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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 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...
In this new image from ESA’s ExoMars orbiter, you can see the winding, crisscrossing tracks of hundreds of dust devils on Mars’ surface.
View larger. | The CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captured this image of Mars’ surface on January 4, 2019. It shows a region northeast of Copernicus Crater, in the Cimmeria region of Mars. The blue/gray streaks are the dust devil tracks.
Mars may have a reputation for being a desolate world, but it is certainly not dead: its albeit thin atmosphere is still capable of whipping up a storm and, as this image reveals, sending hundreds – maybe even thousands – of ‘dust devils’ scurrying across the surface.
These swirling columns of wind scour away the top layer of surface material and transport it elsewhere. Their course is plotted by the streaks they leave behind – the newly exposed surface material, which is colored in blue/grey in this recent image from the CaSSIS camera onboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
Dust devils on Mars form in the same way as those on Earth: when the ground gets hotter than the air above it, rising plumes of hot air move through cooler denser air, creating an updraft, with the cooler air sinking and setting up a vertical circulation. If a horizontal gust of wind blows through, the dust devil is triggered. Once whirling fast enough, the spinning funnels can pick up dust and push it around the surface.
As seen in this image, not much can stand in the way of a dust devil: they sweep up the sides of mounds, and down across the floors of impact craters alike.
In February, the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience referred to an idea made famous by some books and TV shows: that an image of the Mayan King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal, carved onto the lid of his sarcophagus when he died in 683 C.E., shows him taking off in a spaceship. Host Rogan was skeptical of the notion, which has been used to argue that extraterrestrial visitors seeded sophisticated ancient societies like the Maya. He asked what mainstream archaeologists made of it.
For David Anderson, that request was a call to action. Anderson, an archaeologist at Radford University in Virginia, jumped on Twitter: “Dear @joerogan, speaking as a ‘mainstream’ archaeologist … it depicts [Pakal] falling into the underworld at the moment of his death.” The rocket-propelling “fire” below Pakal is a personification of the underworld, and the “spaceship” is a world tree, a common feature in Mayan art. Rogan retweeted Anderson’s thread, bringing him more than 1000 likes and many grateful comments—plus some angry ones.
Pakal’s supposed seat in a spaceship is just one example of what Anderson and others call “pseudoarchaeology,” which ignores the cultural context of ancient artifacts and uses them to support predetermined ideas, rather than test hypotheses, about the past. Common beliefs include that aliens helped build the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, that refugees escaping Atlantis brought technology to cultures around the world, and that European immigrants were the original inhabitants of North America.
These outlandish beliefs have been circulating for decades, but archaeologists like Anderson are now mobilizing to counter them. They are taking to Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and newspapers to debunk false claims and explain real archaeological methods, and they plan to compare notes this week during a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting here. “My profession … needs to do a better job of speaking out,” Anderson says.
He and others are alarmed by the rising popularity of pseudoarchaeological ideas. According to the annual Survey of American Fears by Chapman University in Orange, California, which catalogs paranormal beliefs, in 2018, 41% of Americans believed that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past, and 57% believed that Atlantis or other advanced ancient civilizations existed. Those numbers are up from 2016, when the survey found that 27% of Americans believed in ancient aliens and 40% believed in Atlantis.
“I look at these numbers and say … something has gone massively wrong,” Anderson says. He can’t say exactly what is driving the rise in such ideas, but cable TV shows like Ancient Aliens (which has run for 13 seasons) propagate them, as does the internet.
These beliefs may seem harmless or even amusing, says Jason Colavito, an author in Albany who covers pseudoarchaeology in books and on his blog. But they have “a dark side,” he says. Almost all such claims assume that ancient non-European societies weren’t capable of inventing sophisticated architecture, calendars, math, and sciences like astronomy on their own. “It’s racist at its core,” says Kenneth Feder, an archaeologist at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, who is slated to present at the SAA session and began to write about the dangers of these ideas long before most other scholars paid attention to them.
Adding to archaeologists’ sense of responsibility is that “many of these ideas started within mainstream archaeology,” says Jeb Card, an archaeologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “We have to own these stories.”
For example, white settlers and early archaeologists in 19th century North America excavated elaborate pre-Columbian burial mounds—but ascribed them to a lost “moundbuilder race” that was killed by the ancestors of Native Americans. Former President Andrew Jackson used those ideas to justify displacing Native Americans from their lands.
Today, white nationalists make similar claims. To argue for Europeans’ deep roots in the Americas, they have latched onto Vinland, a short-lived medieval Viking settlement in eastern Canada, and the “Solutrean hypothesis,” which argues that the Americas were first peopled by arrivals from Western Europe. Neither claim started as pseudoarchaeology—Vinland was real, and the Solutrean hypothesis was proposed by mainstream archaeologists, then tested and ruled out—but they have been twisted for ideological ends. A white supremacist accused of murdering two people on a train in Portland, Oregon, in 2017 included the words “Hail Vinland!!!” in a Facebook post less than a month before the attack.
“It’s really a life-or-death issue,” says Stephennie Mulder, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Texas in Austin, who organized a 30 March symposium there called “Aliens, Atlantis, and Aryanism: ‘Fake News’ in Archaeology and Heritage,” at which Anderson was the keynote speaker.
Yet archaeologists have historically been hesitant to tackle pseudoarchaeology. As the field matured in the 20th century, archaeologists moved into the academy and abdicated the public sphere, says Sara Head, an independent cultural resources archaeologist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the author of the Archaeological Fantasies blog, who is co-organizing the SAA session. “We’ve created a vacuum” that pseudoarchaeology has filled.
Today, “Most archaeological research is unavailable to the public,” she says, obscured by jargon and locked behind paywalls. “But you want something from pseudoarchaeology? I can find you 15 references,” all easily accessible online and on TV.
Re-engaging with the public is an uphill battle, Head says. Debunking specific claims, as Anderson did with Pakal’s “spaceship,” is merely a first step. To make a lasting impact, she and others say, archaeologists must proactively share their work and, in particular, explain their methods step by step. That’s important to counter the common pseudoarchaeological claim that researchers are hiding evidence for aliens or Atlantis.
This isn’t easy work, especially online. All the women interviewed for this article have been harassed online after tackling pseudoarchaeological interpretations. Mulder recently fielded replies that included a knife emoji after she tweeted about research showing that people of diverse ancestries, rather than only Western Europeans, lived in Roman Britain. Colavito reports receiving death threats after a host of Ancient Aliens urged his fans to send Colavito hate mail.
Ironically, the popularity of pseudoarchaeology also reveals intense public interest in the past. Anderson understands: His own interest in archaeology was spurred at age 18 when he read a book about a now-vanished advanced civilization that supposedly helped develop the cultures of ancient Egypt and the Maya. He was inspired to take archaeology courses in college—and found that the reality was even more exciting than the myths. “Archaeology was even better than [the book] had presented it.”
6 of history’s strangest ever theories about outer spac
6 of history’s strangest ever theories about outer space
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union's famous satellite Sputnik was launched into orbit, and the space age began. Or did it? SD Tucker, author of Space Oddities, explains that while Sputnik may have marked the beginning of humanity's physical exploration of the universe, we had already been exploring it with our minds for thousands of years…
Here, SD Tucker seeks out the strangest, most surprising and downright silliest theories about outer space that have arisen throughout history.
1. An ice idea
The renegade Austrian astronomer Hanns Hörbiger (1860–1931) didn’t believe in stars, and in an influential 1913 book made the startling assertion that the Milky Way was made entirely out of ice. According to Hörbiger, a series of massive, planet-sized ice-blocks was floating up there in space, encircling our entire solar system in an impenetrable white ring. Light from a few actual suns lurking beyond the ice-ring then shone through this frozen barrier, reflecting off its massed ice-crystals and giving observers on Earth the mere illusion of billions of stars twinkling down at us from the inky blackness.
Other astronomers might attempt to show off photographs of the Milky Way’s alleged ‘stars’ to prove their case, but Hörbiger had an easy answer ready to these arguments: all such images were simply fakes. As to any tedious mathematical objections which might have been made to his proposal, Hörbiger had an even more emphatic response in store. “Mathematics,” he once pronounced, “is nothing but lies!”.
Hörbiger’s full, entirely maths-less, theory was termed the Welteislehre, or ‘world ice theory’. Basically, it held that at some distant point in our galaxy’s past there had been a gigantic super-sun, millions of times the size of our own, next to which had orbited a massive planet, covered by layers of ice hundreds of miles thick. Eventually, this ice-planet fell into the super-sun, melted, and transformed into jets of super-charged steam that blew the sun apart, spewing out lumps of rock and fire which ultimately settled down to become the planets of our own current solar system.
Vast clouds of oxygen were also released from the explosion, and reacted with thin layers of hydrogen gases already swirling through space, creating masses of space-water which, space being cold, soon froze into the gigantic ring of interstellar icebergs which now encircled us all. Sometimes, said Hörbiger, one of these ice-blocks breaks away and floats into the pull of our sun’s gravitational field, falling into it and creating sun-spots, which are really colossal melting ice-cubes. Hörbiger’s theory was later taken up by various leading Nazis, including Adolf Hitler.
Hanns Hörbiger, founder of the World Ice Theory. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)
2. Through a glass
During the 1950s, John Bradbury, a chiropodist from Ashton-under-Lyne, UK, developed a new kind of telescope filled with an amazing 15 lenses. According to Bradbury, the more lenses in your telescope, the better the view of the heavens you would get, something which allowed him to see the very edge of the universe itself, which he said was rectangular, made of metal, and magnetic. His special telescope also somehow allowed Bradbury to discern that the Earth was not spherical at all, but flat on the top, where mankind lived, and hemispherical on the bottom, like a grapefruit cut in half.
As for the moon, Bradbury determined it was constructed of a thin shell of carbon one or two inches thick, and slightly convex. As it travelled through the sky, it accumulated large amounts of phosphorescent plasticine from some unknown source – more and more each day, until it was completely covered in the stuff, leading to what we call a full moon. Then, as the weight of this plasticine grew too heavy, it all started to drop back off again, until we were left with no visible moon at all. One night in 1953, Bradbury claimed to have seen a giant finger made of plasticine emerging from the top of the moon, a remarkable sight indeed, but one which nobody else was able to confirm because no other astronomers possessed one of his multi-lensed telescopes. The reason nobody possessed one of these devices was because, by filling it up with so many pieces of glass, Bradbury ended up with massively distorted images bearing no resemblance whatsoever to reality.
Samuel Shenton, founder of the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS). (Photo by Kent Photo News (K.P.N.)/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
3. Falling flat
Samuel Shenton (1903–71) was the Devon-based leader of the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), which he founded in 1956. Shenton’s beloved ‘flat earth’, he said, was best imagined as being a kind of giant Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by a big circular wall of ice cubes. In 1962, Shenton explained the basics of his theory thus: “You see, the world is flat, like a plate. It is steady, and doesn’t move or revolve. It is surrounded by a solid ice-barrier, and the whole lot is at the bottom of a [cylindrical] pit in what we call ‘Mother Earth’, which is a flat plain so large that it is endless. When you travel around the world and arrive back at the same place, it is like walking around the edge of a plate.” Shenton further speculated that missing persons who leave their homes one day and then never return may simply have walked too far by accident and then fallen off the edge of the world whilst trying to navigate the ice-barrier.
Given the nature of Shenton’s beliefs, the advent of the space age proved quite an irritation for him. On 24 December 1968, Shenton observed Nasa perpetrate the ultimate lie. To a live TV audience of an estimated 500 million, the Apollo 8 astronauts turned their camera down upon Earth itself, displaying disturbing evidence it was round. Seeing as Shenton believed that the Bible proved Earth was flat, he reasoned this footage was simply a “deceptive cloak” on Nasa’s behalf, and by April 1969 he was putting the Apollo 8 crew right in a shocking interview with the Birmingham Evening Echo. Above our Earth, he said, was a giant mass of water, which we were currently protected from by a big air-bubble. An atomic explosion or giant earthquake could make this air-bubble pop any day now, flooding the world once more as in the days of Noah, when the world was apparently square. The shock of a second ‘Great Flood’, predicted Shenton, could be so huge that it would make the disc-shaped flat earth revert back to its hitherto-unknown original form, transforming the Rich Tea world-biscuit into a giant Jacobs cream cracker. From this, many people might conclude that Mr Shenton was somewhat cream crackers himself.
Earth rising over curvature of the moon as seen from Apollo 8. (Photo by NASA/NASA/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
4. The planet of love
The mad Frenchman Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was most famous as a leftwing political theoriser, whose particular brand of thinking was eventually dubbed ‘utopian socialism’, but he was also a very bizarre cosmological theoriser. Basically, Fourier thought that the work of Isaac Newton was fine so far as it went, but that the major attractive force keeping planets in orbit around their suns was not really gravity, as Sir Isaac had said, but passion or love. Fourier proposed that the planets, moons and stars were in some sense living animals, with senses like sight, touch and taste, and who were seemingly obsessed with having sex with one another; most notoriously, Fourier declared that eclipses were really caused by the sun engaging in a “conjugal embrace” of the moon.
In Fourier’s own words: “A planet is a being which has two souls and two sexes, and which procreates like animal or vegetable beings by the meeting of the two generative substances,” which are emitted from their two poles. By this, Fourier meant that the north pole of every planet was male, and that the south pole of every planet was female. Each pole was actually a giant genital, emitting a sort of subtle, airy, sperm-like substance of either male or female quality, termed ‘aroma’. Throughout his work, Fourier constantly talks about planets emitting aromas onto one another in order to turn each other on prior to mating. These ‘aromas’ are best thought of as being a virtually incorporeal ‘fluid’ which connects the planets together into their own little solar systems throughout the universe. Basically, such ‘aromal fields’ were an erotic form of gravity, making planets orbit around their larger suns, or moons around their parent-planets, in much the same way that love-struck teenagers might follow the object of their affections around everywhere they go. So, according to Fourier, the next time you look up into the night sky, you’re really peeping in upon a giant galactic orgy!
Portrait of French social theorist Charles Fourier. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
5. Hive mind
Gerald Heard (1889–1971) was a highly erudite Cambridge graduate, writer, broadcaster and mystic of Anglo-Irish origins who later found his true home in California, the early centre of post-Second World War flying saucer mania. Heard was a man of many remarkable ideas, the most remarkable of which was laid out in his 1950 book The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another World Watching? which holds a place in the record books as the first full-length, non-fiction book about the subject published by a British author. The title was serialised in the Sunday Express throughout October 1950, giving his countrymen ample opportunity to consider Heard’s peculiar idea that the UFOs then being sighted all across the globe were piloted not by humanoid ETs, as you may have presumed, but by alien super-bees from Mars who were watching over us from afar, and perhaps even planning an invasion.
Heard speculated that the Martian bees, having access to various advanced (though presumably tiny) items of super-technology, might well have got around the flower-free conditions of their desert-like homeworld by creating a form of artificial sugar from some unspecified “synthetic substance” which would in effect be a new industrial form of chlorophyll. By mixing this with water and exposing it to air and sunlight, the natural chemical processes of certain plants could then be imitated on a vast scale, said Heard, creating huge supplies of sugar for the bees to eat virtually on-demand.
Following America’s dropping of atom bombs on Japan in 1945, it appeared to Heard that the alien bees’ monitoring of Earth had stepped up a gear. Maybe the bees were worried we would blow up the entire planet through our foolishness? Worse yet, maybe the dust from our ruined Earth would float into space and hover in a big belt around Mars, blocking out the sun’s light and thereby impeding alien honey production? The potential reasons for the bees to fear and hate us seemed endless. Heard did propose training up Earth-bees to become diplomats who could speak to their Martian cousins and work out some kind of peace treaty, but sadly nothing ever came of the idea.
6. Fallen Angel
During the 19th century, before we had the technology to really know what conditions on other nearby planets were like, strange crossovers began to emerge between astronomy and spiritualism, with self-styled psychics claiming to have travelled to places such as Mars and Venus using their astral bodies. For example, in 1895 one Colonel Albert de Rochas (1837–1914), a Frenchman with a liking for both psychical research and hypnotism, was called out to help a family friend, given the pseudonym ‘Mireille’, who was suffering some ailment.
Knowing of his skills in hypnotism, Mireille hoped de Rochas could help alleviate her sufferings. He did, but during one trance session Mireille claimed to be rising up through outer space, which she deemed to be luminous and full of “phantoms”, one of whom was a dead childhood friend of hers named Victor. Mireille spoke of visiting Mars in astral form, before one day it seemed as if her body had been suddenly taken over by the spirit of Victor. He was initially puzzled as to why he was wearing women’s clothing, but once he had calmed down Victor explained that, following his death, he lived on among the planets – a form of existence about which he could give little information beyond the curious detail that all dead people had arms which also functioned as genitalia, or “organs of affection”. According to Victor, these arms grew larger and larger over time and were often mistaken for angel wings, when they were really giant celestial penises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Colonel de Rochas refused to believe ‘Victor’s’ story.
Space Oddities by SD Tucker is published by Amberley Books. To find out more, click here.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) just spotted “moving water molecules” on the near side of the Moon — which could be a big deal for future human missions to the Moon.
Scientists observed water molecules moving around as the lunar surface heated up during the Moon’s day cycle. Researchers had previously assumed that the main source of water — hydrogen ions from solar wind — would be cut off when the Earth travels between the Moon and the Sun. But the new findings didn’t see any decrease when the Earth cut off solar wind to the Moon, suggesting that it could harbor a more sustainable source of water than previously believed.
Hot Topic
The discovery is described in a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by researchers from the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The data was collected by the LRO’s Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), an ultraviolet spectrograph that was built to map ultralight wavelength reflections on the lunar surface.
“This is an important new result about lunar water, a hot topic as our nation’s space program returns to a focus on lunar exploration,” said Kurt Retherford, principal investigator of the LAMP instrument from Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, said in a statement. “We recently converted the LAMP’s light collection mode to measure reflected signals on the lunar dayside with more precision, allowing us to track more accurately where the water is and how much is present.”
The Shape Of Water
A groundbreaking 2017 study from Brown University suggested that there may be substantial amounts of waterinside lunar rocks. At the time, the discovery was a major shift from the consensus view that most water on the Moon is located near its poles.
This year’s results discovered by LAMP seem to underline that the lunar water cycle could make water far more accessible to us during future missions to the Moon than we previously thought — the more water already exists on the Moon, the less time and resources we have to spend in trying to get it there.
Today (April 10), a global collaboration of more than 200 astronomers presented the first image of a directly-observed black hole. The picture of a glowing orange-yellow ring around a dark core, was compiled from observations by eight ground-based radio telescopes known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).
Researchers' data showed the black hole at the heart of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy within the Virgo cluster located about 55 million light-years from Earth. But what exactly is the image showing, and why is the irregular ring orange? [IT'S HERE: The First-Ever Close-Up of a Black Hole]
This is the first-ever image of a black hole. Credit: NSF
Though black holes are compact objects, they are exceptionally massive — the mass of M87's black hole is about 6.5 billion times that of our sun, the National Science Foundation (NSF) said in a statement. Because of this enormous mass, black holes warp spacetime, heating the dust and gas around them to extreme temperatures, according to NSF.
By definition, black holes are invisible, because no light escapes from them. But a prediction made by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity stated that under certain circumstances, an outline of a black hole and its light-swallowing event horizon could be seen, according to representatives of the Haystack Observatory at MIT, which houses one of the EHT telescopes.
"If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow," EHT Science Council chair Heino Falcke, a professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at Radboud University in the Netherlands, said in the NSF statement.
The black hole in M87 isn't the closest to Earth, but it's among the biggest, which made it a very promising target for the EHT, Derek Fox, an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, told Live Science (Fox was not affiliated with the EHT discovery).
In the image, the dark circle represents the "shadow" of the black hole and its boundary, created by the glowing material that surrounds it. However, the colors of the bright ring in the image aren't the actual hues of the gas; rather, they represent a color map chosen by EHT researchers to depict the brightness of the emissions, Fox explained.
"The yellow is the most intense emission, the red is less intense, and then black is little or no emission at all," Fox said. In the optical range, the ring around the black hole would likely appear white, perhaps tinged with blue or red, according to Fox.
"I'd expect it to be more of a whitish glow that is brighter along the crescent, dimmer at the other points, and then black where the black hole is casting its shadow," he said.
So what is the truth and whom do we trust to tell it? In principal, any evidence that is documented by the military and government agencies worldwide are more highly regarded as they uniformly follow procedures and guidelines to rule-out logical explanations and have the resources to assess multiple possibilities.
The topic of UFOs often arrives in a bag filled with cliches and skepticism. At its heart, however, is a simple term, the acronym: Unidentified Flying Object. A term created by one of the director’s of Project Blue Book, US Air Force Captain Edward Ruppelt in the early 1950’s. The definition of a UFO is merely an aerial object or sighting that has not yet been identified. However, once all logical explanations have been ruled-out, from unusual atmospheric phenomena to weather balloons, the UFO term takes on an entirely different meaning as unexplained aerial phenomenon. Yet with all our technological advances and social media reporting, a common question today is; How is it that we still do not have definitive proof that these unexplained UFO phenomena truly exist? At least not that we know of… Or has the stigma of UFOs clouded our ability to remain open to the possibilities? Has our limited knowledge and understanding of the universe caused us to arrogantly ignore the compelling new evidence that continues to rise with each reported event?
UFOs arguably tread through an ebb and flow of believability and popularity. According to a global study by Glocalities, some 61% of the 26,000 surveyed believe in the existence of intelligent alien civilizations. A HuffPost/YouGov poll found that 48% of all adults in the U.S. are open to the idea that extraterrestrial spacecraft are observing the Earth. In an older U.S. survey by Kelton Research, some 80 million Americans believe UFOs are real. News reports of UFOs catch our attention, but are quickly reduced to Internet and social media fodder that are typically trivialized and dismissed by skeptics. Of course the entertainment industry has the power to breathe life back into topics such as UFOs by making them part of the everyday conversation, bringing about re-emergence of questions asked surrounding real events and demanding better conclusions for those events that left us confused and concerned. While the discussion about the belief in god has slowly decreased in recent years, the issue of believability of UFOs continues to increase. Rarely waning long in popularity, UFOs maintain a hold on our interest, and as more voices give validity to whether or not we are alone in the universe, we greedily listen and allow the stigma of believing in little green men to wash away. We look for truth and find some assurance knowing even the U.S. government has also acknowledged UFO existence, to some extent, all along.
So what is the truth and whom do we trust to tell it? In principal, any evidence that is documented by the military and government agencies worldwide are more highly regarded as they uniformly follow procedures and guidelines to rule-out logical explanations and have the resources to assess multiple possibilities. The problem is whether or not this data is then made available to the public. So we are left with individuals and organizations, short on funds, who carry the burden of finding, investigating and reporting what is experienced. The need for evidence of UFOs does not end at the US border, but rather crosses through every country and culture.
In seeking to find out more about a couple of the most compelling UFO events in recent time, I was fortunate to make contact with and interview three highly qualified scientific and engineering professionals that were involved with confidential investigations for these extraordinary events. They agreed to do my interviews as long as they remained confidential. Each UFO event was huge in the landscape of UFOlogy and has been the subject of continued scrutiny, not on whether the events actually happened, but rather what is being done with the evidence.
In 2004, Commander David Fravor, a Navy pilot with the USS Nimitz investigated reports by the USS Princeton of several unidentified flying objects manuevering over the San Diego coastline. Of interest was that the objects had no recognizable flight mechanisms, nor was utilizing any known means of propulsion. Commander Fravor reported the object flew in a manner and pace that could not be of a human-made aircraft. How easy to discount Fravor except Fravor and members of his crew hold 15 years of experience each and declare that what they witnessed could not be of this world.
One of the consultants on the team analyzing the data and video collected from the incident explains, “The bogeys were verified by various Naval support at sea, airborne Navy pilots, as well as ground radar defense support that documented only fragmented and curiously intermittent radar signatures. The contacts were made over the course of a couple of days.” This consultant reports that there were several private aerospace contractors and six private consultants, in addition to several defense department investigators, utilized in the assessment of the data and video footage.
Ten years later, in 2014, Chilean Navy members reported an encounter off the coast of Santiago. A Chilean Naval helicopter crew on routine maneuvers witnesses a flying object 50-60 kilometers from them, yet the object had no signature from onboard radar. Confused by lack of the radar presence, a Captain contacted two primary military ground radar facilities, both were also unable to obtain a signature of the UFO. Having encountered other UFOs in the region, the military also ruled-out other commercial and private aircraft.
What makes the 2014 case even more intriguing is that a new Forward Looking Infra Red (FLIR) surveillance system, typically used for intelligence collection and reconnaissance, enabled the Chilean Naval crew to capture special video images of the object that radar could not. Also captured was an unknown discharge which occurred indifferent to the motion and movement of the object. While blurry objects are often the standard for UFO proof, the Chilean Navy’s new infrared video images now provided another layer of evidence that not even traditional radar could produce.
A year before in Chile, a similar UFO was reported by witnesses in the Collahuasi mining area. One former police officer says while he did not witness the 2014 event, he did witness the Collahuasi UFO in 2013. Because of his personal eye-witness encounter, he was called in to review footage and provide feedback on an investigation that was being conducted on the 2014 event. The former police officer explains that not only were there several witnesses to the flying object in 2013, along with muliple photos and video, but there were additional reports of major energy disruptions, witnesses with radiation burns and missing persons coinciding with very low hovering of the UFO. The former police officer described the Navy’s video as giving a fascinating perspective, visually showing aspects of the environment and the UFO that could not normally be seen with the naked eye. Furthermore, he confirmed that it looked identical to the UFO encounter in Collahuasi.
On October 25, 2017, a curiously intermittent UFO radar signature was documented by Oakland, California’s air traffic control center in the airspace above Northern California traveling close to Mach 1, flying outside registered flight plans, with no collision avoidance transponders and not responding to any radio communication. A separate control center estimated a speed faster than Mach 1, but that would suggest the UFO was capable of sonic speeds without producing a sonic shock wave. Military air defenses had been passively tracking the object until it reached Oregon airspace where it manuervered into busy air traffic corridors, permanently disappearing from all radar. This caused military air defenses to scramble two F-15 interceptor fighters from McChord Air Force Base in Washington to investigate. While the UFO no longer had a radar signature it was now more visible to pilots in the busy flight corridor who reported the object flying on the edge of visual range. By the time the F-15s arrived at the last visual coordinates of the UFO, it was gone, leaving only hesitant reports from commercial and private pilots. It would be an understatement to say that the event was chaotic and inexplicable to all involved.
A similar, but shorter, UFO encounter took place four months later on February 24, 2018 in the skies above Southern Arizona involving commercial and private aircraft. On this particular afternoon, a commercial pilot reported to air traffic control an unidentified aircraft flying above them headed in the opposite direction. The unidentifable aricraft exhibited none of the conventional characteristics of aircraft today, had no collision avoidance transponders and was not responding to radio communication. Ground control in turn contacted other nearby commercial and private aircraft to visually confirm the unknown aircraft, which they did. While commercial and private aircraft confirmed the UFO visually, multiple radar tracking, including Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and Phoenix Sky Harbor Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) could not acquire a radar signature. Ground control was in the process of alerting military air defenses when pilots reported the UFO ascending quickly moments before visual was lost. A variety of rational explanations were quickly ruled-out, including weather balloons, drones, illicit air craft and top secret test aircraft, the UFO apparently exhibiting no known means of propulsion.
As a result of the 2017 and 2018 events, independent comprehensive investigations were conducted, though it is unclear if they were government or private sector operations. A highly-respected aerospace engineer that was part of the teams formed to assess evidence of these events described the meticulous scientific analysis that was conducted as well as the long list of corporations and government agencies that participated in the assessment. Corporations and agencies participated either because of their involvement in the actual event or to offer investigative resources. Reportedly, among the private sector corporations included Raytheon, General Atomics, Aeronautical Systems and Northrup Grumman. The government agencies include the FAA’s Office of investigations, North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), Western Air Defense Sector (WADS), Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to name but a few. Additionally, nine private consultants also participated in every phase of the investigation, four of those specialists reportedly were; Aerospace Engineer Hugh Coleman, Physicist Bruce Maccabee, Physicist Walter Innes and Anomalist Christopher Chacon (who was also involved with both Chile UFO investigations, according to the former Chilean police officer). The participation of such agencies as the NGA could be to supply geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), especially flight-tracking of aircraft or objects, both in real-time or past/pre-recorded, to ascertain possibile points of origin, flight course and/or a destination. The aerospace engineer described the objective of both investigations were to assess all evidence (witnesses, footage, radar data, satellite imagery, etc.), rule-out possible explanations (drones, secret experimental aircraft, unusual atmospheric phenomena, aircraft conducting illicit activities, etc.) and to ascertain the true nature of each event, formulating conclusions to identify the unknown aircraft. The aerospace engineer further noted how painstaking measures were taken to keep these investigations and their conclusions confidential. But with so many investigative bodies, how could any investigation remain completely secret for long?
In 2017, it was disclosed that as the result of ongoing credible UFO sightings, the government was funding a $22 million-dollar program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) secretly operated out of the Pentagon from 2007 to 2012. With the support of Senators Harry Reid and Ted Stevens, the objective of the program is to investigate UFO sightings with a particular emphasis on those incidents that can be considered a national security threat and/or are in anyway involving the U.S. military. And while other countries also have their own classified UFO government programs, many of those declassifying and releasing reports to inform their general public, the U.S. government’s AATIP maintained a high level of secrecy. So much so, that the reported former head of the program, Luis Elizondo, made complaints to superiors that the level of secrecy hindered their work and program objectives. Though the program supposedly shutdown in 2012 when funding was cut off, it has been reported that various parts or divisions of it still operate, confidentially conducting UFO investigations, as well as performing other duties for the Defense Department. While the 2004/San Diego coast event was supposedly one of the cases investigated by AATIP, the classified investigation previously mentioned in this article was reportedly done independent of that program. Additionally, the 2017/Oregon and 2018/Phoenix events were all conducted outside of any known programs, and certainly suggests that there may in fact be a new clandestine model for dealing with UFO’s that allows the program to operate without oversight, congressional or otherwise, perhaps black budget funded or even privately funded.
While AATIP officially ended in 2012, the former head of the program, Luis Elizondo, as well as many outspoken proponents of the disclosure of UFO evidence, have reported that government agencies are well aware of the ongoing UFO phenomena but continue to do nothing. However, the secret indepth investigations still being conducted suggests something else going on. While confirmation of government involvement with UFOs trickles into our media/press at times, it is difficult to decipher what the true objectives are of such involvement, nor whether the disclosure really has some other agenda, as with misinformation. If there is indeed some sort of clandestine program operating with all the resources and logistics to conduct full-scale investigations and research of UFO events, it should be no surprise that every aspect of it would remain clandestine so as to not impede their operations or compromise their power to do with their conclusions as they feel appropriate.
So whether these UFOs are in-fact secret next-generation aircraft technology (from the U.S. or a foreign power) or extraterrestrial in origin, if a new covert program is overseeing the collection and assessment of UFO events, we may never know what was behind these and so many other countless incidents as the evidence and results of investigations conducted will continue to remain confidential for the foreseeable future. All we can do is continue to independently collect and document the experiences, researching and analyze each event with whatever means and resources we can access, and most importantly, continue to ask questions over and over again until the truth is finally disclosed.
3 GREAT UFO DOCUMENTARY MOVIES
1. OUT OF THE BLUE
This well-respected film is widely considered to be the best UFO documentary ever made. Narrated by noted actor Peter Coyote, it is sober and measured as it interviews witnesses of the Phoenix Lights, the Roswell Incident, and other significant but lesser-known incidents—including some witnessed by well-known NASA astronauts, who appear in the film.
It would be difficult to watch this movie in an impartial state of mind and not come away intrigued if not convinced.
2. I KNOW WHAT I SAW
This UFO documentary shares its director, James Fox, with Out of the Blue, and it’s just as compelling and amazing. Where Out of the Blue focuses on compelling UFO incidents in the modern era, I Know What I Saw spends its time juxtaposing credible UFO witnesses against the stance of official denial by the US military. Especially damning: interviews with J. Allen Hynek, once the scientific adviser to the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book. Hynek’s job with Blue Book was to come up with “rational” explanations for UFO sightings, but he was so convinced by some of the evidence he encountered that he later became a ufologist and admitted that the Air Force had told him to deny UFO reality, despite what he might otherwise think.
3. THE SECRET: EVIDENCE WE ARE NOT ALONE
The US government is hiding UFO secrets: many people believe this is a fact beyond debate. The Secret examines leaked government evidence of captured craft that is not of this world, of Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (E.B.E.s) associated with those craft, and of a carefully controlled effort to hide the UFO reality from the general public. Leaked documents are examined by experts who studied watermarks, stamps, and other tell-tale signs and declared them to be genuine. The story they tell—including crash events we’ve never heard of—is astounding. Don’t miss The Secret.
EXTRA BONUS:
1. THE EXTRAORDINARY BELIEFS FILMS FROM JEREMY CORBELL
Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is a film directory with a project. He calls it Extraordinary Beliefs, and it’s a series of films about subjects that are simultaneously beyond belief and absolutely real. Area 51 whistleblower Bob Lazar is the subject of one movie, while another, the excellent I Am Nano Man, reveals hidden technology that is decades ahead of what the best Earth science has now (with the obvious implication: it’s not of this world). Others cover subjects like a man with implants made of impossible metals and UFO/conspiracy legend John Lear.
By the way, we are not in any way affiliated with Jeremy or his work—we’re just fans. We get no money from the films. The cost? It’s pretty cheap; $2.99 to rent for a month.
The classified study was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program (AATIP) and investigated mysterious aircraft or other unexplained phenomena.
Official documents reveal that investigators studied ‘exotic technologies’ including wormholes, antigravity, invisibility cloaking, warp drives and high energy laser weapons.
Now it’s been claimed that AATIP explored the health ‘consequences’ suffered by people who witnessed UFO incidents.
Details of 38 papers published during the AATIP probe were released last year, although only a handful of the actual documents have been released to the public.
One of the studies was called ‘Field Effects on Biological Tissues’.
Nick Pope, who was head of the Ministry of Defence’s UFO investigation desk, said this is likely to be the paper which explored the health effects of close encounters.
Pope pointed us to an article published on Las Vegas Now in which Dr Hal Puthoff, a scientist who worked on AATIP, said: ‘We as part of this program looked at some cases that were really good from Brazil.
‘In 1977, 78, it was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a thousand pages of documents all done by the Brazilian Air Force investigative team, 500 photographs, 15 hours of motion film, a lot of medical injuries when people encountered these craft at close range.’
Pope told Metro the statement is ‘confirmation that the Pentagon’s AATIP program looked not only at UFOs but also at close encounters and alien abductions’.
He said: ‘I can’t prove it, but from sources close to this I’m almost certain that part of this work involved getting blood and DNA samples from close encounter witnesses – including at least one and maybe two witnesses to the UK’s infamous Rendlesham Forest incident.
A view of the oval-shaped UFO encountered by US Airforce pilots
This official photograph shows a craft moving at incredible speeds that was spotted by two US Navy pilots over the Atlantic
‘I believe this was done in a way that disguised the fact that this was for a US intelligence program, with witnesses being told that they were participating in a scientific or academic study.’
The world first heard about AATIP following the release of footage showing an encounter between an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and an oval-shaped UFO travelling at astonishing speed.
Earlier this year, the US Defense Intelligence Agency has released documents which exposed some of the work carried during the top-secret UFO research project.
In a letter addressed to a congressional committee chaired by the late Senator John McCain in 2018, the DIA wrote: ‘The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapon threats from the present out to the next 40 years,’ the letter explains.
A declassified document giving details of the research papers produced by AATIP investigators
And last year, AATIP programme manager Luis Elizondo said he believed there is ‘very compelling evidence we may not be alone’.
He also recently suggested mysterious ‘metamaterials’ which may have come from crashed alien spacecraft are being stored by the American government in specially modified warehouses in Las Vegas.
The AATIP programme was closed down in 2012, although the New York Times reporters that exposed its work believe it is still operational in some capacity.
Over the weekend the topic of UFOs hit the front page of major news outlets around the world, with the revelation that the U.S. Department of Defence has, until fairly recently, been running a secret research program devoted to UFO encounters, known as the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP).
The story broke through major outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico– all of whom, it seems, were provided information and access to interviewees many weeks ago (also worth mentioning perhaps, is that a co-writer on the NYT piece is Leslie Kean, author of the well-known UFO book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record. It seems likely that the ‘access’ was given by Tom DeLonge’s ‘To the Stars Academy’ (TTSA), the controversial new UFO research group that has solicited investment from the public (and has now raised over $2 million!)
There’s a lot to unpack out of all these stories, especially as they don’t always give the full context via the various links between people and organisations. As such, I’m sure we’ll be covering many angles here on the Grail in further posts, but I just wanted to discuss a few initial thoughts to try and get readers up to date with everything (so this post might jump around between a few topics rather randomly).
The Program
The New York Times notes that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was originally set up in 2007, and took up $22 million of the $600 billion annual Defense Department budget. It was funded at the request of Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, who was Senate majority leader at the time, at the urging of his friend (and regular campaign funder, according to Politico), Robert Bigelow, and officials of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who were apparently interested in Bigelow’s research.
Regular readers of the Grail will know Robert Bigelow well: the self-made tycoon (via his ownership of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain) has a long history of engaging with ‘Fortean’ topics. He was an early supporter of Dean Radin’s psi research, he funded a chair of consciousness studies at the University of Nevada, and also has been involved in funding serious research into the paranormal via his own organization, the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS). In more recent times his involvement in extraterrestrial affairs has been – at least on the surface – a bit more mundane: his company Bigelow Aerospace has been constructing inflatable space stations.
AATIP spent a number of years investigating reports of UFOs, led by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, who recently resigned (in October) and became an employee of Tom DeLonge’s TTSA UFO research group. However, according to the reports, “most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow” (my emphasis). So most of the actual leg-work seems to have not been done by AATIP, but by Robert Bigelow’s organization. Interestingly, during the time that Bigelow’s group was conducting this research for AATIP, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies also began funding the previously ‘amateur’ research efforts of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
(For me at least, this should raise some concerns about the Reid-Bigelow relationship and the possibility of the program being a ‘kickback’: Bigelow supported Harry Reid’s election campaigns financially; Harry Reid gets government funding for Bigelow’s paranormal research. This may well have been done with full transparency and accountability; I only raise it here as a possible concern.)
Pentagon officials confirmed the existence of the program to the NYT, though they insisted that “the effort had ended after five years, in 2012”. Elizondo though said that while the funding had been withdrawn, he continued to work on the project by discussing anomalous sightings with defence officials.
Here’s Leslie Kean discussing the revelations on NBC over the weekend:
The Sightings
While the reveal about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was certainly of interest – a little like the Nick Pope/UK UFO desk it seems – what was really compelling about the UFO articles over the weekend was the inclusion of one of the sightings investigated by them: a 2004 sighting by multiple military pilots. A companion article in the New York Times shared the testimony of one of those witnesses, former Navy pilot David Fravor.
Performing training manoeuvres in an F/A-18F Super Hornet operating from the U.S.S Nimitz, Fravor was tasked with investigating some strange radar returns by an operator aboard the U.S.S. Princeton, a Navy cruiser.
For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.
…The two fighter planes headed toward the objects. The Princeton alerted them as they closed in, but when they arrived at “merge plot” with the object — naval aviation parlance for being so close that the Princeton could not tell which were the objects and which were the fighter jets — neither Commander Fravor nor Commander Slaight could see anything at first. There was nothing on their radars, either.
Then, Commander Fravor looked down to the sea. It was calm that day, but the waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.
Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said.
Commander Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object.
But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.”
Partial video of the sighting has been posted online by the To the Stars Academy along with their analysis of it (worth noting: TTSA posted videos from two separate incidents , and a number of sites seem to have confused the two in their articles about this incident and posted the wrong one). Here’s the ‘Nimitz FLIR-1’ video of the sighting:
The TTSA website also has a report by the witness which describes the sighting in more detail than the NYT article. For those interested in UFO reports, I highly recommend it as it is absolutely fascinating and gives a wonderful sense of ‘being there’.
The main concern I have is the account of what happened after the sighting. It seems super weird that by the time the pilots arrive back at the Nimitz, there is no debriefing officer to meet them, and crew members are already “making fun of them” by playing paranormal videos including Signs, Men in Black, and The X-Files via the on-board closed circuit television. This sounds either invented, or if not, as if the event was some sort of hazing ritual for the rookie pilot. The subsequent narrative also sounds fictional:
[The witnesses then] entered the Ready Room, where OK-2 slammed closed and secured both hatchways and began making an electronic copy of the gun tape from his F-18. During this time, Source made detailed written notes of the incident on available printer paper and mailed them to their Aunt with the notice “keep this because this is important stuff about some real X-Files shit”.
How was the electronic copy of gun tape carried out? And was the witness breaching military secrecy in sending his notes to his Aunt?
However, it’s worth pointing out that while this sighting is now world-famous courtesy of the mainstream press coverage over the weekend, information about it has been available online since March 2015 (with even more detail than this recent re-telling) at the Fighter Sweep blog, written by a good friend of Dave Fravor – and the video was apparently on YouTube for years before being taken down near the end of 2014 due to a new government investigation:
Somehow the tape made its way to YouTube. A few years after the incident, when first telling me the story, Dave pointed me to the link. It was unremarkable without the background information. But folded into context it was amazing, especially the slow-mo of the dot accelerating out of screen. For years I told the story to friends and showed them the video as punctuation.
However last month when I called Dave to refresh my memory before sitting down to write this bizarre encounter, he informed me that the video had been removed from YouTube. He told me that a government agency with a three letter identifier had recently conducted an investigation into the AAVs and had exhaustively interviewed all parties involved.
All of the seven flight crew, including 6 aircrew from VFA-41 and Cheeks from VMFA-232. The Fire Control Officer and Senior Chief from Princeton, and the radar operator on the E-2. They even queried the crew of the USS Louisville, a Los Angeles-class Fast-Attack submarine that was in the area as part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group who reported there were no unidentified sonar contacts or strange underwater noises on that day.
(Worth noting also is that in the comments to the blog post, others who had previously known of the story speak up, including somebody who was aboard the U.S.S. Princeton at the time, and a friend of Fravor’s WSO on the flight who mentions that he had been told about the incident as well: “I would have thought it was BS if I didn’t know the WSO that told the story. Most level headed guy you’ll ever know. Smart as hell. He described it as a giant, flying Tylenol that could stop on a dime from super sonic speeds.”)
So the story seems fairly likely to be legit, with footage and multiple, authoritative witnesses.
Strange Metals
Returning to the revelation of the ‘black research’ program, there is one strange element (no pun intended) that has largely been passed over so far, but might be worth further attention. Veteran UFO researcher/journalist George Knapp – who knows fellow Las Vegan Bigelow quite well – stated on his Twitter feed that the most important line in the New York Times story has thus far been overlooked by most people: the fact that Bigelow Aerospace “modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Interestingly Tom DeLonge – formerly of the band Blink-182, now the guy at the forefront of the ‘To the Stars Academy‘ had tweeted the day before this news broke, “what do you get when you zap a layered piece of Bismuth and Magnesium with Terahertz energy? The dissolution of mass. Or, at least the effect of which. We are working on an experiment for you all.”
Which reminded me (and others) of our own Red Pill Junkie’s recent interview with UFO research legend Jacques Vallee, in which he discussed his current interest in the topic of ‘ejecta’ from UFOs, samples of which have been analysed previously and found to contain magnesium. Given Jacques’ own involvement in the past with Robert Bigelow’s anomalies research group the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS), was he discussing the same thing?
Where Does That Leave Us?
Firstly, it has to be said that this positive worldwide coverage has for me rehabilitated the reputation of the To the Stars Academy somewhat, after the earlier debacles of the ‘UFO Event‘ at which DeLonge launched his fund-raising, and his subsequent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast.
However, I still think there’s plenty to be cautious about. The AATIP revelation, and Nimitz information, while very interesting, are certainly not a ground-breaking ‘disclosure’ event, as I’ve seen some people claiming already. As mentioned earlier, information about the Nimitz sighting has been on the web for years. The tiny (relatively-speaking) $22 million budget for AATIP, and the out-sourcing of investigative work to Robert Bigelow’s organization, hardly suggest that the government found alien bodies or technology – instead it sounds like a minor, pet program of one senator, created at the request of a campaign funder with a deep intereste in the topic. And, it must be remembered, up until this more ‘respectable’ news release over the weekend, DeLonge’s story has so far been a dodgy tale very much along the lines of previous psy-ops deceptions performed by the likes of intelligence officer Richard Doty.
Further questions buzzing around my head: what should we make of Robert Bigelow’s apparent ties with the Defence Intelligence Agency? Why does Harry Reid’s testimony both say the program accomplished great things, but shutting it down in 2011 was the right decision? And why, if it did shut down back then, was the Nimitz sighting apparently being investigated in 2014 (according to the Fighter Sweep blog post)?
Perhaps there is something truly happening here, and these individuals are doing their best to overcome government apathy, or secrecy, to bring it to the public. Or perhaps this is, overall, another disinformation campaign, but the weekend’s news was the ‘gain the trust’ part of it. Either way, we should continue to keep an open mind on the topic, but tread cautiously, as things progress.
Like many of us, Joe Rogan’s opinion about UFOs has changed over time. At the beginning of his career he used to tell jokes about the Roswell crash, back when he was also into the Apollo lunar conspiracies. Then his friend Neil deGrasse Tyson convinced him the lunar landings were legit, and Rogan swinged hard into “Big-S skeptic mode” when he starred in the SyFy showJoe Rogan Questions Everything, and made fun of both Squatchers and the “giant bulletproof wolves” of Skinwalker ranch.
Now it seems powerful Joe is swinging back into thinking that maybe not everything is ‘fuckery’ when it comes to unidentified flying objects. On April 5 Joe shared on his Facebook wall he had just watched Jeremy Corbell’s very popular documentary Bob Lazar, Area 51 & Flying Saucers –currently ranking as #6 of the top documentary films on iTunes— and gave a rather surprising positive review of it:
Very, very interesting. I have a love/hate relationship with UFO stories and conspiracy theories but this was some really compelling shit. To answer the obvious question, yeah I was high. I feel like watching a documentary on UFOs narrated by Mickey Rourke without getting high first would be disrespectful.
The good impression he had of the Lazar documentary has been recently shared on multiple times with his guests and audience at The Joe Rogan Experience (ranking #3 in the top podcasts of the iTunes chart):
Corbell is understandably excited and flattered at the unsought attention he’s receiving from one of the most influencing Internet personalities in the world, and is asking his followers to kickstart an informal campaign to see if he can get to be invited to the JRE, even hinting at the possibility that he could convince Bob Lazar himself to join him –which is kind of strange, considering how Lazar has a well-established reputation of being incredibly camera-shy and aversive to grant interviews, so the idea that he would be willing to be the guest of a live-streamed show would be uncharacteristic of him, to say the least…
Credit where credit is due, the fact that Joe found Jeremy’s film compelling should be commended, and is no doubt evidence that it is a well-produced documentary (for the record, I have yet to watch the film myself). I’ve already commented on multiple occasions my take on the Lazar case, so I’ll also refrain from Fortsplaining why I don’t agree with some of Joe’s opinion; I’ll just mention that saying “scientists didn’t know about element 115” back in the 80’s might not be exactly accurate. Some scientists have a very good idea of the things they don’t know, and even before the official discovery of Moscovium (the official name of element 115) physicists had predicted an ‘island of stability’ in the periodic chart of elements decades before Lazar became the ‘cosmic whistleblower’ and the American public learned about Area 51 –and again, years before Lazar gave that historic interview with George Knapp, local reporters and investigative reporters were covering the Air Force’s grab of the public lands surrounding the Groom Lake testing site, so even though ‘Dreamland’ hadn’t yet entered the pop culture lexicon, it’s actual existence wasn’t that much of a secret and Lazar wasn’t certainly the first one to reveal it.
“I’m too stupid to understand the science,” Joe says in one of the clips, admitting he’s not equipped to know whether Lazar’s claims of antigravity propulsion are actually plausible or pure BS. Rogan’s evident curiosity on a variety of diverse topics has always been a tell-tale sign of his underestimated intellect, so I think he would do fine if he actually had the opportunity to talk with Bob Lazar. When it comes to UFOlogical guests, unfortunately, The Joe Rogan Experience doesn’t exactly have the greatest of track records –e.g. Dr. Steven Greer and Tom DeLonge— which may or may not have influenced why Joe ended up dismissing the topic of UFOs for so long –my money is on the latter.
So even Corbell by his own and without Bob would definitely be an improvement; even though I stand by my opinion that he sought too hard to embed himself into the Bob Lazar saga, and doesn’t show proper objectivity when it comes to responding to the valid criticism the story has generated over the years. But personally, I’d much rather see Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal sit at the table of Joe’s studio, as was suggested by Dennis McKenna –a man he deeply respects– but I’m fully aware the high strangeness involved in Strieber’s experiences, and Kripal’s academic take on them are not as ‘sexy’ and approachable as tales of back-engineered alien technology.
Then again, after the JRE had Alex Jones rambling for almost five hours about the “globalist conspiracy to steal humanity’s soul via the psychedelic-enable psychic downloads of blueprints provided by deceptive interdimensional aliens,” maybe Joe is in need to upgrade from UFOlogy 101 once and for all, and talk to the kind of people who are proposing alternatives to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis –someone who, unlike Jones, doesn’t go ‘from zero to tinfoil’ in less than 60 seconds.
Asteroids tend to be either rocky or metallic. This week, scientists said they think metallic – orM-type– asteroids started out as blobs of molten iron floating in space. A new study says that, as the metal cooled and solidified, volcanoes of molten iron might have erupted through the asteroids’ solid iron crust. The study waspublishedApril 8, 2019, in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters. It was prompted in part by NASA’s upcomingmissionto asteroidPsyche, which is the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system.
Although metallic asteroids have been detected in the asteroid belt orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers say their understanding of these asteroids’ surfaces is “limited.” The first detailed images will come from the Psyche spacecraft, scheduled to launch in 2022 and reach the asteroid four years later. The researchers said the mission could look for signs of past eruptions – evidence of what they call ferrovolcanism (ferro means containing iron) – such as variations in the color or composition of material on the surface, and possibly features that look like volcanic vents. These scientists said they aren’t sure what iron volcanoes on metal asteroids would look like. Large volcanic cones, like we see here on Earth, are probably unlikely, said the researchers. Because metallic asteroids would have solidified fairly quickly after their formation, there have been billions of years for any surface features of volcanism to be degraded.
The scientists also said evidence for ferrovolcanism might turn up in the study of iron meteorites in collections here on Earth. Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at University of California Santa Cruz, is the new study’s lead author. He commented:
There are lots of these metallic meteorites, and now that we know what we’re looking for, we might find evidence of volcanism in them. If material got erupted onto the surface, it would cool very fast, which would be reflected in the composition of the meteorite. And it might have holes in it left by escaping gas.
Animation of spacecraft flying around asteroid Psyche.
Via NASA.
Nimmo said he was interested in the composition of metallic asteroids when he asked graduate student Jacob Abrahams to work on some simple models of how the asteroids cooled and solidified. Nimmo said in a statement:
One day he turned to me and said, ‘I think these things are going to erupt.’ I’d never thought about it before, but it makes sense because you have a buoyant liquid beneath a dense crust, so the liquid wants to come up to the top.
Researchers believe that metallic asteroids originated early in the history of our solar system when newly-forming protoplanets collided and were stripped of their rocky outer layers, leaving just the molten, iron-rich core. In the cold of space, this blob of liquid metal would quickly begin to cool and solidify. Nimmo explained:
In some cases it would crystallize from the center out and wouldn’t have volcanism, but some would crystallize from the top down, so you’d get a solid sheet of metal on the surface with liquid metal underneath.
Bottom line: Volcanoes spewing molten iron might have erupted onto the surface of asteroids known as metallic asteroids, according to a new study.
Graham Hancock ontmaskert cover-up rond geavanceerde beschavingen in Amerika. Dit heeft men al die tijd verborgen proberen te houden
Graham Hancock ontmaskert cover-up rond geavanceerde beschavingen in Amerika. Dit heeft men al die tijd verborgen proberen te houden
Archeologie is erg dogmatisch. Zo werd bijvoorbeeld meer dan 50 jaar vastgehouden aan het dogmatische denkbeeld dat de eerste mensen zo’n 13.400 jaar geleden in Amerika verschenen, zegt schrijver Graham Hancock in het programma Going Underground.
“Dit was een doctrine,” merkt hij op.
Iedere archeoloog die op resten stuitte die ouder waren dan 13.400 jaar, werd helemaal afgefakkeld, aldus Hancock.
Verbannen
De archeologische gemeenschap stortte zich als een groep hyena’s op zo’n archeoloog en maakte zijn of haar carrière helemaal kapot, licht hij toe.
De afgelopen 50 jaar werd bewijs waaruit bleek dat mensen al veel eerder in Amerika leefden, gewoonweg genegeerd.
Onderzoekers die het toch probeerden aan te tonen, kregen geen geld voor onderzoek en werden verbannen uit de wetenschappelijke gemeenschap, legt Hancock uit.
Bakermat
“We weten nu dat mensen Amerika al vele tienduizenden jaren bewonen,” zegt hij. “Waarschijnlijk al meer dan 100.000 jaar.”
Naar deze periode wordt pas sinds kort onderzoek gedaan, merkt de schrijver op.
Archeologen zien Mesopotamië als de bakermat van onze beschaving, maar daar begint volgens Hancock verandering in te komen.
Nog oudere beschaving
Er komt steeds meer bewijs dat er al veel eerder geavanceerde beschavingen waren op aarde, bijvoorbeeld in Göbekli Tepe in Turkije.
En die beschavingen werden weer voorafgegaan door een nog oudere hoogontwikkelde beschaving, benadrukt Hancock.
Dit heeft men al die tijd verborgen proberen te houden.
The late Arizona Senator John McCain had an interest in UFOs, according to a former colleague, continuing a tradition among former politicians from the state who shared an interest in the UFO subject.
According to former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the late firebrand politician and political “Maverick”, as he was often called, also had an interest in the study of unusual things in our skies.
“Sure, John knew what I was doing… He didn’t hide the fact that he was interested also,” Reid said in a recent interview with KLAS-TV.
This isn’t news to many who have followed the ongoing inquiries into the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat (and) Identification Program (AATIP). In one of the most recent FOIA releases about the program, John McCain was mentioned in relation to a Senate inquiry about AATIP at that time, which included a synopsis of articles and research materials pertaining to advanced physics projects.
The Pentagon program was formerly headed by Luis Elizondo, now an employee with Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy. Elizondo announced at a conference in Alabama last month, in association with the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, that he would be appearing in a forthcoming television series on History Channel.
As far as Reid’s statement that McCain didn’t hide his interest in the UFO subject, there were indeed other instances from over the years where the late Arizona Senator discussed the possibility of “unknowns.” As far back as February 2000, McCain was apparently asked during a press conference about a then-pending lawsuit by attorney Peter Gersten, aimed at obtaining information from the U.S. Military pertaining to UFOs.
McCain giving a speech at the Pentagon in 1997, just months after the Phoenix Lights Incident.
“It’s always of great interest to me,” McCain said when asked specifically about whether UFOs and possible denial of information about them by the military were of interest to him. Although there was some laughter in the press room at the time, McCain continued:
“I think it’s of great interest. I would point out to you that there was a case a couple of years ago in Arizona, of some lights that were seen over Arizona, and that has never been fully explained.”
McCain was referencing the famous Phoenix Lights case, an incident involving lights which have been variously interpreted as flares from military aircraft during training operations, to a series of unidentified lights oriented in a large, triangle formation. Among the witnesses to this event had been then Arizona Governor Fife Symington, who infamously poked fun at the incident in a press conference shortly after the objects were seen. Many years later, he came forward and discussed his own sighting of the lights, which he believed were attached to a larger, triangular object “with a distinct leading edge.”
One explanation for the incident, as suggested above, had been the presence of a group of A-10 Warthogs conducting a training exercise over the Barry Goldwater Range on March 13, 1997. This Air Force bombing range, as the name would suggest, commemorates John McCain’s predecessor, Senator Barry Goldwater who, like McCain, had also been a one-time contender for the U.S. Presidency, as well as a public proponent of there being a reality behind UFOs.
On another occasion, McCain was asked by Chris Wallace of Fox News whether he had ever seen a UFO as a pilot during the Vietnam War.
“I can’t say that I did,” McCain told Wallace, “but I kept looking all the time.”
As Grant Cameron points out, McCain’s office had also assisted with obtaining medical records for John Burroughs, one of the witnesses to the 1980 Rendlesham incident in Suffolk, United Kingdom.
In conclusion, John McCain’s interest in UFOs is certainly noteworthy, especially in light of his work as an elected official, and remaining political influence since his passing in August of 2018. However, it’s not particularly surprising that he would have such interests, considering the history of similar interest among politicians from his state, and more importantly, the fact that one of the most notable purported UFO incidents in modern history occurred over Arizona.
It Weighed 1000's Of Tonnes and Yet, It Was Lifted By A 7 Stone Man! Secret Doors in Egypt..
It Weighed 1000's Of Tonnes and Yet, It Was Lifted By A 7 Stone Man! Secret Doors in Egypt...
It Weighed 1000′s Of Tonnes and Yet, It Was Lifted By A 7 Stone Man! Secret Doors in Egypt.. Watch the videos.
The tonne, commonly referred to as the metric ton in the United States and Canada, is a non-SI metric unit of mass equal to 1,000 kilograms or one megagram. It is equivalent to approximately 2,204.6 pounds, 1.102 short tons or 0.984 long tons.
Egypt, a country linking northeast Africa with the Middle East, dates to the time of the pharaohs. Millennia-old monuments sit along the fertile Nile River Valley, including Giza’s colossal Pyramids and Great Sphinx as well as Luxor’s hieroglyph-lined Karnak Temple and Valley of the Kings tombs. The capital, Cairo, is home to Ottoman landmarks like Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Egyptian Museum, a trove of antiquities.
I found this face on Mars way back in 1975 when I was in the 1st grade library in Silicon Valley, California. I thought it would be fun to take a closer look at it with todays photo software to add focus and contrast to it. It was obvious that NASA over exposed this photo on purpose to keep a lot of details secret.
I was amazed when I found that the face at Cydonia has a third eye. Yeah, thats right. I'm 100% serious about this. There is a half dome that is dark tinted in a third eye position on the forehead of the face.
I also discovered that there is a dark tower on the lower right area of the chin of the face. The dark tower is made from the non reflective black color substance that I have said was one of three of the most common colors of structures that I find.
Another interesting fact about the face at Cydonia is that the left side of the face has caved in. Its obvious that the face once had a huge hollow space within it and the left side shows some serous broken cliffs that probably crashed down during Mars earthquakes over the last few million years. Yeah...this face is old. You can see the video I made below to see the cliffs better.
This volcano is famous for its UFO and alien sightings. Volcano Popocatepetl has had hundreds of UFOs recorded around it over the last seven years. I started this site eleven years ago, but started reporting UFOs at that volcano back in nine years ago. I will put my first live cam recording of it at the bottom of this post.
The mouth of the volcano is about 600 meters across. It would take about 15 of these UFOs to make the full 600 meters. So this UFO is about 40 meters in diameter. And the eyewitness saw many of these craft near the volcano, but only reported photos of one. I think thats because the other UFOs were too far away or semi cloaked (transparent) so they were difficult to record. Volcano Popocatepetl is one of the most active alien bases in the world, with UFO sightings recorded there on a weekly basis. The base exists about 4-6km below the ground where they made a large cavern area that is so huge that it has its own weather climate.
Scott C. Waring - UFO researcher
About me:I was born in East Los Angeles, California. Had my first NASA photo discovery in the 1st grade (1975) in Silicon Valley where I discovered the face at Cydonia, Mars in the school library. Stopped till high school, where I began searching for buildings in NASA moon photos and succeeded. Started UFO Sightings Daily site in March 2009 to share things I learned about UFOs. I wrote four books. I graduated with a BA in elementary education from ISU and a Masters in Counseling education from MSU. I met my Taiwanese wife in university and opened an English school in Taiwan where I have lived ever since.
News states:
SAN NICOLÁS DE LOS RANCHOS, Puebla.- An "unidentified flying object" was captured by the journalist Carlos Clemente, during the period of activity of the Popocatépetl volcano, on March 27. The images show the object flying near the fumaroles over 3 kilometers high. To make the shot, the journalist of the team of conductor Jaime Maussan, occupied a camera of 3000 mm. The journalist toured the area impacted by the volcanic activity of "Don Goyo", on March 27; material that would serve for the broadcasts of the "Third Millennium News" programs. "When we were doing a photographic survey in the area near this colossus of fire, in one of our images, the presence of an unidentified flying object was captured in an incidental way, when we were observing, we realized that they were passing by, at high speed, at a distance, objects that we could not identify, however, in this photograph we can clearly grasp how one of these objects moved near the volcano, "explained the journalist during the broadcast of the past 28 and 31 of March. The journalist also stressed: "Without doubt, this is one of the clearest pictures of this type of unidentified flying objects that have been taken in the volcano." The image shows a classic dish with a dome, which even reflects sunlight, flying very close to the height of the crater of this volcano, considered one of the most active in the country.
Below is the video of the same volcano back in 2010 with UFO orbs around it on live cam.
Open Minds UFO Radio: Danny Silva runs the website SilvaRecord.com where he covers UFO news and information. He focuses on developments and information related to UFOs. He focuses on the work of the DoD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and the To the Stars Academy (TTSA). With all of the information coming out about UFO investigations related to both of these groups, Danny has done a great job keeping people appraised of news on these projects others have missed.
The AZURE mission successfully launched back-to-back aboard two sounding rockets in Norway tonight. These colorful clouds created a light show in the sky, helping researchers track the flow of neutral and charged particles in Earth's ionosphere. Details: https://go.nasa.gov/2oJGOtz.
NASA has quelled fears of an alien invasion after strange pulsating lights were spotted over the Arctic.
Frightening videos show glowing clouds shimmering over northern Sweden that some online commenters claimed was a UFO light show.
TWITTER/ADPHOTOGRAPHY24
This bizarre light show was triggered by a pair of experimental Nasa rockets
But the space conundrum has a far simpler explanation.
A pair of specially-designed rockets launched by Nasa last week released colourful chemicals into the sky.
Fired from a base in Finland, the rockets were the first of eight planned launches from the Auroral Zone Upwelling Rocket Experiment, or AZURE.
It aims to help Nasa understand the Northern Lights and the role they play in Earth's energy systems.
Travelling 200 miles to their target, the rockets released their payload in the sky during a real aurora to track how particles flow through Earth's atmosphere.
It is thought that the movement of energetic particles through a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere is what causes the Northern Lights.
Once released from the rockets, the gas fell and ionised to produce clouds of colour that gave scientists an idea of the movement of particles.
It also gave onlookers on the ground a great view, and many of them posted clips tosocial media.
Some were left a little confused by the experiment, which made it look like an advanced race had made its way to our planet.
"Residents for hundreds of miles were taken by surprise by these strange lights," according to Chris Nation, who runs the Aurora Addicts guiding service.
"The lights prompted calls to the police and ‘The aliens are coming!’ hysteria!"
Alien hunter Scott C Waring, who runs the crackpot site UFO Sightings Daily, said: "A person walked out onto their patio and expected to see the aurora borealis, but instead caught sight of a UFO fleet coming in for a landing as they entered an underground base."
TWITTER/ADPHOTOGRAPHY24
The colourful streaks gradually fade away over time
Nasa scientists hope the experiments will help them better understand how the Northern Lights appear in the sky.
"By tracking the movement of these colorful clouds via ground-based photography and triangulating their moment-by-moment position in three dimensions, AZURE will provide valuable data on the vertical and horizontal flow of particles," explained Miles Hatfield from Nasa’s Goddard Space Center in the US.
"Such measurements are critical if we are to truly understand the effects of the mysterious yet beautiful aurora."
"The results will be key to a better understanding of the effects of auroral forcing on the atmosphere, including how and where the auroral energy is deposited."
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The cave where the fossils which may belong to a new hominin species were found.
Credit: CALLAO CAVE ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT.
In a cave on a small island in the Philippines, scientists have found evidence of a new species of humans that lived at least 50,000 years ago. They called it Homo luzonensis, after the island of Luzon where the remains were found. These hominins were very short in stature, comparable to Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “hobbits”, which lived on the nearby Indonesian island called Flores. If the species is confirmed by DNA analysis, the findings will not only enrich the human family tree but also complicate the story of human migration and evolution in Asia.
Another one?
The fossils from the island of Luzon were excavated during three expeditions in 2007, 2011, and 2015. Inside the island’s Callao cave, researchers found seven teeth (five from the same individual), two finger bones, two toe bones, and an upper leg bone. All were dated as being at least 50,000 years old by radiocarbon decay analysis. These fossils were found alongside those of butchered animals, suggesting that the cave’s inhabitants were at least sophisticated enough to devise cutting tools and rafts to reach the island from the mainland.
Individually, the bones are very similar to other Homo species in terms of shape and size. However, taken together, they reveal a combination of features that no other hominin shared. Homo luzonensis‘ molars were very small, even smaller than the hobbits. The premolars were relatively large, however, and had up to three roots rather than one — a feature shared by Homo erectus. The finger and toe bones were curved, suggesting tree-climbing ability that is more reminiscent of hominids living two million years ago in Africa.
Five fossil teeth from the same individual have unusual features that helped researchers determine that they might be dealing with a new species of human.
Credit: CALLAO CAVE ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT.
These findings suggest that the landscape occupied by our species was once quite crowded. We now know that Homo sapiens were contemporaries not only with their famous cousins, the Neanderthals, but also with Homo floresiensis, the Denisovans (a species that lived around a cave in the Altai Mountains of western Siberia), and now this fifth species, Homo luzonensis. This dramatically complicates the story of human migration into Asia suggesting that several human lineages had already occupied East Asia by the time the first modern humans reached China as early as 80,000 years ago.
A Homo luzonensis toe bone, showing the longitudinal curve.
Credit: CALLAO CAVE ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECT.
Homo luzonensis was typically around 30 to 50 kilograms, stood 1 to 1.5 meters tall, and had brains around one-third the size of our own. Just like the hobbits on Flores, Homo luzonensis may be descendants of Homo erectus populations that crossed the sea from mainland Asia to Luzon. The small body and unusual skeletal traits may have been adaptations pressured by island dwarfing — a process whereby some creatures confined to isolated habitats such as islands are known to have become smaller over time due to limited resources and ecology.
Digital reconstruction of homo floresiensis, nicknamed ‘the hobbit’.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
It’s not clear yet if we’re dealing with a new species at all. The team of researchers, led by Florent Détroit of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, was unable to extract DNA from the fossils. Until a proper DNA analysis confirms the distinct lineage, Homo luzonensis’ inclusion in the human family tree remains questionable. For instance, the fossils might belong to hybrids — the products of interbreeding between two or more earlier Homo species. Or perhaps Homo erectus populations that arrived at Luzon simply acquired some traits that made them more adapted to their environment, rather than speciating.
The findings are still incredibly exciting, nevertheless. It’s amazing to hear that our species lived at the same time as four other human lineages and perhaps interacted with them. What a sight that must have been to behold.
Three items that cast doubt on the study used to close Project Blue Book
Three items that cast doubt on the study used to close Project Blue Book
Why it’s legit to doubt the University of Colorado UFO study that shuttered Project Blue Book
Alejandro Rojas
In 1947, a U.S. Air Force (USAF)inquiry into “flying saucers” determined the phenomenon to be “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” This inquiry was the impetus for official UFO studies conducted by the USAF from 1947 to 1969. Although the USAF begrudgingly took on this task, public interest helped keep their UFO projects alive.
In December 1969, the USAF finally got out of the UFO business. A document titled The U.S. Air Force Fact Sheet Concerning UFO's and Project BLUE BOOK that can be found on the National Archive’s website states:
“The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, "Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;" a review of the University of Colorado's report by the National Academy of Sciences; past UFO studies and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the 40s, '50s, and ‘60s.
As a result of these investigations and studies and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project BLUE BOOK are:(1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security;(2) there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present-day scientific knowledge; and(3) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.”
Edward Condon, a well-regarded physicist, headed the University of Colorado’s UFO study. Many refer to the study as the Condon Report.
For the media and the scientific community, the study has been enough to write off the entire subject and move on. Recently it has been revealed by the New York Times that the Pentagon has a secret UFO study that allegedly continues to this day. However, it has been questioned whether or not this is a waste of time, because we already looked into UFOs for decades and found there was nothing to it.
The problem with this thinking is it assumes the University of Colorado’s study was universally accepted. However, it was not.
Critics
One of the leading critics of the study was Dr. J. Allen Hynek (seen above). Hynek was a professor of astronomy who served as a consultant for the USAF UFO studies from 1948 to 1969. When he began working with the USAF, he had said he felt the whole UFO phenomenon was “utterly ridiculous.” However, he later changed his mind and spent the rest of his life researching the subject.
As for the University of Colorado’s study, in his book The Hynek UFO Report, Hynek states, “if one goes past Dr. Condon’s summary…one will probably find the Condon Report to be a powerful document in favor of the reality of the UFO phenomenon.” In his book, The UFO Experience, A Scientific Inquiry, he wrote that the report "avoided mentioning that there was embedded within the bowels of the report a remaining mystery; that the committee had been unable to furnish adequate explanations for more than a quarter of the cases examined.”
Hynek also notes in The Hynek UFO Report, that the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) reviewed the document as well and came up with a similar conclusion. The AIAA stressed that it is essential to read the entire study, not just the many summaries available because opposing views were shard, and Condon’s often sighted summary contained more of his “personal opinion.” They wrote, “the [AIAA] UFO Sub-Committee did not find a basis in the report for his prediction that ‘nothing of scientific value will come of further studies.’”
France’s GEIPAN
Another person of importance who agreed with these critics was an engineer for France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), Claude Poher - the CNES is the equivalent of NASA in the U.S. Poher read a copy of the Condon Report, but he had a much different reaction to the case studies than Condon. To Poher, the Condon report demonstrated there was something to the UFO phenomenon.
Poher was so inspired by what he read that he went to his superiors and was able to convince them to create a UFO study group within CNES. In 1977, the study group was made permanent under the name Groupement d’Etude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés (GEPAN). Although the group has changed in size and scope over the years, it still exists to this day as the Groupe d ’Études et d ’Information sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non identifiés (GEIPAN). It is one of the few public official government UFO organizations in existence.
While the Condon Report was used to close Project Blue Book in the U.S., it inspired the creation of GEIPAN in France.
The Low Memo
As can be seen by the response of critics, upon reading the Condon Report, many feel the summary provided at the beginning by Condon does not reflect the body of the report. Some had questioned whether Condon had read the report at all, or if he had made his conclusion before the report was started. In 1967, while the study was underway, evidence was leaked that supported this point of view.
Dr. James McDonald, a senior physicist at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics and a professor at the University of Arizona, was leaked a memo from individuals within the Condon Committee. McDonald was an advocate for the scientific investigation of UFOs, so the leakers knew they would find with him a sympathetic ear. The committee members leaked the memo because they felt there was a preconceived bias to the study.
University of Colorado administrator Robert Low wrote the memo in the summer of 1966 while the University was negotiating with the USAF and considering whether they would take on the project. The memo was sent to a couple of his fellow University of Colorado administrators reassuring them that the study would be sure not to discover anything controversial.
It read:
“Our study would be conducted almost entirely by non-believers who, though they couldn't possibly prove a negative result, could and probably would add an impressive body of thick evidence that there is no reality to the observations. The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a totally objective study but, to the scientific community, would present the image of a group of non-believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.”
Many of the UFO organizations cooperating with the study ended their participation when the memo was leaked. However, skeptics had claimed that Condon had not seen the memo before it was leaked, and thus it had no impact on the study. The leakers had sent the memo to McDonald because they felt differently.
After the memo’s release, the leakers were discovered and removed from their participation in the Codon Committee.
Much has been written about the Condon Report, and often when researchers - including myself - inquire about USAF or other government involvement in UFO studies, they are sent the USAF Fact Sheet referenced above. This has been the case for decades. Little did we know the Pentagon has had a secretive UFO research group since 2007. Senator Reid, who secured the funding for the Pentagon UFO project, claims he believes other UFO projects exist that remain secret.
Pointing to the Condon Report as evidence that there is no reason to investigate the UFO phenomenon may not be as strong an argument as it appears at first glance. Apparently, the Pentagon, and potentially other government entities, also seem to have found reasons to take the matter seriously and allegedly continue to investigate the phenomenon behind closed doors.
"We were on the beach, my boyfriend and I, and saw two bright orange/red lights far on the other end of the beach," ufomystery123 posted to Reddit.
"In a matter of seconds, one of the lights started moving at full speed, in a straight line, no more that 200m above the water until directly in front of us.
"The UFO had changed from having a red light to a bright white light, somewhat like a torch, shining directly at us."
After two minutes the strange object moved away, flying "incredibly fast and with perfect precision" until it disappeared. But this wasn't the end to the strange occurrences.
"We were lying down looking at the stars for a while and then stood up to leave, before realizing there were five surrounding us in different areas of the beach," they posted.
"One of them was flying up and down and another from side to side. The others were just still switching between red and white spotlights.
"This was when we decided to leave, scared shitless."
They fled the beach but couldn't escape the lights. Looking at the sky from Titirangi they saw the lights flying away "like a plane".
They've posted to social media asking if anyone has heard of any UFOs similar to this, or seen any around New Zealand.
One reply suggest a more prosaic answer - "inflatable sports equipment and coloured lights".
"What you saw was a couple of beach ball with LED inside," one user commented.
"There's been a number of sightings recently that have been confirmed to be beach ball with LED."
Other answers included Chinese lanterns or meteorological equipment.
"The flash of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus," one person said.
But others believe it is evidence of something unexplainable - and possibly something not human.
"I've seen the same UFOs at Whatipu about a month ago which is next beach down basically. Strait up [sic]," said one person.
"They didn't come up close to me but they were flying around over the water quite low and at a decent but not super-fast speed.
"I didn't actually think much of it but they were a red/orange colour which I thought was strange. Three or four of them."
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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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..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
