UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In 1987, Whitley Strieber’s book Communion was published. Five years later, in the latter part of 1992, the Strieber family started to receive disturbing, late-night phone calls. Sometimes, they were way after midnight. Of course, whenever any of us get a phone call in the early hours of the morning, we immediately think the worst: it’s someone calling with bad news. Thankfully, they weren’t those kinds of calls, but they were certainly traumatic in the extreme. Typically, the voice at the other end of the line did nothing but deliver a blast of what Strieber called “scary, sneering laughter.” The most obvious explanation would be that this was all the work of pranksters, or some deranged nut who had gotten hold of Strieber’s withheld number and thought it would be fun to shake him up a bit. Maybe a lot. Except, that wasn’t the case, as Strieber was able to prove.

Quickly tired by the calls, Strieber arranged to have Caller ID attached to the family’s phone-line. It was a very wise decision, as it revealed something remarkable. The calls were not coming from someone in Ufology, after all. Rather, they were coming from a particular facility owned by a company called E.G. & G. Understandably angered, and puzzled too, Strieber called them up to see what was going on. He came straight to the point and told the receptionist on the line that not only had he received intimidating calls, but that he had proof – via Caller ID – that the calls were coming from E.G. & G. In other words: take that.

What sounded like the voice of a very old man suddenly came onto the phone and assured Strieber that he would “look into it.” No further calls were made to Strieber’s home, which is extremely telling. Strieber didn’t stop there, though. He took on the role of detective and dug deeply into the world of E.G. & G. In the process, he discovered that the company had ties to NASA, to the Department of Energy, and even to the world’s most well-known secret base (which is surely the ultimate oxymoron), Area 51. Was someone at E.G. & G. trying to destabilize Strieber with all of those late-night calls? Maybe so. That Strieber hit back – and hit back hard, too – quickly put paid to the psychological-warfare techniques of those who were not happy with Strieber’s work and the tremendous amount of exposure he had been getting since 1987. There was, however, more to come.

One year later, in 1993, said Strieber, and after having been given apparently classified information on where the U.S. Government’s top secret UFO data could be found, “Spooks started prowling around my neighborhood upstate. A business associate was accosted on an airplane by a group of young men who flashed badges, claimed to be with the National Security Agency, and questioned him about our activities for a couple of hours.” Those same agents were reportedly looking at attempted penetrations of Department of Defense computers. Then, on one occasion in the following year, 1994, someone managed to stealthily get into Strieber’s cabin, skillfully disabling his security system in the process, and checking out the contents of his computer. Clearly, Strieber was a person of deep interest to more than a few people in the shadowy world of government espionage and clandestine operations. And, it wasn’t just Strieber, his family, and that friend accosted by the NSA who felt the brunt of all this. There was also a man named Ed Conroy.

In 1989, Ed Conroy, a San Antonio, Texas-based journalist, wrote a book titled Report on Communion. It was an independent study of Whitley Strieber and his incredible experiences. In taking on the project, Conroy didn’t realize what he had got himself into. At least, not at first he didn’t. What began as an impartial investigation into Strieber’s claims, soon mutated into something very different: Conroy found himself under similar intimidation to that which would eventually hit the Strieber family. Weird phone calls, secret surveillance and – even – visits from those mysterious black helicopters, whose crews keep more than a careful watch on alien abductees, abounded…

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has flexed some new scientific muscles, likely solving a Red Planet puzzle in the process.

Mission team members repurposed the rover's navigation gear to measure tiny variations in gravitational fields, a new study reports. This novel strategy allowed the researchers to figure out how the huge Martian mountain whose base Curiosity is exploring formed — namely, that it was probably built up as a free-standing mound by the deposition of windblown sand and sediment.

"Going forward, I think this study shows the promise of making gravity measurements on the surfaces of other planets," said lead author Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. [Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover]

"It really gives you data about the subsurface, which is hard to get from any other instruments," Lewis told Space.com.

The car-size Curiosity rover landed on the floor of the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012, tasked with investigating the area's past potential to host life. This work has been incredibly fruitful; Curiosity's observations show that Gale harbored a lake-and-stream system for long stretches — perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time — in the ancient past.

Gale Crater is intriguing for other reasons as well. For example, a mountain rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Martian sky from its center — a dramatic geological oddity that has no close parallel here on Earth.

Scientists have long debated just how this odd massif, known as Mount Sharp, took shape. Is it the remnant of a sedimentary structure that once filled Gale Crater but was worn away by erosion? Or did Mount Sharp coalesce in its current form, growing as Martian winds dropped dirt and sand into Gale Crater?

That's where the new study, which was published online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science, comes in. Lewis and his colleagues mapped out the gravitational-field strength at more than 700 points along Curiosity's traverse, which has taken the rover from Gale's floor up into Mount Sharp's foothills. (Gravitational fields weaken as altitude, and therefore distance from a planet's core, increases.)

Using these "gravimetry" measurements, the researchers calculated the density of the rocks beneath Curiosity's wheels — about 1,680 kilograms per cubic meter. That's low, meaning those rocks are pretty porous. [Ancient Mars Lakes & Laser Blasts: Curiosity Rover's 10 Biggest Moments in 1st 5 Years]

Measurements using the Curiosity Mars rover's engineering accelerometers (gray) show a decrease in the strength of gravity as the rover climbs Mount Sharp. The rate of decrease of the modeled gravity signal (black) allowed researchers to measure the density of the rocks that make up Mount Sharp.

Credit: Kevin Lewis

"It's probably more like a compacted soil than what you might think of as a nice, really well-cemented rock," Lewis said.

If these deposits had once been buried under 3 miles (5 km) of other sediments, they would almost certainly be much denser, he added. So, the new results argue that Mount Sharp was primarily built up by wind-blown deposits, not pared down from a crater-filling feature.

This isn't to suggest that a potentially habitable lake didn't once occupy Gale Crater's floor; Curiosity's observations of lakebed sediments have established this water body's past existence with high confidence, Lewis stressed. But those sediments apparently didn't go all the way to the crater rim. It remains unclear how high they got — where the transition between lake sediments and windblown deposits lies on Mount Sharp's slopes.

Orbital observations have identified an intriguing "unconformity" — a break in the previously continuous sedimentary-rock record — about 2,600 feet (800 m) above Curiosity's current location, Lewis said. So, that region is a candidate.

"We'll see if Curiosity makes it up there, or if we get pieces of that upper unit that roll down the mountain," Lewis said. "But we may have to do a bit more exploring to find such a transition."

But let's get back to the gravity data. Curiosity doesn't carry any dedicated gravimetry instruments, so how did Lewis and his team make their measurements?

By thinking outside the box. Curiosity has two "rover inertial measurement units" (RIMUs), a primary and a backup. Both RIMUs consist of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes, which the rover's handlers normally use for navigation and to determine Curiosity's orientation in space. But Lewis wondered if these engineering data could be recalibrated to capture information about gravitational fields.

"It's something that I had thought about it for a long time," he said. "I didn't expect to have precision that was high enough to be able to use for science purposes. But I started looking into the data and calibrating out some of the complicating factors, like temperature and some other variables. And, lo and behold, it got to the point where the precision was actually scientifically meaningful."

The team was therefore able to build up the first-ever "gravity traverse" on the surface of another planet. The only other such work done off Earth was performed on the moon, by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Lewis said.

Future rover missions to Mars and other planets could make similar measurements, Lewis said. But the strategy his team used isn't universally applicable. For example, researchers probably cannot dredge gravimetry measurements out of the engineering data gathered over the years by NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. Those two golf-cart-size robots collected their engineering data in a slightly different way, Lewis said.

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall.
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Originally published on Space.com.