According to newly conducted research, one of Earth’s oldest rocks may have been discovered on the Moon. The chunk of rock was initially brought back to Earth in 1971 from Apollo 14 astronauts who landed on the Moon.

The Earth rock ended up on the Moon more than likely because of a very powerful impact on our planet that happened approximately 4 billion years ago.

In a statement, David Kring, who is the co-author of the rock study, as well as a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, explained, “It is an extraordinary find that helps paint a better picture of early Earth and the bombardment that modified our planet during the dawn of life.”

Astronauts from the Apollo 14 mission explored the surface of the Moon for a few days in February of 1971 and that’s when they collected rock samples to bring back to our planet. The lunar samples were then studied by a research team which was led by Jeremy Bellucci from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and Alexander Nemchin who is from the Swedish Museum and Curtin University in Australia.

Upon analysis, scientists discovered a small 0.08-ounce (or 2 grams) fragment on a rock that contained quartz, zircon, and feldspar, which are all rarely found on the moon but very common here on Earth. When they conducted chemical analysis on the fragment, they were able to find that it was crystallized in an environment which was oxidized and at a temperature that would have been the same as it was near the subsurface of the Earth in its very early days.

According to the evidence found in the study, the fragment was crystallized here on Earth between 4.1 billion and 4 billion years ago and at around 12 miles below the surface of our planet. It was then thrown into space by a strong impact and ended up on the Moon which was around three times closer to Earth than it is now.

Click here to see a picture of the lunar rock the astronauts brought back in 1971.

Researchers said that after the Earth rock landed on the Moon, some of it melted and was probably buried by an impact which happened around 3.9 billion years ago. It was then uncovered by another impact on the Moon about 26 million years ago which created the 1,115-foot-wide Cone Crater. That’s where two of the Apollo 14 astronauts (Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell) took some rock samples.

The mystery of unexplained, earth-rattling booms continues around the country. Whereas mystery booms were once a rare anomaly, they seem to be happening with unsettling regularity lately. What’s behind this mysterious phenomenon? Sonic booms caused by supersonic or hypersonic weapons and aircraft? Unknown atmospheric activity? Meteorite explosions? Earthquakes, frostquakes, or frack-quakes?  

Anyone’s guess is as good as any. This week’s mystery booms come to us from the American south, where residents of four separate counties in Kentucky reported hearing “an earth-shaking sound” on January 23. Emergency dispatchers in Jackson, Madison, Estill, and Rockcastle counties were called when residents heard and felt a mysterious boom loud enough to shake their homes’ foundations.

“At about 6:19 pm yesterday evening a couple of people called in and said they heard this loud boom in the county. We went to check on it in the area, and we never found anything,” Jackson County Sheriff Paul Hays told local news station WKYT. While the cause of the Kentucky mystery boom is still unknown, locals have speculated it could have been anything from an electrical transformer exploding, a rock quarry blast, a sonic boom, or outgassing caused by hydraulic fracking.

A few states to the west in Arkansas, residents of Little Rock took to social media to ask if anyone might know what caused a deafening mystery boom a few hours later on the same night. According to local news station FOX 16, several residents thought it may have been an F/A-18 breaking the sound barrieroverhead – or worse. North Little Rock local Collette Young says the sounds were eerily reminiscent of battle:

My family has served and have been to war – at one point I thought we might be under attack. I just want to know what it is so the next time I hear the sound I am not so startled.

Spokespersons for nearby Little Rock Air Force Base and the Clinton National Airport had no information about the mysterious boom. I just hope that more of these mystery booms can’t be explained by the same causes as those determined the case of recurring booms heard in Pennsylvania last year; in that incident, it turns out that a would-be domestic terrorist was testing improvised explosives in remote areas. Could more of these mystery booms be of a similar origin, or is something stranger going on?

From almost the days of the actual trip, rumors have flown about possible UFO sightings during the Apollo 11 mission and first manned landing on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin still insists that his comments about a light he saw were taken out of context and what he saw was simply a reflection of the sun off of panels jettisoned from the rocket that had carried them into orbit. The same was said to be true of comments made by Armstrong that were misconstrued over the years to be about something other than space junk. However, a newly released letter written by someone back in the news claims that the first man on the moon had more than just a passing-by-while-in-the-sky interest in UFOs.

“This letter could be somewhat historic because it might actually confirm that Armstrong did have an interest in UFOs.”

Neil Armstrong

Sun Online says the letter (see it here) was discovered by Dr. Irena Scott, a former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer and author of a new book about UFO encounters, “Sacred Corridors.” Dr. Scott is well-known in UFOolgy circles, having served on the MUFON Board of Directors and as a MUFON consultant in physiology and astronomy and a field investigator. The author of the letter is Professor J. Allen Hynek, who has posthumously received 15 more minutes of fame as the focal point of the History Channel’s new series on Project Blue Book.The recipient of the handwritten letter (remember those?) was Jennie Zeidman, a close friend of Hynek who also worked with him at Wright Patterson Air Force Base on Project Blue Book.

“Dear Jennie. A week from today we sail … I got called up by the cruise director asking if the Hyneks would mind sharing a table with the Armstrongs! So – tell Barry I should be able to get the autograph for him! Did I tell you I’m going?”

Hynek was referring to an upcoming two-week cruise from New York to the west coast of Africa in 1973 on which 2,000 teachers, artists, authors, scientists and celebrities would observe a total solar eclipse and listen to lectures and discussions, including a panel with Hynek and Armstrong called “Life in the Universe.” To Scott, this is proof that, while Armstrong never publicly discussed his UFO interests, he intentionally sought on the cruise to have such discussions with a recognized expert in the field.

Sun Online also reveals Scott found evidence that Neil Armstrong and J. Allen Hynek also contacted ufologist and author Leonard Stringfield, who was at one time the director of Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO).

“Stringfield said that a number of years ago when Armstrong was on the board of directors of a Cincinnati bank, Armstrong and Hynek approached him with a proposal to protect the names of the government-connected informants. Armstrong said Stringfield could put his list of names in a safety deposit box at Armstrong’s bank, to which it was assumed Armstrong would also have access. The intention was that in the event of Stringfield’s death, the names wouldn’t be lost, but Stringfield rejected the idea.”

Scott implies that Armstrong was trying to help Stringfield protect the identities of 50 UFO informants. She is sketchy on this – Stringfield died in 1994 and Scott admits in the Sun article that she has no proof it actually occurred but uses it as proof that that Armstrong and Hynek had ongoing contacts, implying Armstrong had lifelong interest in UFOs and in discussing – and perhaps even covering up – their existence with a leader in the field.

So, what does this letter show? Armstrong and Hynek were already going to be on the ship together and sharing at least one panel, but it could be a sign that Armstrong had more to discuss in private – although a cruise ship dining room isn’t exactly private or secure, especially when many onboard were interested in the same subject matter and wanted to be close to the famed astronaut. Being before the fact, the letter doesn’t tell us what was actually discussed and there seems to be no published followup. Nor is there any for the the alleged but unproven meeting with Stringfield. The strongest point there is that Armstrong and Hynek had contact long after the cruise.

For now, it’s an interesting footnote – just in need of a little more foot.

We just have to accept it. We’ve been dragged into the future, despite however hard we kicked and screamed. Robots are real, and they’re basically indistinguishable from the robots of our fictions. If you’re worried about these metal abominations coming to take everything you love, and would like nothing more than to go all John Connors and reduce the lot of them to slag, you’re very much not alone, and researchers are quite concerned.

In a January 19th New York Times article titled “Why Do We Hurt Robots?,” Jonah Bromwich cites a number of cases where people “brutally assaulted” robots. Poor, innocent “security robots” battered and beaten. Gangs of filthy meatbags attacking driverless cars. Three teenagers in Japan beating a robot “with all their might.” A Moscow man bludgeoning a “teaching robot” with a baseball bat as it pleaded for help. People, hilariously and ill-advisedly, crashing their own driverless cars on purpose (I respect the commitment to the fight, but those things are expensive). Another security robot was—just fight back the tears; tears can come later—wrapped in a tarp and covered in barbecue sauce.  Humans are such horrible creatures that we manage to hurt things that don’t even have consciousness, let alone pain receptors.

Don’t look at me like that.

And thus, in keeping with the new cultural norm of using words without any consideration for what they mean, the term “robot abuse” was born.

Destroying robots is wrong. For the same reason that destroying someone else’s car, toaster, musical instrument, house, or computer is wrong. It’s property destruction. However hilarious covering a security robot in barbecue sauce is, a lot of money and time went into creating that machine. But that’s all it is, a machine. Yet we all anthropomorphize robots, both those scared of a robot takeover and those so deeply entrenched in robotics that they see property destruction as abuse.

Cognitive neuroscientist Agnieszka Wykowska, a researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics thinks that our violence towards robots stems from the atavistic demons responsible for our tribalism and ostracization of the other. She says:

“You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans. So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans.”

There’s a lot wrong with this statement. One: you can’t dehumanize something that isn’t human. Two: robots are not agents. They can only do what they are programmed to do. They literally have no agency.

Asked about potential solutions to this “disturbing” problem, Ms. Wykowska offers a story about the savagery a colleague witnessed a  kindergarten class express towards a robot:

“Kids have this tendency of being very brutal to the robot, they would kick the robot, they would be cruel to it, they would be really not nice.

“That went on until the point that the caregiver started giving names to the robots. So the robots suddenly were not just robots but Andy, Joe and Sally. At that moment, the brutal behavior stopped. So, its very interesting because again its sort of like giving a name to the robot immediately puts it a little closer to the in-group.”

So the solution is to teach kids that machines are people? Fantastic. What if, and I know this might sound simple, ignorant, or possibly even on-the-wrong-side-of-history, but what if we don’t want machines as part of the in-group? What if assigning humanity to a tool cheapens and debases our own self-awareness and understanding of what it means to be conscious?

I’m not going.

Let me just step up on this here soapbox for a minute. The whole problem is this shoving the future on us whether we want it or not. The Times article cites a Brown University and M.I.T.  study that showed adding a robot to a workforce reduced the number of employed humans by six. In the very near future we will have armed security robots. We know these machines are coming, we know they’re changing the world, and we know it’s unavoidable. We need to treat them like the tools they are, not like people. We need, more than anything, to learn to celebrate humanity and all conscious non-humans (if I ever see a robot messing with an elephant, that’s going to be one broken robot), not blur the lines between conscious creatures and machines. Forcing people to deny a basic truth—that machines aren’t people—will only make people angrier in the short term, and in the long term will only further the mechanization and dehumanization of the world at large.

But stop breaking other people’s robots.

Last year, I wrote a piece here at Mysterious Universe examining historical cases of UFO censorship in Hollywood products. For the most part, those censorship efforts were in line with the CIA Robertson Panel’s officially stated policy that UFOs are essentially non-existent and should therefore be “debunked and demystified” through media channels.

But what about the flipside of the coin? Is there any substance to the popular notion that the government has been using Hollywood not to censor UFO information, but to encourage us to believe in alien visitation? Conclusive proof of a UFO acclimation agenda remains elusive as the entire theory rests on only a small handful of cases scattered across the decades, which I present in my book, Silver Screen Saucers. Arguably the most compelling case in support of a government alien acclimation agenda is that of the feature documentary film UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (1974).

In 1972, filmmaker Robert Emenegger and his producing partner Allan Sandler were encouraged by the United States Air Force (USAF) to make a major documentary feature about the UFO phenomenon. Emenegger, a former Vice President and Creative Director at Grey Advertising (a real-life Don Draper from Man Men), told me that his partner “had very strange connections” for a producer and that he thought Sandler “did things for the CIA, and maybe even the FBI… they all seemed to work together.”

Robert Emenegger and the book based on his documentary film of the same name.

Emenegger was ideally suited to an assignment of this nature. As a student at UCLA in the mid-1950s, his thesis examined “The Influence of Motion Pictures on Public Behavior,” and the the young Emenegger was particularly interested in how cinema could be used “as an instrument of propaganda.” Additionally, Emenegger had spent a number of years working for the United States Information Agency (or USIA—a politically correct name given the government’s long-running propaganda agency). Emenegger had also performed duties for President Richard Nixon. In December 1968, the then President-elect wrote to Emenegger seeking his “active participation and assistance” in finding “exceptional individuals” worthy of appointment in his incoming administration. Nixon referred to Emenegger as “a leader” and “in a position to know and recommend… the best minds in America.”

Norton Air Force Base, circa 1970.

Emenegger described to me how he was briefed on the UFO project at Norton Air Force Base in “a clean room used by the CIA… so there was no way anyone could eavesdrop on us.” In an offer similar to that made to Walt Disney some twenty years earlier, the USAF promised Emenegger real UFO footage, this time allegedly showing a UFO landing at Holloman Air Force Base in 1971 and the subsequent face-to-face meeting between alien visitors and delegates of the US government. Emenegger was sceptical, but he was assured by the USAF that the footage existed and was genuine.

While he waited for the footage to materialize, Emenegger and his crew continued with their wider production research, for which they were given unprecedented access to DoD facilities, including the Pentagon. Emenegger was even granted time with high-ranking military officers well-versed in UFO-related matters, among them Col. William Coleman, a former spokesman for Project Blue Book, and Col. George Weinbrenner, then head of Foreign Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base—the location where alien materials and bodies allegedly recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash are said to have been stored.

Col. William Coleman.

But who in the Air Force would sign off on such a controversial project? Emenegger put this question to Pentagon spokesman Col. Coleman, who informed him that “the Secretary of the Air Force gave us the order to cooperate.” Thus, in an unprecedented move, the Air Force, Army, and Navy gave their full backing to a UFO-themed production—so too did NASA, who provided Emenegger’s research team with previously unreleased photographs of what appeared to be UFOs in space taken by Gemini astronauts. “We had carte blanche to go anywhere, ask any questions,” Emenegger told me, “there were no restrictions put on us.”  Emenegger even claims to have been shown “top secret” footage shot at Vandenberg Air Force Base which showed two UFOs “playfully running behind” a US missile.

After months of shooting, Emenegger’s documentary was complete, save for one crucial ingredient—the much-hyped alien landing footage. At the eleventh hour, the USAF withdrew its permission for use of the material; the political climate had changed, it said, and was now deemed inappropriate due to the Watergate scandal, which had recently broken in the news. “I felt like we had egg on our face,” Emenegger told me. “I felt cheated that we were not allowed to see this film. It was taken back to the Pentagon… I stupidly expected to have this footage, which would have been earth-shattering.”  Today, Emenegger seems as baffled by the whole affair as anyone, “Were we had? Were we being used?” he asks.

Emenegger’s Golden-Globe-nominated documentary, UFOs: Past, Present and Future, was finally released in 1974 and was ground-breaking in its extensive use of information provided by the DoD. In addition to the aforementioned photographs from NASA, it featured sit-down interviews with the former heads of Project Blue Book, and footage shot inside the Pentagon of Col. Coleman talking open-mindedly about the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. In the absence of the landing footage, Emenegger was forced to include an animated reconstruction of the event as described to him by the USAF, complete with artistic renderings of the alleged aliens. The documentary presented the incident as “one that might happen in the future, or perhaps could have happened already.”

An artist’s imagining of the alleged Holloman UFO landing, based on details provided to the filmmakers by the US Air Force.

But the promised landing footage wasn’t entirely absent, at least not according to Emenegger. During the dramatic reconstruction of the alleged landing, eagle-eyed viewers can catch a few frames of what appears to be a genuine, self-luminescent Unidentified Flying Object descending slowly in the distance against the backdrop of Holloman’s surrounding landscape. These frames, Emenegger claims, were taken from the original landing footage and authorised by the USAF during the editing stage for use in his completed documentary.

Although Emenegger’s documentary was green-lit by the Secretary of the Air Force, the roots of the project likely lead back to Langley, Virginia, and to the CIA. Emenegger revealed to me that it was his production partner, the CIA-connected Allan Sandler, who brought the project to him in the first place; and let us not forget that Emenegger received his briefing at Norton Air Force Base in a CIA “clean room.” Furthermore, Emenegger told me that a “CIA courier” named Dick Beske shadowed him and his crew throughout his documentary’s entire production process. Beske was “always hanging around us,” said Emenegger, “observing.”

Richard “Dick” Beske later became a member of the steering group for Veteran Intelligence Officers for Sanity (VIPS), an organization comprised of former and serving officials of the United States Intelligence Community, including some from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence Bureau, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). VIPs was formed in January 2003 as a “coast-to-coast enterprise” to protest the use of faulty intelligence in the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

It should be noted that Emenegger’s documentary was re-edited and re-released in 1979 featuring additional content. It also received a new title: UFOs: It has Begun. You can watch it here (the Holloman landing reconstruction begins around the 1:17:00 mark, towards the end of the documentary)…

Could it be there really is a government agenda to acclimate us to UFO reality? If so, then, on the face of it, those behind this agenda would, at times, have been working in direct opposition to the Pentagon, which has worked hard over the years to keep UFOs out of the popular imagination and/or to distance itself from UFO conspiracy theories onscreen. But perhaps there has long been a separate, more sophisticated power group working through the national security apparatus—one whose Hollywood agenda transcends the polarized dynamic of debunk vs. acclimate? The UFO subject has always been a divisive one, even within the corridors of power, and it would be a mistake to assume that all branches of the government and military see eye-to-eye on this thorny issue. If there is a hidden hand tweaking and seeding Hollywood’s UFO-themed products, it could well belong to a group or agency so secretive that its very existence is unknown to the public—a quasi-governmental/quasi-private entity accountable only to itself. Something to contemplate while you’re munching on your popcorn at the next big alien movie.