Is NASA giving its early rocket engineers who were extracted from Germany after their country was defeated in World War II one last salute before they’re all gone? That’s what some are implying as it fires up the New Horizons spacecraft to ready it for a visit to Ultima Thule – a peanut-shaped space rock (or possibly rocks) named after the mythical homeland of the Aryan race and popularized by a favorite book of Heinrich Himmler. Should the spaceship be renamed Nazi Horizon?

7 Facts About NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission!

Remember New Horizon? That’s the tiny space probe which visited Pluto in July 2015 and sent back dazzling photos of the dwarf who is still ap planet to many. After the flyby ended in October 2015, New Horizon became the fifth manmade probe to leave the solar system on its way to its next mission – a rendezvous with Kuiper belt object (486958) 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019.

Artist’s depiction of 2014 MU69

However, in this age of cigar-shaped intergalactic asteroids that might be space ships, 2014 MU69 is far too boring of a name, so NASA held a nicknaming contest and the winner was “Ultima Thule” (pronounced ultima thoo-lee). The press release explained that: “Thule was a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography. Ultima Thule means “beyond Thule”– beyond the borders of the known world—symbolizing the exploration of the distant Kuiper Belt and Kuiper Belt objects that New Horizons is performing, something never before done.”

Apparently, they didn’t go far enough into the Wikipedia pageto read that “extreme right occultists believed in a historical Thule, or Hyperborea, as the ancient origin of the “Aryan race.”” This was spread by the Thule Society, which promoted its close ties links to the Nazi party and its origin story, which came from the Oera Linda Book, which was allegedly discovered in the 1800s and, after being translated into German, became a favorite of Himmler. While too late to stop the Nazis, the book was discredited by experts as “a temporary hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians and as an experiential exemplary exercise in reading the Holy Bible in a non-fundamentalist, symbolical way.”

New Horizons Spacecraft Could Visit Kuiper Belt Objects After Pluto

How did NASA miss this? The nicknaming contest, which ended on December 6 after a 5-day extension due to its massive popularity, received 115,000 submissions of 34.000 names which were narrowed down to 29 (plus 8 from NASA) before Ultima Thule was chosen.

“We are grateful to those who proposed such an interesting and inspirational nickname.”

NASA Wants You To Nickname New Horizons' Next Target

Interesting and inspirational? To whom? Operation Paperclip secretly brought over 1.600 German rocket and space scientists, including Wernher von Braun and other former members and leaders of the Nazi Party, to work on the U.S. space program. There is no question their contributions were significant and, despite their backgrounds, they were recognized for them. However, Georg von Tiesenhausen, considered to be the last one, died in June 2018 at the age of 104.

Pluto

Is the naming of the space rock Ultima Thule really an innocent choice? What about the Thule Air Base in Greenland where a meteor recently exploded and the U.S. Air Force was strangely silent? Is there a sinister connection?

How far out do you want to go? What’s the real story behind the Ultima Thule space rock? Is it the home of the long-rumored Nazi space base? Is it a hint about something else? Will we ever find out?

Ancient MAYA - Why the Collapse?

What causes civilizations to collapse? Surely, it has to be something as monumental and awe inspiring as the civilization itself: the arrival of a strange alien invading force from beyond the ocean, mass outbreak of disease, the turning of the cosmic clock signaling the changing of the ages. Maybe sometimes. Sometimes, however, it’s a lot more mundane, banal, and terrifying in its own right. That seems to be the case with the collapse of the Mayan empire, the mysterious and often misunderstood empire that dominated the Yucatan peninsula for thousands of years. According to a paper published in the journal Science, scientists say they’ve finally been able to measure and quantify one of the main factors in the slow decline of the mysterious classical Mayan civilization: just not enough water.

Mayan pyramid.

The first Maya villages formed around 2,000 BCE, from there a massive and singular empire grew for the next 2,800 years. The Maya developed their own hieroglyphic system, calendars, and astronomical measurement systems. They built pyramidsand developed a time-keeping system not just for their growing seasons but for the passing of whole ages. Remember that part about the Mayas being misunderstood? Exhibit A is a film you might remember called 2012 (starring John Cusack). The Maya reached the height of their power between 600 and 800 CE. Huge city-states filled with pyramids and temples sat flourishing in the middle of the jungle, with populations between 50,000 and 120,000 and a political climate akin to classical Greece or renaissance Italy. It was a true force of civilization. Then, around 800 CE, something happened. The next 150 to 200 years saw the Mayas disperse from their city-states and a quick crumbling of an Mesoamerican empire.  To be perfectly clear, this did not end Mayan civilization, the same way that the collapse of the Roman empire didn’t end Roman civilization, but it did mark the end of an era and a point of no return for the opulence and power of the classical Mayan civilization.

Severe drought has long been held as a probable cause of the Mayan collapse, but it’s only now that scientists have been able to measure how severe that drought was.  The paper, titled Quantification of drought during the collapse of the classic Maya civilization details how, by looking at the water isotopes in the gypsum—a mineral found in lake beds and other water sources—in Lake Chichancanab, Mexico, researchers were able to track the course of the long drought and plot it against the period of rapid decline in Maya power during what is known as the Terminal Classic period of the Mayan empire.

Gypsum forms in lake and river beds and water in incorporated directly into the structure of the mineral. In periods of drought, the lighter water isotopes evaporate faster, leaving the heavier water isotopes behind. By measuring which isotopes of water are left behind in a source of gypsum, it’s possible to calculate the rate of evaporation and annual rainfall from a given period. Looking at the gypsum from 800-950 CE, the Terminal Classic period, scientists say that Mayas experienced a 41-54% decrease in rainfall during those years, with periods of up to 70% reduced rainfall. This, they say, was a key factor in the collapse of the Mayan empire.

We take fresh water for granted. Half the average rainfall over the course of a century is all it can take to dramatically change a society. Sure, we have have water purification and reclamation technology now. We’re in a totally different technological era than they Mayas, it’s true. It’s just something to think about.

The Westall UFO incident remains one of Australia’s most infamous and mysterious events involving anomalous aerial phenomena. On the morning of April 6, 1966, over 200 students and teachers at two different schools in Melbourne witnessed a bizarre object nearly the size of a car descend from the sky and hover motionless near a stand of trees near the Westall State School.

The object was described by the 200+ eyewitnesses as saucer-shaped, either grey or silver, and featuring a rod or antenna on its top. Some of the students reported it had a slight purple hue, while other witnesses thought it appeared greenish. The object hovered for nearly twenty minutes, leaving a circle of yellow flattened grass, before launching back into the sky at a high rate of speed after five other unidentified aircraft began circling the object. Several children reportedly collapsed from fright.

Of course, no records of any civilian aircraft in the area were found, while the Royal Australian Air Force also reported no flights in that area. Newspapers at the time reported that it “might have been a weather balloon.” Of course.

It’s always a weather balloon.

To add to the mystery of the Westall incident, just this week a rare and seemingly long-lost audio recording surfaced on YouTube in which Australian UFO researcher and photographer James J. Kibel describes his initial interview with Andrew Greenwood, a science teacher at Westall High School (now Westall Secondary College) who witnessed the event. Kibel recorded his recollection of the interview to send to American physicist and UFOlogy pioneer James. E McDonald.

Kibel recounts to McDonald how Greenwood recalled the object’s movements as the “most amazing flying he had ever seen in his life.” When students first alerted Greenwood to the object, Kibel notes, he was initially skeptical until he saw it for himself:

Greenwood told me the UFO was first brought to his attention by a hysterical child who ran into his classroom and told him there’s a flying saucer outside. He thought this child had become deranged or something so he didn’t take any notice, but when the child insisted that this object was in the sky he decided to go out and have a look for himself.

The object’s flight behavior described by Greenwood sounds eerily familiar to anyone who’s read reports of UFOs being pursued by traditional aircraft:

The planes were doing everything possible to approach the object and he said how they all avoided collision he will never know. Every time they got too close to the object it would slowly accelerate, then rapidly accelerate and then move away from them and stop. Then they would take off after it again and the same thing would happen.

Greenwood told Kibel that the school’s headmaster eventually told students and staff to return to their classes and to never speak of the incident again or face strict disciplinary measures. Several students and staff refused to speak to Greenwood about the incident in the days following.

While this audio recording doesn’t offer up any new information about the Westall incident, the audio offers a new near-first-hand account of the incident from one of the principal witnesses. It is also disturbing to hear that students and staff were threatened to never speak of the incident again – what did the headmaster know? Or what did he not want to know?

To this day, the mystery of the Westall incident remains unsolved. The site of the encounter is now a memorial park complete with a flying saucer-shaped playground. Many former Westall students who witnessed the event met at a reunion in 2006 to commemorate the sighting, and time had done little to alter their recollections. For skeptics, it has been suggested that the object was likely either an off-the-books experimental military craft or a drogue towed behind aircraft for target practice. For believers, the incident remains one of the most compelling UFO events given the large number of eyewitnesses and the fact that they all gave nearly the same testimony.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

As many of you will know, the mystery of the Men in Black is one which has fascinated me for years. It’s a subject that quietly began in the late 1940s – but which really took off in the early 1950s. It was all as a result of the creepy encounters of Albert Bender, a resident of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who established the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Not long after, Bender closed it down: he was threatened by a trio of strange characters dressed in black, and who literally materialized in his attic-based abode. While I have given my views on Bender in my various books on the MIB, it’s always good to get the views of others too. Which brings me to Ray Boeche – UFO researcher and priest – who I interviewed to get his views on the matter of Bender and the Men in Black. Ray told me the following, which I present without interruption:

“I was actually in touch with Albert Bender in the early to mid-70s, which was years after his Men in Black experience. This was in California, when he was involved in helping preserve the work of film composer Max Steiner, and he just would not discuss it: the experience, the Men in Black, none of it. It had obviously affected him.

“I was a kid when I was first in contact with [Gray] Barker [controversial writer/publisher on the paranormal, and a friend to Bender] , and stayed in contact right up until a few months before he passed away. He was always helpful on the phone and in correspondence; he was a very amenable guy. From the contact and conversations I had with Barker, I do think something happened with Bender. Just how much of the actual written account we have is confabulation and how much is exaggeration, I don’t know. But something did happen to Bender, and it may very well have involved FBI agents. And, I tend to think that Bender’s experience was precipitated by a visit from someone in the government.

“Bender may well have been visited by FBI agents. And that whole image of black suits and threats that were possibly playing on Bender’s mind may have dictated how these forces, Bender’s MIB, appeared for him as his involvement with the occult proceeded and he had the experience in his bedroom. He did have a longstanding fascination with the occult, and I think that the FBI visit could have had a definite impact on how he might have experienced these other things, and how ‘they’ might have appeared to him in a context that would serve their ends: the dark suits and hats. There’s a distinct possibility that the phenomenon was pulling this imagery – the FBI agents, black suits, and their visits and warnings – out of Bender’s subconscious and masquerading as something connected to the saucer people to lure him further into the occult.

“There’s a lot we can take from some of the early research into psychedelics, where the major thrust of what type of experience the person would have would be dictated by mindset and setting. And I think that ties into the Bender story, in a sense. I think there’s this idea that if we open ourselves to outside influences – I’m speaking in spiritual terms here – or we seek contact or an experience with an alien, then you assume it to be that – an alien – if and when it appears. It may not be what it purports to be. I think these forces can play on our own mental predispositions of what we expect we see.

“I have always thought that one of the most important things that John Keel ever said was that if you have kids or teenagers, this is not something to encourage them to get involved  with. Keel  was a pretty dyed-in-the-wool atheist. But he understand that, at some level, there’s something, in some sense transcendent over us, that can, if nothing else, ‘mess’ with us. And it can cause a lot of damage.

“Sometimes, I think I’m singing a one-note song with this, from a Christian perspective. I would not consider myself theologically liberal or a theological fundamentalist. My beliefs are solidly orthodox, and rooted in my view of the Bible as God’s inerrant Word. But there are things that we just aren’t equipped  to deal with from a mechanistic, naturalistic worldview. There are malevolent forces out there that will be happy to take advantage of just about any opening we give them. And, so, we need to be very cautious. I tend to think that may be what happened to Albert Bender, but he might not have been so cautious.”