Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
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...
03-10-2018
NASA Balloon Observes Glowing Blue Clouds in Earth's Upper Atmosphere (Video)
NASA Balloon Observes Glowing Blue Clouds in Earth's Upper Atmosphere (Video)
By Sarah Lewin, Space.com Associate Editor
Strange Clouds Spotted at the Edge of Space
A NASA long-duration balloon mission observed glowing blue clouds that ripple at the edge of Earth's atmosphere. The mission aims to help researchers learn about how energy transfers through the atmosphere's layers.
The phenomenon, called noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds(PMCs), occurs 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's poles during the summer just after sunset. The clouds form as ice crystals grow on tiny meteor fragments in the region of Earth's atmosphere called the mesosphere. NASA's PMC Turbo mission sent up a huge balloon in July 2018 to study the phenomenon up close and gather information about movement in Earth's atmosphere; the balloon snapped 6 million high-resolution photos as it floated across the Arctic for five days, according to a statement from NASA. The balloon traveled from Sweden to Canada.
"From what we've seen so far, we expect to have a really spectacular data set from this mission," Dave Fritts, principal investigator of the PMC Turbo mission at Global Atmospheric Technologies and Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, said in the statement. "Our cameras were likely able to capture some really interesting events, and we hope [the photos] will provide new insights into these complex dynamics." [Strange Clouds Spotted at the Edge of Space]
The clouds' rippling and flow reflect the movement of air in the upper atmosphere resulting from a phenomenon called atmospheric gravity waves— not to be confused with the gravitational waves created by massive objects colliding in deep space.
A NASA balloon mission examined the rippling, electric blue clouds found high over Earth's poles during twilight in summertime.
Credit: Joy Ng/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Gravity waves are oscillations in the atmosphere that form as air rises or falls and hits obstacles. This can happen when, for example, atmospheric layers bump up against each other or airflow runs into mountain ranges. Atmospheric gravity waves are normally invisible, but can be seen as they flow through noctilucent clouds.
"This is the first time we've been able to visualize the flow of energy from larger gravity waves to smaller flow instabilities and turbulence in the upper atmosphere," Fritts said. "At these altitudes, you can literally see the gravity waves breaking — like ocean waves on the beach — and cascading to turbulence."
The researchers also used a lidar system to measure, for the first time, the precise altitudes of the clouds and variations in temperature above and below the clouds. By watching gravity waves flow through these vivid clouds, scientists can learn more about how turbulence works in the upper atmosphere, as well as in other fluid systems, such as oceans, lakes and atmospheres on other planets, NASA officials said.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains.
5 Ancient Petroglyphs & Cave Paintings that depict “Ancient Aliens”
5 Ancient Petroglyphs & Cave Paintings that depict “Ancient Aliens”
Thousands of years ago, ancient people around the globe created a number of petroglyphs and cave paintings. Why ancient man depicted strange beings with 5 or 6 fingers, helmets, sandals, and what appear to be space suits is a mystery no one has been able to answer.
Millions of people around the world firmly believe we have been visited by extraterrestrial beings for millennia.
But if such highly advanced beings visited us in the distant past… how did ancient cultures react 2000-3000 years ago? Did ancient man freak out when ‘highly advanced’ spaceships landed on our planet? Or did ancient cultures glorify the visitors, referring to them as gods? Strangely, many ancient civilizations like the Ancient Chinese, Maya, Aztec and Inca, speak of visitors that came from the heavens bringing great knowledge to mankind.
But even before ancient civilizations recorded their legends and spoke of gods that came down to Earth, people were recording what today is interpreted as ‘alien visitations’.
If we take a look at cave art and petroglyphs around the globe, we will notice that in all corners of the planet, ancient man drew on rock all sorts of important events, and in nearly all petroglyphs found to date, there are representations of mysterious and strange beings that do not resemble human beings.
However, what is even more fascinating is that even though these petroglyphs are found scattered across the entire planet, the depictions of the mysterious creatures are eerily similar. This has lead many to believe that ancient mankind that carved and painted the mystery beings must have seen them at one point in history.
Let us go ahead and take a look at three of the most amazing depictions of ancient aliens discovered to date!
1. The Wandjina cave paintings
The Wandjina cave paintings are one of our favorite cave paintings discovered to date. There are a number of interesting details about the cave art found in Kimberley, Australia, in 1838. First of all the age of the cave paintings has become a subject of debate among numerous researchers. Some even suggest that the mystery art called the Wandjina could be well over 100,000 years old (yes you read right).
Among the numerous pieces of ‘ancient Picasso art’ ancient people depicted beings that measure up to six meters in height.
Locals refer to the mystery beings as the “wandjinas”. These mysterious beings are said to have brought civilization and prosperity to the people, and like many other ancient cultures around the globe indicate, the enigmatic “wandjinas” also came from the sky. Even more impressive is the fact that numerous ancient cultures around the globe have in their destroy a serpent or dragon. Strangely, the “wandjina’s” symbol was a feathered serpent. Quetzalcoatl anyone?
But even more fascinating are other depiction of the Wandjina, who are depicted as strange humanoid figures without mouths, with huge black eyes and pale white faces that are surrounded by strange halos.These mysterious paintings have received all kinds of interpretation: strange representation of human beings, gigantic owls, down to the theory of Ancient Astronauts, as beings who visited Earth in the distant past.
2. 10,000-year-old cave paintings in India depict ancient aliens
Another fascinating discovery of what could be interpreted as ancient aliens can be found in India where researchers discovered a number of strange pieces of ancient art resembling what many have interpreted as otherworldly beings and disc-shaped objects.
According to Indian experts, it’s as if people, 10.000 years ago made these paintings while looking at science fiction movies.
The set of curious ancient art is located inside caves located near the town of Charama in the Kanker district.
One archaeologist from India firmly believes that this art clearly reflects that 10,000 years ago, people knew we were not alone in the universe.
Archaeologist JR Bhagat made some very interesting comments while speaking about the enigmatic cave art: „The paintings are done in natural colors that have hardly faded despite the years. The strangely carved figures are seen holding weapon-like objects and do not have clear features. Especially, the nose and mouth are missing. In few pictures, they are even shown wearing space suits.“
3. Tassili n’Ajjer: Proof of Ancient Astronauts
It seems that there is plenty of evidence of ancient alien visitations.
In addition to the above-mentioned cave paintings, ancient art found in Tassili n’Ajjer seems to illustrate mysterious creatures with helmets gloves and strange suits.
Today, experts have managed to catalogue around 5,000 cave paintings in the region. Regrettably, around 20% of them remain visible today, since most of them were destroyed by erosion.
The age of the cave art is believed to be around 10,000 to 15,000 years old. Among the sheer number of rock art found, ancient man drew giraffes, ostriches, elephants, oxen, alligators and even hippos; demonstrating that the Sahara region was full of life in the distant past. However, the most incredible feature are the mysterious depictions of strange beings with helmets and suits, which according to a number of researchers resemble modern-day astronauts.
Why would the ancient inhabitants of Tassili n’Ajjer depict the humanoid figures with helmet-like objects and spacesuits unless they did not seem them? Is it possible, as ancient astronaut theorists suggest, that the natives of the Tassili Caves depicted the ancient astronaut that visited them in the past 10,000 years ago? According to many researchers, it is a possibility.
4. The Toro Muerto Petroglyphs
Another set of intriguing pieces of ancient art depicting strange beings can be found in Peru at the mysterious Petroglyphs of Toro Muerto, which according to many depict strange humanoid figures that do not resemble human beings.
The petroglyphs cover an area of several kilometers in length. Toro Muerto, which translated, means Dead Bull was named because of the herds of livestock that commonly died because of dehydration in the area.
Among the countless carvings at Toro Muerto, there are interesting depictions of what appear to be, shepherds, hunters, and semi-realistic figures, zoomorphic figures like jaguars, condors, camels, and fish. The ancients also depicted sunflowers and trees without branches, geometric symbols, zig-zags, square, diamond shapes and some inscriptions, intaglios, and bizarre writings all over an area of approximately four kilometers.
The most intriguing depictions at Toro Muerto are those of beings that do not share much resemblance to normal human beings. Even more fascinating is the fact that some of the petroglyphs of Toro Muerto bear a freakish resemblance to petroglyphs found in Australia where ancient man also depicted mysterious beings with ‘halos’ around their heads. The beings depicted at Toro Muerto were carved with a number of strange characteristics, like antennas on top of their heads.
5. The Petroglyphs at Karahunj, Armenia’s Stonehenge
This ancient site located in modern-day Armenia is fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all, many researchers claim that the site itself predates both Stonehenge in England and the Pyramids of Giza.
This ancient complex occupies over 7 hectares and offers its visitors a number of strange carvings created by early civilizations that inhabited the region thousands of years ago.
Among the numerous carvings, ancient man depicted what appeared to be strange beings with elongated heads and almond-shaped eyes, eerily similar to ‘modern-day’ representations of Grey Aliens.
In an age of wild claims churned out by politicians, media and advertisers, perhaps people don’t care as much any more
Philip Jaeklµ
Are aliens deserting us? Or do we simply not care any more? Photograph: Joe McBride/Getty Images
This month, the two major online sites for reporting UFOs – the National UFO Reporting Center and the Mutual UFO Network – both documented steep drops in worldwide sightings. The declines started around 2014, when reports were at a peak. They have since reduced drastically to 55% of that year’s combined total, many UFO interest groups have folded, and numerous previously classified government documents have been disclosed.
Do these declines reveal that UFO interest is becoming a blip on the human cultural radar? Perhaps UFO and alien lore is seeming more like a reflection of human culture, tied to the space age, motivated by conquering new existential frontiers.
It might not be a coincidence that the term UFO (unidentified flying object) and some of the phenomena that surrounds it – abductions and impossible technologies – are relatively recent. Before the 1940s, reports of sightings of objects in the sky were extremely rare. Centuries of recorded history give no clear indication of any such activity. Then, at the predawn of the space-age, around the time of the Roswell conspiracy, UFO culture was born, giving rise to everything from Space Invaders to The X-Files.
Possible answers as to why sightings are decreasing are varied. A key factor, however, may be that more people simply don’t care any more. As we are accustomed to being inundated with wild claims churned out by politicians, media and advertisers, the next report of a UFO is no more believed than the long-range weather forecast.
Before home video, photographs were the staple of UFO evidence. Video evidence, during the height of the 1990s UFO mania, was regarded by many as even more substantial. Amateur footage of glowing objects in the sky, as mysterious as they seemed real, made the cut for appearing on television – they were meant to be taken seriously and they fed an audience hungry for amazement, helped by a healthy dose of conspiracy theorising.
According to the cultural historian Stuart Walton, “Belief in UFOs is definitely in a state of decline, along with much else that could be classed as paranormal. Part of the reason is that the technology for providing documentary evidence of such matters is now widely available to everybody with a smartphone, and such purported evidence as there is on YouTube looks extremely threadbare.”
He adds: “It isn't so much that belief can exist without proof; it's that it must emphatically avoid proof to remain belief. We are in the process, paradoxically, of proving a negative hypothesis with UFOs: there never was any such thing.”
Indeed, indisputable evidence of intelligent life coming to Earth could be the greatest news of all time. Yet, after thousands of anecdotal, photo, and video reports have accrued over decades, what are we to conclude? With the greatest balance of scepticism and “wanting to believe”, all that can confidently be asserted is that some objects, appearing in the sky on film or video, seem unidentifiable.
Furthermore, government disclosure of its own video footage isn’t helping to maintain belief. Joseph Baker, sociology professor at Tennessee State University, says: “It’s actually better for UFOs when ufologists can claim that ‘the powers that be know everything and are hiding it from us’ rather than seeing that the government appears to have basically the same info about UFOs as the public: namely grainy, inconclusive visual evidence.”
Perhaps though, the declines in reported sightings may signify only an end to current trends in ufology. After all, from the 1940s aliens were originally characterised as saviours who could help humans transcend the cold-war paranoia of nuclear annihilation; especially marked at the time, after two world wars. But after events like Watergate and the Vietnam war fuelled distrust in government, UFOs came to be viewed more as a possible threat, and some came to believe their existence was verified in secret military documents.
Sharon Hill, a researcher on the paranormal and pseudoscience, says: “The ideas about UFOs and aliens continue to evolve as we project our social and cultural ideas on them. Since we have no single easy explanation for all these claims regarding the decline in sightings, the future vision of ufology seems rather open-ended. I don't think it's dead, just changing.”
This article by the late Mac Tonnies is from Volume 2 of our Darklore anthology series (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK).
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“We are property.” – Charles Fort
“We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.” – Terence McKenna
Part of the fun of being a Fortean is second-guessing myself. While many endeavors encourage us to trust our first impressions, the study of unexplained phenomena offers no such luxuries. Researchers of the “paranormal” are instead tasked with policing their own streams of consciousness – a process as rewarding as it is laborious.
In my own case, the study of UFOs and occupant encounters has led me to two predominant interpretations, each at odds with the traditionally accepted Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). In one scenario, the beings sighted since at least the 1950s (and, if folklore is any indication, long before) are the denizens of an invisible landscape: technologically savvy but impoverished hominids I’ve dubbed “cryptoterrestrials.” In the other, the enduring UFO spectacle is the product of an almost inconceivably ancient machine intelligence not unlike that portrayed in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001. I’ll limit the scope of this essay to the latter possibility.
As the human species enters an era of rampant existential threats and finds itself mirrored in the quantum circuitry of would-be artificial intelligences, there’s reason to suspect our existence has been monitored (and perhaps even groomed) by a “post-biological” super-intelligence. Although the galaxy is formidably vast, it’s also ancient. A growing chorus of pundits clamors over the perceived “Great Silence” that greets our arsenal of electronic listening gear; either we’re alone, condemned to solitude on the edge of an unremarkable galactic disk, or we have neighbors. And if even one of these neighboring intelligences has managed to spawn an artificially intelligent offshoot, there’s no end to how expansive it might have become in the ensuing millennia.
Suppose we’ve not only been detected, but catalogued and studied, our very identity eviscerated and infiltrated. What might we expect? Overt acknowledgement on behalf of the overseeing intelligence might be too much to ask, but it seems reasonable to expect an echo imprinted in our mythological and historical records, however faintly. Indeed, our collective psyche itself might bear mute witness to a visitation we don’t dare acknowledge for fear of staring too deeply into the abyss.
UFOs: A Social Engineering Campaign?
Like most proponents of an imminent technological “singularity,” I’m troubled by the seeming absurdity of UFO behavior. But instead of trying to dismiss the mystery outright, I’ve become convinced that the phenomenon is substantially deeper than the “mere” comings and goings of predominantly biologically beings in metal spacecraft How likely is it that UFOs might represent a spectacle enacted by an ET machine intelligence? As noted by acclaimed researcher Jacques Vallee, the ETH fails to account for the phenomenon’s enduring weirdness. Drawing from world folklore, Vallee posits that UFO sightings might be staged events that unfold according to the mythological syntax of any given era.
The UFO puzzle certainly represents an intelligence of some kind. Once we exclude the fashionable notion that all “good” sightings must invariably be the result of misinterpretation or hoax, it becomes apparent that we’re dealing with an extremely adaptable form of technology (or at least compelled to think we are). If the UFO intelligence is ET in origin, it’s conceivable that the enigmatic “flying disks” and apparent “occupants” that have come to populate 21st century mythology are so much theater designed to appeal to our sense of planetary selfhood. (It bears mentioning that the UFO phenomenon has never been exclusively American. Nor did it begin in the 1940s, as often assumed by ufologists and committed skeptics alike.)
As Vallee has argued in books such as Passport to Magonia and Dimensions, we’re witnessing the latest permutation of a richly historical drama that challenges researchers to re-examine the ETH. Like accounts of gods and “little people” before them, UFOs fulfill a significant psychosocial role. Examined superficially, this alone seems like grounds for debunking sightings of unlikely humanoids and their alleged vehicles. Yet UFOs behave in ways that refute a simple psychological explanation. Decades of multiple-witness encounters, complete with anomalous radar returns, leave little doubt that UFOs are a physical reality.
But why would visiting aliens behave in such a maddeningly elusive manner, eschewing open contact yet persistently presenting themselves in the most bizarre context?
While humanoid aliens engaged in a scientific study of our planet might very well inadvertently reveal themselves from time to time, UFO researchers must grapple with the peculiarly theatric flavor that accompanies so many credible sightings. It seems that whatever we’re witnessing is intentionally tricking us, adopting prudent disguises that fit the reigning zeitgeist.
Vallee – and other researchers of an esoteric bent – suspect we’re the recipients of a social engineering campaign that has little or nothing to do with flesh-and-blood visitors. If they’re right, we might be on the cusp of a new way of addressing ET contact that enlivens the UFO debate and casts new light on our own technological future.
Incompetent Alien Overlords
I’ve always been intrigued by the essentially clumsy methods employed by the purported pilots of UFOs. Alien abductors fare little better. Their induced amnesia has a way of crumbling over a curiously brief period of time; almost inevitably, their victims share stories of their experiences that, while often sincere, seem most unlike the machinations of an advanced extraterrestrial task-force.
Worse still, alien craft – which proponents of the ETH would have us believe are arbitrarily more advanced than our own – tend to leave incriminating scars on the terrain, if not crash with worrisome frequency. Coupled with their occupants’ human mannerisms, such seeming anachronisms all but beg that we rethink the standard interpretation offered by the ETH; instead of dealing with beings wielding technology “indistinguishable from magic,” UFO files reveal beings with the seemingly limited capabilities familiar to readers of pulp science fiction.
Indeed, their arsenal of gadgets, while impressive, is only a few decades in advance of our own. This observation, culled from a near-inexhaustible catalog of close encounters, hints that the phenomenon is at least partly physical, yet extraordinarily unlikely to represent the sort of ET visitation we might expect after viewing Close Encounters.
For example, abductee Betty Hill reported a pregnancy test identical to amniocentesis, a technique invented only shortly after her abduction. Similarly, accounts of electromagnetic effects on car engines and appliances are more in keeping with proposed earthly propulsion technologies than the sort of stealthy efficiency in keeping with a species hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us.
Scientists are already creating microscopic robots for use in medicine and industry. Given the inevitability of such devices, the presence of large metallic craft manned by humanoid pilots would appear, at best, a remarkably inept way to go about observing and cataloging life on this planet. Wouldn’t a genuine ET survey mission employ miniaturized surveillance in keeping with its need for secrecy?
Instead, UFOs cruise our skies with an implacable arrogance. If our visitors are indeed extrasolar aliens, then they have a most curious penchant for drama. If, on the other hand, we’re observing the activities of a machine intelligence, the apparent desire to be seen can be readily explained in terms of misdirection.
“Alien” imagery of the sort encountered in science fiction of the 1950s is the perfect cover, as our own military understands all-too-well. Greg Bishop chronicles just one example in Project Beta, a devastating critique of the black-ops underworld and its readiness to exploit ET mythology in order to deflate serious interest in secret Air Force projects.
By utilizing our innate fascination with flesh-and-blood interplanetary visitors in resplendent metallic spacecraft, the operative intelligence has ensured that any “accidental” sightings will be ascribed to the ETH. The mainstream media, quick to “debunk” for fear of inciting ridicule, thus ignores credible sightings and inadvertently assists the overarching agenda. And if by some chance the sighting is undeniable, its cultural connotations will almost certainly relegate it to our collective Fortean attic.
In a related vein, I don’t think it’s accidental that so many UFOs are adorned with mesmerizing flashing lights. While one can always argue that conspicuous lights indicate the presence of some truly unearthly propulsion system, it’s just as possible that they’re a deliberate ploy to appeal to our sense of the unearthly, thereby eliciting the excitement of the very ET enthusiasts whose sightings are certain to be ignored . . . or, at best, published in some obscure journal or website.
As Vallee has astutely noted, many accounts of UFO landings have the undeniable flavor of staged events. The controversial events at Rendlesham Forest, for instance, seem to make sense only if they were intended to be witnessed, perhaps in an attempt to further impress us with the extraterrestrial meme. Similarly, the famous Washington National sightings, in which objects were tracked over Washington, D.C. with ground- and air-based radar and confirmed visually by multiple witnesses, smack of an orchestrated event intended to arrest our attention.
Intriguingly, the objects over Washington were limited to inexplicable sources of light – not the “structured craft” described in other notable cases. Could the UFO intelligence use a form of holography to trick us into thinking we’re observing tangible vehicles? The possibility can’t be easily discounted. Michael Talbot supports the holographic theory in his book The Holographic Universe, noting that some UFO displays have more in common with sophisticated projections than nuts-and-bolts spacecraft.
The same can be said of many close encounters of the third or fourth kind in which witnesses report anomalous spatial effects. Some witnesses have described the interior of apparent alien vehicles as considerably larger than the craft as seen from outside. This odd detail, so bizarre when considered in isolation, might be explained as a perceptual trick enacted by the “aliens” to render their vehicles more impressive than they actually are. Upon exiting, a witness would be more likely to describe her experience in otherworldly terms.
That the ufonauts use a form of mind control is taken as a given by most abduction researchers. But once we concede that our visitors are able to induce or dampen perception at will, where does one draw the line? Who’s to say the bulk of abduction narratives can’t be interpreted as induced hallucinations? Perhaps some incredible abduction reports, while sincere, reflect an intimate brush with virtual reality rather than encounters with humanoid extraterrestrials.
Establishing the Foundations
But what do we know about the phenomenon? What can researchers agree on, if anything? I certainly don’t expect them to abandon the notion of biological visitors in favor of immersive virtual reality. Neither do I expect ufologists to agree on the ever-nebulous Interdimensional Hypothesis, which raises at least as many reality-altering questions as it purports to answer.
At the same time, the Null Hypothesis, maintaining that UFOs can be universally ascribed to misidentified natural phenomena and sightings of unconventional earthly aircraft, has grown decrepit and toothless. Fashionable debunking aside (up to and including the brittle posturing of self-styled “alien experts” such as the SETI Institute’s Seth Shostak) something absolutely fascinating is happening.
Taking stock of the situation, I’m tempted to reduce the UFO riddle to a few guiding tenets which I think can be reasonably supported by the evidence provided since the “modern” era of sightings began 60 years ago.
A list of pertinent characteristics might go like this:
Regardless of their origin, UFOs are physically real.
UFOs are sometimes observed engaged in behavior which can only be described as intelligently directed.
The psychological and sociological impact of the phenomenon is especially enduring and should be a topic of paramount interest for scholars and researchers in fields as disparate as cultural anthropology, aeronautics and neurology.
The sometimes theatrical behavior of unidentified flying objects suggests the possibility of some form of dialogue, whether directed by ourselves or orchestrated by the phenomenon itself. Likewise, military encounters in which weapons systems have been apparently manipulated in intelligent fashion invite the prospect that the UFO intelligence is at least partially amenable to understanding in terms of human psychology.
A Post-Biological Booster
Assume that something very much like the imminent “Singularity” we’ve been hearing so much about from futurists and transhumanist pundits has already happened elsewhere in the galaxy. Now imagine us awash in its wake, scrambling to summon a vocabulary up to the task of making sense of it.
If I’m right, a postsingular intelligence would eschew formal contact for the simple reason that such disclosure would destabilize us, possibly to the brink of obliteration. Lest this sound unnecessarily dire, it’s worth recalling that theorists have attacked the assumptions underpinning radio-based SETI for much the same reason. If our own history is any example, technologically robust civilizations inevitably subsume less sophisticated cultures, not merely by violently dismantling them, but by introducing a virulent strain of apathy. (The infamous Brookings report to NASA, recommending that the potential discovery of extraterrestrial artifacts be covered up for fear of paralyzing research/development enterprises, stands as perhaps most explicit elucidation of this idea.) The UFO/”alien” phenomenon described by Vallee, John Keel and even Whitley Strieber is alarmingly congruent with a “postbiological” hypothesis. We appear to be interacting with an exceptionally patient intelligence which, despite its advantages over terrestrial science, seems limited by a steadfast refusal to make itself widely known. (Whether this indicates a guiding morality or pragmatic necessity remains to be seen.) Contrary to mainstream expectations, our visitors have opted for a much more gradual form of contact, evidenced both by the often theatrical nature of the apparent vehicles in our skies and by the behavior of the presumed occupants (who seem to enjoy letting us assume they’re predominantly human-like, governed by such familiar traits as curiosity and even sexuality).
I propose that this intelligence has played a significant role in hastening our species’ development as well as keeping us in a periodic “standby” state, rendering us less likely to destroy ourselves. In a way, the human legacy has been scripted to conform to an alien template about which we know nothing. But the available historical, mythological and experiential evidence tends to support a largely benevolent raison d’etre. Perhaps we’re being groomed in preparation for our own Singularity, after which the “others” could have no choice but to deal with us as equals.
Accessing the Interzone
I’ve speculated that the diverse humanoid forms encountered by “abductees” and UFO witnesses might be best understood in terms of a “hive society,” replete with “drones” engineered to perform specialized tasks.
Science fiction writers continue to debate what methods we’ll use when colonizing a planet such as Mars. Ultimately, we might choose to terraform the world into a facsimile of our own. But we could just as easily decide to modify ourselves to tolerate inclimate conditions. A space-faring post-biological intelligence could take up residence elsewhere and populate the surface of its designated planet with lifelike, semi-autonomous drones.
Such a civilization might seem remote, but the general concept is already in practice; if our own robotic space probes continue to increase in sophistication and brain-power, they’ll eventually become indistinguishable from living creatures, at which point we will have effectively achieved the “Singularity” advocated by technoprogressives such as roboticist Hans Moravec and inventor Ray Kurzweil. We will have also created the forebear to the very sort of resourceful, self-replicating machine envisioned by John von Neumann, whose idea suggests that our night sky should be veritably illuminated by the comings and goings of ETs (or their technology).
Taken to its logical extreme, telepresence offers an expansive – if tentative – explanation for myriad “occult” phenomena. It potentially explains why we seldom see aliens in the flesh unless they want us to. And we can’t dismiss the possibility that some UFO sightings, while seemingly physical events, might be enacted on a psychological level. Our own neurological dabbling demonstrates that such techniques are less exotic than some may expect; indeed, if neurologist Michael Persinger is correct, radiation emitted from natural phenomena can sometimes result in convincing hallucinatory states.
To be sure, the realm of the UFO intelligence has the visual flexibility of a multimedia installation or high-bandwidth website. It’s conceivable that “trippers” can access this interzone, even if inadvertently. The beings seen – described similarly in both UFO and drug narratives – might be the equivalent of neuropharmacologists and system operators. If so, what role might be in store for us?
A Sort of Amnesiac Stupor…
UFO researchers like their aliens to abide by 20th century preconceptions of what alien beings “should” look like; encounters with “absurd” entities (such as the goblin-like, levitating creatures made famous by the Hopkinsville case) comprise a kind of viral assault on conformist ufology by insinuating themselves into reigning conceits and quietly subverting ETH dogma. Ultimately, their existence is marginalized and becomes less ufological than “Fortean.” We’re asked, in effect, to consider the Hopkinsville visitors and their like as somehow separate and distinct from “hardcore” case-files that more readily suggest “traditional” extraterrestrial visitation. We do so at our peril.
Even UFO cases central to advocates of the ETH sometimes betray a psychosocial agenda. (“Dogfights” and radar-visual engagements with UFOs, while impressive evidence that the phenomenon is anything but simply visionary, also present the specter of an inexplicably “playful” disposition; this clashes with dogmatic assurances that humanoid aliens would refrain from such childish behavior.)
Encounters with “Hopkinsville-type” beings demonstrate an undeniable commonality with both folkloric sources and the contemporary UFO phenomenon. Taken together, these inconvenient similarities force us to question the easy certainties that prevailed in the 1950s, when human-like space aliens in comprehensible spacecraft seemed all-but-inevitable. “Limbo” cases like Hopkinsville allow us to assess the phenomenon in a brighter, less sullied light.
While one can argue endlessly in favor of a traditionalist extraterrestrial interpretation, a holistic approach leads us to consider that the UFO intelligence not only wants to perpetuate itself via dramatic encounters with ostensible “occupants,” but intends to discredit its own machinations: it stages exciting UFO events that infect both the research community and the popular imagination, knowing that the phenomenon’s inherent absurdity will eventually undermine attempts to arrive at an indictment.
We’re thus conditioned to accept the ETH one moment only to succumb to the “giggle factor” the next, never peering past the curtain to see the agenda behind the special effects. We’re kept in a sort of amnesiac stupor, occasionally graced by visits from what can only be structured ET craft . . . and then deflated by the latest bizarre “occupant” report or account of “missing time.”
Our infatuation with the unknown is systematically provoked and dismantled by a memetic campaign that’s never less than astute in its grasp of human belief.
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Is it aliens? Scientists detect more mysterious radio signals from distant galaxy
Is it aliens? Scientists detect more mysterious radio signals from distant galaxy
Some think the “fast radio bursts” could be evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.
by Jeremy Hsu
Researchers using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia announced the detection of 15 pulses of radio energy from an object known to the astronomy community as FRB 121102.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP-Getty Images
For the past decade, scientists have been puzzling over powerful, millisecond-long flashes of energy from deep space. Some scientists think these “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs, come from natural sources, such as newborn neutron stars or black holes. Others think they could be signals from alien civilizations.
One thing’s for sure: FRBs are more common than we realized. In the latest discovery, scientists working as part of a $100-million initiative known as Breakthrough Listen used artificial intelligence to detect dozens of additional FRBs coming from FRB 121102, an as-yet-uncharacterized source in a galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth.
The work is the first step in the initiative’s grander plans for using AI to find hidden patterns in the bigger sea of cosmic signals that come our way — research that could finally provide an answer to that eternal question: Are we alone in the universe?
"It's a great way of developing the kinds of techniques that we ultimately want to use to find other types of signals that might come from extraterrestrial intelligence," says Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
In August 2017, the Breakthrough Listen team discovered 21 fast radio bursts from FRB 121102 during five hours of observations made by a radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia. In their latest study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers deployed a specialized AI technique known as deep learning to see if any signals had been overlooked in their initial research.
Siemion gave Yunfan "Gerry" Zhang, a doctoral student at Berkeley, the job of training a deep learning algorithm to hunt for the additional bursts. The trained AI was turned loose to sort through 400 terabytes of observational data — a huge trove containing about as much data as is contained in 40,000 hours of 4K video.
After a month of work, Zhang strolled into Siemion's office and told his stunned mentor that he had discovered about 100 previously undetected bursts. To be sure Zhang was right, the researchers used standard computer software to clean up the messy signals — and confirmed the existence of at least 72 additional bursts.
The same AI approach could help astronomers find new repeating sources of fast radio bursts closer to Earth than FRB 121102. If closer repeater sources do exist, astronomers might be able to get a better look at them using optical and X-ray telescopes, says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, the science theory director for all initiatives funded by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
But the Breakthrough Listen team is already looking beyond fast radio bursts. It's developing AI to analyze a wider range of similarly interesting signals coming from nearby stars and galaxies. In this case, AI's broad pattern recognition abilities could prove especially helpful when nobody knows exactly what an alien signal might look like.
"If AI could flag things that don’t look right or don’t look natural, that might be an interesting thing to do," says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California who was not involved in the Breakthrough Listen study.
Eventually, AI could do much more than just filter radio signals. Shostak speculates that AI — already enabling Internet searches for cat and dog videos — could someday automatically search telescope images for unusual visual features that might represent huge alien megastructures from either existing or bygone civilizations. As he puts it, "AI can find cats on the Internet, but maybe it could also find Klingons in space.”
Scientists weigh in on cigar-shaped UFO, believed to carry alien life
Scientists weigh in on cigar-shaped UFO, believed to carry alien life
A GROUP of scientists claim to have identified a mysterious object spotted flying through space and thought to have been an alien spaceship.
Rhian Deutrom
Analysis Reveals Elongated, Cigar-Like Shape for First Interstellar Asteroid. Credit - NASA via Storyful
SCIENTISTS have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.
A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017.
The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it.
An artists’ impression of what Oumuamua would look like close up. Screengrab from video produced by Martin Kornmesser, ESA and NASA.
Source:Supplied
According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close to the Earth” by a high-powered telescope, located in Hawaii.
The report claims Oumuamua is a metallic or rocky object, approximately 400 metres in length and about 40 metres wide.
It has a “comet-like density” and a dark red surface.
“(The red surface suggests) either an organic-rich surface like that of comets and outer solar system asteroids, or a surface containing minerals with nanoscale iron, such as the dark side of Saturn’s moon Iapetus,” the report said.
This image shows the journey of Oumuamua through our solar system. Screengrab from video produced by Martin Kornmesser, ESA and NASA.
Source:Supplied
The report suggested Oumuamua left its home millions of years ago and was likely sent on its lonely journey when it was “ejected during planet formation and migration” and has been linked to four possible star systems.
It was also calculated that Oumuamua moved faster than the existing laws of celestial mechanics.
The report has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal.
The discovery of Oumuamua sparked international debate when it was first discovered, as scientists struggled to explain what exactly the long, thin asteroid was and why it was flying so close to Earth.
The discovery even prompted suggestions that the rock was actually an alien spaceship or probe, used to explore our solar system.
Oumuamua is the first-ever object spotted from beyond our solar system. Screengrab from video produced by Martin Kornmesser, ESA and NASA.
Source:Supplied
But one fact has remained uncontended: Oumuamua is the first object ever observed travelling into our solar system from deep space.
The report found that Oumuamua is likely “one of many” interstellar objects that pass through Earth’s solar system on a regular basis.
The discovery of rock carvings believed to be tens of thousands of years old in India's western state of Maharashtra has greatly excited archaeologists who believe they hold clues to a previously unknown civilisation, BBC Marathi's Mayuresh Konnur reports.
The rock carvings - known as petroglyphs - have been discovered in their thousands atop hillocks in the Konkan region of western Maharashtra.
Mostly discovered in the Ratnagiri and Rajapur areas, a majority of the images etched on the rocky, flat hilltops remained unnoticed for thousands of years.µ
Image copyrightBBC MARATHI
Most of them were hidden beneath layers of soil and mud. But a few were in the open - these were considered holy and worshipped by locals in some areas.
The sheer variety of the rock carvings have stunned experts - animals, birds, human figures and geometrical designs are all depicted.
The way the petroglyphs have been drawn, and their similarity to those found in other parts of the world, have led experts to believe that they were created in prehistoric times and are possibly among the oldest ever discovered.
Image copyrightBBC MARATHI
"Our first deduction from examining these petroglyphs is that they were created around 10,000BC," the director of the Maharashtra state archaeology department, Tejas Garge, told the BBC.
The credit for their discovery goes to a group of explorers led by Sudhir Risbood and Manoj Marathe, who began searching for the images in earnest after observing a few in the area. Many were found in village temples and played a part in local folklore.
"We walked thousands of kilometres. People started sending photographs to us and we even enlisted schools in our efforts to find them. We made students ask their grandparents and other village elders if they knew about any other engravings. This provided us with a lot of valuable information," Mr Risbood told the BBC.
Image copyrightBBC MARATHI
Together they found petroglyphs in and around 52 villages in the area. But only around five villages were aware that the images even existed.
Apart from actively searching for them, Mr Risbood and Mr Marathe have also played an important role in documenting the petroglyphs and lobbying authorities to get involved in studying and preserving them.
Media captionStunning aerial shots of India's prehistoric art
Mr Garge says the images appear to have been created by a hunter-gatherer community which was not familiar with agriculture.
"We have not found any pictures of farming activities. But the images depict hunted animals and there's detailing of animal forms. So this man knew about animals and sea creatures. That indicates he was dependent on hunting for food."
Dr Shrikant Pradhan, a researcher and art historian at Pune's Deccan College who has studied the petroglyphs closely, said that the art was clearly inspired by things observed by people at the time.
Image copyrightBBC MARATHI
"Most of the petroglyphs show familiar animals. There are images of sharks and whales as well as amphibians like turtles," Mr Garge adds.
But this begs the question of why some of the petroglyphs depict animals like hippos and rhinoceroses which aren't found in this part of India. Did the people who created them migrate to India from Africa? Or were these animals once found in India?
The state government has set aside a fund of 240 million rupees ($3.2m; £2.5m) to further study 400 of the identified petroglyphs.It is hoped that some of these questions will eventually be answered.
IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has been used for decades in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) but has barely made a dent in the space to be searched, new calculations suggest.
COURTESY OF THE NAIC-ARECIBO OBSERVATORY, AN NSF FACILITY
With no luck so far in a six-decade search for signals from aliens, you’d be forgiven for thinking, “Where is everyone?”
A new calculation shows that if space is an ocean, we’ve barely dipped in a toe. The volume of observable space combed so far for E.T. is comparable to searching the volume of a large hot tub for evidence of fish in Earth’s oceans, astronomer Jason Wright at Penn State and colleagues say in a paper posted online September 19 at arXiv.org.
“If you looked at a random hot tub’s worth of water in the ocean, you wouldn’t always expect a fish,” Wright says.
Still, that’s far more space searched than calculated in 2010 for the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. In that work, SETI pioneer Jill Tarter and colleagues imagined a “cosmic haystack” of naturally occurring radio waves she could sift through for the proverbial needle of an artificial, alien beacon (SN Online: 5/29/12). Her haystack went beyond physical space to include factors such as a possible signal’s duration, frequency, variations and strength, as well as the sensitivity of radio telescopes on Earth that would presumably detect a signal.
She concluded that searches had covered about a drinking glass’s worth of seawater — hardly enough to conclude the ocean is fishless.
Wright and colleagues Shubham Kanodia and Emily Lubar updated Tarter’s calculation by devising a slightly different haystack, including factors like the frequency and bandwidth aliens might broadcast in. It also included more recent SETI searches such as the Breakthrough Listen project(SN Online: 7/20/15).
Converting the volume to liters for the sake of analogy, the researchers concluded that SETI has covered the equivalent of 7,700 liters out of 1.335 billion trillion liters of water in Earth’s oceans.
“We’re finally getting to the point today … that we have a chance of finding something, depending on how much there is to find,” Wright says.
Earth Could Be Crushed to The Size of a Soccer Field by Particle Accelerator Experiments, Astronomer Warns
Earth Could Be Crushed to The Size of a Soccer Field by Particle Accelerator Experiments, Astronomer Warns
Martin Rees, a well-respected British cosmologist, has made a pretty bold statement when it comes to particle accelerators: there’s a small, but real possibility of disaster.
Particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, shoot particles at incredibly high speeds, smash them together, and observe the fallout.
These high speed collisions have helped us discover lots of new particles, but according to Rees, this isn’t without its risks.
“Maybe a black hole could form, and then suck in everything around it,” he writes, as Sarah Knapton reports over at the Telegraph. “The second scary possibility is that the quarks would reassemble themselves into compressed objects called strangelets.”
“That in itself would be harmless. However under some hypotheses a strangelet could, by contagion, convert anything else it encounters into a new form of matter, transforming the entire earth in a hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.”
That’s approximately 330 feet, or around the length of a soccer field.
And that’s not all. The third way that particle accelerators could destroy the Earth, according to Reese, is by a “catastrophe that engulfs space itself”.
“Empty space – what physicists call the vacuum – is more than just nothingness. It is the arena for everything that happens. It has, latent in it, all the forces and particles that govern the physical world. The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable.”
“Some have speculated that the concentrated energy created when particles crash together could trigger a ‘phase transition’ that would rip the fabric of space. This would be a cosmic calamity not just a terrestrial one.”
Sounds frankly terrifying. But should we really be worried? Surely the smart people at the LHC can clear this up.
“The LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) reaffirms and extends the conclusions of the 2003 report that LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons for concern,” CERN writes on their website.
“Whatever the LHC will do, nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.”
And this is an important point – cosmic rays are basically natural versions of what the LHC and other particle accelerators are doing. And these rays hit Earth constantly.
The team behind the LHC have an answer for strangelets as well.
“Could strangelets coalesce with ordinary matter and change it to strange matter? This question was first raised before the start up of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC, in 2000 in the United States,” they explain.
“A study at the time showed that there was no cause for concern, and RHIC has now run for eight years, searching for strangelets without detecting any.”
Even the late, great Stephen Hawking gave his blessing to the particle accelerator:
“The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is absolutely safe. … Collisions releasing greater energy occur millions of times a day in the earth’s atmosphere and nothing terrible happens,” said Hawking.
In a way, Rees is correct. We’re not 100 percent sure, and might never be. But as he explains, many scientific advances can have risks, but that’s not to say we need to stop entirely.
“Innovation is often hazardous, but if we don’t forgo risks we may forgo benefits,” he writes in On The Future.
“Nevertheless, physicists should be circumspect about carrying out experiments that generate conditions with no precedent, even in the cosmos,” Rees writes.
“Many of us are inclined to dismiss these risks as science fiction, but give the stakes they could not be ignored, even if deemed highly improbable.”
We’ll leave that gargantuan task to the particle physicists.
By Gordon Slovut, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
They sat quietly, leaning toward the lectern in a dark-paneled room near Lake Calhoun, Minn., as a professor from New York told of his encounter with one of the mysterious Men in Black.
In the audience were people such as biophysicist Otto Schmitt, a retired professor of electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota; retired aircraft developer and physicist Cecil Behringer; physician Steven Zuckerman and polymer scientist Arthur Coury.Peter Rojcewicz told them there have been hundreds - perhaps thousands - of such encounters over the centuries.
"The Men in Black are part of the extraordinary encounter continuum - fairies, monsters, ETs, energy forms, flying saucers, flaming crosses," said Rojcewicz, a 37-year-old professor of humanities and folklore at New York's Juilliard School.
The modern era of Men in Black - visitations by mysterious, black-clad men who seem evil and threatening - goes back to at least the early 1950s when a man named Albert Bender reported seeing a UFO in Bridgeport, Conn., and was later frightened by a visit from three Men in Black.
Rojcewicz told the audience that his own MIB (Men in Black) experience occurred in 1980. "I have never gone public with this before," he said.
Most of the modern era MIB encounters have followed sightings of UFOs or strange lights. Rojcewicz's encounter involved no sightings. He said he was just sitting in the University of Pennsylvania library, reading a UFO book suggested by another professor who thought that Rojcewicz would be interested in such phenomena.
"Then in the corner of my vision I noticed a black pants leg and a black shoe, scuffed," Rojcewicz said. Standing in front of him, Rojcewicz said, was a very gaunt, very pale man. He wore a black suit, black shoes, black string tie and a bright white shirt.
Rojcewicz told the man he didn't know much about flying saucers and wasn't sure he was very interested in the phenomena.
The Man in Black screamed: "Flying saucers are the most important fact of the century and you are not interested?"
"I tried to calm him," Rojcewicz said. The man got up, once again all in a single awkward movement, put his hand on Rojcewicz's shoulder and said: "Go well on your purpose" and left.
Rojcewicz said he thinks his experience - and that of others who have been exposed to the Men in Black - are somewhere "in the crack" between real life and fantasy. He has been studying anomalous phenomena such as the Men in Black ever since his 1980 experience. He has interviewed many people who have reported UFOs, flying saucers and Men in Black experiences.
You’d think that physicist Stephen Hawking’s favorite place on Earth would be his native England, but it’s actually someplace completely different – as he explains in a new 25-minute documentary from CuriosityStream.
“Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places” is an exclusive offering from the online video-on-demand channel, founded last year by John Hendricks, who was the mastermind behind the Discovery Channel. It’s the first episode in what’s expected to be a series of original “Favorite Places” features, supplementing CuriosityStream’s library of science documentaries from the BBC and other providers.
The real-life Hawking has to use a computer-equipped wheelchair to get around nowadays, but CuriosityStream’s documentary uses CGI magic to put the good doctor into the cockpit of the S.S. Hawking, a spaceship he designed himself.
From that vantage point, Hawking takes viewers on a tour through time and space – and talks about his own journey through life as well.
“My goal is simple: complete understanding of the universe,” Hawking said in a statement. “It’s always been a dream of mine to explore the universe. So, what if I could? Imagine I could go anywhere and see anything.”
Here are the five places that Hawking picked:
1. The Big Bang:
The S.S. Hawking starts its trip with a visit to the beginning of the universe, giving Hawking the opportunity to explain that the Big Bang wasn’t as big of a bang as people think. “There are no fireworks,” he says. “Light won’t exist for hundreds of thousands of years.” But Hawking spins the time dial fast enough to get to a satisfying flash, 380,000 years after the beginning.
2. The Milky Way’s central black hole:
When Hawking gets to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way, fans of the movie “Interstellar” will recognize the scene. It’s a bigger version of Gargantua, the huge black hole in the movie that’s based on calculations by one of Hawking’s pals, Caltech physicist Kip Thorne. To CuriosityStream’s credit, the scene neatly explains the mechanism behind a black hole’s “Hawking radiation” and why Hawking changed his thinking on black hole behavior.
3. Gliese 832 c:
Hawking journeys to one of the likeliest nearby candidates for habitability beyond Earth – Gliese 832 c, a super-Earth that orbits a red dwarf star located 16 light-years from our solar system. “Plants here wouldn’t be green,” he says. “Photosynthesis from the sun’s red light would produce purple or black foliage. There could be animals, too, perhaps intelligent ones.” Hawking notes that Gliese 832 c (like the more recently discovered Proxima Centauri b) is under observation by the Breakthrough Listen SETI campaign. “Finding intelligent life would be the single greatest discovery in history,” Hawking said. “We would be forced to change.”
4. Saturn:
Hawking’s in love with the giant planet’s rings and its more than 60 moons. “I have no doubt in the future it will be a massive tourist hot spot, complete with hot-dog stands and screaming children,” he says. The S.S. Hawking spends a few extra moments zooming past Enceladus, an ice-covered moon that spews geysers of water vapor and may well harbor life in its hidden ocean.
5. Earth:
The whole planet counts as a favorite place for Hawking, but he’s especially fond of sunny Santa Barbara, Calif., where he spent many happy hours with his young family in 1974. At the time, Hawking held a position at Caltech in nearby Pasadena and was coping with the early stages of his neurodegenerative disease. “My home away from home … It was a world away from the gray skies of Cambridge,” he said. “I’ve traveled the globe, but I’ve never found anywhere quite like this.” Even today, he stops by Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, which he calls “the perfect place for blue-sky thinking.”
CuriosityStream works on an ad-free subscription model, with a month’s free trial. Standard-definitiion access is $2.99 a month, HD is $5.99 a month, 4K Ultra HD is $11.99 a month. More than 1,500 titles are available. For more information about the service, check out the website.
WETENSCHAP Aan de rand van ons zonnestelsel, ver voorbij alle planeten, bevindt zich een mysterieus object. Het is een klein rotsblok dat er 44.000 jaar over doet om een baan rond onze zon te draaien.
Het object heeft de wetenschappelijke naam 2015 TG387 gekregen. Hij is ongeveer 300 kilometer in doorsnee. Mogelijk is hij een dwergplaneet, net als Pluto. De ontdekking is dinsdag bekendgemaakt door de Internationale Astronomische Unie, de wetenschappelijke organisatie die over het onderzoek naar het heelal gaat.
2015 TG387 draait in een ovale baan rond de zon. Toen hij werd ontdekt, was de afstand tot de zon tachtig keer zo groot als de afstand van de aarde tot de zon. Als hij het dichtst bij de zon staat, is dat nog altijd 65 keer de afstand zon-aarde, twee keer zo ver weg als Pluto. En op het verste punt is de afstand tot de zon 2300 keer de afstand van de aarde tot de zon. Er zijn mogelijk duizenden van zulke objecten in de buurt, maar ze zijn erg moeilijk te vinden vanwege de enorme afstand. Tot nu toe zijn er maar een paar gevonden. “We konden 2015 TG387 alleen ontdekken toen hij het dichtst bij de zon kwam. Tijdens 99 procent van zijn omloop was hij te vaag om te zien”, aldus de Amerikaanse onderzoeker David Tholen.
‘Planeet X’
De ontdekkers denken dat er mogelijk een negende, nog niet ontdekte planeet in die uithoek van het zonnestelsel te vinden is. Rotsblokken als 2015 TG387 zijn volgens hen “broodkruimels” die naar die ‘Planeet X’ kunnen leiden. De zwaartekracht van die planeet kan de baan van de rotsblokken namelijk beïnvloeden. Als ze de omloopbanen van de dwergplaneten kennen, kunnen ze uitrekenen waar die zwaartekracht vandaan komt en waar de mysterieuze planeet zich bevindt.
Het is ontegenzeglijk het eerdere object, maar wat het is, is een volkomen raadsel. Een buitenaards ruimteschip of, zo blijkt later, een geweldig grote drone die misschien voor een marketingcampagne wordt gebruikt. De tijd zal het leren, hopen we.
Update: 22 september 2018:
De avond voordat de getuige de bijzondere opname maakte van een ruimteschip dat boven de weg hing, is datzelfde object ook door een andere getuige op video vastgelegd.
Dit gebeurde bij de Shakopee Archery Range, eveneens in Minnesota en op ongeveer 85 kilometer afstand van de eerste waarneming.
Er bestaat geen enkele twijfel dat het om hetzelfde object gaat. Maar wat is het?
Origineel artikel: 17 september 2018
Wanneer je ’s avonds laat naar huis rijdt in het donker en je ziet opeens iets vreemds in de lucht, dan doet dat heel onwerkelijk aan.
Maar, als je het met je eigen ogen ziet en je slaagt er ook nog eens in om dit object te fotograferen, dan wordt het wel heel echt. Het volgende voorval speelde zich af op 14 september 2018 in Stillwater in de Amerikaanse staat Minnesota en is ingediend bij Mufon onder nummer 94921.
Een man reed samen met zijn vriendin naar huis toen ze plotseling iets vreemds boven de weg zagen.
De getuige is er absoluut van overtuigd dat het geen weerspiegeling of iets dergelijks is omdat nadat dit object een minuut of vier boven de weg had gehangen, dit opeens met grote snelheid wegvloog. Iets dat door hem en zijn vriendin beiden is gezien.
Ufoloog Scott Waring is heel benieuwd of er die avond ergens in de buurt mensen zijn vermist of tijdelijk zoek geweest zijn. Hij denkt namelijk dat wanneer een ruimteschip zo dichtbij de weg komt er een reden voor moet zijn. En die reden zou heel goed kunnen zijn dat ze van plan waren om één of meerdere mensen te ontvoeren.
Something is mysteriously killing the great cows of Argentina and their owners, not to mention the great chefs of Europe and the rest of the world, are getting worried … especially since the cattle appear to be being mutilated with a precision and instrumentation that may be out of this world. Aliens? Chupacabra? Something even worse? Is it worthy of a novel or a movie … or both?
The latest cattle mutilation report came less than two weeks ago from the Argentine media conglomerate Cadena 3. Raúl Báez, a cattle rancher in Villa Ojo de Agua, a village in the Santiago del Estero Province in north central Argentina, told reporters that he went out to find “ten cattle animals of his property were dead and four of them had mutilations.” The death of the cows was strange.
“He told us that it seemed strange to him that he did not observe blood and that it seems that the animals would not have defended themselves.”
The mutilations were even more mysterious, especially to a veterinarian who examined them.
“The cuts attracted his attention because that makes it a kind of laser scalpel because it has scars.”
We demand some answers!
A laser scalpel? What kind of Chupacabra has a laser scalpel, fingers to hold it and the patience to carefully remove eyes, tongues, lips, internal organs and other parts of the cow while making sure no blood was spilled? Yet “Chupacabra!” was the first cry of locals, just as it often is. However, another similarattack and mutilation in August has cattle ranchers fearing something worse … extraterrestrials. The bovines in that case had similar precision cuts and witnesses reported seeing “strange lights” before and after the attacks were believed to have occurred.
However, the residents of Villa Ojo de Agua reported no such lights in the September mutilations. Could they have been caused by something else? Yes, say animal experts … Hocicudo.
Hocicudo? Is this some kind of new cryptid? Not hardly, but people across South America might wish they were as rare as the Chupacabra. The Hocicudo is a long-nosed mouse of the genus Oxymycterus. Its 17 species include the rare Argentine hocicudo (Oxymycterus akodontius) and the more common Paramo hocicudo (Oxymycterus paramensis). Both found in Argentina. Animal expert Juan Calla Fontana says it’s common for animals to die at this time of the year in Argentina (early spring) due to exposure and lack of food. Once they hit the ground, Hocicudo move in and dine on their soft parts.
Paramo hocicudo
While that explanation sounds reasonable, it doesn’t explain the precision of the cuts that were reported in these and other mutilation cases. The cattle industry is huge in Argentina, both in exports and in feeding its beef-loving population. Could this be a party-line explanation to avoid panic among ranchers and citizens?
If you want to know who was killing the great chefs of Europe, check out the movie of the same name or the book it was adapted from. If you want to know what is killing the great cows of Argentina … keep asking questions.
At this point, it seems obvious that it’s become a question of when a war in space will break out, not if. The U.S. Military has been preparing for Space War I for some time now, and the world’s other superpowers aren’t too far behind – or maybe they’re even a step ahead. Observers have noted that many Russian spacecraft and satellites have begun behaving in unknown and unprecedented ways lately, and China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force has been spotted testing unknown low-orbit hypersonic aircraft. Where’s the Space Force when you need it?
To add more fuel to the apparent space war brewing, an unidentified new weapon was recently seen being tested by a MiG-31 aircraft at Zhukovsky Airport outside of Moscow, Russia’s base for testing new aircraft and weapons. In his analysis over at The War Zone, aviation sleuth Tyler Rogoway writes that the weapon appears to be either a hypersonic missile similar to the ones tested in China recently, or an air-to-space rocket designed to blow satellites to orbital smithereens.
The weapon, whatever it is, is labeled “81 Blue” and is nearly the size of the MiG carrying it. There are few details to go on yet, but the weapon appears to be similar to other anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. Such air-to-space ASAT rockets have been tested by the U.S. Air Force as early as the 1980s, and with so much recent attention paid to the oncoming satellite wars, there’s no telling for what the rocket could be intended.
World superpowers have been testing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons for decades.
If all of the attention paid to satellites and space supremacy hints at anything, it’s that war in space is coming. Soon. Could all of this recent development and testing of space weapons be related to the recent spate of mysterious booms heard round the world? At this point, I’d be amazed if it wasn’t. Just put those booms alongside other recent developments: increased sightings of fireballs in the sky; unexplained booms rattling the ground; “killer” satellites waking up and acting erratically; the United States creating a Space Force; China and Russia testing new space weapons.
It’s only a matter of time before fiery debris starts raining down around us.
Awesome UFO Footage Of Disk Over Mexico City, Sept 28, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Awesome UFO Footage Of Disk Over Mexico City, Sept 28, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: September 28, 2018
Location of sighting: Mexico city, Mexico
Source: Live Cam
ColourUFO channel of Youtube recorded this outstanding footage of a disk over Mexico City on live Internet cam. The footage clearly shows the classic flying saucer hovering over the city. Lucky for us someone was recording while watching that cam and caught this mind-blowing footage. The UFOs in Mexico City probably come from Colima or Popocatepetl which are both known for UFOs entering and exiting them. I have often said that alien bases sit 4-6km below those to volcanos in Mexico City.
Now I have followed ColourUFO for over five years. I can honestly say he puts in more hours per week than 99% of UFO researchers worldwide.
NASA and Skywatcher caught same Huge Object near the Sun
NASA and Skywatcher caught same Huge Object near the Sun
NASA’s Satellite EI 284 captured on Sep 30, 2018 01.06 AM a huge bright object that seemly leaves the Sun's surface.
On the evening of September 29, skywatcher Stefano Farigu in Italy was witnessing the sunset phase and started to photograph the Sun with a Nikon D800 camera.
Only after viewing the images Stefano noticed the presence of a bright unknown object near the Sun.
Image left: NASA images of the object -
Image right: Skywatcher images of the object.
Stefano talks about a celestial body, like the infamous planet X, Nibiru or planet Nine but since the images from NASA as well as from the skywatcher were taken within the same time frame we may assume that they have captured the same object (UFO?) near the sun.
Smiley UFO with scout fleet above Denmark was a group of unidentified flying objects caught on photo on September 19th 2018 at 3.25 PM local time. They were photographed high in the sky west south-west of Odense city. I did not see them while taking my archive photos of clouds in the sky. But two days later, now in the writing, I discovered them in one of my photos.
I am lucky that I have a Canon EOS 60D with a 300mm zoom lens producing JPEG images in the resolution of 5184 x 3456 pixels (18 Mega Pixels). A smaller resolution would have rendered these objects as fuzzy and nearly invisible blobs. But I caught them with only 190mm focal length and the largest object reveals a surprisingly strange little surprise.
It´s a smiley 🙂 with a big smile 🙂 big surprise! I can further describe this object as a light grey spherical cloud-like object with a horseshoe-shaped glowing white light on it.
Smiley UFO is luminous white
The two pictures above has been filtered with Auto Tone in Photoshop to make the objects more clear for the viewer. But in that process, the large object got a yellow-orange glow which is not the real color. In the original cropped and zoomed version below it is luminous white. It is nearly invisible in the sunlight coming from bottom left in the photo.
Image below has been processed in Photoshop (brightness and contrast adjusted).
My first thought then I saw this thing was “lens flare”. But I have never seen a lens flare with that look (on it´s face) and I have seen many. The object also comes with a small fleet of luminous orb-like objects? It is not a lens flare if you ask me. Space aliens in an extraterrestrial vehicle? We will probably never find out…
NASA’s uncrewed New Horizons probe flew past Pluto, its primary target, in 2015, but its mission is far from over. Soon it will continue on through the Kuiper Belt, and just after midnight on January 1, 2019, New Horizons will perform a flyby of Ultima Thule. The name may sound like a dragon spell from Skyrim or the name of a kindly Norwegian innkeeper, but it’s actually the common name of Kuiper Belt object KBO 2014 MU69, which floats out in space beyond the edges of our solar system. It’s among a class of objects believed to be cosmic leftovers from the early times of planetary formation billions of years ago.
Artist's illustration of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that orbits 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. The encounter will occur on Jan. 1, 2019. With public input, the team has selected the nickname Ultima Thule for the object, which will be the most primitive and most distant world ever explored by a spacecraft.
Credit: Steve Grivven/NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
In a live NASA Science Chat on Wednesday, three of the top New Horizons team members explained the plan for the 2019 flyby, which, at a billion miles beyond Pluto, will be the most distant planetary flyby in human history. Given this fact, KBO 2014 MU69’s name is especially fitting, as Ultima Thule is a medieval phrase that means “beyond the known world.” But New Horizons is going to make it part of our known world.
“We’re gonna zoom right up to it, image it, find out what it’s made of, find out if it has moons or rings, and lots more about it,” Alan Stern, the New Horizons principal investigator, told viewers.
What we do know about Ultima Thule is that it’s about 23 miles across and approximately 10 times the size of an average comet. We also know its trajectory, which makes it the perfect candidate for New Horizons’ secondary mission objective.
Despite its status as a secondary mission, though, the Ultima Thule flyby is taking a good deal of prep. When the Earth-based team woke the probe back up in June, they did system checks and performed system updates to support the flyby, Alice Bowman, the New Horizons mission operations manager, told viewers on Wednesday.
“In August, we transitioned the spacecraft into a mode where we could take pictures, so we are taking pictures now of Ultima Thule,” said Bowman. “We call those optical navigation measurements, and we are using those to target the object.” The image below is an example of one such optical navigation measurement.
Left: Composite image taken by New Horizons showing the estimated range of Ultima Thule in the yellow box. Right: A zoomed-in image of the area inside the yellow box, showing Ultima Thule where scientists predicted it would be.
By tracking Ultima Thule, which was only discovered in 2014, scientists have been able to identify it as a classical Kuiper Belt object, which means it’s likely one of the oldest objects in our solar system. But because it is a poorly understood object, scientists need to keep monitoring it to make sure it moves as they expect.
Researchers need to know exactly where Ultima Thule is to get as close as they want. The New Horizons team plans to fly the New Horizons probe 2,200 miles from Ultima Thule, much closer than the 7,800 miles that separated it from Pluto in 2015. Most importantly, though, the simple fact is that we know very little about Ultima Thule, and this flyby will give us some of the first facts about the ancient object.
“This has all the elements of an unbelievable set of discoveries that are justoutside our reach at the moment but will come into view soon,” Jim Green, NASA’s chief scientist, told viewers on Wednesday. “We know we’re gonna flyby January first, that’s a given. It has the excitement of what are we gonna see?”
Unfortunately, it’ll take quite some time before we find out what New Horizons sees. When the probe performs its epic flyby, it will begin sending its data back to Earth, but with the spacecraft sending a low-powered signal over 4 billion miles, the data won’t reach Earth for about a year. It’ll surely be worth the wait, though, to glimpse an object that may be even older than Earth.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.