Are Humans the Real Ancient Aliens?

This image provided by NASA shows a 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth on Jan. 24, 2012.

NASA via AP

How special are we? A recent research paper suggests that terrestrial-style biology may be rare, and Earth may be among the first examples of a planet able to sustain life in the cosmos. Even as the new kids on the block, humans are seemingly one of the precious few instances of intelligence to arise in the universe since the Big Bang did its thing.

• Related: The Search For Life Starts With Human Missions to Mars

Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb and his colleagues in the U.K. have argued that the halcyon days for life are still to come. It’s not even morning in the universe; it’s pre-dawn. Biology may erupt like weeds on an untold number of worlds, but if so, the infestation will take place tens of billions of years in the future.

Why’s that? And what’s wrong with life sprouting up today?

Obviously nothing. After all, you’re reading this — you, the distant descendant of a small collection of molecules that stumbled on a method for building nearly exact replicas of itself nearly four billion years ago. No scientist is yet sure if this molecular sleight-of-hand is just some sort of highly unlikely event, although opinions abound.

The new argument that primetime for an inhabited universe is still to come springs from astronomy, not biology. Loeb et al.’s proposition begins with the belief that life requires a few essential ingredients: a world that’s amenable to easy chemistry, including liquid water, thick atmosphere — you know the drill. As best we can tell, there’s no shortage of such Goldilocks orbs — there may be tens of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy, and that’s not even counting habitable moons.

An abundance of real estate is essential for this growth, yes. But so is time. Rustling up life, especially of the intelligent variety, might take billions of years.

The argument is straightforward: The longer you wait, the more examples of biology you’ll have. But stars like our Sun can’t wait too long: there’s a relatively short opportunity to strut and fret. In 10 billion years, they’ve run through their easily accessible fuel, and are headed out the door.

But consider red dwarf stars, the runts of the universe. Their masses are considerably less than Sol’s, which means they burn more slowly. The consequence? Red dwarfs with one-tenth the mass of the Sun have lifespans that are up to a thousand times longer.

All else being equal, that would give red dwarfs a thousand times the probability of eventually using its energy to host a world with life. Clearly, it’s most probable that this life would arise not when these stars are still young — which they all are now — but instead during their long adulthood. In other words, the red dwarfs are just getting started, and their biologically fecund years are still ahead.

• Related: How Computers Are Learning to Predict the Future

And here’s an additional fillip: Red dwarfs are as plentiful as bad drivers, comprising three-fourths of all stars. So not only are they individually a thousand times more likely to become winners in the biology lottery, there are a lot more of them buying tickets.

Loeb argues that, looking back on creation ten trillion years from now when the curtain is falling on the universe-as-we-know-it, you’d have to say that the overwhelming majority of life arose around red dwarf stars – and on average, trillions of years after Earth was over and done.

So among inhabited planets it sounds as if Earth beat the rush. From the standpoint of future cosmic civilizations, we are the ancient aliens.

But is that so remarkable? Maybe not. Consider being a citizen of Rome during its Empire. There were about 200 million people in the world then. If you were particularly insightful, it might occur to you that the future human population could be much greater — indeed, there's now 35 times as many people as strolled the world at the time of Jesus.

So that would make Romans special, right? There was a far greater probability that they’d be born after the Renaissance then in the time of the Caesars.

However, while interesting, that’s not to say the Romans were by any means the first humans or even the first to be somewhat civilized. There were 10,000 generations of Homo sapiens before them, and neither they nor the Romans would appreciate being dismissed by the claim that “the best was yet to come.”

• Related: Is an Alien Megastructure Causing This Star's Strange Behavior?

The galactic hordes may still be ahead, but that’s little reason to wait before trying to find some cosmic company. Are you willing to wait 500 billion years before learning whether anyone’s out there? That's more patience than I have.

• Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California. He writes frequently on astronomy and other topics, and hosts the SETI Institute’s weekly radio show, “Big Picture Science.”

For more of the breakthroughs changing our lives, follow NBC MACH.

Seth Shostak

Dr. Seth Shostak is Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and also host of the “Big Picture Science” podcast.

{ https://www.nbcnews.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 23:55 geschreven door peter  

Mystery event that saw mountain crash into river 'may have been UFO attack'

A MYSTERIOUS “blitzkrieg” which led to the side of a mountain crashing into a Siberian river was either a UFO attack or a giant meteorite strike, according to a majority of Russians.

By Kate Oglesby 

The claims about the incident – known as the Bureya Bliztkrieg – come amid a new report which said a “reliable” witness saw a “huge green-coloured body with a very long tail” streaking vertically downwards in the night sky on December 15.

The bizarre event, which took place last month, is under Russian scientific scrutiny after the water flow into a hydro-electric power reservoir was cut due to a massive landfall, creating a 525ft mound which was visible from space rising from the bed of Bureya River in the far east of Russia. 

05-01-2019 om 23:36 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

05-01-2019 om 22:40 geschreven door peter  

A New Study Suggests There Could Have Been Intelligent Life on Earth Before Humans

Looking for aliens across deep space is great, but have we looked hard enough in our own terrestrial backyard—here on Earth?

The artist Surian Soosay offers a playful depiction of 'the Silurian Hypothesis'

One author of the new study, leading climatologist Gavin Schmidt, wrote a work of fiction to explore its findings. Read 'Under the Sun', which we published at Terraform alongside the following piece.

The human yearning to connect with other intelligent life-forms runs deep, and it has become the driving force behind a dazzling range of scientific pursuits. From the SETI Institute’s radio sweeps of the sky, to the discovery of liquid water on neighboring worlds, to the thousands of exoplanets detected over the past two decades, there have been major gains in chasing one of the ultimate cosmic mysteries—whether or not we are alone in the universe.

But in our rush to search for life by peering into deep space, have we overlooked the merits of looking for it in deep time? Earth is the only planet that we’re absolutely certain can support a technologically advanced species, yet little thought has been lent to the possibility that during its 4.5 billion year lifespan, our own world might have produced more than one industrialized civilization.

Outside of some science fiction stories and a speculative paper by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, little serious thought has been afforded to the possibility that we humans are not the first species to build an advanced civilization in the solar system’s history.

“It actually hasn’t been explored that much,” climatologist Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told me over the phone. “It never gets brought up as a potential thing that you want to look for.”

So, Schmidt paired up with University of Rochester physicist Adam Frank to co-author a paper entitled “The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?” The hypothesis borrows its “Silurian” title from the fictional reptilian species depicted in the science fiction franchise Doctor Who—these scaly Silurians flourished on Earth many millions of years before the dawn of our own society.

Published this month in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the work outlines what kind of signature a technologically adept species might leave behind. Schmidt and Frank use the projected footprint of the Anthropocene, the current era in which human activity is influencing planetary processes like climate and biodiversity, as a guide for what we might expect from other civilizations.

“There’s lots of things that are going well for [human civilization], but there’s a big price that’s being paid in the ecology and biology,” Schmidt told me. He emphasized that many of these consequences can seem to be “out of sight, out of mind” due to conveniences like sewage infrastructure and garbage relocation. But when considered in totality, anthropogenic activities really add up, and impact the geological record. “All of the waste and footprint is being hidden from us, but it isn’t hidden from the planet,” he said.

It’s unlikely that any massive telltale structures would remain preserved through tens of millions of years of geological activity—that holds true for both human civilization and any potential “Silurian” precursors on Earth.

Instead, Schmidt and Frank propose searching for more subtle signals, such as byproducts of fossil fuel consumption, mass extinction events, plastic pollution, synthetic materials, disrupted sedimentation from agricultural development or deforestation, and radioactive isotopes potentially caused by nuclear detonations.

“You really have to dive into a lot of different fields and pull together exactly what you might see,” Schmidt said. “It involves chemistry, sedimentology, geology, and all these other things. It’s really fascinating.”

In his spare time, Schmidt also wrote a short story called “Under the Sun,” which Motherboard is publishing alongside this article in Terraform, and which dramatizes some of its key ideas. The story follows Stella, an environmental scientist who stumbles on evidence of past intelligent life in sediments from dating from the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This warming period occurred approximately 55 million years ago, when “something triggered a massive shift in the global carbon cycle” and “all the environmental indicators went haywire.”

Stella’s fascination with the PETM reflects Schmidt’s own ruminations about this mysterious period of climate change, when average global temperatures were about 8°C Celsius higher than they are today. Some 15 years ago, he was discussing the geological impact of the PETM with colleagues, when he realized it would be somewhat analogous to the predicted aftermath of the Anthropocene.

In “Under the Sun,” that connection between the PETM and the Anthropocene is made explicit—it’s the nuclear fingerprint that gives Stella and her colleagues their Eureka moment. Despite the thrill of this discovery, the story hints at the ominous consequences of detecting radioactive fallout from a past society, even as nuclear sabre-rattling continues unchecked in human civilization.

In this way, Schmidt’s paper and his short story both relate the Silurian hypothesis to the Drake equation, which is a probabilistic approach to estimating the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, developed by astronomer Frank Drake.

One of the equation’s key variables is the length of time that civilizations are capable of transmitting detectable signals. A proposed reason that we have not achieved contact with an alien species is that this “length of time” variable may be extremely short—either because technologically advanced civilizations self-destruct, or because they learn to live sustainably on their home worlds.

“It might be the detectable period of a civilization is much shorter than its actual longevity, because you can’t last a long time doing the kinds of stuff that we’ve been doing,” Schmidt explained. “You either stop, because you’ve messed it all up, or you learn not to do it. Either way, the burst of activity, wastefulness, and massive footprints is actually a very short amount of time.”

“Maybe it’s happened a billion times in the universe,” he added, “but if it only lasted 200 years every time, then you’d never see it.”

The same logic holds for any previous civilizations that may have flourished on Earth, only to either collapse in ruin or scale down on activities that threaten their lifespan. There are definitely some not-so-subtle lessons that humans can take from this forked path which is, after all, an industrial version of the age-old evolutionary mantra—adapt or die.

That, for Schmidt and Frank, is one of the core themes of the Silurian hypothesis. If we can mull over the possibility that we are not the first Earthlings to have produced a technologically advanced civilization, perhaps we can better appreciate the precariousness of our current situation.

“Our thinking about our place in the universe has been this progressive distancing of ourselves from the study,” Schmidt told me, citing outdated beliefs like the geocentric model of the universe. “It’s like a stepwise retreat from a total self-centered view, and [the Silurian hypothesis] is really just one extra way of doing that.”

“We do need to be objective and open to all sorts of possibilities,” he added, “if we’re going to be able to see what the universe actually has to offer us.”

{ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us }

05-01-2019 om 22:12 geschreven door peter  

SHOCK as world-renowned scientist says humans are on the brink of making ALIEN CONTACT

HUMANS are on the brink of contacting alien life, with one of the most respected physicists in the world “sticking his neck out” and predicting it could be within this century, it has been revealed.

05-01-2019 om 21:46 geschreven door peter  

Tempel Mexicaanse vruchtbaarheidsgod blootgelegd waar gruwelijke rituelen plaatsvonden: hogepriesters vilden menselijke offers en trokken hun huid aan - HLN.be

Bron: CNN, BBC

Tijdens het jaarlijkse ‘feest’ Tlacaxipehualiztli, letterlijk vertaald ‘de huid van de gevilden dragen’, offerden de inheemse inwoners gevangenen om zo in de gunst van Xipe Totec te komen, zo noteerden de Spaanse overheersers die honderden jaren geleden op de Azteekse stammen stootten bij hun verkenning van het Mexicaanse binnenland. De gevangenen werden gedood in een soort gladiatorengevecht of met pijlen doorboord. Daarna werden ze gevild en hogepriesters trokken hun huid aan als symbool van wedergeboorte. Het hart werd uit het lichaam gesneden en eveneens geofferd.

Met de ontdekking van de tempel is er nu ook voor het eerst tastbaar bewijs van dat gruwelijke verhaal. De tempel werd blootgelegd op de site Ndachjian-Tehuacán in de centrale deelstaat Puebla. Ze bestaat uit twee offeraltaren en drie sculpturen: twee 70 centimeter grote en 200 kilogram zware stenen hoofden en een 80 centimeter grote torso. Ze moeten het huidloze lichaam van Xipe Totec voorstellen. De torso heeft bijvoorbeeld twee handen aan de linkerarm: een van de god zelf en een van de gevilde slachtoffers. In de buik zit een gat waar waarschijnlijk een groene steen zat.

De tempel werd waarschijnlijk gebruikt tussen het jaar 1000 en 1250 door de Popoloca-stam. Die groep werd later door de Azteken overwonnen, die hun rijk over Mexico uitbreidden tot de Spanjaarden arriveerden. Ook de Azteken bleven Xipe Totec aanbidden.

REUTERS

REUTERS

De ontdekte sculptuur van de torso is ongeveer 80 centimeter groot, heeft twee handen aan zijn linkerarm ene en gat in zijn buik.

REUTERS

REUTERS

De archeologische site van Ndachjian-Tehuacan in Puebla.

 { https://www.hln.be/ }

05-01-2019 om 20:54 geschreven door peter  

After China’s Chang’e 4 probe landed on the dark side of the moon, many people focused on the pictures of its rover roving off to search for grass, lunatics and paperboys. However, back on the lander, an experiment got underway that involves both life existing on the moon and growing food to sustain it. Three guesses as to what kind of food it will grow … Matt Damon, you need to recuse yourself on this one.

“The container will send potatoes, arabidopsis seeds and silkworm eggs to the surface of the Moon. The eggs will hatch into silkworms, which can produce carbon dioxide, while the potatoes and seeds emit oxygen through photosynthesis. Together, they can establish a simple ecosystem on the Moon.”

People’s Daily Online described what Zhang Yuanxun, chief designer of the container, put inside it before sending the package to the moon. While the term “dark side” has been replaced somewhat by “far side,” most people still don’t know that the remote non-Earth-facing side of the moon gets sunlight in quantities that are more than enough to grow potatoes and flowers. (Arabidopsis is a flowering plant related to mustard and cabbage – is this a Chinese experiment or an Irish dinner?) The main challenge for the seeds and worms will be heat, so the mini biosphere is insulated and has a battery-operated heat generator and light pipes.

Silkworms

The experiment was developed by students at Chongqing University and 28 other universities in China who will be anxiously awaiting the results. Will they have to wait until the next manned flight to find out?

“The biosphere package also contains water, air and nutrients, which will hopefully allow the seeds and eggs to briefly flourish in their protective capsule on the lunar surface. A tiny camera and data transmission system will allow researchers to see when and if the seeds blossom.”

Get the pan ready … I found ’em!

The key word there is “briefly.” Just how long will those worms be eating the plants while generating fertilizer and carbon dioxide to stimulate more growth? Will there be enough potatoes to feed Matt Damon? Enough silkworms to all him to weave clothing? Hardly. The container is only 18 cm (5 inches) long. Will that be enough of both to prove to moon residents that there’s life on Earth? Better yet, will they be alive long enough for China to call it a “colony” and lay claim to owning the far side of the moon? The official statement of China’s Communist Party, quoted by the Washington Post, says no.

“Unlike mankind’s mania in the past, the Chinese people ultimately harbor the dream of shared human destiny and practices open cooperation. We choose to go to the back of the moon not because of the unique glory it brings, but because this difficult step of destiny is also a forward step for human civilization!”

Will the world accept that?

Will the lunar silkworms? Will they tire of potatoes and cabbage and send the probe back to Earth for Chinese takeout?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

05-01-2019 om 20:37 geschreven door peter  

Super Wolf Blood Moon Harbinger Prophecy January 21 2019

Many people stick to predictions, but do we believe predictions or is it just the uncertainty what the future will bring that people are starting to believe in predictions?

There are many self-proclaimed prophets but there are a few who have indeed made correct predictions, like Edgar Cayes and the blind woman Baba Vanga.

Known as the 'Nostradamus of the Balkans,' Baba Vanga passed away in 1996 at age 85, but more than two decades later her recorded prophecies continue to stir the imagination.

Said to have accurately foreseen such events as 9/11 and the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, a news report informs that her predictions for 2019 include:

A new devastating tsunami in Asia
A giant meteorite hitting Russia
An economic collapse for the European Union
An assassination attempt on Vladimir Putin
A baffling illness for Donald Trump occurring in the forthcoming year.

The year begins with January's full moon which is set to be very special indeed as four lunar spectacles combine to give the night sky a red hue.

Could it be that the first full blood moon which starts on Jan. 20-21 is a harbinger for the things to come this year?

The following video provides more information about the wolf blood moon including the expectations for 2019.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 20:20 geschreven door peter  

Giant UFO Seen In Night Vision Over Netherlands, Dec 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Summer of 2018, but uploaded Dec 2018.
Location of sighting: Groenio, Netherlands

A person was recording with a 3rd generation night vision scope when he noticed a strange cloud. The cloud is rectangle in shape and has four sharp ninety degree corners. He mistakenly identifies it as a partial chem trail, but that is highly unlikely due to the immense size and shape of this object. Night vision scopes see in infrared and any cloaked craft would become visible using this scope. 

If you remember past military infrared video tracking of UFOs, then you know this to be true already. That my friends, is a UFO.
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states: 

In July of this year during sky watching I noticed a single cloud in the night sky ...maybe nothing special but it was a little strange because there were no other clouds except that one...I guess a Chemtrail ..... decide for yourself 😁👍....and in December I tested my Bushnell Equinox during a meteor shower.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 20:07 geschreven door peter  

NASA Rover Draws Giant Penis In Mars Sand Within Few Minutes Of Landing On Planet, Jan 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of photo: Sol 59-61. Spirit Rover

Date of discovery: Jan 2019

Location of discovery: Mars

Photo: 

• http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/115018

 

Imagine this...you are responsible for landing the Mars Spirit rover on the planet. You succeed and drive the Spirit rover out onto the Mars surface. After getting about 50 meters you notice that you can see your wheel marks in a long trail behind you...so you do what first pops into your head, draw a giant penis! Now we know what the Mars rover driver was thinking about during his/her mission. He or she was thinking about some penis. Its the first Mars art ever made by humans. Its also the first Mars porn made by humans. I wonder if NASA will try to preserve this site so that all humanity can remember this great achievement for thousands of years to come?

 

I also found many there ancient artefacts from faces to strange structures.  

 

NASA put these photos in FAULSE color, which is a deep brown/red. So I put them back into natural normal color, which is a click of a button on my photo program. I prefer the real colors over the fake. What you see here on my site is the real color. Click the link to see the dark false color. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 20:04 geschreven door peter  

Kid In India Records Glowing UFO Over City, Dec 28, 2018, Video, UFO Sighting News

Date of sighting: Dec 28, 2018
Location of sighting: India

This possible UFO was seen on Dec 28, 2018 during a overcast night in India. When the smog of the city blocks out the sky at night, no stars can be seen during such a time. So this rules out stars. The object does not have red or blue flashing lights...which most drones have. Also the object is holding position, trying to confuse the eyewitnesses by appearing like a star.  

Remember what I told you in other posts, aliens are prize themselves on being more intelligent than humanity. They literally believe they can fly as close as they want and not get caught...but with todays cheap video cameras and cell phone cameras...humanity is proving them wrong. 

Also, someone should download this video, I estimate that there is a 90% chance the person will panic within a week when people say its a UFO and will take down the video. It happened a lot over the years. This looks to be just a kid and kids worry a lot about posting the wrong kind of videos getting the wrong kind of attention.
Scott C. Waring

Eyewitness states: 

I saw it on 28 dec 18 5am

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 19:41 geschreven door peter  

UFO Glowing And Pulsating Over The Black Sea, Bulgaria On Jan 4, 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: January 4, 2019

Location of sighting: Black Sea, Burgas, Bulgaria

 

This is one of the most irritating UFOs seen around the world. The UFO hovers over neighbourhoods and appears like a star, but is clearly very close, within half a mile away from the eyewitnesses most the time. 

 

I myself was eyewitness to such a UFO one evening over my apartments and recorded it, just 24 hours after the same UFO was seen on TV news in parts of China. The video I uploaded has since disappeared...I'm searching, but strangely enough...its just gone from my channel??? Very odd, will continue searching for it. 

 

What I am saying is that aliens are highly skilled in the art of trickery and deception. They are required by their laws to not interrupt in our way of life or change how things will go in the future, so instead they try to play mind games with eyewitnesses by having their UFOs fly within a few hundred meters of the ground and make clouds around it to hide the craft, or they will fly low over a neighbourhood trying to move very slowly to look like a star, but is clearly too big and too bright to be a star and too small to be the moon. Aliens are extremely intelligent, and they take too much pride in that fact. But in some areas we are better at...like creativity, passion and empathy. 

Scott C. Waring

 

Eyewitness states: 

Fast UFO big spaceship with changing type, trajectory , shape , sizes , color and very dynamic flexi - pulsations ; Location -- in the international space area over Black Sea -- about BULGARIA ; Time -- 03.10. 2018. // 00 : 06AM ; Documentary raw video report № 42 -- Bu. Sh. -- 1636 -- 100N ; Position -- from stationary camera with resolution - 2K ; Photographer -- Rosen Zheynov.

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

05-01-2019 om 18:19 geschreven door peter  

Alien PROOF? Huge ‘ET BASE’ discovered using Google Sky

A HUGE ‘alien base’ has appeared in the sky, leading some UFO hunters to believe that it is 100 percent PROOF that extraterrestrials are real.

05-01-2019 om 00:52 geschreven door peter  

Aliens are coming to Belgium as UFO sightings soar in 2018

UFO sightings over Belgium surged last year with the public reporting higher numbers of possible alien spaceships than in 2017.

Belgium recorded 255 reports of UFOs in 2018, an increase on the 171 witnessed the previous year.

Sightings were up across the whole country, with increases in Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels.

The mayor of the leafy Brussels suburb of Wezembeek-Oppem made news last summer when he claimed to have spotted a UFO.

Belgium has regularly punched above its weight when it comes to UFO sightings. Even in 2017, a relatively fallow year, it outscored Norway, Finland and Denmark and recorded only a handful fewer sightings than its much larger neighbour France.

Patrick Ferryn, president of Cobeps, the Francophone Belgian committee for the study of space phenomena, said: "We don't know why the numbers have increased. It was a hot summer and it may be simply that when the weather is good and the skies are clear, people look at the skies more often."

Irish Independent

see report ( dutch) with link: 

• http://ufomeldpunt.be/publicaties/jaarverslagen.html.

{ https://www.independent.ie/ }

05-01-2019 om 00:29 geschreven door peter  

UFO sightings in Belgium rocket 

Are flying saucers visiting Belgium in ever greater numbers? 

CREDIT: ANTONIO M. ROSARIO /GETTY

By James Crisp, brussels correspondent

{ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ }

05-01-2019 om 00:21 geschreven door peter  

China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft set down last night, according to clocks in the Americas. It’s a historic event, the first time a spacecraft has landed on the side of the moon we cannot see.

The Chinese Chang’e-4 moon lander touched down in the Von Kármán crater on the moon’s far side. No, the far side of the moon does not always stay dark. In fact, Chang’e-4 mission controllers waited for sunrise over this region to set the lander down.

Simulation of lunar far side today, via Alan Dyer (@amazingskyguy on Twitter).

More space history this week, besides the smallest space object ever orbited, and the most distant object yet visited. Last night, according to clocks in the Americas – January 3, 2019, at 02:26 UTC (10:26 a.m. Beijing time; January 2 at 10:26 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast) – China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft successfully landed on the moon’s far side.

• Best New Year’s gift ever! EarthSky moon calendar for 2019

Chinese state media announced the event. The spacecraft landed in Von Kármán crater, located on the lunar far side within the South Pole-Aitken basin. Jason Davis at the Planetary Society wrote:

Chang’e-4 itself launched on December 8, 2018. It entered lunar orbit four days later, where mission controllers spent 22 days testing the spacecraft’s systems, waiting for the sun to rise at the landing site. [On January 2-3, 2019] Chang’e-4 successfully de-orbited and landed.

Scientists say Chang’e-4’s landing site is an area where an ancient impact by space debris pounded the moon long ago, possibly exposing some of the lunar mantle, the layer beneath its crust. So it’s an interesting region geologically. Chinese scientists hope to learn more about the early history of our moon (and by extension the Earth and rest of the solar system) by studying this region via Chang’e-4.

The spacecraft is a combination lander-rover. At this writing, there’s no word that the rover has been deployed, but that’s expected soon. Stay tuned!

Jason Davis

✔@jasonrdavis

It’s a space feat no nation has accomplished until now: China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon! http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/change4-success.html …

• 281

5:28 AM - Jan 3, 2019

• 150 people are talking about this

View image on Twitter

Alan Dyer@amazingskyguy

The Chinese Chang’e Moon lander touched down in the Von Karman crater in the large South Pole-Aitken Basin on the lunar farside, an area that just had sunrise and is starting a two-week-long lunar day.

• 64

7:24 AM - Jan 3, 2019

• 36 people are talking about this

Andrew Jones@AJ_FI

Cheeky #ChangE4 descent & touchdown footage from the corner of the big screen at Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Centre. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciXXj0Tj7zk … (CNSA/CCTV)

• 117

8:20 AM - Jan 3, 2019

• 51 people are talking about this

YE Quanzhi@Yeqzids

#ChangE4's rover may descend around 1030 UT (Jan 3) but it's bedtime now... good night folks. It has been a fun day, commenting an American mission (#MU69flyby) on Chinese social media and then tweeting a Chinese mission here.

• 48

9:57 AM - Jan 3, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See YE Quanzhi's other Tweets

Chang’e-4 mission profile. since the far side of the moon never faces Earth, missions there require a relay satellite. To solve that problem, China launched the Queqiao relay satellite in May 2018. The Queqiao relay satellite also brought along two SmallSats named Longjiang-1 and 2 bound for lunar orbit. Only Longjiang-2 was successful.

Image via Loren Roberts for The Planetary Society.

Bottom line: China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft set down on the moon’s far side on January 3, 2019, at 02:26 UTC. It’s the first time a spacecraft has landed on the far side of the moon.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

04-01-2019 om 23:43 geschreven door peter  

U is for UFOs in Ottawa: The truth is (still) out there

BRUCE DEACHMAN

In 1953, Ottawa Journal readers were urged to be on the lookout for flying saucers, after Wilbert Smith's Project Magnet was given space and equipment to operate out of Shirley's Bay.

One fine summer evening in 1953, with Bank Street bustling as thousands of ball fans headed to Lansdowne Park to watch a game, Wilbert B. Smith, a senior radio engineer with the Department of Transport, and his research team released a weather balloon over the area. Not just any weather balloon, this one was covered with aluminum to make it disk-shaped, while fastened to its centre was a large aircraft flare timed to ignite when the balloon reached 5,000 feet, or 1,524 metres.

The silver object rose slowly in the air and, at 5,000 feet, glowed brilliantly for 15 seconds as its flare ignited. What Smith and his team, dubbed Project Magnet, expected to happen next was a deluge of phone calls from panicked and concerned citizens about the unidentified flying object they’d just seen. It was 1953, after all, with the post-Second-World-War Cold War in high gear and UFOs and their possible extraterrestrial origins frequently in the news. What they got, though, was nothing, or, rather, the conclusion that people just don’t watch the sky all that much: not one person called to report the strange object. This, however, hardly deterred Smith and his colleagues.

Project Magnet was formed in December 1950 on the authorization of Commander C.P. Edwards, then Deputy Minister of Transport for Air Service, with the aim of investigating UFO claims in Canada. It ran separately but in conjunction with a multi-department effort coordinated by the Defence Research Board, named Project Second Storey, to investigate reports of UFO sightings. According to Smith, Project Magnet was never officially sanctioned and no government funding was provided; he had simply requested some space and surplus equipment at a Transport Station at Shirley’s Bay, with which to collect research in his own spare time. Project Magnet’s primary goal was to study how the Earth’s magnetic field could be harnessed as a propulsion system for vehicles, a technology Smith believed extraterrestrials used.

At the time, 50 per cent of Canadians believed “that these mysterious disks are not just imagination and that they are not just a natural phenomenon,” according to a poll conducted by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion.

“So many reliable people are among the witnesses,” noted the Fort William Times-Journal, “it is no longer possible to ignore entirely the possibilities that some aerial survey of the earth is being taken by personalities from some other part of the universe.”

Reports of UFOs in Canada stretch back to 1792, when explorer David Thompson reported a bright blob flying overhead in northern Manitoba. In February 1915, the lights of Parliament Hill, Rideau Hall and the Royal Mint were extinguished after reports of unknown lights crossing the St. Lawrence River and headed for Ottawa reached Prime Minister Robert Borden. Thought to possibly be an aerial attack, the sighting were later blamed on fireworks-laden balloons released in Morristown, N.Y. to celebrate a century of peace.

Smith, who in 1955 became one of City View’s three inaugural trustees, was himself an ardent believer in aliens. In a speech delivered to the Vancouver Area UFO Club in 1961, a year before his death, he claimed to have communicated with extraterrestrials, whom he at least occasionally referred to as “the boys topside.” An engineer, he was particularly interested in such technical matters as how their spacecraft was built and how they were propelled. He claims they explained to him how the speed of light is not constant, and that time was not the measured chronological ticking we imagine, but a “field function” that changed throughout the universe, and which could be altered. Their ships, he was told, were supported on the Earth’s gravitational field. The fields surrounding their ships, he added, created areas that reduced areas that weakened the strength of objects that came into contact with them, accounting for the destruction of earthly military craft that flew too close to them. This explained, among other phenomenon, the May 1956 crash of a military jet into the Villa St. Louis convent in Orleans — the jet, Smith said, flew into a “very strong vortex of reduced binding,” causing it to break apart.

“I wrote a very stiff memorandum to the appropriate people in my own department pointing out some of these facts,” he wrote. But his letter, he maintained, “wound up on the crank file.”

Similar unstable vortices, he added, were created when nuclear explosions occurred. An unnamed friend of his who had also been in contact with “these people from outside” claimed to have spoken with one, Tyla, a garbage collector whose job it was to clean up the radioactive messes created by such man-made explosions. Tyla, Smith said, gathered the material, took it aboard his ship where it was rendered inert, and then dumped it in some secluded spot on Earth. In 1948, Tyla reportedly told his friend that he would dump his next load near Ottawa, and that he would pick an opportune time so many people could witness it. According to Smith, it took place on Remembrance Day that year: “We looked up to the north-west of Ottawa and there was Tyla’s little craft, an egg-shaped affair in the sky, and coming out of the tail-end of it was what looked like an almost dissipated portion of a jet trail that was dropping down.”

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By summarizing sightings reported in 1952, Smith reported that UFOs were “a hundred feet or more in diameter; they can travel at speeds of several thousand miles per hour; they can reach altitudes well above those which should support conventional aircraft or balloons; and ample power and force seem to be available for all required maneuvers.”

The sightings, he noted, occurred at approximately six-week intervals, and most frequently when Earth and Mars were nearest to one another. In his 1952 report, he wrote: “We are forced to the conclusion that the vehicles are probably extraterrestrial, in spite of our prejudices to the contrary.”

The Project Second Storey committee, of which Smith was a member, developed a weighted 28-question questionnaire for those who reported seeing UFOs, to try to determine the likelihood that what they thought they saw actually happened. The conclusion, according to Smith, was that there was a 91-per-cent chance that reported sightings involved real objects, and a 60-per-cent chance that those objects were extraterrestrial vehicles.

On Aug. 8, 1954, Smith and his team at Shirley’s Bay recorded a disturbance they believed was caused by a UFO. Among the telling signs were Morse code transmissions too rapid for a trained operator to decipher.

Only days later, Project Magnet was disbanded. “Scientists,” wrote the Ottawa Journal, “say there is no proof flying saucers exist but they honorably admit there is no proof that all the strange and wandering objects reported in the sky are freaks of imagination or atmosphere.”

It was, Smith explained in a 1957 Weekend Magazine article on UFOs, all a matter of perspective: “If a stock promoter told you that there was a 60-per-cent probability that a certain stock would go up, I don’t think you’d invest with him. But if the weatherman told you there was a 60-per-cent probability that a hurricane was going to hit your area, I think you’d hurry up and bring in the lawn furniture.”

In 2017, there were approximately 1,100 UFO sightings reported in Canada, including 31 in the Ottawa area. The truth remains out there, somewhere.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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04-01-2019 om 23:22 geschreven door peter  

La Belgique a-t-elle connue une vague d’ovnis en 2018 ?

{ https://www.parlons-ovni.fr/ }

04-01-2019 om 23:01 geschreven door peter  

Waar hebben we vorig jaar ufo's gezien? Ontdek het hier

door bbd | Bron: BELGA

179 waarnemingen: dat is een stijging van 33 procent in vergelijking met het aantal meldingen uit 2017 (134 waarnemingen).

De stijging van het aantal meldingen liet zich – naar jaarlijkse gewoonte – vooral voelen tijdens de zomermaanden juli en augustus. Beide maanden samen waren goed voor 44 meldingen. Dit grote aantal waarnemingen kan grotendeels verklaard worden door het warme weer in die periode: we zaten dan veel vaker en langer buiten.

Ook het feit dat er vaak wolkenloze dagen waren, werkte het ufo-spotten in de hand.

In de provincie Oost-Vlaanderen werden de meeste ufo’s gezien. Het Franstalige COBEPS (Comité Belge pour l’Etude des Phénomènes Spatiaux) ontving het afgelopen jaar 76 ufo-meldingen, eveneens een stijging vergeleken met het jaar ervoor.

Sterren, of het ISS

Frederick Delaere, coördinator van het Belgisch ufo-meldpunt, beklemtoont dat de meeste ufo’s vrij snel ontmaskerd worden als vliegtuigen, sterren of het ruimtestation ISS. ‘Dat weten we door het moment van de waarneming en de manier waarop het tuig zich volgens de getuigen verplaatste, te checken.’

Een invloed van drones – die ook voor een ufo zouden kunnen aanzien worden – is er volgens Delaere nog niet.

Toch zijn er een handvol meldingen waarvoor het meldpunt nog geen verklaring heeft. Zo werd in Nederland een felgroen lintvormig object gespot waarvoor nog geen verklaring werd gevonden. Hetzelfde geldt voor enkele foto’s van verwonderlijke wolkenformaties.

Kaart: Ufomeldpunt.be
Legende: geel: 1 melding, groen: 2 meldingen, blauw: 3 meldingen, paars: 4 meldingen, zwart: 5 meldingen
Markers staan op gemeenteniveau.

Het hele jaarverslag vindt u hier.

{ http://www.standaard.be/ }

04-01-2019 om 22:52 geschreven door peter  

04-01-2019 om 22:38 geschreven door peter