Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
28-03-2019
New Insider Reveals His Incredible Experience Within the Secret Space Program
New Insider Reveals His Incredible Experiences Within the Secret Space Program
This refers to an existing organization known as the “Secret Space Program”. Jason Rice, has provided a disclosure of that program, what he revealed means that the Secret Space Program is not a secret any more.
Jason Rice was a member of a Secret Space Program. He has stated that he is coming forward now to disclose that there are thousands of other people who are also involved with this program that is known as “20 and Back”.
He feels that the stories of some who gave their lives for humanity and have not come back need to be told.
A small asteroid has been caught in the process of spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.
Images from Hubble show two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478) Gault. Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid gently shed its material — key evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart.
The asteroid 6478 Gault is seen with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showing two narrow, comet-like tails of debris that tell us that the asteroid is slowly undergoing self-destruction. The bright streaks surrounding the asteroid are background stars. The Gault asteroid is located 214 million miles from the Sun, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Meech and J. Kleyna (University of Hawaii), O. Hainaut
(European Southern Observatory)
Discovered in 1988, the 2.5-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) asteroid has been observed repeatedly, but the debris tails are the first evidence of disintegration. Gault is located 214 million miles (344 million kilometers) from the Sun. Of the roughly 800,000 known asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers estimate that this type of event in the asteroid belt is rare, occurring roughly once a year.
Watching an asteroid become unglued gives astronomers the opportunity to study the makeup of these space rocks without sending a spacecraft to sample them.
This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the gradual self-destruction of an asteroid, whose ejected dusty material has formed two long, thin, comet-like tails. The longer tail stretches more than 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) and is roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide. The shorter tail is about a quarter as long. The streamers will eventually disperse into space.
Credits: NASA, ESA, K. Meech and J. Kleyna (University of Hawaii), and O. Hainaut (European Southern Observatory)
“We didn’t have to go to Gault,” explained Olivier Hainaut of the European Southern Observatory in Germany, a member of the Gault observing team. “We just had to look at the image of the streamers, and we can see all of the dust grains well-sorted by size. All the large grains (about the size of sand particles) are close to the object and the smallest grains (about the size of flour grains) are the farthest away because they are being pushed fastest by pressure from sunlight.”
Gault is only the second asteroid whose disintegration has been strongly linked to a process known as a YORP effect. (YORP stands for “Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack,” the names of four scientists who contributed to the concept.) When sunlight heats an asteroid, infrared radiation escaping from its warmed surface carries off angular momentum as well as heat. This process creates a tiny torque that can cause the asteroid to continually spin faster. When the resulting centrifugal force starts to overcome gravity, the asteroid’s surface becomes unstable, and landslides may send dust and rubble drifting into space at a couple miles per hour, or the speed of a strolling human. The researchers estimate that Gault could have been slowly spinning up for more than 100 million years.
Piecing together Gault’s recent activity is an astronomical forensics investigation involving telescopes and astronomers around the world. All-sky surveys, ground-based telescopes, and space-based facilities like the Hubble Space Telescope pooled their efforts to make this discovery possible.
The initial clue was the fortuitous detection of the first debris tail, observed on Jan. 5, 2019, by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Hawaii. The tail also turned up in archival data from December 2018 from ATLAS and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) telescopes in Hawaii. In mid-January, a second shorter tail was spied by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and the Isaac Newton Telescope in Spain, as well as by other observers. An analysis of both tails suggests the two dust events occurred around Oct. 28 and Dec. 30, 2018.
Follow-up observations with the William Herschel Telescope and ESA’s (European Space Agency) Optical Ground Station in La Palma and Tenerife, Spain, and the Himalayan Chandra Telescope in India measured a two-hour rotation period for the object, close to the critical speed at which a loose “rubble-pile” asteroid begins to break up.
“Gault is the best ‘smoking gun’ example of a fast rotator right at the two-hour limit,” said team member Jan Kleyna of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
An analysis of the asteroid’s surrounding environment by Hubble revealed no signs of more widely distributed debris, which rules out the possibility of a collision with another asteroid causing the outbursts.
The asteroid’s narrow streamers suggest that the dust was released in short bursts, lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days. These sudden events puffed away enough debris to make a “dirt ball” approximately 500 feet (150 meters) across if compacted together. The tails will begin fading away in a few months as the dust disperses into interplanetary space.
Based on observations by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope, the astronomers estimate that the longer tail stretches over half a million miles (800,000 kilometers) and is roughly 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide. The shorter tail is about a quarter as long.
Only a couple of dozen active asteroids have been found so far. Astronomers may now have the capability to detect many more of them because of the enhanced survey capabilities of observatories such as Pan-STARRS and ATLAS, which scan the entire sky. “Asteroids such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore,” Hainaut said. “That means that all these asteroids that start misbehaving get caught.”
The researchers hope to monitor Gault for more dust events.
The team’s results have been accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
Contacts and sources:
Donna Weaver / Ray Villard Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
When a current or former world leader professes a belief in UFOs, the public ponders about their sanity and about what they might really know concerning the cause of unidentified flying objects. When that world leader also warns about potentially catastrophic extraterrestrial invasions, ears and antennas both go up. That was the case last week in Poland, when former Polish president and head of the Solidarity movement Lech Walesa pontificated on UFOs, aliens and their role in the potential demise of Earth as we know it.
Lech Walesa
“There are three levels of intellectual development on other galaxies. We are the lowest. And the higher civilization comes as a UFO and others, and looks at what they are doing here. If we threaten to destabilize here with Macron, Putin there, they will interrupt us, cut us in half, the Earth will collapse, everyone will crush.”
Multiple Polishmedia sources reported on a speech Walesa made to a civic club in Krosno, an ancient city in southwestern Poland. While not there to talk about UFOs, Lech wandered off the script (as world leaders seem to do a lot these days) and worked UFOs and “higher civilizations” into the conversation. While he doesn’t seem to have spoken publicly about his belief in UFOs and aliens, his comments suggest he’s of the opinion that they’re the type that’s observing us without interference (the ‘zoo’ theory) but will move in if they feel the need. Then he warns that actions by current politicians (French president Emmanuel Macron and Russian president Vladimir Putin) could trigger just such a decision by a higher civilization of watchers. Walesa believes their interference would not be benevolent and the consequences would be long-lasting. (If you understand Polish, you can watch the entire speech here. The UFO comments begin at 1h 04m 56 sec.)
“(The higher civilization (can hold us that way for five thousand years. They will send Adam and Eve and we will build the world again.”
It also appears from his comments that Walesa at least considers the possibility that an alien civilization has interfered with humans before.
“People find things, dig in stones, these pyramids … no answer, where did it come from?”
Why didn’t the higher civilization interfere with this?
Does Lech Walesa know something we don’t? While there’s no indication that he himself has had a UFO or alien encounter, Poland has had a number of them. The most famous is the so-called Emilcin incident in 1978 when a farmer from that eastern Polish town allegedly met olive-skinned aliens who took him onboard their ship. Polish UFO researcher and author Piotr Cielebiaś says there were plenty of reports of alien encounters by military pilots until Poland joined NATO in 1999. Walesa was president from December 1990 to December 1995 so he undoubtedly was aware of these reports.
Why did Lech Walesa feel the need to talk about UFOs and extraterrestrial invasions now? What does he REALLY know?
Another month has passed, and the mystery boom phenomenon continues without a definitive explanation. Throughout March, several incidents of unexplained explosion noises have added to the already large and still growing body of evidence suggesting either an unknown natural occurrence or some type of unidentified man made activity is leading to these loud, powerful, and anomalous noises. I’ve collectedhundreds of reports of these mystery boomsover the past few years in an attempt to discover what may be behind the phenomenon, but so far an explanation remains elusive. Are these separate events actually related? And why aren’t they receiving more attention?
On March 7, residents of Block Island in the U.S. state of Rhode Island were rattled by what was described as an “unexplained boom” early in the morning of Friday, March 1. Sound familiar? Some Block Islanders reported the noise was so loud that they thought something could have exploded inside of their own homes. While scores of residents reported being terrified by the noise, The Block Island Times reports that theories put forth on local social media sites “were mostly whimsical,” with most eyewitnesses choosing to crack jokes about the sky-splitting noise. As has been noted throughout ufology circles for years, joking about something being “aliens” is a great way to discredit those who take the phenomenon seriously. Could someone be leveraging social media to actively discourage serious research into mystery booms?
A few days later on March 6, another eerily familiar boom shook the northern Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. The U.S. Geographical Survey said the event was not an earthquake, while meteorologists with the National Weather Service reported that there were no weather conditions that could explain the boom. According to the Coastal Review Online, the boom was heard over a broad area, making it unlikely that a singular sonic boom from an aircraft overhead could have caused it. As in many other cases, some type of unknown atmospheric temperature inversion was cited as a possible cause, although there is little hard evidence to support that speculation.
The next day on March 8, another mysterious boom described as a “loud explosion” was heard throughout Liberty, Ohio. “You could feel it like a shock wave,” one Liberty resident told emergency dispatchers after calling 911. “It knocked me out of bed.” Fire crews at the Liberty Fire Station also felt the boom, reporting that the entire fire station shook. So far, the cause of the boom has not been found.
No further booms were reported until March 22, when several cities near Birmingham, Alabama were rattled by a massive explosion in the sky. Like in North Carolina, the U.S. Geological Survey and National Weather Service were baffled. The typical hypotheses were put forward, after which the story was buried by the news cycle as in so many other cases.
In Sacracmento, California, residents of Fair Oaks reportthey’ve have been shaken from their beds at night in recent months by powerful, unexplained booms strong enough to set off car alarms. With no official explanation, people are throwing around all sorts of theories including weather phenomena and secret SpaceX launches. Meanwhile, local police believe the booms are being caused by illegal fireworks.
On March 26, a loud boom shook southern Idaho, the latest in a recent spate of similar booms. According to local radio station KEZJ, the booms are being caused by munitions testing at the nearby Mountain Home Air Force Base.
Also on March 26, North Carolina experienced another mysterious event, but this time whatever happened was powerful enough to register on seismographs. Several counties in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina were rattled by an eerily familiar boom. “I’ll tell you right now, that was the loudest — it shook the whole damn house partner,” one frightened caller told police dispatchers as emergency services in the area were inundated with calls about the boom.
Shortly thereafter, the USGS reported recording two separate 2.6-magnitude earthquakes throughout the state, one of which was not far from the site of several other mysterious booms heard throughout 2018 for which conflicting explanations were offered. While this most recent boom could possibly be explained by seismic activity, there is always the possibility that whatever caused the boom wasn’t an earthquake per se but was powerful enough to rattle the ground and register on seismographs.
Many aerospace agencies and military branches have been researching hypersonic craft and weapons over the last several years. Could they have anything to do with the phenomenon?
While I normally wouldn’t jump to conclusions without evidence, the spate of other similar events in recent weeks makes this earthquake explanation seem incomplete to me. Then again, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy, seeing things in the cracks between seemingly disparate news stories and trends which may not really be there. Whatever the case may be, I and other Mysterious Universe writers have been tracking these reports week after week for years, and we’re not alone. Many readers have reached out to me in recent months with their own experiences with mystery booms or their own theories on the phenomenon. Are these incidents in fact related, or could many separate phenomena or forces be causing these booms? If that’s the case, why are so many reports so similar, and why are they occurring with such frequency lately?
So many questions. Are unknown seismic events violently rattling the Earth, or could unknown aircraft be wantonly breaking the sound barrier over residential areas? Is an unknown atmospheric or meteorological forces causing ‘skyquakes’ or other anomalous disturbances, or could industrial operations be to blame? Meteors? Psychological warfare? Aliens? Anybody’s guess is as good as anyone else’s at this point (but it’s likely not aliens).
Although it’s great news that these species have been rediscovered, the question still remains: why are these supposedly “extinct” animals suddenly reappearing? Were they even extinct in the first place? According to the IUCN Red List, a species is only listed as extinct when “…there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died.” It’s also required that “…exhaustive surveys in known and/or expected habitat, at appropriate times… throughout its historic range [which] have failed to record an individual. Surveys should be over a time frame appropriate to the taxon’s life cycle and life form.”
Galápagos giant tortoise
The last time that people see a certain species is often calculated in the decision on whether it is in fact extinct or not, and that’s not entirely correct, as many species are very elusive and prefer to stay away from populated areas and people in general. So, just because they haven’t been seen in several years, doesn’t mean that they are extinct. Sightings can come in many forms, from actually seeing the species face-to-face, or capturing a picture of it, t more indirect evidence like footprints or people retelling stories of their encounters.
What’s even more confusing is the fact that the word “rediscovered” means that someone or something was lost or forgotten about, but we also interpret it as returning from the dead. As for the Fernandina Island Galápagos tortoise, although it hadn’t been spotted since the early 1900s, footprints, bite marks on pear cacti, and tortoise faeces had been discovered as recently as 2013. In 2015, it was declared “Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct), and apparently species are presumed extinct until it is proven that they are still living.
And while Wallace’s giant bee hadn’t been seen in 38 years, it was listed as “Data Deficient” and more recently as “Vulnerable”, but never as an extinct species. One of the species, however, that was listed as Extinct was the Formosan clouded leopard, as many hunters said they hadn’t seen the animal and no footage was ever captured from the several cameras in the area.
Clouded leopard
The giant tortoise and bee were declared alive after living specimens were discovered, but the clouded leopard’s existence is still uncertain as there have only been eyewitness testimonies so far and no solid proof.
I believe it’s only a matter of time before several more “extinct” species are suddenly “rediscovered”. Since pretty much everyone nowadays has a cell phone with video/photo options, and many others fly drones in wooded areas, it’s very possible that more eyewitnesses will come forward with video and/or photographic proof. And maybe not, since some species just want to be left alone in their secret locations, safely hidden away from humans.
On December 9, 2014, in Capilla del Monte Argentina, a woman named Cele who was on vacation near a site called the clods 9 km from the chapel of the Argentine mountain when she captured with her cell phone a sphere of light following the car in the back.
Although the amazing video was shot in 2014, this phenomenon is still something that is not understood.
The video comes from the well known UFO researcher Maussan and is subtitled in English.
Now I wanted to check an old discovery of mine back from 2013-14 to see if it was still there. You see, NASA has deleted about 50% of my discoveries from their archives. Google Map has deleted about 80% of my discoveries from their maps. So I try hard to keep up and keep the public aware. This is really an incredible structure. The round dome is the main part, but there are three other connecting structures that just make this one of the most important pieces of evidence to date. You may have seen others reporting this long ago, they got it from me. I do share my info freely. Only by sharing wholeheartedly can the UFO community unite and grow. Feel free to use my videos on your own channel. I do not have Adsense on my Youtube or my UFO Sightings Daily site. I probably would've made hundreds of thousands of US dollars by now, but I would have been manipulated by money instead of passion. I have seen others doing it only for the money, reporting fake sightings, even making their own sightings and videos. Money creates power and power corrupts. That I cannot have. Knowledge is true power...and meant to be free for all. Scott C. Waring
Some researchers became more convinced that the foo fighters had then simply been hallucinations.
The name “foo fighters” has become synonymous with Dave Grohl’s rock band of that name, but prior to the late 1990s, when the band Foo Fighters achieved worldwide fame, the name “foo fighter” was primarily known only in conspiracy theory circles or UFO research groups.
It refers to mysterious flying objects sighted by pilots in the last few years of the Second World War – objects variously described as glowing red, orange, yellow or white balls of light, or balls of fire – that seemed to appear out of nowhere, flew with aircraft in formation, and conducted aerial maneuvers that no aircraft could have performed.
Sometimes they were described as orbs, sometimes as cigar-shaped. Sightings of foo fighters were primarily reported by Allied pilots flying over Western Europe, but similar sightings were also reported by German and Japanese pilots. To this day, nobody knows exactly what they were.
Photograph of “an unusual atmospheric occurrence observed over Sri Lanka”, forwarded to the UK Ministry of Defence by RAF Fylingdales
The first sightings of foo fighters were reported in November 1944 by American pilots of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. The first plane to report a foo fighter sighting was piloted by Lieutenant Edward Schlueter. Lieutenant Donald Meiers was the radar observer and Lieutenant Fred Ringwald was the intelligence officer onboard.
They were flying over the French-German border when Ringwald spotted a row of eight to ten lights, glowing orange. He called ground radar to see if they were enemy aircraft, but they couldn’t pick anything up. Suspecting that the lights were some sort of new German weapon, they prepared to engage them – but then the lights vanished.
415th Night Fighter Squadron Northrop P-61 Black Widow
The strange lights were given a name by Meiers: foo fighters. The term “foo” was taken from a popular comic strip of the time, called Smokey Stover. In the comic strip, the character Smokey (a firefighter) used to say “where there’s foo there’s fire.” Meier’s use of the name “foo fighters” stuck, and after this, that was the term used to describe these strange phenomena.
Over the next few months, reports continued to pour in of foo fighter sightings, many of which were seen by pilots of the 415th.
While the description of what they looked like sometimes varied, what was always consistent about the sightings was that the foo fighters seemed to be under some sort of intelligent control, were spectacularly maneuverable, impossible to shoot down or outmaneuver, not hostile (they never once attacked or made any attempt to attack or damage the aircraft that sighted them), and that they both appeared out of nowhere and then vanished into thin air.
Sightings were not only reported by the 415th, of course. The foo fighters were also observed by members of the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force.
An Associated Press war correspondent spoke to airmen of the 415th toward the end of 1944, and soon the story he penned about foo fighter sightings was appearing in newspapers across America.
A number of explanations were put forth to explain the phenomenon – they ranged from the more prosaic, such as the suggestion that the pilots had simply seen weather balloons or were suffering from battle fatigue and thus having hallucinations, to the more outlandish, such as suggestions that the foo fighters were visitors from outer space.
Diorama of a Nazi Foo-Fighter by G. W. Dodson, Roswell UFO Museum, Roswell, New Mexico, USA.
Photo: mr_t_77 CC BY-SA 2.0
Suggestions were made that it was some sort of electrical discharge stimulated by atmospheric conditions, similar to St Elmo’s fire, but given the nature of how the foo fighters moved and conducted aerial maneuvers, this was ruled out.
It was also suspected, of course, that the foo fighters were some sort of hitherto-unseen secret German weapons, but this seemed rather unlikely, given that they never attacked the Allied aircraft or did any damage to them.
St. Elmo’s fire on a ship at sea
These foo fighter sightings eventually became so widespread that the US Army Air Command put together a panel of officers to conduct an official investigation into the phenomenon. The report which detailed the panel’s eventual findings, however, was lost after the war.
The sightings also contributed to the US Navy investigating in 1945 the degree of visual hallucinations experienced by aviators operating at night, for which they conducted a number of experiments.
Some researchers became more convinced that the foo fighters had then simply been hallucinations, even though the airmen who had sighted them were known to have been utterly sound of mind and not under any kind of extreme stress at the time they reported the sightings.
Photograph of an alleged UFO in Passaic, New Jersey, taken on July 31, 1952.
While the frequency of foo fighter sightings died out toward the end of the war, sightings of “flying saucers” and UFOs by civilians throughout the continental US (and the rest of the world) soon became a widespread cultural phenomenon in the decades following WWII.
As for the foo fighters of the Second World War, they remain an unexplained mystery, and we are no closer to understanding what they really were now than were the airmen who saw them in 1944 and 1945.
Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study
Are we alone? Unfortunately, neither of the answers feel satisfactory. To be alone in this vast universe is a lonely prospect. On the other hand, if we are not alone and there is someone or something more powerful out there, that too is terrifying.
As a NASA research scientist and now a professor of physics, I attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “You have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in. Humans are fearful of extraterrestrials visiting Earth. Perhaps fortunately, the distances between the stars are prohibitively vast. At least this is what we novices, who are just learning to travel into space, tell ourselves.
Cover of the October 1957 issue of pulp science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. This was a special edition devoted to ‘flying saucers,’ which became a national obsession after airline pilot Kenneth Arnold sighted a saucer-shaped flying objects in 1947.
I have always been interested in UFOs. Of course, there was the excitement that there could be aliens and other living worlds. But more exciting to me was the possibility that interstellar travel was technologically achievable. In 1988, during my second week of graduate school at Montana State University, several students and I were discussing a recent cattle mutilation that was associated with UFOs. A physics professor joined the conversation and told us that he had colleagues working at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where they were having problems with UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. At the time I thought this professor was talking nonsense. But 20 years later, I was stunned to see a recording of a press conference featuring several former US Air Force personnel, with a couple from Malmstrom AFB, describing similar occurrences in the 1960s. Clearly there must be something to this.
With July 2 being World UFO Day, it is a good time for society to address the unsettling and refreshing fact we may not be alone. I believe we need to face the possibility that some of the strange flying objects that outperform the best aircraft in our inventory and defy explanation may indeed be visitors from afar – and there’s plenty of evidence to support UFO sightings.
The Fermi paradox
The nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi was famous for posing thought provoking questions. In 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory after discussing UFOs over lunch, Fermi asked, “Where is everybody?” He estimated there were about 300 billion stars in the galaxy, many of them billions of years older than the sun, with a large percentage of them likely to host habitable planets. Even if intelligent life developed on a very small percentage of these planets, then there should be a number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Depending on the assumptions, one should expect anywhere from tens to tens of thousands of civilizations.
With the rocket-based technologies that we have developed for space travel, it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. Since this should have happened several times already in the history of our galaxy, one should wonder where is the evidence of these civilizations? This discrepancy between the expectation that there should be evidence of alien civilizations or visitations and the presumption that no visitations have been observed has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
This photograph was taken in Wallonia, Belgium.
J.S. Henrardi
Carl Sagan correctly summarized the situation by saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem is that there has been no single well-documented UFO encounter that would alone qualify as the smoking gun. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that many governments around the world have covered upand classifiedinformation aboutsuch encounters. But there are enough scraps of evidence that suggest that the problem needs to be open to scientific study.
UFOs, taboo for professional scientists
When it comes to science, the scientific method requires hypotheses to be testable so that inferences can be verified. UFO encounters are neither controllable nor repeatable, which makes their study extremely challenging. But the real problem, in my view, is that the UFO topic is taboo.
While the general public has been fascinated with UFOs for decades, our governments, scientists and media, have essentially declared that of all the UFO sightings are a result of weather phenomenon or human actions. None are actually extraterrestrial spacecraft. And no aliens have visited Earth. Essentially, we are told that the topic is nonsense. UFOs are off-limits to serious scientific study and rational discussion, which unfortunately leaves the topic in the domain of fringe and pseudoscientists, many of whom litter the field with conspiracy theories and wild speculation.
I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy. A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted. The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.
The media amplifies the skepticism by publishing information about UFOs when it is exciting, but always with a mocking or whimsical tone and reassuring the public that it can’t possibly be true. But there are credible witnesses and encounters.
Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?
I am often asked by friends and colleagues, “Why don’t astronomers see UFOs?” The fact is that they do. In 1977, Peter Sturrock, a professor of space science and astrophysics at Stanford University, mailed 2,611 questionnaires about UFO sightings to members of the American Astronomical Society. He received 1,356 responses from which 62 astronomers – 4.6 percent – reported witnessing or recording inexplicable aerial phenomena. This rate is similar to the approximately 5 percent of UFO sightings that are never explained.
As expected, Sturrock found that astronomers who witnessed UFOs were more likely to be night sky observers. Over 80 percent of Sturrock’s respondents were willing to study the UFO phenomenon if there was a way to do so. More than half of them felt that the topic deserves to be studied versus 20 percent who felt that it should not. The survey also revealed that younger scientists were more likely to support the study of UFOs.
UFOs have been observed through telescopes. I know of one telescope sighting by an experienced amateur astronomer in which he observed an object shaped like a guitar pick moving through the telescope’s field of view. Further sightings are documented in the book “Wonders in the Sky,” in which the authors compile numerous observations of unexplained aerial phenomena made by astronomers and published in scientific journals throughout the 1700s and 1800s.
Evidence from government and military officers
Some of the most convincing observations have come from government officials. In 1997, the Chilean government formed the organization Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos, or CEFAA, to study UFOs. Last year, CEFAA released footage of a UFO taken with a helicopter-mounted Wescam infrared camera.
Declassified document describing a sighting of a UFO in December 1977, in Bahia, a state in northern Brazil.Arquivo Nacional Collection
The countries of Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom have been declassifying their UFO files since 2008. The French Committee for In-Depth Studies, or COMETA, was an unofficial UFO study group comprised of high-ranking scientists and military officials that studied UFOs in the late 1990s. They released the COMETA Report, which summarized their findings. They concluded that 5 percent of the encounters were reliable yet inexplicable: The best hypothesis available was that the observed craft were extraterrestrial. They also accused the United States of covering up evidence of UFOs. Iran has been concerned about spherical UFOs observed near nuclear power facilities that they call “CIA drones” which reportedly are about 30 feet in diameter, can achieve speeds up to Mach 10, and can leave the atmosphere. Such speeds are on par with the fastest experimental aircraft, but unthinkable for a sphere without lift surfaces or an obvious propulsion mechanism.
In December 2017, The New York Times broke a story about the classified Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, which was a $22 million program run by the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and aimed at studying UFOs. Elizondo resigned from running the program protesting extreme secrecy and the lack of funding and support. Following his resignation Elizondo, along with several others from the defense and intelligence community, were recruited by the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which was recently founded by Tom DeLonge to study UFOs and interstellar travel. In conjunction with the launch of the academy, the Pentagon declassified and released three videos of UFO encounters taken with forward looking infrared cameras mounted on F-18 fighter jets. While there is much excitement about such disclosures, I am reminded of a quote from Retired Army Colonel John Alexander: “Disclosure has happened. … I’ve got stacks of generals, including Soviet generals, who’ve come out and said UFOs are real. My point is, how many times do senior officials need to come forward and say that this is real?”
A topic worthy of serious study
There is a great deal of evidence that a small percentage of these UFO sightings are unidentified structured craft exhibiting flight capabilities beyond any known human technology. While there is no single case for which there exists evidence that would stand up to scientific rigor, there are cases with simultaneous observations by multiple reliable witnesses, along with radar returns and photographic evidence revealing patterns of activity that are compelling.
Declassified information from covert studies is interesting, but not scientifically helpful. This is a topic worthy of open scientific inquiry, until there is a scientific consensus based on evidence rather than prior expectation or belief. If there are indeed extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth, it would greatly benefit us to know about them, their nature and their intent. Moreover, this would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.
Dr. Kevin Knuth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University at Albany (SUNY), and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Entropy (MDPI). He is a former NASA research scientist having worked for four years at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division designing artificial intelligence algorithms for astrophysical data analysis. His current research interests include the foundations of physics, quantum information, inference and inquiry, autonomous robotics, and the search for and characterization of extrasolar planets. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has been invited to give over 80 presentations in 14 countries.
Kevin was also a recent presenter at the Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena Conference (AAPC) hosted by the Scientific Coalition for Ufology (SCU) held near the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Kevin’s talk was titled, “Constraints on Societies Engaged in Relativistic Interstellar Travel,” and covered the odd spacetime effects this sort of travel would entail. In this episode, Kevin discusses the effects individuals traveling in this manner would experience, and the odd effects and problems that would occur with a group traveling in this manner interacting with others. We also discuss Kevin’s experience and thoughts on how the scientific community views the UFO topic.
Scientists are trying to bottle solar energy and turn it into liquid fuel
"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity you put sunlight in and get heat out."
Professor Kasper Moth-Poulsen holding a tube containing the catalyst in front of the ultra-high-vacuum setup that was used to measure the heat release gradient in the molecular solar thermal energy storage system.
Johan Bodell
By Wayt Gibbs
What if we couldbottle solar energyso it could be used to power our homes and factories even when the sun doesn't shine?
Scientists have spent decades looking for a way do just that, and now researchers in Sweden are reporting significant progress. They've developed aspecialized fluid that absorbs a bit of sunlight's energy, holds it for months or even years and then releases it when needed. If this so-called solar thermal fuel can be perfected, it mightdrive another nail in the coffin of fossil fuels — and help solve our global-warming crisis.
Unlike oil, coal and natural gas, solar thermal fuels are reusable and environmentally friendly. They release energy without spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand," says Jeffrey Grossman, who leads a lab at MIT that works on such materials.
A MOLECULAR JEKYLL AND HYDE
On the roof of the physics building at Chalmers University of Technology in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Kasper Moth-Poulsen has built a prototype system to test the new solar thermal fuels his research group has created.
As a pump cycles the fluid through transparent tubes, ultraviolet light from the sun excites its molecules into an energized state, a bit like Dr. Jekyll transforming into Mr. Hyde. The light rearranges bonds among the carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in the fuel, converting a compound known as norbornadiene into another called quadricyclane — the energetic Mr. Hyde version. Because the energy is trapped in strong chemical bonds, the quadricyclane retains the captured solar power even when it cools down.
The energy system works in a circular manner. First, the liquid captures energy from sunlight, in a solar thermal collector on the roof of a building. Then it is stored at room temperature. When the energy is needed, it can be drawn through the catalyst so that the liquid heats up.Yen Strandqvist
To extract that stored energy, Moth-Poulsen passes the activated fuel over a cobalt-based catalyst. The Hyde-like quadricyclane molecules then shapeshift back into their Jekyll form, norbornadiene. The transformation releases copious amounts of heat — enough to raise the fuel's temperature by 63 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).
If the fuel starts at room temperature (about 21 degrees C, or 70 degrees F), it quickly warms to around 84 degrees C (183 degrees F) — easily hot enough to heat a house or office.
"You could use that thermal energy for your water heater, your dishwasher or your clothes dryer," Grossman says. "There could be lots of industrial applications as well." Low-temperature heat used for cooking, sterilization, bleaching, distillation and other commercial operations accounts for 7 percent of all energy consumption in the European Union, Moth-Poulsen says.
A- solar thermal fuel could be stored in uninsulated tanks inside houses or factories — or perhaps piped or trucked between solar farms and cities. Very little of the fuel or the catalyst is damaged by the reactions, so the system can operate in a closed loop, picking up solar energy and dropping off heat again and again. "We've run it though 125 cycles without any significant degradation," Moth-Poulsen says.
HEAT WITHOUT FIRE
Moth-Poulsen has calculated that the best variant of his fuel can store up to 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram. Pound for pound, that's roughly twice the energy capacity of the Tesla Powerwall batteries that some homeowners and utilities now use to store electricity generated by solar panels.
"I'm very excited by what Kasper is doing," Grossman says of the research. After a burst of work on norbornadiene fuels in the 1970s, he says, chemists were stymied. The fuels kept breaking down after a few cycles. They didn't hold their energy very long, and they had to be mixed with toxic solvents that diluted the energy-grabbing fuel. Moth-Poulsen "has gone back to that molecule and is using state-of-the-art tools to fix it," Grossman says.
The new results, published in a series of scientific papers over the past year, have caught the attention of investors. Moth-Poulsen says numerous companies have contacted him to discuss the potential for commercialization.
FROM PROTOTYPE TO PRODUCT
For all the promise of solar thermal fuels, years of development lie ahead. "We've made a lot of progress," Moth-Poulsen says, "but there is still a lot to figure out."
A crucial next step will be to develop a single fuel that combines the best characteristics of the many fuel variants the Chalmers team has developed — including long shelf life, high energy density and good recyclability.
Wei Feng, who leads a research group working on solar thermal fuels at China's Tianjin University, points to solvent-free operation as another "big challenge for future commercialization."
Moth-Poulsen's prototype fuels are made via common industrial processes and from widely available industrial agents, including derivatives of acetylene. But it's unclear how much a commercial version of the fuel would cost.
One important factor in the cost will be the fuel's efficiency, which currently is quite low. The prototype fuels respond only to the shortest wavelengths of sunlight, including ultraviolet and blue, which account for just 5 percent of the solar energy available. Moth-Poulsen says he's working to extend the fuel's sensitivity to include more of the spectrum.
He's also aiming to break his own record of a 63-degree C temperature increase. When that heat is added to water that has been preheated to 40 degrees C or more by conventional solar collectors, he says, "That's just enough to boil water into steam." The steam could then drive turbines to make electricity. But with more tweaks to the chemical structure, he says, "I think we could push [the temperature increase] to 80 degrees C or higher." For electricity generation, hotter is better.
"When I started, there was really only one research group working on these kinds of systems," the 40-year-old Moth-Poulsen recalls. But progress has drawn others to the challenge. "Now there are teams in the U.S., in China, in Germany — about 15 around the world," he says.
A UFOseen plummeting towards Earth has left US Air Force bosses baffled.
Footage, filmed in Anchorage in the US state of Alaska, shows what looks like two plumes of black smoke trailing a mysterious object, which appears to have a light guiding its way.
A variety of military aircraft operate out of the nearby Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, but spokeswoman Erin Eaton said the sighting was nothing to do with them.
"That doesn't look like any of our planes," she said.
Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration added that the object in the video was not an aircraft, and that it hadn't received any reports of aviation issues at the time.
The bizarre object was spotted in the sky above Alaska, USA(Image: Pen News)
But some experts still think a plane is the likeliest explanation.
Peter Davidson, director of the Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center, said that the video showed "a high-altitude jet airliner, with a contrail behind it".
"It is in level flight, but because it is flying away from the camera, it appears to be falling," he said.
"It is not, but parallax makes it look that way."
Adonus Baugh, who shot the video, was not convinced.
The 18-year-old said the object looked like something coming into the atmosphere.
Eyewitnesses say it looked like it was a meteor or something coming into the atmosphere(Image: Pen News)
"Me and my mom were just coming in to the parking lot of our house and that's when I noticed that something was falling from the sky," he said.
"I thought it was a meteor or something coming into the atmosphere.
"I actually never saw something like this before."
Another witness, Bebe Kang, agreed: "It didn't look like an airplane or one of those jets. It was big, super slow and red.
"I really just thought it might be an asteroid."
Aircraft operating out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson include F-22 Raptor stealth fighters, C-130 Hercules and C-17 Globemaster III transports, and E-3 Sentry AWACS command jets.
USS Nimitz UFO incident took place during November of 2004 when U.S. fighter pilots encountered an unidentified flying object, which later become known as “tic-tac”. In 2017 the footage of the occurrence was released to the public and became one of the most hotly discussed topics among ufologists.
The video itself does not offer a clear image, due to the nature of radar systems. However, there are several factors that make this case one of the most fascinating studies in the field. Firstly, the existence of an audio recording of pilots experiencing the visual contact the object. Secondly, Interview given by one of the pilots. Thirdly, a report was done by Washington post about Department of Defense’s operations to analyze the sighting and was later confirmed by the Pentagon itself, giving the sighting more legitimacy.
David Fravor, a Navy Pilot with decades of experience, is the centerpiece of USS Nimitz UFO incident. His skepticism in the subject quickly evaporated, when the training mission encountered something that could not be explained. Skeptics often explain such events by a secretive technology being tested, weather balloons, or unreliability of the witnesses. None of them applies to this eye witness.
Not only would he be aware of something that could be explained by our current technologic capabilities, but also the routine nature of their training operations would make the area unsuitable for any testing by different military branches. This also makes him immune to the claims of him not being able to differentiate something as mundane as a weather balloon, natural occurrence or mechanical dysfunction from UFO.
One of the main reasons that cause the USS Nimitz UFO incident to be a fascinating study is its continuous nature. The encounter with “tic-tac” was not a one-off incident. US Navy was following the unknown object for almost two weeks. At one point over 8 objects were seen on the radar. This was not some sort of the glitch on a radar system of the single ship. This was an organized operation by a fleet of ships to track down an unknown intruder.
The occurrence, in which David Fravor took part in when he and several other pilots directly encountered the UFO was a culmination of the chase. However, even after that event, several anomalies on the ocean surface where seen. Some point looked disturbed as if something has been hovering over them, however, no further visual contact was made. What truly transpired during USS Nimitz UFO incident is debated till this day. Several things are known for certain, the U.S. Navy fleet deemed the occurrence noteworthy enough to initiate the chase, which lasted for two weeks. No one who took the part in it can give an explanation of what happened.
David Fravor, a veteran Navy pilot was shaken by the incident and after 2 years retired from the navy. He said that after his jet returned to the carrier, his description of the events were ridiculed by his colleagues. What showed up on U.S. fleets radars for two weeks and what managed to evade most sophisticated military in the world, remains a mystery till this day.
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un gigantesque “Vaisseau Mère bloque le soleil’ dans une vidéo de SpaceX
Un astronome aux yeux de faucon a repéré un objet mystérieux bloquant une partie du soleil lors du feed en direct de SpaceX.
Les images montrent ce qui semble être un grand objet sombre qui bloque une grande partie du soleil.
Le chaîne complotiste The Grimreefar a trouvé le point noir en regardant en direct le satellite Es’hail-2, qui a été lancé à bord de la SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket la semaine dernière.
En parlant de l’objet, ils ont dit : “À mon avis, si c’était un objet bloquant le soleil, il serait trop grand pour être compris.”
La vidéo a été visionnée des centaines de fois depuis qu’elle a été publiée hier, et des théoriciens ont affirmé que l’objet pourrait être extraterrestre.
Une personne a écrit : “c’est un vaisseau mère extraterrestre. Si énorme.”
Un autre a fait des commentaires : “C’est un objet massif ! Dieu seul le sait !”
“Peut-être que certains fanatiques religieux ont raison ? Peut-être qu’il y a une guerre dans les cieux.”
Un troisième s’étonne : “C’est beaucoup trop grand pour être une tache solaire, alors qu’est-ce que c’est ? Ça ne peut pas être un astéroïde massif, c’est si bizarre.”
C’est la deuxième observation étrange depuis le lancement de la fusée Falcon 9 dans l’espace le 15 novembre.
Juste après le lancement, les téléspectateurs ont affirmé avoir vu le tristement célèbre satellite Black Knight se déplacer sur leurs écrans.
Pas plus tard que la semaine dernière, les autorités américaines ont autorisé SpaceX d’Elon Musk à mettre en orbite une constellation de 12 000 satellites.
À ce sujet, Musk a dit : “Le diable est dans les détails, et SpaceX semble repousser les limites de ce qui a déjà été fait sur plusieurs fronts simultanément.”
Russia's military-industrial complex has developed the Avangard strategic intercontinental ballistic missile system equipped with a gliding hypersonic maneuvering warhead. Credit: Getty Images
Both the United States and Russia last monthpulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty(INF), a Cold War–era pact that prohibited land-based ballistic or cruise missiles with ranges between 311 and 3,420 miles. That agreement limited just one class of weapons, but it is not the only accord poised to end: The much-broader New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) will expire on February 5 next year, unless both parties agree to extend it—whichthey may not do.
New START limits the number of missiles the U.S. and Russia deploy, with an eye toward reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world. Without it, for the first time since 1972 there would be no limit on how many warheads either nation can build and deploy. As tensions rise, both countries are looking to modernize their nuclear weapons, and Russia in particular is teasing terrifying new missiles that—if they work—could bypass the U.S.’s elaborate system of ground- and satellite-based defenses.
“The Russians really hate missile defense,” says Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear policy expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “They really don’t like the possibility that they might be outmatched technologically. So there’s a whole battery of Russian programs—from the doomsday torpedoes, to nuclear-powered cruise missiles, to hypersonic reentry vehicles, to anti-satellite weapons.”
Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled six new weaponsduring a governmental address. The most impressive, according to nuclear experts, were the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, the nuclear-powered cruise missile Skyfall and the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). These three are the crown jewels in Russia’s aggressive new nuclear policy, capable—according to Putin—of circumventing U.S. missile defense systems. Currently, American defenses are designed to knock an incoming nuke out of the air before it can hit its target—but this was already a complicated and difficult task before the development of hypersonics.
Although Russia’s new weapons sound frightening, none has actually been deployed yet. They may be ready in the next year or two, but “none of them are fully operational,” says Philip Coyle, a board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Coyle (who has also served as U.S. assistant secretary of defense), explains that some have been tested, but “none of them have been so successful that they can claim to have operational capability.”
But that doesn’t mean Coyle is not worried, especially about hypersonic threats. “Some of those would be impossible for United States missile defense systems [to counter],” he says, “especially the hypersonic air-to-ground-system and the hypersonic glide system, both of which [Putin] said had been successfully tested.” The current crop of weapons that defense experts label as hypersonic reach speeds greater than 3,000 mph.
INSIDE THE NUCLEAR ARSENAL
Other countries, including the United States and China, have also tested hypersonic weapons—but it is Russia’s hypersonic glide vehicle, the Avangard, that has garnered the defense community’s most intense attention. Glide vehicles could theoretically combine the maneuverability of a cruise missile with the speed of an ICBM. On a traditional nuclear launch involving an ICBM, a powerful rocket sends the warhead on a trajectory similar to a space launch (long-range ICBMs even go suborbital) before it turns around and plummets to Earth at hypersonic speeds. Glide vehicles like the Avangard would ride an ICBM into the sky, but they would then be released and soar along at the top of the atmosphere—above sensor range—before heading to their targets.
However, not everyone is fretting about high-speed glide vehicles. “I’m not so impressed by those,” Lewis says. He says the vehicles themselves, once released, will no longer be traveling at hypersonic speeds (although other experts disagree with this assessment). “The missile is gliding, so it actually slows down quite a bit and makes a much better target [than traditional ICBMs] for missiles defenses,” Lewis says. The vehicle could supposedly move to evade a defense system, but Lewis remains unconvinced. “It’s great that it can maneuver so that it doesn’t come into the range of missile defenses. But if it does, it’s going to be a much brighter target because it’s moving more slowly and it’ll be superhot,” he says. “The hypersonic gliders people are talking about actually represent slower reentry than what currently exists.”
Instead Lewis worries more about the Skyfall, the nuclear-powered cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead. “I’m a little bothered by the menagerie of science fiction ideas that the Russians are working on,” he says. “We don’t know much about the technology behind that one (Skyfall), but certainly when the U.S. investigated the idea it was pretty nasty in terms of radiation released just to power it.” According to Putin, the Skyfall is a superpowered Tomahawk cruise missile launched via ground or air. The best Tomahawks can travel 1,550 miles—but with a nuclear reactor powering it, the Skyfall effectively has an unlimited range. Russian military sources reported the country had successfully tested the cruise missile in January 2019; however, U.S. intelligence suggests that it has yet to demonstrate a range greater than 22 miles, and may not reach its full potential for another 10 years.
Still, a radiation-spewing cruise missile with unlimited range is not Russia’s only frightening new weapon. It is also testing the RS-28 Sarmat, a liquid-fueled ICBM designed to brute-force its way through U.S. missile defense systems. The missile is fast, huge—119 feet tall with a weight of more than 220 tons—and full of weapons: It carries a 10-ton payload, big enough to include 24 separate nuclear-tipped Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles.
And the Sarmat is dangerous for reasons beyond its size. According to Coyle it also has a shorter-than-usual boost phase (the period of an ICBM’s launch when it is rocketing into the atmosphere), which gives U.S. missile defenses less time to shoot it down. If a brief launch window is not enough to protect the missile, Coyle says, “[Putin] also said that Sarmat would carry countermeasures designed to confuse U.S. anti-missiles systems.”
The Sarmat’s short boost phase exemplifies what really makes these missiles so terrifying: time. Nuclear warheads are always dangerous, but the U.S. has long relied on its ability to create lead time between launch, detection and response. Essentially, the longer the commander-in-chief has to decide how to react to the news of an ICBM launch, the better. The abilities of these new weapons—short boost times, hypersonic speeds and unlimited range—all eat into those precious minutes. “It’s going to tighten the noose around our necks,” Lewis says. “These systems add complexity and reduce decision time. That’s the kind of change that can really threaten stability.”
Meanwhile, the most recent U.S. Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review promised to develop America’s own hypersonic weapons. The reviews also teased the creation of new sensors, floated the idea of turning the F-35—the new U.S. fighter jet—into an ICBM killer, and suggested developing space-based sensors to augment American missile defense systems. But both reviews were long on theory and short on details. In particular, Coyle says, “The Missile Defense Review is unclear about what it is we would deploy in space.”
However, these protections are still theoretical. At the moment, no one has a concrete solution to the threat—and Russia continues to build and test new and potentially devastating nuclear weapons.
A Physicist Claims He’s Figured Out Why We Haven’t Met Aliens Yet, And It’s Pretty Worrying
A Physicist Claims He’s Figured Out Why We Haven’t Met Aliens Yet, And It’s Pretty Worrying
The question “where is everyone?” is the crux of theFermi Paradox. If life on Earth is not particularly special and unique, where are all the alien civilizations? Many explanations have been proposed to explain why we seem to be alone in the vast universe. None have been 100 percent convincing, and people continue to puzzle over a solution.
According to one scientist, any civilisation that is capable of colonising beyond its own planet 'necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion'
(Stock Image)
Russian physicist Alexander Berezin, from the National Research University of Electronic Technology (MIET), has another idea. He calls it the “First in, last out” solution of the Fermi Paradox. He suggests that once a civilization reaches the capabilities of spreading across the stars, it will inevitably wipe out all other civilizations.
The grim solution doesn’t hypothesize a necessarily evil alien race. Simply, they might not notice us, and their exponential expansion across the galaxy might be more important to them than what would happen to us.
“They simply won’t notice, the same way a construction crew demolishes an anthill to build real estate because they lack incentive to protect it,” he writes in the paper, which is available on pre-print and yet to be peer-reviewed.
While the picture he paints is quite grim, there’s an even less cheery aspect. He suggests that the reason we are still here is that we are not likely to be the ants. We are the future destroyers of countless civilizations.
“Assuming the hypothesis above is correct, what does it mean for our future? The only explanation is the invocation of the anthropic principle. We are the first to arrive at the [interstellar] stage. And, most likely, will be the last to leave,” Berezin explained.
Berezin’s solution for the paradox comes from several simplifications of assumptions. For example, our definition of life depends on seven parameters, but for Berezin, there’s only one that matters: growth. Growth is the push for expanding beyond the planet of origin, and if the push to expansion becomes the dominant force, it will trample any other existing life in the universe. Colonialism and capitalism are two historical example of such forces.
So, is this it? We need to either go out there and conquer or be destroyed? Well, Berezin hopes that he’s wrong. One other requirement of his solution is that life can only be found when very close rather than at a distance. So finding alien life before we are on the destruction path might just make us a decent civilization.
WHAT IS THE FERMI PARADOX?
The Fermi Paradox questions why, given the estimated 200bn-400bn stars and at least 100bn planets in our galaxy, there have been no signs of alien life.
The contradiction is named after its creator, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
He first posed the question back in 1950.
Fermi believed it was too extraordinary that a single extraterrestrial signal or engineering project has yet to be detected in the universe — despite its immense vastness.
Fermi concluded there must a barrier that limits the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced space-colonising civilisations.
This barrier is sometimes referred to as the 'Great Filter'.
If the main obstacle preventing the colonisation of other planets is not in our past, then the barrier that will stop humanity's prospects of reaching other worlds must lie in our future, scientists have theorised.
Professor Brian Cox believes the advances in science and engineering required by a civilisation to start conquering the stars ultimately lead to its destruction.
He said: 'One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that.
‘It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster.'
Other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox include that no other intelligent species have arisen in the universe, intelligent alien species are out there — but lack the necessary technology to communicate with Earth.
Some believe that the distances between intelligent civilsations are too great to allow any kind of two-way communication.
If two worlds are separated by several thousand light-years, it's possible that one or both civilisation will be extinct before a dialogue can be established.
The so-called Zoo hypothesis claims intelligent alien life is out there, but deliberately avoids any contact with life on Earth to allow its natural evolution.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised the so-called Fermi Paradox in the 1950s. It explores why there is no sign of alien life, despite the 100 billions planets in our galaxy
A.A. Berezin cautions that rogue AIs that rebelled against their creators could pose a threat to humanity if it does not begin colonising the stars first
These rocks are a good indicator that water once flowed on Mars.
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, on March 24, 2019, Sol (day) 2356 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
The images that Curiosity and the otherMars Roverssent back to Earth have been nothing short of amazing. They’ve offered us a breathtaking window into a planet which shares bothstriking similaritiesanddramatic differences to our Earth. But generally, these pictures have one thing in common: they’re clearly from Mars. The image above, in contrast, looks like it could have been snapped from most rivers on Earth.
A few things are intriguing in this image. For starters, the rocks seem a bit paler than the usual rust-red we’re used to seeing on Mars. Secondly, the rocks are rounded off as if they are river rocks — and to top it all off, there’s a couple of strangely-looking spherical white-ish rocks which you just wouldn’t imagine on Mars.
While NASA says these are almost certainly not river rocks, they still hint at Mars having a wet past.
These rounded rocks are formed through a phenomenon called concretion. Concretionary rocks are quite common on Earth: they form in water-rich environments, hardening over time. A concretion is formed by the precipitation of mineral cement within the spaces between particles and is found in sedimentary rock or soil. Concretions are often ovoid or spherical in shape, although irregular shapes also occur.
This type of rocks are very susceptible to erosion (not necessarily water erosion), and the outer layers erode faster than the inner ones, leaving behind the rounded shapes we see here.
It’s a fantastic reminder that the geological processes we are so familiar with here on Earth are also often present on other bodies — and at least in some ways, Mars is very much like the Earth.
A self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover on Vera Rubin Ridge, which it’s been investigating for the past several months. Directly behind the rover is a clay-rich slope scientists are eager to begin exploring.
Indian authorities claim to have successfully tested an anti-satellite missile.
“India is now a major space power,” said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to local news. “India has achieved a big feat today.”
Election Season
The destroyed satellite was one of India’s own, orbiting the Earth at 186 miles (300 km). The Independent reports that it may have been a mini-satellite launched into orbit a month ago for this purpose. The interceptor missile was launched from a launch complex on the East coast of India on Wednesday morning.
“India has always maintained that space should not be an arena for warfare and that remains unchanged in spite of this,” Mohdi said, according to local media. “India has always been a nation of peace, but we also defend ourselves. It is with that intention that we achieved this capability.”
The news comes in the midst of election season in India, with polls opening in several weeks. The move could be a bid to bolster Modi’s chances at re-election, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Space Arms Race
India isn’t the only world nation that has carried out such a test. China claims to have carried out a successful test in 2007, the U.S. in 1985. The Pentagon has recently warned of both China and Russia developing anti-satellite technology, including jammers and even lasers capable of disrupting or damaging satellites in orbit.
Whether India’s test will fuel the race to become the dominant nation in low-Earth orbit and beyond, or, as India claims, “secure and further peace” is still uncertain.
Why hasn't Earth received any messages from extraterrestrials yet? Perhaps because we're already unwitting inhabitants in a so-called galactic zoo.
This was one of the scenarios a group of international researchers explored on March 18 at a meeting organized by the nonprofit organization Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). The gathering, which took place at the City of Science and Industry museum in Paris (Cité), brought together about 60 scientists who research the possibility of communication with hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrials.
There, they debated "The Great Silence" — why aliens haven't contacted us — exploring one possibility known as the "zoo hypothesis." First proposed in the 1970s, it describes Earth as a planet that is already under observation by "galactic zookeepers" who are deliberately concealing themselves from human detection, Forbes reported. [9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for Why Humans Haven't Found Aliens Yet]
"When we try to better understand the universe, the question of whether we are alone is unavoidable," meeting attendee Florence Raulin-Cerceau, an associate professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, told Paris-Match.
That Earth would be the lone planet to evolve and host intelligent life among potentially billions of planets in our galaxy alone seems very unlikely. But if there are intelligent extraterrestrials out there, where are they, and why haven't we found them yet? This conundrum, posed in 1950 by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, is known as Fermi's Paradox, and it still stymies experts today.
Fermi didn't live to see evidence of the first exoplanets, which were discovered decades after his death. Since 2014, NASA's Kepler space telescope has confirmed the existence of hundreds of distant worlds, and its findings have hinted at potentially 2,300 more. And yet, despite these exciting exoplanet discoveries, contact with extraterrestrials seems no closer now than it did in Fermi's day.
Under alien observation?
One explanation that scientists explored at the METI meeting, is that aliens are aware of Earth and are observing us as we would observe animals kept in a zoo, METI President Douglas Vakoch said in a workshop. If this is the case, humans should increase their efforts to create messages capable of reaching our "keepers," to demonstrate our intelligence, Vakoch explained.
For example, if a captive zebra were to suddenly tap out a pattern of prime numbers, humans would be required to re-evaluate their understanding of zebra cognition, "and we would be compelled to respond," according to EarthSky.
But what if we're not part of a vast alien zoo — what if, instead, humanity has been evaluated by alien civilizations, and subsequently "quarantined" from our galactic neighbors?
It's possible that extraterrestrials are actively isolating us from contact for our own good, because interacting with aliens would be "culturally disruptive" for Earth, meeting co-chair Jean-Pierre Rospars, honorary research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), said in a workshop.
Of course, it's also likely that we haven't heard from aliens because they're locked under a layer of ice in subsurface oceans; trapped on massive "super-Earth" worlds by gravity's intense pull; or dead because their advanced civilizations have already destroyed themselves — as humanity might — through runaway consumption of their planet's natural resources.
Though, maybe if we want to hear from aliens we just need to relax and be patient. After all, Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years, while extraterrestrial research is less than 100 years old, Paris-Match reported.
WETENSCHAPOnderzoekers zijn er voor de eerste keer in geslaagd om directe observaties te doen van een planeet buiten ons zonnestelsel. Ze gebruikten daarvoor een compleet nieuwe techniek. HR8799e draait rond een ster in het sterrenbeeld Pegasus en blijkt een soort super-Jupiter te zijn.
HR8799e werd voor het eerst gespot in 2010 en bevindt zich op 129 lichtjaar van onze Aarde, dat is 1.220.434.230.962.923 kilometer van ons verwijderd. Nooit eerder slaagden wetenschappers erin om rechtstreekse observaties te doen van een planeet buiten ons zonnestelsel. Dat komt door het verblindende licht van de sterren waarrond ze draaien.
Deze keer lukte het wél, met een techniek die het licht van verscheidene telescopen combineerde. Via zogenaamde ‘optische interferometrie’ konden de vier telescopen van de Very Large Telescope (VLT) – een geavanceerd astronomisch observatorium in de Atacamawoestijn in Chili – gecombineerd worden tot één super-telescoop: Gravity. Dat beeldvormingssysteem was zó gevoelig en precies dat het in staat was om het licht van de planeet en het licht van zijn ster uit elkaar te halen.
Wat de wetenschappers zagen, was iets wat ze nooit eerder hadden gezien. HR8799e bleek groter en jonger te zijn dan de planeten in ons eigen zonnestelsel. Het was een bal van gas en in zijn atmosfeer woedde een gigantische en krachtige storm. De oppervlakte werd gedomineerd werd door wolken van ijzer en silicaten (de grondstof van glas). (lees hieronder verder)
RV
De Very Large Telescope (VLT) in de woestijn van Chili.
ESO/P. Horálek
“Onze observaties suggereren dat het om een bal gas gaat die van binnenuit verlicht wordt”, aldus teamleider Sylvestre Lacour van het Observatoire de Paris in Frankrijk en het Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “Stralen warm licht wervelen door stormachtige donkere wolken.”
Volgens de man zou de heel jonge planeet een “dynamische atmosfeer” hebben en complexe fysische en chemische processen ondergaan. Hij zou nog ‘maar’ 30 miljoen jaar oud zijn en de wetenschap een kijk geven op hoe planeten en planetaire systemen gevormd worden.
Niet bewoonbaar
Voor alle duidelijkheid: de planeet is nog in de verste verten niet bewoonbaar. Door de energie die vrijkwam bij zijn ontstaan en een krachtig broeikaseffect loopt de temperatuur er op tot ongeveer 1.000 graden Celcius. De atmosfeer zit bovendien vol koolstofmonoxide.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
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