Moon Rock Found To Be Petrified Wood, NASA Tries To Clean Up Its Lies, March 2019, UFO Sighting News.

 

News source: 

• http://www.nbcnews.com/id/32581790/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/moon-rock-museum-just-petrified-wood/#.XIoNVi17FR4

NASA has announced yesterday that they would open up sealed boxes of moon rocks to study them more deeply. They said the tools today were not available back in the 1970s, so they could learn so much more...or so they said. 

I of course throw that excuse in the garbage. You see NASA has been saying those rocks are really from the moon, however all evidence available to the public points to them being fake. 

 

Lets go back to Aug 2009, when the world news announced that the Dutch National Museum has in its possession and on display...a fake moon rock. This moon rock was tested and found to simple petrified wood. Now unless the moon had ancient forests...LOL, this should be impossible. This moon rock, which is fake, is 100% proof that the Apollo missions were faked to make other countries perceive America as a world power. 

 

The rock was first given to Prime Minister Willem Drees who received it back in Oct 6, 1969 from US Ambassador William Middendorf during a visit from the three Apollo 11 astronauts. 

 

Since the NASA has done everything in its power to steal back the moon rocks from those who were given them. They would even go so far as to get court papers stating that those moon rocks who astronauts families own, were property of NASA and must be given back. Why? Because they were all fake moon rocks. Yes, its true. 

 

 

I have to admit I am curious at what the scientists are actually doing opening those boxes? Perhaps NASA has purchased meteorites that were from the moon and are going to replace them with those to be tested? A simple switch behind closed doors and nobody would be the wiser. 

 

Here is a another true fact. We no longer need NASA. They are obsolete and fail to give the public what they promised. Now we have Ellon Musk, who delivers on his promises in mere weeks. Its time to close down NASA and stop wasting the tax payers money on an organization with so much falsehood and lies behind it. 

 

Remember the Dragon capsule Ellon Musk made in just a two weeks after NASA asked him to make it? Well it docked at the space station a few days ago, the video SpaceX uploaded to Youtube was HD quality. I saw the same footage on the NASA Internet live cams which was horrible quality...like that of an iPhone 3. So I ask you, what has NASA really done for us lately? Who has inspired the generations of kids and adults to take a new interest in science and space? Yeah, Ellon Musk of course.  

Scott C. Waring

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

14-03-2019 om 19:13 geschreven door peter  

Traces left in ice cores and tree rings allowed researchers to estimate the storm’s power

BY CAROLYN GRAMLING 

BLASTS FROM THE PAST  Swift, powerful bursts of charged particles emitted by the sun can be strong enough to breach Earth’s magnetosphere (blue bubble in illustration). To see how common such emissions have been in Earth’s past, scientists look for telltale data in tree rings and ice cores. 

NASA

One of the strongest solar storms ever to hurtle toward Earth blasted the planet in 660 B.C., researchers say, based on traces of the storm preserved in both ice cores and tree rings. The study was published online March 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As the sun’s magnetic field shifts, it occasionally releases bursts of charged particles into space. In the most extreme solar storms, called solar proton events, these charged particles are dramatically sped up by interactions with other solar emissions: solar flares or coronal mass ejections. Even Earth’s protective magnetic field can’t deflect such swift, energetic particle streams. The radiation is particularly hazardous to modern technology and astronauts.

It’s unclear how common such extreme events are; satellite- and ground-based instruments have tracked them for only about 70 years. To look farther back in time, researchers hunt for spikes in cosmogenic radionuclides such as carbon-14 — recorded in tree rings — or beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 — preserved in ice cores. Such radionuclides form when cosmic rays interact with molecules in Earth’s atmosphere.

In 2017, scientists identified a sudden spike in tree ring carbon-14 dating to about 660 B.C. that might indicate a solar proton event. But a carbon-14 spike can also signal a supernova or a solar flare.

In the new study, researchers led by geologist Paschal O’Hare, then at Lund University in Sweden, examined two Greenland ice cores. O’Hare, now at Heathgate Resources in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues found spikes in beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 dating to the same time.

The relative abundance of the radionuclides in the ice suggested that the 660 B.C. event was about 10 times more powerful than a 1956 event, the strongest solar storm recorded by instruments. The only known solar storm to rival the ancient storm’s power occurred in A.D. 774–775, an event also recorded in tree rings and ice cores.

Citations

• P. O’Hare et al. Multiradionuclide evidence for an extreme solar proton event around 2,610 B.P. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online March 11, 2019. 

Further Reading

• C. Gramling. A drill built for Mars is being used to bore into Antarctic bedrock. Science News Online. January 11, 2019. 
• L. Grossman. The sun’s strongest flare in 11 years might help explain a solar paradox. Science News. Vol. 192, September 30, 2017, p. 6
• A. Witze. Quiet maximum. Science News. Vol. 184, November 2, 2013, p. 22.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

14-03-2019 om 01:24 geschreven door peter  

14-03-2019 om 01:09 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious Cloud Of Chaff Lights Up Radar Over Dozens Of Miles Of New Mexico Airspace

It is the latest in a string of peculiar chaff release events from across that U.S. that have drawn a lot of attention in recent months 

14-03-2019 om 00:51 geschreven door peter  

When Galaxies Collide! Gorgeous Hubble Photo Gives Glimpse of Milky Way's Fate

By Elizabeth Howell 

Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 6052, a pair of colliding galaxies that lies in the constellation of Hercules, about 230 million light-years away from Earth.

(Imag: © ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Adamo et al.)

A new image from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope shows what happens when two galaxies collide. That's relevant for us residents of the Milky Way, because our own galaxy is expected to collide with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in about four billion years.

The image captures a scene some 230 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Hercules. (One light-year is the distance that light travels in a year — about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.) Here, Hubble zooms in on the merging galaxies, a double object known as NGC 6052.

When NGC 6052 was first cataloged in 1784 by William Herschel, it was classified as a single, irregular galaxy with an odd shape. Now, however, we know that shape is odd because two galaxies are coming together. 

Related: When Galaxies Collide: Photos of Great Galactic Crashes

Scientists study mergers such as NGC 6052 to better understand galactic evolution, and to get an idea what our own collision will look like a few billion years from now. Galactic mergers are very common in the universe; we know, for example, that Andromeda devoured one of the Milky Way's siblings long ago. The Milky Way-Andromeda collision isn't expected to pose any threat to Earth, because the distances between individual stars in galaxies are so vast, but scientists are still interested in the mechanics of how these interactions happen.

"A long time ago, gravity drew the two galaxies together into the chaotic state we now observe," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a description of the new photo. (Hubble is a joint mission of NASA and ESA.)

"Stars from within both of the original galaxies now follow new trajectories caused by the new gravitational effects," they added. "However, actual collisions between stars themselves are very rare, as stars are very small relative to the distances between them — most of a galaxy is empty space. Eventually, the galaxies will fully merge to form a single, stable galaxy."

Hubble launched to Earth orbit in April 1990. The iconic telescope received multiple visits from astronauts over the years, to maintain or replace its components. The last visit, in 2009, installed the Wide Field Camera 3, which obtained the new image. Hubble also took an image of NGC 6052 with an older instrument, Wide Field Camera 2; scientists released that one in 2015. 

Hubble is expected to keep operating well into the 2020s. Its successor, the $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2021.

• Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace.
• Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom or Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

14-03-2019 om 00:35 geschreven door peter  

If we want a shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one crucial thing: technologies that can convert electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa. Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the equation. Now, researchers have created lab-scale gadgets that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.

The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States; in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.

Some utilities are beginning to install massive banks of batteries in hopes of storing excess energy and evening out the balance sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the grid for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then convert that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the grid.

But commercial electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts to speed up the two reactions, meaning a single device can’t do both jobs. To get around this, researchers have been experimenting with a newer type of fuel cell, called a proton conducting fuel cell (PCFC), which can make fuel or convert it back into electricity using just one set of catalysts.

PCFCs consist of two electrodes separated by a membrane that allows protons across. At the first electrode, known as the air electrode, steam and electricity are fed into a ceramic catalyst, which splits the steam’s water molecules into positively charged hydrogen ions (protons), electrons, and oxygen molecules. The electrons travel through an external wire to the second electrode—the fuel electrode—where they meet up with the protons that crossed through the membrane. There, a nickel-based catalyst stitches them together to make hydrogen gas (H₂). In previous PCFCs, the nickel catalysts performed well, but the ceramic catalysts were inefficient, using less than 70% of the electricity to split the water molecules. Much of the energy was lost as heat.

Now, two research teams have made key strides in improving this efficiency. They both focused on making improvements to the air electrode, because the nickel-based fuel electrode did a good enough job. In January, researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, reported in Energy & Environmental Science that they came up with a fuel electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that harnessed 76% of its electricity to split water molecules. And in today’s issue of Nature Energy, Ryan O’Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, reports that his team has done one better. Their ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, harnesses as much as 98% of the energy it’s fed to split water.

When both teams run their setups in reverse, the fuel electrode splits H₂ molecules into protons and electrons. The electrons travel through an external wire to the air electrode—providing electricity to power devices. When they reach the electrode, they combine with oxygen from the air and protons that crossed back over the membrane to produce water.

The O’Hayre group’s latest work is “impressive,” Haile says. “The electricity you are putting in is making H₂ and not heating up your system. They did a really good job with that.” Still, she cautions, both her new device and the one from the O’Hayre lab are small laboratory demonstrations. For the technology to have a societal impact, researchers will need to scale up the button-size devices, a process that typically reduces performance. If engineers can make that happen, the cost of storing renewable energy could drop precipitously, helping utilities do away with their dependence on fossil fuels.

{ http://science.sciencemag.org/ }

14-03-2019 om 00:05 geschreven door peter  

Massive solar storms are naturally-recurring events, study finds — and we’re unprepared for them

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU 

Solar storms can be even more powerful than what our measurements so far have indicated — and we’re still very unprepared.

Image via Pixabay.

Although our planet’s magnetic field keeps us blissfully unaware of it, the Earth is constantly being pelted with cosmic particles. Sometimes, however — during events known as solar storms, caused by explosions on the sun’s surface — this stream of particles turns into a deluge and breaks through that magnetic field.

Research over the last 70 years or so has revealed that these events can threaten the integrity of our technological infrastructure. Electrical grids, various communication infrastructure, satellites, and air traffic can all be floored by such storms. We’ve seen extensive power cuts take place in Quebec, Canada (1989) and Malmö, Sweden (2003) following such events, for example.

Now, new research shows that we’ve underestimated the hazards posed by solar storms — the authors report that we’ve underestimated just how powerful they can become.

‘Tis but a drizzle!

“If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our high-tech society,” says Raimund Muscheler, professor of geology at Lund University and co-author of the study. “That’s why we must increase society’s protection again solar storms.”

Up to now, researchers have used direct instrumental observations to study solar storms. But the new study reports that these observations likely underestimated how violent the events can become. The paper, led by researchers at Lund University, analyzed ice coresrecovered from Greenland to study past solar storms. These cores formed over the last 100,000 years or so, and have captured evidence of storms over that time.

According to the team, the cores recorded a very powerful solar storm occurring in 600 BCE. Also drawing on data recovered from the growth rings of ancient trees, the team pinpointed two further (and powerful) solar storms that took place in 775 and 994 CE.

The result thus showcases that, although rare, massive solar storms are a naturally recurring part of solar activity.

This finding should motivate us to review the possibility that a similar event will take place sooner or later — and we should prepare. Both the Quebec and Malmö incidents show how deeply massive solar storms can impact our technology, and how vulnerable our society is to them today.

“Our research suggests that the risks are currently underestimated. We need to be better prepared,” Muscheler concludes.

The paper “Multiradionuclide evidence for an extreme solar proton event around 2,610 B.P. (∼660 BC)” has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

13-03-2019 om 23:48 geschreven door peter  

Physicists say sound waves might actually carry mass

 BY TIBI PUIU 

In a surprising new study, scientists claim that sound waves could theoretically carry mass, which implies that they’re also affected by gravity.

“You would expect classical physics results like this one to have been known for a long time by now,” Angelo Esposito from Columbia University, the lead author on the paper, told Scientific American. “It’s something we stumbled upon almost by chance.”

Previously, researchers at Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University showed that phonons could have mass in a superfluid — a liquid that flows without friction. Phonons are particle-like excitations which correspond to collective oscillations of atoms inside a molecule or a crystal.

It’s easier to understand phonons in relation to their cousins, the much more famous photons. We know from Newtonian physics that atoms and molecules vibrate away from their equilibrium positions, a motion that we recognize as heat. Basically, the more the atomic lattice vibrates, the higher the temperature. But this classical view doesn’t offer the full picture unless we also include quantum mechanics — the physics of the microscopic world.

‘Quantum’ refers to the smallest indivisible unit to things. For instance, a quantum of light is a photon — the smallest amount of light there is. Similarly, when you apply quantum mechanics to a lattice structure, there’s a ‘smallest packet of lattice vibration’ called a phonon.

The word phonon is derived from ‘phonos’, which is greek for sound. This is because long-wavelength phonons can be interpreted as single waves of sound propagating through the lattice.

In their new study, Esposito and colleagues used approximations known as effective field theory to show that phonon could not only have mass in a superfluid, but in other types of materials as well, including room-temperature liquids and solids; even in air, the primary medium through which sound waves propagate.

The study not only contradicts that popular notion that phonons are massless, but also suggests that they carry negative mass. Something with negative mass also implies negative gravity, which means it would repel other matter around it. Likewise, if you’d push an object with negative mass, it would accelerate towards you. Phonons having negative mass implies that their trajectory would gradually move away from a gravitational field such as that of the Earth. For water, the researchers calculated that phonons traveling through such a medium would drift by about one degree over 15 kilometers, which makes it extremely challenging to measure.

“In a gravitational field phonons slowly accelerate in the opposite direction that you would expect, say, a brick to fall,”  Rafael Krichevsky, a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, told Live Science.

Hover, this mass is extremely tiny — comparable with a hydrogen atom, about 10^–24 grams. This is another measuring challenge, although it is still theoretically possible to do. According to the researchers, we do not currently have the necessary technology to measure the mass of phonons. However, they envision an experimental setup where super-precise clocks would detect the slight curvature of a phonon’s path.

Although sound waves carrying mass will not influence our daily lives, the notion carries certain important practical implications in science. For instance, in the dense cores of neutron stars, sound waves move at nearly the speed of light — that’s a lot of energy, meaning that an anti-gravitational sound wave should pose significant effects on the star’s behavior.

The findings appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

13-03-2019 om 23:27 geschreven door peter  

What Scientists Found After Sifting Through Dust in Our Solar System

Just as dust gathers in corners and along bookshelves in our homes, dust piles up in space too. But when the dust settles in the solar system, it’s often in rings. Several dust rings circle the Sun. The rings trace the orbits of planets, whose gravity tugs dust into place around the Sun, as it drifts by on its way to the center of the solar system.

The dust consists of crushed-up remains from the formation of the solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago — rubble from asteroid collisions or crumbs from blazing comets. Dust is dispersed throughout the entire solar system, but it collects at grainy rings overlying the orbits of Earth and Venus, rings that can be seen with telescopes on Earth. By studying this dust — what it’s made of, where it comes from, and how it moves through space — scientists seek clues to understanding the birth of planets and the composition of all that we see in the solar system.

Two recent studies report new discoveries of dust rings in the inner solar system. One study uses NASA data to outline evidence for a dust ring around the Sun at Mercury’s orbit. A second study from NASA identifies the likely source of the dust ring at Venus’ orbit: a group of never-before-detected asteroids co-orbiting with the planet.

“It’s not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system,” said Marc Kuchner, an author on the Venus study and astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is right in our neighborhood.”

In this illustration, several dust rings circle the Sun. These rings form when planets’ gravities tug dust grains into orbit around the Sun. Recently, scientists have detected a dust ring at Mercury’s orbit. Others hypothesize the source of Venus’ dust ring is a group of never-before-detected co-orbital asteroids.

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

Another Ring Around the Sun

Guillermo Stenborg and Russell Howard, both solar scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., did not set out to find a dust ring. “We found it by chance,” Stenborg said, laughing. The scientists summarized their findings in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on Nov. 21, 2018.

They describe evidence of a fine haze of cosmic dust over Mercury’s orbit, forming a ring some 9.3 million miles wide. Mercury — 3,030 miles wide, just big enough for the continental United States to stretch across — wades through this vast dust trail as it circles the Sun.

Ironically, the two scientists stumbled upon the dust ring while searching for evidence of a dust-free region close to the Sun. At some distance from the Sun, according to a decades-old prediction, the star’s mighty heat should vaporize dust, sweeping clean an entire stretch of space. Knowing where this boundary is can tell scientists about the composition of the dust itself, and hint at how planets formed in the young solar system.

Scientists think planets start off as mere grains of dust. They emerge from giant disks of gas and dust that circle young stars. Gravity and other forces cause material within the disk to collide and coalesce. (illustration)

Credits: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

So far, no evidence has been found of dust-free space, but that’s partly because it would be difficult to detect from Earth. No matter how scientists look from Earth, all the dust in between us and the Sun gets in the way, tricking them into thinking perhaps space near the Sun is dustier than it really is.

Stenborg and Howard figured they could work around this problem by building a model based on pictures of interplanetary space from NASA’s STEREO satellite — short for Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory.

Ultimately, the two wanted to test their new model in preparation for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is currently flying a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, swinging closer and closer to the star over the next seven years. They wanted to apply their technique to the images Parker will send back to Earth and see how dust near the Sun behaves.

Scientists have never worked with data collected in this unexplored territory, so close to the Sun. Models like Stenborg and Howard’s provide crucial context for understanding Parker Solar Probe’s observations, as well as hinting at what kind of space environment the spacecraft will find itself in — sooty or sparkling clean.

Two kinds of light show up in STEREO images: light from the Sun’s blazing outer atmosphere — called the corona — and light reflected off all the dust floating through space. The sunlight reflected off this dust, which slowly orbits the Sun, is about 100 times brighter than coronal light.

“We’re not really dust people,” said Howard, who is also the lead scientist for the cameras on STEREO and Parker Solar Probe that take pictures of the corona. “The dust close to the Sun just shows up in our observations, and generally, we have thrown it away.” Solar scientists like Howard — who study solar activity for purposes such as forecasting imminent space weather, including giant explosions of solar material that the Sun can sometimes send our way — have spent years developing techniques to remove the effect of this dust. Only after removing light contamination from dust can they clearly see what the corona is doing.

The two scientists built their model as a tool for others to get rid of the pesky dust in STEREO — and eventually Parker Solar Probe — images, but the prediction of dust-free space lingered in the back of their minds. If they could devise a way of separating the two kinds of light and isolate the dust-shine, they could figure out how much dust was really there. Finding that all the light in an image came from the corona alone, for example, could indicate they’d found dust-free space at last.

Mercury’s dust ring was a lucky find, a side discovery Stenborg and Howard made while they were working on their model. When they used their new technique on the STEREO images, they noticed a pattern of enhanced brightness along Mercury’s orbit — more dust, that is — in the light they’d otherwise planned to discard.

“It wasn’t an isolated thing,” Howard said. “All around the Sun, regardless of the spacecraft’s position, we could see the same five percent increase in dust brightness, or density. That said something was there, and it’s something that extends all around the Sun.”

Scientists never considered that a ring might exist along Mercury’s orbit, which is maybe why it’s gone undetected until now, Stenborg said. “People thought that Mercury, unlike Earth or Venus, is too small and too close to the Sun to capture a dust ring,” he said. “They expected that the solar wind and magnetic forces from the Sun would blow any excess dust at Mercury’s orbit away.”

With an unexpected discovery and sensitive new tool under their belt, the researchers are still interested in the dust-free zone. As Parker Solar Probe continues its exploration of the corona, their model can help others reveal any other dust bunnies lurking near the Sun.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-03-2019 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious Hum Driving People MAD! Researchers Have the Answer Why 

By Lisa Haven

Since the early 1970’s numerous reports of a humming nose have been reported across the world. Original reports began in the United Kingdom and spread to the US in the early1990’s. Reports include a type of diesel engine noise heard at a low-frequency indicating some type of electromagnetic energy noise that some people hear due to sensitivity, while others do not. People have speculated that the sound could be due to cell-towers, delusions, local noises in the area, HAARP, UFO’s, and more. But most of the research has led people to dead ends….until now!!!

A geoscientist by the name of David Deming has done some intense research on this subject and may just have the answer you’re longing to know. The video below dives through some of Deming’s research and I believe you will be shocked when you find out the true source…..

GET THE MORGAN: https://historicsilvercoins.com/

(GET $5 OFF USE CODE: LISA) 

For More Information See:

• http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.518.9056&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/13/what-is-the-mysterious-gl-hum-and-is-it-simply-noise-pollution?f
• http://www.thehum.info/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

13-03-2019 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

Every claimed alien abduction case is weird by default, but the 1973 abduction of Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson in Pascagoula, Mississippi is weird even by those standards. The two men were fishing on the west bank of the Pascagoula river when, they said, a UFO appeared hovering above the ground. Three creatures disembarked from the craft, paralyzed Parker and Hickson, and brought them aboard. According to the men, the creatures were pale with remarkably wrinkled skin, “lobster-like” claws for hands, and carrot-shaped growths where their eyes and ears should have been. The creatures seemed to each have one thick leg, like two legs had been fused together.  On the ship, the creatures allegedly performed medical procedures and levitated them back to their original position 20 minutes later.

The story drew international attention and became one of the most well-known alien abduction cases.  Through the course of the investigation, some of the big guns of the UFO world were brought out, with Hickson and Parker being interviewed by James Harder and J. Allen Hynek (of Project Blue Book fame), who concluded that Parker and Hicks had “a very real, frightening experience.” While some small details changed over the course of time, neither man ever recanted their stories. Charles Hickson passed away in 2011, and to the end of his life he maintained that the story was true.

Now 46 years later, a couple from the Pascagoula area has come forward claiming that they too saw something that night, but never before went public with their testimony for fear of ridicule. According to the Sun, Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sitting in their car looking out over the Pascagoula river, on the opposite bank from Parker and Hickson, when they saw strange blue lights begin circling around the area. Maria Blair says:

“I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing. And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”

The couple allegedly watched the lights for approximately 40 minutes, before stepping out of their car and walking down the pier towards the water. Maria says that’s when she saw one of the creatures emerge from the water:

“We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry ‘There’s somebody out there’. They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.

[Jerry] said ‘Come on – there’s nobody out there’. I know I saw it.

I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car.”

The impetus for the Blairs coming forward was apparently the recently published book Pascagoula-The Closest Encounter by Calvin Parker, who had previously remained largely hidden from media attention since the incident. Calvin Parker met with Maria and Vernon last Wednesday for the first time and says he felt an immediate connection to the couple:

“It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning. It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding. I felt like I had known [Maria] for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day.

Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay. But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.

So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me. Just like me – she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years.”

It’s a weird case. The aliens are weird. The witness testimony is weird. There are weird holes in the descriptions of events. And everyone involved is weirdly earnest. Witness testimony is never proof of anything, but it’s yet another layer in one of the strangest encounters with the paranormal that’s ever been recorded.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-03-2019 om 21:13 geschreven door peter  

UFOs have always been paradoxical — viewed from the corridors of power as a tangible national security concern warranting decades of secret investigations, they  are also frustratingly impalpable cultural artifacts. As real phenomena, they continue to flit in and out of our perception, sometimes profoundly affecting individual lives. Meanwhile, they permeate our culture as iconographic entertainment products. UFOs are real, and they are unreal. This dichotomy demands some focused attention.

Art by Andreas M. Wiese.

The literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin saw in the cinematic medium a “unique faculty to express by natural means and with incomparable persuasiveness all that is fairylike, marvelous, supernatural.” Benjamin died in 1940, seven years prior to the birth of the modern UFO phenomenon. Had he lived to experience the age of the flying saucer, and of saucer movies, his observation would likely have been extended to include the “alien.”

The transcendent, actualizing power of cinema has been similarly noted by the artist Valie Export, who suggests that films are “expansions of our structures of time and space, of our experiential structures… they are expansions of our reality and our independent consciousness.” Through cinema, says Export, “the past is made visible, space and time can be transported… the boundaries between artificial and natural reality, between actual and possible reality… between man and object are transcended.”

The spectacle and the hyperreal

The social theorist Guy Debord spoke of the “spectacular society,” in which “the real world changes into simple images… and the simple images become real.”  In our spectacular society, said Debord, “the image matters more than the object, in fact, much more so than mere objective truth.” The image replaces the truth – it is truth, it is reality. The resultant state, in postmodern theory, is “hyperreality.”

By its most popular definition, hyperreality is:

An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies… [it is] a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

Something that is hyperreal, then, is simultaneously real andunreal, fact and fantasy.

The key words in the above definition are “technologically advanced.” Technologies of reproduction (mechanical and digital) have ushered in the age of the hyperreal, an age where simulations of reality threaten to dissolve the boundaries between “fact” and “fantasy,” between “true” and “false,” “real” and “imaginary.” It is my contention that cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history have all but consumed the history itself through the process of replication, just as humans were consumed and replicated as pod people in genre classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

The power of cinema

Cinema has an essential mystical ability to completely detach us from our physical environment and transport us to another, more vivid, realm of perception; a realm where everything is at once illusory, yet strangely real.

In film studies, anything that exists within the world of the film is known as diegesis. The cinema screen separates their fictional world from our “real” world. But, actually, the diegesis seeps through the screen into our world, into our subconscious. It becomes part of our reality.

Key to cinema’s power is that movies, in their slick, neatly packaged, self-contained way, serve to narrativize and contextualize the events, debates, and processes that constitute our frustratingly non-narrative world. Life rarely makes sense, but movies usually do, and in that we take comfort and, therein lies the problem: movies, no matter how realistic they are in the events they depict, are not real life. They are, at best, reflections of our reality, snapshots of it, simulations of it, skewed and distorted through the ideological framework of those who have made them.

Movies masquerade as the final word on a given topic. No matter what the subject, and regardless of how much that subject has already been written about and debated, once it is committed to film – once it has received the full Hollywood treatment – it is embedded firmly and forever into the popular consciousness. Imprinted on our psyche. Plunged into the deep wells of memory and imagination.

UFO reality

Unidentified Flying Objects are “real,” which is to say they exist independently of cinema, and of pop-culture more broadly. UFOs have been investigated by governments around the world for seven decades. What the phenomenon represents is open for debate, and various theories have been propounded, from secret military aircraft, to natural phenomena, otherworldly intelligences, and even untapped human potential. The point is that even in a world without movies, people would continue to report UFOs. People were reporting UFOs, and flying saucers specifically, long before Hollywood got in on the act.

UFOlogy informs Hollywood more than Hollywood informs UFOlogy, which is to say that Hollywood engages with UFO lore in a parasitic fashion, sucking dry the pulsing veins of a seventy year old subculture. The industry grabs hold of fringe ideas and popularizes them through the science-fiction genre: Men in Black, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fourth Kind, Area 51. Hollywood didn’t create these terms, they were all part of the common language of UFOlogy decades before Hollywood lifted them.

In Hollywood’s UFO movies, broadly speaking, art imitates life. If the opposite were true, then following the release of James Cameron’s Avatar,  the highest grossing film of all time, we might reasonably have expected thousands of people to have begun reporting ten-foot-tall blue aliens. This did not happen; just as Hollywood’s forceful projection of the ‘little green men’ meme has failed to result in mass sightings of little green men (although reports of such entities do lightly pepper the UFO literature).

When it comes to UFOs, Hollywood produces depictions, albeit not entirely faithful ones, of what people actually report. This is not to say that what’s reported is necessarily true or accurate, but merely that Hollywood sees dramatic potential in these reports.

My position is this: Hollywood draws extensively from fact-based discourse on UFOs – a phenomenon whose existence is already rejected by consensus reality. The presentation of this UFO discourse onscreen — and particularly within the context of the sci-fi genre — serves to blur the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy.

UFOs and the hyperreal process

Cinematic simulations of UFOlogical history (UFO movies and TV shows) simultaneously actualize and fictionalize their underlying subject matter – it becomes hyperreal, both real and unreal. We can unpack this concept into what I consider to be the three phases of UFOlogical hyperreality:

Phase one

SIMULATION

In which a film or TV show is produced that reflects a basic UFOlogical reality.

Phase two

RECEPTION

In which the basic UFOlogical reality is screened as spectacle for mass consumption, and, in the process, is masked and perverted through the cultural value of the medium (in this case film or TV, but we could also extend it to video games, comic books, etc.).

Phase three

HYPERREALITY

In which reality and simulation are experienced as without difference, or rather, the image has come to mean more to us than any underlying reality.

Essentially, then, the hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon has arisen primarily through processes of mass media simulation. The blurring of true and false, real and imaginary, through that most magical of mediums (cinema), and within the context of that most fantastical of genres (science fiction), engenders our acceptance of the UFO as just that: a fictional media construct with little or no grounding in our lived historical reality. And yet, thanks to their permanent residency in the popular imagination, UFOs are no less real to us as a result.

UFO tourism: The Little A’Le’Inn near Area 51 in Nevada.

It boils down to this…

In our hyperreal world, a world where Roswell is better understood as a plot device and Area 51 is a tourist attraction – a UFOlogical Disneyland – debates surrounding official “Disclosure” of UFO reality (whatever that reality might be) are meaningless. How does one Disclose what is already hyper-real? The hyperreality of the UFO phenomenon in the popular imagination nullifies its potential to be either real or unreal, because it is now, and perhaps always will be, both.

Of course, this hyperreality model does not offer a solution to the UFO enigma, because it does not address what UFOs are at an ontological level. But it does, I believe, go a very long way towards explaining why UFOs continue to defy acceptance within our consensus reality.

And so, again, if you care about UFOs, you should care a great deal about UFO movies. They have shaped your perceptions of the phenomenon, often without conscious intent, but sometimes wilfully. With this in mind, when next we encounter a silver screen saucer, let us all take a moment to peer up from our popcorn, and to separate the fact from the fantasy. We can but try.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-03-2019 om 14:46 geschreven door peter  

Pareidolia: the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.

Mars: a red planet covered in pareidolia.

The Opportunity Mars rover may be dead, but the phenomena it helped propagate is alive and well and continuing to cause odd news stories about creatures, humanoids and strange out-of-place objects on the surface of the fourth rock from the Sun. The latest can be seen in a photograph making the usual romp across the paranormal and weird news side of the Internet showing what appears to be a piece of metal with a perfectly round hole cut into it lying on the surface of Mars as if it: a) fell off of an alien spaceship; b) was left by humans who secretly visited the planet; c) is part of an abandoned alien city slowly rising up as the soil is blown away. Or it could be a rock.

Credit: NASA

The photo was the star of a video uploaded this week on the WhatsUpInTheSky37 YouTube channel, which attributes it to a “Shamus” who apparently found it at a really cool site called Gigapan for SOL 2013 which shows panoramic views of the Martian surface that can be moved and zoomed. All of that could be more impressive than the object itself, which indeed looks like a triangular piece of metal with a perfect circle cut out that skeptics know from looking at other pareidolia-fied photos from Mars and the Moon could very well be a rock whose image is distorted by shadows and angles.

Or it could be something else.

On the “piece of a human Martian probe” side, commenters point out that it could be debris from the lander that brought Curiosity to Mars or it could have fallen to the surface from another successful or failed Mars mission. Adding a little imagination, it could be a piece of a spaceship or vehicle or other equipment from a secret mission – you know, the NASA missions to land humans on Mars that no one can talk about. There are no tire tracks or footprints around the piece, but those could easily have been blown away by the strong Martian winds, although they somehow didn’t cover up or pile sand against the object, which seems to be resting unobstructed on the Martian ground.

Going full pareidolia-plus-enhanced-imagination, commenters speculate it could be from an alien spacecraft – assuming their spacecraft crash or fall apart like ours do, even after successfully navigating accident-free for light years. Again, that panoramic view from Gigapan shows no other objects in the immediate area. Yes, that’s the case with many fossils found on Earth, but those are tissue that can deteriorate, decay and disintegrate … this is allegedly a piece of metal that survived a trip of light years.

Or a rock.

In the end, unless a rover with an arm, a robot with an arm or a human astronaut with an arm can pick up the object, inspect it closely or bring it back to Earth, we’re unarmed to do more than just speculate what this thing might be. For now, the needle on the meter is very close to ‘rock’.

Pareidolia … you’re a cruel friend.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-03-2019 om 14:45 geschreven door peter  

Over the years there have been numerous investigators of the Men in Black phenomenon, such as UFO researchers Gray Barker, Jim Keith, and Harold Fulton – all of whom are now long gone. None of them, however, came anywhere close to Albert K. Bender. He was the man without whom our knowledge of the MIB and their agenda would be sorely lacking, and who created the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Born in 1922, Bender was someone who served his country during the Second World War in the United States Army Air Corps. Post-World War Two, Bender lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a somewhat creepy-looking old house that stood at what was, at the time, the junction of Broad Street and North Frontage Road. Today, the house is no more, the secrets it once held now being just memories and stories in books.

Adding to the creepy atmosphere, Bender lived in the attic. Of course! Where else? As a fan of the worlds of sci-fi-, fictional horror (H.P. Lovecraft was one of Bender’s favorites), and the real world of the paranormal, Bender radically altered his attic-room into what he termed his “Chamber of Horrors.” Paintings of grotesque monsters filled the walls. Imagery of skulls and black cats abounded. A Gothic-style painting of an old cemetery dominated the room. And, plastic spiders hung from the ceiling. Then, there was Bender’s altar – it was at the foot of that unsettling place of worship that Bender would engage in infernal rites designed to provoke a supernatural response from…well…who knew what? Bender didn’t care what “it” was, he just wanted that reply. He got it, alright. He opened the kind of door that it’s never, ever wise to open. And, something came through.

As Albert Bender noted in his 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in practically no time after he called forth something supernatural from the other side, he was paid a visit. Yes, the Men in Black had picked up on Bender’s request for communication – and they responded in kind. Bender was replying to a mountain of mail from the readers of the latest issue of his Space Review magazine when he received his first visit of what, finally, amounted to several. It was late one night in 1953 when the MIB turned up. There was no slow, loud, knock at the door, though. Nor were any U.S. Government ID cards flashed. Bender’s Men in Black walked through the walls and door of the attic. They were shining-eyed, pale monsters. Their mode of dress was black suits, black fedoras, skinny black-ties, black shoes, and crisp white shirts. Imagine a 1950s-era member of the Mafia mixed in with a liberal amount of a resurrected zombie that has seen better days, and the image swirling around your mind won’t be too far off what it was that Bender encountered.

As the Men in Black got closer, so Bender got weaker. His energy levels plummeted like those of a diabetic who has missed breakfast, lunch and dinner. He was freezing cold and the shakes had suddenly set in. Even in his hazy, sickly state, Bender couldn’t fail to see something which chilled him to the bone: the weaker he got, the brighter and more fiery the eyes of the terrible trio got.  Weaker, brighter. Weaker, brighter. You get the picture. Bender certainly did. In a macabre and terrifying way…Albert Bender was, bit by bit, being eaten; devoured, even.

With Bender sprawled out on the bed, and as helpless as a newborn puppy, the Men in Black telepathically warned him to leave the UFO subject well alone. If he didn’t only something terrible would befall the man himself. The three turned on their heels (black, of course) and dematerialized as mysteriously as they had first appeared. Bender was no fool: he knew that if he didn’t quit chasing flying saucers that the MIB were surely likely to turn his life into a living hell. But, the allure of the space-beings and their silvery, saucer-shaped craft was way too strong. So, it was all but inevitable that Bender would get another visit. And another. He did. Things got worse and worse: like those ghoulish drivers who can’t keep their eyes off of a fatal car accident on the highway, the MIB couldn’t keep away from Bender: they would always arrive at night and hover over the bed, as Bender fell into that same state of sudden illness and weakness that hit him on the first occasion.

By the second visit, Bender’s health was suffering significantly: he had gotten progressively weaker. He started to develop stomach problems. From his descriptions, it may have been ulcers and a dose of ulcerative-colitis. His energy levels had fallen off the scale and he lost weight. He was constantly out of breath. And migraines plagued him day and night. As for those MIB? Well, their eyes just proceeded to get brighter and brighter with every visit. It didn’t take Bender long to realize that he was effectively being bled dry. It was, in a strange way, very similar to the actions of those black-cloaked vampires who drained bevies of buxom babes of their blood in the likes of Universal Studios’ 1931 version of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. In a very strange state of twisted irony, the movie was one of Bender’s all-time favorites.

Come the third visit, Bender was not in a good condition at all: he was now seeing the MIB in the darkened streets of town. They would stand on the street-corner, leering at him – entities that no-one but Bender could see. The stomach problems were getting worse. He was losing more weight.  Bender knew he had to do something. And, he did. Bender, albeit somewhat reluctantly, walked away from UFOs and closed down Space Review. Bender shut the doors on the International Flying Saucer Bureau, too, and quit the subject. He made a very brief reappearance in 1962, to write the aforementioned Flying Saucers and the Three Men, after which he left the subject behind and never returned. From the 1960s, and until his death in 2016, Bender was, when it came to UFOs, permanently AWOL.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-03-2019 om 14:29 geschreven door peter  

Your GPS Devices May Stop Working on April 6, 2019

Your GPS devices may stop working on April 6, 2019 and if If that sounds familiar, it’s because the situation is basically the same as the “millennium bug” behind the infamous Y2K scare.

April 6 is the day millions of GPS receivers will literally run out of time, rolling over their time counters back to zero, thanks to limitations in timekeeping for older GPS devices. Many navigation systems may be affected, such as on ships or older aircraft, although your smartphone will be fine.

But because GPS satellites are also crucial to digital timekeeping used by websites, electrical grids, financial markets, data centers and computer networks, the effect of April 6 may be even more wide-ranging.

Although an information-security expert during a presentation at the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco said "I'm not going to be flying on April 6," thankfully, no one is hyping the GPS bug to an exaggerated degree - but it could still cause problems.

  

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

13-03-2019 om 14:17 geschreven door peter  

Two Mile Alien Structure Found On Earths Moon, March 2019, Photos, UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: March 13, 2019

Location of discovery: Earths Moon

Source photo: 

• http://ser.sese.asu.edu/MOON/CLEM_COLOR/moon.tiff

I found this alien structure near the edge of crater in an old NASA photo today. The structure looks like an oval sphere with two thick arms coming out of it. It also appears to have a few antennas or thin structures coming out of its top center. The shininess indicates it is absolutely a metallic surface. 

 

The NASA photo loads slowly, its 21MB in size, so give it a few minutes to load. 

 

The main question on most peoples minds is probably how big is it? Thats a bit tough, but I would estimate to be close to 1.5-3 miles across. How can they hide such a large object? Come on guys, its NASA, we only see photos that NASA or other organizations who are secretly controlled by NASA (ESA & JAXA & world wide network of telescopes funded by...who else...NASA). So we only know and trust what NASA says. It mental manipulation. We only know what they tell us, what they teach us, what they chose to tell us about. But have you ever asked yourself...what does NASA chose to not tell us about?

Scott C. Waring

 

 

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

13-03-2019 om 14:11 geschreven door peter  

Ten Mythological Creatures in Ancient Folklore

{ http://trailer.web-view.net/ }

13-03-2019 om 00:57 geschreven door peter  

Water Hops All Around the Moon Over the Course of a Lunar Day

By Meghan Bartels

An image captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows areas scientists suspect to be covered with frost.

(Image: © NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio)

Water molecules are hopping around the moon as the lunar surface warms and cools throughout the day, new research suggests.

That research is based on observations gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying our planet's close companion since 2009. A recent upgrade to an instrument onboard the orbiter called Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP) has allowed scientists to keep a closer eye on where the moon's surface shows signs of water.

"This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation's space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration," Kurt Retherford, a co-author on the new research and the principal investigator of the LAMP instrument at Southwest Research Institute in Texas, said in a NASA statement. 

Water on other planetary bodies could be a valuable resource not just for human explorers to drink, but also to serve as fuel for future robotic exploration, since water can be split to form rocket fuel, saving missions from having to carry that fuel from Earth.

But it was only in 2009 that scientists were able to confirm that there was water locked up in ice on the moon's surface. Now, they have tracked how individual water molecules bind and release from the rocky regolith as temperatures change over the course of the moon's monthlong daylight cycle.

According to the researchers' observations, water molecules remain stuck to the surface throughout the lunar morning. As the neighborhood warms up around lunar noon, some of the molecules lift off into the moon's puny atmosphere and migrate around the moon's surface until they stumble upon someplace cold enough that they can settle back down to the surface.

"More work is needed to fully account for the complexities of the lunar surface, but the present results show that [this] work is definitely worth doing!" Michael Poston, a co-author on the new research and a research scientist on the LAMP team at Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

The research was described in a paper published Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

• Mining Moon Ice: Prospecting Plans Starting to Take Shape 
• Photos: The Search for Water on the Moon 
• NASA Is Studying How to Mine the Moon for Water 

 Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her @meghanbartels.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

12-03-2019 om 23:45 geschreven door peter  

Where did the “Seven Seas” come from?

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU

What does this idiom mean and who did we inherit it from?

Image via Pixabay.

Some idioms weather the years with grace. Their meaning keeps them relevant even after cultural context leaves them in the dust. We advise our friends against “beating a dead horse”, for example, or point out that you can take it to water but not make it drink — despite the fact that almost nobody today has even interacted with a horse.

Then there are those idioms that aren’t only removed from the modern way of life but are also factually incorrect. Yet they persist. “Sailing the seven seas” is one such idiom. Today, we’ll take a look at how it came to be and which seas, exactly, it harkens to.

Nowadays the term “seven seas” is a shorthand for “all the seas and oceans”; sailing the seven seas, then, means you’re quite the accomplished sailor. But, these “seven seas” carried various meanings throughout history and across cultures. Each civilization understood it differently, through the lens of their religion, culture, and the places they knew. Keep that in mind as we delve into the seven depths of this idiom.

Seven degrees of mystical seas

The earliest use (that we know of) is religious in nature. It comes from the ancient Sumerians, the first people to inhabit Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. Enheduanna, a high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna from the city-state of Ur, and the first poet to have their name recorded in history, refers to ‘seven seas’ in a hymn written around 2300 BC. Betty De Shong Meador provides a translation of these hymns in Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna (University of Texas Press, 2000, page 73), which reads (note that I’ve added all the commas and breaks between verses based on how I interpret the text):

“[….] O, house / Your shining face is the great snake of the reed marsh / Your foundation, o, shrine / The fifty abzu’s, the seven seas, has plumbed the inner-workings of your prince / Decision maker / Crown of wide heaven / He, Ashimbabbar, king of heaven, o , Ur / Shrine has built this house on your radiant and placed his seat upon your dais.”

Ashimbabbar seems to be a normalized, alternative spelling of Nanna’s name; Nanna was a moon god and “the tutelary deity of the city of Ur”, according to Oracc. In this context, abzu’s — from ‘ab’ meaning waters and ‘zu’ meaning deep in Akkadian — are probably fresh underground waters, such as those from springs or dug wells. The Sumerians believed underground waters came from the primordial sea and held an important religious significance.

Ok, hardhats on, it’s time to go on a limb here. In the Babylonian creation epic, Abzu morphs into a key deity. It’s possible they/it has been so all along. But, the fact that Enheduanna cites ‘fifty’ abzu’s suggests to me that this wasn’t the case while she lived, or that the two concepts were similar but already separated. Abzu, as a deity, represents a primordial freshwater ocean which, after coupling with Tiamat, a primordial saltwater ocean, essentially leads to the creation of the Universe. The two birth younger gods, who eventually usurp & murder them and create the world as we know it from their corpses.

Fresh- and salt-water seem to play a central part in the Sumerian religion and culture. The fifty abzu’s (which are fresh, Abzu’s domain) and the seven seas (seas tend to be salty, Tiamat) may have symbolized the primordial, raw stuff of which reality was born from in Enheduanna’s eyes. These ‘seven seas’, then, may have symbolized knowledge, creation, or the essence of both the mundane and the godly — not a stretch of the map. Possibly; that’s my take on it.

Seven western seas

Western cultures likely inherit the idiom from the ancient Greeks and Romans (who basically exported Greek culture throughout Europe). NOAA states that “the Seven [Greek] Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a ‘sea'”. This fits well with the world as known to the ancient Greeks, who were quite the accomplished sailors themselves. Although they never moved out of the Mediterranean and its connected seas in large numbers, that still places them within a reasonable distance of Mesopotamia, its culture, and our known source for the idiom.

Another reference to the seven seas comes from Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and admiral. Writing in his book The History of the World (the quote below is taken from Chapter 16, or ‘XVI’ in Roman numerals) these ‘seas’ were, in fact, the navigable salt marshes that the river Po forms when it meets the Adriatic sea.

“And there is not a river againe, that in so little a way, groweth to a greater streame [than the Po]: for over-charged it is and troubled with the quantitie of water, and therefore worketh it selfe a deepe channell, heavie and hurtfull to the earth under it, although it be derived and drawne into the other rivers and goles, betweene Ravenna and Altinum, for 120 miles: yet because he belcheth and casteth them out from him in so great abundance, he is said to make seven seas.”

“[….] All those rivers and trenches afore-said, the Tuscanes began to make first out of Sagis, carrying the forcible streame of the river acrosse into the Atrian meeres, which are called the seven seas, and made the famous haven of Atria a towne of the Tuscanes; of which the Adriaticke sea tooke the name afore time, which now is called Adriaticum.”

Here too we see that the ‘seas’ themselves weren’t necessarily seas per se, but the idiom has at least moved firmly into the realm of geography by this time.

The ‘seas’ in seven seas change over time, keeping pace with the most up-to-date maps. NOAA goes on to explain that in medieval European literature, “the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red, and Arabian seas”. On the Arabian side of the cultural divide, these seven seas were the waters on the Eastern trading routes — the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Khambhat, the Bay of Bengal, the Strait of Malacca, the Singapore Strait, the Gulf of Thailand, and the South China Sea, according to LiveScience.

As Europe crawled out of the middle ages and reached for cultural dominance through exploration (and sadly, colonization), the seven seas changed to mean the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico (when Europeans first reached the Americas), and then the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea as trade in spices and tea between Europe and Asia intensified.

In other words, the ‘seven seas’ idiom evolved over time to mean ‘a faraway place’ rather than a particular area or group of seas — probably under the combined efforts of sailors and captains looking to impress land-locked ladies. Maybe it’s an old-timey equivalent to ‘in a galaxy far, far away.’

But this still leaves one part of the puzzle unanswered:

Why is it always ‘seven’?

This is a trickier question to handle.

It may be a vestige of Enheduanna’s hymns. Ancient Sumerians regarded the heavens as being formed of seven domes, each made of a different type of precious stone. It’s possible, then, that each of the seas she refers to could have spawned one of the domes, and the wording just stuck.

Another possible explanation, in my view, has to do with the number itself. One of the most cited papers in psychology today, published in 1956 by George A. Miller, a Harvard psychologist, reports that the average memory span of young human adults is approximately 7 items. Whether this is the cause or not, I cannot say for sure — but the number seven pops up time and time again in all manners of places and contexts.

Rome was built on seven hills, and the world, according to Christian mythos, was made in seven days — although technically the last one was a cheat-day. Christian traditions also tell us of seven deadly sins and seven virtues, of Noah being told to bring seven pairs of every animal aboard his ark, of Jericho’s walls falling on the seventh day after seven priests with seven trumpets march around it seven times. Hinduism tells of seven different chakras, Islam of seven hells and seven heavens, and Mahatma Gandhi lists Seven Blunders of the World — to name a few. A massive poll carried out by writer, mathematician, and broadcaster Alex Bellos a few years ago found that 7 was the most-voted ‘favorite number’ (10% out of some 44,000 voters).

Do I believe that the number 7 is magic? Of course not — the only magic I believe in is Santa Claus and that booze can make me dance. But, seeing the number pop up so often definitely suggests something is special about it.

“Seven is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided our multiplied within the group [it’s a prime number]. [It] is the only number between two and ten that is neither a multiple nor a factor of the others. In this way, “lucky number seven” stands alone—and we grasp this implicitly,” Bellos told Brandon Specktor for Reader’s Digest.

“It’s unique, a loner, the outsider. And humans interpret this arithmetical property in cultural ways.”

“By associating seven with a group of things, you kind of make them special too. The point here is that we’re always sensitive to arithmetical patterns, and this influences our behavior—even if we’re not conscious of it.”

One voter from New Zealand even told Bellos in his comments that “People don’t usually tend to pick 7, and I like to be different,” humorously supporting his hypothesis.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

12-03-2019 om 23:06 geschreven door peter  

EXCLUSIVE

By Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent

NEW witnesses to one of the most infamous "alien abductions" ever have come forward to tell their story for the first time.

Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were fishing on the banks of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, in 1973, when they claim a UFO landed nearby and three alien creatures kidnapped them.

JONNY DILLON

Police audio files obtained by Sun Online last year showed the pair were highly agitated by the alleged incident but they never wavered from their story - even when cops left them alone and secretly taped them.

And now, 45 years later, a couple have come forward to verify their story after seeing a strange UFO on the same night and location as the fishermen.

Maria and Vernon Jerry Blair were sat in their car looking out across the river when they saw strange blue lights in the sky.

Maria, now 69, said: "I thought was an aeroplane because of its bright lights flashing.

JONNY DILLON

ANGELA BLAIR/ PHILIP MANTLE

Vernon and Maria have come forward after 45 years

"And it just kept going back and forth across the sky. I told my husband there’s something wrong with that plane, it’s like he doesn’t know where he wants to go.”

They watched the strange lights for around 40 minutes before getting out of their car and walking down the pier towards a boat.

However events took a sinister turn as Maria spotted a strange figure emerging from the water.

She recalled: "We started walking down the pier and something came up out of the water. It was like a person. I told Jerry 'There’s somebody out there'.

"They came up out of the water, then went back down. So I’m standing there waiting for this person and the water rippled out.

ARTISTS SEBASTIAN WOSCYK COURTESY PHILIP MANTLE

“He said 'Come on - there’s nobody out there'. I know I saw it.

"I walked down to the boat and it was about 11.30pm to 12pm before I came back down the pier. I was by myself. I ran back to the car."

Unbeknown to the couple, Charles and Calvin were on the opposite river bank having a terrifying close encounter with the UFO and its occupants.

They claim they were captured by three alien creatures, who came out of a door on the oval shaped "craft".

The men said the creatures had "lobster-like claws" at the ends of their arms, "carrot-like" growths for their nose and ears and their heads also appeared to connect directly to their shoulders, with no discernible neck.

The creatures' skin was described as pale in colour, wrinkled, with no eyes and slits for mouths.

JONNY DILLON

Onboard the UFO, Hickson claimed that he was examined by what looked like a large football-shaped mechanical eye, about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, that seemed to scan his body.

Calvin claimed that he could not recall what had happened to him inside the craft, although later, during hypnotic regression he offered some hazy details.
Now, 45 years later, Calvin has written a book about his experiences called Pascagoula - The Closest Encounter, published by British UFO expert and author Philip Mantle.

Calvin, 64, also met Maria and Vernon for the very first time in person on Wednesday this week after only speaking to them on the phone.

He said: "It was a very emotional meeting from the beginning.

"It started out with both of us tearing up and automatically bonding.

PHILIP MANTLE

Calvin Parker in 1973 shortly after the incident

PHILIP MANTLE

Calvin, pictured now, met the two witnesses for the first time

"I felt like I had known her for years. It started off with her telling me that she saw the abduction on October 11, 1973, but didn’t know who was involved until the following day. This was of course me and Charles Hickson.

"Mrs Blair then set out on a quest to find me so she could see if we were okay.

"But she had no luck because I was in hiding away from the media attention. Her husband told her she would be a fool for coming forward and that everyone would make her out to be crazy.

"So, she kept this to herself telling me she would think about it every night and worry about me.

"Just like me - she had secrets that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.

"Thank God I wrote the book as it has helped us come together. Although we have just met we have had a connection for over 45 years."

Maria, who lives in Theodore, Alabama, said: "I enjoyed meeting Calvin, it was like we have always known each other for ever. He is truly a wonderful person."

Philip Mantle, of Pontefract, West Yorks, who runs Flying Disc Press, has appealed to any new witnesses to contact him at philip.mantle@gmail.com.

He added: "I have little doubt that there were other witnesses to this remarkable event."

Charles died in 2011, aged 80, but never backed away from his alien abduction story despite ridicule.

{ https://www.thesun.co.uk/ }

12-03-2019 om 22:53 geschreven door peter