It seems that whenever strange, unexplainable, loud sounds – horns, booms, shrieks, etc. – occur in the sky, HAARP is usually blamed. When mysterious clouds – trails, saucers, pillars, etc. – occur, HAARP, with its reputation for alleged weather control experiments, is blamed again. While HAARP’s involvement in these types of events has never been conclusively determined, Slovakia may have a case for pushing the investigations to continue since it seems to be a hotbed (testing ground?) for both strange sounds and odd clouds. Another sound event occurred this week and many are demanding answers before it’s too late. Or is it already? (See the video here.)

“Something very strange is going on in recent years in the atmosphere on the planet.”

If anyone should know about these strange atmospheric events, it’s Martin Mikuaš, who runs a YouTube channel where he posts videos of these eerie sounds and unusual cloud formations – along with other odd stuff – and, perhaps as a result of the sheer number he’s found, likes to point his finger towards Alaska at the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP. To his credit, Mikuaš also gives an alternative explanation for this particular sound over Slovakia.

HAARP

“With frequent observations of these sounds, I noticed that this mysterious sound can be heard before or after the bigger earthquake in the world. It probably has a connection from the shifting of the lithospheric plates.”

Hmm. Mikuaš posted the video on March 1, 2019, and there have been no earthquakes in Slovakia in the past 30 days. However, there was one in 2015, the same year Mikuaš uploaded videos of what appears to the untrained ear to be the same sounds (see it here.). Videos of the sound were uploaded by other people in 2016 and they show strange cloud formations as well. On his channel, Mikuaš also uploads videos of strange clouds (here’s one from 2018) and UFOs over Slovakia (Here’s one from 2017).

Castle in Slovakia

Are these strange sounds, clouds and UFOs over Slovakia because Martin Mikuaš lives there and is either quick with his cellphone or has a network of spotters? Hard to say. Is he a hoaxer, as some commenters suggest? That’s certainly possible, but his collection of videos is pretty large and varied. Is Slovakia ground zero for HAARP testing or some other types of atmospheric or weather experimentation? Well, Eastern European countries have been used for strange, unusual and deadly experiments before.

One thing is certain … Martin Mikuaš is listening. Is anyone listening to him?

A recent proposal made by the Interior Department could potentially make it more difficult to request and obtain public records, in a move some transparency advocates are calling a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act.

In response to the proposed changes, a group of congressional leaders penned a letter to David Bernhardt, Acting Interior Secretary, arguing that the move could undermine efforts toward more transparency in government.

A portion of the letter reads, “The proposed rule appears to restrict public access to DOI’s records and delay the processing of FOIA requests in violation of the letter and spirit of FOIA. Rather than clarifying DOI’s FOIA process, the proposed rule would make the process more confusing and potentially expose it to politicization and unnecessary litigation.”

David Paulides, author of a number of books on people who have vanished in National Parks, Tweeted about the proposed changes.

“For 9 yrs I’ve explained how the DOI demanded $1.4 mil for a list of missing people from our parks,” Paulides wrote. “They have abused, ignored and now want to change the FOIA.”

“The National Park Service is not what the public perceives and is fed via advertising,” Paulides said. In his books, Paulides has discussed the exorbitant fees the National Park Service requested from him in the past, in response to a request for details on people who have vanished on U.S. federal land.

FOIA laws have traditionally provided civilians access to information pertaining to a wide variety of different areas of government. In January, one notable release via FOIA by the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed new details about the Pentagon’s UFO tracking program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program.

This is not the first such change in policy in recent years. Beginning on March 1, 2017, the FBI changed its FOIA policies, stating the agency would no longer accept Freedom of Information Act Requests via email. The decision was met with derision by transparency advocates, who argued that this placed limitations on the public’s ability to request and access information that can be lawfully obtained from government agencies.

Prior to 2017, the FBI cited requests numbering greater than 951 pages “complex,” and anything between 50 and 950 “medium” processing track. This was changed in 2017, with requests involving more than 50 pages now being labeled “complex.”

Elizabeth Hempowicz with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) was quoted by The Daily Caller at the time of the decision, saying “It’s hard to see this move by the FBI as anything other than an attempt to make it more difficult for the public to access information about the agency, as is our legal right under the Freedom of Information Act.”

According to an AP report, the changes for 2019 proposed by the Interior would affect “wording authorizing staff to reject records requests they deem ‘unreasonably burdensome’ and impose monthly limits on the number of FOIA requests that can be filed by an individual. The proposal would also replace the phrase “time limit” in the agency’s FOIA regulations with the term ‘time frame,’ a subtle change critics worry might allow staff to treat FOIA’s legally required time limits as mere guidelines.”

The proposed changes are similar to the FBI’s policy shift in 2017, in that both appear to be aimed at limiting large numbers of requests that can be filed with ease through digital mediums like email. There are reasons why it can be assumed such changes may be deemed necessary by certain government agencies; particularly those like the FBI that receive a large volume of FOIA requests, which often may be pertaining to information for which the agency keeps no records.

However, transparency advocates (which includes the bipartisan group in Washington whose letter recently opposed the changes) argue that this moves government institutions further away from accountability and measures which allow openness and disclosure of information to the public.

Lauren Easton, a spokesperson for the Associated Press, said in January that the proposal “would greatly infringe upon the public’s right to know and understand the inner workings of its government,” and the news agency “condemns such restraint of public information and any move by a government agency to undermine transparency.” They are one of several media outlets currently opposing the measure.

Alex Hinson, a spokesman for the Interior, argues to the contrary, saying recently in a public statement that the agency believes “these changes will result in a more transparent, equitable, and accountable FOIA program.”

It remains unclear how placing restrictions on the amounts and methods by which individuals may request information would promote transparency.

We all know the world of men will end someday. It could be tomorrow or it could be thousands of years from now – either way, it’s pretty clear by now that our time on Earth is limited. Will a man-made catastrophe like nuclear or biological warfare, climate change, or resource depletion bring about our demise, or will natural disasters, an astronomical impact event, or the evolution of a new superbug wipe out humanity?

Let’s not fool ourselves. We all know the machines will soon crush our collective skull under their cold, metal feet.

Whatever the cause is, the histories of our planet and its life show us that all things must pass. Humanity is ultimately just a blip on the unimaginably long life of the spaceship we call Earth, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and preserve our knowledge and civilizations for future beings or intelligent machines to learn from. With that in mind, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Arch Mission Foundation has set out to create a “civilization backup” which would outlive humanity in the event of a species-wide catastrophe. The first version of this backup was sent to the moon last week.

The “Lunar Library,” as the civilization backup is known, consists of 30 million pages of information etched onto tiny metallic discs packed into a container the size of a DVD and is being hailed as “the first library on another celestial body.” The disc was carried aboard the privately-funded Israeli Beresheet spacecraft which was launched towards the moon aboard a SpaceX rocket on February 22nd. The archive is meant to be an encyclopedia of human knowledge, containing over 200 gigabytes of information such as the entire English-language version of Wikipedia, thousands of works of literature, nonfiction, and textbooks, and a “Rosetta Stone” consisting of 5,000 human languages and the means to translate between them.

A SpaceX Falcon launching from Vandenberg AFB in 2017.

The Arch Mission Foundation says their Lunar Library is intended to preserve the best parts of humanity to ensure any future humans don’t make the same mistakes we do (here’s a hint: don’t build artificial intelligence). “One of the primary evolutionary challenges that we face is amnesia about our past mistakes, and the lack of active countermeasures to repeating them,” an Arch Mission Foundation spokesperson told NBC news. “For the survival of our species, we need to find ways to raise our awareness of what worked and didn’t work, and we need to ensure it is shared with the people of the future.”

Nearly exactly a year ago, the Arch Mission Foundation sent a similar payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Do they know something we don’t, or is this merely a group of simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic well-wishers?

Time will tell. It’s too bad we won’t be here to see if future civilizations can avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.

A decades-long scientific mystery may have finally been solved. Some Antarctic icebergs are an odd emerald green color instead of the normal blue tinge and scientists have suggested a new theory as to why they look that way.

Ice absorbs more red light than blue light and that’s why they appear as a blue color. While most of them look blue or white while they are in the seawater, many people over the years have seen these oddly colored icebergs. Even sailors and explorers from the early 1900s have reported witnessing strange colored green icebergs around Antarctica.

A green iceberg floats in the Wendell Sea in 1985. Green icebergs’ unusual color has long perplexed researchers.

AGU/JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH: OCEANS/KIPFSTUHL ET AL 1992

While green icebergs have captured the curiosity of scientists for several decades, glaciologists conducted new studies which lead them to believe that iron oxides that’s in rock dust from Antarctica’s mainland is what’s turning the icebergs a green color. Australian researchers found huge amounts of iron in East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf and that’s how the theory got started.

Iceberg in Antarctica

Interestingly, iron is a very important nutrient for phytoplankton which is a microscopic plant that’s at the base of the marine food chain. While iron is very limited in quite a few areas of the ocean, if this new discovery of iron in some icebergs proves to be true, it would be an extremely important benefit for marine life.

According to Stephen Warren, who is a glaciologist at the University of Washington, “It’s like taking a package to the post office. The iceberg can deliver this iron out into the ocean far away, and then melt and deliver it to the phytoplankton that can use it as a nutrient,” adding, We always thought green icebergs were just an exotic curiosity, but now we think they may actually be important.”

Icebergs break off of glaciers and ice shelves that extend out into the sea. Normal glacier ice is created when several layers of snow build up and eventually harden up, meaning that it has air pockets that light reflects off of. However, some icebergs in Antarctica contain a layer of marine ice which is water from the ocean that has frozen to the bottom of an overhanging ice shelf. Since marine ice doesn’t have any air pockets that reflect light, it is darker and much clearer than glacier ice. When Warren and his colleagues studied the green icebergs, they noticed that the green areas were in fact made up of marine ice instead of glacier ice.

Iceberg in Antarctica

Iron oxides that are found in soil, common rust, and rocks typically have warm, earthy colors such as yellow, orange, brown, and red. That’s why Warren was thinking that the iron oxides in the marine ice were turning the blue ice into a green color.

When glaciers move over bedrock, the rocks end up grinding into a very fine powder called glacier flour that ends up going into the ocean. The pieces of rock dust could then become part of the marine ice if it gets trapped under an ice shelf.

Warren, along with iron researchers from Australia are now planning to sample different colored icebergs in order to find out exactly how much iron they contain as well as how much light they reflect. If their theory is proven, that would be a huge discovery in regards to the study of icebergs, especially since iron is such an important and beneficial nutrient to marine life.

Click here to see more pictures of icebergs, including a green one.

Seawater sometimes freezes to the underside of ice shelves, creating a layer of what’s called marine ice.

Credit: AGU.

A partly-capsized iceberg embedded in sea ice. The clear, light blue ice is made of marine ice. The boundary between the glacier ice and marine ice (originally horizontal) is now tilted about 60 degrees.

Credit: Collin Roesler.

With new and advanced space technology, humans tend to feel more protected and not as scared if an asteroid was to ever threaten Earth. That’s because we believe that advanced technology allows us to be able to smash an asteroid into tiny pieces in order to protect our planet. However, new research indicates that blowing up an asteroid may not be as easy as we once thought.

In the early 2000s, a team of researchers conducted an experiment where they created a computer model of a simulated asteroid with a diameter of around one kilometer smashing head-first into a target asteroid with a diameter of 25 kilometers with a five kilometer per second impact velocity. Their results showed that the asteroid would have been totally destroyed.

However, newly conducted research by a new team suggests that after an asteroid is hit, its gravity would be so powerful that it would be able pull the destroyed pieces back together. After the impact, millions of cracks would form, pieces would fly off, and a crater would appear on the asteroid. After studying the cracks and predicting how they would multiply and move throughout the asteroid, they found that the entire body would not have broken up. They instead noticed that it had a huge damaged core that had such a powerful gravitation pull that the broken pieces would have been pulled back in. This means that the asteroid would need to be hit with a much stronger force than previously thought.

Charles El Mir, who is a doctoral graduate at Johns Hopkins University, explained in a statement, “It may sound like science fiction but a great deal of research considers asteroid collisions.” He went on to say, “For example, if there’s an asteroid coming at Earth, are we better off breaking it into small pieces, or nudging it to go a different direction? And if the latter, how much force should we hit it with to move it away without causing it to break? These are actual questions under consideration.”

While scientists don’t have much information about the interior structure of asteroids, they once believed that the bigger it was, the easier it would be to destroy, but they now think differently. “We used to believe that the larger the object, the more easily it would break, because bigger objects are more likely to have flaws,” El Mir explained, “Our findings, however, show that asteroids are stronger than we used to think and require more energy to be completely shattered.”

A top defensive idea has always been to knock an incoming asteroid off course or obliterate it.

Picture: NASA/JPL-CaltechSource:Supplied