‘Oumuamua, the interstellar interloper who buzzed through the solar system before we had a chance to really get to know it, is becoming like one of those mystery guests at a party or wedding. You know the type. Everyone kind of remembers something about them but no one actually talked to them, no one is quite sure who invited them and the pictures and videos are blurred or only show them from the back. That’s ‘Oumuamua … and another group of astronomers/guests just issued a new report saying they’ve been listening to it ever since and haven’t heard a thing. Did someone offend our mysterious, possibly alien guest? Or is it really just a space rock?

“We were looking for a signal that would prove that this object incorporates some technology – that it was of artificial origin.”

Dr. Gerald Harp from the SETI Institute is the lead author of a paper – “Radio SETI observations of the interstellar object ′OUMUAMUA” published in the February edition of Acta Astronautica – which details work done by scientists using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California to listen to ‘Oumuamua as it swung by at a distance of 170 million miles away or less than the diameter of Earth’s orbit.

“Observations were made at radio frequencies between 1 and 10 GHz using the Array’s correlator receiver with a channel bandwidth of 100 kHz. In frequency regions not corrupted by man-made interference, we find no signal flux with frequency-dependent lower limits of 0.01 Jy at 1 GHz and 0.1 Jy at 7 GHz. For a putative isotropic transmitter on the object, these limits correspond to transmitter powers of 30 mW and 300 mW, respectively.”

In astronomical terms, that’s like putting a glass up to the wall of your hotel room and listening to the guests next door. And?

“We didn’t find any such emissions, despite a quite sensitive search. While our observations don’t conclusively rule out a non-natural origin for ‘Oumuamua, they constitute important data in accessing its likely makeup.”

Despite high hopes that it might be an alien spacecraft or probe (like the Harvard scientists who still believe it was), Harp says all they heard was space crickets. Nothing. Not even the whoosh of slight acceleration that a light sail (the Harvard idea) might make as it sped up from being pushed by solar rays.

Does this mean they should pack up the Allen Telescope Array and go home?

“While no signals were found coming from ‘Oumuamua, the types of observations reported by SETI Institute scientists may have utility in constraining the nature of any interstellar objects detected in the future, or even the small, well-known objects in our own solar system.”

Of course not, say the scientists making sure they don’t jeopardize their future funding. This exercise will allow them to refine their listening when the next interstellar object flies by. In fact, those Harvard guys have identified some candidatesalready in the solar system. With this new research, they’re ready for them.

Thanks, ‘Oumuamua!

After travelling more than 1.25 billion miles in 27 months, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe has finally reached its destination. On December 3, 2018, the probe reached the diamond-shaped asteroid named Bennu in NASA’s first asteroid-sampling mission. The reason for this $800 million mission is to gather samples from the asteroid and return them to Earth in the year 2023. The name OSIRIS-REx stands for “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer”.

Asteroid in space (not Bennu)

But the probe isn’t ready to start digging for samples just yet. It is currently flying alongside the asteroid and will continue to do so for the next four weeks. The probe will fly around the 1,650-foot asteroid, even getting as close as 4.4 miles from its surface. The reason for these close flybys is to determine the asteroid’s mass and its exact shape before entering its orbit on December 31^st.

• Click here to see the asteroid named Bennu.

Heather Enos, who is from the University of Arizona and is OSIRIS-REx Deputy Principal Investigator, told Space.com, “Manoeuvring around a small body that basically has no gravity is a very challenging endeavor.” She continued by saying, “So, we do have to get a little more information to proceed every step of the way.”

When the probe enters the asteroid’s orbit on December 31^st, it will move at just 4 inches per second and get within one mile of its surface which will also set a record for the closest proximity that a spacecraft will have orbited a small body. The probe will then search around the asteroid for the best area to take samples and once an area is picked by July 2020, it will then spiral down to the surface and collect the sample. The entire process of collecting the sample won’t last much longer than about five seconds.

The probe will leave the asteroid in March 2021 and head back to Earth. Then in September 2023, the asteroid sample will land in Utah inside of a special return capsule.

Asteroid in space (not Bennu)

Once the sample is collected, researchers will then study it with high-tech equipment in order to better comprehend the early days of the solar system and the potential role that carbon-rich asteroids could have played in the evolution of life on Earth. And by studying Bennu’s trajectory through space, it could help scientists better understand the non-gravitational forces that determine their paths, therefore helping to predict asteroid-impact forecasts.

Now that our technology can keep up with our interest in Mars and we have a few rovers running around looking at stuff, we’re going to start finding weird things and mysteries. Everything’s new and exciting on another planet. We really have no idea what we might find, especially since scientists are now confident that Mars used to have liquid water and the potential to support life. Of course, Mars is a whole unexplored planet and we’re looking at it through a couple small camera lenses and a time-delay, so naturally everything is going to appear a bit more mysterious than it probably is. The opposite could also hold true: what we see through the Mars rovers’ eyes as just a piece of rock or mineral deposit might, in fact, be the bones of an ancient Martian dinosaur. Well, probably not, but it is true that we’re finding surprising and mysterious things on Mars already.

Last week was full of activity on Mars (relatively). Just after the Insight rover touched down on the Martian surface, NASA reported that the Curiosity rover found a mysterious, shiny object on the Martian surface. NASA nicknamed the object “Little Colonsay,” presumably because it resembles the Isle of Colonsay in Scotland. That means at NASA mission control, when they received pictures of a mysterious, unidentified object from another planet, someone said “Hey, that looks like Scotland!” See? Everyone’s a goofball.

The Little Colonsay object. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL

Little Colonsay is a small object that stands out from the rest of the Martian surface by how shiny and homogeneous it looks. It’s hard to tell exactly how large it is from the photo, taken by the small black and white camera on the Curiosity rover. It looks to be a reflective metallic material. NASA says the object might be a meteorite:

“The planning team thinks it might be a meteorite because it is so shiny. But looks can deceive, and proof will only come from the chemistry.”

So far, NASA has found six iron meteorites on the surface of Mars, and they all look similar to the Little Colonsay object, though not similar enough to immediately say that it’s an iron meteorite. There are, assuredly, a whole lot of people who would disagree with the planning team and jump to their own conclusions on what its shininess must be proof of.

Regardless, no one will know what the Little Colonsay object is until Curiosity has a chance to analyze it. NASA says a previous attempt was made to collect the object and analyze its structure, but the rover’s arm missed its target. According to NASA, the object will be analyzed soon.

Whether it’s a meteorite or something else, only time will tell.

Will the next Cold War be fought in the really cold realm of outer space? Those who think about these things for a living point to the U.S. announcement of the formation of a separate military branch known as the Space Force as an indication of the affirmative. Who will they be fighting? No less of an expert than Nick Pope, former investigator for the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), said this week he believes it was be extraterrestrials. Meanwhile, Russia unveiled its own new space weapon – a laser cannon capable of knocking planes, satellites, flying saucers and other crafts out of space. Is that weapon for us or ‘them’? And what’s China doing while everyone else is watching these two?

“There are conspiracy theories suggesting President Trump’s plans for a Space Force reflect a need to protect Earth against hostile aliens. There were similar conspiracy theories about President Reagan’s Star Wars plan. While there may not be an alien connection, President Trump surely knows all of America’s UFO secrets – some of which were released earlier this year as part of the AATIP project – and this may have contributed to his keenness to develop a military Space Force. And of course he knows that the two key battlespaces in any future conflict are going to be cyberspace and outer space, so it’s vitally important for the US to dominate those battlespaces.”

In an interview with Star Online, Pope hints that the president knows what many of the alleged unidentified objects in the sky really are and, wherever they come from, he wants to be ready in case they start firing, bombing, blasting or something worse. Pope believes President Trump would have demanded to see this information, contrary to conspiracy theorists who contend those with the information are withholding it from him.

“I do not want to reveal more details. It is not the time yet. But experts will understand that with such weaponry, Russia’s capacities for defending itself have multiplied.”

Here’s something else for the Space Force to worry about … Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week that the Russian army has deployed the Peresvet laser cannon (paging Austin Powers) that can “zap satellites out of space.” Named after Alexander Peresvet, a 14th century Russian Orthodox Christian monk and heroic warrior. The cannon looks sufficiently scary (see the video here) but the announcement did not include a demonstration – is this merely a case of laser-rattling or has it already been used and we just don’t know about it?

If you want to throw in one more superpower, China’s National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC) denied this week that the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) will begin searching for aliens in 2019 despite Wu Xiangping, director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, bragging that “It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe.” While NAOC wants the world to believe that FAST is looking for radio millisecond pulsars and gravitational waves, it’s no secret that China wants to be the first nation to publicly announce the discovery of alien life.

Unless it has already visited us, as a NASA scientist implied this week. Who should we believe? Who do YOU believe? Are we in trouble … or is it too late?

It’s been almost a year since the New York Times dropped a bombshell last December, which detailed the existence of a secretive UFO study program overseen by the Pentagon.

The news was shocking for many, as it was the first public confirmation of taxpayer-funded UFO studies undertaken by a U.S. Government agency since the conclusion of Project Bluebook, the United States Air Force study that ended in 1968 (although there are whispers of other, smaller-scale studies that may have occurred since that time).

Few details were given about the program, apart from its name–The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program–and confirmation of its existence by the likes of Luis Elizondo, the former head of the program, as well as politicians like Harry Reid who helped secure funding for it. It was also revealed that much of the funding allocated for the program–a meager $22 million, according to the NYT–was funneled to aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, who used it to outsource UFO research to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Some of the funding may have also been put toward the furtherance of scientific studies of alleged paranormal activity at a ranch southeast of Ballard, Utah, known as Skinwalker Ranch.

Plenty of questions remain about all of this, of course. Despite Elizondo’s entry into the private sector (he now works for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy, along with a number of other scientists with similar backgrounds in the unexplained), few additional details have been forthcoming about the Pentagon’s UFO interests. There were a few videos that were released, however, reportedly made with Raytheon’s Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) system; but as with most UFO videos, these leave much to the imagination, and remain far from being satisfactory “proof” capable of resting the doubts of the more skeptical among us. In other words, nothing conclusive about UFOs themselves–video or otherwise–has emerged with the knowledge of the Pentagon’s ongoing UFO studies.

Nothing akin to further evidence for their existence was even needed, of course, in order to stir the proverbial pot of public interest. A recent article at The Daily Beast, commenting on a summary of the original New York Times piece that appeared in The New Yorker, quoted the latter as saying that, “The internet went slightly more bananas than usual last weekend over The New York Times’ story implying that extraterrestrials are real and the U.S. government has been tracking them for years.” As The Daily Beast notes, “The [New York Times’s] reporting was long-awaited validation for anyone who has ever claimed a UFO sighting, or an inexplicable encounter with the beyond.

Not so fast.

Did the New York Times really imply, as The New Yorker suggests, “that extraterrestrials are real?” In short, the answer is no: the New York Times article never even used the term “extraterrestrial” (nor it’s acronym form, E.T.)… not even once. This was by design, of course: one of the article’s co-authors, Leslie Kean, has long championed the case for renewed interest in the UFO phenomenon by scientific and government organizations. She has also warned against conflating the terms “UFO” and “extraterrestrial,” and even addressed this specifically in the introduction of her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, where she noted:

It’s extremely important to establish at the very beginning that neither I nor the other writers are claiming that there are alien spacecraft in our skies, simply because we do not deny data showing a physical presence of something there. The term “UFO” has been misused and has become so much a part of popular culture that its original (and accurate) definition has been nearly completely lost. Almost everyone equates the term “UFO” with extraterrestrial spacecraft, and thus, in a perverse twist of meaning, the acronym has been transformed to mean something identified rather than something unidentified. The false but widespread assumption that a UFO is, of necessity, an alien spaceship is usually the reason the term generates such an exaggerated and confusing range of emotional responses. A recognition of the extraterrestrial hypothesis as being a valid, although unproved, possible explanation worthy of further scientific scrutiny is something entirely different from approaching the subject of UFOs as if this discovery had already been made.

I doubt that Leslie Kean would call the conflation of terms like UFO and extraterrestrial a “perverse twist of meaning” if she secretly meant “extraterrestrial spacecraft” every time she talked about UFOs. Hence, why it’s all the more important to address the problem she brings to light in the passage above.

No matter how carefully we attempt to frame discussions on the UFO subject, it is often difficult to escape the insinuation that UFOs are synonymous with extraterrestrials. In my own experience, there have been occasions where I have proposed ideas like time travel, interdimensional, or psychosocial phenomenon as alternative hypotheses to explain aspects of the UFO situation (these are speculative ideas, of course, and in my opinion, some are even less likely than the ever-popular “extraterrestrial hypothesis” or ETH. Nonetheless, I have at least been willing to entertain and write about these ideas, though never committing to them in the absence of solid evidence). In such cases, the conversations have often tended to come back around to something like, “so you’re saying that aliens are time travelers from the future?” In essence, the “extraterrestrial” stereotype prevails, even in cases where other theories are on the table.

Even when proposing alternatives like advanced “black budget” or military programs and experimental aircraft as possible sources for some UFO sightings (an idea that should seem entirely plausible, and perhaps even most likely in several cases), the stigma seems to remain. All too often, the idea that our government could have built some of these aircraft becomes attached to shadowy stories of “crash retrievals” and other similar things. In other words, we might be building them… but we couldn’t have learned to do something like that on our own: we must have stolen our ideas from the aliens! 

Note the similarity here between the “back-engineered crash retrieval” theories, and the myriad ancient astronaut ideas that have emerged over the years. Whether it’s UFOs we see buzzing around in our skies today or ancient monuments that seem impossible to build even with modern engineering knowledge, the intellectual black hole that is the ET hypothesis remains ever-present.

Of course, the very fact that there are several competing “theories” about what UFOs are points to the bigger problem: that despite the popularity of the “extraterrestrial” idea, rational-minded thinkers who have looked at the subject all realize that there simply isn’t enough evidence to support this idea, or any other theory about them, for that matter. We literally do not yet have enough evidence to tip the scales in favor of any single theory about what UFOs are, despite the accumulation of anecdotal evidence suggesting that they might exist… whatever “they” might be.

The best we seem to be able to do is acknowledge that some theories appear to be more likely than others. Arguably, the ETH could be seen as being more likely than fantastic alternatives like time travel, interdimensional gateways, or notions that UFOs are “quantum-topological” points of intersection between our perceived reality and the “Matrix” exterior to the simulation in which we operate, to paraphrase something cool that David Bowie once supposedly said about a UFO he saw.

Humans like to deal in absolutes, and nobody ever said that getting to the bottom of something like UFOs would be easy. At least on the civilian level, we appear to still be in the mode of trying to determine if there actually is a phenomenon, apart from all the anecdotal data that implies it. If… and that’s a big if… there is a provable phenomenon here worthy of study (as many have argued over the decades), then perhaps some of it could be of extraterrestrial origin. It’s not impossible, but it remains unproven.

We have a ways to go before we can make any firm conclusions about what UFOs are… and that’s why making presumptions about them in the meantime becomes a real problem.

Every month it seems like some new form of ‘dark’ stuff is discovered which has the potential to rewrite huge chunks of scientific textbooks: dark matter, dark energy, even dark life. When will the darkness stop? According to some new mind-bending research published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, never, because 95% of the universe could be covered in a mysterious and bizarre “dark fluid.”

This new study attempts to solve one of the longstanding mysteries of astrophysics: why seemingly empty space in the cosmos seems to exert gravitational forces on objects. Theories proposing dark matter and dark energy don’t quite reconcile the gravitational effects physicists have observed in seeming empty space with the theory of general relativity, and that’s where this new theory of “dark fluid” comes in.

According to Oxford physicist Jamie Farnes, author of the theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity and the concepts of dark matter and dark energy can all work together if we combine dark energy and dark matter into a dark fluid which covers nearly everything in the universe:

Previous approaches to combining dark energy and dark matter have attempted to modify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which has turned out to be incredibly challenging. This new approach takes two old ideas that are known to be compatible with Einstein’s theory—negative masses and matter creation—and combines them together. The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses.

Farnes admits that the idea of fluids with negative masses “sounds a little far fetched” but assures that “they are considerably less strange than you may immediately think.” The concepts of negative mass and negative energy can resolve many of the problems in modern physics – although we currently don’t have any way of conclusively proving they exist; their existence is merely inferred from gravitational effects seen in deep space.

While I can only begin to wrap my head around these theories, it’s pretty fascinating to think that we may only be able to perceive 5% or so of the stuff in the universe around us. Who knows what may be out there

As a follow-on to my previous article, “Bob Lazar, Area 51, UFOs and Russians,” I thought I would expand on why it would be so important for U.S. authorities to keep a careful watch on any potential Russian penetrations of Area 51 in the 1970s and 1980s. And also to mislead the Russians as to what was going on at the legendary base. When it comes to the matter of Area 51 and the 1970s, there is one important issue that cannot be ignored. And it  should not be ignored. It was the early development of what has become known as “Stealth” technology for aircraft. It was in 1988 that both the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and the Northrop Grumman B-2Spirit were unveiled for one and all to see. The completely black, triangular-shaped aircraft caught the world’s attention, primarily because of their strange, angular shapes. It’s intriguing to note that in 1982 a wave of encounters with what became known as “Flying Triangles” began over portions of New York State, specifically in Hudson Valley.

In their 1988 book, Night Siege, authors Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Philip J. Imbrogno and Bob Pratt wrote: “Can 7,000 eyewitnesses be wrong? They were there to witness the huge, hovering object in the sky, the flashing lights, the eerie silence. They are ordinary people from all walks of life: stay-at-home moms, kids, business people, engineers. They tell their stories here, and they all agree on one thing: they saw the same massive object cruising over their backyards. And it was like nothing they had seen before…”

At the time when the Hudson Valley encounters were at their peak, it was reasonably assumed by UFO researchers just about here, there and everywhere that aliens had arrived and were scoping out the area to a massive degree. When, however, the Stealth planes were unleashed in 1988 – planes that looked eerily like the Hudson Valley “UFOs,” more than a few of those same ufologists came to wonder if what was seen over Hudson Valley was actually a top secret variation on the Stealth Fighter and the Stealth Bomber. Regardless of whether or not the Hudson Valley UFOs originated in the United States, or on a world far, far away, one of the most intriguing revelations that surfaced when the Stealth planes were revealed was the startling fact that they had been secretly flying not just for a few years, but since the 1970s – at Area 51. And, the secret (the top secret) had been skillfully contained for more than a decade.

If there is one thing that just about any and all military agencies want, it’s for their aircraft to be completely invulnerable. Well, while that’s a tall order, steps were taken in the early 1970s to create an aircraft that could not be detected on radar. It would, then, be the ultimate predator: quietly and carefully approaching its completely oblivious target. That is, until it was all too late. Lockheed Martin, the company which was secretly contracted to come up with a stealth-driven fighter, state that a pair of engineers, Dick Sherrer and Denys Overholser, “developed a computer program based on obscure German and Russian theories, which postulated that radar beams could be reflected by a series of carefully angled triangular panels,” which is precisely why both the B-2 and the F-117 look so odd. But, cool, too.

The most important development came in 1976. That was the year in which a program designated “Have Blue” was established as, to quote Lockheed Martin, “the stealth demonstrator that would lead to the F-117A Nighthawk.” Built out of aluminum and not much else, the aircraft was typified by the angular shape and futuristic-look. Although the Nighthawkremained unknown to virtually everyone until 1988, it was first test-flown on June 8, 1981, just one year before the Hudson Valley “UFOs” were first seen. Notably, the Nighthawk – while in test stage – was flown exclusively at night. And, while it seems unlikely that the F-117A was the culprit at Hudson Valley, perhaps a far more advanced stealth plane was.

One of the most notable of all the missions that the Nighthawkstook part in revolved around the invasion of Iraq in January of 1991. The radar-systems of the Iraqi military were woefully inadequate and, as a consequence, they flattened close to forty targets in no time at all; something which helped to bring the conflict to a close in a little more than forty days. Today, the Nighthawk is no more. It has been mothballed. But, how many other stealth aircraft – of highly advanced forms and technologies – remain hidden from prying eyes is anyone’s guess. Now, let’s take a look at the Stealth Bomber: the Spirit.

The brainchild of Northrop Grumman, the B-2 stealth bomber is, to quote the team that brought it to fruition, “a key component of the nation’s long range strike arsenal, and one of the most survivable aircraft in the world. Its unique capabilities, including its stealth characteristics, allow it to penetrate the most sophisticated enemy defenses and hold at risk high value, heavily defended targets.” It has played major roles in numerous conflicts, including Operation Iraqi Freedom in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, and in Libya. Not only that, the Spirit is capable of flying for 6,000 miles without refueling and can soar through the skies for 10,000 miles when refueled just once. And, it is armed with nuclear weapons. The B-2, then, is a decidedly formidable craft. Twenty-one such aircraft were built and deployed, of which only one came to grief, while taking to the skies from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam in February 2008. Just like the Stealth Fighter, early versions and incarnations of the Spirit were secretly flow from Area 51.

It goes without saying that hiding (from the Russians) the existence of early Stealth planes out at Area 51 would have been paramount to those working on the highly-classified  projects. And, to the extent that they may even have used tales of UFOs to act as convenient covers for what was really afoot – all of which could have led to additional operations, such as the one involving Bob Lazar in the late eighties.

Duke University in North Carolina is known for its excellent academic programs, high number of Rhodes Scholar graduates and outstanding basketball teams. All of that pales in comparison to the recent announcement that Duke will now offer a course in UFOs taught by a religious studies professor who is also a well-known UFO researcher. Is that enough to convince your parents not to cut off your tuition money when they find out you’ve changed majors to UFOlogy?

Image credit: stockxpert

“It’s not the first time I’ve taught a course on UFOs. In the spring semester of 1996, when I was a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Religious Studies, I gave a seminar called “Special Topics in Mysticism: Heavenly Ascensions and UFO Abductions.” One of my colleagues indulgently labeled it “a funny course.” He didn’t understand. Whatever UFOs are, they aren’t funny.”

David J. Halperin, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offers this bit of his own history on his website as an introduction and an aid for students wondering of a course entitled “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth” is a good elective. Professor Halperin is no slouch in either of his fields. After receiving his Ph.D. from Berkeley he taught Judaic studies in UNC’s Department of Religious Studies and had a special interest in religious traditions of heavenly ascensions and otherworldly journeys, resulting in five books on Jewish mysticism and messianism. He’s also the author of a novel, “Journal of a UFO Investigator,” and has a non-fiction book, “Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO,” coming out in 2020.

Halperin’s 1996 course covered the abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill, a class assignment to read and discuss Whitley Strieber’s Communion, and student research and presentations on, among other topics, the “X-Files” TV series, alien contact and different aspects of the UFOs’ impact on African-American culture. Halperin retired in 2000 and never taught the UFO course again … until now. Why resurrect it?

“UFOs are still with us, however, enjoying a surprising new respectability in the world that’s emerged from the 2016 Presidential election.”

He’s referring to when candidate Hillary Clinton said she would reopen the real X-files if she were elected president. Halperin’s new course will update his old one, then cover the alleged 1966 UFO landing at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia; the “Men in Black”; the experience of alien abduction’ and a look at what happened in 1947 near Roswell, New Mexico. He’ll finish with more on what has happened since the 2016 election and conclude by discussing the same question about UFOs he attempted to answer in 1996: “What do they mean?”

What DOES it mean? It means one of the top universities in the country is offering a course in UFO studies, thus providing a little more legitimacy to a subject begging for it. “UFOs – Encounter, Mystery, Myth” will be offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Duke from January 7 to March 25, 2019. You can learn more and sign up here.

Go Blue Devils!

Geoscientists exploring the remote Canadian wilderness have discovered a massive cave in British Columbia’s Wells Gray Provincial Park which may have never been explored by humans. In a nod to The Return of the Jedi, the cave has been nicknamed the “Sarlacc Pit” due to its gaping hole-like appearance – although us real fans know that the actual name was the “Pit of Carkoon” and that the Sarlacc was the ancient carnivorous beast inside the pit, not the name of the pit itself. Filthy casuals.

Kinda like calling this guy “Frankenstein.”

The cave in British Columbia was spotted by helicopter crews conducting a caribou count. It’s believed that the entrance has been covered in snow up until the last few decades, hence why it hasn’t yet been documented by either indigenous First Nations peoples or the Canadian Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. While we’d all like it to be named after the Sarlacc, consultations are underway with First Nations representatives to determine if they would like to name it.

The cave has not yet been given an official name or explored, and researchers aren’t exactly sure how it avoided detection for all of these years. “My immediate reaction was that there can’t be a cave there, it’s impossible,” said scientist Catherine Hickson. “It is huge. It is enormous. When you first see it, you just gasp because it’s just this huge hole in the ground.” The entrance measures 100 meters by 60 meters – the same size as a football field – and opens onto a shaft extending 100 meters underground. Check out Canadian Geographic‘s coverage for some breathtaking photos of the massive, unexplored cave.

Just what exactly may lie at the bottom of this cave remains unknown, as are its exact dimensions; once the cave is explored, it very well could become Canada’s largest cave. For now, scientists are keeping the location of the cave a secret until more research can be done and in order to protect it from intrepid spelunkers seeking to find a new definition of pain and suffering as they are slowly digested over a thousand years.