicate with each other. While theoretically possible, traveling through wormholes or at the speed of light is currently both economically and technically impossible for us here on Earth. Using modern propulsion methods, it would take 70,000 years to reach the nearest star.
DAVIES: Our fastest rockets are totally puny. It’s really pathetic. So we’re talking about luck. Any object that we can fire out into the solar system is going to take tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star. Believe it or not, at 4.6 billion yrs old, our solar system is one of the youngest in the universe. But if civilizations exist in other galaxies, is it possible that they are more advanced than those on Earth?
And if so, could they be ahead of us in their ability to travel through space and time?
CHILDRESS: For extraterrestrials to come here, through the vast reaches of space to our planet, they clearly have to have technology that’s way in advance of what we have today. To go from solar system to solar system, rather than going warp speed, like in Star Trek, you really are going to travel, as they do in Star Wars, where you’re jumping through hyperspace. Going from a solar system to solar system is no time at all.
TSOUKALOS: Just because we can’t travel from star to star does not mean another more advanced society can’t do it either. I think that’s the height of human arrogance to say, “Just because we can’t do it, another more advanced civilization can’t do it either,” so, you know, we have to stop looking at us that we are the pinnacle of creation ’cause we’re not. Celestial beings. Visitors from the skies.
Deities descending from the heavens to interact with man. Could these worldwide stories be the foundation for the prevailing belief that something greater than ourselves, from beyond our world, created the universe as we know it?
Almost all of the great world faiths are based on stories of celestial beings who visit Earth. Many millions of people accept these legends as part of their core beliefs. And from the earliest cave drawings to images at Roswell, we see artists’ interpretations of extraterrestrials or gods coming to our planet.
YOUNG: In many traditions, there is something coming from above. There is a stairway to heaven or there’s a whirlwind or an angel descends. Sometimes the encounter is quite dangerous. As would be appropriate to something awesome and larger and more powerful than we are. Usually it is memorable.
CHILDRESS: Many of the myths are much more specific and they really talk about gods physically coming to Earth– landing, doing miracles, and showing the people how to live. If visitors did come from the stars, is it possible that they actually changed the way ancient people thought? Did they provide an intellectual spark to prehistoric civilizations? Could that be the reason why so many different cultures could build such large and lasting monuments?
NOORY: It’s almost as if primitive man woke up one morning and went, “Hey, I’ve got this knowledge and I know how to make tools and I’m gonna go and build all these things.” Nah, I don’t think it happened that way. I think others came down to this planet and started teaching other people, uh, that were beginning to evolve. But the one thing I truly do not believe is that modern cavemen at the time basically created all this knowledge out of thin air.
TSOUKALOS: All around the world, we have concise descriptions in ancient texts which say word for word that some beings came from the sky. So it’s as if this intellectual Big Bang or this Big Bang of knowledge occurred in various periods of time, and those various periods of time most concisely always correlate with some type of description of gods descending from the sky.
HANCOCK: I do think of that as a very significant before-and-after moment in the human story, and it is not a moment that is linked to physical evolution. We’ve already got the hardware. It’s as though something happened to our software around about that time, and I think it’s a very intriguing moment in the human story. For supporters of ancient alien theory, the verdict is already in. They believe that aliens visited many of Earth’s earliest cultures thousands of years ago. But is it possible?
Are extraterrestrials responsible for the sacred creation myths of the first human civilizations? Might they have tampered with our DNA?
Are humans themselves aliens from another planet in the heavens or even from another time? While man continues to search for these answers, the questions remain. If they came here, what was their mission?
We call Earth home, but with perfect conditions for life, could it be a beacon, calling out to other intelligent civilizations that may exist in the universe?
CARGILL: I think there is life, simple life, bacterial life, microbial life on other planets. I think we’re going to find that. And who knows?
Maybe one day we’ll find some other planet that’s capable of sustaining life, that has evolved people over a long period of time, that are also looking up at the stars wondering: is there anybody else out there, are we the only ones?
HELDMANN: What bigger question could we ask about ourselves and our place in the universe? You know, is there life elsewhere in the universe, or are we it?
I mean, I think it’s one of the most fascinating questions, and we’re fortunate enough to live in a time when we can address this question scientifically and really try and get at some answers.
NOORY: You can then come up with a conclusion that something, one, very strange is happening on this planet, and two, if it’s coming from outside of this system, then we’re being visited by something that has some intelligence behind it.
TSOUKALOS: In the end, the truth wins, and we’ve seen this in history, where scientific theories or ideas that have been deemed impossible turned out to be true, and so it is my firm conviction that the same will count for the ancient alien theory.
NOTE:This article is an edited version of episode one, season two, of the TV Series Ancient Aliens. Our editors worked hard to correct out any mistakes, and arrange the context so that our readers can enjoy reading through the episodes, without having to watch them. I believe that when you read through these episodes, you can imagine (reconstruct) what the participants of the Series were trying to say in a much more efficient, a much richer way.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Lockheed Martin, and NanoRacks all love talking about how they want to colonize space. But there are obviously a few of logistical issues, including how to produce enough energy and breathable air for astronauts to be in outer space for prolonged periods of time.
Cracking the code may involve taking a cue from our fellow earthlings, plants, who are able to convert sunlight into chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis. That’s according to an international group of scientists who say that their recent leap in the field of so-called artificial photosynthesis may help establish human outposts in deep space.
In the paper published in Nature Communications Thursday, the researchers detailed how to conduct photoelectrochemical experiments — the chemical reactions needed to turn light into chemical energy and produce oxygen — in a microgravity environment. This takes them one step closer to being able to use sunlight both to extract breathable oxygen from water but also to harvest hydrogen gas as a renewable source of fuel.
There is still a lot of work to be done until scientists can reproduce this process as well as plants, but first-author Katharina Brinkert, said the team believes artificial photosynthesis could one day create artificial atmospheres in outer space.
A 1969 NASA space concept, to be assembled on-orbit from spent Apollo program stages.
“On long-term space missions, it’s about creating an artificial atmosphere on the spaceship, so essentially something nature provides for us,” she tells Astronomy Magazine “We are so lucky to actually have trees and algae and so on performing natural photosynthesis. So we would like to do […] artificial photosynthesis.”
The team conducted their experiments inside the Bremen Drop Tower in Germany — a 476-foot spire built to drop things off of. Throwing things down this tower creates exactly 9.3 seconds of weightlessness. This gave the researchers a moment to see if their photoelectrochemical cell could produce hydrogen gas from a water solution in zero-gravity.
The experiment succeeded, which means it could potentially be implemented to improve existing devices aboard the International Space Station. The ISS already has its own system that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it’s far from becoming the spacecraft’s only source of fuel. The station relies on regular resupply shipments from Earth to keep it operational.
By dropping their TK cell from the top of the Bremen Drop Tower, the researchers were able to see if it would function in a microgravity environment.
Frequent shipments to the ISS are possible because it’s only orbiting a couple of hundred miles above our head. The further out in space we go, the more costly these missions become.
The type of research conducted by Brinkert’s team could one day lead to self-sustaining human outposts orbiting the Moon, Mars, and even our most distant planetary neighbors.
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Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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