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...
24-10-2018
VIDEO. Net een horrorfilm: grootste ijsvlakte ter wereld maakt buitenaards geluid - HLN.be
VIDEO. Net een horrorfilm: grootste ijsvlakte ter wereld maakt buitenaards geluid - HLN.be
Onderzoekers ontdekten dat het grootste ijsplateau ter wereld, de Ross-ijsvlakte in Antarctica, een vreemd geluid maakt. De buitenaardse klanken zouden kunnen helpen met hun onderzoek naar de klimaatsverandering.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:HLN.be - Het Laatste Nieuws ( NL)
Shape Shifting UFO Caught Following Space Station On Live Cam, Oct 24, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Shape Shifting UFO Caught Following Space Station On Live Cam, Oct 24, 2018, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Oct 24, 2018 Location of sighting: Earth orbit at space station Source:NASA Live cam I was watching the live cam and noticed this UFO in the far distance. The UFO moved slightly and changed shape from a round appearance to a long cigar shape. Its also odd that a new NASA red screen kept popping up about 6 times during the sighting. I believe the new color indicated an emergency that needs dealt with...a UFO. It may be a new AI system for detecting anomalies flying past. Scott C. Waring
Bilderbergclub heeft zinnen gezet op de kosmos. Wat vertelt deze sinistere groep ons niet over buitenaards leven?
Bilderbergclub heeft zinnen gezet op de kosmos. Wat vertelt deze sinistere groep ons niet over buitenaards leven?
Schrijfster en journaliste Cristina Martin Jimenez heeft zich uitgebreid verdiept in de Bilderbergclub, die volgens haar aanstuurt op een samenleving met één enkele religie, één gemeenschappelijke munt en een wereldregering.
Jimenez heeft ontdekt dat de sinistere club nu haar zinnen op de ruimte heeft gezet.
Haar onderzoek heeft geresulteerd in een revolutionair, uniek en controversieel boek, getiteld ‘Hijos del Cielo’ oftewel kinderen van de hemel.
Ze merkte op dat er allerlei krachten actief waren om de publicatie van haar boek tegen te houden. “Maar ik ben niet bang voor hen,” zei ze in een interview met Epipress.
Een eerder boek van haar was jarenlang niet verkrijgbaar.
Buitenaardse schepen
De Bilderbergclub is vastbesloten om te investeren in de ruimte en de kosmos te verkennen. Zij is er zeker van dat buitenaardse schepen met daarin superieure wezens de aarde hebben bezocht.
Dat terwijl ze ons jarenlang hebben voorgelogen over alles wat er in de lucht gebeurt en mensen die over UFO’s spraken belachelijk hebben gemaakt en in diskrediet hebben gebracht, aldus Jimenez.
Het blijkt dat er altijd een speciale band is geweest tussen de aarde en deze wezens, die sterk, knap en intelligent zijn; heel anders dan het stereotiepe beeld in de samenleving, legde ze uit.
We danken alles aan deze superieure wezens, die ook wel ‘goden’ werden genoemd en die in ruimteschepen ‘feller dan de zon’ neerdaalden vanuit de hemel. Dankzij hen konden we evolueren, zei ze.
Nieuwe wereldoorlog
De Bilderbergers zitten volgens haar ook achter de financiële crisis van 2008. “Zij hebben dit systeem gecreëerd, waarbij van tijd tot tijd economische crises ontstaan.”
Ze zei verder dat de nieuwe wereldoorlog al gaande is. Het is een subtiele en discrete oorlog, die de cultuur aanvalt.
Het is ook een economische en psychologische oorlog die hier en daar nog klassieke oorlogstinten heeft, zoals we in Syrië zien, klonk het.
Bilderberg wil een wereldregering in particuliere handen vestigen door de emoties en gevoelens van mensen te manipuleren in een samenleving die wordt bedwelmd door de grote techbedrijven, die ook van Bilderberg zijn, zei Jimenez.
Rotte fundamenten
Ze voegde toe dat sommigen beginnen in te zien dat deze manipulatie uit de hand is gelopen.
David Rockefeller, de vader van Bilderberg, was al in 1947 van plan om regeringen te vervangen door een privémacht. Ook Paul Warburg had het over een wereldregering.
Het Marshallplan, het omvangrijke ‘hulpplan’ dat na de Tweede Wereldoorlog in werking trad, is volgens de journaliste bedacht door de Amerikaanse elites en de Bilderbergclub om Europa te onderwerpen.
Jimenez zei dat de VN is opgericht om alvast te experimenteren met een soort wereldregering. “De VN is opgebouwd op rotte fundamenten, op het terrein van de Rockefellers,” zei ze.
Pedofiele priesters
In 1957 zag Bilderberg hoeveel invloed je op mensen kunt uitoefenen door middel van religie.
Ze wees erop dat veel machtsgroepen die met Bilderberg verbonden zijn, in de katholieke kerk zijn geïnfiltreerd en dat veel pedofiele priesters leden zijn van deze manipulatieve groepen.
Steeds meer mensen doorzien de plannen van Bilderberg, zei ze. Er is een informatieoorlog gaande en iedereen die tegen de gevestigde orde is wordt genadeloos hard aangevallen.
In de VS is dat Trump en in Europa gaat het om Polen, Hongarije en Italië, waar regeringen rebelleren tegen de oude garde, besloot ze.
Weird Square Iceberg in Antarctica ‘Something hidden in plain sight?’
Weird Square Iceberg inAntarctica ‘Something hidden in plain sight?’
NASA’s project Operation Icebridge, studying climate conditions in Antarctica, captured a weird square iceberg during a flyover of Antarctica.
According to NASA twitter: From yesterday's IceBridge flight: A tabular iceberg can be seen on the right, floating among sea ice just off of the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.
The iceberg's sharp angles and flat surface indicate that it probably recently calved from the ice shelf.
Yes NASA that is indeed very weird; it just split from the edges of ice shelves and there it is… a perfect square iceberg.
It looks almost as if the iceberg was sliced with a laser. This square iceberg with its perfect 90 degrees corners just does not fit in the surrounding area if you compare it with other icebergs.
It is known that there are secret bases and underwater bases in Antarctica. Could it be that this weird iceberg is more than just an iceberg, something hidden in plain sight?
A former Air Force sergeant who claimed to have seen top-secret photos of an alien base on the far side of the moon has died in a bicycle crash.
Karl R. Wolfe was killed in the crash on October 10 in Lansing, New York, after he was struck from behind by a tractor trailer traveling southbound on North Triphammer Road near Sharon Drive. He was 74.
Wolfe was rushed to Cayuga Medical Center where he later died from injuries sustained in the crash.
Although the crash is under investigation, no charges have been filed and the Tompkins County Sheriff's office did not release the name of the tractor trailer driver, the Ithaca Journal reported.
Karl R. Wolfe (above) was killed in the crash on October 10 in Lansing, New York
In 2001, Wolfe gained fame when he came forward with claims that he had he had seen photographic evidence of an alien structure on the far side of the moon.
In a video interview, Wolfe said that in the mid-1960s, he had a top secret clearance and worked for Tactical Air Command at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Wolfe said his job was working as a electronic technician in photographic surveillance labs, and he spent most of his time working on machines that processed surveillance footage of Vietnam.
One day, Wolfe recalled that his superior told him to report to an NSA facility on the base to help with an issue with equipment used to process imagery from the first lunar orbiter mission.
Wolfe said he reported to the facility, which he described as a large hangar-type building with many foreign citizens in civilian clothes, accompanied by interpreters - a surprising sight to the military man.
The former airman recalled that he was alone in a darkroom with another Airman second class, when the other enlisted man said: 'By the way, we've discovered a base on the back side of the moon.'
The far side of the moon is seen in a 1972 photo taken by Apollo 16. Wolfe said that he saw an alien moon base in photos taken by the first lunar orbiter
Wolf (above) was working as a photo technician for the Air Force when he says he was called in to repair equipment that was used to process images from the first lunar orbiter
'I said, 'Whose? What do you mean?'' Wolfe recalled. He said he was fascinated by the statement but was fearful that someone would walk in on their conversation.
Then, Wolfe said, the Airman showed him a photo mosaic assembled from multiple passes by the lunar orbiter.
'He pulled out one of these mosaics, and showed this base which had geometric shapes - there were towers, there were spherical buildings, there were very tall towers and things that looked somewhat like radar dishes, but they were very large structures,' Wolfe said.
'Every day when I went home I thought, 'I can't wait to hear about this on the news,'' Wolfe said.
After serving in the Air Force, Wolfe attended the University of Buffalo with a dual major in Social and Cultural Anthropology, and Electronics Engineering.
Wolfe went on to become a self-help consultant. He never married, and had no children.
Ever seen one of these? People sometimes report them as UFOs. They’re called hole-punch clouds, and jets make ’em. The connection between hole-punch clouds, jets and snowfall, here.
Patricia Evans spotted this hole-punch cloud in November 2015 from a restaurant parking lot.
You’re probably familiar with contrails, the wispy strands of clouds made by jet exhaust high in the sky. But if you’ve ever seen a hole-punch cloud, sometimes called a fallstreak hole, you’ll be surprised by their strange appearance. They look like strange clearings in an altocumulus cloud layer, often circular patches of clear sky, surrounded by clouds. Sometimes people report them as UFOs. Airplanes create hole-punch clouds – but just how do they do it?
… composed of small water droplets that are below freezing called ‘supercooled water droplets.’ If ice crystals can form in the layer of supercooled droplets, they will grow rapidly and shrink or possibly evaporate the droplets completely.
Studies, including this one by Andrew Heymsfield and collaborators, have shown that aircraft passing through these cloud layers can trigger the formation of the heavier ice crystals, which fall to Earth and then leave the circular void in the blanket of clouds.
They concluded that aircraft propellers and wings cause the formation of those initial ice crystals. There are zones of locally low pressure along the wing and propeller tips which allow the air to expand and cool well below the original temperature of the cloud layer, forming ice crystals.
Rick Trent in Paradise, California, caught this hole punch cloud in November 2016.
Image via Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission.
Houston, Minnesota.
Photo via Jamie Vix.
Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research spoke with EarthSky some years ago, when his study first appeared. He told us:
This whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.
His team found that – at lower altitudes – jets can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. As a plane flies through mid-level clouds, it forces air to expand rapidly and cool. Water droplets in the cloud freeze to ice and then turn to snow as they fall. The gap expands to create spectacular holes in the clouds. He said:
We found an exemplary case of hole-punch clouds over Texas. From satellite imagery you could see holes just pocketing the sky, holes and long channels where aircraft had been flying at that level of the cloud for a while.
Heymsfield used a weather forecast model developed at NCAR – and radar images of clouds from NASA’s CloudSat satellite – to explain the physics of how jet aircraft make hole-punch clouds.
Heymsfield’s team found that every measurable commercial jet aircraft, private jet aircraft and also military jets as well as turbo props were producing these holes. He said a hole-punch cloud expands for hours after being created. Major airports, where there’s a lot of aircraft traffic, would be a good place to study cloud holes. He said:
What we decided to do was look at major airports around the world, especially where there’s low cloud cover and cold clouds in the wintertime, and found that the frequency of occurrence suitable for this process to occur is actually reasonably high, on the order of three to five percent. In the winter months, it’s probably two to three times higher, 10 to 15 percent.
Image via Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission.
He said people who look out their airplane window in flight can see for themselves how the wing changes a cloud.
When an aircraft lands or takes off sometimes – especially in humid, tropical areas – you see a little veil of clouds over the wings of the aircraft. And basically, what’s happening over the wings of the aircraft, there’s cooling. And the cooling produces a cloud.
It’s basically a super-cooled cloud. It’s just like a fog you see at the ground except that its temperature is zero degrees centigrade [32 degrees Fahrenheit]. So in that process of expanding, the air expands over the wing and cools. And that cooling can be as much as 20 degrees centigrade [68 F].
The cooling of air over the wings generates ice, said Heymsfield.
About the Texas incident where satellite imagery showed many hole-punch openings and channels, Heymsfield said:
What we found was that there were about a hundred of these little features. We decided to, first of all, identify their location and see if we could link them to particular aircraft. Then the second thing we did was say, okay, why do these long channels last for the period of time it would take for a satellite to take a snapshot of them? We got high-time-resolution satellite imagery and were able then to track these features, these holes, and watch them develop with time, watch how they developed.
Bottom Line: Scientists have found that, at mid-altitudes, jet aircraft can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. These are the strange hole-punch clouds that are sometimes reported as UFOs.
NASA Tests Astronaut Survival Systems for Orion Splashdowns
NASA Tests Astronaut Survival Systems for Orion Splashdowns
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
In a previous drill, NASA astronaut Suni Williams tests an Orion crew module escape mechanism at the agency's Johnson Space Center, before the capsule was ready to be tested in open water.
Credit: NASA
NASA and the U.S. Air Force recently tested astronaut survival systems for the first time since the space shuttles stopped flying in 2011.
Those tests were part of the agency's preparations for the first crewed flights of its Orion module, which is designed to carry astronauts out of our immediate neighborhood and toward more exotic destinations like the moonand Mars.
Orion Spacecraft✔@NASA_Orion
Orion, @NASAGoddard and the @usairforce tested open water raft and survival equipment performance in challenging weather conditions and dynamic simulated sea states. The search and rescue beacon notification system was exercised for the first time since the Space Shuttle program.
The scenarios focused on systems that would protect astronauts landing in open water under harsh weather conditions. (As usual for spaceflight systems, the agency wants to make sure everything works safely in the most extreme conditions that might be experienced.)
During the tests, NASA and the Air Force studied both the rafting equipment that lets crewmembers leave the capsule and the beacon systems that help rescue personnel track down the astronauts. The latter are leftover from the space shuttles' systems and haven't been checked since the vehicles stopped flying in 2011.
The Orion capsule is designed to fly on the Space Launch System, a powerful rocket that NASA has yet to complete. Crewed flights are scheduled to begin in the early 2020s, leaving the agency plenty of time to ensure all the safety systems can hold up under the harshest possible conditions.
AN ALIEN SATELLITE IS IN RETROGRADE ORBIT AROUND EARTH
AN ALIEN SATELLITE IS IN RETROGRADE ORBIT AROUND EARTH
By: Gaia Staff
There are currently more than 100,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, from space junk, to high tech probes transmitting signals back to Earth. But one of these satellites is thought to be of extraterrestrial origin and has been circling our planet, prior to the launch of Sputnik. This mysterious spacecraft is known as the Black Knight satellite, alleged to be of alien provenance and covered up by NASA for more than 60 years.
While most man-made satellites orbit in prograde, due to the ease and fuel efficiency of using the Earth’s natural gravitational pull, the Black Knight is said to orbit in retrograde, adding to its curious nature. But is it actually an alien satellite monitoring our planet, or simply a thermal space blanket like NASA has claimed photo evidence of it to be?
TESLA AND THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE
Recently, a series of fast radio bursts was picked up by Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Listen Initiative, which some have speculated could be coming from the technology of an advanced, extraterrestrial species. This wouldn’t be the first time a scientist picked up signals from the cosmos and believed it to be of alien origin. Nearly a century ago, Nikola Tesla claimed to have recorded electrical signals at his laboratory in Colorado Springs that were of intelligent nature.
Tesla had been working on the technology for his Wardenclyffe Tower, when he noticed signals which were not of earthly origin and could be ruled out as being weather-related. He believed the signals were being transmitted from a civilization on Mars, so he developed a device to send signals back out to make contact. Tesla was arguably the most well-versed in radio signal transmission at the time, having pioneered the technology, so it’s hard to imagine he would have been confused by any earthly interference.
No one knows exactly what those signals were, but some believe they may have been a transmission from the Black Knight satellite. Not long after Tesla’s reception, an amateur radio operator in Norway named Jørgen Hals, recorded transmissions called Long Delayed Echoes, or LDEs. Stanford professor, Ron Bracewell, proposed the idea that these echoes were the product of an alien satellite picking up radio signals from Earth and rebroadcasting them back, creating a delay of several seconds. Some speculate that the Black Knight could be this theoretical transmitter, known as a Bracewell probe.
In the early 1970s, a man named Duncan Lunan reinterpreted and examined these LDEs, concluding they were too strong to simply be echoed radio signals from Earth. Lunan said he translated the signals and, to his surprise found a map of Epsilon Boötis, a binary star in the Boötes system. Although Lunan doesn’t like his interpretation of the LDEs associated with the conspiracy surrounding the Black Knight, there are similarities in nature and timeliness.
IS THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE REAL?
In 1954, a few news reports claimed the U.S. Air Force had discovered two satellites orbiting the Earth. With the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, not launching for another three years, the discovery was surprising. But the Air Force was not the only government agency to notice the satellites. The Venezuelan Communications Ministry also noticed their presence a few years later while tracking Sputnik. The ministry noted that these satellites were moving from east to west, in retrograde orbit. Aside from the fact that there were only a few artificial satellites in orbit at the time, none would have been in retrograde orbit.
In 1954, Donald Keyhoe claimed found a satellite was found to orbiting Earth. Keyhoe was originally a marine naval aviator who later became the most prominent name in ufology, establishing the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP. Keyhoe’s claim was picked up by the San Francisco Examiner and St. Louis Post Dispatch. According to the articles, Keyhoe said that the Secretary of the Air Force, Harold Talbott, was aware of the satellites and had even witnessed a ‘silvery, disc-shaped object’ in the sky. Though, Talbott dismissed these claims.
Another confounding characteristic of the Black Knight was the fact that it was circling the Earth in polar orbit, a feat not accomplished by man-made satellites until 1960. This type of orbit is typically used for mapping, reconnaissance, and tracking, and often it is done in a sun-synchronous orbit so that each time the satellite passes a particular spot, it is the same time of day. The combination of retrograde and polar orbits makes this type of satellite stick out especially in the late 50s/early 60s when satellite technology was in its nascent phases. And it wasn’t just military entities who photographed an unidentified satellite, but also the Smithsonian Observatory at Harvard as well as the Gruman Aircraft Corporation in New York.
But the story of the Black Knight gets even more bizarre with the French Space Commission’s observation of the satellite while Jacques Vallée was on staff. Despite excitement and intrigue by Vallée and his colleagues, a senior member of his team deleted their imaging of the satellite, for reasons unknown. While Vallée said he believed it was out of embarrassment for the commission’s inability to identify the orbiting object, it was becoming increasingly common for agencies around the world to notice the unidentified satellite, without explanation.
The Black Knight Satellite –
wikipedia.com
NASA’S BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE EXPLANATION
There are several pictures circulating the internet of what is thought to be the Black Knight. These pictures, according to NASA, are images of a thermal cover dropped during a spacewalk or during some type of extra-vehicular activity on the ISS. During this expedition, one astronaut purportedly finished his mission early and was asked to cover the space station’s trunnion pins with thermal covers. The astronaut was asked to complete this as a free-floating task, despite not having the cover properly attached, inevitably losing track of it as it floated off.
When asked later which pin he lost the cover to, he said he could not remember and that he was too upset with himself to think about it. NASA maintains that the photographs most people point to as evidence of the black knight are images of this thermal cover. There is also a video of the astronauts inside the space station filming and photographing the cover as it floats off.
It is entirely possible that NASA’s claims are true. There are plenty of similarities between the thermal cover and the images believed to be the Black Knight. There aren’t however, sufficient explanations of sightings and documentation of the satellite from the 1950s and 60s by numerous government and scientific agencies.
In 1963, while orbiting Earth, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a glowing green light ahead of his Mercury 9 module. He reported it to the Australian Space Command, who were able to track it. Oddly enough, when Cooper returned to Earth he was not allowed to talk about the light and it wasp officially reported he had suffered hallucinations from an excess of carbon dioxide in his cabin.
Despite NASA’s attempt to explain what Cooper saw with a more mundane explanation, he continued throughout his life to divulge stories that detailed his experiences with UFOs and other unexplained phenomena. He often spoke of attempted government cover-ups regarding UFOs and unexplained activity, so it could be probable he saw the Black Knight realizing its existence was deliberately being withheld from the public.
One of NASA's twin MarCO spacecraft took this image of Mars on October 2 -- the first time a CubeSat, a kind of low-cost, briefcase-sized spacecraft -- has done so.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's MarCO mission was designed to find out if briefcase-sized spacecraft called CubeSats could survive the journey to deep space. Now, MarCO - which stands for Mars Cube One - has Mars in sight.
One of the twin MarCO CubeSats snapped this image of Mars on Oct. 3 - the first image of the Red Planet ever produced by this class of tiny, low-cost spacecraft. The two CubeSats are officially called MarCO-A and MarCO-B but nicknamed "EVE" and "Wall-E" by their engineering team.
A wide-angle camera on top of MarCO-B produced the image as a test of exposure settings. The MarCO mission, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, hopes to produce more images as the CubeSats approach Mars ahead of Nov. 26. That's when they'll demonstrate their communications capabilities while NASA's InSight spacecraft attempts to land on the Red Planet. (The InSight mission won't rely on them, however; NASA's Mars orbiters will be relaying the spacecraft's data back to Earth.)
This image was taken from a distance of roughly 8 million miles (12.8 million kilometers) from Mars. The MarCOs are "chasing" Mars, which is a moving target as it orbits the Sun. In order to be in place for InSight's landing, the CubeSats have to travel roughly 53 million miles (85 million kilometers). They have already traveled 248 million miles (399 million kilometers).
MarCO-B's wide-angle camera looks straight out from the deck of the CubeSat. Parts related to the spacecraft's high-gain antenna are visible on either side of the image. Mars appears as a small red dot at the right of the image.
To take the image, the MarCO team had to program the CubeSat to rotate in space so that the deck of its boxy "body" was pointing at Mars. After several test images, they were excited to see that clear, red pinprick.
"We've been waiting six months to get to Mars," said Cody Colley, MarCO's mission manager at JPL. "The cruise phase of the mission is always difficult, so you take all the small wins when they come. Finally seeing the planet is definitely a big win for the team."µ
Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study
Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study
By Marlowe HOOD Paris (AFP)
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday.
In some locations, the amount of oxygen available could even keep alive a primitive, multicellular animal such as a sponge, they reported in the journal Nature Geosciences.
"We discovered that brines" -- water with high concentrations of salt -- "on Mars can contain enough oxygen for microbes to breathe," said lead author Vlada Stamenkovic, a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
"This fully revolutionises our understanding of the potential for life on Mars, today and in the past," he told AFP.
Up to now, it had been assumed that the trace amounts of oxygen on Mars were insufficient to sustain even microbial life.
"We never thought that oxygen could play a role for life on Mars due to its rarity in the atmosphere, about 0.14 percent," Stamenkovic said.
By comparison, the life-giving gas makes up 21 percent of the air we breathe.
On Earth, aerobic -- that is, oxygen breathing -- life forms evolved together with photosynthesis, which converts CO2 into O2. The gas played a critical role in the emergence of complex life, notable after the so-called Great Oxygenation Event some 2.35 billion years ago.
But our planet also harbours microbes -- at the bottom of the ocean, in boiling hotsprings -- that subsist in environments deprived of oxygen.
"That's why -- whenever we thought of life on Mars -- we studied the potential for anaerobic life," Stamenkovic.
- Life on Mars? -
The new study began with the discovery by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover of manganese oxides, which are chemical compounds that can only be produced with a lot of oxygen.
Curiosity, along with Mars orbiters, also established the presence of brine deposits, with notable variations in the elements they contained.
A high salt content allows for water to remain liquid -- a necessary condition for oxygen to be dissolved -- at much lower temperatures, making brines a happy place for microbes.
Depending on the region, season and time of day, temperatures on the Red Planet can vary between minus 195 and 20 degrees Celsius (minus 319 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit).
The researchers devised a first model to describe how oxygen dissolves in salty water at temperatures below freezing.
A second model estimated climate changes on Mars over the last 20 million years, and over the next 10 million years.
Taken together, the calculations showed which regions on the Red Planet are most likely to produce brine-based oxygen, data that could help determine the placement of future probes.
"Oxygen concentrations [on Mars] are orders of magnitude" -- several hundred times -- "greater than needed by aerobic, or oxygen-breathing -- microbes," the study concluded.
"Our results do not imply that there is life on Mars," Stamenkovic cautioned. "But they show that the Martian habitability is affected by the potential of dissolved oxygen."µµ
An 'octomite', or a speculative alien produced by natural selection.
Courtesy Helen Cooper/Cambridge University
What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford University in California. Several ideas were tossed around – unusual gases in a planet’s atmosphere, strange heat gradients on its surface. But none felt persuasive. Finally, one scientist offered the solution: a photograph. There was some laughter and a murmur of approval from the audience of researchers: yes, a photo of an alien would be convincing evidence, the holy grail of proof that we’re not alone.
But why would a picture be so convincing? What is it that we’d see that would tell us we weren’t just looking at another pile of rocks? An alien on a planet orbiting a distant star would be wildly exotic, perhaps unimaginably so. What, then, would give it away as life? The answer is relevant to our search for extraterrestrials, and what we might expect to find.
Astrobiology – the study of life on other planets – has grown from a fringe sub-discipline of biology, chemistry and astronomy to a leading interdisciplinary field, attracting researchers from top institutions across the globe, and large sums of money from both NASA and private funders. But what exactly is it that astrobiologists are looking for? How will we know when it’s time to pop the Champagne?
One thing that sets life apart from nonlife is its apparent design. Living things, from the simplest bacteria to the great redwoods, have vast numbers of intricate parts working together to make the organism function. Think of your hands, heart, spleen, mitochondria, cilia, neurons, toenails – all collaborating in synchrony to help you navigate, eat, think and survive. The most beautiful natural rock formations lack even a tiny fraction of the myriad parts of a single bacterial cell that coordinate to help it divide and reproduce.
And living things, unlike dirt and wind, appear to be trying to do things – eat, grow, survive, reproduce. If you’ve ever tried to squish a resilient bug, you know that it doesn’t require a complex mind for an organism to appear to want to survive. Or for a squirrel to ‘want’ to jump from one branch to the next. Or for a plant to ‘try’ to reach towards the Sun and soak up nutrients from the soil. Not only do living things have many intricate parts, but all of those parts have the same, common purpose – survival and reproduction. This combination of complex design and apparent purpose, also known as adaptedness, defines life. When we look at that photo of an alien, it’s exactly this adaptedness that would make us go: ‘Aha!’ We would see, clearly, the difference between a disappointing pile of rocks and an exciting alien – design. This is good news, because there’s only one way to get such design: natural selection.
Scene from a desert planet: a panoramic view of the Payson outcrop near the Opportunity rover’s landing site. With its ocean long gone, Mars may yet have liquid reservoirs underground, and spacecraft have seen signs of surface flows. Life, if it ever existed, most likely followed the water.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Cornell)
Natural selection occurs whenever you have a collection of things (cells, replicators, birds, an imaginary species we’ll call ‘Glipgloops’) that have three properties: variation, heredity and differential success. For example, some of the Glipgloops we posited have longer eyestalks than others (variation). Long-eyestalked Glipgloops have long-eyestalked babies (inheritance of the variation). And Glipgloops with long eyestalks can see out of their methane holes better and therefore have more babies (differential success linked to that variation). The result is that, over time, Glipgloops evolve to have elongated eyestalks.
This is the process by which the apparent design in nature is generated: in every generation, at every instant, individuals with traits linked to better reproduction are being ‘selected’. As a result, over time, populations consist of individuals who appear designed for the purpose of reproducing. It’s exactly because the selection criterion is always the same that design can develop. Imagine a car that was constructed using a different blueprint at every step – well, you likely wouldn’t end up with a car. It’s natural selection’s unwavering mantra – the contribution of genes to future generations – that allows for design to appear without a designer.
In fact, the selection criterion is so consistent, that an organism cannot be designed for anything other than contributing genes to future generations. This is why we don’t get organisms who sacrifice for the good of their species. In general, organisms are selfish – reproducing yourself at the expense of others is a great way to pass on genes. We do sometimes see sacrifice and cooperation in nature – but only when the benefits of cooperation come back to you, or the sacrifice benefits relatives. Relatives share genes, so a bee can sacrifice for the queen (its mother), if it means she’ll produce 100 more sisters, each carrying half the bee’s genes. The calculus of which traits lead to more genes, and exactly when and how much to sacrifice, is precise and rigid. This is why evolutionary biologists can make mathematical models that correctly predict how many helpers a bird should allow at her nest, and how often wasps should cannibalise their siblings. But this algorithmic rigidity of natural selection also comes in handy for the astrobiologist.
Curiosity’s study of a formation called Whale Rock revealed evidence of flowing water, one of the main clues scientists look for to assess whether a site was once habitable.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Athread should be revealing itself: life is special because of its apparent design. The only way to get design without a designer is natural selection. Therefore, aliens must be the product of natural selection. And natural selection follows certain rules, and can produce only certain kinds of organisms. Thus, astrobiologists can use the theory of natural selection, and the mathematics of evolution, to make predictions about aliens.
Are there exceptions? We can’t get complex life, even something as simple as a bacterium, without natural selection. Even a postorganic, computer-based alien would ultimately be the product of a product of natural selection. But let’s consider a borderline case. Imagine a collection of replicating molecules, like tiny naked genes, on an alien planet. If these replicators made copies of themselves (inheritance), but replicated perfectly every time (no variation or differential success), you wouldn’t get natural selection.
Would this be life? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be very exciting. For one, without variation, the molecules can never change, or become more adapted, or evolve into anything more interesting or complex. Finding bacteria or bears on a distant planet would suggest that the universe might be teeming with life of all shapes and sizes. These replicators wouldn’t suggest anything. Even more problematic, their existence would likely be fleeting – without natural selection, they wouldn’t be able to cope with changes on their planet, and so would disappear before we found them.
The argument from natural selection is robust, even at the boundaries. This frees us up to use the same evolutionary tools we use on Earth to make predictions about life elsewhere.
Previous work in astrobiology has extrapolated from what’s happened on Earth, potentially limiting our vision to certain special features, such as DNA or carbon-based life, that won’t hold on other planets. Natural selection, on the other hand, is universal. It doesn’t depend on DNA (remember, Charles Darwin knew nothing of genes) or carbon chemistry or the presence of water. It’s incredibly simple – it just requires a few ingredients – and it’s the only way to generate life.
A mental image of that prized photo, showing entities apparently designed to fit their surroundings, is beginning to form. We can’t say whether the grainy picture of the alien will have eyes, or limbs, or be green. That’s not the kind of prediction good evolutionary theory can make. But natural selection tells us that its forms, goals and evolutionary pathways are constrained.
One example posed by our team in the sketch above is what we playfully call ‘the octomite’ – a conglomerate of once-separate entities now working together to survive, reproduce and evolve. How would we recognise an alien? It would include a hierarchy of entities, with the interests of each lower level aligned with components in levels above. The photo we envision would show division of labour, with various parts specialising in various tasks in a mutually dependent way.
This work of incorporating evolutionary theory into our astrobiological toolkit is only just beginning. What else can Darwin tell us about aliens? Presumably quite a lot. The photo, if and when it comes, will be something entirely exotic to the naked eye. But to the student of evolutionary biology, it might look surprisingly familiar.
More evidence of water on Mars: Close-up views show features like those left on Earth after water evaporates.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
In 1996, even closer microscopic views inside a Martian meteorite led to claims of fossil life—which today are mostly discounted.
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Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua's Surprise Arrival Still Thrills Scientists One Year Later
Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua's Surprise Arrival Still Thrills Scientists One Year Later
By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer
Artist's illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar asteroid.
Credit: M. Kornmesser/ESO
A year ago, astronomers spotted a strange object barreling through our solar system on a very weird path — the first discovery of an interstellar object, now called 'Oumuamua, which means "messenger from afar" in Hawaiian.
During the abrupt flyby, scientists made frantic observations of the object before it passed out of range of even the most-powerful telescopes. Ever since then, 'Oumuamua has provided scientists a seemingly endless supply of questions, with most answers still very much up in the air.
Astronomers got their first glimpse of 'Oumuamua on Oct. 19, 2017, through the Pan-STARRS1 telescope based in Hawaii, which is fine-tuned to catch temporary phenomena like passing comets. Right away, scientists knew this wasn't your average comet; its path was way too strange. They'd caught sight of the object on its way out of our solar system, so scientists are still trying to figure out where its journey began. ['Oumuamua: The Solar System's 1st Interstellar Visitor Explained in Photos]
'Oumuamua has also endured a bit of an identity crisis during its first year in the scientific literature. At first, astronomers thought it was a comet. Then, they realized there was no cloud of gas and dust enveloping the object, so they reclassified it as an asteroid. But that proved problematic when they realized it was moving faster than an asteroid ought to be, as if getting a little boost of speed from volatile materials evaporating off its surface, like those that form a comet's surrounding cloud.
Another puzzle is the object's strange shape: long and thin, something like six times longer than it is wide. That's unlike most cosmic objects, which are generally lumps. It's also spinning strangely, tumbling end over end like a stick tossed for a cosmic dog. Some of the hypotheses to explain that elongated shape are that 'Oumuamua had a messy run-in with an asteroid or that the incredible gravitational pull of a giant planet stretched the object.
Because they can't gather any more data about 'Oumuamua, scientists have turned their attention to spotting another such interstellar visitor, hoping to find one sooner rather than later. (Researchers have said the objects should be pretty common, and scientists had in fact been waiting for a flyby like 'Oumuamua's for decades.)
But regardless of the mysteries scientists may never be able to solve with the observations they did gather in time, one thing about 'Oumuamua is nearly certain: It's not an alien spaceship broadcasting back to its creators. Yes, they checked.
Salty Martian Water Could Have Enough Oxygen to Support Life
Salty Martian Water Could Have Enough Oxygen to Support Life
By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer
Pockets of salty water just beneath the Martian surface may contain enough oxygen to support life — in some places, even complex multicellular life such as sponges, a new study suggests.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Salty water buried just beneath the Martian surface could have enough dissolved oxygen to support microbes, and perhaps even simple animal life such as sponges in some places, a new study suggests.
This surprising conclusion could help reshape scientists' understanding of the Red Planet's habitability, both past and present, study team members said.
"We live in exciting times," said lead author Vlada Stamenković, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Especially as there is so much more work still needed to better understand the Martian habitability, I hope this creates excitement in the [scientific] community, in the world, to think of Mars as a potential place for life to exist maybe even today." [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]
Water underground
Water flowed liberally across Mars' red dirt in the ancient past, as observations by spacecraft such as NASA's Viking orbiters, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity rovers have shown. Indeed, many scientists think the Red Planet even featured oceans billions of years ago.
This surface water disappeared long ago, after Mars lost most of its atmosphere and transitioned to the cold, dry world that we know today. But researchers believe that some wet stuff probably persists underground to this day — in deeply buried aquifers as well as in salty brine pockets, some of which may lie just below the surface.
For example, some scientists think the seasonal Martian dark streaks known as recurring slope lineae are caused by the escape of such brines, which can remain liquid at much lower temperatures than "pure" water because of their salt content.
The dark streaks on some Martian slopes known as recurring slope lineae — imaged here by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — may be caused by salty liquid water, some scientists think. The Red Planet could have pockets of oxygen-rich brines just below its surface.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Stamenković and his colleagues modeled the oxygen-harboring potential of near-surface brine reservoirs, calculating how much dissolved O2 they could contain at various locales around the Martian globe.
This an interesting astrobiological question. Life as we know it doesn't necessarily need oxygen; the earliest Earth organisms were anaerobic, after all, as is a huge chunk of the planet's modern microbial diversity. But oxygen is such a rich energy source that its availability makes possible many interesting evolutionary pathways, such as the rise of complex plant and animal life. (Nearly all known multicellular species here on Earth breathe oxygen in some fashion.)
The researchers found that Martian brines could hold a lot of oxygen — enough to support aerobic microbial life pretty much everywhere, if the requirements of these hypothetical Mars bugs mirror those of Earth. And the models showed that dissolved-oxygen capacity varies greatly both over time and from place to place, because it depends on temperature and, to a lesser extent, pressure. (The temporal variation is tied to shifts in Mars' obliquity — the tilt of its axis of rotation.)
Colder temperatures promote greater oxygen entry into brines. So, especially frigid pockets near the Martian poles could potentially be oxygen-rich enough to support complex multicellular organisms such as sponges, the researchers determined. Such "aerobic oases" may be common today above 67.5 degrees north latitude and below 72.5 degrees south latitude. [Photos: The Search for Water on Mars]
Astrobiologists therefore shouldn't turn their noses up at extremely cold environments just because relatively warm ones tend to be better for life as we know it here on Earth, Stamenković said.
"Each environment has its own pros and cons," he told Space.com.
Spurring the search
There is some observational evidence to back up the new modeling results, study team members said. For example, the Curiosity rover has spotted manganese oxides during its exploration of Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater.
It takes a lot of dissolved oxygen to produce these minerals, Stamenković said. Here on Earth, he added, manganese oxides formed only after O2 began persisting in the atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago — a milestone known as the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE).
"Our model says that [manganese oxide formation] is possible to occur on Mars, because of the briny environment and the low temperatures," Stamenković said.
The GOE was tied to the rise of oxygenic photosynthesis, which produces virtually all of the oxygen in Earth's air today. There's only a small amount of abiotically produced oxygen in Mars' air, but that doesn't mean that none of the stuff can make it into buried brines. For instance, in addition to the trace atmospheric oxygen, radiation emitted by radioactive elements in Martian rocks could split water molecules into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen, Stamenković said.
Indeed, radiolysis and/or other processes may have been important players for nearly all of the Red Planet's history, raising the possibility that Mars life — if it ever arose — has had access to energy-rich oxygen for billions of years. And the same may be true on other worlds with chilly habitable environments, such as the buried-ocean moons Europa and Enceladus (which orbit Jupiter and Saturn, respectively), Stamenković said.
"There are so many abiotic ways of creating small but sufficient amounts of oxygen which then, at the colder temperatures, can be absorbed effectively, and could actually maybe trigger evolution in a different way than we got on the Earth," he said. "This is all hypothetical, but worth exploring."
Both NASA and the European Space Agency (in partnership with Russia) aim to launch life-hunting rovers toward Mars in 2020. But both of those robots will be hunting for signs of past life. The last, and so far only, spacecraft to look for present-day Red Planet organisms on the Martian surface were NASA's twin Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers, which touched down in 1976.
Stamenković would like for that to change, and he said he hopes the new study — which was published online today (Oct. 22) in the journal Nature Geoscience — provides a little momentum in that direction.
"There is still so much about the Martian habitability that we do not understand, and it's long overdue to send another mission that tackles the question of subsurface water and potential extant life on Mars, and looks for these signals," he said.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There," will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
In its current form, Mars isn’t the best place to host life — but some of its subsurface oases may be pretty welcoming, a new study reports.
Credits: NASA.
In order to sustain life, a planet (or any celestial body) must fulfill quite a lot of conditions. You need sufficient gravitational pull, an atmosphere with a specific chemical makeup, a Goldilocks temperature — and that’s just the start of it. All in all, the stars need to align just right to provide the necessary conditions for life to evolve.
Mars definitely fulfills some of those requirements. It’s a rocky planet, lies at a reasonable distance from its star, and shows signs of hosting water. Its atmosphere, however, isn’t conducive to life as we know it. Aside from being very thin (just 6% the density of Earth’s atmosphere on average), it comprises 96% carbon dioxide and only contains traces of free oxygen. Due to the scarcity of oxygen, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration, researchers write in a new study.
However, there are some places where Mars could, in fact, host life: underground. But the story isn’t that straight-forward.
Here on Earth, oxygen and life go hand in hand. Photosynthesis evolved at least 2.3 billion years ago, and aerobic (or oxygen-breathing) life evolved with it. We haven’t seen any sign of that on Mars, however. Furthermore, life requires liquid water — and with an average surface temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 Celsius), liquid water is a scarce commodity on the red planet. There’s no clear evidence that liquid water exists (or could exist) on Mars’ surface, but there are some hints that liquid water could exist underground, in the form of brine (very salty water).
Water mixed with salt freezes at lower temperatures than freshwater. While pure water will freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Celsius), salty water will still be liquid at that temperature. But salt also reduces the amount of oxygen that water can store, while low temperatures increase the amount of oxygen. So salt, temperature, and oxygen are trapped in a constant push and tow.
To study this dance, Vlada Stamenković and colleagues calculated how much molecular oxygen could be dissolved in subsurface Martian liquid brines. They found that molecular oxygen concentrations are particularly high in the polar regions, and remarkably, some of them could even contain enough oxygen to support aerobic life.
These findings also fit with surface observations, particularly oxidized rocks observed by rovers exploring Mars’ surface.
“That’s the thing of habitability; we never thought that environment could have that much oxygen,” saysStamenković, a planetary scientist and physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
This completely changes our understanding of the potential for life on current-day Mars, he adds. Of course, it doesn’t mean that there is life on Mars — but the fact that could be is already pretty exciting.
The study has been published in Nature Geoscience.
NASADe rechthoekige ijsplaat: een geheime militaire basis, of een gril van Moeder Natuur?
MILIEUWetenschappers van NASA hebben op de zuidpool een opmerkelijk fenomeen gespot. Tussen een chaotische wirwar van drijvend ijs, zagen ze plots een perfect rechthoekige ijsberg drijven. Een geheime militaire basis, of een gril van Moeder Natuur?
De natuur is vaak rommelig, onregelmatig en asymmetrisch. Rechte vormen en hoeken van 90 graden zijn eerder zeldzaam. Toch is deze plateauvormige ijsberg volkomen natuurlijk. De foto werd gemaakt tijdens NASA’s IceBridge-project. Daarbij worden de poolgebieden jaarlijks vanuit de lucht gefotografeerd en in kaart gebracht om te zien hoe de gigantische ijsplaten en het zee-ijs zich door de jaren heen ontwikkelen.
Dat de ijsplaat zo mooi afgelijnd is, komt niet omdat iemand het ijs heeft zitten snoeien. “Wellicht is ze nog maar recent afgebroken van een groter geheel”, vertelt Kelly Brunt van de universiteit van Maryland. “Onder invloed van de wind en de zee zal het strakke lijnenspel van deze plaat snel minder scherpe vormen aannemen.” De grootte van de plaat is niet gemeten en is alleen op basis van een foto moeilijk in te schatten, maar Brunt vermoedt dat ze minstens 1,6 kilometer breed is.
If it looks like a volcanic eruption and acts like a volcanic eruption, is it a volcanic eruption … even if it’s on Mars, which hasn’t had an eruption at this particular volcano in at least 50 million years and hasn’t had a lava flow anywhere in at least 2 million years? That question is currently being hotly debated by astronomers and conspiracy theorists after many people looking at recent pictures from the European Space Agency’s Mars webcam on board its Mars Express orbiter spotted what looks like a volcanic plume over Arsia Mons, a volcano on the Tharsis bulge near the Martian equator. Is it a volcano or is it something else? Is it being covered up or is it something else?
Let’s start by saying that no one questions that something DID happen on Mars over the Arsia Mons volcano and it WAS photographed by the webcam on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. The pictures being referenced appear to be from 9-5-2018 to 10-20-2018. Further investigation by Forbes found that NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey mission also picked up clouds over Arsia Mons in September 2018. Those photos didn’t cause the same controversy in the conspiracy community since the looked more like fog than a volcanic plume.
Photo of plume
(ESA)
Speaking of the conspiracy community, multiplesites picked up the photographs, called it a volcanic eruption and speculated it was being covered up with their evidence being the recent shutdown of the solar observatory in New Mexico, shutdowns of other observatories and the conspiracy theorists’ inherent distrust of NASA. Those shutdowns have been explained (the one in New Mexico was due to a criminal investigation and possible threats) and one wonders why a ‘solar’ observatory would be shut down over a Martian eruption. The answer is point three – they don’t trust NASA.
For those who do trust NASA, at least occasionally, it sent Tanya Harrison, Director of Research for Arizona State University’s Space Technology and Science Initiative and a Science Team Collaborator on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity, to Twitter to explain the plume.
“It’s not a plume of smoke, but rather water ice clouds condensing out over the summit of the Arsia Mons volcano. We see them quite often over this particular volcano.”
She also showed another view of the Arsia Mons from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in October showing ice clouds and explained further:
“We see these clouds hang out over the summit of Arsia for weeks at a time during this time of year, every year. It’s a combination of its high elevation and the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere at this time of year causing the clouds to form.”
Another view of Arsia Mons couds
(NASA)
A report about the plume in Forbes agrees with Harrison, referencing similar plumes in 2015 and a 2005 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research about “persistent water ice clouds on the flanks of Arsia Mons Volcano.” Jacob Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, gives the accepted volcanic history of Arsia Mons in a 2017 study:
“We estimate that the peak activity for the volcanic field at the summit of Arsia Mons probably occurred approximately 150 million years ago—the late Jurassic period on Earth—and then died out around the same time as Earth’s dinosaurs. It’s possible, though, that the last volcanic vent or two might have been active in the past 50 million years, which is very recent in geological terms.”
And yet … the distrust of all things NASA leads to the current questioning of all things Arsia Mons. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is this: if this truly is the first recorded volcanic eruption on Mars in 50 million years, wouldn’t NASA and the ESA be shouting just as loudly … not to mention fighting over whose discovery it was?
One of the strangest cases in my files comes from a woman who, back in the 1990s, had a series of experiences that left her seriously ill, and which took her several months to fully recover from. Alison, of Texas was seventeen when, in late 1998, she began to feel ill. The first symptom was a rapid loss of weight: around ten pounds in less than a month – which is definitely not a good thing. Given her age at the time, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that Alison’s mother tactfully asked if all was okay with her. When her mother brought up the issue of her weight loss, Alison became noticeably defensive, but denied that she had anorexia or bulimia.
Nothing more was said: Alison continued to have a healthy appetite, despite continuing to steadily lose weight. It was around ten days later, however, that Alison’s mother became deeply worried: early on a Sunday morning Alison screamed for her mother, who quickly came running to her bedroom. To her horror, she saw Alison laying on the bed, her face deathly pale. When her mother tried to help Alison to sit upright, Alison’s eyes rolled into her head and she fainted. Luckily, the pair lived only a few minutes’ from the local hospital and so Alison’s mother got her into the car and raced to the emergency room. In no time, she was being examined.
As Alison – who regained consciousness in the car, but who felt weak and dizzy – rested, a doctor asked her mother about Alison’s general health. She explained that Alison had lost a lot of weight in the last few weeks. Maybe not surprisingly, the doctor too asked questions about anorexia and bulimia. When Alison recovered, the pair left the hospital, with the doctor suggesting to Alison’s mother that she keep a very close eye on her daughter, and – if she had any more fainting spells – to take her to their regular doctor. They were wise words: Alison fell sick on three more occasions, and as her weight began to plummet: a final total of approximately twenty pounds in around six weeks. She was admitted to hospital and watched very carefully.
Tests showed that, physically, Alison was exhibiting all the physical signs associated with early anorexia. But, there was always someone with her when she ate her meals in her hospital room – and at home, too. In fact, she was eating eagerly. On top of that, Alison’s mother sat with her for hours after eating each meal – on the suggestion of one of the doctors, to make sure she didn’t make herself ill, bulimia-style, by vomiting up her meals. Further tests were run but no answers were to be found. At least, not by conventional medicine.
At the height of her illness, when Alison even started to take on a jaundiced look, she confided in her mother that there was something she had not told her – or the doctors. Alison’s mother feared, initially, that her daughter was going to say she had been using and abusing hard drugs. But, no. Alison said that four or five days before she began losing weight, she woke in the dead of night to see a pale-faced woman, attired in a long and black, hooded robe, standing next to the bed. The woman was very tall – around six-foot-three or –four. Her skin was white, and her eyes were staring and bulging. Alison found herself unable to move as the woman closed in on her, looming over the bed as Alison struggled to move. The woman gave a loud, satisfying groan at the very same time that Alison suddenly felt ill and cold. The woman retreated into the darkness of the bedroom and vanished.
Alison put the whole thing to a bad dream – and told her mother that she didn’t think any more about it. That is, until the pale hag returned the next night, and the next night, and…well, you get the picture. Alison’s mother listened, in fear and dread, as her daughter told her how, every night for weeks, the woman appeared in the bedroom. And, all the time, Alison was getting sicker and thinner. Alison even claimed to have seen the woman in her hospital room – as if, said Alison, the Woman in Black knew where she was at all times. Alison confided one other thing in her mother: four or five nights before the woman first appeared, Alison and two of her friends had been playing with an old Ouija-board. Alison’s mother was more terrified than she was angry – after all, she only wanted to get her daughter well, not pass judgment when she was severely ill.
As luck, or fate, would have it, Alison’s mother had a friend, Jennifer, who worked in the field of alternative medicine and who also had deep knowledge of the world of the supernatural. Jennifer agreed to perform a cleansing of not just the family home, but also of Alison herself. Since the pale, supernatural woman only ever appeared at night, Jennifer said it would be a good idea for her to sit in the bedroom while Alison slept – to ensure that if the woman did appear she would be ready to deal with her.
Jennifer arrived the following evening, armed to the teeth with just about everything she needed to ensure that the evil entity in the home would be banished for good. Jennifer’s weapons included sea salt – which is said to have the ability to prevent supernatural creatures from crossing certain thresholds, including doorways to rooms. So, Jennifer scattered more than liberal amounts of sea salt at the front- and back-doors of the home, in front of Alison’s bedroom, and across the window-sill in her room. That was followed by the use of sage. Traditionally, and for centuries, sage has been seen as both a powerful protector and a cleanser. So, Jennifer did what she does best: she performed a lengthy cleansing program that went on for several hours, and ensuring that the smoke reached all corners of the home. Then, it was a case of watching and waiting.
Alison’s mother stayed in the living-room, at the suggestion of Jennifer – who sat by Alison’s bed, ready for just about anything. The black-garbed woman did not put in an appearance, but there were two inexplicable things that did happen that night: Alison’s bedroom was briefly filled with an odor like rotting meat, and, for a few moments, rapid scratching noises were heard on the walls of the bedroom. Alison and Jennifer held hands tightly, and prayed that the hideous thing would leave – and leave now. By all accounts, the rituals worked. The eerie woman was never seen again and over the course of five or six weeks Alison’s health returned to normal. Today, and now in her late thirties, Alison is convinced that whatever the woman was, she was feeding on her, something which led to the weight loss and anorexia-like side-effects and symptoms. To this day, Alison keeps both sea salt and sage in her home – which, today, is in Arizona.
If you’ve seen the movie “Titanic,” you know that icebergs are not ice cubes. Apparently, Netflix isn’t available in Antarctica because a plane operated by NASA to scan the ice photographed a berg that looks more like a tombstone or a sheet cake or a frozen Christmas present … in other words, it’s nothing like a chunk of the Larsen C ice shelf it broke off of. Is it real or are the scientists stationed in Antarctica killing time with picks, chainsaws and tape measures?
The iceberg suspected of sinking the Titanic
“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square.”
In an interview with LiveScience, Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and at the University of Maryland, described the block of ice spotted by a plane belonging to NASA’s Operation IceBridge fleet – a project whose purpose is to measure annual changes in the thickness of Antarctica’s ice and glaciers in order to predict future break-offs and meltings caused by climate change. The planes give a closer and quicker look at these occurrences than the IceSat satellites. Should we be worried that the ice is suddenly breaking off in such neat and precise rectangular cuboid bergs?
“We get two types of icebergs: We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface. And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”
Despite the predictable Internet panic when NASA posted photos on its NASA ICE #IceBridge Twitter feed, Kelly assures the masses that this mass is rare but normal. For the non-scientists (much appreciated, Kelly), she likens the cuboid iceberg calving process to a long fingernail that cracks off with a clean, straight edge on at least three sides. Also like a fingernail, the tabular iceberg is much wider than it is thick. This one is a mile across and, while it probably looks like a fun place for Antarctic scientists to blow off frozen steam playing mobile hockey, she warns that it’s unstable and moving away from the Larsen C ice shelf into the Weddell Sea.
Drawing of a NASA IceBridge plane
(NASA)
That explanation sounds believable despite the dubious comments on various websites that it’s was actually caused by aliens, secret experiments or bored scientists. Whatever the case, let’s hope funding continues for cryospheric (ice-related) research projects like NASA ICE and Operation IceBridge. It may not be disaster movie-worthy but it’s critical to predicting how many of us will be underwater in a few years.
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.
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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.