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...
27-12-2018
Raadselachtige ruimte ontdekt in Grote Piramide. Wat was het doel ervan?
Raadselachtige ruimte ontdekt in Grote Piramide. Wat was het doel ervan?
Met de hulp van kosmische straling hebben wetenschappers een minstens 30 meter lange ruimte in de grootste van de drie piramides in Gizeh ontdekt.
Het resultaat betekent een doorbraak om de interne structuur van de piramide van Cheops beter te begrijpen, schrijven de onderzoekers in een verslag dat door het vakblad Nature werd gepubliceerd.
“We weten niet wat de bedoeling van deze holle ruimte is,” zei Mehdi Tayoubi van het internationaal wetenschappelijk team. “Daarom willen we ook niet van een kamer spreken.” Maar de omvang van de ontdekte ruimte is groot.
Honderden meters
Drie teams van verschillende instituten en universiteiten uit Frankrijk en Japan onderzochten gedurende twee jaar de 4500 jaar oude piramide in Gizeh.
Daarbij gebruikten de wetenschappers een scan met muonen, een bijproduct van kosmische straling.
Net zoals röntgenstraling bij het menselijk lichaam kunnen die elementaire deeltjes honderden meter steen doordringen, aldus de wetenschappers.
Geheimen
De piramide van Cheops is de oudste en de grootste van de drie piramides van Gizeh en is één van de zeven wereldwonderen uit de Oudheid.
De piramide is 139 meter hoog en 230 meter lang. Het bouwwerk werd tijdens de regeerperiode van Cheops (2509 tot 2483 v. Chr.) opgericht en heeft nog steeds niet al zijn geheimen prijsgegeven.
Using detailed computer models of asteroidal-type objects between the Sun and Jupiter, two Harvard University researchers find that at least four known objects are likely to have origins from outside our solar system.
This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar object discovered in the Solar System, `Oumuamua.
CREDIT: ESA/HUBBLE, NASA, ESO, M. KORNMESSER
After becoming gravitationally-trapped, the four potentially interstellar objects --- 2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13, and 2018 TL6 --- are thought to spend most of their time between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. However, during their closest approaches to the Sun, they do pass through Earth’s neighborhood.
In a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Harvard co-authors Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb, compare the orbital characteristics of theoretical high-inclination objects to those of the centaurs, the most similar population of known asteroids.
“We find that there should be hundreds of Oumuamua-size interstellar objects identifiable by Centaur-like orbits,” write the authors. 1I/2017 U1 Oumuamua, the first bona fide interstellar object, was discovered Oct. 19, 2017 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-Starrs telescope. But the authors note that there should be at least 66 possible other interstellar objects in their calculations, ranging in diameter from roughly 100 meters to 10 kilometers in size.
And all of these potential interstellar interlopers should be detectable by the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), currently under construction in Chile.
Our paper, says Loeb, shows that by focusing on objects at high inclinations to the plane of the solar system and on counter-rotating orbits to the planets, we can isolate interstellar objects.
As for the four that the authors have thus far identified as potential interstellar objects?
“We do not know if they are comets, asteroids, or artifacts ,” Amir Siraj, a Harvard University undergraduate in astrophysics, told me. Until these objects pass close to earth again, he says we won't be able to know. Siraj notes that of the four, object 2018 TL6 will make a close Earth approach in another twenty years.
Could they be artificial in origin?
“We do not have any evidence that these [four] objects are unnatural at this point,” said Siraj.
They pass near Earth on timescales of some 20 to 120 years so it will be another 20 years until we can photograph one of them, he says. That is, unless someone designs a flyby mission that will visit one or more of them. The most likely source of interstellar objects is planetary systems that eject them during formation and development processes.
And as for Oumuamua which NASA classifies as a highly-elongated, rocky, cigar-shaped object with a somewhat reddish hue?
NASA’s Spitzer infrared telescope data rules out typical cometary activity, says Loeb. And he says it also sets an upper limit on Oumuamua's size, which in turn implies a shiny surface, which is at least ten times more reflective than a typical asteroid.
"These results are at odds with the properties of comets and asteroids in the solar system are fully consistent with an artificial origin,” said Loeb.
I'm a science journalist and author of "Distant Wanderers: the Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System" who writes about over-the-horizon technology, primarily astronomy and space science. I’m a former Hong Kong bureau chief for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine and former Paris-based technology correspondent for the Financial Times newspaper who has reported from six continents. A 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society's Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA), I’ve interviewed Nobel Prize winners and written about everything from potato blight to dark energy. Previously, I was a film and arts correspondent in New York and Europe, primarily for newspaper outlets like the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and Canada's Globe & Mail. Recently, I've contributed to Scientific American.com, Nature News, Physics World, and Yale Environment 360.com. I'm a current contributor to Astronomy and Sky & Telescope and a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Twitter @bdorminey
Astronomen volgen vier mysterieuze ruimtesigaren in ons zonnestelsel. Nog meer interstellaire bezoekers?
Astronomen volgen vier mysterieuze ruimtesigaren in ons zonnestelsel. Nog meer interstellaire bezoekers?
In ons zonnestelsel bevinden zich tenminste vier objecten die waarschijnlijk uit de interstellaire ruimte komen. Dat zeggen twee onderzoekers van de Harvard-universiteit op basis van computermodellen.
De objecten – 2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13 en 2018 TL6 – staan meestal ergens tussen Jupiter en Neptunus.
Als ze de zon het dichtst naderen, komen ze ook bij de aarde in de buurt.
Honderden
Harvard-wetenschappers Amir Siraj en Abraham Loeb hebben hun onderzoek gepubliceerd in het tijdschrift Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
“Er zouden honderden interstellaire objecten ter grootte van Oumuamua [in het zonnestelsel] moeten zijn,” schrijven ze.
1I/2017 U1 Oumuamua, het eerste interstellaire object, werd op 19 oktober 2017 ontdekt met behulp van de Pan-Starrs-telescoop van de Universiteit van Hawaï.
Visnet
Er zouden volgens de onderzoekers tenminste 66 andere interstellaire objecten moeten zijn met een doorsnee die varieert van 100 meter tot 10 kilometer.
De LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), die momenteel wordt gebouwd in Chili, moet al deze objecten kunnen spotten.
“De zon en Jupiter fungeren als een visnet dat interstellaire objecten vangt,” zei Loeb. “Op ieder moment bevinden zich enkele duizenden gevangen objecten in het zonnestelsel.”
20 jaar
Over de vier objecten die de onderzoekers tot dusver hebben geïdentificeerd als mogelijke interstellaire objecten zei Siraj: “We weten nog niet of het kometen, asteroïden of artefacten zijn.”
Hij merkte op dat één van de vier, 2018 TL6, over 20 jaar opnieuw dicht in de buurt van de aarde komt.
“We hebben geen bewijs dat deze vier objecten onnatuurlijk zijn,” zei Siraj.
Kunstmatig iets
Ondertussen heeft NASA’s infraroodtelescoop Spitzer uitgesloten dat Oumuamua normale kometaire activiteit vertoont, aldus Loeb.
Daarnaast is het oppervlak van de mysterieuze ruimtesigaar 10 keer zo reflecterend als een doorsnee asteroïde.
Volgens Loeb gaat het dan ook niet om een komeet of asteroïde, maar om een kunstmatig iets.
For advice about living on Mars, who would you turn to? Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Matt Damon? How about someone who has actually lived beyond the orbit of the Earth? That small and sadly diminishing list includes Bill Anders and Frank Borman, two of the first three astronauts to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the Moon on the Apollo 8 mission – an event whose 50th anniversary we’re now celebrating. While Anders and Borman never set foot on the lunar surface, they certainly have more experience with living far from Earth than an electric car driver or a cardboard box mailer, right? So, what does former astronaut Bill Anders think about living on Mars?
“What’s the imperative? What’s pushing us to go to Mars? I don’t think the public is that interested.”
That was one of the nicer things Anders said about sending humans to Mars in a recent interview with the BBC celebrating the Apollo 8 anniversary. He was referring more to the exorbitant costs of human space exploration versus less expensive and safer missions using robots, rovers and other remote exploring machines. He’s probably right about the public’s predicted reaction to the costs, but he saves his stronger words for his assessment of sending humans to work and live on Mars in general, calling it “stupid” and “almost ridiculous.”
“NASA couldn’t get to the Moon today. They’re so ossified… NASA has turned into a jobs program … many of the centers are mainly interested in keeping busy and you don’t see the public support other than they get the workers their pay and their congressmen get re-elected.”
Apollo 8 crew: James Lovell, William Anders and Frank Borman
(NASA)
Anders obviously isn’t happy with the organization he worked for as an astronaut and later worked with as the Executive Secretary for the National Aeronautics and Space Council. He knows firsthand the scientific progress that has been made since then and the challenge of dealing with the politics of space, having worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, the joint U.S./USSR technology exchange program for fission and fusion power, General Electric’s Aircraft Equipment Division and as Textron’s Executive Vice President for aerospace. It’s no wonder he says that “I’m not a very popular guy at NASA for saying that.”
“I’m not as critical of NASA as Bill is. I firmly believe that we need robust exploration of our Solar System and I think man is part of that. I do think there’s a lot of hype about Mars that is nonsense. Musk and Bezos, they’re talking about putting colonies on Mars, that’s nonsense.”
Fellow Apollo 8 crew member Frank Borman – experienced in the politics of space as the only astronaut on the Apollo 1 fire review board and experienced in both the costs and benefits of air travel as the CEO of Eastern Airlines – is less critical of NASA than Anders but agrees that the costs of human habitation on Mars far exceeds the benefits to the point of “nonsense.”
Earthrise from the Moon
(NASA)
While he didn’t comment on the Martian colony controversy, third Apollo 8 crew member Jim Lovell – one of only three humans to visit the Moon twice – waxed philosophical about the real purpose of space exploration:
“When I looked at the Earth itself… I started to wonder why I was here, what’s my purpose here … it sort of dawned me. And my perspective is that God has given mankind a stage on which to perform. How the play turns out, is up to us.”
It’s up to us. Who are you going to listen to for advice on living on Mars – the battery and cardboard box guys or three experienced space travelers?
No humans will live on Mars These astronauts guarantee Even if Jeff and Elon Build a fancy B-and-B
The 387-mile (623 km) Bureya River flows southward in the Khabarovsk region of far-eastern Siberia – well, ‘used to flow’ might be a more appropriate description today. At some point in early December, an unexplained force from space slammed into a one-kilometer hill, pushing 800 tons of dirt, debris and vegetation into a mound that now dams the Brureya River. Its remoteness has made the cause a mystery – there are no witnesses to the explosion that some investigators now at the site say could not have been caused by a meteorite. With the usual government denial that it was a wayward rocket or a bomb test, some people are beginning to believe far-fetched claims that it was the result of a UFO crash. Is it possible?
“It cannot be man-made.”
Locals who have nothing to hide have already decided that any explanations other than a meteorite or UFO are impossible, based on what they’ve found at the site that hunters Anton Ivanov and Alexander Makan stumbled onto on December 14th. They have good reason to be suspicious, since the massive and violent event took place in early December, was not found (at least officially) until December 14th and was not revealed to the public until December 24th. Who or what wants this event kept under such tight wraps?
“The height is from 80 to 160 metres above the ice level. There is no radiation. An object entered at a sharp angle, pulled down a mound and spread it along the river bed. It is not clear what it is: maybe an explosion, a bomb, or a falling airliner.”
Local government official Alexey Maslov described the mound of dirt created by something to the Siberian Times. (Photos and video here and here.) There were no official reports of airline crashes, bombs or other manmade events that could have caused such carnage. However, Evgeny Zubko, a cosmic dust expert (nice work if you can get it) from the School of Natural Sciences of the Federal University of the Far East, talked to local residents who had noticed “the arrival of a blast wave” and to the two hunters, who said they arrived to find that:
“It smells like hydrogen sulphide and vapour comes out in some places. We even found a spot on the very top where there are warm stones, we used them to keep our hands warm. It looks like it was very hot there. The ice edges are slim as if they were in boiling water.”
All of that says “meteorite” to cosmic dust expert Zubko, but not to Aleksei Makhinov, regional chairman of the Russian Geographic Society, who believes this was a “seismic landslide” caused by an earthquake.
‘It happens very often in the (Russian) Far East. The entire coast of the Sea of Okhotsk is covered with these landslides when half a mountain falls down.”
However, there’s no record of an earthquake in the matching time-span. Nor is there a record of a meteorite either, says Boris Shustov, the head of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who says nothing was picked by Russia’s extensive network of ground-based tracking systems and thinks it was “just a landslide.”
The mysterious river-blocking mound of dirt is keeping water from this power plant
As of right now, there’s no crater and no debris –just an 800-ton mountain of dirt that wasn’t there a few weeks ago and is now blocking a river that drives the downstream Bureyskaya hydro power station. That means it’s costing someone money – which means it won’t be blocking the river much longer. Will it be cleared before the mystery of its cause is solved? A cause that experts and witnesses say can’t be manmade, can’t be a meteorite, but could be a UFO?
It’s a lightly-populated area in Siberia and the secretive government and big money are involved … what do you think?
Is NASA getting ready for some kind of disclosure of what it and the U.S. government know about aliens, UFOs and the other stuff conspiracy theorists believe is hidden in real X-files? Here’s a sign the answer may finally be yes – the agency announced last week the hiring of a communications department executive whose mother claims to be an alien abductee and recently ran for Congress. Couple that with her connection to another announcement last week that the Pentagon is putting plans in place for the president’s Space Force and the Christmas wishes of conspiracy theorists may be coming true … whether they believe in Santa or are just marginal about it.
On December 17th, Bettina Inclán was named by Administrator Jim Bridenstine to be NASA’s Associate Administrator for Communications. Inclán definitely has the right background for the job with over 15 years of experience as a communications specialist and strategist working with major technology firms and non-profit organizations, and has held senior roles with government leaders at the federal, state and local levels, including one who said this:
“I went in. There were some round seats that were there, and some quartz rocks that controlled the ship — not like airplanes.”
That’s Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera, who Bettina Inclán calls ‘Mama’, describing the alien spaceship she was taken to at age 7 by “three blond, big-bodied beings — two females, one male” who continued to communicate with her telepathically at various times later in her life. While she readily admitted to her extraterrestrial encounters earlier in life, she denied them at first when they came out during her recent campaign for a Congressional seat in Florida. Although she finally admitted to the abduction and later encounters, they didn’t prevent her from being endorsed by the Miami Herald but didn’t help her get elected.
Did her mom’s revelations help Inclán get her job with NASA? It didn’t hurt … nor did the fact that her brother-in-law is Jarrod Agen, Deputy chief of staff and communications director for Vice President Mike Pence …
… who last week announced at the Pentagon that President Trump will sign a new space policy directive in the coming days that will lay out plans and a timeline to create a U.S. Space Force as a sixth branch of the armed forces. Pence then received a briefing on space operations and cyber defense and on the proposal the Pentagon is drafting to establish the Space Force.
Is Bettina Inclán, with her family ties to aliens and the Space Force and her new job in NASA’s communications department, the long-awaited focal point for full disclosure of government secrets about aliens and UFOs? Will she introduce her mother’s alien friends to the Space Force or will she warn them to leave town before they start shooting?
To conspiratorially paraphrase a famous Star Wars quote — the dots are close together with this one.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a picture of global UFOlogy today.
Piotr Cielebiaś was born in 1986 in Czestochowa, Poland. he holds an MA in history and a BA in political sciences. He is a well known Polish writer and journalist specializing in fringe science and paranormal phenomena. He is co-founder of the infra.org.pl website, which collects UFO reports. He is a ufological publisher and contributor to English-language UFO magazines and websites. He writes regularly for Onet.pl–the most popular Polish web portal–and for “Nieznany Świat,”the oldest Polish monthly publication devoted to fringe science and paranormal phenomena. He is the author of “The True UFOs,” a book in Polish summarizing the UFO phenomenon as a whole, and UFOs Over Poland (2016, Flying Disk Press)
RG:Who have been the defining figures in Polish UFOlogy over the past 70 years (for better or for worse), and why?
PC: UFO studies in Poland emerged in the 1950s, but the most influential researchers began their work in 1970-80s in a time of heightened UFO activity. Krzysztof Piechota and Bronisław Rzepecki are worthy of mention. The former was one of the most prolific UFO writers in Poland; the latter partnered him and co-authored one of best Polish books in the field: “UFOs over Poland” (1996). Originally, Piechota and Rzepecki leaned toward the ET hypothesis, as did Kazimierz Bzowski, another well-known ufologist from Warsaw who assumed that UFOs are “energetical” and informational in nature and that they use “channels” or portals which could be detected by means of radiesthesia (in other words, aliens would be sending their crafts as galactic e-mails). The late Zbigniew Blania-Bolnar, another prominent ufologist, criticised Bzowski’s views and applied more scientific methods.
Among present day researchers I would include Arek Miazga, Damian Trela and Robert Leśniakiewicz. They differ considerably in their opinions about UFOs but they remains the most experienced and prolific ufologists.
Warsaw, Poland.
RG: What do you consider to be the most compelling Polish UFO incident on record, and why?
PC: It’s hard to choose one particular case. Many UFO enthusiasts in Poland would surely say that the most compelling close encounter is the famous Emilcin case of 1978 when a farmer from Eastern Poland met olive-skinned aliens who took him onboard their strange craft. Others think that the most compelling cases are those witnessed by military pilots. Bronisław Rzepecki wrote a book about such encounters in Poland that were quite frequent, and former pilots often speak about their experiences publicly. The openness ended after Poland joined NATO in 1999. Another case that is worthy of special attention is a close encounter from Bedzienica-Nockowa (described by Arek Miazga) when a family from a small village in South-Eastern Poland observed a strange “screen” with huge, greenish aliens peering from inside. Also quite unique is the 1979 case from the Tropy Sztumskie area when an ambulance was stopped by spherical UFO blocking the road.
An artist’s impression of the alien from the Emilcin UFO case of 1978.
RG:What is the Polish government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?
PC: To be honest, I have no idea what Polish special services or military agencies know about UFOs. Politicians have never touched the problem, though I’m sure they’re interested. It’s hard to believe that they don’t bother about cases involving unauthorised intrusions in Polish aerospace. The government remains silent about UFOs and that’s a continuation of Eastern, post-Soviet mentality assuming that society shouldn’t be interested what’s going on behind the official curtain. I think that something really unusual must happen for the Polish government to issue a statement about UFOs. But years of research has shown that even the most concerning cases were swept under the carpet. For example, in 2013 flying saucers appeared several times in vicinity of civilian and military airport in Cracow. In 2013-2015 many sightings of flying triangles/boomerangs took place in Poland and there was a suggestion that they were connected with US Army or USAF activity. No one from the government or from the mainstream media seemed interested.
RG:Does the Polish Ministry of National Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?
PC: No, but reports about encounters with UFOs circulated amongst Air Force officials. Under the socialist regime, any information about unexplained activity in airspace above Poland was shared with Moscow. One man called Ryszard Grundman—who was once a chief of staff in Air Force—gathered reports about unexplained events on his own. It wasn’t an official unit but rather a “private X files.” He collected reports from pilots and military counterintelligence. For example, in the 80s, two counterintelligence agents received reports from concerned locals of Kobyłka (Warsaw region) of strange lights coming out of the forest. Two agents entered the trees encountering a huge flying saucer over a clearing that soon shot up and disappeared.
The Presidential Palace, Warsaw, Poland.
RG:Has the Polish government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?
PC: The Polish political system and culture is closely related with political parties and their members are mostly interested with holding power and sponging from the state budget. They don’t bother with such things as UFOs, or even the future of the country. Crucial for them is to look after their own private interests. Sad but true.
RG:Does Poland have a national UFO investigations organisation today, and how many smaller Polish UFO groups are you aware of?
PC: We have currently a few organizations, but I don’t think they are comparable to professional groups from the past (or to those from abroad, like MUFON, for example). Most Polish ufologists work independently and they get on. Also, our magazine “Nieznany Swiat,” has been gathering reports about anomalous phenomena (involving UFOs) for nearly 30 years.
Rural Poland.
RG: What are the most active regions of Poland for UFO sighting reports (hotspots)?
We tend to call them “anomalous zones.” They can be both local and regional. For example, regions of two big cities in southern Poland—Wrocław and Rzeszów—abound with reports about UFOs, while there are also areas with virtually no sightings. The Rzeszów area is especially interesting because lot of high strangeness events have occurred there which were researched by Arek Miazga—author of very interesting book, “UFOs over Subcarpathia.” Inside the Rzeszow anomalous zone there is a smaller zone in Glinik village where very unusual sightings have taken place (people reported small, atypical UFOs and strange flying beings). I’m also living in some kind of “UFO hotspot” because Częstochowa and the Jura region are known from various incidents, including high strangeness events. A long history of encounters with balls of light and other strange phenomena is connected with Osson’s Hill (Częstochowa). For many years also Warsaw was a prominent UFO hot spot with very interesting cases involving the landing of a saucer in Czerniaków district (1982) witnessed by police officer.
RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings?
PC: Of course, and so therefore I’m sure that the phenomenon exists. I was 6 years old. I woke up (probably to get something to drink) and soon noticed a funny flying saucer amongst the clouds. It wasn’t big and was probably quite close. I still remember its colourful lights and distinct shape. It just hovered in mid-air and then flew away. I saw it very clearly but at that time I wasn’t a UFO expert and I just took it for a funny aircraft. As an adult I also saw several interesting things as well as some phenomena that can be easily mistaken for UFOs. But the earliest sighting was the trigger for my interest in paranormal.
Piotr’s latest book, UFOs Over Poland (2016, Flying Disk Press), is available at Amazon.
RG:How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?
PC: I entered the UFO field in 2005, but it must be said that I’m more a journalist than ufologist, focussing on other “fringe phenomena” too. Since then I’ve interviewed many UFO witnesses. Some were interesting but the best part of it involved just lights/things in the sky. For me, the most interesting aspect of the phenomenon is the high strangeness. I think that cold analysis of those bizarre, grotesque and sometimes funny cases could tell us much more about the nature of real, paranormal UFOs than any military-funded projects. The biggest mystery of the phenomenon is the connection between those objects and human consciousness. But in my opinion there’s no simple answer to the question about nature of the phenomenon which is also probably evolving with us. UFO is just like a huge river consisting of various tributaries.
RG:How can Polish UFOlogy better itself?
PC: Very hard to say. UFOs are elusive and, in fact, all we can do is to describe and analyse their appearances the best we can. Polish ufology would be better if refrained from disinformation and bullshit, but the fact is that for decades we’ve dealt with the same theories and approaches. Ufology is in stagnation and it’s hard to say anything about the future.
While going through some old photos the photographer found an interesting photograph taken 35 years ago.
The photo taken on November 14, 1983 outside Anchorage Alaska near Portage Glacier shows a huge flying saucer and near the disc-shaped UFO another unknown flying object.
Since it is unclear of these objects are man-made or real UFOs, the photographer has submitted the unaltered image to Mufon registered under file 97092 for further investigation.
I found another face on Mars again. The face is similar to the one I reported yesterday, similar species but the younger version. The forehead shape appears to be the same, as well as the nose, mouth, chin, and eye. Very strange I know, but there it is. Its not like I have only reported one face found on Mars, but in reality its more like I have reported hundreds of faces...which makes this no longer a coincidence but instead makes it evidence.
British Government Goes Into Emergency Session After Failure To Keep Gatwick UFO Attack Secret, UFO Sighting News.
British Government Goes Into Emergency Session After Failure To Keep Gatwick UFO Attack Secret, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Dec 2018 Location of sighting: London, UK Here is an important question...were UFOs seen over the Gatwick Airport and down played as drones to control the situation? It happened at a China airport back in China back in 2010 when a huge glowing UFO shut down their airport and with many eyewitnesses getting great photos of this glowing UFO, it was hard to deny. However I cannot find any photos of a drone or UFO over the Gatwick Airport, which is strange. I believe that people at the airport did not see the UFO. That it was only seen on radar zooming around the airport. That would cause them to panic, especially if it was cloaked causing them to panic from not being able to see it. Scott C. Waring Video states:
A gripping new Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) report circulating in the Kremlin today chiding London for “never missing an opportunity” to hinder Russian media in the United Kingdom, states that the British clampdown on press reporting is because they have become so unnerved over the UFO attack on Gatwick Airport this past week—and that has now sees Prime Minister Theresa May having gone into emergency session with her government after the “drone story” first put out by the propaganda mainstream media was shot down by police, thus causing the innocent couple arrested to be set up as patsies having to be released without charge.
Computerchips kunnen een pak sneller worden gemaakt als de signaaltransmissie gedeeltelijk zou gebeuren met licht.
De binaire informatie die wordt gegenereerd in de transistors op een computerchip, wordt via elektronen getransporteerd naar andere chips, en eventueel ook processors. Deze transmissie gaat al heel snel, maar volgens computerwetenschappers nog niet snel genoeg. Zij zoeken niet alleen naar methoden om chips nog kleiner te maken (en processors dus nog sneller en geheugens krachtiger) maar ook om de snelheid van deze signaaloverdracht te verhogen.
Een team van Amerikaanse, Britse en Franse ingenieurs1 heeft nu een begin gemaakt met een doorbraak, en wel door een manier te ontwikkelen waarop de elektronische informatie wordt overgezet op lichtstralen. Fotonen hebben immers het voordeel dat ze (nog) veel sneller reizen dan elektronen. Helaas zorgde de signaaloverdracht tussen elektronen en fotonen (en vice versa) tot nu voor problemen.
De onderzoekers lijken dat probleem te hebben opgelost, en wel door gebruik te maken van een nieuwe soort metamaterialen. Dat zijn materialen die eigenschappen van licht ingrijpend kunnen veranderen. Tot voor kort werden ze enkel gebruikt om lichtstralen om te buigen en af te leiden, maar de vorsers hebben ze nu ingezet om licht snel in een andere kleur (frequentie) om te zetten. Dat zorgt voor een vlottere transmissie tussen elektronen en lichtdeeltjes.
Als de signaaloverdacht via fotonen kan verlopen, hoeven chips ook niet meer voorzien te worden van minuscule koperen draadjes, waardoor ze ook nog eens een pak kleiner kunnen worden gemaakt.
Back in August, the crew on the International Space Station (ISS) repaired a small leakthat was allowing air to escape the orbiting outpost — damage that Russia speculated could have been the result of intentional sabotage.
Now, the Associated Pressreports that a Russian cosmonaut who helped investigate the damage during a spacewalk earlier this month has said that whoever drilled the hole appeared to do so from the interior of the station — though he’s far from convinced the drilling was an act of sabotage.
The controversy surrounding this hole has revealed that international tensions on Earth can reach outer space, which has long been a haven for international scientific cooperation — but the cosmonaut’s comments are a heartening example of how public figures in the research community can push back against the use of space as a proxy battleground for terrestrial conflicts.
Space Talk
On Monday, the AP reported, cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev — who took part in the spacewalk to investigate the damage — said at a press conference after returning to Earth that the hole appeared to originate from inside the capsule.
But Prokopyev also “scoffed” at the idea that an ISS crew member drilled the hole, according to the AP.
“You shouldn’t think so badly of our crew,” he said. He also cautioned that “it’s up to the investigative organs to judge when that hole was made” — an apparent suggestion that the hole could have originated in a manufacturing facility on Earth.
Fresh Air
When the leak was first discovered, Russia’s space agency said the damage was probably caused by a micrometeorite. But in a startling about-face, the director of the agency suggested days later that the leak was the result of intentional sabotage — even specifically mentioning evidence of “several attempts at drilling” with a “wavering hand.”
Prokopyev, though, is behaving like a scientist: reporting the facts, but withholding judgment until after the collection of all data — a comforting approach during an era characterized by knee-jerk reactions.
This year’s report shows that the Arctic region experienced the 2nd-warmest air temperatures ever recorded, the 2nd-lowest overall sea-ice coverage, and lowest recorded winter ice in the Bering Sea.
NOAA released its2018 Arctic Report Cardon December 11. This year’s report shows – once again – how the climate of Earth’s north polar region is changing. Measurements include warmer air and ocean temperatures and declines in sea-ice that are driving shifts in animal habitats.
The annual Arctic Report Card – now in its 13th year – is a peer-reviewed report that provides an update on the region and compares these observations to the long-term record. The 2018 report was compiled from the research of 81 scientists working for governments and academia in 12 nations.
This year’s report shows that the Arctic region experienced the second-warmest air temperatures ever recorded; the second-lowest overall sea-ice coverage; lowest recorded winter ice in the Bering Sea; and earlier plankton blooms due to early melting of sea ice in the Bering Sea.
NASA’s Operation Icebridge captured this image of the town of Narsaq in Greenland in April 2018.
– Surface air temperatures in the Arctic continued to warm at twice the rate relative to the rest of the globe. Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900.
– Atmospheric warming continued to drive broad, long-term trends in declining terrestrial snow cover on land, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and lake ice, increasing summertime Arctic river discharge, and the expansion and greening of Arctic tundra vegetation.
– Despite increase of vegetation available for grazing, herd populations of caribou and wild reindeer across the Arctic tundra have declined by nearly 50 percent over the last two decades.
– In 2018, Arctic sea ice remained younger and thinner, and covered less area than in the past. The 12 lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last 12 years.
– Warming Arctic Ocean conditions are also coinciding with an expansion of harmful toxic algal blooms in the Arctic Ocean, threatening food sources.
– Microplastic contamination is on the rise in the Arctic, posing a threat to seabirds and marine life that can ingest debris.
Declining Arctic sea ice: The 2018 Arctic Report Card found the Arctic region had the second-lowest overall sea-ice coverage on record. The map shows the age of sea ice in the Arctic ice pack in March 1985 (left) and March 2018 (right). Ice that is less than a year old is darkest blue. Ice that has survived at least 4 full years is white.
The Report Card is intended for a wide audience, including scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers and the general public interested in the Arctic environment and science. You can read the 2018 Arctic Report Card here.
In addition to annual updates on ocean temperature, snow cover, tundra greenness and melting on the Greenland Ice Sheet, the report card also includes reports on multi-year environmental changes, including a long-term population decline of the region’s iconic wildlife species, the caribou. Other multi-year essays focused on the expansion northward of toxic harmful algae and significant concentrations of microplastic pollution that are transported by ocean currents into the Arctic Ocean from other parts of the global ocean.
Caribou and wild reindeer numbers drop 56 percent in 20 years: Arctic caribou and wild reindeer populations dropped sharply from 4.7 million to 2.1 million grazing animals in two decades, with the largest declines in Alaska and Canada. Scientists attribute the declines to Arctic warming, which is increasing the frequency of drought, affecting the quality of forage. Longer, warmer summers also increase flies, parasites and disease outbreaks in the herds. These caribou were spotted in Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve.
They Came from the Sky is how Ancient Aliens links asteroids, meteroids, and meteorites to terraforming, exploration, and colonization.
How are meteorites sent to Earth? Are they examples of alien technology? Why were they sent here by aliens? What’s up with Giorgio’s hair? All these questions (except the last one) are answered on this episode of Ancient Aliens.
As far as episodes of Ancient Aliens goes, this one provides more examples than most. Ultimately it leads to how humans have started to consider using asteroids and meteoroids for our own space exploration efforts.
What’s the purpose of meteroites?
During the intro of this episode, David Hatcher Childress frantically asks, “Was this black stone supposed to interact with humans on Earth?” Interesting he considers this question, because the answer on Ancient Aliens is always a resounding yes. Or as is often said, “Ancient astronaut theorists say yes.”
There is, however, a secondary possibility. They could just be meteorites that floated through space, yanked and pushed at the whim of celestial gravity, mathematically destined to hit Earth. A third possibility exists.
Theme #1: Creating life
First, Ancient Aliens suggests aliens used asteroids and meteoroids to send life throughout space. They created life. A NASA biologist named Richard Hoover posited in 2011 that nine meteorites he examined had micro-fossils of bacteria capable of creating life. A different Australian meteorite possesses the building blocks for DNA & RNA, everything required to start life. The Aztecs – as well as some other ancient civilizations – even have a mythology about mother god and father god giving birth to flint stone, a knife of some kind, cast down to Earth, where many gods came forth to create human life.
There’s a real-life NASA concept called RAMA directly related to the concept of repurposing asteroids, because of their composition and cost-savings, for space exploration. Furthermore, the question as to whether an alien race would actually use asteroids to spawn new life throughout the universe is answered by not only The Genesis Project but also those bastards from Klendathu. Rico’s Roughnecks!
Theme #2: Communication
Were the meteorites sent to Earth by gods? Were they meant as a means of communication? In 1902, an Oregonian farmer named Ellis Hughes found a huge boulder which rang like a bell when hit with a pickaxe.
It was later unearthed as the Willamette meteorite, the largest on the planet. Composed of elements like iridium, germanium, gallium, and nickel, it became a shrine to locals, and was known by the Clackamas Indians long before Hughes’s version of Manifest Destiny grabbed headlines. Indeed, the Clackamas believed the meteorite had special powers and came from their gods.
One aspect of this communication is how some stones signify communication a deeper meaning than others. The Black Stone of Islam, situated in the Kaaba at Mecca, has profound meaning and supposedly allows a connection to the Prophet Muhammad. A 135lb meteorite comprised of nickel and iron was found in Camp Verde, Arizona in 1915, and it was buried like a human. Ancient Greece, of course, has the Temple of Apollo, where a meteorite named Omphalos was sent to Earth by Zeus as an indication of where life began.
The source of these meteorites is part of the mystery. The Hypatia stone in South Africa is non-chondritic, which means it came from outside the solar system. The Mundrabilla meteorite is a superconductor of uncharacteristic nature. There are also quasicrystals, which are only remotely discussed.
All of the above primarily comes from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which, according to Ancient Aliens, could be debris of a planet destroyed during a cosmic battle in Sumerian and Babylonian lore. Or it could be those bastards from Klendathu.
Whether or not meteorites are actually sent here by aliens is left completely wide open in one of the least convincing Ancient Aliens episodes ever. If hundreds (thousands?) can enter our atmosphere every year, then surely a few of those will be bizarre or unique. Whether they could be used is a different issue.
Ancient Aliens Season 13 returns to the History Channel on January 4th.
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26-12-2018
Viruses, ET and the octopus from space: the return of panspermia
Viruses, ET and the octopus from space: the return of panspermia
A major paper revives the oft-mocked theory that life on Earth began in a rain of cosmic microbes. Stephen Fleischfresser reports.
The search for ET, say researchers, could start and end with the octopus. VIZERSKAYA/GETTY IMAGES
The peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology recently publisheda most remarkable scientific paper. With 33 authors from a wide range of reputable universities and research institutes, the paper makes a seemingly incredible claim. A claim that if true, would have the most profound consequences for our understanding of the universe. Life, the paper argues, did not originate on the planet Earth.
The response?
Near silence.
The reasons for this are as fascinating as the evidence and claims advanced by the paper itself. Entitled Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, the publication revives a controversial idea concerning the origin of life, an idea stretching back to Ancient Greece, known as panspermia.
The scientific orthodoxy concerning the origin of life is called abiogenesis. This suggests that at some point in the earth’s early history, conditions were favourable for the creation of complex organic chemistry that, in turn, led to the self-organisation of the first primitive life forms.
Much is understood about the process, but exactly how information came to be coded in nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) to form the system of genetic inheritance and expression, and how this transformed into life itself, remains unknown. The other slightly uncomfortable aspect of the abiogenic account is that it seems to take place in a surprisingly short amount of time. The theory requires that the "primordial soup" from which self-replicating RNA emerged formed within an 800 million year period following the stabilisation of the Earth's crust, a timeframe some researchers think is too narrow.
Despite its drawbacks and lack of detail, abiogenesis is the consensus, the only plausible hypothesis for the origin of life.
The panspermia hypothesis, however, disputes nearly every aspect of this story.
Of the 33 authors, Edward Steele and Chandra Wickramasinghe are the most well-known.
Steele, an Australian immunologist, has a history as something of a maverick. He has long championed the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics, a theory first aired by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French evolutionist prior to Darwin.
Although the latter much admired Lamarck’s work, most scientists have since discarded it. In 1979, Steele took a contrary position, advocating a neo-Lamarckian idea known as “somatic selection hypothesis", published in 1979. The later advent of epigenetics, and the discovery of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in numerous microbial organisms have somewhat restored Lamarck’s tarnished reputation, with some biologists suggesting HGT represents "a form of (quasi)Lamarkian inheritance".
Wickramasinghe is a famed astronomer and astrobiologist with an illustrious career. He has held a string of professorships at Universities in both England and Sri Lanka, and has more than 70 publications in Nature.
One of his more notable contributions, along with his long-time collaborator, the late Sir Fred Hoyle, was the hypothesis that interstellar dust was partly made up of organic molecules, which Wickramasinghe went on to confirm experimentally. This finding prompted him to become a lifelong advocate of the panspermia hypothesis, publishing numerous papers on the topic.
Hoyle thus exerts a posthumous influence over the new paper. Originally Wickramasinghe’s PhD supervisor, he was an odd mix of genius and far-out ideas: he formulated the notion of stellar nucleosynthesis, the now well-established theory that says all elements heavier than helium are created through fusion in the hearts of stars. He also thought that the famous Archaeopteryx fossil, transitional between dinosaurs and birds, was a manufactured fake.
Astronauts working on the exterior of the International Space Station, which research has found to be covered in bacteria.
NASA/SCIENCE SOURCE
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe developed the model of panspermia at the centre of the recent study. The new paper is a review of “the key experimental and observational data gathered over the past 60 years”, write the authors, “consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology”.
The H-W model holds, the authors state, “that life was seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (at or just before 4.1 billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells and organisms, … perhaps even fertilised ova and plant seeds, may have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth helping to drive further the progress of terrestrial biological evolution.”
In other words, the researchers suggest that abiogenesis did not happen on Earth and the main source of genetic novelty is not caused by the selection of naturally occurring advantageous mutations, but rather comes from a rain of extra-terrestrial living matter that integrates itself, via neo-Lamarckian mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer, into the genomes of terrestrial life.
Beyond this, the model also postulates that various epidemics are caused by the arrival of viruses from space and that extra-terrestrial retroviruses drove the Cambrian explosion.
Not to mention that the octopus might well be an alien.
One might be tempted to laugh, if it weren’t for the volume of titillating evidence they present, and the nagging worry that the naysayers have been wrong before. For decades everyone knew, for example, that continents didn’t just go drifting about the place. Until they did.
But just because theories seen as crackpot by the scientific establishment have later been vindicated does not necessarily mean that is the case here.
The proof advanced “would support an extra-terrestrial origin of life,” writes commentator and evolutionary scientist Keith Baverstock from the University of Eastern Finland, puts it in the same issue of the journal, but is “not evidence that could not be explained in any other terms." In other words, the argument advanced by Steel and colleagues in plausible, but not convincing.
Nonetheless, the paper has withstood a year of intense peer review. As Steele points out to Cosmos, “It has thus passed some severe and tortuous tests already.” The tension between the evidence and the claims based on it make for uneasy reading.
Just as the field of Alzheimer’s research ponders if its main theory of many decades is wrong, perhaps it is worth entertaining a quaint notion: what if panspermia is right?
The paper is remarkable in tone. Far from the cautious claims of normal scientific literature, it is almost triumphant. “The consistency with panspermia of a vast swathe of new data,” Wickramasinghe tells Cosmos, “often entailing new and unexpected developments of technology, over the past four decades have given us the confidence to adopt this tone.”
The evidence is enough to back their confidence, fascinating and detailed. Central to their paper, and indeed their model of panspermia, is the action of viruses, retroviruses, in particular, and much of the evidence presented revolves around them.
Retroviruses are fiendishly clever. They are the foremost practitioners of horizontal gene transfer, integrating their own genetic material into the genome of the infected host to produce more viruses.
Intriguingly, if they infect germline cells, sperm or ova, for example, then the organism will transmit the integrated retrovirus, known as a provirus, to their descendants. In other words, the acquired genetic material becomes part of the offspring’s inheritance. It’s a solidly Lamarckian mechanism and Steele’s own somatic selection hypothesis is based on such viral capacities.
This ability to affect the genetic makeup of their hosts makes viruses a force to be reckoned with. As a group of researchers, led by microbiologist Matthew B Sullivan, wrote in 2016, “viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things, but to what extent remains a mystery.”
And the truth is there are a lot of viruses around.
Virologist Curtis Suttle from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues last year published the first research into the number of viruses being deposited from the atmosphere. The amount is staggering, possibly billions a day for every square metre of the earth. Viruses are puissant and ubiquitous.
Steele and colleagues seem to have been finally spurred to action by new virological data connecting viruses and evolution.
In 2017 Pakorn Aiewsakun and Aris Katzourakis from the University of Oxford in the UK published a paper in Nature Communications that concluded that “retroviruses emerged together with their vertebrate hosts in the ocean” at least 460 million years ago. They also established that the two entities demonstrate patterns of co-speciation: as the host organisms transform into new species, their viral counterparts similarly transform. This, claim Steele and colleagues, is a key prediction of the H-W panspermia hypothesis.
Steele and colleagues derive two points from Aiewsakun and Katzourakis’ findings.
The first is that viruses are successful only because they have evolved to make use of the host’s cellular machinery and genetic regulatory make-up – that is, they are “in touch with the whole of the cell’s very ability to grow and divide to produce progeny cells and to evolve”. Given this, evidence that retroviruses emerged at the same time as, and co-speciated with, their hosts, simply doesn’t add up. Retroviruses are carefully adapted to the stable make-up of their target hosts and such co-variance just shouldn’t happen.
The second point is that the emergence of these retroviruses barely predates the Cambrian Explosion, a period in which sudden and unparalleled biological diversity and complexity appeared on Earth. They also emerge not long after a mass extinction event at the end of the Ediacaran period, 542 million years ago.
Panspermia accounts for all this, the authors explain, thus: the Ediacaran extinction was most likely brought about by comets that brought with them complex retroviruses. The retroviruses were the main driver of the Cambrian explosion. They integrated themselves into the genomes of countless terrestrial species, introducing novel genetic material which resulted in an explosion of diversification of living forms.
They integrated so quickly and easily, without the need or time to evolve to the target host’s genetic make-up, because they arrived already primed to do so. This is because the H-W panspermia hypothesis posits a cosmic biology, in which, write the researchers, “the entire galaxy (and perhaps a local group of galaxies) constitutes a single connected biosphere”. All life, both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, is related, according to this view, as all life comes from the greater biosphere in which genetic material in the “cosmic gene pool” is readily shared. There is an underlying biochemical unity of all life, differing only in which isotopes of essential elements life from different parts of the universe might use.
One of the loudest champions of panspermia theory, the late astronomer, Fred Hoyle.
DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGES
As Wickramasinghe puts it, “Our point of view is that in the context of an interconnected cosmic biosphere involving at least 100 billion habitable exoplanets in our galaxy alone, and with continuing exchanges of biomaterial, large scale HGT including exchanges of complex genetic packages in the form of viruses, seeds, bacteria is unavoidable.”
One of the reasons for adopting panspermia, he explains, is the “superastronomically improbable transition from non-life to life”.
The idea that abiogenesis occurred on the cosmically insignificant earth in an awkwardly short amount of time strikes him as improbable, at best.
“The choice between life originating on Earth against manifestly insuperable odds,” he says, “and an origin in the connected volume of a large part of the almost infinite universe is a simple binary choice. We chose the most probable.”
Steele and colleagues argue that abiogenesis is deeply unlikely here on earth and that “it is many orders of magnitude more likely that it emerged in one of the trillions of comet-like incubators or water-bearing planets (cosmic-wide versions of Darwin's 'warm little ponds') at a very early time in the growth of this universe”.
Despite this, Wickramasinghe, Hoyle and Steele have all entertained the notion that there is no need for such a creation story. When asked if there must be abiogenesis at some point, somewhere in the universe, Steele replies, “Actually no. If the universe is steady state infinite there is no formal abiogenesis! I am not saying I agree with that. But Big Bang or steady state are so mind-boggling I find both incredible!”
The reason for this, and a common factor amongst the three scientists, is a commitment to, or interest in, the steady state theory of cosmology.
The idea, first put forward by Hoyle and two colleagues in 1948, holds that the universe has no beginning or end and remains the same size. As matter at the outer reaches of the universe loses energy and goes dark, new matter is created.
In this view, biology is as timeless and without origin as the universe itself. Hoyle famously lost the fight over cosmological models to George Gamow and the advocates for the Big Bang. Despite the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, something predicted by Big Bang theory, Hoyle never recanted his beliefs, and the steady state universe seems an underlying presence in the H-W model of panspermia.
The background theories and characters may be unsettling, but they don’t detract from the evidence upon which the paper rests, which must be taken on its own terms. Much of it is peer reviewed, but it is not always as persuasive as billed. Nonetheless, there is a good deal that gives one pause for thought.
For example, when asked why we haven’t found obvious signs of microbial life elsewhere in the solar system, both Steele and Wickramasinghe seem adamant that such evidence has, in fact, been found. Both point to the work of Gilbert Levin, the principal investigator of the 1976 Viking mission to Mars and his colleague Patricia Straat. Viking’s results pointed to something with a metabolism in the Martian soils, but then couldn’t detect any organic material. The result is interesting, but inconclusive.
The authors also insist fossil microbes have already been found in various meteorites, including the famous Murchison meteorite that fell in Victoria, Australia, in 1969. While they point to refereed journal articles for support, it seems the jury is still out. Once again, the evidence is tantalising but not conclusive.
More recently, traces of seemingly biological carbon deposits have been found in rocks predating the emergence of life, during a period of heavy comet and asteroid bombardment. The authors see this as evidence of life carried to earth, but, as Baverstock suggests, there are other reasons such carbon might be there.
More intriguing is the discovery of bacteria and microbes in unlikely places, such as the stratosphere, 30 to 40 kilometres above the surface of the planet, and more excitingly on the outside of the International Space Station. In the case of the ISS, contamination has been ruled out and the physics suggests that it is not possible for the microbes to have been lofted up from the earth’s surface.
Just as fascinating are suggestive astronomical findings, such as the Rosetta mission’s discovery of organic compounds on and around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This finding coincides nicely with Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s demonstration that interstellar dust is partly made of organic molecules.
Perhaps the most intriguing astronomical evidence of all is that which converted Steele to the panspermia hypothesis.
A development from the research into organic interstellar dust, the spectrum of light produced as infra-red radiation passes through cosmic dust turns out to have the exact same spectral signature as freeze-dried E. coli bacteria. Steele’s frustration with the scientific community’s indifference to this staggering result is palpable.
“All our knowledge of the universe,” he says, “has been built this way – get the spectrum (emission, absorption) in the laboratory on Earth, then focus the telescope on a cosmic source/object and ask, What is the spectrum or signature? Does it match that found in the Earth-based laboratory?”
The answer? “It is an exact match – you cannot get better than that in science.”
So why has the result largely been passed over as a curiosity? Steele muses, “The situation is reminiscent to the problem Galileo had with the Catholic priests of his time – most refused to look through his telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.”
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the new paper concerns the origins of the octopus. The discussion begins, as it so often does in the paper, with some intriguing evidence.
Cephalopods (the group comprising squid, cuttlefish, nautilus and octopus) have a somewhat confusing evolutionary tree, first appearing in the late Cambrian period and seemingly descending from an ancestral primitive nautiloid.
Of these, the octopus is the most striking, with features, such as a complex nervous system, sophisticated eyes and a capacity for camouflage, that appear quite suddenly in its evolution. The genes necessary for this transformation, the authors suggest, are not present in its ancestry. Thus, they hold that “it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”
Interestingly, the octopus has some real and pervasive biochemical differences from the nautilus, presumably the closest living relative of the former’s ancestor. In particular, there is evidence of extensive changes in the RNA, and thus proteins, found in the neural structures of cephalopods.
These changes have been evolutionarily preserved and are not found to this extent elsewhere in nature, not even in the nautilus. This indicates that a qualitative evolutionary transformation occurred relatively recently and abruptly in behaviourally complex cephalopods. The sheer scale of these changes leads the authors to conclude that it cannot be explained by normal neo-Darwinian processes. Or even Lamarckian processes. And they may have a point.
But here things get weird. “One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth – most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilised octopus eggs,” write the authors. This would “be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the octopus' sudden emergence on Earth [about] 270 million years ago.”
It’s moments like this that point to the source of the paper’s unease. It lies not with the evidence it presents, but rather the larger conclusions drawn.
The evidence is nonetheless provocative. Taken together it indicates, if nothing else, that there is much we don’t know and that our prevailing scientific orthodoxies will undergo transformations, as all scientific theories do.
The orthodox scientific response is encapsulated in the commentary from the decorated virologist Karin Moelling of the Max Planck Institute Molecular Genetics, in Berlin, and Institute of Medical Microbiology, Zürich, published in the same journal issue.
“So this article is useful, calling for attention, and it is worth thinking about,” she says, “yet the main statement about viruses, microbes and even animals coming to us from space, cannot be taken seriously.”
These kinds of pronouncements have led to the near-radio silence from the media, except for the occasional piece riffing on the theme of space octopuses. Scientific commentary is muted, confused by the tension between the outlandish claims and the peer-reviewed status of the paper.
Maybe we should side with sage advice of the journal’s editor, the renowned British biologist Denis Noble. “The usual mantra ‘further research is needed’ applies even more than usual,” he writes. “In the future, the ideas will surely become testable.”
The authors, too, think this the best course of action. “The whole issue is on the verge of being decided by decisive evidence of extra-terrestrial life being found elsewhere in our solar system,” they conclude.
Instead of dismissing panspermia out of hand, perhaps then, we should just wait for the discoveries that future space probes might bring. Evidence, as always, will be the ultimate decider.
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The Terrafugia Transition could end the long wait for flying cars
The Terrafugia Transition could end the long wait for flying cars
The car-plane hybrid goes on sale in 2019, but experts say air taxis might steal its thunder.
Terrafugia's Transition vehicle looks like a cross between a car and a miniature airplane — and can fit right in your garage.
Courtesy Terrafugia
By Tom Metcalfe
It might not the most elegant-looking thing on the road or in the sky, but an automobile-airplane hybrid that’s being called the world's first practical flying car is almost ready to spread its wings.
The two-passengerTransitionwill go on sale in the U.S. next year atan estimated price of $400,000, according to Terrafugia, the Woburn, Massachusetts-based firm that makes it.
The Transition has four wheels, folding wings and a rear-mounted “pusher” propeller. Powered by a four-cylinder hybrid-electric engine, it can fly 100 miles an hour at altitudes of up to 9,000 feet, with a flying range of 400 miles. There are controls for both flying and driving: for the roads, conventional brake and accelerator pedals and a steering wheel; for flying, the usual yoke and rudder pedals.
The vehicle converts from driving to flying mode in less than a minute, according to Terrafugia. But don’t expect it to get you out of a traffic jam. Though it’s the first vehicle certified to drive on U.S. roads and fly in U.S. skies, it can take off and land only at airfields — and you’ll need a pilot's license.
Many flying car prototypes have been built in recent decades, but none has proven practical enough to become a full-fledged production vehicle. The Transition is designed mainly for light aircraft owners who don’t want to get stuck when bad weather makes flying impossible, or who want to avoid airfield parking fees and fuel costs, according to Terrafugia. The vehicle runs on ordinary premium gasoline and can be kept in a garage at home.
But the company, now owned by Chinese car maker Geely, also hopes the Transition will attract people who are new to private aviation. “We would like people who never thought of becoming a pilot before to consider it because, hey, it’s a flying car,” Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia’s founder, told Smithsonian Air and Space magazine.
Terrafugia was founded in 2006 with a plan for a “flying SUV” that earned Dietrich a prestigious technology prize. But with recent advances in autonomous passenger drones — electrically powered “air taxis” that take off and land vertically without a runway — experts say vehicles like the Transition are likely to be a niche product.
“The world changed while they were working on that vehicle,” says Richard Anderson, an aerospace engineering professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
Investors worldwide are pouring billions of dollars into the development of air taxis, with manufacturers like Airbus and Germany’s Volocopter claiming to be well on the way to bringing the vehicles to market. “The business case is absolutely crystal clear, and the technology is here,” Anderson said.
Terrafugia said it is developing its own vertical-takeoff-and-landing passenger vehicle, dubbed the TF-2, that could take to the skies as a piloted aircraft in 2023. That’s likely to be several years before the first self-piloted air taxis get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, Anderson said.
“These vehicles are things that were never seen before, so there's a learning process,” Anderson said of the FAA. “Even if they are willing to embrace the technology, they have to understand it before they're going to let it fly over our heads in a city.”
(Credit: Sergio Larripa, Asier Marzo and Bruce Drinkwater)
These tiny particles are being lifted with sound — no magic tricks required! Scientists have harnessed the physical force of sound waves before, but for the first time acoustic levitation has been successfully used on multiple objects independently.
The breakthrough was achieved by Asier Marzo Pérez of the University of Navarra in Spain and Bruce Drinkwater of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Their results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers developed a new algorithm that uses an array of sound emitters to create an acoustic field complex strong enough to trap multiple objects, like these one millimeter plastic beads.
They imagine the system being used to create mid-air displays using physical pixels, and “acoustic tweezers” that can be used for noninvasive surgery, noting “acoustic devices are 100,000 times more efficient than optical systems.”
The current experimental setup can simultaneously handle 25 tiny particles in 3-D space. It’s precise enough that the scientists were able to attach a thread to two of the spheres and “sew” it onto a piece of cloth using nothing but sound. They hope to be able to adapt the technique to use in water over the next year.
UFOJane shares her favorite Texas UFO sightings from 2018, which include spooky triangles and plane-following orbs. What are your favorite UFO and alien stories and sightings from the year? Do you think we are getting closer or farther to UFO and Alien Disclosure?
Stephen Hawking's Final Theory About Our Universe Will Melt Your Brain
MICHELLE STARR
Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing hislast theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven.
The paper, published in the Journal of High Energy Physics in May, puts forward that the Universe is far less complex than current multiverse theories suggest.
It's based around a concept called eternal inflation, first introduced in 1979 and published in 1981.
After the Big Bang, the Universe experienced a period of exponential inflation. Then it slowed down, and the energy converted into matter and radiation.
However, according to the theory of eternal inflation, some bubbles of space stopped inflating or slowed on a stopping trajectory, creating a small fractal dead-end of static space.
Meanwhile, in other bubbles of space, because of quantum effects, inflation never stops - leading to an infinite number of multiverses.
Everything we see in our observable Universe, according to this theory, is contained in just one of these bubbles - in which inflation has stopped, allowing for the formation of stars and galaxies.
Visualisation of the inflating multiverse.
(A. Linde/Stanford University)
"The usual theory of eternal inflation predicts that globally our universe is like an infinite fractal, with a mosaic of different pocket universes, separated by an inflating ocean," Hawking explained.
"The local laws of physics and chemistry can differ from one pocket universe to another, which together would form a multiverse. But I have never been a fan of the multiverse. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite the theory can't be tested."
Even one of the original architects of the eternal inflation model has disavowed it in recent years.
Paul Steinhardt, physicist at Princeton University, has gone on record saying that the theory took the problem it was meant to solve - to make the Universe, well, universally consistent with our observations - and just shifted it onto a new model.
Hawking and Hertog are now saying that the eternal inflation model is wrong. This is because Einstein's theory of general relativity breaks down on quantum scales.
"The problem with the usual account of eternal inflation is that it assumes an existing background universe that evolves according to Einstein's theory of general relativity and treats the quantum effects as small fluctuations around this," Hertog explained.
"However, the dynamics of eternal inflation wipes out the separation between classical and quantum physics. As a consequence, Einstein's theory breaks down in eternal inflation."
Hawking's last theory is based on string theory, one of the frameworks that attempts to reconcile general relativity with quantum theory by replacing the point-like particles in particle physics with tiny, vibrating one-dimensional strings.
This illustration shows the evolution of the Universe, from the Big Bang on the left, to modern times on the right.
Image: NASA
In string theory, the holographic principle proposes that a volume of space can be described on a lower-dimensional boundary; so the universe is like a hologram, in which physical reality in 3D spaces can be mathematically reduced to 2D projections on their surfaces.
The researchers developed a variation of the holographic principle that projects the time dimension in eternal inflation, which allowed them to describe the concept without having to rely on general relativity.
This then allowed them to mathematically reduce eternal inflation to a timeless state on a spatial surface at the beginning of the Universe - a hologram of eternal inflation.
"When we trace the evolution of our universe backwards in time, at some point we arrive at the threshold of eternal inflation, where our familiar notion of time ceases to have any meaning," said Hertog.
In 1983, Hawking and another researcher, physicist James Hartle, proposed what is known as the 'no boundary theory' or the 'Hartle-Hawking state'. They proposed that, prior to the Big Bang, there was space, but no time. So the Universe, when it began, expanded from a single point, but doesn't have a boundary.
According to the new theory, the early Universe did have a boundary, and that's allowed Hawking and Hertog to derive more reliable predictions about the structure of the Universe.
"We predict that our universe, on the largest scales, is reasonably smooth and globally finite. So it is not a fractal structure," Hawking said.
It's a result that doesn't disprove multiverses, but reduces them to a much smaller range - which means that multiverse theory may be easier to test in the future, if the work can be replicated and confirmed by other physicists.
Hertog plans to test it by looking for gravitational waves that could have been generated by eternal inflation.
These waves are too large to be detected by LIGO, but future gravitational wave interferometers such as space-based LISA, and future studies of the cosmic microwave background, may reveal them.
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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.