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...
Last week, I was on Dave Schrader’s Darkness Radio show. Although the show was on alien abductions, we also touched on the matter of the Black Eyed Children. Dave asked me about some of the stranger and creepier BEC accounts I have in my files – which amount to quite a few. We discussed several such cases, but there’s one which I didn’t touch on, and that is one of the weirdest of all.. It’s the account of a man named Martin, who lives just outside of Tecumseh, Oklahoma. Martin’s encounter with a pair of Black Eyed Children went down in March 2011. Fortunately, I was able to interview Martin personally just a few weeks after his experience. Martin was at home alone when he had just about the worst encounter was possible.
In terms of Martin’s encounter, it occurred two days after he returned home. As a truck-driver, he had been on the road for two weeks and was looking forward to a few days of relaxation and fun. He got neither. On his first night back, Martin planned on watching a bunch of shows he had recorded while he was away on the road. The evening began in completely normal fashion: he made himself a big sandwich, cracked open a cold beer and watched his shows. Normality was about to go out of the window. Around 8:30 p.m., there was that knock on the door, the kind of which so many witnesses to the BEC have now experienced, but surely wished they hadn’t. Martin didn’t even bother looking through the spy-hole: he assumed it was his immediate neighbor, Rex, who would take in any packages from the likes of UPS, Amazon and FedEx that might have been left on Martin’s doorstep while he was away. Sadly for Martin, as he opened the door, he instantly realized it was not Rex.
Martin got the shock of his life when he was confronted by a boy and a girl – both around eleven or twelve years of age and with large, black, eerie-looking eyes. The girl was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black top, while the boy had the almost-ubiquitous black hoodie. Both looked sickly and scrawny and is if they needed a hearty meal in them. Little did Martin know that this was exactly what they were there for. Hardly a fan of the supernatural, Martin had never heard of the BEC phenomenon and could only stand and stare at their curious faces, assuming at first that this was some kind of joke. But, the Black-Eyed Children were certainly not laughing. They stood together, hand in hand, looking at Martin with expressions on their faces that were, paradoxically, lacking in emotion but which also gave off airs of highly charged malevolence.
Echoing Brian Bethel’s encounter back in the 1990s (which largely began the BEC phenomenon and debate) , Martin said that when the girl said they were homeless and needed something to eat, it all seemed very much like a ruse – as if they had spoken the words time and time again. It was like a carefully-crafted scheme on their part. Most disturbing of all, for a few moments Martin felt transfixed – almost hypnotized – by those large, black eyes. Indeed, he told me that he could not understand why he did not quickly shut the door at the sight of those terrible eyes. Martin could only say that it was if he was somehow being prevented from shutting the door on the pair. One might be justified in saying Martin had been placed in a state of full-blown mind-control.
The girl repeated: “We need to eat. May we come in?” Martin said that he recalls her words accurately, and he felt that the girl’s use of the term “may we?” (instead of “can we?”) sounded like “how people talked way back.” There is one missing portion from Martin’s story: he cannot recall how the pair got into his house. He recalls inviting them in – “it felt like I said it in a dream” – but, the next thing he remembers is seeing the pair standing in front of him, while he was sat on his living-room couch. The girl said just one word: “eat.”
At that point, Martin suddenly felt deathly ill. It was, he said, as if he “hadn’t eaten in days.” He explained that it was as if he himself was suddenly starving, but it was the children who needed to eat. The pair stared intently at Martin, who found himself getting weaker and weaker. And weaker still. “Crashing” might be a more ideal term to use: Martin found himself barely able to move. Not because he was being prevented from moving, but because physically-speaking he simply did not have the energy to even stand up. It was, Martin said, as if he was himself being eaten alive by the paranormal pair of ghoulish things in his midst.
After a few minutes, both the girl and the boy turned and left, still holding hands. Martin finally managed to crawl to his bedroom, where he lapsed into a deep sleep. He did not wake until well into the following afternoon. For the next three four or days, the overwhelming weakness – made worse by bouts of dizziness and a bad taste in his mouth – kept him in his bed. It was almost a week later before he finally felt fully back to normal. While Martin has no idea as to what the BEC were or are, he believes they were not human and, somehow, had drained him of energy.
UFO Probe Seen Flying Over Wild Pigs In Texas On Animal Cam, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Probe Seen Flying Over Wild Pigs In Texas On Animal Cam, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: 1-1-2011, but reported today. Location of sighting: Texas, USA Source: Mufon #95803 Animal cams are awesome at catching fast glimpses into nature, but the fact that they also record in infrared makes it even more special, because the human eye cannot see in infrared without the technology. Here a donut shaped UFO is flying over a pig and the UFO clearly is round with a large hole inside of it. That donut shape does not fit any insect, bat, bird or animal known to man. Therefore it is a UFO. Small UFO probes often are used to come closer to the ground so that the chances of being seen are much smaller. Also they are sent to observe, record and learn about life on Earth...all life, not just us boring humans. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Lights seen over deer feeder shot beams down to the ground at some javelinas feeding.
The strange craft was seen moving over thew sky of Mexico City, and several people captured the sight on video.
As the UFO moves through the air, a few hundred metres off the ground, it emanates a blurry field which is commonly reported from alien enthusiasts.
Many believe this latest sighting is strong evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth and, had the camera quality been better, it “would be definitive proof of the existence of aliens”.
The video was originally captured by a YouTube user known as Carlos Sanchez, but was quickly picked up by conspiracy theorists around the internet.
Prominent UFO hunter Scott C Waring who believes it is a genuine sighting of an alien spaceship.
Mr Waring writes for his blog UFO Sightings Daily: “This dark craft came right out into the open and was seen when a worker came outside for his break.
“The UFO tilted some as it moved, which is what many UFOs do in order to control their direction.
“Just sad he had such a bad camera. Looks like he is using an old phone to record it.
UFO seen in clear daylight over Mexico is PROOF of aliens - shock claim
(Image: GETTY • YOUTUBE)
“Had it been an iPhone 7-8 this video would be definitive proof of the existence of aliens.
“I also notice that there is a blurry field around it, just as thousands of UFO reports also describe.”
Mexico is a hotspot for UFO sightings.
Earlier this year, a video showing a smoking crater next to a motorway lead to speculation it could be a UFO crash site.
The strange craft was seen moving over thew sky of Mexico City
(Image: YOUTUBE)
The huge 26 feet across burning pit was filmed by shocked onlookers as a thick mist rose into the air by the Torreón to Saltillo highway in the state of Coahuila in north east Mexico.
The pit was said to be as deep as it was wide and, according to reports, no evidence has been found as to what caused it.
Online theories have ranged from a crashed spaceship or a meteor falling to Earth.
One YouTube poster said: "Looks like a UFO landed and took off before anyone could see, leaving a crater.”
HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS THINK OF STEPHEN HAWKING’S POSTHUMOUS PREDICTIONS ABOUT AI, GENE HACKING, AND RELIGION
HERE’S WHAT EXPERTS THINK OF STEPHEN HAWKING’S POSTHUMOUS PREDICTIONS ABOUT AI, GENE HACKING, AND RELIGION
Hawking Claims
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, but his final book, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” only came out this week.
In it, Hawking makes a number of bold claims about the future of gene editing, artificial intelligence, and even religion. Here’s how experts evaluate his predictions.
Superhuman Overlords
Hawking raised eyebrows when he claimed that powerful people will hack their genes to become smarter, stronger, and longer-lived. Eventually, he writes in his new book, the rest of us will “die out, or become unimportant.”
Many geneticists already see this as inevitable. Some fear that people will use CRISPR to edit their genes before the technology is deemed safe, so they advocate new laws to protect non-augmented humans.
“We’re probably going to need new international oversight structures, so that we don’t realize these dystopian ‘Brave New World’ examples,” said George Daley, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in 2015.
Killer AI
During his lifetime, Hawking was vocal about his fear of powerful AI. He reiterates his reservations in this book, writing that ignoring the threat of super-powerful AI could be humanity’s “worst mistake ever.” It could destroy us with weapons “we cannot even understand,” he wrote.
But others play it down. “[There’s] no reason right now to be worried about self-conscious AI algorithms that set their own goals and go crazy,” Stanford machine learning lecturer Richard Socher told Fortune. And a poll of AI researchers found that most believe it will take at least 25 years to create an AI superintelligence — so at least we have a little time to prepare.
No Gods, No Masters
Hawking also came out swinging at religion in the book. “Belief in the afterlife is just wishful thinking,” he writes, adding that there’s “no possibility” of God.
Many scientists certainly agree with Hawking on this claim, though not all. A 2015 survey found that many researchers around the world are religious, but in most countries, scientists are by and large less religious than non-scientists.
The Next Battleground: What Do We Really Know About What Adversaries Do in Space?
The Next Battleground: What Do We Really Know About What Adversaries Do in Space?
By Sandra Erwin, SpaceNews Staff Writer
This article was first published in the SN Military.Space newsletter. If you would like to get our news and insights for national security space professionals every Tuesday, sign up here for your free subscription.
As the Pentagon moves to stand up a U.S. Space Command and Congress debates whether it makes sense to create a Space Force, a central focus is to defend satellites from orbital weapons that would seek to damage or destroy U.S. assets in space.
Washington policymakers are gripped by the prospect of enemies shooting missiles or lasers at U.S. systems. But that is only a small piece of the puzzle, says Jeffrey Gossel, senior intelligence engineer at the Space and Missile Analysis Group of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. [Trump's Space Force Plan Revealed by VP Mike Pence]
More attention should be paid to the larger space infrastructure that Russia and China are putting on orbit, Gossel argues. Many space systems are not weapons but still provide powerful capabilities for watching what the United States is doing and developing strategies to counter U.S. advantages.
"[A]s we think about space as a warfighting domain, it's not those weapons that are as important as what our enemies have on orbit," Gossel says during a recent Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill. His office is part of the intelligence community but supports the Defense Department. He anticipates that the future U.S. Space Command will be his largest customer.
"The sexy thing in Washington for years has been those offensive capabilities that our adversaries are building." Jeffrey Gossel, Space and Missile Analysis Group
His point is that if a military conflict extended into outer space, it's imperative the United States knows in precise detail the type of satellites and sensors that other countries have on orbit because those would be potential targets for the U.S. military.
'Know Everything About the Satellite'
The weapons "aren't the things that we are going to have to shoot down," Gossel says. "When we start to do military operations in space, the intelligence community has to spend more time looking at what enemies have on orbit in a forensic way, to understand everything about that satellite — the materials, the power source, every intricate little detail of the spacecraft, we need to know." [The Most Dangerous Space Weapons Concepts Ever]
"If we wanted to put a cyber effect, shoot a laser, you only want to cause a specific effect and you don't want anyone to know you did it, you need to know a lot about that satellite and sensors. From an intelligence perspective we have to concentrate more on those things, not on the guns they're shooting."
The U.S. government also should have a deeper understanding of what intelligence foreign powers are getting from space that they provide their military operators, such as signals intelligence, optical and radar imagery, Gossel says. "That's what's important. We want to keep them from having that data."
Gossel cautions that he was only speaking generically about space threats as the specifics are classified.
'What Can They See and Hear?'
"The order of battle for space is greatly increasing, it has tremendously increased over the last decade," he explains. Order of battle is military-speak for how many weapons platforms adversaries have at their disposal. What this means in space is that enemies might have co-orbital weapons to destroy satellites but of greater concern is their deployment of satellites that collect intelligence.
"We need to know what they can see and what they can hear," Gossel asserts.
Space was militarized decades ago but it wasn't until China tested a weapon that shot down its own satellite in 2007 that Gossel saw any reaction in D.C. That event began the conversation about the national security ramifications of other countries moving to challenge the United States is space. The Pentagon since then has increased spending on space systems and technologies to defend U.S. satellites. But Washington's focus on the use of weapons in space misses the larger picture. "We need to shift our thinking to what our adversaries have on orbit. Understanding that might be what we should spend our money on."
This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
Rocket Lab selects Wallops Flight Facility for US launch site
Rocket Lab selects Wallops Flight Facility for US launch site
by Staff Writers Wallops Island VA (SPX)
File image of Rocket Lab's current launch facility in New Zealand.
US orbital launch provider Rocket Lab has today confirmed it will build its first US launch pad for the Electron rocket at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA. The site will be Rocket Lab's second dedicated launch complex and builds on Rocket Lab's existing ability to launch up to 120 times annually from the world's only private launch site, Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1, in New Zealand.
Launch Complex 2 will be capable of supporting monthly orbital launches and is designed to serve US government and commercial missions. The site brings Rocket Lab's global launch availability across two launch complexes to more than 130 missions per year. The option to select from two launch sites adds an extra layer of flexibility for small satellite customers, offering an unmatched ability to rapidly deploy space-based assets with confidence and precision from a preferred location.
"Accessing space should be simple, seamless and tailored to our customers' missions - from idea to orbit. Launching from a second pad builds on Rocket Lab's ability to offer the small satellite industry unmatched schedule and launch location flexibility," said Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck.
"Having proven the Electron vehicle with a successful orbital launch this year, we're thrilled to expand on our ability to provide rapid, reliable and affordable access to orbit for small satellites.
"We've worked closely with the experienced and welcoming teams from Virginia Space and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops to design a pad and processes that will enable an agile and streamlined approach to small satellite launch on US soil," he added.
Rocket Lab will work with Virginia Space to construct dedicated pad infrastructure at the site, tailored to the Electron launch vehicle. In addition to the pad, Rocket Lab will develop a Launch Vehicle Integration and Assembly Facility in the Wallops Research Park to support the simultaneous integration of up to four Electron vehicles.
The facility will also contain a control room with connectivity to LC-2, as well as dedicated customer facilities. This new facility, combined with the purpose-built gantry located at LC-2, will provide significant and dedicated vehicle processing capability and flexibility to meet Rocket Lab's high launch cadence.
Through construction and day-to-day operations, Rocket Lab expects to create around 30 jobs immediately to directly support Launch Complex 2, with this number predicted to increase to approximately 100 as launch frequency increases. The development of Launch Complex 2 will also see Rocket Lab continue to expand Electron rocket production at the company's headquarters in Huntington Beach, California, to supply complete launch vehicles for government and commercial customers.
"We are honored to be Rocket Lab's selection for Launch Complex 2," stated Dale Nash, CEO and Executive Director of Virginia Space. "There is an incredible synergy between Virginia Space and Rocket Lab and we are proud to support their missions launching from U.S. soil. We'd like to thank Rocket Lab for their confidence in our team. Virginia Space and MARS employees are standing ready to do everything we can to ensure successful, safe and timely launch missions for Rocket Lab just as we do for every customer of the Spaceport."
Bill Wrobel, director of NASA Wallops, said, "Wallops has more than 70 years of experience successfully supporting missions using suborbital as well as small and medium-class orbital launch vehicles. We look forward, along with our partner Virginia Space and its Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, to supporting Rocket Lab's Electron missions and expanding commercial launch operations from Wallops."
Four spaceports were shortlisted to become Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2, including Cape Canaveral, Wallops Flight Facility, Pacific Spaceport Complex - Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base. Wallops Flight Facility made the final cut thanks to high flight frequency available from the site, as well as rapid construction timelines that will see Rocket Lab target the first Electron launch from US soil Q3 2019.
Rocket Lab continues to assess additional launch sites in the US and internationally to provide additional launch flexibility for small satellite customers. The company also maintains agreements with Cape Canaveral in Florida and Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska to conduct launches from existing pads as required.
It started with a long-ago conversation with astronomer Carl Sagan, which awoke an abiding interest in UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life in Robert Zemeckis. That led in part to 1997’s “Contact,” which Zemeckis helmed, and, now, “Project Blue Book,” which he’s executive producing for A+E Studios.
The show bears more than a passing resemblance to “The X-Files,” from the tagline (“Over 12,000 UFO sightings. 1 government cover-up”) to the menacing presence of a shadowy figure in a hat and coat. Based on a real-life government operation called Project Blue Book, the series centers on the investigation by the U.S. Air Force into UFO sightings in the 1950s and ’60s. It stars Aidan Gillen as J. Allen Hynek, an astrophysics professor recruited to help with the investigation, and Michael Malarkey as the Air Force captain assigned to debunk the stories.
The first of 10 hourlong episodes of “Project Blue Book,” which bows this winter, was screened for press and other guests Tuesday at Mipcom.
The drama’s period detail is evident in the ’50s interiors and cars, a Flash Gordon comic book, a reference to the not-so-long-ago panic caused by Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” Inevitably, however, those involved insist on the show’s timeliness in today’s troubled, Trumpian, truth-challenged times.
“Project Blue Book was the original fake news,” said showrunner Sean Jablonski, calling it a government program created to discredit people’s sincere accounts of unexplained phenomena and to “give them alternative facts.”
“We didn’t just settle for case-of-the-week stories, but layered in the facts of a government cover-up that exposes the origin of fake news,” Zemeckis wrote in an e-mail read out at the screening. “Unfortunately, that feels as relevant today as it did back then.”
It’s clear that “Project Blue Book” is being shepherded by true believers, folks who have faith not just in the show but in the existence of life beyond Earth. Jablonski is in no doubt of that, recounting a solo trip he took to the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, in Peru, in the belief that aliens built it.
On stage with Jablonski in Cannes, Gillen (“The Wire”), Malarkey (The Vampire Diaries”) and Laura Mennell (“The Man in the High Castle”), who plays Hynek’s wife, Mimi, also professed themselves open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. “I have no reason to be a non-believer,” Malarkey said, in a Q&A conducted by series executive producer Barry Jossen, the head of A+E Studios.
“When you look at what we know about our vast universe, it’s impossible not to hope for the existence of worlds (and life) beyond our own,” Zemeckis wrote in his e-mail.
The cast also includes Ksenia Solo (“Orphan Black”) as a woman who befriends Mimi Hynek and is quickly revealed to be not all she seems, and Neal McDonough (“Minority Report”) and Michael Harney (“Orange Is the New Black”) as a pair of cabalistic air force generals. Whether little green men appear in “Blue Book” remains to be seen. The show was created and written by David O’Leary.
“The series is based in fact,” Jablonski said. “When you scratch the surface, the conspiracy and truth of what actually happened give you a lot of story to tell.”
Renewed US interest could produce some fascinating hearings, but the focus should be on the quality not just the quantity of reported sightings
The terms UFO and ‘flying saucer’ are both wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with ‘extraterrestrial spacecraft’. Photograph: Jim West/Rex/Shutterstock
There’s renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon and it’s coming from an unexpected source: the United States Congress.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is looking into a 2004 incident where US Navy pilots flying with the USS Nimitz strike group encountered, chased and filmed fast-moving unidentified objects. Reliable sources say at least two of the military pilots involved have already been interviewed, and a radar operator was subsequently invited to get in touch.
In parallel, the House Armed Services Committee is taking an interest. Records from April show the committee received a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing on the Pentagon’s UFO project, the cryptically-named AATIP. We know so little about AATIP that there’s even dispute over whether the acronym stands for Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program or Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program. The very existence of the project caused a sensation, because until the New York Times broke the story in December 2017, the US government claimed it had not investigated UFOs since the 1960s when sightings were looked at in a study called Project Blue Book.
As noted in the Guardian recently, data from two civilian UFO research organisations show that the number of reported sightings has fallen in recent years. However, there’s no single, global focal point for reports (the Ministry of Defence stopped investigating UFOs in 2009) and statistics will never tell the full story.
It would be better if the phenomenon were assessed and judged not on numbers alone, but by focusing on cases where we have compelling evidence: independently submitted reports from pilots on different flights; visual sightings corroborated by radar; photos and videos regarded as genuinely intriguing by intelligence community imagery analysts. Irrespective of the methodology we use to assess the phenomenon, how can we do so in an even-handed way when the subject has so much pop culture baggage?
A first step in reframing the debate might be changing the language. The term “UFO” has become as obsolete and baggage-laden as the now largely-defunct “flying saucer”. Both are widely, but wrongly, regarded as being synonymous with “extraterrestrial spacecraft”, when self-evidently all the phrase should mean is something in the sky that the observer cannot identify. When the question “do you believe in UFOs?” is misinterpreted as “do you think we’re being visited by aliens?” then we clearly have a problem.
We addressed this in the MoD in the 1990s by replacing “UFO” with “UAP”, for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. It got us increased funding and made a few senior officials take the matter more seriously, because they felt we were looking at a science problem, not a science fiction mystery.
Years later, in 2011, I was one of the briefers at a private gathering in Washington DC, chaired by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta, who has a longstanding interest in the issue. It was reminiscent of an episode of The X-Files and there was even a former CIA director sitting at the back, playing no part in the discussion, but silently taking notes. I briefed attendees on the MoD’s use of the term “UAP” and the message clearly hit home.
During Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for which Podesta was the campaign chair, she occasionally discussed UAPs and in one interview on the Jimmy Kimmel show she corrected the host for using the term “UFO”. We have yet to learn what Donald Trump thinks about UAPs, but his enthusiasm for a Space Force has certainly created a few conspiracy theories.
When it comes to UAPs, truth really is stranger than fiction. It turns out that AATIP was largely the brainchild of the then Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and that much of the work was contracted out to Bigelow Aerospace, run by former budget hotel magnate (and believer in extraterrestrial visitation) Robert Bigelow. A 2009 letter from Harry Reid about AATIP reads like science fiction in places.
Now, some of the people formerly involved with the project – including the DIA official who ran it, Luis Elizondo – have joined a Public Benefit Corporation called To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, fronted by Tom DeLonge, the former vocalist/guitarist and founder of pop punk band Blink-182. Their mission statement talks about creating a consortium “to explore exotic science and technologies … that can change the world”.
If current US Congressional interest evolves into formal hearings, either specifically on AATIP, or on UAPs more generally, I hope they can get past debates about terminology, and avoid getting bogged down in statistical analyses. I have made clear my willingness to testify on the basis that my experience with the MoD might be relevant.
Focusing on the quality of reports and not simply the quantity should result in a far more meaningful assessment of the phenomenon. Irrespective of the outcome, these might turn out to be the most fascinating Congressional hearings in history.
•Nick Pope worked at the Ministry of Defence for 21 years. From 1991 to 1994 he was posted to a division where his duties included investigating UAP sightings to determine whether they had any defence significance.
Why We Might Miss Extraterrestrial Life Even If It's Staring Us in the Face
Why We Might Miss Extraterrestrial Life Even If It's Staring Us in the Face
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor
See anything unusual in this aerial image?
Credit: Modified photo of an original NASA picture
What do you get when you combine a classic psychology experiment with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?
A gorilla on Mars.
OK, that one's not going to kill on the comedy circuit. Here's what's going on: Researchers from the University of Cádiz in Spain found that most people who were asked to look for signs of human-made structures on alien terrain completely missed a little, waving gorilla figure inserted into one of the images.
"We think [of] ETI as another form of humans, but much more advanced," study leader Gabriel G. De la Torre, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cádiz, told Live Science in an email. "We try to understand the world as [if] it was done to fit our beliefs, framework and senses. [In] reality, [it] could be much more different."
The limits of imagination
The limits of human imagination do likely constrain the search for extraterrestrial life, said Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, which uses radio and optical observations to hunt for brainy extraterrestrials. But that observation is "not exactly a call to action," he said.
Inside the Occator crater of the dwarf planet Ceres appears a strange structure that looks like a square inside a triangle.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
"I do get emails that say, 'Oh, well, you guys are just not being broad-minded enough," Shostak said. "That's a pretty easy thing to say, but it doesn't advance the search much."
In the new paper, De la Torre and his co-author, Manuel Garcia at the University of Cádiz, argued that extraterrestrials may not communicate using radio or light waves — the main mediums humans are using to search for signals from "little green men." Aliens might instead communicate through dark matter, the researchers wrote. That's the mysterious form of matter that should exist in order to provide enough gravitational force to keep galaxies from flying part, but which is not directly observable, because it doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum. Aliens might even be dark matter, the researchers wrote. [7 Huge Misconceptions about Aliens]
In that sense, humans might be so focused on searching for aliens using the kind of technology familiar to us that we miss the communications all around us, the researchers wrote. To demonstrate human inattention, the researchers conducted an experiment inspired by a famous psychology protocol from 1999. In the original experiment, researchers asked participants to do a task (say, counting the number of passes in a pickup basketball game) while watching a scene in which the investigators had inserted something truly ridiculous (say, a guy in a gorilla suit strolling right through the middle of the game). The researchers found that hardly anyone noticed the gorilla.
The cosmic gorilla
To update these findings for the SETI age, the researchers asked 137 participants to scan aerial photos of interplanetary imagery and search for structures that appeared unnatural, built by humans (or aliens). In one image, the researchers inserted a small photo of a person in a gorilla suit waving.
Only 45 out of 137, or 32.8 percent, of the participants noticed the gorilla. The researchers also asked the participants to take some surveys to reveal whether they had a more intuitive cognitive style or a more analytical cognitive style. It might seem that the intuitive types would be less likely to scan the scene carefully, thus missing the gorilla, but that was the opposite of what the researchers found.
"Those with a more intuitive cognitive style detected the gorilla more compared with the more rational/analytical style," De la Torre said. It might be that the rational types were more focused on the task at hand, making them blind to unexpected phenomena like the gorilla.
Thus, De la Torre said, the current search for E.T. may be limited by humanity's preconceived notions.
Shostak agreed to some extent. If you'd been able to ask a trilobite 500 million years ago who it expected to run the Earth in another few hundred million years, it might have dreamed up a "really souped-up trilobite," Shostak said. The organism probably wouldn't have foreseen a couple of mass extinctions and the upheaval of all forms of life on Earth. Humans likely face that same sort of problem in imagining life on other planets, Shostak said.
On the other hand, Shostak said, SETI researchers have given the matter some thought. There are arguments, he said, that humans are actually a pretty good example of what an intelligent life-form might need to get by — opposable thumbs, stereovision — and thus looking for aliens who look like us isn't a bad strategy. There are also arguments that the most likely type of extraterrestrial intelligence won't be biological at all, but will be artificially intelligent machines created by biological, but less bright, creators, Shostak said.
The idea of dark matter as an alien being seems less likely, he said, given that intelligence requires some level of complexity. Dark matter is currently hypothesized to consist of some undescribed theoretical particle, possibly WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. A bunch of particles "isn't going to give you anything that's organized enough to get you intelligence," Shostak said.
For De la Torre, the lesson of the "cosmic gorilla" is that SETI researchers need to consult with psychologists and neuroscientists.
"Currently, all psychological work in this area has been majorly dedicated to look[ing] into the impact of contact [with aliens] in our society," he said, but psychology has more to offer. "If we want to find other intelligences, multidisciplinary work is needed, and psychologists are the experts for intelligence matters."
Extraterrestrial life may use purple pigments to harvest energy.
Credit: iStock/Getty Images Plus
Alien life might be purple.
That's the conclusion of a new research paper that suggests that the first life on Earth might have had a lavender hue. In the International Journal of Astrobiology, microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman at the University of California, Riverside, argue that before green plants started harnessing the power of the sun for energy, tiny purple organisms figured out a way to do the same.
Alien life could be thriving in the same way, DasSarma said.
"Astronomers have discovered thousands of new extrasolar planets recently and are developing the capacity to see surface biosignatures" in the light reflected from these planets, he told Live Science. There are already ways to detect green life from space, he said, but scientists might need to start looking for purple, too. [7 Wild Theories on the Origin of Life]
Purple Earth
The idea that the early Earth was purple is not new, DasSarma and his colleagues advanced the theory in 2007. The thinking goes like this: Plants and photosynthesizing algae use chlorophyll to absorb energy from the sun, but they don't absorb green light. That's odd, because green light is energy-rich. Perhaps, DasSarma and his colleagues reasoned, something else was already using that part of the spectrum when chlorophyll photosynthesizers evolved.
That "something else" would be simple organisms that captured solar energy with a molecule called retinal. Retinal pigments absorb green light best. They're not as efficient as chlorophylls in capturing solar energy, but they are simpler, the researchers wrote in their new paper published Oct. 11.
Retinal light-harvesting is still widespread today among bacteria and the single-celled organisms called Archaea. These purple organisms have been discovered everywhere from the oceans to the Antarctic Dry Valley to the surfaces of leaves, Schwieterman told Live Science. Retinal pigments are also found in the visual system of more complex animals. The appearance of the pigments across many living organisms hints that they may have evolved very early on, in ancestors common to many branches of the tree of life, the researchers wrote. There is even some evidence that modern purple-pigmented salt-loving organisms called halophiles might be related to some of the earliest life on Earth, which thrived around methane vents in the ocean, Schwieterman said.
Purple aliens
Regardless of whether the first life on Earth was purple, it's clear that lavender life suits some organisms just fine, Schwieterman and DasSarma argue in their new paper. That means that alien life could be using the same strategy. And if alien life is using retinal pigments to capture energy, astrobiologists will find them only by looking for particular light signatures, they wrote.
Chlorophyll, Schwieterman said, absorbs mostly red and blue light. But the spectrum reflected from a plant-covered planet displays what astrobiologists call a "vegetation red edge." This "red edge" is a sudden change in the reflection of light at the near-infrared part of the spectrum, where plants suddenly stop absorbing red wavelengths and start reflecting them away.
Retinal-based photosynthesizers, on the other hand, have a "green edge," Schwieterman said. They absorb light up to the green portion of the spectrum, and then start reflecting longer wavelengths away.
Astrobiologists have long been intrigued by the possibility of detecting extraterrestrial life by detecting the "red edge," Schwieterman said, but they may need to consider searching for the "green edge," too.
"If these organisms were present in sufficient densities on an exoplanet, those reflection properties would be imprinted on that planet's reflected light spectrum," he said.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Argentijnse nieuwsuitzending onderbroken door aliens? Dit object verscheen plotseling in beeld
Argentijnse nieuwsuitzending onderbroken door aliens? Dit object verscheen plotseling in beeld
Een nieuwsuitzending op de Argentijnse tv werd afgelopen week onderbroken toen plotseling een ongeïdentificeerd vliegend object in beeld verscheen.
Tijdens het programma Mananas Argentinas op zender C5N was de skyline van Buenos Aires te zien op een enorm scherm.
Zilveren bol
Terwijl presentatrice Mariela Fernandez praatte over het weer en de smog in de lucht, doemde opeens een UFO op.
Het leek te gaan om een zilveren bol, die van rechts naar links door het beeld bewoog en uiteindelijk uit beeld verdween.
Onder de indruk
Fernandez was zichtbaar onder de indruk van het object, dat hoger en hoger klom. Ze riep uit dat het geen vliegtuig was, terwijl haar collega Diego Angeli suggereerde dat het een UFO was.
De laatste tijd worden vaker UFO’s gezien tijdens nieuwsuitzendingen. Eerder werden tijdens uitzendingen in Oregon, Milwaukee en Buffalo onverklaarbare dingen gezien in de lucht.
Prince would love this news. A new study claims that the first life on Earth may have been (get ready, Oprah!) the color purple and the same science behind this indicates that alien life forms, if they exist, could be a matching hue. Sorry all you greys, tall whites and green Reptilian fans! Might this be linked to the mysterious purple skies recently in Ohio and Florida?
Microbiologist Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and postdoctoral researcher Edward Schwieterman at the University of California, Riverside, are the authors of the study published in the International Journal of Astrobiology with the self-explanatory title: “Early evolution of purple retinal pigments on Earth and implications for exoplanet biosignatures.” Their “Purple Earth” hypothesis is based on the proposition that the purple-pigmented molecule called retinal may have enabled early life forms to create energy from sunlight before they went green with chlorophyll and photosynthesis.
The key to the Purple Earth hypothesis is the Great Oxygenation Event which designates the planet’s atmospheric switch 2.4 billion years ago from carbon dioxide and methane to primarily oxygen. Prior to this, DasSarma and Schwieterman speculate that retinal, a purplish molecule that is simpler than chlorophyll, was the primary energy enabler, then retinal and chlorophyll existed together before chlorophyll and photosynthesis generated enough oxygen to convert the entire atmosphere over to one more suitable for green plants. If we could travel back to that time, we’d see that the plants were purple because retinal molecules absorb green and yellow light and emit a mix of blue and red light that appears purple.
If the Purple Earth hypothesis is true, then it could happen on other planets that may be similar to Earth. To find them, the study says that astronomers need to start looking for planets with a “green edge” — since retinal reflects green infrared light – rather the “red edge” they currently seek because chlorophyll molecules reflect infrared red light. That would mean that any alien life utilizing retinal would be purple, including human-sized life forms. Can we deal with real Smurfs?
An example of a purple sky?
Did aliens have anything to do with the purple sky seen last week in northern Ohio and in Florida after Hurricane Michael? Videos of both show definite purple sky that’s more than just purple rain. Fortunately, local meteorologists calmed panicky skywatchers by explaining that there was nothing alien about it – the purple sky was the result of a phenomenon called scattering. A red sunset hits the blue sky and scatters the shorter blue wavelengths, creating purple – a color we should see every night but don’t because of the way our eyes adjust to different minor wavelengths.
Will our purple alien friends have the same problem? What color will they see us? Let’s hope it’s not the same as their favorite food.
A new French film about alien abduction (among other things) was screened last week at the BFI London Film Festival. Directed by a man simply known as Quarxx, the film, All the Gods In the Sky, has yet to secure a distribution deal, but, when it does, audiences should be prepare to be disturbed. Apparently, it was inspired by a photograph of a boy who lay next to his dead sister for three weeks.
The official synopsis is as follows:
“30-year-old factory worker Simon lives a solitary existence on a decrepit farm in the remote French countryside. Devoting his time to caring for his sister Estelle, who was left severely disabled when a childhood game went horribly wrong, Simon is plagued by guilt and depression. But he sees a way out, looking to otherworldly forces as a means of liberating both himself and his sister from the corporeal prisons in which they are confined.”
Pretty vague. So where do aliens come into all of this?
In her review for SciFi Now, Katherine McLaughlin notes that the film’s protagonist, Simon (Jean-Luc Couchard), is “convinced he was abducted by aliens who are still trying to contact him.” These aliens are, we can infer, “all the gods in the sky,” of the title and are regarded by Simon as a force of potential salvation for he and his disabled sister who wish to be freed from the heavy shackles of their Earthly existence.
McLaughlin describes the film as “Genuinely bleak and upsetting in places [and] intent on both shocking audiences and inspiring awe.” Melanie Gaydos, in the role of Simon’s sister, Estelle, delivers a “superb and committed” debut film performance, writes McLaughlin in her review, and adds that first-time director Quarxx “ups the disorientation levels and adds wonder to all the melancholy, unpleasantness and despair with remarkable, otherworldly imagery.”
Ultimately, however, the weighty themes are spread a little too thin for McLaughlin’s tastes, as she concludes of the film:
“Touching upon trauma, the pressures of caring for someone, disability, poverty and stolen childhoods [and, yes, alien abduction] in an ambitious and imaginative way Quarxx occasionally reaches a bit too far. Some of the narrative threads feel a little undercooked and unnecessary even if they are affecting and visually intriguing.”
As previously stated, All the Gods In the Sky is yet to secure a distribution deal, but it seems likely that it will be available on some platform or another sometime in 2019. In the meantime, if you’re intrigued at the notion of UFOlogical themes being incorporated into an arthouse film, you should check out the brilliant Under the Skin, which I count among my favorite UFO movies.
Whenever we think we’ve got a good grasp on how things work out in space something comes along and tells us otherwise. In this case it’s our models of how planets and star systems form. Astronomers in Chile recently discovered four enormous gas giants in a star system that should be far too young to have formed these massive planets.
CI Tau is a baby. It’s only two million years old and still surrounded by its protoplanetary disk, the swirling mass of dust that will eventually form into planets as gravity and time continue to work their weird magic on the system. The strange thing is that in this protoplanetary disk are conspicuous gaps, and in those gaps are already-formed massive gas giants. Scientists have no idea how they got there.
Protoplanetary disk.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech
One of the planets, the closest to CI Tau was already known to astronomers. This monster of a planet—known as CI Tau b— is about 10 times the size of Jupiter and orbits CI Tau once every nine days. When astronomers discovered CI Tau b, it was the first so-called “hot Jupiter” ever discovered around such a young star. Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit their star at very close distances and very high speeds. CI Tau b is closer to its sun than Mercury is to ours. Hot Jupiters already seem to defy assumptions about how solar systems form, and finding one around such a young star was even stranger. The other hot Jupiters found belonged to star systems hundreds of times older than CI Tau b. Now it turns out that this anomaly of a planet has three other neighbors that are even more surprising and strange.
What a hot Jupiter might look like.
Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/Principia College
The discovery of the three new planets was detailed in a new paper published in TheAstrophysical Journal Letters. The next planet out from CI Tau b is about the size of Jupiter, and orbits CI Tau at a distance of 13 AU (Astronomical Units, one AU is the distance from Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers). Further out are the two most mysterious planets in the system. These are both about the size of Saturnand they orbit at distances of 39 and 100 AU. Yet another thing that makes this system so strange is that the outermost planet is 1000 times further away that the innermost planet, a variance in distance that is hardly ever seen in star systems. At such extreme distances it’s supposed to take a very long time for Saturn-sized planets to form. According to Professor Cathie Clark, lead author of the paper:
“Saturn mass planets are supposed to form by first accumulating a solid core and then pulling in a layer of gas on top, but these processes are supposed to be very slow at large distances from the star. Most models will struggle to make planets of this mass at this distance.”
More observations of these bizarre planets will be required to even being to make sense of how they formed. Regardless of what we find,it will likely further challenge our assumptions of how planets are formed. Especially if we find an alien planet manufacturing factory hiding in the protoplanetary disk. Likely? No, not at all. But it would be pretty cool.
On Saturday, a young man found two distinctive drawings in the snow, but found no human footprints. At around 20:00 hours on Saturday, a youth from Moquehue (Neuquén) went out on his motorcycle to ride through a seldom-transited area along Route 117 and found strange drawings in the snow. "Their size and perfection were striking," said Rodrigo in a conversation with LM Neuquén regarding the spots. "I'd never seen anything like them." The young man said that after seeing the drawings, he alerted his family and they returned to the site to take photographs and inspect the designs. "I was surprised that there were no footprints nearby. This in an area that is rarely visited," he added. The ground marks were found on Route 11 heading toward Norquinco in an area that remains closed in winter and only recently reopened in the spring. Patches of snow often remain and that is where the marks were seen. Other local residents said that drawings similar in their size and perfection were found a kilometer distant from the site. "I believe UFOs exist. Perhaps it was them," Rodrigo concluded.
Steve Andrews Close UFO Encounter & Alien Abduction Incident in 1978
Steve Andrews Close UFO Encounter & Alien Abduction Incident in 1978
In 1978 Steve Andrews claims that he witnessed a close UFO encounter in Cardiff (Wales), and had been abducted and taken on board a spaceship by aliens. He was hypnotically regressed by Dave Coggins to recall his experience. Steve Andrews is also known as “The Bard of Ely”, was born in Canton, Cardiff in 1953 and lived in Ely for 25 years, a suburb on the outskirts of Cardiff in South Wales. He is a singer-songwriter, writer and journalist with a strong interest in botany and conservation. Andrews is known for having a brightly coloured beard and being a Welsh icon.
In an age of wild claims churned out by politicians, media and advertisers, perhaps people don’t care as much any more.
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.” 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.”
The science of proving an object was created by an extraterrestrial civilization
The science of proving an object was created by an extraterrestrial civilization
1. Introduction
In the recent world of fringe science, there has been an explosion of interest in so-called meta-materials allegedly “recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Although this announcement has created a great deal of excitement, there has been very little context to these claims. The public, therefore, has no real baseline by which to critique or even understand the claims or methods being employed to confirm the potentially anomalous nature of the material. For example, how can a member of the public understand whether or not the testing methods suggested by a variety of individuals are sufficient? And how will the evidence such testing provides be understood and analyzed by the scientific community, and how best can that be expressed to the general public? In this report our group will give this context, helping the public to construct informed opinions on these testing methods, results, and the very nature of the tests performed.
As a first pass on this analysis, we must understand what questions are being asked. In other words, let’s suppose we were given a piece of material that was believed to have come from another, potentially alien civilization. The challenge presented to our scientific team is to prove whether or not this material really did, or at least most likely must have, come from some non-Earth intelligence. How would we begin to develop a plan to test if the evidence supported this hypothesis? This question can be broken down into a number of significant portions. Firstly, we would want to identify if the material has come from outer space by comparing it to similar materials or samples we find on Earth. Does it show significant enough differences to cause us to believe it did not come from our planet? Second, is there evidence that the material has been engineered or designed in some way? Does it show properties or applications that we wouldn’t expect to occur naturally, or is it engineered or composed in a way to give it specific properties? And third, does it show advanced techniques or knowledge with which we are unfamiliar. Are there super-heavy elements which we have yet to discover here on Earth, does it show crystal structures or solid phases that have not yet been documented by the materials science community, does it show composition and engineering which is beyond the scope of science today? If these three questions are answered in the affirmative and supported by evidence this would be enough to support the hypothesis. This would show that this material is not only from outer space but from a civilization that had engineered it for a specific purpose. Each question answered in the affirmative would be a tremendous milestone for the person who found the material, but not enough to support the extraordinary claim of alien engineering on its own. For instance, if the material were found to be from outer space with evidence of unknown properties it may be a meteorite or other piece of space debris, but not necessarily from another civilization. At the same time, if the material showed evidence of engineering and was also found to have unknown properties it could be from an experimental aircraft or another device that is currently unknown to the public and scientific community. One possibility we cannot ignore here is that our current science may not be able to understand or determine the properties or applications for which a given material has been engineered. This may give a false negative to our question 3 above and lead us to unfairly characterize some samples as not passing the high threshold we have set. Ultimately if a material has been engineered, it is almost implied that there would be a reasoning behind this engineering, some application for which it would be used. Therefore, I would anticipate that although we may not currently understand its application that does not imply that an application was not in mind when the material was initially designed. This suggests that for cases where engineering is suspected as well as a non-Earth point of origin careful consideration must be given to potential applications we do not expect, as well as a variety of tests that may not be obvious to the engineer or scientist.
Materials science is a broad field with applications across the breadth of scientific, engineering, and medical studies. It deals primarily with the analysis and study of solid materials, both in their bulk form (for example the properties of a gallon of sand) and at the level of individual particles (a single grain of sand). This science deals with both crystalline materials, those with repeating patterns of atomic arrangement into what are known as crystalline phases (one of the most well-known examples of a crystalline solid is diamond, although crystals do not need to be gem-like, for example, salt), and amorphous solids, those without repeating atomic arrangements (one of which is aluminosilicate glass materials such as those used for dishware or windows in homes). Other materials which are well known to the reader are metallic solids such as Iron (a bulk collection of iron atoms held together by shared electrons) and steel (an alloy of iron with other metals, creating a solid mixture of components into a roughly homogeneous material). These materials are all, more or less, simplistic in their composition and manufacturing processes. For the majority of our time as a civilization, we have either mined them from the Earth for our direct use, or performed slight modifications such as melting, remixing, and re-casting to make them more useful. It is potentially true that other civilizations, having obtained the ability to make their way to our distant corner of the universe, will have also had their bronze or iron ages far in the past, and come to roughly the same conclusions as our metallurgists, scientists, and engineers when it comes to how to shape and utilize these materials at the bulk scale (assuming of course that these beings are physical things at all, something that is out of the scope of this discussion). In recent years, materials engineering has focused on the creation of novel materials for directed applications. In particular, this has focused on the creation of materials with nanoscale properties, those which become apparent at the bulk scale but are due to properties of the material at the scale of 1 x 10-9 meters long. Of particular interest to the study of potentially engineered materials, the behavior of nanoengineered solids is such that they would not, in general, be possible in nature as far as we understand it. These may include the creation of composite materials (e.g. solid particles covered in polymer molecules, layers of unlike oxides and metallic compounds with polymer or soft matter layers, designed or engineering crystal or polymer phases, and others), the creation of non-standard geometries (asymmetrical crystal growth or properties, designed crystal defects at regular positions, pillaring or other mixed porosity structuring), or the creation of materials that are post-synthetically functional (in other words materials that can be reversibly altered through the application of heat, chemical impulse, electromagnetic field, or some other energy/force). Probing structures of this sort is a complicated process, but one which has a tremendous amount of literature background available for the interested scientist or engineer. The pathway is apparent to those with the wherewithal to follow it; however, the jargon and specifics may be confusing and difficult to the interested public. In general, however, there are a number of properties that would be of immediate interest to a material scientist faced with the three hypotheses we have posited above. 2. Atomic and Isotopic Make-Up The first piece of useful information is what the material is composed of. This question in the first place helps to narrow down our later searches significantly, provides information to hint at the origin point of the material, and may even help us answer if the material has been engineered or not; as has been gone over consistently in the popular articles on this subject one of these tests would include something like EDS (Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy) or XRF (X-ray Fluorescence). In both of these tests, a material sample is bombarded with X-Rays in a test chamber, causing the atoms within the sample to become excited. These excited atoms eventually relax back to their initial ground state, by releasing photons which are then collected by a detector within the test chamber. The released photons are dependent on the atomic number of the elements within the sample, and in some testing methods, the oxidation state of the atoms within the material can be determined as well. These tests provide information on the elements within the sample, as well as a rough estimate of the chemical makeup of the bulk solid. In the unlikely case that the material contains an unknown element, it is these sorts of tests that would show the scientist that further testing should likely be performed. These tests may also suggest the presence of elements we don’t expect to find normally on the surface of the Earth, or even percentages of elements that are uncommonly found. For example, there are elements which are not naturally occurring but instead result from our nuclear weapons testing. Elements of this sort such as Strontium and Cesium would not be anticipated in high percentages in a normal sample of material, although again this would only suggest that the material is not from a standard source and not that it is extraterrestrial in origin.
Another type of information which has been held up as the holy grail of material testing in pop science is isotopic testing and ratio analysis. Isotopes of a given element are defined by their atomic number (the number of protons in their nucleus, which gives the element it’s identity and placement on the periodic table) and their mass (the number of protons and neutrons, each defined as one atomic mass unit, within the nucleus). The relative abundance of an isotope of an element on the surface of the Earth is, very roughly, averaged to give the atomic mass listed on the periodic table for that element. Isotopes vary due to their stability (with radioactive isotopes decaying and therefore becoming less abundant with time), and therefore the relative ratio of isotopes within a given sample would normally be expected to fit within the range of other samples found on the Earth. However, the variation of isotopes across the Earth’s surface can vary significantly, with radioactive testing and other geological or historical factors potentially playing a part. Therefore, it is important to be nuanced and careful in the analysis of these tests, a fact that has not been fully appreciated to date by those claiming to have extraordinary samples. At best isotopic testing would tell us that material is outside of the range of terrestrial samples we usually find, warranting further study by other means. It may also tell us if the sample is from before or after the Earth or even our solar system formed, or what local chemical or geological make up may have looked like over the lifetime of the sample. However, isotopic testing alone is not sufficient to answer the question of whether or not a sample has been engineered or left behind by some advanced civilization. Isotopic testing is generally performed utilizing magnetic mass spectrometry techniques such as Isotope-Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS) or Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICPMS). In these tests, the material sample is first atomized, either by grinding or very fast heating and dispersion in a carrier solution, which also causes them to take on a net positive or negative charge and thereby become ions. These ions are then carried with the carrier gas or plasma through a magnetic field towards an ion detector. The magnetic field is set up in such a way that ions will be separated from one another based on their mass to charge ratio, a value which is specific to ions of isotopes of a given element. Essentially, isotopes which are heavier will flow more slowly with the carrier gas, and those with higher charges will be more attracted to the magnetic field. This allows us to obtain a readout of the mass to charge ratio of the atoms within a sample, which when compared to a standard set of samples can then be used to determine the isotopes within the sample as well as their relative abundance based on the number of hits the detector reads. The results of these tests can be extremely accurate, down to parts per million of a sample if given the correct calibrations and analysis methods being employed.
3. Crystallography and Surface Characterization
If an advanced civilization has engineered a material for a specific purpose, one of the avenues to discover the trademarks of this engineering may be in the specifics of the solid components that make up the material. This includes the surface characteristics of the individual solid components (for example are they patterned or etched, do they show evidence of atomic deposition or other surface treatments for growth or sealing, are the surfaces polished or show a lack of imperfections), the porous structure of the support (is the surface area very high, are their complex porous channels that appear to have some separation or adsorption potential, are the pores engineered to include secondary chemical sites for chemisorption or catalysis of some sort), the crystal structure or phase of the components (is it a crystal structure that currently exists on Earth, is it a single crystal compound, does it show multiple materials combined together in a way which is unexpected), and the bulk properties of the solid (how does it respond to temperature, pressure, shear stresses, radiation, etc). The range of possible properties that can be probed in this case is vast; however, there are a few tests which I would consider to be absolutely necessary for a true analysis of any potentially engineered solid. These include X-Ray Diffraction, Pore/Surface analysis via adsorption isotherm, Raman or FTIR Spectroscopy, Electron Microscopy, and Thermogravimetric Analysis/Differential Scanning Calorimetry. These cover the broad gamut of materials characterization, giving a view of the materials properties as they currently exist, and would hint at potential other applications or methods of engineering should they exist. X-Ray Diffraction consists of the analysis of how an X-Ray beam is diffracted off of a materials crystal lattice. You can imagine a crystal structure like a regularly repeating pattern of atoms, each placed in a fixed position to one another in 3-dimensional space. During X-Ray diffraction, the crystal lattice is bombarded with photons, which are being shot as a beam at a given angle. Photons will interact and collide with atoms within the crystal lattice if they come into contact and be diffracted off of the solids lattice. In X-Ray Diffraction the photons that are diffracted are collected at each given angle and analyzed to determine information about the geometry of the crystal structure, how well defined the crystal is, and even in some cases how much stress or strain the material is under. For our analysis, the first important characterization is if the material is a crystal structure or not. If it is a crystal, is it a sort of crystal structure that we would find in the scientific literature, or is it something novel to materials science? From the hints that we have received so far by those in possession of these materials, we may expect that the solid is layered, or lamellar. These layered solids possess diffraction patterns at the lowest X-Ray angles, between 0.1 and 5 degrees 2 theta (2 thetas being the measured angle of the X-Ray beam). This corresponds to very large spaces between repeating planes, with most layered materials in the open literature showing d spacings of between 10 and 40 Angstroms. This would be a quick and easy test to run and would immediately tell us if the structure is layered in any way which would make it outside of the scope of naturally occurring lamellar structures such as clays or layered hydroxides. Spectroscopy occurs similarly, probing the structure with photons of a given energy and observing the excitation of the material surface to tell us something about the chemical bonds likely present on the material. Raman spectroscopy is generally utilized in this field for metallic structures, although the information obtained in this way is generally limited. The true use of these spectroscopic techniques from a materials science perspective is in the ability to see if there are secondary chemical functionalities present on the material’s surface. For example, we may expect that catalysis or separation applications on some other planet would require the same careful control of chemical binding sites as we use on Earth for our catalysis and separations applications. This would be clear by the presence of secondary chemical species not often found on the surface of solid materials. Sensors on a material surface, coatings for different applications, and other potential surface species adsorbed onto the material being studied (such as debris from entry into the upper atmosphere, chemical species from the atmosphere of where ever this material has been, and other surface alterations) would also potentially be observable from such an analysis. This in tandem with isotherm analysis for porosity and surface area information would also be extremely useful. Materials with very high surface areas may show potential as catalysts or adsorbents and would show at least that the material was likely created and not naturally occurring (surface areas as high as 3000 m2/g have been achieved on Earth, although only for synthetic materials). Electron Microscopy via Scanning Electron Microscopy and Transmission Electron Microscopy would give information as to the solids bulk surface properties, although outside of that the information gleaned from such analysis is likely to be limited. Of particular interest would be whether the surface is patterned or altered in some way. For example, on Earth we are currently studying the effect of rough surface patterning on anti-bacterial or microbial properties of surfaces, as well as what effect surface etching or patterning can have on the ability to repel or absorb water. We may expect that other intelligences would also find these properties useful to tune and would utilize them to provide beneficial properties to their materials. There may also be other surface patterning alterations which provide additional benefits, for example, radar cloaking or resistance to heat or radiation. On top of that if the material has been fabricated at the micron or bulk scales, then these microscopic techniques would tell that story, providing direct evidence of engineering. Thermal analysis may also provide some benefit, although this would again be limited. TGA and DSC work by heating the material slowly over time and observing what changes are made to the temperature of the material or the weight of the material. This may provide information on organic content, the ability of the material to withstand increased temperatures or heat fluxes, and how the solid behaves under the extreme heat of entry into the atmosphere from space.
4. Current State of Materials Study and Conclusion
As far as can be gleaned from the information available to the general public, it appears that efforts to date concerning the analysis of solids potentially occurring from some unknown civilization have focused on the first class of studies, those concerning the elements making up the material and their isotopes. However, as has been suggested by this work that is only a small portion of the entire picture needed before any definitive conclusions can be made. There are other, more specific tests that would need to be run to determine the potential applications of any material, how it was potentially fabricated, and where it may have come from. However, as any first-year materials science student can tell you, these are the basic analytical techniques which would be utilized for a serious investigation. Of particular concern to the interested public should be any study that purports to give evidence without reporting clearly and in detail their methods, potential sources of error, the accuracy of their measurements, and other information required to replicate their results. Without these pieces of information, it is impossible to verify any claims regarding a material’s properties, let alone more extraordinary claims regarding potential engineering by a non-Earth civilization. It is the authors hope that this report has been informative to the general public, and it is our sincere hope that this work may be of some use to those interested in these subjects who are not sure what to make of extraordinary claims of materials with special properties or exotic origin points.
How Paul Allen Saved the American Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
How Paul Allen Saved the American Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The Microsoft co-founder single-handedly revolutionized the American search for extraterrestrial intelligence at a time when no public institutions wanted to touch it.
On Monday evening, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 65. At the time of his death, Allen was the 47th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $26 billion. For the last few decades of his life, Allen used his wealth for a staggering variety of business and philanthropic interests. In addition to owning the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers, Allen founded a brain science institute, an AI institute, and Stratolaunch Systems, which was exploring private spaceflight.
Yet one of the research areas where Allen made the biggest impact was also the one he spoke about the least: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Indeed, Allen almost single-handedly rescued American SETI by donating over $30 million to scientists scanning the cosmos for intelligent radio signals.
SETI’s early years in the United States was mostly defined by intermittent searches bankrolled with public funds, such as the National Science Foundation-funded program at Ohio State University which discovered the Wow! signal, or university endowments, such as Harvard’s Project Sentinel. By the early 90s, however, many of the early SETI programs had ended. The best hope for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence seemed to be NASA’s first foray into SETI, the Microwave Observing Program, which began observations in 1992.
Less than a year after the start of NASA’s SETI program, it was killed by members of Congress who didn’t want to waste money on the “great Martian chase.” The SETI Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1984 by the radio astronomer Jill Tarter, wasn’t going to let SETI die at the hands of a few cynical congressmen, but it also realized that the only hope for the future was privately funded searches.
Fortunately, one of the earliest SETI Institute supporters was Barney Oliver, who founded and directed Hewlett Packard laboratories. So in 1993 Oliver called Bill Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett Packard, Intel founder Gordon Moore, and Paul Allen to ask for their support.
“It probably only took Barney a few hours on the phone to get each of them to commit $1 million every year for the next five years,” Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told me on the phone. “I’m not sure any of them were particularly interested in SETI, but they were interested in whatever Barney thought was a good idea.”
This $20 million commitment bankrolled Project Phoenix, a SETI program that ran from 1995 to 1998. Over the course of three years, Project Phoenix rented time on the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to scan for signals from 800 stars within 200-light years of Earth.
"There’s no doubt that Paul saved American SETI."
Project Phoenix was better than nothing, but SETI astronomers realized that if the search had any chance of success, it would need its own dedicated SETI radio telescope. Or better yet, an entire array of small telescopes, which together produce a wide view of the sky and can target hundreds of stars at a time. This was the topic of a series of meetings organized by the SETI Institute between 1998 and 2000 that were meant to plot the next two decades of SETI research.
Led by Tarter, the meetings attendees cobbled together a telescope array design that consisted of 350 20-foot radio telescopes. There was just one question: Who would foot the $25-million bill? Knowing that Allen helped revive SETI with Project Phoenix a few years earlier, Tarter reached out to him and asked if he could summon a monetary life raft once again. By 2000, Allen had committed $25 million out of his own pocket to building a telescope array in northern California, the first facility specifically built for SETI in the US.
“We were very excited at the institute,” Shostak said. “Prior to the telescope array, we had to piggyback on other equipment. That’s like being a doctor and everytime you need to do research you need to borrow someone else’s microscope. There’s no doubt that Paul saved American SETI.”
The cost of building a 350-telescope array ended up being far more expensive than anyone at the SETI Institute had anticipated, however. By the time the Allen Telescope Array came online in 2007, only 42 telescopes had been built and Allen’s donation had largely been consumed.
Aerial view of the Allen Telescope Array.
Image: Seth Shostak/SETI Institute
Shostak told me he was there for the dedication ceremony where Allen “pushed the button” to turn the system on. He said he briefly had a chance to speak with Allen about what fueled his interest in SETI. According to Shostak, Allen told him that it was because he was interested in finding new ways to use technology.
“I thought it was just a talking point, but Allen’s whole career backs that up,” Shostak said. “The array was in line with that philosophy.”
Over the past ten years, the Allen Telescope Array has had as many successes as setbacks. It has analyzed 200 million signals from thousands of stars, studied unusual high-energy radio emissions, and even scanned the “spliff-shaped” Oumuamua asteroid for signs of intelligent life. The radio telescope experienced a major setback in 2011, however, when it had to shutdown due to lack of funding. It was brought back online the following year with a donation from Qualcomm’s cofounder Franklin Antonio.
Shostak said Allen never returned to the SETI Institute or the radio telescope that bears his name in the decade leading up to his death. Despite this, however, Allen never lost interest in the project or the prospect of communicating with extraterrestrials.
“The scientists are optimistic because they think that if they have better instruments that look deeper or on more frequencies, there should be civilizations out there broadcasting,” Allen said in an interview with Discover Magazine shortly after the array began observations. “I think everybody would admit it’s a long shot, but if that long shot comes in…”
Where to Land on the Red Planet? That's the Choice for Mars 2020 Rover Team.
Where to Land on the Red Planet? That's the Choice for Mars 2020 Rover Team.
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
An artist's depiction of the Mars 2020 rover at work on the Red Planet.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's next Mars spacecraft will soon know its landing site, as scientists meet to debate the relative merits of four final contenders. The mission will investigate whether the Red Planet ever hosted life.
That meeting, taking place in California, gathers hundreds of people to make a final community recommendation to NASA for the Mars 2020 rover missionlanding site.
"The Mars 2020 landing site could set the stage for Mars exploration for the next decade," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a statement. "I'm looking forward to the spirited debate and critical input from the science and engineering community. Whichever landing site is ultimately chosen, it may hold the very first batch of Mars soil that humans touch."[NASA's Mars Rover 2020 Mission in Pictures]
The four landing sites now under consideration for NASA's 2020 Mars rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
That's because Mars 2020 is designed to be the first part of a hoped-for sample-return mission, although the homeward leg is not yet on the agency's formal docket. But among Mars 2020's other tasks will be gathering and packaging up dirt samples that a future mission can bring home, so scientists could study Martian soil in terrestrial laboratories for the first time.
But the Mars 2020 rover can travel only so far, so scientists need to pick a landing site that optimizes the mission. Not only should the site avoid adding danger to the already-hazardous process of landing on Mars, but it should also allow access to a range of scientifically intriguing sites.
Scientists have already narrowed the site down to just four options: Columbia Hills, Jezero Crater, Northeast Syrtis and Midway. At this week's three-day workshop, scientific advocates of each candidate location will explain the appeal of the site. At the event's end, the group will send a final recommendation to NASA.
The agency plans to announce a final decision before the end of the year, according to the statement. That's plenty of time for the Mars 2020 team to finalize plans for the mission, which is scheduled to land on our neighboring planet in February of 2021.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
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