Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 10 MONTHS.
ON 06/04/2024 MORE THAN 1.951.050
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
13-04-2019
Crash and Burn: Israel’s Moon Shot Ends in Disaster.
Crash and Burn: Israel’s Moon Shot Ends in Disaster.
With the settler state more divided than ever, and tensions between the native Palestinians as high as ever, this event was meant to be Israel’s “unifying moment” that would bring all Israelis (but not its Arab residents) and globally Jewry together with a shared purpose for one glorious moment.
The attempted moon landing by the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet was broadcast live last night, on the side of the spacecraft read the slogan, “Small country, big dreams.”
However, the Jewish state’s lunar dream crashed and burned, in spectacular fashion, as one of the craft’s main engines blew up on its final descent, crashing into the Moon.
The explosion is said to have marked the end of Israel’s fledgling satellite industry, effectively denying the Jewish state a seat in the elite global club of countries who’ve executed successful lunar landings.
The timing of this grand process – culminating at the exact moment when the Israeli election results were announced – was perhaps too much a coincidence for even the most ardent non-skeptic. Somewhat poetically, Israel’s shallow 2019 election campaign ended as it deserved: A farce.
Noa Landau from Haaretz summed the irony up as follows:
“This is why the loss of communications with the spacecraft, just a moment before the anticipated landing, and just a moment before the announcement of the final election vote results, which at the very last moment went awry – exactly like the landing – felt like one big metaphor. Like the country that could have been, but we have missed out on. In the high-tech superpower filled with traffic jams and embarassing trains, where it’s impossible to receive a package in the mail, and votes can’t be correctly counted, everything is so close, but not quite.”
Beresheet’s engine stopped working around 10 kilometers from the surface, with the vehicle crashing into the Moon at a speed of over 130 meters per second.
It looks like the #beresheet lander (the first private lander trying to land on the moon) hit the surface going 134 m/s (wayyyyyy too fast) after its main engine cut out around 10 km in altitude
The blunder occurred on a live feed in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, who arrived at the control center for the occasion.
Just received from SpaceIL communication team what appears to be the last image #Beresheet spacecraft managed to beam to earth before it crashed on the moons surface
However, the space explorers didn’t seem shaken by the setback as they all chanted a solemn song to show that getting so close to the goal was an achievement in itself.
Netanyahu has already promised that an Israeli spacecraft will be back to the Moon in the next two or three years.
Beresheet, which is Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning,” could have also become the first private spacecraft to land on the Moon. It was constructed by Israeli nonprofit space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defense contractor Israel Aerospace Industries. The $100 million needed for the ambitious project came from private investors.
Only Russia, the US, and China have so far managed to perform controlled “soft” landings on the lunar surface.
It’s time for the latest edition of “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”, the game show that pits seemingly unethical science against potentially catastrophic predictions. In today’s competition, scientists in China (one point already for the catastrophic team) announce they used gene-editing to place human brain genes in rhesus macaque monkeys and it made their brains smarter. Cue the music from every “Planet of the Apes” movie and let the game begin!
“The presented data represents the first attempt to experimentally interrogate the genetic basis of human brain origin using a transgenic monkey model, and it values the use of nonhuman primates in understanding human unique traits.”
China Daily reports that researchers from the Beijing-based National Science Review, the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of North Carolina (that’s in the U.S. – looks like it’s playing for the Seemingly Unethicals) edited human MCPH1 genes – a gene that is critical in fetal brain development because it controls brain size and rate of growth – and created 11 transgenic (a cloud word meaning “artificially carrying DNA from an unrelated organism”) monkeys. Eight of those monkeys were first-generation and three were second-generation, obliterating the ‘artificial’ part of ‘transgenic’ by getting their human genes from their monkey parents.
“According to the research article, brain imaging and tissue section analysis showed an altered pattern of neuron differentiation and a delayed maturation of the neural system, which is similar to the developmental delay (neoteny) in humans.”
In other words, the monkeys showed the human trait of slow brain development (neoteny) rather than the rapid growth of normal monkey brains. What was the benefit of this slow growth?
“The study also found that the transgenic monkeys exhibited better short-term memory and shorter reaction time compared to wild rhesus monkeys in the control group.”
To put it bluntly — even the monkeys could understand the results because the human genes made them smarter!
Ding-ding-ding! That bell means it’s time to play the lightning “What could possibly go wrong?” round.
Time-out called by the Potentially Catastrophics. In a shocking and somewhat honorable display of conscience, Martin Styner, a University of North Carolina computer scientist and coauthor of the Chinese report, told the MIT Technology Review that his role was merely to train Chinese student on how to extract brain volume data from MRI images and, after learning the true purpose, considered removing his name from the paper, which he claims could not find a publisher in the West. Styner then throws his “What could possibly go wrong?” pitch:
“I don’t think that is a good direction. Now we have created this animal which is different than it is supposed to be. When we do experiments, we have to have a good understanding of what we are trying to learn, to help society, and that is not the case here.”
Is this going to be a sequel to Planet of the Apes or Flowers for Algernon?
Unfortunately, that pitch didn’t strike out Bing Su, the geneticist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology who led the research. He told the MIT Technology Review he is planning to create more smart monkeys and is planning to test another gene — SRGAP2C – which has been called the “humanity switch” and the “missing genetic link” because it appeared about two million years ago when Australopithecus (the Southern Ape) was being replaced by the smarter Homo habilis.
Putting the “humanity switch” in a monkey? What could possibly go wrong? This game isn’t over … it’s barely starting. Is this progress … or an unethical march down the field to unforeseen consequences?
If we’ve learned anything from “Planet of the Apes,” it’s that if this game goes into overtime, it won’t be a sudden death.
In the summer of 1997, one of the most controversial UFO-themed books ever written was published. Its title wasThe Day After Roswell. It was written by William Birnes (the editor of the now-defunct UFO Magazine and of History Channel’s also defunct UFO Hunters) and Philip Corso (the subject of the book). Specifically, he was Lieutenant Colonel. Philip J. Corso. U.S. Army. Corso’s story was both amazing and groundbreaking. But, was it true? That, quite possibly, was the biggest and most important question of all. While some in the field of Ufology firmly embraced the story, many certainly did not, preferring instead to view the book as either government disinformation – intended to confuse the truth of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico back in the summer of 1947 – or nothing more than an elaborate and ingenious hoax designed to make money from the gullible and the “I want to believe” crowd.
According to Corso, in near-singlehanded fashion he spearheaded a top secret program designed to seed alleged alien technology and wreckage – recovered from the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico by the U.S. Army Air Force’s 509th Bomb Wing in July 1947 – into the private sector. As a result of this wholly clandestine operation, so Corso maintained, the United States was soon able to understand, and even back-engineer, at least some of the extraterrestrial materials found on the ranch. Fiber-optics, transistors, night-vision equipment, and computer chips, were all, allegedly, a direct outgrowth of the extensive studies of the Roswell materials. But, it’s not so much the technology reportedly found at Roswell that I’m focusing my attentions on. Rather, it’s the bodies of the beings allegedly found strewn around the crash site.
Contrary to what the UFommunity said or assumed at the time and since, Corso never explicitly stated that the Roswell corpses were extraterrestrial. In fact, what he really said was quite the opposite. In Corso’s story the so-called “Grey aliens” are actually created, built, or grown to perform specific tasks. As for the creators of the Greys, it was they, Corso repeatedly maintained, who were the real aliens. Corso also said that, as far as he was personally aware, no one has ever seen the real aliens, only ever their black-eyed, large-headed worker-drones that are so well known in the field of Ufology. As for Corso himself, he stated: “…perhaps we should consider the EBEs [Extraterrestrial Biological Entities] as described in the medical autopsy reports humanoid robots rather than lifeforms, specifically engineered for long distance travel through space or time.”
Corso expanded on this, outlining the profoundly weird nature of the Greys: “While doctors couldn’t figure out how the entities’ essential body chemistry worked, they determined that they contained no new basic elements. However, the reports that I had suggested new combinations of organic compounds that required much more evaluation before doctors could form any opinions. Of specific interest was the fluid that served as blood but also seemed to regulate bodily functions in much the same way glandular secretions do for the human body. In these biological entities, the blood system and lymphatic systems seem to have been combined. And if an exchange of nutrients and waste occurred within their systems, that exchange could have only taken place through the creature’s skin or the outer protective covering they wore because there were no digestive or waste systems.”
Today, more than two decades after The Day After Roswellsurfaced, the undeniably strange story of Colonel Corsocontinues to divide the UFO research field. It probably always will. Me? I’m sticking to the scenario laid out in my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.
Studies of a solar flarerevealed something unexpected about the sun: its magnetic field is even stronger than scientists predicted.
Measuring that magnetic field within loops of material bursting out of the sun has been a tricky feat because of the interference of Earth's atmosphere. But a team led by David Kuridze, a solar physicist at Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom, got lucky when they caught sight ofa super-strong flare that the sun belched on Sept. 10, 2017.
The researchers spotted the flare using the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telescope at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. The solar telescope is a particularly powerful solar telescope, but its aperture (viewing area) allows researchers to examine only 1 percent of the sun at a time. Fortunately, the team was looking at exactly the right spot when a solar flare erupted.
This good luck allowed them to measure the flare's magnetic field strength high in the sun's corona, or atmosphere.
The sun is well-known for its magnetic activity, including periodic flares that rise from the surface when magnetic lines twist and "snap." Flares are associated with coronal mass ejections, which send streams of charged particles into space. If these particles are aimed toward Earth, they can disrupt satellites or cause colorful auroral displays.
The new finding could help scientists better understand what is happening in the corona, the superheated part of the sun's upper atmosphere that is visible to humans only during a total solar eclipse. The corona is being studied by a NASA spacecraft called the Parker Solar Probe, which is zooming closer to the sun than any other spacecraft before it.
"Everything that happens in the sun's outer atmosphere is dominated by the magnetic field, but we have very few measurements of its strength and spatial characteristics," Kuridze said in a statement. "These are critical parameters, the most important for the physics of the solar corona. It is a little like trying to understand the Earth's climate without being able to measure its temperature at various geographical locations."
The research is described in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and that was posted to the preprint server arXiv.org in February.
CONNECTICUT — There must be something in the air in Newington as three of the 17 reported UFO sightings in 2019 have occurred there. UFOs were spotted in Newington on March 11, 17, and 19. As of right now, Newington is the only town in Connecticut that has had multiple reported sightings thus far.
Since Jan. 1, 2019 there have been 17 reported sightings: Greenwich on Jan. 6, Southington on Jan. 9, Storrs on Jan. 12, Stamford on Jan. 27, Waterbury on Jan. 28, Madison on Feb. 6, East Hartford on Feb. 22, North Branford, on Feb. 24, Killingworth on March 3, Newington on March 11, 17, and 19. Other sightings include: Rocky Hill on March 22, Windsor on March 23, and Hamden on March 27.
There were a total of 93 reported UFO sightings in Connecticut in 2018, according to the National UFO Reporting Center. And there were 70 reported UFO sightings in 2017.
Here are some of the reported accounts as recorded by the National UFO Reporting Center:
"Several blinking red, white, blue, and green objects in sky moving to one spot.I woke up a little after midnight. I looked out the bathroom window and a red and white blinking object was in the sky. t stayed in one spot for about 3 minutes and proceeded to move faster and blink red. It went towards the backyard.
"I looked out the back window and saw one white, another white, and red flashing lights light up the sky in a line. Looking around the sky, several more triangle shaped objects all oddly moved DOWN towards this line of flashing lights. Two were disc shaped and were fastly blinking red, white, blue, and even green. My mom and I also heard a powerful unordinary sound. Once ALL these objects made it to this line of flashing lights, we saw continued blinking but the objects seemed to vanish," reported in Hamden.
"2 bright greenish flashes illuminated the entire area greenish light. Second flash was very alarming and unnatural giving all three of us in vehicle a panicked bracing for impact feeling. No sounds at all heard. Silent," reported in Killingworth.
"Bright green slow flashes (2) one after another lasting 2-3 secs. through solid cloud deck. No aircraft heard in vicinity.Walking while looking directly north (clouds deck overhead no visibility of stars) first one slow 2 to 3 sec flash GREEN like maybe a meteor, but extremely bright to be able to see thru clouds, followed by a second slow 2-3 sec flash of equal brightness.
"Best guess 2 green meteors coming down. Both were lighting the sky from horizon up to 60' above north horizon and from northwest to northeast expansion. No sound or blast wave followed. But they did look close to be so bright through a solid cloud deck. I was standing just 50 yards north of highway 80 and totoket road intersection walking north in RV park. I am a pilot and amatuer astronomer and well versed in sky phenomenon.
"I only saw the flashes which were green and lit up the cloud deck above me as described above. No other visible indications. I waited but nothing followed. I can say by the color of flash etc... it was not a ground vehicle lights or any ground based lights causing this. Nothing to north but trees and countryside," reported in North Branford.
"On 91 ramp in (Windsor Locks) saw a flat disk with two bright lights hovering.I was on an on ramp to get onto 91 south in the Windsor Locks area and I saw a flat dark disk with two bright lights on it. I initially thought it was an airplane however when I pulled my car over to take a longer look it had disappeared. There were no trees or faulty sight lines blocking it--it was too high up in the air. It disappeared in less than ten seconds," reported in Windsor.
The NUFORC has existed since 1974 and investigates reported sightings around the world. There have been more than 90,000 reports made globally.
Check out all the Connecticut sightings dating back several decades as reported to the UFORC here.
Israel's first moon lander came up just short in its historic touchdown bid this afternoon (April 11).
The robotic Beresheet spacecraft, built by SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), aimed to become the first Israeli craft, and the first privately funded mission, ever to land softly on the moon. But the little robot couldn't quite make it, crashing into the gray dirt around 3:25 p.m. EDT (1925 GMT). Mission control lost communications with the spacecraft when it was about 489 feet (149 meters) above the moon's surface.
"We had a failure in the spacecraft; we unfortunately have not managed to land successfully," Opher Doron, the general manager of IAI, said during a live broadcast from mission control. "It's a tremendous achievement up 'til now."
"If at first you don't succeed, you try again," said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who watched Beresheet's landing attempt from SpaceIL's control center in Yehud, Israel.
So the list of moon-landing nations remains at three, all of them superpowers — the Soviet Union, the United States and China.
But Beresheet accomplished plenty during its short life, as we shall see.
Beresheet's story begins in 2011, when the nonprofit organization SpaceIL formed to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize. The GLXP offered $20 million to the first privately funded team to put a robot down softly on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) on the lunar surface and have it send high-resolution imagery home to Earth.
The runner-up would pocket $5 million. An additional $5 million was available for various special accomplishments, bringing the contest's total purse to $30 million.
The competition ended last year without a winner, but SpaceIL and IAI, the country's biggest aerospace and defense company, continued working on the 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet. (Some other former GLXP teams, such as Florida-based Moon Express, have kept going as well.)
Last month, the X Prize Foundation announced that SpaceIL could win a special $1 million Moonshot Award if Beresheet successfully landed on the lunar surface. Just minutes after the moon crash, X Prize founder and Executive Chairman Peter Diamandis and CEO Anousheh Ansari said SpaceIL and IAI will receive the award despite failing to land.
"I think they managed to touch the surface of the moon, and that's what we were looking for for our Moonshot Award," Ansari said.
"And also, besides touching the surface of the moon, they touched the lives and the hearts of an entire nation, an entire world, schoolkids around the world," Diamandis said.
Peter Diamandis✔@PeterDiamandis
XPRIZE to award $1 Million Moonshot Award to SpaceIL team for them to continue their work and pursue Beresheet 2.0. Space is hard!!! @xprize @TeamSpaceIL
The lander launched on the night of Feb. 21, soaring into Earth orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Beresheet continued looping around our planet for the next six weeks, performing engine burns now and again to push its elliptical orbit closer and closer to the moon.
Beresheet ended up covering about 4 million miles (6.5 million kilometers) during this phase of the mission, team members said. No other spacecraft has taken such a long road to the moon.
Beresheet's slow-and-steady strategy paid off on April 4, when the moon's gravity captured the lander. Beresheet then lowered its lunar orbit via a series of burns, the last of which occurred yesterday (April 10). That 32-second maneuver shifted the spacecraft into a highly elliptical orbit with a closest lunar approach of just 9 to 10 miles (15 to 17 kilometers) and a most-distant point 125 miles (200 km) from the gray dirt, mission team members said.
Surface plans
Today's landing was scheduled to occur autonomously, on a patch of the lunar near side known as Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity"). (All lunar surface craft to date have explored the near side, with one exception: China's Chang'e 4 mission touched down on the far side this past December.)
Beresheet was designed to make some measurements of the local gravity field around its landing site during its two or three Earth days of work on the moon. The craft also toted a small laser retroreflector array built by NASA, a technology demonstration that could increase the precision of future touchdowns on the moon and other celestial bodies. But Beresheet was not a science mission at heart.
The main goals, SpaceIL and IAI representatives have said, involved advancing Israel's space program, increasing the nation's technological knowhow and getting young people more interested in science, technology, engineering and math.
And the lander has certainly done all of that. It managed to make it to lunar orbit, after all, send back a photograph from near the moon's surface, and almost nail the landing. And Beresheet did all of this for a total mission cost of just $100 million, including launch.
In addition, project team members have met with more than 1 million Israeli schoolkids over the past eight years, taking the space-exploration message to the young masses. Some of those children will eventually become scientists — and perhaps help design, build or operate spacecraft themselves someday.
"Well, we didn't make it but we definitely tried," Morris Kahn, an entrepreneur who helped found the Beresheet mission, said shortly after the spacecraft's failed landing attempt. "I think we can be proud."
Space.com senior writer Meghan Bartels contributed to this report.
The orange speckles in a new image from NASA'sChandra X-ray Observatoryadd another dimension tothe first-ever image of a black hole. This supplemental picture offers a zoomed-out perspective of the same tremendously dense structure of the now-viral image, helping scientists learn more about what's happening in the black hole's neighborhood.
The supermassive black hole starring in both pictures is located in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87. It's a behemoth; this black hole boasts a mass several billion times greater than that of Earth's sun.
To offer a little more perspective about this structure and the powerful effect it has on the matter around it, scientists collaborating with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured a different view of this same target. They did so in tandem with EHT observations made in April 2017, according to a statementpublished the same day as the black hole picture.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory spent 30,000 seconds watching the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 during the April 2017 observing run by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). These X-ray data, in combination with the new radio image from the EHT released April 10, will help scientists learn more about high-energy emission as well as the physics of accretion and ejection at the black hole's event horizon.
To capture the incredible image of a supermassive black hole's shadow, the EHT project gathered data from a global array of radio antennas. On Wednesday (April 10), the incredible feat of finally imaging this enigmatic structure astonished scientists and the public alike.
But another instrument in space, Chandra, has been gazing at the black hole's home galaxy over the last two decades, collecting data in a different wavelength: X-rays. Astronomers had Chandra stare at Messier 87 (M87) for about 30,000 seconds, or roughly 8.3 hours, as the EHT dish network took its observations from the ground.
The four ultrasensitive mirrors that Chandra carries in its orbit around Earth observed the X-ray radiation of multimillion-degree gas shrouding M87.
The National Science Foundation funded the Event Horizon Telescope project, which successfully captured this picture, the first-ever image of a black hole using radio waves.
These X-rays came from the high-energy particles the black hole was flinging into space. The material resulted in a jet shape which extends over 1,000 light years from the center of M87, Chandra representatives said in the statement. Viewers can observe the jet more clearly in the enlarged image inset.
Black holes are superdense structures with tremendous gravitational pull, and past a black hole's threshold, the event horizon, even light cannot escape.
Every galaxy is thought to host a supermassive black hole, like this one within M87, at its center.
Scientists used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to obtain data about the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, an elliptical galaxy located 60 million light-years away from Earth, in the Virgo galaxy cluster.
Here are some glorious photos of rare lenticular clouds, sometimes called UFO clouds, plus a word about how they form.
Beautiful shot of lenticular cloud at sunset by Chris Walker in Dayton, Nevada.
Enjoy these photos of beautiful lenticular clouds taken in places around the world, and shared with us by our community atEarthSky Facebook and EarthSky Community Photos.
These lens-shaped clouds typically form where stable moist air flows over a mountain or a range of mountains. When this happens, a series of large-scale standing waves may form on the mountain’s downwind side. If the temperature at the crest of the wave drops to the dew point, moisture in the air may condense to form lenticular clouds. As the moist air moves back down into the trough of the wave, the cloud may evaporate back into vapor. So lenticular clouds can appear and disappear relatively quickly. Plus they’re not familiar to people who live in low-lying or flat terrain. And, just to confound things, lenticular clouds have also been known to form in non-mountainous places, as the result of shear winds created by a front. For all of these reasons, lenticular clouds are often mistaken for UFOs (or “visual cover” for UFOs). Enjoy the photos! Thank you to all who posted.
Alba Evangelista Ramos, a Brazilian biologist, captured these rare images of a lenticular cloud from a moving vehicle, near the Haute-Provence Observatory, situated in southeastern France. In this particular case, the “UFO cloud” seems to have been produced by the cold mistral wind that strongly blows over southern France, as it was pushed up the 2,132-foot-high (650-meter-high) plateau of the observatory.
Jan Whiteman captured this photo at Lord Howe Island, a volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.
Shared with EarthSky by Jay Lundstrom, who caught this lenticular cloud near Mount Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine.
Sarah Fischer wrote, “I came out of my apartment building, and these were right above my head.”
Lenticular cloud over Roque del Conde, on the island of Tenerife, via Roberto Porto.
“Lenticular cloud outside my window in Dublin, Ireland, this morning. I was surprised to see this as we don’t get them too often here,” said Anthony Lynch Photography.
View larger. | Lenticular cloud over Iceland by Anne Greschuk.
View larger. | Lenticular clouds over Sangre de Cristo mountains, New Mexico, by EarthSky Facebookfriend Geraint Smith.
Angela Mosley caught this lenticular cloud from Denver, Colorado.
Lenticular clouds by Richard T. Hasbrouck in Truchas, New Mexico.
David Marshall captured this lenticular cloud above the Alps in northern Italy.
John Lloyd Griffith in north Wales captured this lenticular cloud.
This photo comes from Michel Studinger of Operation IceBridge. It’s a lenticular cloud over Antarctica.
Radek Zek Photography caught this lenticular cloud.
Emilio Lepeley captured this lenticular cloud over Vicuña, Chile.
Jackie Phillips caught this lenticular cloud over Virginia.
Bottom line: Photos of lenticular clouds in various parts of the world, from the EarthSky community. Click here to submit your photo.
Découvrez l’histoire des momies de Nazca, également appelées les reliques du Pérou, ou encore, les momies tridactyles. Quand les Houaqueros, des pilleurs de tombe d’Amérique latine dévoilent une partie de leur découverte et transmettent à un français, Thierry Jamin, ce qui pourrait être la plus impressionnante découverte de notre Histoire, nous nous retrouvons face à une nouvelle facette de notre passé et de nos origines. Mais quand les analyses ADN de ces restes biologiques parlent, les questions se réveillent…
19/11/18 Momies de Nazca : Résultats Alien Project 2018 - NURÉA TV / GREPP
Momies de Nasca : Résultats Alien Project 2018
Lundi 19 novembre 2018 à 15h00 (09h00 heure péruvienne)
Sous l’égide du congressiste Armando Villanueva, auteur du projet de loi sur les momies de Nasca, présentation officielle des résultats d’analyses au congrès de la République du Pérou (métaux , histologie, datation C14, analyses ADN, scanners HD)
Voilà déjà un long moment que nous suivons de très près le dossier des corps « exotiques » découvertes en 2016 par des Waquerros dans le désert de Nasca au Pérou (dossier ensuite pris en charge sur place par les équipes d’Inkari Cusco et Alien Project) et que nous partageons sur notre antenne les avancées sur les analyses et les interprétations qui peuvent être faites sur ces corps. Après des mois de travail et de nombreuses analyses effectuées par des laboratoires indépendants (C14, ADN, métaux, scanners, tomographies, histologie) l’équipe Alien Project a décidé de présenter officiellement les résultats obtenus lors d’une réunion programmée le 19 novembre à Lima en présence de membres du Congrès péruvien.
A cette occasion, nous avons décidé de dépêcher sur place plusieurs membres des équipes de Nuréa TV et du GREPP afin de vous faire vivre cet évènement au plus près et de vous informer au mieux des éléments nouveaux qui s’ajoutent au dossier « Momies de Nasca ». Notre objectif : récolter un maximum d'infos sur le dossier, essayer de séparer le vrai du faux, l'interprétation du factuel et ainsi donner à chacun la possibilité de se faire un avis sur ces découvertes.
Vous pourrez suivre ici cette réunion en direct du congrès péruvien à Lima et traduite simultanément en français.
Merci d’avance pour vos partages et invitations.
Nora & Guillaume
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
This is the last image Israel’s lunar lander took before it crashed into the moon
This is the last image Israel’s lunar lander took before it crashed into the moon
Israel-based organization SpaceIL lost control of lunar lander Beresheet during the landing attempt on Thursday evening.
What happened:
During the lander’s descent onto the moon, the main engine failed and shut down. Once it got back online, communications with Beresheet were gone, indicating a likely crash landing. “Israel made it to the moon. Beresheet’s journey hasn’t ended,” said the chairman of SpaceIL, Morris Kahn. “I expect Israel’s next generation to complete the mission for us.” The above photo is one of the last shots the craft sent back of the lunar surface.
The community response:
SpaceIL was originally formed to take part in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, which ended with no winner. But the competition’s organizer, the X Prize Foundation, has said it will still award the $1 million “Moonshot Award” to the team despite the failed landing. A number of prominent members of the space community took to Twitter to offer both condolences and congratulations. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin tweeted: “Never lose hope—your hard work, teamwork, and innovation is inspiring to all!”
A major accomplishment:
The mission still achieved a number of milestones, despite not sticking the landing. As the head of Israel Aerospace Industry’s space division, Opher Doron, said during a live stream, Israel is now the seventh country to orbit the moon and the fourth to reach the surface. SpaceIL is also the first former Lunar X Prize team (see “Why getting back to the moon is so damn hard”) and private organization to send a craft into lunar orbit.
On Wednesday (April 10), the international Event Horizon Telescope project have release the first resultsfrom its plan to image black holes. But what exactly is an event horizon?
The event horizon of a black hole is linked to the object's escape velocity — the speed that one would need to exceed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull. The closer someone came to a black hole, the greater the speed they would need to escape that massive gravity. The event horizon is the threshold around the black hole where the escape velocity surpasses the speed of light.
According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster through space than the speed of light. This means a black hole's event horizon is essentially the point from which nothing can return. The name refers to the impossibility of witnessing any event taking place inside that border, the horizon beyond which one cannot see.
"The event horizon is the ultimate prison wall — one can get in but never get out," Avi Loeb, chair of astronomy at Harvard University, told Space.com.
When an item gets near an event horizon, a witness would see the item's image redden and dim as gravity distorted light coming from that item. At the event horizon, this image would effectively fade to invisibility.
Within the event horizon, one would find the black hole's singularity, where previous research suggests all of the object's mass has collapsed to an infinitely dense extent. This means the fabric of space and time around the singularity has also curved to an infinite degree, so the laws of physics as we currently know them break down.
"The event horizon protects us from the unknown physics near a singularity," Loeb said.
The size of an event horizon depends on the black hole's mass. If Earth were compressed until it became a black hole, it would have a diameter of about 0.69 inches (17.4 millimeters), a little smaller than a dime; if the sun were converted to a black hole, it would be about 3.62 miles (5.84 kilometers) wide, about the size of a village or town. The supermassive black holes that the Event Horizon Telescope is observing are far larger; Sagittarius A*, at the center of the Milky Way, is about 4.3 million times the mass of our sun and has a diameter of about 7.9 million miles (12.7 million km), while M87 at the heart of the Virgo A galaxy is about 6 billion solar masses and 11 billion miles (17.7 billion km) wide.
The strength of a black hole's gravitational pull depends on the distance from it — the closer you are, the more powerful the tug. But the effects of this gravity on a visitor would differ depending on the black hole's mass. If you fell toward a relatively small black hole a few times the mass of the sun, for example, you would get pulled apart and stretched out in a process known as spaghettification, dying well before you reached the event horizon.
However, if you were to fall toward a supermassive black hole millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, you wouldn't "feel such forces to a significant degree," Loeb said. You would not die of spaghettification before you crossed the event horizon (although numerous other hazards around such a black hole might kill you before you reached that point).
Black holes likely spin because the stars they generally originate from also spun and because the matter they swallow whirled in spirals before it fell in. Recent findings suggest that black holes can rotate at speeds greater than 90 percent that of light, Loeb said.
Previously, the most basic model of black holes assumed they did not spin, and so their singularities were assumed to be points. But because black holes generally rotate, current models suggest their singularities are infinitely thin rings. This leads the event horizons of rotating black holes, also known as Kerr black holes, to appear oblong — squashed at the poles and bulging at their equators.
A rotating black hole's event horizon separates into an outer horizon and an inner horizon. The outer event horizon of such an object acts like a point of no return, just like the event horizon of a nonrotating black hole. The inner event horizon of a rotating black hole, also known as the Cauchy horizon, is stranger. Past that threshold, cause no longer necessarily precedes effect, the past no longer necessarily determines the future, and time travel may be possible. (In a nonrotating black hole, also known as a Schwarzschild black hole, the inner and outer horizons coincide.)
A spinning black hole also forces the fabric of space-time around it to rotate with it, a phenomenon known as frame dragging or the Lense-Thirring effect. Frame dragging is also seen around other massive bodies, including Earth.
Frame dragging creates a cosmic whirlpool known as the ergosphere, which occurs outside a rotating black hole's outer event horizon. Any object within the ergosphere is forced to move in the same direction in which the black hole is spinning. Matter falling into the ergosphere can get enough speed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull, taking some of the black hole's energy with it. In this manner, black holes can have powerful effects on their surroundings.
Rotation can also make black holes more effective at converting any matter that falls into them into energy. A nonrotating black hole would convert about 5.7 percent of an infalling object's mass into energy, following Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2. In contrast, a rotating black hole could convert up to 42 percent of an object's mass into energy, scientists have determined
"This has important implications for the environments around black holes," Loeb said. "The amount of energy from the supermassive black holes at the centers of virtually all large galaxies can significantly influence the evolution of those galaxies."
Recent work has greatly upset the conventional view of black holes. In 2012, physicists suggested that anything falling toward a black hole might encounter "firewalls" at or in the vicinity of the event horizon that would incinerate any matter falling in. This is because when particles collide, they can become invisibly connected through a link called entanglement, and black holes could break such links, releasing incredible amounts of energy.
However, other research seeking to unite general relativity, which can explain the nature of gravity, with quantum mechanics, which can describe the behavior of all known particles, suggests that firewalls may not exist — because event horizons themselves may not exist. Some physicists suggest that instead of abysses from which nothing can return, what we currently think of as black holes may actually be a range of black-hole-like objects that lack event horizons, such as so-called fuzzballs, Loeb said.
By imaging the edges of black holes, the Event Horizon Telescope can help scientists analyze the shapes and behaviors of event horizons.
"We can use these images to constrain any theory on the structure of black holes," Loeb said. "Indeed, the fuzzball speculation — where the event horizon is not a sharp boundary, but is rather fuzzy — could be tested with images from the Event Horizon Telescope."
Dr. Steven Greer, a leading figure in the UFO disclosure movement, has just proposed an audacious idea concerning official disclosure of extraterrestrial life. In his expert opinion, acquired over more than 25 years of disclosure advocacy, continued secrecy is better than disclosing the truth about visiting aliens if they are depicted in any other way than peaceful nonviolent beings attempting to advance the evolution of human life on Earth.
In the February 5 installment of Gaia TV’s Disclosure series, Greer was interviewed on the topic of the “Architecture of Secrecy” and explained his view about how official disclosure should be handled. He asserted his controversial idea that continued secrecy is better than any disclosure scenario that depicts extraterrestrials as in any way constituting a threat:
My biggest concern is that there’s a hijacking of disclosure around a narrative of a threat, of an us versus them scenario. That is the sort of thing that can lead to the worst possible outcome. I wrote a paper called “When Disclosure Serves Secrecy”. Disclosure that would serve the secret agenda is not something that we need. I’d rather have the secrecy continue, frankly. But a disclosure that would be truthful and would be forward looking, and that would have an interplanetary peace initiative, and communication and contact initiative, and that would have the release of these technologies for peaceful energy generation, transportation and what have you, that would transform the planet very quickly (Video: 9:45)
Greer explicitly referred to Luiz Elizondo and Dr. Hal Puthoff, who are senior figures in Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy, as a major part of the threat scenario that is being currently put out into the public arena through the major news media. On that score, I would agree with Greer that the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” (AATIP) which was created within the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2007, and headed by Elizondo up to 2017, was unnecessarily framing the UFO issue in terms of it being a threat to national security.
If Greer only limited himself to critiquing depictions of UFOs and all extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, which AATIP appeared to be doing, he would be on solid ground. However, Greer in the Disclosure interview, as well as in past public statements, made it clear that he is against researcher that depict any extraterrestrials, even if only a small percentage, as a threat in any way.
On May 2, 2006, Greer launched an extraordinary public attack on my exopolitics research for having committed the egregious sin of proposing that extraterrestrials could in any way behave similarly to humans in terms of a wide range of motivations. My research dividing extraterrestrials into different motivational categories, e.g., the good, the bad and the indifferent, was lambasted by Greer as fueled by disinformation.
Greer is no doubt correct that elements of the Military Industrial Complex are exaggerating the threat narrative when it comes to UFOs and extraterrestrial visitation, which AATIP appeared to be currently doing and which I acknowledged back in my 2006 response to Greer. In it, however, I also pointed out that Greer’s bold assertion that there is no evidence of hostile extraterrestrial behavior, can be easily shown to be wrong by examining multiple sources revealing the egregious behavior of some extraterrestrial visitors.
On July 26, 2010, Greer was confronted by Project Camelot founders, Kerry Cassidy and Bill Ryan, over the same issue, and they presented their own evidentiary sources that some extraterrestrial visitors were behaving unethically and maliciously.
In 2018, Greer attacked two of the insider sources I have cited extensively in my secret space program book series, Corey Goode and William Tompkins, as putting out disinformation about aggressive extraterrestrials, Draconian Reptilians, who are described as a prominent part of the planetary control system. In this case, he speculated that both Goode and Tompkins were implanted with false memories and were unwittingly spreading disinformation.
Again, I responded to Greer by pointing out the abundant evidence refuting his audacious assertion that no extraterrestrials behave in ways that are unethical or malicious. Indeed, I showed how his dismissal of Tompkins claims, in particular, ignored the impressive documentation substantiating his information.
With that brief background on Greer’s past public statements on the issue of some, not all, extraterrestrials being unethical and malicious, the context has been set for better understanding the implications of what Greer had to say next in the February 5 interview.
Greer repeated his assertion that continued secrecy is preferable to any official disclosure announcement describing aliens as a threat, even if only partially or a subset of the entire alien visitation scenario:
The disclosure of this subject is the most important announcement in the history of the human race. How it’s handled, it has to be handled with great wisdom and great care. If it is handled with the kind of buffoonery and clumsiness that is evolving, or with partial truths, mixed in with disinformation, with frightening scenarios that scare the hell out of the public, I actually prefer the secrecy. (17:34)
What makes Greer’s views significant is that he claims to be in touch with members of the oversight group of up to 200 members commonly referred to as the MAJIC committee. Greer asserts that he is providing them with an expert civilian perspective on disclosure, where, incredibly, he appears to be advocating continued secrecy if an official disclosure statement is not framed in the way he prescribes.
In short, what is widely regarded as “full disclosure”, where all the facts and evidence of visiting extraterrestrials – good and bad – along with the truth about secret space programs is publicly revealed in an official announcement, is not supported by Greer. On the contrary, he only supports a “limited disclosure” statement where all references to unethical or malicious aliens is sanitized.
It’s hard to envisage that a leading figure in the disclosure advocacy movement could support continued secrecy on any grounds, let alone the dubious grounds Greer asserts, which I and others have shown ignores a large body of evidence. As to why Greer is taking such an extreme position, there are a number of explanations that come to mind. One is that he is personally invested in a secret Vatican initiative to establish a “New Cosmic Esoteric World Religion” through a “false flag alien savior event” as described elsewhere. Another is that Greer has been co-opted or compromised by the MAJIC Committee in charge of extraterrestrial related projects and is sabotaging the disclosure movement by imposing unreasonable demands for a future official disclosure announcement.
Greer’s position that continued secrecy is better than an official disclosure announcement which contains reference to any extraterrestrial visitors as a threat, is a position that he will find increasingly difficult to defend given the public’s growing awareness of all the available evidence of visiting aliens, and the diverse motivations behind their activities. Full disclosure is already well underway through multiple public initiatives disclosing all aspects of visiting extraterrestrial life and secret space programs, and any effort to filter or curtail such information in ways favored by Greer, are certain to fail.
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.
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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 73 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.
