Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
15-10-2018
Search for alien life needs to be integral to NASA missions in the future, new report says
Search for alien life needs to be integral to NASA missions in the future, new report says
An artist conception of what the system around Kepler-186f could look like.
Credit: NASA AMES/SETI INSTITUTE/JPL-CALTECH.
Although we’ve yet to find life outside planet Earth, astrobiology has certainly come a long way in the past decade alone. Our once crude assumptions are now more finessed and, thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, we now know of thousands of exoplanets, some potentially habitable and only a couple light-years away. Bearing recent developments in mind, a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine outlines some of the key steps NASA needs to take in order to bring alien hunting to the next level.
A plan to hunt alien life
The 196-page report starts by making a point of the fact that recent scientific advances have provided opportunities to strengthen the role of astrobiology in NASA. For instance, NASA’s Curiosity rover and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have found evidence of organic molecules, atmospheric methane, briny surface water, and even an underground Martian lake filled with liquid water. Elsewhere, on Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Europa, scientists found evidence of plumes that shoot up hundreds of miles and which contain water and other organic compounds. In fact, it’s Europa — and not Mars — that is the most promising place where scientists think we’ll find life outside our planet.
It was also recently that biologists found strange Earth lifeforms which live deep underwater or underground, with no direct contact with the sun’s energy input. This means that life may be less capricious than once thought.
The committee that authored the new report, which is chaired by the University of Toronto’s Barbara Sherwood Lollar, claims that we need to expand our search for biosignatures. To this aim, they propose compiling a more “sophisticated catalog and framework will be important to enhance our ability to detect both life that might be similar to terrestrial life, and potential life that differs from life as we know it.”
In particular, the authors of the report call for NASA to focus on exploring the possibility of finding life below the surface of a planet or moon. They also recommend that NASA seeks to deploy better technologies, such as powerful telescopes and starlight-blocking instruments capable of more complex probing of alien planets.
But accurately finding and interpreting biosignatures will be a challenge. For instance, many biosignatures can be produced by abiotic chemical reactions. Methane is often touted as an important byproduct of biological activity, but it could very well be produced by non-biological processes.
The James Webb Space Telescope (artist's concept above) will be one of the primary instruments scientists use to continue the search for planets outside our solar system.
Credits: NASA
The report is also careful to mention how such an ambitious mission is actually a planetary goal. NASA needs to build or strengthen collaborations with other institutions and private organizations, the authors note.
Along with a similar survey of exoplanets released last month, the new report will be included into two decadal surveys covering astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary sciences. These decadal surveys ought to form the backbone of NASA’s decision-making process about which missions to pursue or prioritize.
Stephen Hawking warned superhumans would use gene editing to take over.
The late physicist Stephen Hawking’s last writings predict that a breed of superhumans will take over, having used genetic engineering to surpass their fellow beings.
In Brief Answers to the Big Questions, to be published on Oct. 16 and excerpted today in the UK’s Sunday Times (paywall), Hawking pulls no punches on subjects like machines taking over, the biggest threat to Earth, and the possibilities of intelligent life in space.
Artificial Intelligence
Hawking delivers a grave warning on the importance of regulating AI, noting that “in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours.” A possible arms race over autonomous-weapons should be stopped before it can start, he writes, asking what would happen if a crash similar to the 2010 stock market Flash Crash happened with weapons. He continues:
In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants.
Earth’s bleak future, gene editing, and superhumans
The bad news: At some point in the next 1,000 years, nuclear war or environmental calamity will “cripple Earth.” However, by then, “our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.” The Earth’s other species probably won’t make it, though.
The humans who do escape Earth will probably be new “superhumans” who have used gene editing technology like CRISPR to outpace others. They’ll do so by defying laws against genetic engineering, improving their memories, disease resistance, and life expectancy, he says
Hawking seems curiously enthusiastic about this final point, writing, “There is no time to wait for Darwinian evolution to make us more intelligent and better natured.”
Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. If the human race manages to redesign itself, it will probably spread out and colonise other planets and stars.
Intelligent life in space
Hawking acknowledges there are various explanations for why intelligent life hasn’t been found or has not visited Earth. His predictions here aren’t so bold, but his preferred explanation is that humans have “overlooked” forms of intelligent life that are out there.
Does God exist?
No, Hawking says.
The question is, is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can’t understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second. If you like, you can call the laws of science “God”, but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to.
The biggest threats to Earth
Threat number one one is an asteroid collision, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. However, “we have no defense” against that, Hawking writes. More immediately: climate change. “A rise in ocean temperature would melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide,” Hawking writes. “Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus with a temperature of 250C.”
The best idea humanity could implement
Nuclear fusion power. That would give us clean energy with no pollution or global warming.
RUSSISCHE LANCERING VAN DE SOYUZ RAKET GESABOTEERD?
RUSSISCHE LANCERING VAN DE SOYUZ RAKET GESABOTEERD?
Afgelopen donderdag ging het mis met de lancering van een Soyuz raket richting ISS ruimtestation.
Dat is opvallend, want er zijn sinds 1983 geen ongelukken meer geweest met de meest betrouwbare raket ter wereld.
Enkele dagen geleden zagen we de lancering van een Russische Soyuz raket richting ISS ruimtestation die misging waardoor de astronauten een noodlanding op aarde moesten maken.
We schreven over dat voorval in het kader van een ijkpunt dat door remote viewer Ed Dames is genoemd in de aanloop naar de Killshot c.q. komst Nibiru.
Echter, er zit misschien nog een heel ander aspect aan deze zaak. Op de laatste dag van augustus schreven wij onder andere het volgende:
Het internationale ruimtestation ISS is geraakt door een kleine meteoriet, die de nodige schade heeft veroorzaakt. Volgens NASA werd er door een lek lucht weggezogen en de instantie is druk bezig om dit euvel te herstellen. Er zou geen onmiddellijk gevaar zijn.
Hoe zoiets er in de praktijk uit ziet is te zien op de volgende afbeelding, waarop zichtbaar is dat op een bepaald moment alle vijf parkeerplaatsen bij het ISS bezet waren.
Het is de aan het ISS gekoppelde Soyuz module waar de problemen door zijn ontstaan. Volgens de Russische techneuten is er een scheurtje in het schip ontstaan van ongeveer 1,5 mm door de inslag van wat men noemt een micro meteoriet.
Hierdoor wordt lucht en zuurstof vanuit de ISS gezogen, iets dat natuurlijk niet te lang moet duren. Op dit moment bevinden zich zes astronauten aan boord van het ISS en is men druk bezig met het uitwerken van plannen om het probleem op te lossen.
Enkele dagen later kwamen de Russen met de mededeling dat het er veel op leek dat het gaatje in de capsule van de Soyuz niet was veroorzaakt door een meteoriet, maar dat het een geboord gat zou zijn.
We zijn nu bijna zes weken verder en enkele dagen geleden kwamen de Russen inderdaad tot de conclusie dat het geen meteoriet was, geen fabricagefout, maar wel degelijk een met opzet geboord gat.
Dmitry Rogozin, hoofd van de Russische NASA, Roskosmos, vertelde dat een onderzoekscommissie tot die conclusie was gekomen. Dit was de eerste stap van het onderzoek en er zal nu een tweede commissie worden benoemd om uit te zoeken wie dat gat heeft geboord. Eerdere suggesties waren dat dit door één van de bemanningsleden zou zijn gedaan om een zieke collega op die manier terug te krijgen naar de aarde. De bemanning ontkent dit en noemt het verhaal beschamend.
In ieder geval, gaten hebben niet de gewoonte om zichzelf te boren en dus zal ergens iemand dit hebben gedaan.
Dan hebben we enkele dagen geleden de lancering van een Soyuz raket die hopeloos fout gaat. En dat is vreemd, want deze Soyuz raket is de meest betrouwbare raket op aarde en al sinds 1967. Er zijn in totaal 139 lanceringen geweest, waarbij het twee keer is fout gegaan bij lanceringen. Eén keer in 1975 en één keer in 1983. Daarnaast zijn er twee dodelijke ongelukken geweest tijdens terugkeer in de dampkring en die vonden plaats in 1969 en 1971. Sinds 1983 is er niets meer misgegaan met een Soyuz raket tot afgelopen week en dit vlak nadat Rosmoscos heeft vastgesteld dat er met opzet een gat is geboord in de Soyuz capsule van een vorige missie.
Toeval? Of is er iets of iemand in de weer om de Russische ruimtevaart te boycotten?
Rond dezelfde tijd dat er een gat verschijnt in de Soyuz module, verschijn er toevallig dit bericht:
Rusland zal vanaf 2019 geen Amerikaanse astronauten meer meenemen naar het International Space Station (ISS). Dat heeft de vicepremier van Rusland Yury Borisov laten weten.
Uiteraard weten wij ook niet wie erachter zit en met welke motieven, maar het lijken teveel toevalligheden op een rij.
Mochten er lezers zijn met slimme ideeën, laat het ons weten.
Is president Kennedy het zwijgen opgelegd? Wat hij wist over aliens en het mysterieuze Majestic 12
Is president Kennedy het zwijgen opgelegd? Wat hij wist over aliens en het mysterieuze Majestic 12
Werd John F. Kennedy vermoord vanwege zijn interesse in buitenaards leven? Een geheime memo van de Amerikaanse CIA maakt duidelijk dat de president 10 dagen voor zijn dood om inzage vroeg in UFO-documenten.
In een brief geadresseerd aan de CIA-baas vroeg Kennedy om vertrouwelijke documenten over UFO’s en het bestaan van aliens.
De memo is één van de twee brieven aan de Amerikaanse spionagedienst waarin Kennedy om opheldering vraagt.
Veel meer
De interesse van de president in UFO’s en aliens, zo kort voor zijn dood, strookt met complottheorieën over de moord.
Verhalen dat Kennedy omgelegd zou zijn uit angst dat hij achter de waarheid zou komen over het bestaan van aliens, werden bevestigd na het uitlekken van de geheime stukken.
Schrijver William Lester kreeg de documenten voor een boek dat hij heeft geschreven over Kennedy’s interesse in UFO’s.
De brieven voeden de theorieën dat de CIA veel meer over het bestaan van UFO’s weet dan zij ons wil doen geloven.
Duizenden stukjes
Kennedy had bovendien gezegd dat hij ‘de CIA in duizenden stukjes wilde versplinteren en deze door de wind laten wegblazen’.
James Forrestal was een belangrijke mentor van president Kennedy. In 1947 werd Forrestal de eerste Amerikaanse minister van Defensie.
Hij was van mening dat de Amerikanen op de hoogte moesten worden gebracht van het bestaan van buitenaards leven en aanverwante technologieën.
Forrestal moest onder president Truman zijn ontslag indienen omdat hij zijn informatie had gedeeld met verschillende hooggeplaatste functionarissen, waaronder toenmalig congreslid Kennedy.
Direct gevaar
Nadat hij in 1960 de presidentsverkiezingen won, hoorde Kennedy van Eisenhower dat het geheimzinnige agentschap Majestic 12 zijn eigen weg was ingeslagen.
Eisenhower waarschuwde Kennedy dat Majestic 12 een direct gevaar vormde voor de Amerikaanse vrijheden en de democratie.
Dezelfde krachten die de dood van Forrestal orkestreerden, dwarsboomden Kennedy waar ze maar konden.
Kennedy wilde de CIA dwingen geheime informatie over UFO’s te delen met andere overheden, maar dat zou hij nooit voor elkaar krijgen.
Er is iets gaande in de ruimte en wat het ook is, wij mogen het niet weten.
Na de sluiting van zonne-observatorium kortgeleden en het uitschakelen van de webcams bij anders observatoria, worden nu belangrijke ruimtetelescopen in een slaapstand gezet.
Er is de laatste tijd iets bijzonders gaande in de ruimte, want er zijn zoveel “toevallige” gebeurtenissen dat het absoluut geen toeval meer kan zijn. Waar het alle kenmerken van heeft is dat er iets heel bijzonders gaande is in de ruimte en dat er alles aan wordt gedaan om dingen aldaar verborgen te houden.
We hebben enige tijd geleden de onverwachte sluiting meegemaakt van het Sunspot zonne-observatorium in Amerika. Van de ene op de andere dag werd dit gesloten na een inval van de FBI met veel bombarie.
Daarnaast werden ook ongeveer gelijktijdig een fiks aantal webcams van andere observatoria wereldwijd afgesloten, zonder opgaaf van redenen.
Tot op de dag van vandaag is er geen bevredigende verklaring gekomen voor het sluiten van het Sunspot observatorium en de sluiting van al die webcams.
Er zijn ook nog een aantal merkwaardige voorvallen geweest met een paar van de NASA ruimtelescopen.
Zoals met de Hubble ruimtetelescoop die opeens moest worden afgesloten.
De ruimtetelescoop Hubble (Hubble Space Telescope, HST) bestaat uit een aantal precisie-instrumenten voor astronomische waarnemingen. Hij is genoemd naar de Amerikaanse astronoom Edwin Hubble en draait sinds de lancering door NASA op 24 april 1990 als een kunstmaan rond de aarde. De Hubble wordt gebruikt voor optische waarnemingen. De telescoop bezit ook een infraroodcamera. Voor observaties in het röntgengolflengtegebied wordt gebruikgemaakt van het Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Op 8 oktober kwam het bericht van NASA dat er problemen zouden zijn met de Hubble telescoop en dat deze in een soort slaapstand ging waardoor er geen beelden meer beschikbaar kwamen. De reden dat de telescoop niet meer functioneerde zou worden veroorzaakt door een kapotte gyroscoop.
Het tweede bovengenoemde telescoop platform, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, heeft eveneens problemen en moest ook plotsklaps worden afgesloten. Dit werd afgelopen vrijdag medegedeeld door NASA, alhoewel dit systeem sinds woensdag al niet meer werkt. Hier komen ze helemaal met een vage reden, namelijk een “system complication”.
Dan wordt door sommigen ook nog de crash met de Soyuz erbij gehaald en het feit dat er problemen zijn met de communicatie van de NASA rovers op Mars, maar het feit dat belangrijke telescopen uit de lucht worden gehaald is eigenlijk veel meer sinister.
Dit zijn de ogen waarmee in de ruimte wordt gekeken, net zoals het observatorium dat door de FBI werd gesloten en de webcams van de andere observatoria die plotseling niet meer werken.
Wat bevindt zich daar in de ruimte waardoor opeens al deze paniekmaatregelen worden genomen.
Alles wat met de ruimte te maken heeft en waarmee dingen gezien kunnen worden, worden in grote haast geblokkeerd. In dat kader zijn de volgende foto's die vanmorgen vroeg door een lezer in Kaatsheuvel zijn genomen, heel interessant (dank!).
EEN WOLK IN EEN WOLKENLOZE LUCHT VALT OP ( VIDEO )
EEN WOLK IN EEN WOLKENLOZE LUCHT VALT OP ( VIDEO )
µWanneer buitenaardsen de aarde bezoeken weten ze dat de mens niet erg oplettend is/een beperkt waarnemingsspectrum heeft en daar maken ze handig gebruik van.
Voor buitenaardsen is de meeste geschikte manier om een beetje anoniem over de aarde te surfen om zich voor te doen als een wolk. De meeste mensen lopen tenslotte met hun neus richting grond of met hun ogen vastgeplakt aan het scherm van hun mobiele apparaten waardoor ze toch weinig of niets opmerken van wat er zich boven hun hoofden afspeelt.
Wanneer men wél naar de lucht zou kijken, dan bestaat de kans dat ze dingen ziet zoals het volgende.
Een volkomen wolkeloze hemel met daarin toch één wolk. Een wolk die de vorm heeft van een UFO, die daar op dat moment niet thuishoort.
Andere keren vermommen ze zich niet als een wolk, maar verstoppen ze zich achter bestaande wolken en gaat het soms mis zoals te zien is op de volgende opname die enkele dagen geleden is gemaakt op het eiland Martinique.
Een enorm ruimteschip dat even zichtbaar wordt achter de wolken.
Dan krijgen we het volgende bericht van een lezer (dank!):
Dit is een foto die we gemaakt hebben op 6 oktober 2018 om 10:20 uur in de buurt van Leer; Duitsland.
Dit lijken toch wel verdacht veel op ufo's vermomd als wolk.
En inderdaad, als je goed kijkt, dan zie je drie UFO’s die eruit zien als een wolk en wederom in een lucht waarin die wolken niet thuishoren.
Daarnaast hebben de wolken voor buitenaardse bezoekers nog een functie en wel die van een soort dimensieportaal van waar ze aankomen of vertrekken.
Nog steeds een prachtig voorbeeld daarvan werd gefilmd in 2014 toen enkele mensen ’s avonds hun camera hadden opgesteld in Mexico om daar opnames te maken van een komende maansverduistering.
Dit voorval vond plaats afgelopen 7 oktober en een dag later gebeurt het volgende in Mexico.
Enkele weken geleden, op 8 oktober, is er een maansverduistering in Mexico. Een aantal mensen staat klaar met een mobiele telefoon om hier opnames van te maken, totdat ze een vreemde wolk waarnemen. Dat is vreemd want verder is de lucht onbewolkt.
Het is ook geen gewone wolk, het is klaarblijkelijk een onweerswolk want de bliksemflitsen schieten er doorheen en uit.
Dan, ineens, zie je rechts een sigaarvormige UFO in beeld komen die met een fenomenale snelheid op de wolk afschiet.
Minder dan een seconde later is hij in de wolk verdwenen en komt tegen alle natuurwetten in niet aan de andere kant tevoorschijn.
Volgens de op onze aarde bekende en geldende natuurwetten kan dit niet. Een object wat met een dergelijke hoge snelheid komt aanvliegen kan niet binnen zo'n relatief kleine wolk tot stilstand worden gebracht. En toch gebeurt het; kijk en val niet van je stoel.
Daarom, ruk je ogen los van het smart-scherm en kijk naar boven, je weet nooit wat voor onverwachte dingen zich daar voor kunnen doen.
Super-Fast Stars in the Milky Way May Be Visitors from Beyond
Super-Fast Stars in the Milky Way May Be Visitors from Beyond
By Doris Elin Salazar, Space.com Contributor
The positions and reconstructed orbits of 20 high-velocity stars, superimposed on top of an illustration of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Researchers identified these stars using data from the second release of ESA's Gaia mission. The seven stars in red are shooting away from the galaxy and might be traveling fast enough to someday escape its gravity. But the 13 stars seen in orange represent those that might be racing toward the Milky Way. They could be stars from another galaxy.
Credit: ESA (artist's impression and composition); Marchetti et al. 2018 (star positions and trajectories); NASA/ESA/Hubble (background galaxies); CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The cosmic "merry-go-round" that is our rotating Milky Way galaxy may not be the reason stars are whizzing by and seemingly flying off at high speeds.
A team of astronomers noticed something interesting when they were sifting through the recently published second data release from the Gaia mission. The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Gaia spacecraft in 2013, and the new data release includes observations made between July 25, 2014, and May 23, 2016, according to ESA.
The data offers the positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars, and their motions can tell astronomers a lot about what our galaxy used to be like. Stars travel at different speeds and the very fastest are called hypervelocity stars. Using a level of precision that sometimes "equates to Earthbound observers being able to spot a Euro coin lying on the surface of the moon," ESA officials said in a statement describing the mission, Gaia is able to gather observations about these hypervelocity stars.
The European Space Agency released a new map from the Gaia spacecraft of nearly 1.7 billion stars, giving the best-ever view of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies in color.
Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Researchers thought the black hole at the center of the Milky Way was responsible for flinging out these stars. They thought the stars originated from the center of the galaxy, and that this black-hole interaction caused their high-speed journeys toward an exit of the Milky Way.
"Of the seven million Gaia stars with full 3D velocity measurements, we found twenty that could be traveling fast enough to eventually escape from the Milky Way," said Elena Maria Rossi, one of the authors of the new study, which was detailed in a recent statement by the Royal Astronomical Society in the U.K.
Or, they could be "intergalactic interlopers."
"Rather than flying away from the Galactic centre, most of the high-velocity stars we spotted seem to be racing towards it," co-author Tommaso Marchetti said in the statement. "These could be stars from another galaxy, zooming right through the Milky Way."
"Stars can be accelerated to high velocities when they interact with a supermassive black hole," Rossi added. "So the presence of these stars might be a sign of such black holes in nearby galaxies. But the stars may also have once been part of a binary system, flung towards the Milky Way when their companion star exploded as a supernova."
Rossi said studying these hypervelocity stars will answer questions about how nearby galaxies behave.
To find out where they come from — some potential origins include the Large Magellanic Cloud or the Milky Way's halo — new data will be needed. Royal Astronomical Society officials said at least two more Gaia data releases are scheduled in the 2020s.
The study detailing these findings was published Sept. 20 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
These Spheres Are Tiny Homes And Take Just A Day To Install
These Spheres Are Tiny Homes And Take Just A Day To Install
An engineer who used to work at Rolls-Royce has designed stunning Conker style living pods that cost only $24,000 to build and which can be installed in only one day. The UK engineer believes that the pods might be a solution to one of the biggest issues in the United Kingdom, housing availability.
Conker Living Pods Might be the Solution to Affordable Housing
More and more young people are struggling to find affordable housing, while those who have managed to obtain a mortgage struggle to meet the monthly repayments each month. University students are often the people who are hit the most with regards to finding affordable housing. Jag Virdie came up with one solution, living pod homes.
Living pods are not something news, we have heard about them before, but typically they are very small and cubicle like. However, the living pods do not have this issue, and they are aesthetically pleasing. Virdie used a quote from Henry Royce when he said, “Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.”
The Living Pod is 3.9 Meters in Diameter
This is just what Virdie did with the Conker style living pods. He designed a living pod that takes on the appearance of a Conker or football. The living pod is constructed from material made in Britain and it is 3.9 meters in diameter along with being 10 square meters in area. The pods offer waterproofing against the inclement weather along with having a heat-retention system that is efficient. The living pods can be customized to the needs of the buyer plus they are fast and easy to install, taking just one day.
Virdie said:
"Our mission is to change the way buildings are designed today, by disrupting the norm, challenging construction practices at their core."
Living Pods Can Link Together to Make Bigger Homes
The living pods can also be linked together so people can make them as large as they need to include additional bathrooms, kitchens or studies. The idea for the design came from an idea that Virdie had when building a tree house for his own children. With him having extensive experience in designing cars for Rolls-Royce this put him in good stead for designing a pod house.
Purchasing the living pod house is very simple, first register interest, check the location, then go onto customizing the Conker home you require. In the future, this may well be the solution for governments to use to do away with homelessness.
The Missing Link: Scientists Discover Fish With 'Feet'
The Missing Link: Scientists Discover Fish With 'Feet'
The oceans are so vast that many parts have yet to be explored. Deep down there are creaturesand fish that have not yet been discovered or which are rarely captured on film. This applies to the Mona Canyon located just off the coast of Puerto Rico when the NOAA Okeanos exploration came across a fish with legs that was walking on the ocean floor.
Species of Angler Fish
The researchers found a deep sea fish with the name of the Pink Frogmouth, which is rarely seen, also given the name of the Sea Toad. This is an anglerfish using fins that have been modified and turned into fins allowing the fish to walk around the seafloor. Scientists believe that the fish has been living on the bottom of the sea for so long that the front along with the back fins have adapted into feet so that the fish could get around on the bottom of the sea floor more easily.
The Pink Frogmouth Can Also Swim in the Ocean
A video was captured showing the Pink Frogmouth fish walking along the bottom of the ocean floor and it one of the strangest things to witness. As fish generally swim about in the ocean this fish with its downturned mouth looks almost alien as it shuffles along on the ocean floor. The fish walks using two smallish fins at the back and front. However, it does enjoy the best of both worlds as it also has larger fins situated in the middle of its body allowing it to swim just as any other fish swims around the ocean.
The Pink Frogmouth fish usually lives in a depth range of between 200 and 978 meters. The fish has been spotted living in the Atlantic along with the Mediterranean Oceans where it dines on shrimp. The Pink Frogmouth fish looks like something straight out of a horror movie. It now only needs to develop further to allow it to breathe on land and it could walk right up out of the ocean.
The United States Space Force is a newly proposed military branch that President Donald Trump announced during a meeting of the National Space Council on June 18, 2018. If the proposal is enacted, it will become the sixth armed forces branch, joining the Navy, Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard.
Trump's announcement took many by surprise, especially in the Pentagon. Some saw the sudden proposal as a strategy to compel Congress and the Department of Defense into supporting a military branch focused solely on space. Others saw it as answering the need to address the growing rivalry and presence of China and Russia in space.
"It is not merely enough that we have American presence in space," Trump said during his public proposal. "We must have American dominance in space."
Vice President Mike Pence officially unveiled the plans for the U.S. Space Force a short two months later on Aug. 9, 2018.
So, what is the Space Force?
As much as it sounds like the Space Force will be astronaut soldiers wielding blaster rifles, the reality is much more mundane. Rather than deploying soldiers in space, the Space Force will focus on national security and preserving the satellites and vehicles that are dedicated to international communications and observation.
Immediately following Pence's announcement in August, the Pentagon released a report that detailed some of the Department of Defense's immediate actions for creating the Space Force:
Establish a Space Development Agency – This is an agency tasked with developing and testing new and improved national-security capabilities and technology in space.
Establish a Space Operations Force – This force will be a collection of space experts from throughout the military who will provide needed expertise to combat commanders and anyone else throughout the Space Force.
Create a United States Space Command – Led by a four-star general or flag officer, the new space command would direct and improve operations for space war fighting.
These three components would later be united to become the final Space Force.
Why is a Space Force needed?
Russia and China are the U.S.'s two greatest space competitors and also potential military threats. And both have demonstrated formidable space capabilities.
In 2007, for example, China launched a missile that climbed skyward for 500 miles until it impacted one of the country's own defunct weather satellites, which rained down in thousands of pieces. In a similar unnerving event in 2014, a piece of supposed Russian space junk called Object 2014-E28 turned out to be an autonomous robot of sorts that was capable of docking onto satellites.
During his August 2018 address, Pence said that China was investing in hypersonic missiles capable of evading U.S. detection. And both Russia and China had integrated anti-satellite attacks as part of their wartime protocols.
Given that the U.S. government and military rely heavily on satellites for forecasting weather, collecting high-resolution images for intelligence and directing missiles with GPS satellites, the threat became obvious.
Does something like this already exist?
China, Russia and the United States have military sectors already dedicated to space. Russia revived the Russian Space Forces in 2015 as a branch of the Russian Aerospace Forces. In the same year, China established the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force as the space and cyberwarfare branch of the People's Liberation Army.
The U.S. has the Air Force Space Command, which is integrated into the U.S. Air Force. But many have argued that an independent branch should be established to focus exclusively on space. "Whether it's a Space Force or something else, it is absolutely critical to have someone who thinks about this day and night," Terry Virts, a retired NASA astronaut and former Air Force fighter pilot, told SpaceNews.
Representative Mike Rogers, R-Ala., first made such a proposal. He called it the U.S. Space Corps during the 2016 Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
The proposal was eventually included as an amendment to the House of Representatives 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which spelled out the Department of Defense's budget and policies for the 2018 fiscal year. The House passed the bill with the amendment, but members of the Senate viewed the amendment with skepticism and ultimately vetoed it.
Trump then commandeered the debate in June 2018 and announced the administration would form the U.S. Space Force.
What's next?
Many details remain uncertain, such as how much a new military branch would cost and whether Congress would ever fund it.
"It's hard to see a scenario where the Space Force doesn't need a bunch of additional money to not only fund the reorganization but also all the new programs and capabilities," Brian Weeden, a space policy expert at Secure World Foundation in Washington, D.C., told Politico.
The White House pushed for Congress to invest an initial $8 billion in national security space systems over the next five years. But creating an entirely new branch of the military is expected to cost much more. A leaked memo from the Air Force in mid-September shows estimates of it requiring as much as $13 billion in its first five years.
Because the program would also draw resources and a necessary 13,000 personnel away from other military branches, some fear it would weaken the U.S. military overall.
The Pentagon, nevertheless, immediately got to work on laying out the proposal. Less than two months later, in early August 2018, Pence announcedthat the new branch would be established as soon as 2020.
Planet Earth: Facts About Its Orbit, Atmosphere & Size
Planet Earth: Facts About Its Orbit, Atmosphere & Size
By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor
Credit: NASA
Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. It's the only planet known to have an atmosphere containing free oxygen, oceans of water on its surface and, of course, life.
Earth is the fifth largest of the planets in the solar system. It's smaller than the four gas giants —Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — but larger than the three other rocky planets, Mercury, Mars and Venus.
Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and is round because gravity pulls matter into a ball. But, it's not perfectly round. Earth is really an "oblate spheroid," because its spin causes it to be squashed at its poles and swollen at the equator.
Water covers roughly 71 percent of Earth's surface, and most of that is in the oceans. About a fifth of Earth's atmosphere consists of oxygen, produced by plants. While scientists have been studying our planet for centuries, much has been learned in recent decades by studying pictures of Earth from space.
Earth's orbit
While Earth orbits the sun, the planet is simultaneously spinning on an imaginary line called an axis that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole. It takes Earth 23.934 hours to complete a rotation on its axis and 365.26 days to complete an orbit around the sun.
Earth's axis of rotation is tilted in relation to the ecliptic plane, an imaginary surface through the planet's orbit around the sun. This means the Northern and Southern hemispheres will sometimes point toward or away from the sun depending on the time of year, and this changes the amount of light the hemispheres receive, resulting in the seasons.
Earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, but rather an oval-shaped ellipse, similar to the orbits of all the other planets. Our planet is a bit closer to the sun in early January and farther away in July, although this variation has a much smaller effect than the heating and cooling caused by the tilt of Earth's axis. Earth happens to lie within the so-called "Goldilocks zone" around the sun, where temperatures are just right to maintain liquid water on our planet's surface.
Statistics about Earth's orbit, according to NASA:
Average distance from the sun: 92,956,050 miles (149,598,262 km)
Perihelion (closest approach to the sun): 91,402,640 miles (147,098,291 km)
Aphelion (farthest distance from the sun): 94,509,460 miles (152,098,233 km)
Length of solar day (single rotation on its axis): 23.934 hours
Length of year (single revolution around the sun): 365.26 days
Equatorial inclination to orbit: 23.4393 degrees
Earth's formation and evolution
Scientists think Earth was formed at roughly the same time as the sun and other planets some 4.6 billion years ago, when the solar system coalesced from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed because of its gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun.
"It was thought that because of these asteroids and comets flying around colliding with Earth, conditions on early Earth may have been hellish," Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, previously told Space.com. But in recent years, new analyses of minerals trapped within ancient microscopic crystals suggests that there was liquid water already present on Earth during its first 500 million years, Marchi said.
Radioactive materials in the rock and increasing pressure deep within the Earth generated enough heat to melt the planet's interior, causing some chemicals to rise to the surface and form water, while others became the gases of the atmosphere. Recent evidence suggests that Earth's crust and oceans may have formed within about 200 million years after the planet took shape.
Internal structure
Earth's core is about 4,400 miles (7,100 km) wide, slightly larger than half the Earth's diameter and about the same size as Mars' diameter. The outermost 1,400 miles (2,250 km) of the core are liquid, while the inner core is solid; it's about four-fifths as big as Earth's moon, at some 1,600 miles (2,600 km) in diameter. The core is responsible for the planet's magnetic field, which helps to deflect harmful charged particles shot from the sun.
Above the core is Earth's mantle, which is about 1,800 miles (2,900 km) thick. The mantle is not completely stiff but can flow slowly. Earth's crust floats on the mantle much as a piece of wood floats on water. The slow motion of rock in the mantle shuffles continents around and causes earthquakes, volcanoes and the formation of mountain ranges.
Above the mantle, Earth has two kinds of crust. The dry land of the continents consists mostly of granite and other light silicate minerals, while the ocean floors are made up mostly of a dark, dense volcanic rock called basalt. Continental crust averages some 25 miles (40 km) thick, although it can be thinner or thicker in some areas. Oceanic crust is usually only about 5 miles (8 km) thick. Water fills in low areas of the basalt crust to form the world's oceans.
Earth gets warmer toward its core. At the bottom of the continental crust, temperatures reach about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), increasing about 3 degrees F per mile (1 degree C per km) below the crust. Geologists think the temperature of Earth's outer core is about 6,700 to 7,800 degrees F (3,700 to 4,300 degrees C) and that the inner core may reach 12,600 degrees F (7,000 degrees C) — hotter than the surface of the sun.
Magnetic field
Earth's magnetic field is generated by currents flowing in Earth's outer core. The magnetic poles are always on the move, with the magnetic North Poleaccelerating its northward motion to 24 miles (40 km) annually since tracking began in the 1830s. It will likely exit North America and reach Siberia in a matter of decades.
Earth's magnetic field is changing in other ways, too. Globally, the magnetic field has weakened 10 percent since the 19th century, according to NASA. These changes are mild compared to what Earth's magnetic field has done in the past. A few times every million years or so, the field completely flips, with the North and the South poles swapping places. The magnetic field can take anywhere from 100 to 3,000 years to complete the flip.
The strength of Earth's magnetic field decreased by about 90 percent when a field reversal occurred in ancient past, according to Andrew Roberts, a professor at the Australian National University. The drop makes the planet more vulnerable to solar storms and radiation, which can could significantly damage satellites and communication and electrical infrastructure.
"Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage," Roberts said in a statement.
When charged particles from the sun get trapped in Earth's magnetic field, they smash into air molecules above the magnetic poles, causing them to glow. This phenomenon is known as the aurorae, the northern and southern lights.
Earth's atmosphere
Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, with trace amounts of water, argon, carbon dioxide and other gases. Nowhere else in the solar system is there an atmosphere loaded with free oxygen, which is vital to one of the other unique features of Earth: life.
Air surrounds Earth and becomes thinner farther from the surface. Roughly 100 miles (160 km) above Earth, the air is so thin that satellites can zip through the atmosphere with little resistance. Still, traces of atmosphere can be found as high as 370 miles (600 km) above the planet's surface.
The lowest layer of the atmosphere is known as the troposphere, which is constantly in motion and why we have weather. Sunlight heats the planet's surface, causing warm air to rise into the troposphere. This air expands and cools as air pressure decreases, and because this cool air is denser than its surroundings, it then sinks and gets warmed by the Earth again.
Above the troposphere, some 30 miles (48 km) above the Earth's surface, is the stratosphere. The still air of the stratosphere contains the ozone layer, which was created when ultraviolet light caused trios of oxygen atoms to bind together into ozone molecules. Ozone prevents most of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching Earth's surface, where it can damage and mutate life.
Water vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere trap heat from the sun, warming Earth. Without this so-called "greenhouse effect," Earth would probably be too cold for life to exist, although a runaway greenhouse effect led to the hellish conditions now seen on Venus.
Earth-orbiting satellites have shown that the upper atmosphere actually expands during the day and contracts at night due to heating and cooling.
Chemical composition
Oxygen is the most abundant element in rocks in Earth's crust, composing roughly 47 percent of the weight of all rock. The second most abundant element is silicon, at 27 percent, followed by aluminum, at 8 percent; iron, at 5 percent; calcium, at 4 percent; and sodium, potassium and magnesium, at about 2 percent each.
Earth's core consists mostly of iron and nickel and potentially smaller amounts of lighter elements, such as sulfur and oxygen. The mantle is made of iron and magnesium-rich silicate rocks. (The combination of silicon and oxygen is known as silica, and minerals that contain silica are known as silicate minerals.)
Earth's moon
Earth's moon is 2,159 miles (3,474 km) wide, about one-fourth of Earth's diameter. Our planet has one moon, while Mercury and Venus have none and all the other planets in our solar system have two or more.
The leading explanation for how Earth's moon formed is that a giant impact knocked the raw ingredients for the moon off the primitive, molten Earth and into orbit. Scientists have suggested that the object that hit the planet had roughly 10 percent the mass of Earth, about the size of Mars.
Life on Earth
Earth is the only planet in the universe known to possess life. The planet boasts several million species of life, living in habitats ranging from the bottom of the deepest ocean to a few miles into the atmosphere. And scientists think far more species remain to be discovered.
Researchers suspect that other candidates for hosting life in our solar system — such as Saturn's moon Titan or Jupiter's moon Europa — could house primitive living creatures. Scientists have yet to precisely nail down exactly how our primitive ancestors first showed up on Earth. One solution suggests that life first evolved on the nearby planet Mars, once a habitable planet, then traveled to Earth on meteorites hurled from the Red Planet by impacts from other space rocks.
"It's lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life," biochemist Steven Benner, of the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology in Florida, told Space.com. "If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell."
Mysterious moon swirls have finally been explained
Mysterious moon swirls have finally been explained
"This was the final piece in the puzzle of understanding the magnetism that underlies these lunar swirls."
by Chelsea Gohd, Space.com
Light and dark markings swirl over the moon, looking like cream swirled into coffee or clouds against a slate gray sky. These lunar swirls may result from ancient, magnetic lava just below the moon's surface, according to one new study.
A joint study between researchers at Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, pointed to the moon'sinternally generated magnetic fieldand past volcanic activity to explain the lunar swirls.
An image of the Reiner Gamma lunar swirl from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.NASA LRO WAC science team
Researchers have known for some time that lunar swirls share space with localized magnetic fields and that when those fields deflect particles from solar wind, parts of the moon's surface weather more slowly than other parts. "But the cause of those magnetic fields, and thus of the swirls themselves, had long been a mystery," Sonia Tikoo, co-author of the study and a researcher at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said in a statement. "To solve it, we had to find out what kind of geological feature could produce these magnetic fields — and why their magnetism is so powerful."
The researchers developed mathematical models for these localized fields, or "geological magnets" as they're described in the statement. These models showed that each lunar swirl must exist above a narrow, magnetic object located just below the lunar surface.
Even stranger, researchers think that these subsurface magnetic objects are ancient, long, narrow lava tubes formed by flowing lava or lava dikes, which are vertical sheets of magma in the crust of a moon or planet. Past experiments have shown that, when heated above 1,112 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius) in a zero-oxygen environment, certain minerals in moon rocks break down and release metallic iron, making the rocks extremely magnetic.
So, when the moon was erupting lava over 3 billion years ago, these magnetic lava tubes or lava dikes were likely created and became highly magnetic as they cooled down, according to the statement.
"No one had thought about this reaction in terms of explaining these unusually strong magnetic features on the moon," Tikoo said in the statement, referring to the lava becoming magnetic moon rock under the surface and causing lunar swirls. "This was the final piece in the puzzle of understanding the magnetism that underlies these lunar swirls."
This study was published July 26 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
'Definitely Not Aliens': These Photos of SpaceX's Night Rocket Launch and Landing Are Amazing!
'Definitely Not Aliens': These Photos of SpaceX's Night Rocket Launch and Landing Are Amazing!
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti captured this shot of the Falcon 9 plume over the lights of LA on Oct. 7, 2018.
Credit: Office of the Mayor/Eric Garcetti
All rocket launches are spectacular, but SpaceX took things to another level over the weekend.
On Sunday night (Oct. 7), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched the SAOCOM 1A Earth-observation satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California's Central Coast. And the two-stage booster's first stage landed back at Vandenberg less than 8 minutes after liftoff, pulling off SpaceX's first-ever terra-firma touchdown on California soil.
The plume generated by the Falcon 9 launch from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on Oct. 7, 2018, looked like something NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope might spy in the vast distances between the stars. Photo by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Credit: Office of the Mayor/Eric Garcetti
"Nope, definitely not aliens. What you're looking at is the first launch and landing of the @SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on the West Coast. The rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 7:21 p.m. and landed safely back on Earth," Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted Sunday night, along with an amazing photo of the Falcon 9 cloud hanging over the city.
Skywatcher Doug Macmillan captured this shot of the plume created by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Argentina’s SAOCOM-1A radar-imaging satellite from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Station on Oct. 7, 2018. Macmillan was in Del Cerro Park in the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which is near Los Angeles.
Credit: Doug Macmillan
Another photo posted by Garcetti captured the pulses of the first stage's small reaction-control thrusters, which etched a big Wi-Fi symbol in the sky. Those thrusters were firing to keep the booster on course for its historic touchdown. (SpaceX has now pulled off 30 first-stage landings, but all the previous ones had occurred at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station or on robotic "drone ships" stationed in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.)
The pulses fired by the Falcon 9 first stage’s small reaction-control thrusters as the booster headed back to Earth carved a Wi-Fi symbol into the sky, as captured in this shot by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Credit: Office of the Mayor/Eric Garcetti
Astrophotographer Sean Parker viewed the launch from Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California and was suitably excited by the sky show.
"That was pretty FN awesome, @elonmusk @SpaceX #falcon9," Parker tweeted yesterday (Oct. 8), along with a photo of himself exulting in the desert beneath the glowing cloud.
This photo captures all of the SpaceX action on Oct. 7, 2018: A Falcon 9 rocket launching the SAOCOM-1A satellite from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Station; the plume created by the liftoff; and the Falcon 9’s first stage coming back to land at Vandenberg (short orange arc at right).
Credit: SpaceX
And then there are the close-up views of the launch and landing, which SpaceX snapped. These photos are spectacular in a different way, highlighting power and precision rather than abstract and ephemeral beauty. But they are spectacular nonetheless.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Argentina’s SAOCOM-1A radar-imaging satellite from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Station on Oct. 7, 2018. The rocket’s first stage came back to Earth for a landing at Vandenberg less than 8 minutes after liftoff.
Credit: SpaceX
SAOCOM 1A, by the way, was developed by Argentina's national space agency. The satellite will observe Earth in radar light from its perch about 385 miles (620 kilometers) above the planet, primarily to measure soil-moisture levels. This information will aid predictions of crop yields and also help planners and emergency-management officials monitor disasters such as floods and fires.
The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket made history with this landing at Landing Zone 4 at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Station on Oct. 7, 2018. The touchdown marked SpaceX's first-ever West Coast landing of a Falcon 9 rocket.
Credit: SpaceX
SAOCOM 1A has a twin, SAOCOM 1B, which will make similar observations. SAOCOM 1B will also launch aboard a Falcon 9, perhaps as early as next year.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," will be published on Nov. 13. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
Why Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Are A National Security Risk And Also An Opportunity For Progress
Why Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Are A National Security Risk And Also An Opportunity For Progress
A career’s worth of intelligence work for the U.S. Government has taught me one key lesson: national security is a lot like playing a game of chess. You have to anticipate your opponent’s every move in order to remain one step ahead.
Disclosing your strategy will be used against you. But if you recognize certain opportunities, you can win the match.
When I headed the government’s highly sensitive Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), I worked with a team to assess whether a particular chess piece — in this case in the form of an unfamiliar aerial technology — was a threat to our side of the chess board.
If it was, we had to know how to counter it.
Since the Government views Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) as a potential national security issue, they’re secretive by necessity. They don’t want to reveal any information to a potential enemy.
But there are risks to keeping that information classified.
Say the person who first learned how to harness fire never shared it with the next generation, or the person who invented the telescope threw it away when he was done using it. What if the creator of the wheel decided it was too labor intensive for others to build and decided, “Forget it”?
As a species, we’re meant to evolve. And we needed those advancements to get to where we are today. Reports of strange crafts with seemingly inexplicable properties have been circulating within the U.S. Government for at least 70 years, which suggests it isn’t going away. There is “something out there.”
Declassifying certain information about UAP and sharing it with the public could lead to new technological discoveries, new forms of medical research, and a broader view of how humanity understands reality.
Here’s why:
A government must assume anything is a threat until it has been proven otherwise.
When determining whether an unknown entity is friend or foe, the U.S. Government looks at factors including capabilities, intentions, vulnerabilities, and exploitability. A close look at these factors reveals just how little UAPs are understood.
Advancements in our understanding of physics at the quantum level have helped shed faint light on the potential science behind UAPs. But these advancements have also shown us that UAPs have superior technical knowledge as well. If these capabilities fell into the hands of a foreign adversary, it would be a decisive game-changer.
Likewise, the intentions of UAPs haven’t been made clear to us at this point. There could be a number of reasons for their presence, ranging from peaceful curiosity to a probe for battlespace preparation. The possibilities are numerous.
UAP vulnerabilities, however, remain a complete mystery. Some have hypothesized that there’s a correlation between UAPs and our nuclear capabilities, while others have suggested that nuclear-generated electromagnetic pulses are a potential weakness.
Regardless, we still don’t really know what vulnerabilities UAPs might have short of speculation. Right now, it’s anyone’s guess.
From a national security perspective, exploitation is the holy grail of endeavors. It’s critical to determine whether UAP technology could be reverse-engineered and used to our benefit, but we can’t exploit such technology unless we first understand it.
When it comes to UAPs, the U.S. knows less than it should, and perhaps much less than our adversaries.
The potential rewards outweigh the risks.
There is always a risk involved when it comes to communicating national security issues to the public. But it’s subjective. The significance of that risk depends on who you ask.
If you ask a military leader, for example, they would say government secrecy about advanced aerospace phenomena is crucial because you want to avoid broadcasting your capabilities and intentions to your potential enemy.
A politician would view UAPs completely differently. They may ask, “Is this something potential voters need to know, or will concealing it cause my constituents to lose faith in me? How does this discussion affect the voters and my ability to represent them?”
A religious figure, on the other hand, would likely be more concerned with the religious and philosophical implications UAPs might have on his or her faith.
There are countless examples throughout history of individuals challenging the prevailing systems of power with radical scientific ideas.
When Galileo told the church hundreds of years ago that Earth was not the center of the solar system, for example, they nearly killed him for it.
As someone without a political or religious agenda, I’m free to say the rewards outweigh the risks in this situation. For example, in December 2017 our team at To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science helped release U.S. military footage of UAPs. No government imploded, no religion dissolved.
Like Galileo, our mission is simple. Collect and disseminate the truth about the unknown. As long as the risks don’t compromise national security, the rewards can benefit all.
Scientific truths help push society forward.
At this point, there’s no question about whether UAPs are out there — they are. People can choose to either continue to live with their heads buried in the sand, or they can take a proactive approach to the phenomenon.
Centuries ago, when mankind first stood on the shores of a beach and contemplated sailing across the horizon, the chorus shouted, “You’re crazy! You’re going to fall off the Earth! There are sea monsters!”
But now, in the 21st century, people travel across oceans every day. What our ancestors thought were sea monsters are great white sharks, blue whales, and giant squid. It turns out that they’re just another part of our natural environment.
Once people committed to discovering the truth for themselves, it was no longer mystical, it was just nature.
But because government processes demand secrecy when it comes to classified information, false knowledge about UAPs spreads rapidly. Secrecy empowers people selling their snake oil and YouTubers profit from peddling their ill-informed narratives about UFOs. Soon people start believing Elvis lives on the mothership — just as they once believed you could fall off the edge of the Earth.
The more knowledge people have, the better they will be able to master their own destinies, and not be held hostage to the monsters of their imaginations.
What if we actually do inhabit a Universe where life, at least complex life is unbelievably rare. So rare that in the immense dark fathoms of deep time, with near infinite real estate, intelligent life arose exactly once. Us. There is no pantheon of intergalactic minds. “We’re first” is one of the three classes of answers to the Fermi Paradox, the other two being “we’re rare” and “we’re fucked.”
Few scientists I’ve spoken to take “we’re first” answers seriously. It seems statistically unlikely; the Galaxy is filled with planets very much like ours orbiting stars very much like ours, and this planet is actually about two billion years younger than average in our galaxy, giving plenty of other places a considerable head start on developing life.
I tend to agree with that understanding but what if? What if it is not true.
What if we are the first? The first (and so oldest) aliens, the first in the time stream who will time travel or the first in the universe who will discover interstellar travel. This would explain why there have not been visitors from the future because we are the very first to invent the time machine and do that. I love author Larry Niven’s thoughts on this: If time travel is possible, the universe will keep being changed (by time-travellers) until a state is reached where time travel is never invented. That universe will not change. And we’re living in it.
It would also explain why we haven’t seen aliens, maybe it’s because WE are the first “aliens” to travel interstellar and colonize the galaxy, only to discover other species who are just a couple million or a couple of thousand years behind us.
I think people (scientists are just people who know science) tend to dismiss the “we’re first” position too easily because it seems born out of hubris, wishful thinking, dreams of exceptionalism, or religious nonsense.
I can see a more plausible scenario, goes like this:
Resources needed to sustain a growing population are always limited to the planet the species is on. Space exploration is great, but it will not produce the additional water, air, carbon dioxide or space needed to grow.
Technology consumes resources, as does population growth.
Societies like ours that are dedicated to growth and consumption eventually deplete their resources and vanish. That kind of conscious, then, might well be deemed an aberration, cosmically speaking.
That tendency is clearly due to a particular kind of “consciousness” that humans have evolved. But rather than being an unequivocally good thing, that kind of consciousness may ultimately be self-defeating.
Societies that thrive are those that learn to live in a mildly-adjusted “harmony” with nature–or homeostasis, really–where they are not taking more from the environment than they are giving back.
A population that is living in that manner (whether consciously, as we know of consciousness), or in a more automatic way, like other species on this planet) do not (or unable to) do much in the way of space exploration or technology development–and in any case they are liable to be limited to a relatively small area, given the size of the universe.
So there are likely to be a relatively large number of planets containing life that have never ventured out looking for others.
Of those that have ventured out, their “visitation possibilities” are extremely limited.
Any such visitation would probably be limited to say, a probe containing automated-interaction systems of some kind. The best design would probably limit the probe’s life to 1,000 years, at most. (Even were it totally self-sustaining, jungle overgrowth, earthquakes, and other natural disasters would inevitably overtake it, in time.) Or it might touch down, stay a few years, and then move on. Either way, any such contact would be fleeting and ephemeral, recorded only in myth and legend.
Any records of such contact would be irretrievably lost by a species such as ours, with the kind of consciousness that goes around burning each other’s libraries on the theory that if what they say is in our religious texts, they’re redundant, and if not, they’re heretical.
But let’s consider the alternatives. If intelligence is common in the Universe, we would have seen signs. Even with interstellar distances what they are, some narcissistic and evangelical civilization would have sent, at the very least, unmanned probes to other stars to bring knowledge of their existence and/or spread their knowledge and principles. There’s no reasonable counter-argument; even if most civilizations destroy themselves before they reach that stage, it is hugely unlikely that all would. Even if most civilizations prefer navel-gazing, it is hugely unlikely that all would.
So intelligence is not common (the only other possibility is that we are under some sort of pointless quarantine). It is really not hard to believe this rarity. It took more than a billion years since life evolved for intelligence to arise. Our Galaxy has roughly 100,000,000,000 stars. If only 1 in 1,000 has planets with conditions to make life possible, and life only starts in 1 out of 1,000 potential incubators, and intelligence only arises in 1 out of 1,000 cases where life starts, well, that makes 100 intelligent civilizations arising in the Galaxy at some point. Say the propensity to self-destruct or navel-gaze accounts for 95% of them (not that unlikely)–now it’s not that hard to begin that of the remaining handful we may be either the first or far enough away for expanding probes of the others to not have reached us.
What about the other 100,000,000,000 galaxies? Here, distances are so immense that almost certainly nobody would attempt to travel or communicate. We can’t know if we’re first. We know we’re rare. So if we self-destruct, it will be a real pity…
Bottom line: The probability that is life out there is enormous. That probability that it evolved technology (and still exists) is very much smaller. The probability that they are within hailing distance is smaller yet. The probability that any such “hailing” would be recognized, and then remembered, is smaller still.
How many times a day do you see a man walking his dog or a friend posting pictures of their cat? why would this be any different for extraterrestrials? There are other types of alien creature that may have been brought to or accompanied aliens on their visits to our planet.
In 1670, skywatchers saw a nova, a star that appeared where none had been before. Today’s astronomers have learned it was a collision between an aging white dwarf star, and less massive brown dwarf.
Astronomers now think this hourglass-shaped image of the object known as CK Vulpeculae is the result of a collision of a brown dwarf and a white dwarf.
In the 1600s, western astronomers were just emerging from centuries of medieval thought, when the heavens were thought to be unchanging. You can imagine their astonishment when – in July of 1670, in what had been a blank, dark sky – some observers witnessed a bright pinprick of light that appeared, faded, reappeared, and then disappeared entirely from view. At that time, astronomers called such an event a nova or new star. This one was located in front of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and so received the name Nova sub Capite Cygni (a New Star below the Head of the Swan). Modern astronomers have learned it wasn’t a new star. It wasn’t even a spectacular collision of two main-sequence stars, as announced in 2015. Instead, using data from the ALMA telescope in Chile, astronomers now believe the event was a collision between an aging white dwarf star and a brown dwarf (star with too little mass to ignite thermonuclear fusion and thereby shine as most stars do).
The new work is based on observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The astronomers studied the debris from this explosion, which takes the form of dual rings of dust and gas resembling an hourglass with a compact central object (see image at top). Sumner Starrfield of Arizona State University is a co-author on a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He said in a statement:
It now seems what was observed centuries ago was not what we would today describe as a classic ‘nova.’ Instead, it was the merger of two stellar objects, a white dwarf and a brown dwarf. When these two objects collided, they spilled out a cocktail of molecules and unusual isotopes, which gave us new insights into the nature of this object.
How did they conclude that the collision was between a white dwarf and a brown dwarf, and not two main-sequence stars, as had been reported earlier? They did it by studying the light from two more-distant stars, shining behind the the dusty remains of the merger. These studies let the astronomers detect the telltale signature of the element lithium, which is easily destroyed in the interior of a main sequence star, but not inside a brown dwarf. Astronomer Stewart Eyres of the University of South Wales (@astrostewey on Twitter) and lead author on the paper explained:
The presence of lithium, together with unusual isotopic ratios of the elements carbon, nitrogen and oxygen point to material from a brown dwarf star being dumped on the surface of a white dwarf. The thermonuclear ‘burning’ and an eruption of this material resulted in the hourglass we see today.
According to the researchers, the white dwarf would have been about 10 times more massive than the brown dwarf, though much smaller in size. As the brown dwarf spiraled inward, intense tidal forces exerted by the white dwarf would have ripped it apart. Starrfield remarked:
This is the first time such an event has been conclusively identified.
The constellation Cygnus the Swan, with Vulpecula.
Bottom line: In 1670, skywatchers saw a nova, a star that appeared where none had been before. Today’s astronomers have learned it was a collision between an aging white dwarf star, and less massive brown dwarf.
Alien Human Hybrids are Amongst Us (Richard Dolan Live)
Alien Human Hybrids are Amongst Us (Richard Dolan Live)
Ok this is Richard Dolan speaking live on his youtube channel - he is a well respected UFO researcher
My thoughts - he is right, aliens hybrids are now living amongst us, he speaks at one point about a train carriage filled with mind reading alien human hybrids, the freaky bit for me is this took place just a few miles from where I live.
As I scour the virtual world for new information on UFOlogy I usually find much of the same. Same stories retold in ever increasing lunacy. So many people claim to know so many things in which they can not know. I see that more often than not people’s imagination gets the better of them. “Gets the better of them” is a polite way to say that their imagination beats them like they owe it money. So many people, in so many places, believe some strongly delusional stuff. Yes… I am looking at you, Stephen Bassett. I fart in your general direction Dr Steven Greer.
If even only 1/10th of one percent of accounts in UFOlogy have some merit beyond delusion and self-interest, there would still be a myriad of alleged craft with varying occupants zipping around our atmosphere. I am a UFO experiencer myself (see my previous writings). I know that something very real and quantifiable is happening to a vast many people. But I do not have the foggiest clue as to who, where, why, and what I and my family saw that fateful afternoon. I would really like to know, as would a billion people would I am sure.
But the big dirty truth is that no one knows who they are. I can say that with a reasonably high sense of certainty.
Spend any amount of time in the waters of mainstream UFOlogy and you will contract the digital equivalent of Malaria. You will have been infected with parasites, heavy nausea, cold chills, and explosive disrupted bowel movements. At least your mind will feel like that. So much nonsense, so many clicks, so little thought. I have seen claims of dozens of different aliens visiting our pale blue dot. Grays, Nordics, Reptilians, and Blue avians for an example short list. There are hundreds of other less popular ones as well. All English language understanding bipedal humanoid aliens. One alien that looks like us is beating insurmountable odds. Parallel evolution is so unlikely to ever occur. It may in a cosmic blue moon occur but for it to happen dozens of times in our little corner of infinity is impossible. Not improbable but outright impossible. Not everything is possible, the Universe has laws that itself follows most of the time.
How can all these aliens be coming to Earth on such a regular timetable and that we do not have any credible evidence to support it? The easy answer is that they are not. All these volumes of alleged aliens mingling on Earth are just fantasy. Not even a good fantasy. This could change in the light of credible verifiable evidence. Anything, a single cell or material scraping from extraterrestrial materials biological or otherwise would be nice. No real evidence has ever come forward that could withstand even the most tertiary scientific examination. There have been many hoaxes in bygone days, and even more ongoing today. Without any evidence, there is no reason to believe any of it.
Several governments have opened up their versions of Area 51 and have released their UFO files. Thousands and thousands of reports of sightings have been released to a fevered UFOlogy community. Many very good descriptions of encounters but not a single word on the origins of these silent thieves in the night. Not one word! There is only one way to interpret that. They do not know. If they knew they would tell us. Why wouldn’t they? It would mean absolutely nothing to most people. Knowing that they come from a star system 89658 light years away, tells us nothing useful. Not even something like that has ever been uttered.
The only time you hear of any explanation of sourcing is from the lunatic fringe. Nothing has ever been uttered by a reputable source… Ever! Not surprising when you really think about it. No one that could possibly know anything has ever uttered one syllable of useful data to help us suss out the source of the UFO enigma.
I am fascinated by the quality of good reports that the gifted UFO researchers such as Paul Dean have deduced and compiled. Some very interesting government documents exist that shed light on the cover-up of information they have waged on us for nearly 60 years.
All those documents are great but they do not hold my interest very long. I already know they are real and exist in our skies. No need to convince me of that. I have the luxury of knowing. None of the big questions is being answered. I believe they can not possibly be answered. At least not yet in our intellectual evolution.
There would be no way for the extraterrestrials to tell us anything of any substance. When two different life forms meet and have no common genetic heritage don’t expect much informative information exchange. A true alien is not going to understand us and we certainly will not understand them. We would have zero things in common. We could sit across a table from them for a year and never get past “My name is Trevor… what is yours?”. A real-life encounter with aliens will be stranger and more baffling than we can imagine. Humans can not even have a meaning conversation with any other creatures besides fellow homo sapiens. We can’t have a good conversation with anything on earth except with ourselves. All those life forms have a common genetic evolutionary heritage with us. We evolved on the same planet, with the same sun, and same moon. We have a lot of things in common with all life forms on Earth and that provides zero help. We would never understand a truly alien intelligence. End of story. Without a galactic “Rosetta Stone” we are hopelessly lost in translation.
Even if we squeezed into a parallel Universe where we could understand each other. How can they reference infinity in a form we can fathom. When we sent Voyager 1 probe out of Earth orbit and shot it into deep space we attached a gold plaque. It contained a graphic representation of pulsars in our vicinity. They provided a pulsar map that has directions to find Earth in the vast blackness. A pulsar map is nice but won’t work if you are too far away. This kind of map is only at best good within our own galaxy. Only works in our backyard.
How could an alien tell us or give us coordinates we could understand without any common language or mutual understanding on how distances and time work. If they are any substantial distance from Earth we will not see anything in common. We may not be able to gather the data due to it being further away then we can usably use in any definition. It possibly is going to be impossible to get any meaningful location information ever. The Universe is a big place and our map is woefully incomplete.
I propose that the source of these visitors does not ultimately matter. It is more important to try to assess intention and purpose. Those two are also more than likely beyond our understanding for the same reasons.
I would not worry about them too much. They are not blasting aeroplanes out of the sky or melting the Presidents face like in Mars Attacks (Unless they are waiting for Trump to win…then I say go for it). I would hypothesize that they are here just for observation and fact gathering. We could be one hell of a strange sociological experiment for some intelligence somewhere. They have been here a long time and we are still here. To our Earthbound brains, we will see gross indifference with the same eyes as we see hostility. Is grave indifference what we are experiencing in UFOlogy? Almost like a scientific detachment… Hmmm.
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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.
