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...
23-07-2018
They’re real and contain hidden messages, scientist says
They’re real and contain hidden messages, scientist says
IT all started with a UFO sighting.
Dr Horace Drew, 61, was just 10 years old when he allegedly saw an unidentified, silver, windowless craft hovering in the sky near his suburban home, in Jacksonville, Florida. The encounter lasted only moments but led to a lifelong fascination with the extraterrestrial.
“I saw a UFO, so I knew they were real from an early age,” Dr Drew told news.com.au.
The scientist, who holds a PhD in Chemistry from Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, and worked for CSIRO as a molecular biologist, has been researching crop circles and aliens for 20 years. Dr Drew relocated to Australia in the 1980s but most of his work has taken him overseas, predominantly to Europe.
“They’re quite rare in Australia,” he said.
He, along with many conspiracy theorists, believe crop circles are the work of aliens or human time travellers. Sceptics say most are probably man-made.
A crop circle is typically defined by standing wheat stems that have been flattened in the shape of a circle or more complex pattern. They tend to appear mainly in developed Western or secularised countries — including Japan.
The cause of many of the circles is unknown despite various natural and unorthodox explanations having been put forward. Some crop circles have been proven to be hoaxes.
But according to Dr Drew, a number are legitimate and contain puzzles that can be decoded and linked to time travel and alien life.
He told news.com.au he had visited about “two dozen crop circles” around the globe in his career. Typically, they were between 50-500m in length, he said.
“This has led to at least one major breakthrough the discovery of a more advanced binary code than our computers currently use.”
Dr Drew claimed that aliens or human time travellers have been leaving the crop circles on Earth as messages to “us or themselves”.
WHY ARE THERE CROP CIRCLES?
Dr Drew said he was one of a handful of scientists around the world who had worked to successfully decode some of the messages in crop circles.
According to him, some crop circles provide general descriptions of the future.
“Other crop (circles) show schematic images of the future for astronomical or human events,” he said.
He said some of the decoded messages read: ‘Much pain but still time. Believe. There is good out there’; ‘Beware the bearers of false gifts and their broken promises’; ‘We oppose deception. Conduit closing’.
Dr Drew has developed at least two theories as to the purpose of the circles by reading their “advanced (version of) binary codes”.
“One theory is that they are trying to introduce themselves to us peacefully, like we do using bubbles with dolphins,” he said.
“When (humans) want to talk with dolphins we put little bubble circles under the ocean with a generator. We watch the dolphins come up and play and investigate, and we study them.
“This is called the ‘dolphin communication project’.”
He said the dynamic between the way humans interact with dolphins and whales was likely comparable to how extraterrestrials communicate with us.
“Barack or Trump have never said to a dolphin: ‘take me to your leader I want to sign a treaty with you’,” he said.
“And (the extraterrestrials are) not interested in making a treaty with us.
“They are ahead of us like we are ahead of the dolphins and the whales.”
His second theory was that the messages “are not even for us”.
Dr Drew said human time travellers from the distant future could be creating the circles as directional markers, to help them navigate “in their distant past, which is our present”.
“There are definitely humans living there in about 5000 years with time travel capability,” he said.
“They’re coming back and flying all over Earth.
“They seem to just say ‘this is a certain day’ and mark it.
“So the trouble is we don’t know space time physics enough to understand what’s happening. It’s beyond our knowledge.
HOW ARE THEY MADE?
Dr Drew said the circles appeared to be created by an “unknown energy that heats the crops up”.
“It’s like microwave energy but is something beyond earth’s science,” he said.
“It can pattern the wheat.
“No one sees or hears anything and that's why its so hard to prove. If there’s a craft, it’s silent, noiseless.”
But there’s nothing to fear, according to him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
REAL OR A HOAX?
Telling the difference between a real crop circle and a hoax is like differentiating between an original painting and a fake, according to Dr Drew.
“There are some things to look for,” he said.
Crops that are bent “halfway up” their stems, rather than on the ground ,is one telltale sign “cereologists”, or someone that advocates paranormal explanations of crop circles, look for to determine that it’s not a hoax.
“You can’t absolutely prove a crop circle wasn’t a hoax but you can give a high probability and judgment,” he said.
“If there’s a hoax the word of it gets around very fast, people are aware, people are not that easily fooled.”
In 1991, English pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley took credit for most of the crop circles across southern England made since 1978. They were inspired by the Tully “saucer nest” case in Australia, where a farmer found a flattened circle of swamp reeds after observing a UFO.
Using basic tools including a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line, they said they made complex crop circles in England — which others then copied all over the world into the 1980s.
They made a circle for journalists, which was later declared authentic by a cereologist. They then revealed their hoax to the world, spurring on even more copycats.
Dr Drew said there was a lot of scientific evidence to show that some crop circles were made by human time travellers or extraterrestrial beings. “Laboratory results on plant or soil samples taken from a crop circle in Brazil in October of 2016 show that it was formed by unknown sterilising images,” he said.
The earliest mention of a crop circle dates back to the 1500s. A woodcut from the time showed a “mowing devil” making the pattern.µ
GOVERNMENT SECRETS?
Earlier this month, US TV host Jimmy Kimmel asked former US President George Bush if he went through “secret files, the UFO documents” when he was in office.
But instead of laughing off the question, the former commander in chief replied: “Maybe.”
Mr Kimmel then asked him if there were “any great secrets you know that you can’t share with people?”
“Yeah, there are,” Mr Bush said. “But I’m not telling you.”
Many conspiracy theorists and some scientists, including Dr Drew, argued that Mr Bush’s comments indicated the US government knows much more about extraterrestrial life than it has publicly revealed.
“The politicians are scared they'll lose votes if they talk about it,” Dr Drew said.
He said international media had also played a part in causing the public to doubt the legitimacy of crop circles and aliens.
But according to him, its important for humans to keep seeking answers.
“The ET visitors have technologies which would benefit us greatly, for example, how to make safe, clean energy without burning oil, coal or gas,” Dr Drew said.
“Ultra-fast propulsion systems, based on gravity and inertia, could carry us safely to distant planets or stars.
“We may also need to upgrade our planetary defences soon, to protect against ET’s who may not be friendly.”
There’s still a lot more to be understood but Dr Drew’s hope is that he one day gets a closer look at what was inside the UFO he believes he saw as a child.
“I’d like to meet (the extraterrestrials or human time travellers) in person,” he said.
“But I don’t think they're going to do that.
“Whichever scientific team is doing this I don’t think we’re supposed to have full knowledge of it because it will interrupt their program, whatever they're doing.”
Chandra May Have First Evidence of a Young Star Devouring a Planet
Chandra May Have First Evidence of a Young Star Devouring a Planet
Chandra data indicates that a young star has likely destroyed and consumed an infant planet.
If confirmed, this would be the first time that astronomers have witnessed such an event.
The star, known as RW Aur A, is a few million years old and is located about 450 light years from Earth.
Studying this may help astronomers gain insight into the processes affecting the early stages of planet development.
This artist's illustration depicts the destruction of a young planet or planets, which scientists may have witnessed for the first time using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, as described in our latest press release. If this discovery is confirmed, it would give insight into the processes affecting the survival of infant planets.
RW Aur A is a star about 450 light years from Earth, making it relatively nearby. Since the 1930s, astronomers have studied RW Aur A and been curious about why the optical light from this star changes over time. In recent years, scientists have observed that this variability has increased, with the star dimming even more and for longer periods of time.
To investigate this mystery, a team of astronomers used Chandra to get information in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. X-rays are generally emitted by more energetic and hotter phenomena than their optical light counterparts and can reveal information about different elements, including iron.
The Chandra data suggest that the most recent dimming event from RW Aur A was caused by the collision of two "planetesimals" (that is, infant planetary bodies still in the process of formation), including at least one object large enough to be a planet.
Because the X-rays come from the hot outer atmosphere of the star, changes in the X-ray spectrum — the intensity of X-rays measured at different energies — over these three observations were used to probe the density and composition of the absorbing material around the star.
The team found that the dips in both optical and X-ray light are caused by dense gas obscuring the star's light. Also, a Chandra observation in 2017 showed strong emission from iron atoms, indicating that the disk contained at least 10 times more iron than in the 2013 observation during a bright period.
The Chandra spectra from the 2013 and 2017 observations are shown in an inset in the graphic. The sharp peak on the right side of the 2017 spectrum is a signature of a large amount of iron.
The researchers propose the excess iron was created when the two planetesimals collided. If one or both planetary bodies are made partly of iron, their smash-up could release a large amount of iron into the star's disk and temporarily obscure its light as the material falls into the star.
A paper describing these results led by Hans Moritz Guenther (MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics) appears in the most recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The other authors on the paper are Til Birnstiel (Ludwig-Maximillians-University Munich), David Huenemoerder (MIT), David Principe (MIT), Christian Schneider (Hamburger Sternwarte), Scott Wolk (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Franky Dubois (Astrolab IRIS), Ludwig Logiie (Astrolab IRIS), Steve Rau (Astrolab IRIS), and Siegfried Vanaverbeke (Astrolab IRIS). NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Un militaire sur l'USS Carl Vinson communique avec l'USS Princeton, en octobre 2001 (image d'illustration)
Selon un rapport du Pentagone cité par la presse américaine, un ovni de la taille d'un avion de ligne mais de la forme d'un «œuf allongé», est apparu à proximité d'un porte-avion américain, plusieurs jours durant en 2004.
Un rapport du Pentagone révélé par la chaîne de télévision américaine KLAS fin mai et amplement cité par la presse anglo-saxonne, livre de nouveaux détails sur un objet volant non identifié (ovni) qu'ont observé, plusieurs jours durant en 2004, des militaires américains au large de la côte californienne. Le New York Times avait publié une vidéo de l'incident en question en décembre dernier, dans un article traitant du programme d'étude des ovnis financé aux Etats-Unis par le Pentagone.
Selon ce rapport, l'objet, de la taille d'un avion de ligne et de forme ovale, a été repéré une première fois par le radar de l'USS Princeton, un porte-avion américain, alors qu'il volait à 60 000 pieds (plus de 18 000 mètres). Il a alors subitement plongé vers la surface de l'océan, pour l'atteindre en quelques secondes seulement. Peu après, l'ovni s'est éloigné à une vitesse si impressionnante que les membres d'équipage ont pensé qu'ils s'agissait d'un missile balistique.
Deux jours plus tard, toujours selon le rapport du Pentagone, l'objet est à nouveau apparu près de l'USS Princeton et a cette fois été pris en chasse par deux F-18. Mais les pilotes ont expliqué qu'ils avaient été incapables de l'intercepter, l'ovni s'étant brusquement rendu invisible. Il pouvait cependant toujours être détecté, à cause de l'onde visible à la surface de l'eau créée sous lui, «d'environ 50 à 100 mètres de diamètre».
L'engin a été décrit par un des pilotes comme étant «blanc uni, lisse, sans bords, uniformément coloré, sans nacelles, pylônes ou ailes» et ressemblant à «un œuf allongé ou un Tic Tac». D'après le rapport du Pentagone, un avion de surveillance E-2C Hawkeye a réussi à détecter l'objet mais sans pouvoir le «verrouiller», ce qui laisse penser qu'il était capable d'esquiver le radar.
Le rapport se conclut en confirmant que l'engin ne correspondait à «aucun avion ou véhicule aérien actuellement connu dans l'inventaire des Etats-Unis ou de toute autre nation étrangère».
Photo Credit: Roberto Molar-Candanosa, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science
2. 79 moons … wow
12 new moons have been discovered around Jupiter, bringing the grand total of known moons around the planet to 79. Of these 12 newly found moons, 1 is an "oddball."
NASA deployed a tiny, 26-lb (12-kg) satellite called HaloSat from the International Space Station. It will explore the halo of hot gas around the Milky Way.
Photo Credit: Retro Space Images/NASA via collectSPACE.com
4. 49 years from moonshot
50 years ago Friday (July 20), the first moon landing with Apollo 11 was still four months from being announced. Look back at where things stood on July 20,1968, and how NASA got from there to the next year's moonshot.
Researchers think that two different types of stars, pulsars and magnetars, might actually be the same type of star, just at different points in its life.
Two newfound "twin" exoplanets, discovered by direct imaging, look and act very similarly. But researchers think that they were created in very different ways.
Raging, planet-wide dust storms – like the one going on now – happen only every 6 to 8 years on Mars. Here’s how NASA spacecraft are studying it, plus a cool before-and-after video!
Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the red planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The view from May shows Valles Marineris chasms (left), Meridiani center, an autumn dust storm in Acidalia (top) and the early spring south polar cap (bottom). The view from July shows the same regions, but most of the surface was obscured by the planet-encircling dust cloud and haze.
Over the past month, Mars has put on a spectacular show in our night sky. The show culminates on July 27, 2018, when Earth will pass between Mars and the sun, bringing Mars to opposition on the same night that Mars will be near a totally eclipsed moon! All of that is wonderful for skywatchers, but space scientists are having a field day with Mars now, too. The same event that’s making Mars extra bright for us – that is, Mars’ September 16, 2018, perihelion or closest point to the sun – has also created conditions for a planet-wide dust storm, which has been raging now for over a month.
For scientists watching the red planet from data gathered by NASA’s orbiters, the past month has been a windfall. Global dust storms, where a runaway series of storms creates a dust cloud so large it envelops the planet, only appear every six to eight years (that’s three to four Mars years). Scientists still don’t understand why or how exactly these storms form and evolve.
Side-by-side movies shows how dust has enveloped the red planet, courtesy of the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) wide-angle camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
For NASA’s Opportunity rover, the dust storm has not been good news. NASA said it meant:
… a sudden drop in visibility from a clear, sunny day to that of an overcast one. Because Opportunity runs on solar energy, scientists had to suspend science activities to preserve the rover’s batteries. As of July 18, no response has been received from the rover.
But other NASA spacecraft – both on the ground and in orbit – are observing the dust storm. In fact, NASA said:
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiters are all tailoring their observations of the red planet to study this global storm and learn more about Mars’ weather patterns. Meanwhile, the Curiosity rover is studying the dust storm from the Martian surface.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has two instruments studying the dust storm. Each day, its Mars Color Imager maps the entire planet in mid-afternoon to track the evolution of the storm. Meanwhile, its Mars Climate Sounder instrument measures how the atmosphere’s temperature changes with altitude. Rich Zurek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is the project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Zurak said:
The very fact that you can start with something that’s a local storm, no bigger than a small [U.S.] state, and then trigger something that raises more dust and produces a haze that covers almost the entire planet is remarkable,
The MAVEN orbiter has been circling Mars since 2014. Since it entered Mars’ orbit, said Bruce Jakosky, the orbiter’s principle investigator,
… one of the things we’ve been waiting for is a global dust storm.
NASA said MAVEN isn’t studying the dust storm itself. Instead:
… the MAVEN team wants to study how the dust storm affects Mars’ upper atmosphere, about 62 miles (more than 100 km) above the surface — where the dust doesn’t even reach. MAVEN’s mission is to figure out what happened to Mars’ early atmosphere. We know that at some point billions of years ago, liquid water pooled and ran along Mars’ surface, which means that its atmosphere must have been thicker and more insulating, similar to Earth’s.
Since MAVEN arrived at Mars in 2014, its investigations have found that this atmosphere may have been stripped away by a torrent of solar wind over several hundred million years, between 3.5 and 4.0 billion years ago.
But there are still nuances to figure out, such as how dust storms like the current one affect how atmospheric molecules escape into space … For instance, the dust storm acts as an atmospheric insulator, trapping heat from the sun. Does this heating change the way molecules escape the atmosphere?
Most of NASA’s spacecraft are studying the dust storm from above. And the Opportunity rover is currently inoperable. But the Curiosity rover – designed to explore Gale Crater on Mars – isn’t suffering the same fate as Opportunity. That’s because Curiosity doesn’t run on solar power. It is a nuclear-powered science machine – and therefore largely immune to Mars’ dust-darkened skies – still collecting science data as the dust flies all around it.
We’re working double-duty right now. Our newly recommissioned drill is acquiring a fresh rock sample. But we are also using instruments to study how the dust storm evolves.
NASA said:
Curiosity has a number of “eyes” that can determine the abundance and size of dust particles based on how they scatter and absorb light. That includes its Mastcam, ChemCam … its suite of weather instruments [called the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS]. REMS can also help study atmospheric tides – shifts in pressure that move as waves across the entire planet’s thin air. These tides change drastically based on where the dust is globally, not just inside Gale crater.
The global storm may also reveal secrets about Martian dust devils and winds. Dust devils can occur when the planet’s surface is hotter than the air above it. Heating generates whirls of air, some of which pick up dust and become dust devils. During a dust storm, there’s less direct sunlight and lower daytime temperatures; this might mean fewer devils swirling across the surface.
Even new drilling can advance dust storm science: watching the small piles of loose material created by Curiosity’s drill is the best way of monitoring winds.
Scientists expect the Mars dust storm to last several more months. Expect some new science results from this grand opportunity to study nature on another world!
Physics professor unveiled: "Face on Mars" clearly has a mouth full of teeth
Physics professor unveiled: "Face on Mars" clearly has a mouth full of teeth
Several studies and scientists have argued on the basis of strictly scientific criteria that the "face of Mars" was indeed built by a very highly developed Mars civilization from the past of Mars. An exact analysis also reveals a mouth full of "teeth".
Why do we ignore such important discoveries and fail to report on them and highlight their importance simply because they contradict established science?
The anomalous features of the so-called "Mars Face" feature, as seen in the 1976 Viking image, were refuted 20 years ago with reference to a 1998 Mars Global Surveyor image. Ten years later, in 2008, however, a much higher-quality image was achieved with details that were identical to the original from 1976.
By means of comparisons, we show how this 2008 picture can better identify the identified anomalous details.
The following picture was taken by NASA in 1976
Among them an image of Mark Carlotto, an image scientist with 30 years of experience in satellite remote sensing and digital image processing, who studied optics, signal and image processing at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1972-1981 and received his doctorate in electrical engineering there. He has held several positions in science and industry. Here are some of the peer-reviewed essays he wrote and co-authored before this one.
Below is a screenshot of a section of the study describing what happened to the picture that was published in 1998.
NASA released the image on April 5, 1998, with low contrast to make the feature look flat, faceless and without three-dimensional depth. The lack of tonal value details is surprising.
The study then continues to compare a decade later with a picture that seems very strange because they look so different.
What's really going on here? Is NASA changing its images?
Below you can see the MRO CTX image: B01_010143_2216, received on 24 September 2008, from a distance of just over 311 km. This image has not been edited and is shown here as it was received from the MRO HiRise website.
According to the authors, the following picture shows "clearly an 'eyeball' in the eye socket and 'teeth' in the mouth area".
Comparison of Viking single image 70A13 with 2008 MRO CTX image B01_010143_2216
It seems that there are a lot of people who are firmly convinced that we are visited by ETs and that this is hushed up. People aren't stupid, and all these people just don't believe that for no reason.
The truth is out there, and it has enormous effects on perception, consciousness, spirituality, historiography, and science.
This matter really does not leave any aspect of humanity untouched.
NASA Scientists Claim the Face & Pyramid on Mars is Real "NASA is Covering Them Up"
1. The real perspective of Cydonya Face. Fill the void (mirror) and you have the real Cydonya Lord
2. Half of the face, from Mars Global Surveyor, then the half flipped and put side by side, to create a whole face. This is what it would have looked like a million years or so ago. Can you say, planet of the apes?
3. Not well studied but this is pretty hard to deny...
New Look Inside Sun's Atmosphere Yields Clues About Mysterious Solar Wind
New Look Inside Sun's Atmosphere Yields Clues About Mysterious Solar Wind
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Heavy data cleaning allowed scientists to study the sun's corona, or outer atmosphere, in stunning detail.
Credit: Craig DeForest, SwRI
Our sun is surrounded by a deep, million-degree atmosphere that affects everything in the solar system — but how, precisely, it does so is a mystery.
The atmosphere, called the corona, produces the solar wind — a flood of charged particles that stream out of the sun and across the solar system. As the solar wind travels to Earth, it brings threats of radiation and magnetic interference.
Now, in a new study, researchers have finally managed to watch it being born in the sun's outer corona. The images provide enough detail for researchers to be able to start piecing together why it flows in such complex ways. They have concluded that one likely explanation is that the turbulence is a legacy of where it comes from. [During Eclipses, Astronomers Try to Reveal the Secrets of the Solar Wind]
"Previous images showed the outer corona as a smooth structure, but in deep space, the solar wind is turbulent and gusty," co-author Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas,said in a university statement. "Using new techniques to improve image fidelity, we realized that the corona is not smooth, but structured and dynamic. Every structure that we thought we understood turns out to be made of smaller ones, and to be more dynamic than we thought."
The research relied on data from STEREO, a NASA mission that has been orbiting the sun since 2006. It carries an instrument called a coronagraph, which uses a black disk to block out the bright surface of the sun. That lets scientists see what's happening in the corona, which is much fainter than the surface and would otherwise be washed out by its light.
But that data hasn't been detailed enough to let scientists see what's really happening inside the corona, according to NASA. To tackle that problem, the researchers first asked for a specific type of data from the STEREO team: long-exposure images that would capture fainter signals. Then, they set to work laboriously cleaning up the data to remove confusing factors like the light of background stars or false signals from the instrument itself.
The cleanup involved piecing together the images in a particularly careful way that considered how quickly the solar wind was flowing out and shifting the images accordingly. To do so, they matched up images over time, according to their place in the flow of solar wind, rather than their specific location in space — like tracking individual patches of solar wind as they streamed out of the sun.
The process is the equivalent of aligning sequential images of a log drifting in a current so that the log, rather than the trees along the riverbank, stacks up in every image — offering a more detailed image of the log.
The solar wind, as seen before (left) and after (right) serious imaging processing. While the processed image may look fuzzier, it's actually a better view of the solar wind, with background stars and dust eliminated from view.
Credit: Craig DeForest, SwRI/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The result is a much clearer picture of the flow of solar wind, showing the smaller structures that make up the seemingly disorganized whole. That structure, hidden below the smooth surface, helps explain why the solar wind flows so turbulently as it travels farther away from the sun.
The research is described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 18.
The new imaging also highlighted a region where things got particularly interesting, about 4.3 million miles (7 million kilometers) above the sun's surface. Before and after this point, the solar wind was relatively easy to track, but in this region, the flow seemed to hit a bump in the road. The team isn't sure what's happening there.
Conveniently enough, NASA is due to launch a new mission that will bring scientists even more data about the sun's corona. The Parker Solar Probe, scheduled for launch in early August with data collection beginning later this year, will eventually fly directly through this region of our star, dipping below the bumpy section — and hopefully deciphering still more mysteries about the solar wind and its birthplace.
Chinese residents claimed to have sighted UFOs after several mysterious lights were seen flashing in the sky of Chongqing.
The strange bright dots appeared to move in a line as one disappeared and another one emerged in front of it. The eerie scenes from Wednesday have been captured in videos, which are trending on Chinese social media platforms.
While the rumours of extra-terrestrial activities were circulating among Chinese web users, a leading UFO expert claimed that the footage could be of 'a rocket zooming into the atmosphere'.
Video emerged online shows mysterious lights moving in a linear motion in the sky in Chongqing, China (left). It disappeared and reappeared in front of one another (right)
The series of baffling videos were posted yesterday on Weibo, a Twitter-like social media platform.
They showed several orange-red lights following each other in a linear motion.
Some web users claimed the scene looked like a cell splitting in the sky, whilst others said aliens were visiting China.
Weibo user 'wangshuashuadishua' said the phenomenon resembled 'a person making smoke rings while walking'; while 'BIM' gushed 'the aliens finally made their visit to China, they used to go to America only'.
There were also web users claiming to have seen the same mysterious pattern appearing above other cities, including Shanghai in east China and Xinjiang Autonomous Region in north-west China.
Residents of Chongqing wondered if aliens were visiting the city after sighting the unusual lights on Wednesday night (left). Web users claimed it was also seen in other cities (right)
One influential science blogger, known as 'Steed's scarf' on Weibo, has another theory.
'Steed's scarf', who has more than 4.5 million Weibo followers, believed that the lights came from a moving plane and they were the aircraft's navigation lights.
In a post on July 19, he wrote: 'If you watch the footage carefully, the lights actually appeared in pairs. It came from a dark-coloured aircraft, so it was difficult to spot.
'The lights appeared a few seconds on the camera but as the plane kept moving, another pair of lights appeared. So it looks like one following each other.'
Leading British UFO expert Nigal Watson, the author of Haynes UFO Investigations Manual, told MailOnline that the footage 'could be of a rocket zooming into the atmosphere'.
'The pulses of light are either blasts from its engines or reflections. Similar lights were filmed elsewhere in China, suggesting it was something of this nature,' he said.
Chinese authorities are yet to comment on the matter.
Chinese stad in rep en roer na verschijnen mysterieuze vliegende lichten. Zijn dit UFO’s?
Chinese stad in rep en roer na verschijnen mysterieuze vliegende lichten. Zijn dit UFO’s?
De Chinese stad Chongqing is in rep en roer nadat mysterieuze vliegende lichten boven de stad zijn verschenen.
Beelden van het tafereel verschenen op Chinese social mediaplatforms, waar ze enige tijd trending topic waren.
Terwijl Chinese internetgebruikers dachten aan buitenaardse activiteiten, claimde een UFO-expert dat de beelden mogelijk een raket in de atmosfeer toonden.
Andere steden
De filmpjes werden op Weibo geplaatst, een Twitter-achtig social mediaplatform. In de filmpjes zijn meerdere oranjerode lichten te zien.
Sommigen zeiden dat het deed denken aan cellen die zich deelden in de lucht, terwijl anderen zeiden dat China werd bezocht door aliens.
Meerdere mensen claimden dat hetzelfde mysterieuze patroon ook boven andere steden is verschenen, waaronder Shanghai in het oosten van China en de autonome regio Xinjiang in het noord-westen.
Nog niet gereageerd
Een invloedrijke blogger op Weibo dacht dat de lichten afkomstig waren van een vliegtuig.
“Als je goed naar de beelden kijkt zie je dat de lichten in paren verschijnen,” zei de blogger, die meer dan 4,5 miljoen volgers heeft. “Ze waren afkomstig van een donker vliegtuig en dus moeilijk te spotten.”
UFO-expert Nigel Watson zei tegen de Daily Mail dat het een raket in de atmosfeer zou kunnen zijn geweest.
De Chinese autoriteiten hebben nog niet gereageerd op de waarnemingen.
ONTVOERDE PROFESSOR HEEFT FOTO'S VAN BUITENAARDSEN ( VIDEO )
ONTVOERDE PROFESSOR HEEFT FOTO'S VAN BUITENAARDSEN ( VIDEO )
Er zijn genoeg verhalen van mensen die zeggen ontvoerd te zijn door buitenaardsen, maar nooit zie je eigenlijk foto’s van die wezens.
Dat ligt anders bij de oud professor Maurizio Cavallo uit Italië, want hij heeft wel degelijk opnames van de buitenaardsen die hem hebben ontvoerd.
De nu 63-jarige Maurizio Cavallo heeft een wel heel bijzonder verhaal en hij heeft foto’s waarvan hij zegt dat het de buitenaardsen afbeeldt die hem ontvoerden.
Vroeger was Maurizio Cavallo professor aan de Volksuniversiteit in Vercelli in Italië, maar tegenwoordig is hij meer auteur en journalist.
Het leven van Cavallo veranderde compleet toen hij naar eigen zeggen in september 1981 werd ontvoerd door buitenaardsen afkomstig van een planeet met de naam Clarion. Deze planeet bevindt zich in een sterrenstelsel met de naam Adelaar op een afstand van 150.000 lichtjaren van onze aarde.
Op aarde hebben de buitenaardsen die hem ontvoerden een ondergrondse basis in het Amazone gebied en dat is ook de plek waar ze hem naartoe brachten en aan het werk gingen met het verruimen van het bewustzijn van Cavallo.
Tijdens zijn verblijf aldaar slaagde Cavallo erin om de nodige foto’s te maken van de buitenaardse wezens.
Niet alleen waren daar de originele buitenaardsen, maar ook de zogenaamde hybriden, een kruising tussen mensen en buitenaardsen.
De nu 63-jarige Cavallo geeft hoog op over de buitenaardsen en noemt ze sterk geëvolueerde tijdloze wezens die afkomstig zijn uit dat deel van de kosmos waar eeuwigheid wordt geschapen.
Verder zegt Cavallo dat onze opvattingen over de ruimte niet kloppen, dat er nooit een big bang is geweest en dat buitenaardsen veel sneller kunnen reizen dan de snelheid van het licht. Daarnaast dat er 12 planeten in ons zonnestelsel zijn en geen acht of negen.
Verder zegt hij dat er wel degelijk zuurstof en water op de maan aanwezig is.
Iemand die veel contact heeft gehad met Maurizio Cavallo is de Italiaanse journaliste Paola Harris.
Zij heeft hem persoonlijk geïnterviewd en in de volgende video vertelt zij onder andere het vreemde, maar ook fascinerende verhaal van Maurizio Cavallo. Het deel over Cavallo begint rond minuut 53.
If you thought that Roswell was/is the most controversial of all alleged crashed UFO cases, you would be wrong. There is also the matter of the much-debated claims of a UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. It’s a story which was made famous in Frank Scully’s 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon (although certainly not all, such as Scott and Suzanne Ramsey) dismiss Aztec as nothing but a hoax, one perpetrated by a shady businessman / conman named Silas Newton.
There is an interesting aspect to the Newton / Aztec story, which is worth noting. By his own admittance, and after the Aztec story surfaced, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as the late UFO researcher (and CIA employee) Karl Pflock worded it. Those same representatives told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was complete bullshit. Incredibly, though, they wanted him to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone who would listen.
This led Pflock to wonder: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?” Far more intriguing, though, is the next question that Karl posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?”
Pflock – a CIA intelligence officer, and a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration – was not just fascinated by the Aztec saga of 1948, per se. He was also fascinated by the possibility that someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military – and maybe even a combination of all three – had created the story to hide something else. Or, at the very least, had encouraged the telling and retelling of the Aztec story for psy-op-basedreasons.
I know just how fascinated Karl was when it came to Aztec and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” I first met Karl in 2003 – at a UFO gig in the small town of Aztec, New Mexico. For a number of years, the conference was a yearly event. But, no more. Karl and I were in touch by landline and fax (how quaint) as far back as the mid-1990s. When Karl and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Karl’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds and hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy. He thought we would make a good team, and particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Texas, which is, of course, not at all far from New Mexico, where Karl resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.
As I listened, Karl told me that his idea was, essentially, to make the book a biography on Newton, but with the Aztec affair being the main thrust. I thought it was a good idea and Karl suggested we prepare a synopsis. Which is exactly what he did. The book was going to be called Silas the Magnificent: A True Tale of Greed, Credulity, and (Maybe) Government Chicanery and Cover-up in 1950s America. Note that the book makes no mention of UFOs in its title and sub-title.
Unfortunately, the project was permanently derailed when Karl fell sick with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He unfortunately died from the effects of ALS on June 5, 2006, at the age of just sixty-three. Karl is gone, but the synopsis still exists. It would have made a good book. And, very possibly, it just might have revealed more of the psy-op/disinformation aspect of Aztec and of other crashed UFO yarns of bygone decades.
Comet PANSTARRS C/2017 S3 in Outburst - Its Atmosphere is Twice as Wide as the Planet Jupiter
Oumuamua actually is a comet or eventually a spaceship” that arrived from out of our solar system then we may now be looking at the second object of this class.
Comet C/2017 S3 has an eccentricity of 1.0000787, which makes its orbit hyperbolic. Its inclination is about 99 degrees to the plane of the solar system. This makes it very unlikely that it a comet from our own solar system, kicked into a hyperbolic, sun-escaping orbit by a close encounter with Jupiter.
This strange comet suddenly flashed on July 2, 2018.
Michael Jäger took the above picture of the comet's expanding green atmosphere shortly after the outburst.
The gas cloud around the comet's nucleus is about 4 arc minutes wide," says Jäger. That means the comet's atmosphere is 260,000 km in diameter, almost twice as wide as the planet Jupiter.
Barely a week later, the comet fizzled, dimming almost as much as it had brightened. Then it exploded again, its green atmosphere ballooned in size, large enough to swallow Jupiter twice.
Michael Jaeger captured the comet's newly-formed tail on July 20, 2018 see GIF animation below.
Why is Comet PanSTARRS so unpredictable? Is it really a comet or is it something like Oumuamua?
They suggest that probably it has never felt the heat of the sun before. The comet is arriving from the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of fresh comets in the outermost solar system.
And this is its first time among the inner planets. Unfamiliar warmth is making veins of fresh ice pop and fizz as the comet approaches.
It is expected to brighten many-fold as it approaches the sun inside the orbit of Mercury in August, a narrow open-ended path that will ultimately fling it back to the outer solar system, reports spaceweather.
Black UFOs Size Of Car Shoot Past SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch, July 2018, UFO Sighting News
Black UFOs Size Of Car Shoot Past SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch, July 2018, UFO Sighting News
Date of sighting: July 2018
Location of sighting: SpaceX Launch site
I was watching the SpaceX launch of the Falcon Heavy when I noticed that some dark black objects shot past the rocket at incredible speed. The object were 1000X faster than birds and 20X faster than a jet, so what the heck could it be other than alien craft that are investigating and observing the progress of Elon Musk. The UFO was the size of a minivan and there were several of them. Now my estimate of its size is very conservative. Being about 5+ meters long, the UFO could be as large as 8 meters in comparison with the width of the rocket. Why were they moving so fast? So they wouldn't be noticed by the human eye. Well, most human eyes, but apparently not fast enough.
Glowing White UFOs At International Space Station During Space Walk, July 10, 2018, UFO Sighting News
Glowing White UFOs At International Space Station During Space Walk, July 10, 2018, UFO Sighting News
Date of sighting: July 10, 2018 Location of sighting: Earths orbit at Space Station Source: MUFON #93505 This video is part of a MUFON report that came in today. In the video we see several white UFOs that move past the space station during a space walk this week. The UFOs are there to observe how humans do things on the outside of the space station and in stressful environments. Watching humans under stress teaches aliens a lot about us, including how we may react to meeting a real alien. Scott C. Waring
This article was produced in partnership with the History Channel's Project Blue Book, who sponsor IFLScience. Learn more here.
In recent months, leaked military intelligence has been attracting international attention, yet again prompting the question: Is there something – or someone – else out there?
Of course, the question of intelligent life beyond our planet is nothing new. A top-secret United States program, made available online in 2015, even shows the lengths governments have gone to in order to investigate that very question. The program, called Project Blue Book, is the longest-running UFO investigation conducted by the US government.
It all started in 1947 when the government began conducting investigations into unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and related phenomena under the name Project Sign, which later evolved into Project Grudge. From 1952 to 1969, the United States Air Force worked under Project Blue Book to scientifically analyze data related to UFOs and determine if they were a threat to national security.
Of the 12,618 UFO sightings recorded during Project Blue Book, 701 remain "unidentified" to this day.µFBI
In the short amount of time the program was in operation, there were 12,618 sightings researched and investigated – 701 of which remain “unidentified” to this day. More than half a century later, about 130,000 pages of files from the project were made available to the public online.
Outlined in the heavily marked pages are some of the project’s most famous cases, including the 27-minute “dogfight” between a UFO and a North Dakota Air National Guard lieutenant in 1948 as well as the formation of lights seen over a small Texas town for two months in 1951 known as the Lubbock Lights. There's even the case of the Flatwoods Monster that tormented a small West Virginia town and terrified a nation in 1952, which remains unsolved to this day.
In just a few months, these cases will be investigated in a new scripted drama series called Project Blue Book coming to cable network HISTORY this winter. The all-star cast in each episode draws from actual case files and methodically blends UFO theories with authentic historical accounts.
Whether you have your own personal out-of-this-world extraterrestrial experience or you’re a total skeptic, you can check it all out for yourself at Comic-Con in San Diego this weekend. Here, you can take time to investigate past UFO cases for yourself and have a professional sketch artist bring your own UFO experience to life (if you have one, of course).
In addition, a collaboration between HISTORY and SpaceSpeak is teaming up to try to answer one of humanity’s greatest burning questions: Is there life beyond Earth? To help find out, you can now beam a text message made up of radio waves billions of miles into space using a transmitter attached to a parabolic dish. Developed by SpaceSpeak, the technology allows these messages to travel through space for millions of years. Senders can program their message to automatically rebroadcast each year and track how far the message has traveled.
From top-secret programs to curious citizens, it seems the quest for alien life continues to capture the attention of both believers and skeptics alike.
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
Blood Moon 2018: Longest Total Lunar Eclipse of Century Occurs July 27
By Elizabeth Howell, Space.com Contributor
Skywatcher Giuseppe Petricca took this image of a "supermoon" total lunar eclipse on Sept. 27, 2015, from Pisa, Italy, about 2 minutes prior to the beginning of the totality phase.
The longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century is less than two weeks away.
The total phase of the "blood moon" eclipse of July 27 will last 1 hour and 43 minutes, during which Earth's natural satellite will turn a spectacular red or ruddy-brown color. From start to finish, the entire celestial event will last nearly 4 hours.
The eclipse won't be visible to viewers in North America, except via webcasts. But observers in much of Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia and the Indian Ocean region will get an eyeful, given cooperative weather, according to lunar scientist Noah Petro, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. [In Photos: The Rare Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse of 2018]
July's total lunar eclipse occurs on the same day the planet Mars reaches its opposition, when it will shine at its best in the night sky. This month, Mars will be at its closest to Earth since 2003. After opposition, when Mars will be brightest, it will reach that closest point on July 31. You can learn more about that event in our dedicated guide here: Mars at Opposition 2018: How to See It and What to Expect
Unlike with solar eclipses, you need no special equipment to observe lunar eclipses. These latter events, which occur when the moon passes into Earth's shadow, are safe to view directly with the naked eye, telescopes or binoculars.
The moon turns deep red or reddish brown during eclipses, instead of going completely dark. That's because some of the sunlight going through Earth's atmosphere is bent around the edge of our planet and falls onto the moon's surface. Earth's air also scatters more shorter-wavelength light (in colors such as green or blue); what's left is the longer-wavelength, redder end of the spectrum.
Where and when will it be visible?
The timing if this total lunar eclipse means it won't be visible from North America, though much of the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth will see part or all of the eclipse. The entire eclipse will be visible from Africa, the Middle East and countries in central Asia. The eclipse will be visible from eastern South America as it is ending, and from Australia as it is beginning.
The time of greatest eclipse will be 4:21 p.m. EDT (2021 GMT) on July 27, according to EarthSky.org. The total eclipse will last from 3:30 p.m. to 5:13 p.m. EDT (1930 to 2113 GMT). There will also be some time before and after when the moon is in the lighter part of Earth's shadow, which is called the penumbra. Including that penumbral time, the eclipse will last for 3 hours and 55 minutes.
In July 27, 2018, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. This NASA chart by eclipse expert Fred Espenak shows details and visibility projections for this “blood moon” eclipse.
Credit: Fred Espenak/NASA GSFC
Why is it the longest of the century?
"What controls the duration of the lunar eclipse is the position of the moon as it passes through the Earth's shadow," Petro told Space.com. The darkest part of Earth's shadow is called the umbra. You can picture the umbra as a cone extending from Earth in the opposite direction to the sun, Petro explained.
"The moon can either graze through the cone, or go right through the middle. That [the middle] gets a longer-duration eclipse," he said. "This time, the moon is passing closer to the center of that cone, and it's therefore a little bit longer than the eclipse we had back in January."
Additionally, the moon will be at a farther point from Earth along its orbit, EarthSky pointed out. That means the moon will appear slightly smaller in the sky and will take a little bit longer to go through Earth's shadow.
Petro is also the project scientist for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter(LRO), which has been orbiting the moon for nine years. It is best-known for obtaining detailed information on water ice and taking high-resolution pictures of spacecraft on the lunar surface. Because LRO is an older probe, most of its components (except for battery warmers and the like) will be turned off during the eclipse, to preserve the solar-powered spacecraft's battery and keep it safe during the greatest part of the eclipse, Petro said.
When is the next lunar eclipse?
The next total lunar eclipse visible from North America will occur on Jan. 21, 2019. Totality on that day will last 1 hour and 2 minutes, and the eclipse will especially favor viewers on the West Coast. That year will also see a partial eclipse, on July 16, 2019 — the 50th anniversary of the launch of the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11. LRO will likely still be operating then, having passed its 10th anniversary of arriving at the moon on June 23, 2019.
Editor's note: If you capture an amazing photo or video of the total lunar eclipse or any other night-sky sight and would like to share it with Space.com for a story or gallery, send images and comments to spacephotos@space.com.
Wandering Star May Have Disrupted Outer Solar System's Order
Wandering Star May Have Disrupted Outer Solar System's Order
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's depiction of Sedna, hidden in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
There's something strange about the outer solar system — and that could be the signature of a long-ago visit to our neighborhood, according to a new study that looked to simulate how the outer solar system might have ended up so oddly arranged.
Astronomers have been wrestling with a few puzzles about the neighborhood for a while now. First, there's just not nearly as much stuff out there, all told, as they would expect. Also, it's odd that Neptune is more massive than the closer-in Uranus. And many of the small objects in the outer swath — like Sedna, a strange dwarf planet — follow extreme, stretched orbits at stark angles to the rest of the solar system's more orderly inhabitants.
Those quirks suggest that something must have stirred up the pot after the planets and large moons clumped together and formed out of the cloud of dust surrounding our sun early in its life. One possible culprit is a star that might have slipped next to our solar system and tugged objects off their original paths, throwing some out of the solar system entirely and skewing the orbits of others. [Planet 10? Another Earth-Size World May Lurk in the Outer Solar System]
That's not a new idea, but astronomers had thought that it was a pretty unlikely scenario. They expected that a close stellar flyby would have been pretty rare, starting about 10 million years after the birth of the Milky Way, when they thought objects would still be busy forming in the outer solar system.
But recently, scientists have been able to study many more young solar systems, and they've realized that, early in their lives, their outer edges can be more developed than expected. That means that an early flyby could still do the trick when it comes to explaining our solar system's oddities.
So, the team behind the new research ran a set of simulations to see how likely it was that a neighboring star might have snuck past our solar system in just such a way that it explains what we see today.
That calculation is pretty promising, and the researchers claim such a model may explain all the weird qualities of the outer solar system. The research is described in a recent paper posted to the preprint server arXiv.org.
Next, the team wants to keep testing the hypothesis, making their models more detailed and exploring more details of how the region could have responded to such a close approach.
Previously unseen documents reveal how officials at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence handled the 'UFO mania' of the late 1990s.
The truth is out there … and it’s not from another planet. Previously unseen documents reveal how officials at the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence handled the “UFO mania” of the late 1990s.
In 1997, there was massive spike in interest around UFOs, fueled by the 50th anniversary of the purported UFO incident in Roswell, NM. and the global popularity of the “X-Files” TV series.
Set against this backdrop, over-worked officials at the Ministry of Defence sought to cut their commitment to investigating UFO reports, the Guardian reports.
The documents were obtained from the MoD by Dr. David Clarke, a principal research fellow at the U.K’s Sheffield Hallam University. “The new papers show the UFO desk head in 1997 ‘wanted to get rid of’ an issue they considered a ‘diversion from their main duties’,” Clarke wrote in a blog post. “Within the files civil servants, intelligence officers and military staff debate how the British Government should respond to growing public interest in the phenomena and what they called ‘the media’s obsession with UFOs’.”
The UFO documents
(Dr David Clarke/Sheffield Hallam University)
The files run to more than 2,500 pages and some of the more sensitive papers, declassified from “secret,” are heavily redacted, according to Clarke. “What has survived the censor’s pen paints a fascinating picture of the arguments that raged behind closed doors in Whitehall around the 50th anniversary of the UFO mystery in 1997,” he wrote.
One RAF Wing Commander, for example, urged caution on shifting focus away from UFOs. “He argued that as MoD had not carried out any study of the UFO data they had collected since the 1970s it was not credible – and also politically risky – to continue to claim UFOs posed no ‘threat to the realm’,” Clarke explained.
In 1996, the MoD commissioned a defense contractor to produce a comprehensive report on UFO sightings, which were carefully described as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).
The report, which analyzed a database of sightings between 1987 and 1997, was delivered in 2000. The study duly found that sightings could be explained by a variety of known phenomena, both man-made and natural. The incidence of relatively rare natural phenomena was also noted.
This opened the door for the MoD to start scaling back its UFO-related operations. The DI55 department, which had secretly collected data on potential UFO sightings since 1967, closed at the end of 2000. The MoD’s UFO Desk closed in 2009.
It appears, however, that the writing was already on the wall for the MoD’s UFO operations long before the report was finished. In a document dated April 16 1998, the report’s author writes: “I am particularly looking ahead to my expected recommendation, that DI55 should no longer be involved in UAP monitoring.”
“It was the end-game,” Clarke told Fox News. “They created a definitive study that would draw a line under their involvement in the subject.”
The academic notes that in 1997 MoD officials were clearly swamped with reports of UFO sightings. At that time, the Ministry even had a UFO hotline that members of the public could call. “The workload on the subject had trebled as a result of what was going on in popular culture,” he said.
“All our historic files which refer to UFOs have either been released, or are in the process of being released to The National Archives,” explained the MoD, in a statement emailed to Fox News. “The MoD continues to have no opinion on the existence, or otherwise, of extra-terrestrial life and does not investigate reported unidentified flying object sightings.”
Asked by Reddit to name the creepiest thing he’s ever dealt with in space, former astronaut and retired US Navy captain Scott Kelly didn’t hold back. In the video, posted Wednesday, he revealed it was a huge floating orb of sulfuric acid and astronaut pee.
“I had to clean up a gallon-sized ball of urine mixed with acid,” Kelly told Biography.com in a video interview produced with Reddit. “Essentially, the sulfuric acid that is mixed with the urine basically keeps the toilet from clogging up.”
“If you could imagine, something like Drano.”
The specific piece of hardware that Kelly’s referring to here is the International Space Station’s E-K pre-treatment toilet tank. The E-K introduces astronaut urine to a mixture of water, sulfuric acid, and chromium oxide — the latter of which helps to prevent oxidation and gives the solution an alien-like (but also, maybe, less gross) purple color. The top photo on this article doesn’t actually depict the urine-acid ball but approximates what it might look like; the green orb is actually an experiment Kelly once ran on the ISS using water, green food coloring and an antacid tablet designed to visualize water’s complex physics in zero gravity.
Nearly all varieties of stainless steel contain at least 10.5 percent chromium, and it is the invisible surface layer of chromium oxide created by these oxidation reactions that helps to keep that steel from rusting (that is, oxidizing). You can imagine how important adding more of that chemical might be for restroom facilities inside of a hermetically sealed can of human beings orbiting the Earth.
Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide with a space toilet on the ISS.
While you’re here thinking about it: the ISS had a major overhaul to its bathroom system in 2008, installing a system that actually harvests all wastewater and recycles it into potable drinking water. This wastewater includes: all of the astronauts’ urine, the water used to brush their teeth and conduct other personal hygiene activities, and even the excess moisture in the air.
During the so-called Year-Long Mission (Ron Howard voice: “It was 11 months.”), NASA estimates that Kelly consumed somewhere around 193 gallons (730 liters) of water recycled from the team’s urine and sweat (as well as his own).
Kelly is, of course, only one in a long line of space plumbers. This lucrative, high-demand trade job has also been performed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide; cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko; and Italian European Space Agency astronaut and Italian Air Force pilot, Samantha Cristoforetti.
Samantha Cristoforetti✔@AstroSamantha
In space-plumber mode, replacing the pre-treat tank in our toilet. In modalita' "idraulica spaziale".
While the urine-acid orb might be the creepiest or grossest thing that Kelly has ever experienced in space, it’s very likely not the nastiest thing anyone has ever dealt with up there. That distinction would have to go one of the innumerable horror stories to come out of the Soviet space station Mir — which was plagued by hidden orbs of watery mold, fires, porthole-damaging fungal infections, and the occasional power failure. (Mir was like an RV driven by a touring 80s hardcore band. It was gross and it ruled.)
If you think you can handle it, you can watch the rest of Kelly’s admittedly less scatological AMA answers here.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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