It’s getting harder and harder to separate the alien spacecrafts and extraterrestrial orbs from the meteors, the secret military tests, the usual flares and Chinese lanterns and all of the other bright and unusual objects increasingly crowding our nighttime and even daytime skies. The latest example occurred this week in the air over Los Angeles on the night of the third and final supermoon of 2019 when thousands witnessed bright objects streaking across the sky that behaved nothing like the ones Californians are used to seeing, even without the aid of mind-altering substances. They became even more suspicious when officials quickly called their reports “bull.” Cover-up?

“A mysterious streak of light in the Los Angeles sky sent the imaginations of many onlookers over the moon.”

ABC News, along with other national, local, international and Internet news organizations were quick to report on the incident which occurred as night darkness approached on March 20. SyFyWire’s science writer and astronomer Phil Plait began receiving accounts and videos from the less imaginative wondering if the wandering fireballs were drunken meteors and, at first glance, Plait agreed.

“Apparently quite the meteor show over LA tonight! Looks like it skimmed through the upper atmosphere but I’m guessing. Waiting for more footage. It’s LA. There’ll be more footage.”

Those with better imaginations or better zoom lenses suspected flying humanoids, and it turns out they were closer to the truth. Tired of all of the emergency calls, the LA police and fire departments issued similar explanations.

“PSA: A meteor did not crash into Downtown Los Angeles, and no, it’s not an alien invasion…just a film shoot. This is Tinseltown after all.”

Were Los Angelenos witnessing the opening shots or battle scenes of the long-rumored Independence Day 3 sequel? If so, they will be disappointed, not just because a few measly little flaming humanoids would not be much of a blockbuster-worthy invasion but because this wasn’t a theatrical shoot but a commercial one. And yes, the elected officials who said “Bull!” were, for a change, telling the truth.

“As the third and final supermoon of 2019 rose over the iconic Los Angles skyline, the Red Bull Air Force – a team assembled from the most accomplished and experienced skydivers in the world – marked the occasion as only they can: springing into the air to get an up close and personal look at the phenomenon.”

(Watch the video here.)

Really? An energy drink promotion? Do we really need another “War of the Worlds” panic, a Phoenix Lights confusion, a Great Los Angeles Air Raid cover-up or a death-defying stunt just to sell more of a product that is already ubiquitous? Did it have to be tied to a supermoon – another over-hyped natural phenomenon that did not portend the apocalypse, much less an alien invasion, a new movie or an old product? Have we regressed from Mulder’s “I want to believe” back to Groucho’s “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

Are we really becoming this gullible? This fearful? This enslaved to advertising?

Bull?

Asteroids were once the forgotten lesser members of the Solar System, far behind planets, moons, comets and meteorites. That changed as telescopes, especially orbiting ones, became stronger and space probes began visiting the asteroid belt instead of just passing through on their way to Jupiter and beyond. Now we’re suddenly finding out intimate details about the behavior of these space rocks and learning we’re much closer relatives that once thought. This past week brought the news that the asteroid Bennu has a weird and possibly disgusting habit of spitting out smaller rocks, while a piece of a meteorite found in Turkey has been identified as a chunk of the asteroid Vesta.

Asteroid 101955 Bennu was discovered on September 11, 1999, during a Near-Earth asteroid survey by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). It’s roughly a smoothish sphere with a mean diameter of 492 m (1,614 ft; 0.306 mi). Because of its size and close proximity to Earth, Bennu was chosen as the destination for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to acquire and return samples from an asteroid. OSIRIS-Rex has been orbiting Bennu since December 3, 2018, and once it’s done mapping the surface it will land in July 2020, scoop up some material and return it to Earth in September 2023. Unless it gets hit by spitting rocks.

Bennu spewing particles

(Image: © NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin)

“(This) is probably the biggest surprise of the early stages of the OSIRIS-REx mission and, I would say, one of the biggest surprises of my scientific career.”

OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, announced the discovery at a news conference on March 19. It turns out Bennu is a rare ‘active’ asteroid that has been observed at least 11 times spewing bursts of surface particles numbering up to 100 per spit, with some measuring 10 cm (4 inches) or larger and traveling at a rate of 11 km/h or 7 mph. That could sting, although Lauretta, being your typical space scientist, thinks it’s cool.

“Basically, it looks like Bennu has a continuous population of particles raining down on it from discrete ejection events across its surface. This is incredibly exciting.”

And incredibly puzzling, since they’re not sure what is causing the spewing. While it doesn’t appear to be a danger to Bennu, it could be to Earth. The asteroid-lets may be causing an annual meteor shower in September in the Southern Hemisphere, which Lauretta says astronomers are now searching for.

Speaking of meteor showers, that takes us to Turkey, where in 2015 a three-foot meteor burst into pieces near Sariçiçek. An amazing 343 chunks were recovered and researchers identified them as Howardites, an unusual type of meteorite believed to have come from the asteroid Vesta. Why Vesta? The brightest asteroid visible from Earth was hit by something 22 million years ago, creating a massive crater and knocking a huge amount of Vesta particles into space. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around Vesta in July 2011 for a year, it studied what the 10 mile (17 km) wide Antonia crater and determined it was 22 million years old.

Vesta (Credit: NASA)

Still with me?

The Turkish researchers determined that the Howardite meteorite pieces were also 22 million years old. However, that wasn’t enough to connect the dots. That’s when they looked at the videos. Believe it or not, security cameras in Sariçiçek picked up the incoming meteor and gave them enough information to determine its trajectory, which they traced back to … get your eureka ready … the area in the sky where Vesta is located! Put it all together and they’re confident they’re holding a piece of the asteroid Vesta. All of this is published in the current edition of Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

That sound you hear is Turkish scientists yelling, “Eat our asteroid dust, OSIRIS-REx!”

Photographs are an amazing thing. We now take them for granted, but have you ever stopped to think about how incredible they truly are? They manage to freeze one moment in time forevermore, a peek at a split second in time that we can never get back, but which remains eternally etched upon that picture as if it never left. We have come a long way since the first attempts to capture images on film, and it is weird to think that less than 200 hundred years ago the thought of taking a picture of any kind was magic. How many scenes and images over human history have been lost to die with those who last saw them, before we had the capability of preserving them for all to see? Vast swaths of history have been visually lost to us, from a time before cameras and Instagram. Looking at old photographs can be a surreal experience, a step through time to another era, and here we will take a look at some major pioneering firsts in the world of pictures, a peek through the ages to another era.

When it comes to fascinating photographs of the past, perhaps it is best to start at the very beginning, with the first one ever taken, or at least the oldest surviving one. This particular picture was taken in around 1826, by inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a special, revolutionary method (for the time) that involved a pewter plate covered in an asphalt derivative. The process is though to have taken several days of exposure, and the result is a view out of a window at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, in a time long forgotten but forever preserved in this image.

The oldest surviving photograph

Moving on to other early firsts, we have the 1838 photograph taken by Louis Daguerre at the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, France, at a place called the Place de la République, in what is thought to be the first photo ever taken of a human being. At the time, the process required at least 10 minutes of exposure to take a picture, meaning that human beings did not show up, and this was just a regular landscape photo for quite a long time until someone noticed that a human figure can be seen in the bottom left. It is believed that the unidentified man had been standing still for long enough to show up because he had been having his shoes shined. There is another blurry figure of a person that can be seen as well, although not nearly as clearly. Daguerre was actually the inventor of the device he used to take it, called a “daguerreotype,” which utilized silver plates and mercury fumes, and was used to take many of the earliest photos.

First photograph of a person. You can see him in the lower left.

From the following year, in 1839 we have what is considered to be the world’s first selfie, taken by a student in Pennsylvania named Robert Cornelius, who would also be instrumental in further refining and developing the daguerreotype. He tested it out by taking a photo of himself as he stood in front of a store front in Philadelphia, standing completely still for an estimated 10 to 15 minutes to capture this historic shot.

First selfie

Speaking of firsts, there is also the first photograph ever taken of a woman, a portrait taken by a Dr. John W. Draper of his sister, Dorothy Catherine Draper, at his New York studio in 1840. The photo looks like a pretty normal old-timey pic, but it is important to note that the subject had to keep completely still without even blinking for over a minute to achieve this.

First photograph of a woman

The oldest surviving photograph of a president was taken by daguerreotype in 1843, and shows the then former president John Quincy Adams approximately 14 years after his presidency had ended. The photograph was taken by Philip Hass, and although Adams was no longer in office at the time it is remarkable nonetheless.

First photo of an American president

The year 1845 saw more breakthroughs in photography when the French physicists Louis Fizeau and Leon Foucault managed to take the first ever photos of the sun. It is interesting to note that just 5 years before these same men had also been the first to take a photograph of the moon, from a rooftop observatory in New York. Also note that sunspots can even be observed in this photograph.

First photo of the sun

Another unique daguerreotype photograph is what is believed to be the first photo ever taken of New York City. The picture in question was taken in 1848 at Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and you can see that at the time it wasn’t nearly the big bustling metropolis we see today. There was another even older picture of New York, but it has been lost over the years, and so this is effectively the oldest.

First photo of New York City

There is also a very intriguing image taken in 1853 by a man named Solomon Nunes Carvalho at Big Timbers, Colorado. This photo would become part of the U.S. Library of Congress, and is thought to be the very first photograph taken of a Native American village. Most people only have the image of these places in their heads from Western movies and Cowboys and Indians shows, so to take a glimpse through time in this photo is fascinating to say the least, with even two Native American figures visible in the center left.

First photo of a Native American camp

Just less than a decade after this photo first, in 1860 there was taken the first aerial photo ever. Although we now take such pictures for granted, at the time it was unheard of, but James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King managed to capture this image from 2,000 feet in the air, which shows Boston, Massachusetts at the time. There were earlier photos taken from hot air balloons, but they were lost and this is the earliest surviving one.

First aerial photograph

The very next year, in 1861, the first ever color photograph would be taken, by photographer Thomas Sutton. The technique used was first proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, and he was the first to suggest that three light sources could be mixed and matched to achieve any desired color. Sutton used Maxwell’s advice and took three different black and white photos of a ribbon and used blue, red, and green filters on each one, after which he merged them into one image to create the first known color photograph, a truly revolutionary concept at the time.

First color photograph

At the start of the following decade, in 1870 another photographic milestone was reached when photographer Carol Popp de Szathmari took what is regarded as the very first photograph taken of a battle. The picture shows Prussian troops advancing against French defenders, and it is largely due to images like this that Szathmari is widely said to be the first war photographer.

First photo of a battle

The ensuing decades would bring some other photographic firsts, when in April of 1884 the first photo of a tornado was taken by an A.A. Adams in Garnett, Texas. Adams was lucky enough to be present or the tornado and to find a comfortable vantage point from around 14 miles away, standing by the United Presbyterian Church in Garnett where he went about capturing this historic and unique image.

First photo of a tornado

Finally we come to a whole new avenue of photography in the early years, that of underwater photography. This had long been seen as virtually impossible, but in 1926 National Geographic photographer Charles Martin, along with botanist William Longley, were in the Florida Keys trying out their new fancy equipment utilizing waterproof housing and a magnesium flash, when they managed to snap this pic of a hogfish off the Florida Keys. It may seem rather quaint in modern times, but this had never been done before, and stands as a testament to human ingenuity and remains a rather dramatic photographic first.

First underwater photograph

While we now take and share photographs instantaneously at a moment’s notice, it seems that we should sometimes take a step back and look at where it all began, to the time when this was extremely cutting edge science fiction stuff. Looking at these photos we are brought to another era in history, frozen there for all time. Even as we move into the future and the world changes, these moments will not, frozen there on film forevermore, and earning their place in history.

Just about everyone has heard of the Loch Ness Monster. You may be aware of some of the more well-known and famous cases. There are, however, aspects of Loch Ness’ long and strange history that you may not be aware of. So, I thought today I would share with you a few examples of some of the lesser known facts and tales concerning that huge body of water. One of the strangest stories of paranormal weirdness at Loch Ness came from an acclaimed author on all manner of mysteries, Andrew Collins. As Christmas 1979 loomed, Collins – with colleagues Graham Phillips and Martin Keatman – spent a week in Scotland, investigating the Nessie enigma. It involved interviewing witnesses, spending time poring over old archives in Inverness’ library, and checking out the loch itself. It was while they were deep in the heart of their investigation that the trio uncovered a very weird story. Back in the early 18^th century a young couple inexplicably vanished while riding a horse and trap near Loch End, on the south shores of Loch Ness. Rumors circulated that the pair was either murdered or abducted. And neither the horse nor the trap were ever seen again. It would have remained a complete mystery, were it not for one thing; a very uncanny thing.

A typical almshouse

More than one hundred years later, and at the height of tumultuous thunderstorm, a young man and woman walked into a local almshouse, inquiring if the priest that oversaw it would give them shelter for the night, which he did. The priest couldn’t fail to see that the pair was dressed in the kind of clothing that was popular around a century or so earlier. Plus, they seemed very confused, dazed and bewildered, and completely unable to explain where they were from. They remained in that odd, altered state for a couple of days, after which they simply walked out of the almshouse and were never seen again. When the story got out, however, several of the locals recalled old tales of the events of a century earlier, and the missing pair of young lovers. Was this, perhaps, a case of a slip in time having occurred? Did the couple vanish from the 18^th century, only to briefly and incredibly manifest in the 19^th? Or was the whole thing just an old legend that had endured? Take your pick. Moving on…

Alexander MacDonald made mention of Scottish lake monsters in his 1914 book, Story and song from Loch Ness-side, which was almost twenty years before the phenomenon of Nessie began. He said: “The fairy-lover in this story is identified in many parts of the Highlands with the water-kelpie, of which the conception that prevailed generally was one that inspired repulsiveness. There seems no getting away from the fact that, in the far back, obscure corridors of the past, came across the path of man as he slowly but diligently was making his way upward and onward.”

Four years later, Henry Cyril Dieckhoff revealed some interesting and eye-opening data in Mythological Beings in Gaelic Folklore, which was published by the Gaelic Society of Inverness. He was of the opinion that even though much of what had been written about Scotland’s supernatural kelpieswas clearly folkloric in nature, he solidly believed that the beasts had a basis in fact. It was his firm belief that the tales were specifically born out of a combination of inherited memory and oral lore of giant, violent creatures of an unknown kind that lived during the earliest years in which the Celts first appeared on the scene. It’s hardly surprising, then, that when the Nessie phenomenon hit the headlines in 1933, Diekhoff became a fervent follower of the mystery and an adherent of the theory that Loch Ness was the home of terrible monsters.

Then, there’s the possibility of the Nessies being supernatural in nature; maybe even paranormal shapeshifters. In 1880, Duncan MacDonald had a terrifying, eye to eye encounter with something that resembled a giant, goat-sized frog. A tusked beast was seen in the waters of the River Ness, in 1932, by a Miss K. MacDonald. Lieutenant McP Fordyce described seeing an animal that walked like an elephant, that looked like a combination of a “very large horse and a camel,” and which was shaggy in appearance. Arthur Grant’s sighting was of something more akin to a plesiosaur. Mr. and Mrs. George Spicer encountered a creature that had a jerky, wormy gait and which provoked both nightmares and what practically sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder. And, Hugh Gray photographed an animal with a beak-like, turtle-style head. Finally…

Aleister Crowley

Nineteen-seventy-one was the year in which Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, purchased Aleister Crowley’s old abode, Boleskine House, which, for years, overlooked Loch Ness. Until, that is, December 2015. That was when it was almost destroyed in a fire.  Ironically, for someone who was a major devotee and follower of the teachings of Crowley, Page actually spent very little time there. Boleskine House has had a long and turbulent history. Despite his lack of time spent at Crowley’s old home, Page certainly acknowledged that the entire place was saturated in high-strangeness. He acknowledged it had “bad vibes,” adding that, “A man was beheaded there and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.” None of this kept Page away from the world of the occult. That much is evidenced by the fact that he later owned a famous London bookshop devoted to all things supernatural, paranormal, and esoteric. Its name: The Equinox. In addition, portions of Led Zepelin’s movie, The Song Remains the Same (released in 1976, but shot in 1973) were filmed on the grounds of Boleskine House. Page sold the creepy, old house in 1992.

Students of computer history know mathematician John von Neumann was key in the development of early digital computers and algorithms. Students of atomic history know von Neumann was involved with the Manhattan Project. Students of both science and science fiction history know he developed the theory of the self-replicating machine (also known as the universal constructor) which makes exact copies of itself which then make exact copies of themselves ad infinitum, or at least until the raw materials give out. John von Neumann died in 1957, but his work lives on today, as evidenced by a new paper which claims that the reason why we don’t see self-replicating interstellar probes from advanced alien civilizations – an idea many Earthlings also believe is the best way to explore space – is because their algorithms develop flaws that eventually turn them into predatory cannibals that cause their own extinction. Really? Would Von Neumann agree? How about Fermi? Asimov?

John von Neumann

“The concept of a rapid spread of self-replicating interstellar probes (SRPs) throughout the Milky Way adds considerable strength to Fermi’s Paradox. A single civilisation creating a single SRP is sufficient for a fleet of SRPs to grow and explore the entire Galaxy on timescales much shorter than the age of the Earth – so why do we see no signs of such probes? One solution to this Paradox suggests that self-replicating probes eventually undergo replication errors and evolve into predator-prey populations, reducing the total number of probes and removing them from our view.”

Duncan H. Forgan invokes both John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi in his new study, “Predator-Prey Behaviour in Self-Replicating Interstellar Probes” which will be published soon in the International Journal of Astrobiology and was recently reviewed in Cosmos magazine. Forgan, a research fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, starts with the Fermi paradox (if there are billions of stars offering the possibility of billions of civilizations, why haven’t we seen a single one?) and applies it to von Neumann-style self-replicating space probes.

“Such a probe would be able to produce a copy every time it visits a new star system. As each copy makes copies, the number of self-replicating probes (SRPs) grows exponentially, and every star in the Milky Way is explored on a timescale much, much shorter than its age. Estimates for this exploration timescale vary, but are as short as ten million years (Nicholson & Forgan, 2013), and perhaps shorter still. Given that this timescale is much shorter than the age of the Earth, and only one ETI constructing SRPs is sufficient to produce this scenario, on balance we should expect to see an interstellar probe orbiting the Sun. And yet, we do not. How can this be resolved?”

Yeah, how? Forgan’s answer starts with the potential for encoding errors by the probes’ creators which, over time, could cause the breakdown of the probes and end their trips. A more interesting (and better for a sci-fi movie) scenario is that the error causes the probes to notice that it would be far easier and faster to gather parts from its own copies. As the clones become both self-predators and self-prey, they could eventually self-cannibalize themselves into self-extinction with nothing left to show for their existence but selfies.

Mmmm … dinner.

Forgan’s theory assumes that the advanced civilization which created the von Neumann machines was not sharp enough to make them perfect and not moral enough to ponder the negative consequences of sending them out into space to potentially attack other civilizations for cloning materials and decide it wasn’t worth the negative galactic publicity and cancel their creation. It also assumes that the last replicator standing wouldn’t find raw materials on a planet or asteroid, build more clones and start the process again. He does admit that some cloned replicating probes could escape before being eaten, but they would have the error in their software and would eventually succumb to cannibalism and self-destruction.

Does this explain why we’ve never seen any von Neumann-style self-replicating probes from other civilizations? That was one of the many theories bounced around when ‘Oumuamua passed through the solar system, but it didn’t stay and didn’t seem to make any copies. Or did it? If its program is flawed, how would we know?

Sic-fi movie plot or plausible explanation for the machine version of the Fermi paradox. Whatever you decide, don’t blame von Neumann.