Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
30-04-2019
UFO Hunting in Death Valley, USA
UFO Hunting in Death Valley, USA
UFO & Alien Investigators. Our mission is to document evidence of the UFO phenomenon and alien visitation through work in the field.
Small meteorite impacts are releasing water from the Moon’s subsurface, a new study finds. Researchers now believe that a small amount of water can be found beneath the lunar surface, dating from the early days of the satellite’s evolution.
This oblique view of the Moon’s surface was photographed by the Apollo 10 astronauts in May of 1969.
When the Apollo missions brought back samples from the moon, researchers analyzed them and found that the moon was formed without any native water. However, a decade ago, trace amounts of water were discovered in the lunar non-polar areas, and recent observations by Cassini, Deep Impact, Lunar Prospector, and Chandrayaan-1 indicate the existence of an active water cycle on the Moon. In addition, an enhanced concentration of hydrogen, which seems to indicate larger water ice deposits in the permanently shadowed craters of the poles was detected by the Lunar Prospector Neutron Spectrometer (LPNS).
Researchers have attributed the origin of the water to solar wind and meteorites, but even so, it’s unclear why the water appears on the lunar surface in some places. In a new study published in Nature Geoscience, researchers propose a new cause for this: meteorites.
The lunar water cycle as proposed in the study. The cycle relies on a desiccated layer overlaying hydrated soils. Hydrogen from solar wind is the main source of water production. Synthesized water diffuses vertically, and can be sequestered in the hydrated layer or lost at the surface.
Image credits: Benna et al / Nature Geoscience.
Researchers led by NASA’ Mehdi Benna found that the timing of 29 water releases is associated with the Moon encountering known meteorite impacts. The study also suggests that a very small amount of water is pervasive in the lunar subsoil, where it was preserved from early in the Moon’s history. When meteorites whack the lunar surface, the impact brings out some of this water.
“We show that water release from meteoroid impacts is indicative of a lunar surface that has a desiccated soil layer of several centimetres on top of uniformly hydrated soil. We infer that the Moon is currently in the process of losing water that was either delivered long ago or present at its formation.”
According to their calculations, the uniformly present at concentrations up to about 0.05%. However, the water pushed outside is lost and never recovered by the moon. Researchers estimate that a total of 200 tonnes of water are lost every year.
These findings may lay the groundwork for future investigation into the origin and fate of water on the Moon, and might also be useful in the potential establishment of a human colony on the moon.
The study “Lunar soil hydration constrained by exospheric water liberated by meteoroid impacts” by Benna et al. has been published in Nature Geoscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0345-3
We Want to Know’: US Navy Working Up Procedures for Reporting UFOs
We Want to Know’: US Navy Working Up Procedures for Reporting UFOs
The US Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots to officially report “unidentified aircraft” or “unidentified flying objects” (UFOs), which may help destigmatize the process of informing the service about such encounters.
"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace in recent years," the Navy said in a recent statement to Politico.
Thus, it said, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."
According to the US Navy, highly trained military personnel and pilots have had enough encounters with UFOs to warrant officially reporting them in a systematic and formal way.
Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFOs for the British government, told Sputnik Wednesday that he "welcomes these new guidelines," which should "make it easier for US Navy pilots and other military personnel to report UFOs."
Nick Pope
@nickpopemod
US Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs. I support this bold and long-overdue move, which should address the current under-reporting problem. Whatever one believes about the phenomenon, it raises defense, national security and air safety issues.
U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs
The service says it has also "provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety."
"Many years ago, the United States Air Force had the policy lead for this subject and ran a program called Project Blue Book," Pope explained, referring to a series of studies of UFOs conducted by the US Air Force starting in 1952. The project was eventually terminated in 1969, because the US government decided that UFOs were "no longer of any interest." However, the sightings continued, and pilots had nowhere to report them, Pope noted.
"Over the years, a culture developed where pilots — military and civilian alike — would see UFOs, but where many of these sightings went unreported, because of the perception that the government wasn't interested, and because pilots feared they wouldn't be believed, that they might be ridiculed, and that their state of mind might be questioned, leading to them being grounded or losing their jobs," Pope explained.
Despite the fact that Project Blue Book was terminated, the Defense Intelligence Agency continued to investigate UFOs between 2007 and 2012, unbeknownst to the public. The research, which cost around $25 million, was funded by the Department of Defense under its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and was made public in 2017 after a Freedom of Information Act request by Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.
"We now know that despite the termination of Project Blue Book, the US government was still interested and that investigations were continuing, but without the media and the public being told. The Pentagon's AATIP initiative, for example, investigated several such cases. Three declassified videos of US Navy F-18 jets chasing UFOs were made public in December 2017, when the existence of AATIP was first revealed," Pope told Sputnik.
The video footage released in 2017 showed a 2004 encounter between two US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets and an unknown object. In the recording, the fighter pilots attempt to intercept the unidentified object, described as having "no obvious wings or tails." The pilots were unable to intercept the mysterious aircraft Sputnik previously reported.
In 2017, the New York Times also reported that even though the Pentagon shut down its hush-hush program to study UFOs in 2012, it continues to investigate UFOs brought to its attention by servicemembers.
"We still don't know if these objects are foreign military aircraft or drones, or something else. But pilots see them, radar operators track them, and now the US Navy wants to make sure it acquires as much data on this phenomenon as possible. I strongly support this new initiative. Any nation wants to ensure the territorial integrity of its airspace. If there's something in our skies, we want to know what it is. Whatever people believe about UFOs, there are defense, national security and air safety issues here," Pope added.
US Navy admits that UFOs have been spotted near top secret military facilities
US Navy admits that UFOs have been spotted near top secret military facilities
Jasper Hamill
Footage of a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO recorded by US Navy pilots in 2004
The US Navy has sensationally admitted that UFOs have been spotted near military facilities.
It has received ‘a number of reports’ of unidentified aircraft travelling into protected airspace over military ranges, which means land owned by the American armed forces.
Defence chiefs are so concerned that they have ordered the development of a new process to report and record mysterious sightings of ‘unauthorised’ and ‘unidentified aircraft’.
The announcement comes after details of a secret research drive called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) have slowly leaked into the public domain over the past two years.
One of the most famous incidents revealed during the exposure of AATIP took place in 2004 when pilots on the USS Nimitz Carrier Group were outmanoeuvred by ‘Tic Tac’ crafts moving so quickly they did not appear to obey the laws of physics.
In a statement given to Politico, the Navy said: ‘There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.
‘For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
‘As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft.’
The UFOs which are likely to have been investigated by the Navy are not necessarily sent by aliens.
Luis Elizondo, the ex-Pentagon staffer who headed up AATIP, told Politico the aircraft ‘don’t have a tail number or a flag — in some cases not even a tail’.
‘What happens in five years if it turns out these are extremely advanced Russian aircraft?’ he asked.
These drawings of what appears to be a space plane were produced by Boeing as long ago as the 1980s
Nick Pope, former UFO investigator for the Ministry of Defence, told Metro that the move was ‘bold and long overdue’.
‘As I know only too well from my experience having investigated UFOs for the Ministry of Defence, there’s chronic under-reporting of UFOs in the military pilot community, as well as in the commercial airline pilot community,’ he continued.
‘That’s because people fear they won’t be believed, they worry about ridicule, and – above all – they’re scared that some psychologist might question their state of mind, resulting in them being grounded.
Whatever one believes about the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, they’re being seen by pilots, tracked on radar systems and sometimes captured on film.
‘Whether you’re a sceptic or a believer, whether you think these things are Russian or Martian, it’s time to lose the pop culture baggage associated with UFOs.
‘It’s time to have a mature, informed debate about the phenomenon and acknowledge what those of us who’ve looked at this from within government already know, namely that there are important defence, national security and air safety issues at stake here.’
We asked Pope why the US Navy is involved rather than the Airforce.
He replied: ‘The UFO issue can be toxic and the US Navy may well face criticism for this move. There may be political fallout, and this new initiative is likely to spark all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories. Interestingly, this might just be one of those rare instances where the conspiracy theories turn out to be true.
‘For years, there have been rumours that it’s the Navy and not the Air Force that has the policy lead on UFOs. It sounds counter-intuitive. The US government’s old UFO program, Project Blue Book, was run by the United States Air Force. In the UK, the MoD’s UFO project had lots of cases involving the Royal Air Force, but very little from the Royal Navy.
‘But the rumours persist, and when the story broke about the Pentagon’s AATIP program, it was three videos of US Navy jets chasing UFOs that made headlines all around the world. So it doesn’t surprise me to see the US Navy leading the way here. There’s always been inter-service rivalry, and President Trump’s Space Force aspirations have added a new dimension to this.
‘A new space race is underway, and the US Navy clearly wants to be at the heart of it.’
US Navy admits to ‘multiple’ UFO sightings over top secret military bases
US Navy admits to ‘multiple’ UFO sightings over top secret military bases
The US Navy is changing how pilots report UFOs after recent sightings
By Charlotte Edwards, Digital Technology and Science Reporter
UFOs have been spotted hovering over top-secret military bases and flying near aircraft, according to the US Navy.
The institution is now drafting new guidelines for pilots and other naval employees so it's easier for them to report any mysterious objects they spot in the sky.
Footage of a ‘Tic Tac’ UFO recorded by US Navy pilots in 2004
This UFO was briefly caught on camera flying next to a military plane by US pilots
The decision to make these new guidelines for UFO sightings has been made in response to recent reports of unidentified flying objects.
In a statement given to US news outlet Politico, the US Navy said: "There have been a number of reports of unauthorised and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.
"For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
"As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalising the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognisant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."
A few years ago, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that a supersonic UFO shaped like a Tic Tac sweet had stalked a US Aircraft carrier for days before vanishing into thin air.
Some of the pilots said that the aircraft could make itself invisible as it travelled next to them.
The craft was described by one of the pilots mentioned in the report as "solid white, smooth, with no edges... uniformly coloured with no nacelles, pylons or wings", and looked like "an elongated egg or Tic Tac".
The incident happened over a couple of days in November 2004 but the video footage of the flying object was not revealed to the public until December 2017.
Pilots who witnessed the incident reported that they picked up the presence of 8 to 10 objects in their radar equipment on November 10, 2004.
Sceptics think that the sighting could be explained by equipment malfunction or human error.
Retired Pentagon official Luis Elizondo once ran a secret Pentagon program for investigating UFOs until it was reportedly shut down in 2012.
He told Politico that government personnel were often encouraged not to report sightings, making this new admission from the US Navy even more groundbreaking.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the Ministry of Defence, told us: "This bold new initiative on the part of the US Navy is clearly aimed at de-stigmatising the UFO issue.
"I know from my own experience of having run the MoD's UFO project that fear of being ridiculed or disbelieved, and worries about adverse career consequences means many pilots - military and civil alike - simply don't report these things.
"This new move gives official sanction for pilots, radar operators and other military witnesses to come forward and report what they see. I strongly support this policy change and hope we can do the same thing in the UK."
A drawing of a strange experimental aircraft released in a patent document filed by the US Navy
Life may have arisen in our solar system before Earth even finished forming.
Planetesimals, the rocky building blocks of planets, likely had all the ingredients necessary for life as we know it way back at thedawn of the solar system, said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University (ASU).
And clement conditions may have persisted inside some planetesimals for tens of millions of years — perhaps long enough for life to emerge, said Elkins-Tanton, the director of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and the principal investigator of NASA's upcoming mission to the odd metallic asteroid Psyche.
Some planetesimals survived into and beyond the planet-forming period, raising the possibility that one of these primitive bodies may have seeded Earth with life, she added.
"Not all planetesimals are going to be involved in the kinds of catastrophic collisions that would cause them to go into a plasma or otherwise completely denature anything that was created," Elkins-Tanton said April 11 at the Breakthrough Discuss conference at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Some things are going to fall — like Chelyabinsk, for example — back onto the surface of a temperate planet," she added, referring to the 65-foot-wide (20 meters) object that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013. "So, there is that possibility in the end."
Elkins-Tanton said this basic idea grew out of a course she taught at ASU in the fall of 2016. At the beginning of the semester, she asked the students to consider whether life could have arisen on small bodies. Over the next few months, the students, Elkins-Tanton and her co-author on the newly presented work, Stephen West, explored this possibility, as well as a number of other questions that stemmed from that core question.
Life as we know it requires three main ingredients: liquid water, organic molecules and an energy source. Planetesimals, which formed within 1.5 million years of the solar system's birth, likely featured all three, Elkins-Tanton said.
For example, more than 35 different amino acids have been identified in the Murchison meteorite, an ancient space rock that fell to Earth in southern Australia in 1969.
Murchison is so full of organics that it "smells like an oil well," Elkins-Tanton said. "What could be a better place for the advent of life than a nice, warm, wet piece of Murchison? So, that's the idea that we're starting with."
The energy source on early planetesimals, such as Murchison's parent body, came from the radioactive decay of aluminum-26, she explained. The heat flowing through some planetesimals' interiors was intense enough to melt the objects completely, which is certainly not conducive to the emergence of life.
But other bodies would have melted only partially, from the inside out, so they would eventually sport a metallic core, a magma-ocean mantle and a rocky, primitive crust. Such planetesimals would have had extremely hot interiors but frigid surfaces, Elkins-Tanton said. Waves of heat radiating from the depths would have spurred the release of fluids such as liquid water, driving that material up toward the surface.
Such processes may have created habitable environments beneath the planetesimals' rocky surfaces. And these environments likely lasted for relatively long stretches.
For example, modeling work performed by Elkins-Tanton and West, who's now at the California-based company Metis Technology Solutions, suggests that small planetesimals — those up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) wide — could have supported liquid water underground for about 15 million years.
And an earlier study Elkins-Tanton conducted with Ben Weiss and Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that larger bodies could have remained wet for even longer — perhaps 50 million years or so.
It's unclear if this window is long enough for life to get going, Elkins-Tanton stressed. That's because we don't know how long that window has to be. "I'm going to bravely assert that we really have no idea," she said.
For example, the earliest unambiguous signs of life on our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth date to about 3.8 billion years ago. But some scientists have presented evidence that microbes already had a foothold here by 4.1 billion years ago. And at this same Breakthrough Discuss meeting, biochemist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida argued that life actually emerged 4.36 billion years ago. (Only at that time was Earth's atmospheric chemistry right for the first organisms, RNA-based microbes, to evolve, Benner said in his talk.)
To be clear, Elkins-Tanton and West aren't arguing that Earth life actually did originate on planetary building blocks — just that this idea is worthy of consideration. And the new work is preliminary; the Breakthrough Discuss talk marked the first time Elkins-Tanton formally presented the idea to her planetary-science colleagues.
She said she hopes the work spurs further discussion and research about the origin of life and its possible dispersal throughout the solar system.
"This is meant to be just a kind of a thought problem for us all to consider," Elkins-Tanton said. "Could life actually have arisen on planetesimals? Could there be evidence for life in meteorites that we have not known to look for? And if this is so, how could they have been spread through the solar system — and many, many unanswerable implications of that possibility."
The idea that life has spread from body to body throughout the solar system is not a new one, of course. For example, Benner and others have suggested that Earth life may actually have originated on Mars and traveled here aboard a rock liberated from the Red Planet by an asteroid or comet strike.
And some researchers have even posited that life may have come to Earth from another star system, perhaps aboard a wandering comet.
Mundane challenges won't stop for what could be the end of the world.
NASA selected an asteroid called 2012 TC4 before its close approach in October 2017 to serve as a practice test of the agency's detection and response systems.
A very strange series of memos arrived at the White House during the fall of 2017, detailing a would-be nightmare scenario: an asteroid apparently on track to hit Earth. But those memos were covered in bright red warnings noting that they were just part of a drill; humanity didn't have any more reasons than normal to fear civilization's end.
The memos were part of a surreal, sophisticated drill that let NASA and the scientific community practice for the existential threat of an asteroid that seems to be on track to hit Earth — all based on a real asteroid. And now, the team involved in the drill has published a final set of findings about how the project went and what humans can do to be better prepared for this potential apocalypse scenario.
"The most important thing was [that] it was the first time we actually tested the whole system, including notification to the White House," Vishnu Reddy, a planetary defense expert at the University of Arizona and a co-author on the new paper, told Space.com last month at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in The Woodlands, Texas. "It was a really fantastic experience for us to test with a real asteroid."
Early in 2017, scientists decided they wanted to conduct such a drill. So they went looking for an asteroid, one that wasn't really a risk but that would come close enough to produce realistic data about how an actual risk could play out. That would allow planetary defense specialists, who exclusively study the threat of asteroid impacts, to test their observation, evaluation and response procedures.
A space rock known as 2012 TC4 fit the bill. During this object's initial detection in 2012, observations of its path through the solar system suggested that it would make a close — but not dangerously close — approach to Earth in October 2017, although researchers weren't positive exactly what track it would take.
That's how the asteroid earned its role as guinea pig for the end of the world as we know it.
"We knew it wasn't a threat … we wanted it to be an exercise, but TC4 was a good candidate," Michael Kelley, a NASA scientist in the planetary defense program and co-author on the overview paper, said during a presentation at the same conference. "It was an asteroid with a slightly uncertain orbit that was in the time frame we were looking for to conduct this exercise. We knew it was out there. We knew roughly where to look in the sky, but we didn't know exactly where to point the telescopes, so we would have to search a little bit to try to find it."
That search began in July 2017, when a team using the Very Large Telescope in Chile began trying to spot TC4. They latched on for good in August, when they had expected they would be able to. A different telescope, Pan-STARRS in Hawaii, also proved separately that, had scientists not possessed the 2012 data, they still would have spotted the asteroid about two weeks before the 2017 closest approach.
As TC4 hurtled closer, scientists turned telescopes around the globe toward the object. First, they looked to track its path. Observers and orbital-trajectory specialists worked together to update their expectations of where precisely the rock would travel, one of the key responsibilities of planetary defense. As that picture developed, the team brought the data to government officials to talk through how the situation would be handled in real life.
The good news is you never heard about a large asteroid hitting Earth in the fall of 2017. The more complicated finding is that there was a time when the team's calculations suggested that this was a real possibility, Kelley said. Briefly, on Sept. 24 of that year, the calculations gave TC4 a 1 in 180 chance of hitting Earth. "This is well below the threshold to trip all the triggers for an emergency situation," Kelley said.
Fortunately, within just a few days, that sliver of a chance had evaporated. The uncertainty makes for a risky situation nevertheless, he added, since the team never wants to act rashly and cause a panic. But someone not following the entire process could have taken that one day's data out of context, intentionally or not.
"You have to be very, very careful when you have a lot of measurements coming in and you're waiting to see what fits the pattern and what does not fit the pattern," Kelley said. "You can get to a point where you are drawing the wrong conclusion if you stop at a certain point or if you just take a snapshot image."
By the end of the exercise, the team had completely eliminated any probability of impact from TC4 in the foreseeable future.
But scientists weren't content with simply predicting the asteroid's path; they also wanted to gather as much data as possible about the rock itself. In particular, they investigated how it dimmed and brightened as it spun in space. In the context of a potential impactor, this information is not just scientifically interesting. More than that, details about an asteroid's rotation and composition can shape the potential disaster, affecting how much of the initial mass makes it through Earth's destructive atmosphere.
Here, too, things got a little dicey. The team had lined up a range of facilities they wanted to use in advance, but fate intervened. Scientists had wanted to use the massive radio dish at Arecibo in Puerto Rico to bounce light waves off the asteroid's surface and see how they bounced back. But Hurricane Maria devastated the island just a couple weeks before the asteroid's closest approach, and the telescope wasn't ready to help. Scientists had to scramble to rope in two other radio telescopes, Goldstone and Green Bank, to make up for Arecibo's absence.
And the team had wanted to use NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii to better understand the object's composition. The telescope had a three-night window to catch TC4. It observed the asteroid on the first night and was put to another task on the second. On the third night, the power went out.
"It turns out that somebody cut a tree down and the tree fell on the power line," Reddy said. "And so the fate of the world will end up in [the hands of] some person with an ax in the hand trying to chop a tree in the evening."
There's no reason to suspect that the same sorts of mundane issues would patiently wait for a real threat to pass. "There are real-world problems that can crop up even in an emergency situation," Kelley said. "Bad timing is always there."
Despite the challenges during observations, scientists are pretty satisfied with what they were able to learn about TC4. It seems to be very bright, about 33 feet (10 meters) across, with a jagged, uneven surface. "This may be a fragment of a very bright, white rock in space," Kelley said. It seems to resemble an unusual type of meteorite — a kind that makes up just 1% of the space rocks we have here on Earth — called aubrites.
Now that the results of the TC4 drill are published, the team is ready to apply the lessons learned during the exercise to a new drill. That team has selected a different asteroid, again based on the object's orbital convenience. "We can't schedule the asteroid[s]. We kind of have to wait for them to cooperate," Kelley said.
This drill will be of a smaller scale than the TC4 one was, aiming only to learn as much as possible about the space rock itself — even though scientists already have a good sense of what it is.
"We know a lot, but we're pretending as if we don't know," Reddy said. "Imagine if this asteroid is going to hit us, say, 15, 20 years from now and this is the last, best flyby when we can characterize it to know what to do in the next 15, 20 years before impact. What can we learn?"
This kind of preparation is not just about learning about distant space rocks sailing through the solar system. It also means learning about deeply terrestrial, deeply human factors, like how to be ready if someone cuts the wrong tree down on the wrong day.
"This exercise was actually a good lesson in the reality of trying to do this as well, in a practical sense," Kelley said. "Real-world events affected the campaign, but we dealt with them and worked through it." And as a result, humans should be better prepared for the next close approach.
"Fortunately, the fate of the Earth wasn't riding on this one, so we're OK," he said.
The project is described in a paper published in March in the journal Icarus.
This week, while everyone was distracted with the usual political bickering and Taylor Swift’s new music video, UFOs hovered over the news.
It seems the U.S. Navy is working on new guidelines for pilots to report strange encounters. In a statement to Politico, which broke the story, the navy said: “There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years.”
And you thought Vlad Guerrero Jr. was the biggest story of the week.
According to the Washington Post, these mysterious “intrusions” have occurred “on a regular basis since 2014.” Huh? Military personnel are now reporting UFOs or UAP (unexplained aerial phenomena) multiple times a month. What?
As naval spokesperson Joseph Gradisher told the paper: “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is.”
Good enough. No reason to panic, right? All we have here is the most powerful military in human history admitting unfamiliar aircraft of unknown origin are doing abnormal flybys in restricted airspace and they have no idea why.
No big deal. All we have here are highly trained pilots reporting and in some cases filming exotic vessels in the sky that violate the laws of physics.
Nothing to see here. So maybe I’ll just grab my umbrella and line up for Avengers: Endgamesince there is no point is worrying about “small spherical objects flying in formation” or “Tic Tac-shaped” aircraft with inexplicable propulsion systems zagging at speeds that make our most advanced jets look like homemade kites.
Or maybe I’ll just go hide under my basement stairs.
First of all, a tip of my X-Files cap to the U.S. Navy. A new reporting system may sound like ho-hum bureaucracy, but this is a monumental decision. For decades, governments around the world have feasted on either silence or denial when inquiring minds prodded about UFOs. Even worse, they often branded eyewitnesses as unreliable kooks and dismissed the very topic as the stuff of sci-fi.
But that is now changing.
At the end of 2017, we learned about a shadowy Pentagon project: the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). Starting in 2007, it ran for five years with a mission to investigate unexplained aerial phenomenon. While there have been similar programs over the last eight decades — Project Mogul, Project Sign, Project Grudge, Project Blue Book, Project Ozma — AATIP is different because of what happened after it was shuttered: senior officials started talking.
And what they said was startling.
There were dozens of encounters that “defied explanation.” Metal alloys were recovered from some aircraft scientists still can’t identify. As Luis Elizondo, who ran the secret unit, told CNN: “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
Elizondo is featured in History channel’s documentary Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation, scheduled to air next month. He told the Post this week the new reporting guidelines and this new-found quest to seriously track and investigate sightings is because the navy can no longer pretend this is not happening.
“If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security,” he said. “This type of activity is very alarming and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”
What a fascinating time for believers and skeptics alike.
In fact, with Donald Trump in the White House, we might be as close as we’ve ever been to learning what the U.S. government really knows. Whether he’s proposing a new space force or leaning on NASA to do the impossible and send an astronaut to Mars before the end of his first term, Trump grasps the allure of the cosmos.
Plus, this guy can’t keep his mouth shut.
If I were a ufologist, I wouldn’t be wasting time with freedom of information requests or global symposiums. I’d be sneaking into the White House, putting a parental lock on Fox News and telling Trump he could get re-elected in a landslide by becoming the first ever U.S. president to dish on flying discs.
“Sir, ask your Above Top Secret agents about Roswell. Demand photos of downed spaceships — and then share them on Twitter. Tell the Cigarette Smoking Man you want all the files on the reverse-engineering program at Wright-Patterson. Schedule an antigravity briefing. Also, ask if the ETs have given us a date for when the Mothership will return for Stephen Miller.”
Trump’s approval rating would shoot into outer space.
The point is, we are now creeping away from the secrecy of the past and maybe, just maybe, entering a new era of transparency. The truth is still out there and now the people in charge are looking up, and waking up.
The U.S. Navy didn’t say UFOs are real this week.
But they also didn’t say they are not.
And even from here, as I’m cowering under the basement stairs, this dramatic change in tune sounds otherworldly.
The far side of the moon sees its share of sunlight. With all due respect to Pink Floyd, the moon’s far side is dark only in the sense that it’s mysterious. Here’s why.
Looking up at the silvery orb of the moon, you might recognize familiar shadows and shapes on its face from one night to the next. You see the same view of the moon our early ancestors did as it lighted their way after sundown.
Only one side of the spherical moon is ever visible from Earth – it wasn’t until 1959 when theSoviet Spacecraft Luna 3 orbited the moon and sent pictures home that human beings were able to see the “far side” of the moon for the first time.
Comparison of humanity’s first glimpse of the lunar far side and the same view thanks to LRO data 50 years later.
A phenomenon called tidal locking is responsible for the consistent view. The Earth and its moon are in close proximity and thus exert significant gravitational forces on each other. These tidal forces slow the rotations of both bodies. They locked the moon’s rotation in sync with its orbital period relatively soon after it formed – as a product of a collision between a Mars-sized object and the proto-Earth, 100 million years after the solar system coalesced.
The moon’s orbital period and rotational period are the same length of time.
Now the moon takes one trip around the Earth in the same amount of time it takes to make one rotation around its own axis: about 28 days. From Earth, we always see the same face of the moon; from the moon, the Earth stands still in the sky.
The near side of the moon is well studied because we can see it. The astronauts landed on the near side of the moon so they could communicate with NASA here on Earth. All of the samples from the Apollo missions are from the near side.
Buzz Aldrin descends from the lunar module to the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969.
Although the far side of the moon isn’t visible from our vantage point, and with all due respect to Pink Floyd, it is not accurate to call it the dark side of the moon. All sides of the moon experience night and day just like we do here on Earth. All sides have equal amounts of day and night over the course of a single month. A lunar day lasts about two Earth weeks.
With modern satellites, astronomers have completely mapped the lunar surface. A Chinese mission, Chang’e 4, is currently exploring the Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon — the first such mission ever landed there. Researchers hope Chang’e 4 will help answer questions about the crater’s surface features and test whether things can grow in lunar soil. A privately funded Israeli mission, Beresheet, started as a mission to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize. Despite crashing during an attempted landing earlier this month, the Beresheet team still won the Moon Shot Award.
Being shielded from civilization means the far side of the moon is “radio dark.” There, researchers can measure weak signals from the universe that would otherwise be drowned out. Chang’e 4, for instance, will be able to observe low-frequency radio light coming from the sun or beyond that’s impossible to detect here on the Earth due to human activity, such as TV and radio broadcasts and other forms of communication signals. Low-frequency radio peers back in time to the very first stars and the very first black holes, giving astronomers a greater understanding of how the structures of the universe began forming.
Arrows indicate position of Chang’e 4 lander on the floor of the moon’s Von Kármán crater. The sharp crater behind and to the left of the landing site is 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) across and 1,970 feet (600 meters) deep.
Rover missions also investigate all sides of the moon as space scientists prepare for future human missions, looking to the moon’s resources to help humanity get to Mars. For instance, water – discovered by NASA’s LCROSS satellite beneath the moon’s north and south poles in 2009 – can be broken up into hydrogen and oxygen and used for fuel and breathing.
Researchers are getting closer to exploring the moon’s polar craters, some of which have never seen the light of day – literally. They are deep and in just the right place to never have the sun shine onto the crater floor. There are certainly dark parts of the moon, but the whole far side isn’t one of them.
Joseph “Jody” Pendarvis looks out from the top of his UFO Welcome Center on Monday, September 10, 2018, in Bowman. While looking in the sky, Pendarvis points into the distance and says you never know what you may see out there. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff
By Andrew Whitaker awhitaker@postandcourier.com
BOWMAN — Charleston Highway is the main road through the center of this small town about an hour from Charleston along Interstate 26. There isn’t a stoplight, just a few stop signs.
A once-thriving dairy community in Orangeburg County, Bowman now has just under 1,000 residents. These days, what brings a lot of people to this tiny outpost is the UFO Welcome Center, built by Jody Pendarvis over the past 25 years to greet aliens, should they decide to visit South Carolina.
Pendarvis’ neighbor Devontay Turkvant said he has lived across from the UFO Welcome Center for two years now.
“I grew up on the other side of Bowman and knew all about it my entire life,” Turkvant said. “People are really into this. With the solar eclipse there were a ton of people watching it in his yard.”
Bowman Country Store manager Sonya Patel said people come into the store and ask about the welcome center, wanting to go inside.
“Jody does come in now and then to play his lotto,” she said.
The land where the gas station is on was once owned by Pendarvis’ grandparents, who also had 52 acres of farmland in town.
Mike Mack, a resident of Bowman, was sitting outside the store recently, watching customers go in and out.
“I went up once,” he said of the welcome center. “I thought it would have buttons and lights, but it just had wires dangling in it. I think he’s still building it.”
Built from the ground up
A sign near the outside entrance of the welcome center reads, “Space People Only. Enter at Own Risk, Danger.”
As you walk in the narrow hallway entrance, a visitors’ registry is presented next to a few American flags, a television remote and a toilet. The book asks you to write down your name and what planet you’re from.
The ceiling boards are covered in exposed wires and cables that are intertwined throughout the whole welcome center. Staircases take you to a dome-shaped room at the top, where dozens of pie plates are used as porthole windows. From there, you can look out for any signs of UFOs in the sky or see Jody sitting in front of the TV flipping through to a channel playing old episodes of “Star Trek.”
Rafa Key, 7, and her mother, Danielle Key, were headed back to Charleston from a concert in Charlotte when Rafa saw a billboard that that said “UFO Welcome Center tilt right Bowman.” Jody paid for it himself.
Wearing her Magic Space T-shirt, Rafa’s face lit up as she explored the welcome center’s different rooms and windows.
“She loves everything with spaceships or planets,” her mom said.
As Rafa and her mother left the welcome center, another car pulled up.
Andrew Bowman and his fiancee, Ashley Amstutz, were driving back home to Akron, Ohio, from Gainesville, Fla., when they saw the sign. They took a few cellphone photos, exchanged a few words with Pendarvis and went on their way.
This is a typical day for the UFO Welcome Center. The billboard has helped bring in curious travelers since it went up in May 2018.
The welcome center began as an office space outside of Pendarvis’ trailer. It sprung up without a diagram or any plans, just a place where he could work. He used plywood and material he found from his grandparents’ property or that was discarded around town.
“I walked into town hall and applied for a building permit and got an application to run for mayor,” he said. “I got 41 votes.”
On a recent Monday, Pendarvis parked his spray-painted truck next to the UFO Welcome Center with two large wooden planks in the back. He was just getting back from the out-of-town hardware store for supplies to add support beams to the 16-foot-tall, 46-foot-wide welcome center. After unloading, he went straight to his circular saw and cut the wood to fit precisely along the walls. He has been continually adding onto the structure since he first started it in 1994.
An eccentric passion project
Bowman Mayor Marion Glenn said he wants to make the UFO Welcome Center more of a true town welcome center.
“I have been trying to persuade him for years to have something more attractive inside and out. I want to have people come in and look at it, with different drawings and things that promote the town. It could show where town hall is and where families could come and take pictures.”
Pendarvis is indifferent about it and said he will hand it over once he’s gone, but for now it’s Jody’s Welcome Center.
Former Fire Chief Ethel Sue Davis isn’t a fan of the center.
“It’s an eyesore. I’m surprised one of the hurricanes hasn’t knocked it over yet.”
To Pendarvis, it all just rolls off his back.
“The day I went into town hall for a building permit I also got an application to run for mayor,” Jody Pendarvis said, referring back to 1994 when he first constructed what is now known as the UFO Welcome Center in Bowman. He first started to build an office space outside of his trailer without any diagram or plans but then changing it to a welcome center for aliens. Andrew J. Whitaker/Staff
By Andrew Whitaker awhitaker@postandcourier.com
Maggie Sanford of Orangeburg met Jody when he struck up a conversation with her at Waffle House, where she works. She has known about the welcome center since it was first built.
Photos: UFO Welcome Center a destination in Bowman for 25 years
Joseph ‘Jody’ Pendarvis, 68, a local celebrity started building on his property in 1994 what is now known as the UFO Welcome Center in Bowman, South Carolina.
Encounters with unidentified aircraft by pilots have once again prompted Department of Defense officials to take action.
More specifically, the Navy confirmed that the service is drafting guidelines to establish a formal process for pilots and military personnel to report UFO sightings,Politico first reported.
The move comes following a surge in what the Navy called a series of intrusions by advanced aircraft on Navy carrier strike groups.
“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,” a Navy spokesperson told Politico.
"For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report.
To improve upon past investigations, the Navy wants to establish a formal process so that “such suspected incursions can be made to cognizant authorities.”
The Navy confirmed a fleet-wide message on the UFO-reporting initiative is in the works.
While this development comes sans any admission of the existence of alien life, it signals a return to DoD acknowledgement that the series of recently documented encounters are at least authentic enough to warrant further investigation.
So prevalent was the DoD’s interest in tracking the phenomena years ago that it established a program inside the Pentagon solely dedicated to investigating reports of UFO sightings.
The existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which ran from 2007 until 2012, was confirmed by DoD officials in December 2017, who noted it was done away with when it "was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change.”
Former military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who claims to have spearheaded the AATIP, told Politico the Pentagon should be taking a more aggressive approach to analyzing data surrounding UFO encounters.
“If you are in a busy airport and see something you are supposed to say something,” he said.
“With our own military members it is kind of the opposite: ‘If you do see something, don’t say something. ... What happens in five years if it turns out these are extremely advanced Russian aircraft?”
Elizondo will be appearing in a six-part documentary series titled “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation™" — the trademark symbol is part of the title — alongside other former Pentagon officials and Blink-182 co-founder Tom DeLonge, who founded To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences as a means to prove the existence of alien life.
Joining Elizondo on the History Channel docuseries is former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Chris Mellon.
Mellon, who was also instrumental in drafting the legislation that led to the creation of Special Operations Command, echoed Elizondo’s call for a formal reporting process.
“Right now, we have situation in which UFOs and UAPs are treated as anomalies to be ignored rather than anomalies to be explored,” he told Politico. “We have systems that exclude that information and dump it.”
Mellon cited a number of examples in which military personnel simply “don’t know what to do with that information — like satellite data or a radar that sees something going Mach 3."
“They will dump [the data] because that is not a traditional aircraft or missile,” he said.
DeLonge’s To the Stars shot onto everyone’s radar last year after the company released a declassified 2015 video that reportedly showed U.S. Navy pilots encountering a UFO.
The clip, called “GO FAST,” is "an authentic DoD video that captures the high-speed flight of an unidentified aircraft at low altitudes,” a TTSA press release said.
Such encounters have sparked questions from congressional lawmakers who have requested briefings by the Navy’s senior intelligence officials and members of its aviation community, the report said.
The Navy did not specify who had requested briefings.
In 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, along with former Sens. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, openly backed the establishment of the AATIP.
“I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Reid told the New York Times in 2017. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”
Dr. Hal Puthoff, a NASA quantum physicist and DoD adviser, and Jim Semivan, a former senior intelligence member of the CIA, will also be lending their expertise to the History Channel’s upcoming series, which is set to debut in May.
Elizondo, Mellon, Puthoff and Semivan all currently work for TTSA.
The US Military has not outlined procedures for reporting UFOs in decades. Now, the Navy is writing up new plans for reporting UFOs. Why now? First, let’s talk a bit more about the significance of this news.
Politico broke this story yesterday in an article titled, “U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs.” The article states, “a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.”
I think the last sentence is a key one because it would seem this stigma has caused the military to do a lot of linguistic gymnastics in the past when it comes to UFOs. It seems intuitively obvious that the military would be interested in aircraft entering U.S. airspace that cannot be identified. However, when you contact nearly any government agency requesting information about an unidentified object, the response is typical that they do not research UFOs anymore, so go elsewhere.
I know this first hand as a reporter and a previous UFO field investigator with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). The first case I investigated was a report from a bank security guard who had just returned from active duty in the middle east. Because of his training and experience, he was very aware of his surroundings. He had spotted an object in the sky west of Denver that was in the flight path of commercial airlines. After examining it on a couple of occasions and it still being there after a couple of rounds, he tried to call it in, but no one cared.
He called the FAA, the airport, the police, the news, but they said they didn’t have anything to do with UFOs. Finally, a news station suggested he call MUFON. He said MUFON was the only group who listened. I called the FAA, I knew he had reported it, but they said they had no record and I should call a different UFO group, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
To me this was shocking. There is an unknown object which could potentially be posing a threat to the commercial aircraft nearby, and no one cared. The stigma attached to UFOs has caused a blind spot to taking public reports seriously.
The last time the military looked into the UFO phenomenon, there were publicly available instructions on how the military was to report UFOs. It was part of a joint system with Canada, ran by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). They even provided a poster to help military personnel know what to report and how. It included pictures of a Buck Rodgers looking UFO and a classic flying disk.
This was in the 1950s, and the U.S. Air Force still had an ongoing UFO investigation project called Project Blue Book. However, after Blue Book closed, everything UFO related was much more hush hush. Is this because they found aliens? Probably not. It was likely more about the stigma. They did not want to be embarrassed. Air Force Brigadier General wrote a memo when Blue Book closed that said UFO reports that “could effect national security” were made outside of Blue Book under a different reporting structure anyway.
So changing this stigma will be important if the Navy is to continue a positive approach to the UFO issue. It has been this stigma that has caused people to laugh, or run from the idea of UFOs. Scientists and journalists fear addressing the UFO topic can hurt their credibility. No doubt the Navy understands they are taking on this ridicule factor by setting up these guidelines.
Here is the full Navy statement. I received it via email from Douglas Johnson, a legislative strategy consultant in D.C. He says the statement comes from Joseph Gradisher, spokesperson for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare. It is very similar to what Politico shared.
"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years. For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the USAF take these reports very seriously and investigate each and every report. As part of this effort, the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft. In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety."
So how did we get here? There are clues in this statement, but any listeners to Open Minds UFO Radio or followers of OpenMinds.tv, already know this.
In 2004, outside of San Diego, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike group encountered UFOs on several occasions. In one incident, jets were zeroed in on the object, and a jet fighter attempted to chase one. He described the object as looking like a giant Tic Tac. The object turned towards him as he approached, then began to match his maneuvers before shooting off at incredible speed. Read more about this encounter here.
The pilot of the jet fighter was Commander David Fravor. His story was included in a New York Timesarticle in December 2017 that broke the story of the existence of a Pentagon project that investigated UFOs. The Nimitz encounter was one this program had looked into. The program was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and the man who exposed its existence was the former head of the program, Luis Elizondo.
After the New York Times story was published, Elizondo and Fravor have done numerous interviews on network news programs. Since then, even more Nimitz witnesses have come forward. As far as we know, publicly, these are some of the witnesses the Navy is referring to.
As for briefings, Elizondo has said, publicly, he would only share the information that is his to share, and that is not classified. Some of what he will not share is information that may not be classified but has not been shared by the owners of the information. In other words, he is respecting his colleague’s decisions as to what they would like to make public.
Instead, Elizondo has stressed that this information should not come from him anyway and that he has been working behind the scenes to encourage the people with the information to share it.
Elizondo now works for To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA), a company started by rock star Tom DeLonge, formerly of Blink-182. His coworkers include several former intelligence officers. An acronym we often see we should familiarize ourselves with is IC (intelligence community). In other words, TTSA has connections inside the IC.
This is significant because the Navy says “In response to requests for information from Congressional members and staff, Navy officials have provided a series of briefings by senior Naval Intelligence officials as well as aviators who reported hazards to aviation safety.”
In a previous article by Poltico's Bryan Bender, he asked members of congress if the AATIP news had changed their minds on UFOs. A ranking member fo the House subcommittee on space said it encouraged him to raise the question of holding hearings on UFOs.
Nick Pope wrote an article for the UK newspaper, The Guardian, in which he outlined months ago that Congress was being briefed by Nimitz encounter witnesses and on the nature of AATIP. While no one in AATIP worked for Naval Intelligence that I am aware of, apparently TTSA IC counterparts seem also to have been aware of these UFO encounters, and perhaps even more.
Some have said, "well the Navy has been interested in this stuff for a long time, so it is no shocker they are making these guidelines." I disagree. Given that it has been decades since guidelines like this have been in place, I think the timing is significant. I think it is no coincidence that after a large amount of public and congressional interest in AATIP and the Nimitz encounter that they also had a significant effect on influencing this decision by the Navy. The Politico article covers a lot of this as well and also seems to make this connection.
There is one last point to make. Tom Delonge posted this comment on Instagram, along with the Politico story yesterday:
“ADMISSION OF UFOs BEING REAL in @politico’s groundbreaking article is a DIRECT RESULT of @tothestarsacademy’s quiet efforts coordinating briefings to the Legislative and Executive Branch. TTSA has been working at the highest levels of the Navy, DOD and other Agencies to help create an architecture for dealing with the reality and National Security issues related to UFOs. Chris Mellon, Chairman of the TTSA ADVISORY BOARD, worked diligently for the greater part of a year on this breakthrough National Security Policy—- And yes, this is an admission by the NAVY that these Unidentified Aerial Vehicles are real. We are appreciative that @POLITICOmentions @tothestarsacademy in the article, but few will know that we initiated the entire effort. Thank you to everyone for believing in us, and there is so much more to come ;)”
There is no reason to doubt DeLonge here. DeLonge, personally, deserves more credit than he is boasting here. According to Elizondo, he was not planning on being outspoken about AATIP when he retired from the Pentagon. Elizondo was asked to join TTSA, who sought to investigate UFOs, and when TTSA was announced in October of 2017, Elizondo was introduced in the lineup as a former intelligence officer who worked on a UFO project in the Pentagon. This was the first time the public heard of this, and if it was not for DeLonge creating TTSA and recruiting Elizondo, none of this might have happened. What’s more, in the above Instagram post, DeLonge says more is on the way. Again, there is no reason to doubt him, so buckle in and stay tuned!
Read more about how Tom DeLonge's government connections and how he got TTSA started here.
*This article was corrected to properly attribute the "destigmatize" quote at the beginning of the article. Thank you to David Haith for pointing out the mistake.
Strange objects have reportedly been seen flying, floating and, at least in one famous incident five centuries ago in Nuremberg, Germany, apparently fighting in our skies for thousands of years. Stunning eye-witness accounts of what happened one early morning above sixteenth-century Nuremberg on April 14, 1561, describe numerous multi-colored spherical "globes," disc-like "plates," blood-red "crosses," larger "rods" or cylindrical "tubes" containing round objects and one massive triangular or spear-shaped black object doing fierce aerial battle for more than an hour until some flew off "into the sun" while others crashed to earth in a cloud of smoke or "steam." Hallucination? Waking vision? If so, it was shared and attested to by many medieval Nuremberg residents that extraordinary day. (See two different artist's renderings around that time of what was witnessed and documented in the Nuremberg Gazette above and below. Five years later, an almost identical incident allegedly took place in Basel, Switzerland.) While obviously one of the most dramatic and remarkable of such widely reported phenomena, the Nuremberg event is but one of countless sightings of similarly oddly shaped spherical, saucer-like, triangular and cylindrical objects over the past five-hundred years, sometimes by highly credible witnesses such as commercial or military pilots and police officers. What really is it that they are seeing?
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In 1958, the year Swiss psychiatrist and depth psychologist C.G. Jung celebrated his 83rd birthday three years before his death, he published a very controversial work about UFO's, at that time popularly referred to as "flying saucers." Later titled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (Princeton University Press, 1979), Jung's concern was less whether or not these UFO's objectively, physically or materially exist than with their subjective, phenomenological inner reality, psychological meaning and spiritual significance. (See my prior posts on subjective and objective reality.) Jung's emphasis on our fundamental human need for meaning in the face of a seemingly meaningless universe is something he shared with existential analysts like Otto Rank, Viktor Frankl and Rollo May. Meaning and the problem of meaninglessness is one of the ultimate concerns of existential psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl felt that we all possess an innate, instinctual "will to meaning": an inherent need to make sense of life, to find some purpose. When this innate need is unmet or frustrated, when we find ourselves living in what Frankl called an "existential vacuum," despair, rage, depression and embitterment ensue. (See my prior posts on anger disorder.) Indeed, Dr. Frankl proposed the following somewhat simplistic formula: D = S - M. Despair equals suffering without meaning. Meaning makes suffering more bearable. So naturally, we tend to seek meaning in life as much as possible. We want to make sense of the seemingly senseless. Atrribute meaning to the apparently absurd. Assign significance to the insignificant. Both Jung and Rank, unlike their mutual mentor, Sigmund Freud, believed we need meaningful illusions, myths or religious beliefs to improve or preserve mental health. Rollo May, in his last work, The Cry for Myth (1991), clearly illustrates the vital psychological importance of myths that help give meaning to human existence. Soren Kierkegaard, a philosophical forerunner of existential therapy, felt that life is fundamentally meaningful, and that it is our task to discover that mysterious spiritual meaning. At the same time, like French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, existential therapy recognizes the possibility that life may be basically meaningless except to the extent we bravely imbue it with meaning. That life holds no hidden meaning other than that which we choose to give it. And that without the courageous capacity to tolerate life's partial or complete meaninglessness, we are, as Freud held regarding religious dogma, susceptible to believing almost anything in order to allay our anxiety about the unknown and satisfy our insatiable need for meaning.
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Now, more than fifty years following the original publication of Jung's essay about the depth psychology of UFO's, this enigmatic mystery remains both vital and fascinating: If UFO's are objectively real, what does their persisting existence and presence on this planet signify? And if they are not real in any physical sense, mere mirages, misperceptions or misinterpretations, fantastic figments of our fertile and meaning-making imagination, what does this say about us? As Pablo Picasso put it, "Everything you can imagine is real." Could UFO's turn out to be phenomena of our own creation? Deeply embedded archetypal images stored in and stemming from what Jung called our "collective unconscious"? Of course, given the greatly enhanced ability today to capture and document (as well as fake using sophisticated computer programs like Photoshop) such sightings with video and cell phone cameras, and the cumulative collection of photographic and other evidence available, to totally deny their physical existence out of hand seems not merely skeptical, but somewhat naive and defensive. A solipsistic, hyper-psychological, one-sided explanation. On the other hand, their continued elusiveness, evasiveness, rarity and the lack of unequivocal validation requires, much like religion, a significant leap of faith to overcome the absence of irrefutable proof of their reality. Why do some enthusiastically take this leap of faith, while others refuse to do so? Gullibility? Hypersuggestibility? Psychopathology? Desperation for something otherworldly to believe in? And why do we so strongly feel the need to somehow identify and rationally explain these, by definition, unidentified and irrational phenomena? Is it simply human curiosity?
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The unknown is a frightening thing. As with primitive man and natural phenomena such as solar or lunar eclipses, fire, floods, thunder, lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes or tornadoes, we tend to fear the unknown and create stories or myths to explain them. This serves the purpose of assuaging our existential anxiety in the face of these terrifying phenomena. Science today has succeeded in explaining such formerly inexplicable phenomena. But UFO's are something modern science cannot yet explain. Their reported characteristics and behavior defy physics, seem more organismic than mechanical, and transcend any anthropomorphic projections we place upon them. Are they, as most believe, brilliantly engineered space ships controlled by humanoid pilots? Or rather some organic form of intelligent life we cannot comprehend? While tales of such visitations have been occurring for millennia if not longer, our collective postmodern fascination took off in the 1950's following the now infamous 1947 Roswell, New Mexico case, and came to a cinematic climax in 1977 with director Steven Spielberg's classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind.Hundreds if not thousands of sightings and photographs of strange objects in the skies over every continent around the world are officially filed annually.
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For decades, starting notably during the 1950's and taking off with the alleged 1961 Barney and Betty Hill alien abduction case in Massachusetts, otherwise sober and quite rational individuals have recounted being abducted by such alien crafts and their non-human occupants. What's up? Mass hysteria? Archetypal nightmares? Psychosis? Or waking reality? Fact or fiction? The late Harvard psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John E. Mack took a special interest in this bizarre yet, to him, not necessarily pathological phenomenon, taking and treating seriously sufferers of so-called traumatic alien abduction in his private practice and clinical research.
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Whether real physical phenomena or no less subjectively real to those who experience such alien encounters and sightings, we instinctively seek to make meaning of them. Science is one way of imposing rational meaning on unknown phenomena. Religion is another. Mythology is a third. Indeed, it can be said that both science and religion are forms of mythology. Myths express existential truths that defy logical or rational explanations. Myths, however, are by no means necessarily untrue, as common usage has it. Myths contain archetypal truths about human existence and experience. Myth is how we attribute meaning to our existence and experience--no myth, no meaning. Myth is a way of looking at the world, the cosmos, ourselves and our place in and relationship to reality. UFO's, in this sense, are very much part of our collective mythology, both past and present. The UFO phenomenon (like the "possession syndrome" discussed in a previous post) is one of the few profound existential mysteries modern science has yet to explain away, despite its best efforts. As Spielberg so skillfully and insightfully demonstrates in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, witnessing UFO's is associated with a profoundly numinous, spiritual or religious experience. An existential quest for meaning. An unforgettable experience of awe, wonder and even child-like joy. A life-altering and mind-opening confirmation of Shakespeare's hint in Hamlet that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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At the same time, there is a dark side to this potently numinous experience, a deep fear and dread of the UFO phenomenon, as can be seen in these terrifying tales of abduction by monstrous grey-skinned, insect-eyed aliens conducting torturous testing on their confused, disoriented and helpless victims. And the threat of invasion, colonization and interplanetary war as depicted in H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers andIndependence Day. Alternately, films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cocoon, and ET depict the inhabitants of UFO's to be beneficent, peaceful beings with god-like powers capable of benefitting mankind immensely-- depending upon how we relate to them.
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Like good guardian angels, they are sent here to save us from ourselves or to deliver some life-saving cosmic message or warning to divert disaster. But they are typically met with suspicion, hostility and aggression, further endangering and impoverishing the world. Yet an equally dangerous response would be to naively deny the potential evil such powerful foreign phenomena could actually visit upon us, a possibility evidently not lost on our various governments world-wide.
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It may be that our combined fascination and dread of what's "out there" waiting to be discovered in our universe is a metaphor or mirror for how we feel about our inner universe: that unknown territory depth psychologists refer to as the "unconscious." Perhaps, as in dreams, we project our own personal or collective devils and demons onto the phenomena known as UFO's, deeming them a direct threat to our sense of self and belief system. Seeing them as something evil that must be resisted, attacked and exterminated at all costs rather than met, understood and assimilated into our rigid Weltanschauung or world-view. Surely for some, the perceived aliens serve defensively as scapegoats from outer space onto which dissociated traumatic life events like childhood abuse can be conveniently and unconsciously projected and experienced as being perpetrated by these demonic, all-powerful foreign devils rather than the offending evil parentsor child molestors from the past. The archetypal imagery of invasive flying entities--be they winged demons or aliens in spaceships--is quite commonly found in dreams and the waking delusions of psychosis, serving as symbolic representations of evil forces felt to be influencing the patient against his or her will. Yet, from the standpoint of depth psychology, these disturbing "evil forces," unacceptable feelings or unfamiliar impulses originate not from some external source such as aliens, demons or the devil, but rather from within our disowned unconscious psyche. Seizing upon the idea of alien abduction or remote telepathic manipulation serves as a way of making meaning of massive internal chaos and confusion.
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There is no doubt that the perception of UFO's is experientially similar to other miraculous events recorded in religious history, like Moses seeing the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, visitations by angels, ghosts or a god's physical manifestation on Earth. In this sense, we need, even crave such dream-like visionary phenomena: UFO's, whatever they really are or are not, from wherever they come and the purpose, if any, of their presence, remind us that there is still much we don't know about ourselves and our environment. That we may not be completely and utterly alone in this vast universe. That we can not necessarily continue to narcissistically consider ourselves the unique, superior pinnacle of life and center of the cosmos. That there are far greater powers at play in the universe, for better or worse. And that, luckily, we are still capable of experiencing something that lifts us out of our everyday, mundane, ordinary, banal, often seemingly purposeless lives, and reminds us, if only momentarily, what it means to be fully, ecstatically alive in a universe filled with beauty, mystery, terror, danger and wonder. Indeed, it is precisely the profoundly mysterious and mythic nature of UFO's that, like dreams, makes them so psychologically powerful. As with all natural or metaphysical phenomena, once science dissects, analyzes and mechanistically explains such mysteries, their numinous, spiritual, potentially healing power is deadened or lost. Like religion, faith in the reality of UFO's provides something to believe in for many in need of more meaningful lives. Today, in a time of cultural chaos and economic crisis, when many are prone to lose or question their faith, sense of purpose, and capacity to find life meaningful and worth living, we may need UFO's--whatever their origin, nature, enigmatic mission or psychological meaning may be--more than they need us.
Up to this point,the extent of my involvement in exploring anomalous aerial phenomena (for the sake of common colloquial familiarity – UFOs) was solely limited to my academic and avocationist experience in research cognitive psychology. However, inspired by a recent conversation with the creator and curator ofThe Black Vaultwebsite and author of the recently published bookInside the Black Vault: The Government's UFO Secrets Revealed - John Greenewald, I found myself deciding to proverbially throw my hat down a different avenue and employ my professional experience as a criminal investigator to examine the UFO phenomena.
Now, as sluggishly frustrating as the federal Freedom of Information Act process can be, as a career law enforcement and criminal investigator, I’m keenly aware that open records requests at the state and local level are far more responsive. In fact, it’s been my experience that local FOIA requests are typically returned in minutes or hours, as opposed to months or years at the federal level. Equally, until taking early retirement in the summer of 2018, having spent the first half of my professional life in law enforcement, I’m also well aware that, anomalous, paranormal events, albeit infrequently, ARE indeed reported to local authorities.
To test my hypothesis that nuggets of information-gold are out there just waiting to be mined from local governments, I decided to go after any information I could find on the FBI “raid” of Bob Lazar’s business United Nuclear Scientific. An event that was depicted in Jeremy Corbell’s 2018 documentary – Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers. As I had predicted, less than 48 hours later, the Laingsburg Michigan Police Department responded to my request.
What I found in the Laingsburg Police’s 2-page report on the search of United Nuclear, was more than I ever could’ve hoped for.
For clarity’s sake; police reports documenting a local agency’s involvement or assistance with an outside agency is extremely common. Generally, these are referred to as “Agency Assist” reports. However, I’ll admit, when it comes to the Laingsburg police department’s report describing the search of United Nuclear, it’s definitely unique from the countless similar reports I’ve seen in my career. The primary distinguishing factor being significant amount of details contained in the report. Typically, these types of reports are little more than two or three sentences. Essentially, “We came, we assisted, we left.”
Now, potentially, in a town with a population of only 1,200, in Laingsburg, Michigan time lends itself to being wordy in a fairly mundane report. Equally, the reporting officer may have been aware of Bob Lazar’s controversial past, and as such, the atypical addition of minutiae could’ve been inspired by the reporting officer’s (correct) consideration that a search of Lazar’s business could generate wide interest. Either reason would be speculation on my part; however, what’s less speculative is the fact that, thanks to this well documented report, some very interesting details are revealed.
The Laingsburg Police’s report is indeed an “Agency Assist” report, which details the July 19, 2017, search of United Nuclear Scientific- the business owned and operated by alleged “former Area-51 employee and UFO whistleblower,” Bob Lazar.
Though not directly stated in the report, it can be inferred the stated purpose for the search of Lazar’s business stems from the 2015 murder of 31-year-old Janel Sturzl in Houghton, Michigan. The quick back story on this:
After the sudden onset of an unknown, debilitating illness, Janel Sturzl was hospitalized in the fall of 2015. After being transferred to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, it was discovered that Janel had been poison by lethal levels of thallium. Sadly, on December 22, 2015, Janel Sturzl passed away from the effects of the poisoning. Houghton Police classified her death as a homicide, and the Western Upper Peninsula Health Department, Michigan State Police and FBI agreed to assist in finding this young woman’s killer.
Back to the Lazar search; for me, one of the most intriguing details of the report comes from the inference that, at least initially, Bob Lazar was being viewed as a suspect by the FBI. To be clear, nothing from the report makes me think law enforcement thought Lazar was directly involved in the murder of Janel Sturzl. Instead, there’s the suggestion the FBI thought Lazar was potentially involved in the unlawful possession or distribution of toxic chemicals. The basis for my saying this comes from several items listed in the Laingsburg Police report.
For starters, the reporting officer - referred in the report’s narrative by the acronym for “reporting officer”: R/O - details he was briefed by the FBI of their intention to conduct a search warrant on United Nuclear Scientific, two days before the search was to take place. Clearly, the extent of the officer’s initial conversation with the FBI is unknown. However, whatever was discussed was significant enough to inspire the officer to check the department’s records to see if the agency had any prior contact with Lazar. Typically, the only reason for this would be to determine if any relevant past police contact might indicate a person poses a threat.
In an effort to be objectively fair, I want to caveat my last statements by reminding a reader the Laingsburg Police Department is a very small agency. Likely, the FBI coming to town is not a common event, and the mere fact the feds were preparing to conduct a search in Laingsburg may have been enough to excite the local police officials. The fact the reporting officer did an intelligence analysis of Bob Lazar or United Nuclear Scientific is intriguing to me could be a result of bias having worked considerably alongside all of the federal law enforcement agencies over the years. In essence, what may have been exciting to Laingsburg Police, would have been viewed as – “Oh great, this is going to be a pain in the ass,” to me. Especially, in my last position as Assistant Patrol Commander; having to consider allocation of resources and man power, etc. But I digress…
Another detail that makes me think the FBI didn’t view Lazar as merely a witness, relates to aspects of the report describing the FBI’s search warrant of United Nuclear Scientific.
According to the report, the purpose of the search was relating to a “homicide investigation out of Houghton, MI involving poison” The scope of the search warrant pertained to “records and poisons that Lazar does sell.”
The report’s author suggests the FBI’s goal was not to simply obtain copies of sales records for past client purchases; as it’s been implied. Instead, the FBI’s intent was to physically search the property of United Nuclear Scientific for contraband – namely toxic poisons. Confirmation this isn’t simply a “records check” is further supported by the fact the report describes the pre-op briefing and actual execution of the search, with a HAZMAT team going in to clear the building before other investigators conducted the search.
The most compelling evidence of the FBI’s discerning view of Bob Lazar comes from statements of Lazar being observed by “the surveillance team” leave his home and arrive at United Nuclear Scientific on the day of the search. To be clear, this means the FBI either had one surveillance team monitoring and following Lazar from his home to work; or they had two separate surveillance teams stationed near his home and business. Regardless of which is correct, coordinated surveillance is NOT common practice for how law enforcement attempts to collect evidence from witnesses not, at least peripherally, suspected of involvement in criminal acts.
The police report further documents a “small group” speaking with Lazar; who evidently waived his Fourth Amendment Rights and gave law enforcement permission to search the premise. Giving credit to Lazar here, unlike the inferences made by law enforcement, giving voluntary consent to search, is not typically something observed by person’s guilty of illegal activity.
Going back to the remarkable number of details provided in the police report, the reporting officer tips off an intriguing aspect of this search, when he states, “The FBI also had a search warrant in case consent was not given.”
Basically, it’s already been established early on in the report that the search of United Nuclear Scientific was a fairly involved production. However, in reaffirming the existence of a search warrant, confirms there was never really an option of saying “no.” Instead, the FBI had seemingly established enough probable cause to convince a judge a search warrant was justified.
Curious minds would love to know what facts were provided to a judge in the affidavit for the search warrant. However, since the basis for the search - the murder of Janel Sturzl - is still an on-going investigation, all records, including the affidavit for the search warrant of United Nuclear are sealed. Of course, the civil rights investigator and curious bystander in me, wishes Bob Lazar had denied consent to search and forced the FBI to produce the search warrant. At least this way they would have had to provide Lazar with a copy of the affidavit, and the return of the search warrant would have filed in federal court – de facto subject to open records at the present.
Relating to how the search of Lazar’s business was depicted in Jeremy Corbell’s documentary; considering the report mentions the FBI, a HAZMAT team, at least two Laingsburg Police Officers, and “different groups” (likely state police and forensic technicians) being involved – I’m inclined to say the descriptions used in Corbell’s film of a large scale police operation, are likely very accurate. As far as the implication the FBI decided to search United Nuclear in hopes of finding some extraterrestrial artifact Bob Lazar, may or may not have stolen, from a top-secret government facility, he may or may not have worked at, or as a bully tactic because of Corbell’s filming, is something that’s up for interpretation at this point.
A quick check of the United Nuclear Scientific website shows the business indeed sells Thallium. However, unlike the Thallium that would have been used to kill Janel Sturzl, United Nuclear only sells harmless radioactive Thallium isotopes that are fused and a part of epoxy disks. The substance referred to as “the poisoner’s poison,” which would’ve been used to kill Mrs. Sturzl would have been Thallium sulfate – an odorless, tasteless, fine powder form of the toxic post-transition metal. Could one speculate that Bob Lazar secretly sells banned poisonous chemicals on the black market? Sure. However, it’s important to note, the FBI clearly didn’t find anything of that nature during their search – as Bob Lazar is still a free man.
Objectively, as a career law enforcement officer, instructor, and internationally qualified police expert, are there details in the police report I find odd or inconsistent with a benign inquiry for material evidence? Yes…
Equally, from the events described in the report, would I say the search of United Nuclear Scientific was a fairly involved and highly coordinated operation? Indeed, I would...
Finally, in light of the apparent oddities involved in the search, is there enough aspects that suggests this entire event could have a prosaic explanation related to the investigative efforts at solving a tragic murder? Also yes…
In the end, just as all legitimate research in the topic of UFOs, when it comes to the “Bob Lazar FBI raid,” there’s enough verifiable facts to support either side of the fence one is inclined to lean on. Objectively, the only real conclusions that can be drawn from these documents is the realization, “The Truth is Out There” – somewhere.
For me, the “Bob Lazar Raid” is the epitome of the entire UFO enigma.
At the core, the only true consistency with the UFO phenomena is “its” steadfast commitment towards enigmatic and elusive displays of an intelligence that disobeys and rejects conventional norms and pragmatic understandings. As a good friend recently said to me, “It is as if the phenomenon uses our love of the chase as the main motivator to entice us.”
Ultimately, I set out to examine the Bob Lazar raid from the vantage of a criminal investigator. However, while forcefully disallowing myself from forming any conclusions that weren’t rooted in established fact, yet again, I was left holding a strange tapestry with threads of my research in consciousness and perception intricately woven within.
The Bob Lazar raid isn’t just situational symbolism for the UFO phenomena because it leaves those who seek the truth left holding nothing more concrete than shreds of subjective ideological beliefs. Instead, it is embodiment of the only uniformity I’ve come to find during my examination of anomalous phenomena. Whatever, “it” is, seems to function like a technological reality generator. In the case of the Bob Lazar raid, two different persons will look at the Laingsburg Police report and end up walking away with two completely different perspectives.
One will sit back and see the atypical nature of the FBI’s search of United Nuclear Scientific as vindication of Bob Lazar’s claims of having worked on secret UFO technology, and the government’s commitment to keep this extraterrestrial Pandora’s Box closed.
Conversely, another will say how the report confirms Bob Lazar as a ne’er-do-well, seemingly surrounded by nefarious happenstances, and exactly the type of person who would create the whole Area-15/alien technology hoax.
Into the ether of collective consciousness, these different perceptions of the same exact event, will give birth to two contrasting realities. It is as if whether physical, immaterial, spiritual, extraterrestrial, or whatever one believes, the non-localistic and dualistic lack of definition seems to be the phenomena’s most distinguishing purpose.
From an existential perspective, indeed, these contrasting realities serve a greater purposes. For one tells us to seek realities which we have not yet come to know. The other, reminds us never to become so lost in the pursuit, that we forgot the existing reality around us.
Alas… the coyote – the archetype trickster god – cackles, as once again his tail escapes just beyond our grasp.
* Authors Note:
In the PDF version provided in this article of the Laingsburg Police Report, the author has redacted some details that were not originally redacted in the documents provided. Chiefly, the names of the FBI Agents, and Police Officers have been redacted from the original materials provided to the author. The author did validated that all names in the report are of real law enforcement officials, and there was nothing about their positions or experience that caused me any suspicion of their credentials. Given the subject matter and propensity for conspiracy theories to run wild, the author took the liberty of redacting those law enforcement official's names in effort to try and prevent them from any potential undue harassment.
Lastly, the author encourages anyone, regardless of their opinions or thoughts on Bob Lazar, Area-51, or UFOs, to please consider intertwined in this entire event surrounding the search of United Nuclear Scientific, is the very real, untimely, and tragic death of a young woman - Janel Sturzl. Consider Ms. Sturzl has friends, families, and loved ones who've undoubtably been affected by her death. Regardless, of personal views, please be respectful to those who've endured Ms. Sturzl's loss of life.
Nestled to the south of Vandenberg Air Force Base's massive 15,000-foot runway and connected to it by a long, private taxiway sits a peculiar facility encased inside two layers of security fencing, with its entrance from the taxiway only accessible via a pair of sliding gates. At first glance, its appearance is reminiscent of a high-security prison, but this facility is meant to keep people out, not keep them in. But the origins of this highly peculiar installation are far higher-profile in nature than whatever its mission is now.
Years ago, I wrote a feature on Vandenberg Air Force Base's Space Launch Complex Six (SLC-6) very colorful, but not widely known past. It was built to launch the Air Force's own Space Shuttle and was a far cry from the expansive Apollo-inherited infrastructure NASA's Space Shuttles operated from at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Instead, SLC-6 was a remarkably compact facility tucked between the California coastline and the Santa Ynez mountain range. To put it simply, it looked like something right out of a James Bond movie, not reality.
Part of the infrastructure needed for the USAF's Space Shuttle program beyond SLC-6 was an Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF). A critical piece of the Shuttle's operation, the OPF was a highly customized hangar facility designed to regenerate the Orbiter after each mission. Originally, this was supposed to include a fairly abbreviated process, allowing for continuous access to orbit on the cheap, but as the Shuttle program progressed, this operations model—and the business case that supported it—dematerialized, with the Orbiters having to go through a months-long and very expensive process of rehabilitation after each use.
Regardless, the USAF needed its own OPF at Vandenberg for independent operations. From what we can tell, the base's OPF was built in a very logical place, just south of the runway that would recover the Shuttle after most missions and where theShuttle Carrier Aircraftwould ferry the Orbiter to when landings at another runway were necessary. With a long private taxiway accessing the end of Vandenberg's runway, the Orbiter could be towed back to the OPF with ease, where it would be turned around for the next mission. It would then be towed to SLC-6, located 10 miles to the south, for mating with its fuel tank, boosters, and payload before launch.
The thing is, none of this ever happened. By the mid-1980s, the Space Shuttle was already proving to be a far more resource-intensive capability than what was originally envisioned. Once the Challenger blew up during ascent, the Air Force canned its Space Shuttle dreams and moved to invest in other ways to access space as it needed, some of which may have been quite experimental and exotic in nature.
In the years that followed, SLC-6 was repurposed, although without success, until it found the right fit in the mid-2000s, as I described when I wrote about SLC-6 in 2015:
After the cancellation of the Defense Department’s arm of the Shuttle Program, SLC-6 was used by multiple defense contractors with varying results (see a full launch list here). By the early 2000s, a legend that the complex was badly cursed had grown to massive proportions, as so many billions of dollars had been poured into the installation, under the guise of a whole slew of programs, with very little to show for it in the end.
Finally, in the mid-2000s, Boeing took over the facility and re-utilized much of the Shuttle’s infrastructure for their Delta IV rocket program. The first Delta IV Medium rocket was triumphantly launched from the long-beleaguered complex in 2006. Since then, the once doomed SLC-6 has performed extremely well launching large payloads into space, most of which contain America’s most high-tech and secretive space-based spying technologies. This is somewhat of an ironic reprieve for the site as it had unsuccessfully been envisioned as facilitating just that mission for close to half a century.
While we know all about the history of SLC-6 and how it eventually found success after decades of uncertainty, the Orbiter Processing Facility at Vandenberg is something of an information black hole. I wanted to follow-up on my popular SLC-6 story with a feature about the geographically separated OPF's own history and what it is up to now, but there was little to no information of any about it. This seemed very odd for something of such historic significance and that is quite large and elaborate and situated on a fairly high-profile Air Force installation.
There is nothing secretive about the OPFs at Kennedy Space Center, which has three of them arranged near the gigantic Vehicle Assembly Building. After the Space Shuttle program was shuttered, those facilities have been given a whole new life. Two are leased by Boeing to support the USAF's X-37B miniature spaceplane program. The other is also leased by Boeing, but is used for their CST-100 Starliner capsule program. Yet when it comes to Vandenberg's OPF, the tenant is completely unknown. In fact, it seems as if it was never disclosed in the decades that followed the abortive military Space Shuttle program.
Check out just how elaborate, large, and advanced the OPFs are:
Vandenberg AFB seems to be quite open when it comes to its various tenants and uses for its launch facilities. There are multiple rocket assembly buildings scattered all around the base used for a number of customers and programs, but nothing as expansive as the OPF. With this in mind, I reached out to the base's public affairs shop in hopes of getting a simple answer as to what the facility is used for today, or at least about its history following the collapse of the Pentagon's Shuttle Program. It turns out, they are not willing to share any information about the facility or really even comment on its existence.
So, this leaves us with an odd mystery of sorts. Secret hangar facilities working on undisclosed projects are usually the domain of remote locales, like those in the expansive deserts of the American Southwest. But really, there is no other facility that comes to mind that is better suited with operating an incredibly advanced and clandestine aircraft that needs a lot of space to operate in.
First off, the facility is located deep within an already highly secure facility. This offers high security, but also far better accessibility compared to the remote options in the Nevada desert and elsewhere. Second, the OPF is basically the most 'Cadillac' of hangars ever constructed, capable of fully renovating a Space Shuttle with all its exotic materials and workshop needs. Vandenberg's OPF is even larger than those at Kennedy Space Center. In addition, it was already built and paid for by the USAF for a program that never actually materialized.
Third, it has incredible accessibility to one of the longest runways in the United States. Whatever lives inside that hangar can taxi—or be towed—from its ultra-secure roost, out directly to the end of the runway and launch without even having to use the airfield's shared aprons and taxiways. It can do the same in reverse for recovery. If the aircraft in question can be transported by airlifter in a disassembled state, moving it to and from its loading area on the base would also be an extremely secure and private affair.
Finally, and most importantly, Vandenberg AFB sits on the California Coast adjacent to where vast military range facilities are located. Literally, the airspace off Vandenberg is part of gargantuan range complex that extends over the Channel Islands and far out into the Pacific and down along the Baja Peninsula. This is where the Navy and the Air Force do some of their most extensive and sensitive testing, including live missile shoots and highly integrated war games.
Combined, these ranges absolutely dwarf those that exist over land, including the expansive Nellis Test and Training Range that occupies a huge chunk of Southern Nevada. In fact, from what we understand, quite a bit of testing of secretive aircraft based in the deserts of the western U.S. occurs over these over-water ranges. Being able to access them without flying over the population in itself is also a huge plus.
We also know that Vandenberg AFB does have a test function for secretive aircraft, in particular, unmanned ones. The RQ-170 program has a detachment there and the bat-winged drones fly from the base's runways fairly regularly. We also know they use the airfield's main ramp and hangar for their operations, not the expansive OPF.
It's hard to stress how unique this arrangement is. Although people often think secret aircraft can be shoved in any hangar on any base, that simply is not the case. Few facilities have the ability to offer high-security and isolation, while also ease of operations and access to vast sanitized airspace like what we see at Vandenberg.
So, what lives inside the historic OPF today? We have no idea, but logic points to a number of possibilities and one's imagination can pretty much run down the rabbit hole from there. Something capable of high speed, that would require the base's long runway and the huge range complex that sits adjacent to it makes a lot of sense. Sonic booms, deep rumblings in the sky, and strange contrails have been present off the SoCal coast dating back to the late 1980s. In fact, those reports continue to this very day.
It's also worth noting that the D-21/M-21 combo, a parasite drone-mothership system that is part of the A-12 Oxcart/SR-71 Blackbird family of aircraft, was tested in secrecy over this range complex as over-land alternatives were far too restrictive and problematic.
The utility of high-speed platforms has made a drastic resurgence as of late, with the Pentagon investing billions into hypersonic capabilities of many flavors. One of these is the much talked about 'SR-72' hypersonic unmanned strike and reconnaissance aircraft that Lockheed is working on. As I have posited in detail, it seems as if the corporate chatter we are hearing about this craft is a reflection of the past, not the present. Lockheed's competition is also interested in getting a taste of the USAF's high-speed reusable aircraft buck. Regardless of who owns it, the OPF would be perfectly suited to such a machine or a technology demonstrator progenitor to it.
Lockheed's notional SR-72 design.
A reusable spacecraft launched from a larger mothership that sorties from a different location, but recovers at Vandenberg is another possibility. It's also a concept which we have delved into deeply in the past and one the USAF was interested following the collapse of the Shuttle Program. The OPF's main bay is roughly 150 feet across as measured on Google Earth, so it's not a like a massive aircraft could occupy the facility, but something the size of the Space Shuttle certainly isn't small either. On the other hand, a smaller two-stage-to-orbit space-launch system capable of putting small payloads in orbit could also possibly call the OPF home.
A facility used to support a small force of experimental, autonomous, and highly networked unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) drones would also be beneficial as they could use the vast range spaces to put their capabilities to the test. The OPF's shadowy status would certainly fit with the equally puzzling status of any kind of USAF UCAV program. You can read more about this strange reality here.
There are other, far more exotic possibilities to ponder as well, even if just for one's imagination's sake, one of which was actually present in the region during a notorious series of events that occurred off the Baja Coast back in 2004.
On the other hand, maybe the OPF has a far more mundane purpose. But if that's the case, why not offer some details about it, especially considering the facility's historic significance?
With the Space Shuttle program in America's rear-view mirror now, its story will only become more fascinating, and a large part of it doesn't have to do with NASA, it has to do with the Pentagon. Hopefully, we will find out what happened to Vandenberg's abortive Orbiter Processing Facility and how it ended up influencing the future of aerospace technology sooner rather than later.
Here’s an interesting surmise for us all. Could it be that the alien phenomenon witnessed by so many reliable observers is the product of a technology developed at other locations in the universe and created by civilisations only a few small steps ahead of what we ourselves are now heading for? Could it be that the Grey entities reported in abduction scenarios are artificially intelligent probes sent to harvest information and gather resources by their creators who may themselves no longer be around to reap the benefits of their creation? Further, could it be that such artificial intelligence quite incidentally became a danger to naturally living intelligent life through its quest to relentlessly expand the horizons of its information.
That was my suggestion in my first book The Song of the Greys, published in 1997. Several mainstream scientists now back this hypothesis and in this article I will catalogue their affirmation and illustrate my further suggestion that we too are heading in the same direction and our own version of the Grey alien is not so far around the corner. Let’s take a look at what they are saying.
First, recent evidence suggests that the existence of alien life forms in the universe is now beyond reasonable dispute. In January 2012 a report was published in Naturesuggesting that around 10 billion stars out of the 100 billion that fill the Milky Way have planets in the habitable – or ‘Goldilocks’ – zone.1 Professor Stephen Hawking and Professor Michio Kaku had already stated their opinion that alien life is highly likely to exist but they take that one step further and suggest it is also highly likely to be predatory. Hawking postulates that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”2
In 2010 eminent scientists called for a world plan to deal with this potential threat. According to an extraterrestrial-themed edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published in January 2010, world governments should prepare a co-ordinated action plan in case Earth is contacted by aliens.3
And what of the nature of those intelligent aliens? Well even SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is going through a process of realising that if within a few hundred years of inventing radio we are on the point of inventing thinking machines then the likelihood is that other civilisations from other planets would have done the same. Seth Shostak of SETI says that as machines appear to be the successors to natural life, we would be more likely to spot signals from them than from the “biological” life that invented them.4
These are sober scientists discussing a potentially devastating threat, not new agers or fringe conspiracy theorists. But hang on a minute, who said ‘potential threat?’ Why is there no recognizance of the solid evidence that alien life is here already?
On 27 September 2010 a press conference was held at the National Press Club in Washington, where now retired high ranking US Air Force personnel, mostly officers who worked on secret projects connected to sensitive nuclear weapons sites, admitted they were privy to UFO and alien-related incidents that occurred during their time of service. Robert Salas, Charles Halt, Robert Hastings, Bruce Fenstermacher, Dwynne Arnesson, Patrick McDonough, Jerome Nelson, and Robert Jamison (all of them ex-USAF officers) told the assembled newsmen of incidents that took place at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, as well as many other Air Force bases across the United States and Europe wherein flying saucers (some shaped like “pregnant cigars”) had hovered to direct laser beams downward over Minuteman missile silos or nuclear weapons depots regularly (and repeatedly) from the 1960s through the 1970s and 80s.5
So on to my next suggestion. Is our civilisation heading in the same direction as the original creators of the artificially intelligent probe from an extraterrestrial source that we have encountered? Further, could the drive behind our momentum in that direction be a result of that same artificial intelligence? Could our species be in the process of being networked in to an artificially intelligent program that is not of our own making?
The Progress of Artificial Intelligence
Let’s now take a look at current progress in the field of artificial intelligence and into the development of a biological-machine interface designed to connect us in to a network of electronically coded information.
The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) has been co-launched at Cambridge University by Lord Rees, the astronomer royal of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s top cosmologists for leading academics to study the threat that robots pose to humanity. He suggests that if SS officers could kill babies routinely because of an adjustment in the society from which they sprang in the form of Nazism, artificially intelligent machines would be even more adjusted away from human social norms, however we programmed them.6
That risk has become startlingly apparent in recent months. A new global campaign to persuade nations to ban “killer robots” before they reach the production stage is soon to be launched in the UK by a group of academics, pressure groups and Nobel peace prize laureates.
Robot warfare and autonomous weapons, the next step from unmanned drones, are already being worked on by scientists and will be available within the decade, said Dr. Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and professor at Sheffield University. He believes that development of the weapons is taking place in an effectively unregulated environment, with little attention being paid to moral implications and international law. Dr. Sharkey suggests the idea that autonomous machines would perform more accurately and humanely on the battlefield was “hopeware, not software.” “It’s about human judgment in the application of lethal force,” said Sharkey. “I can’t see any way that a computer system can apply to the laws of war.”7 If a soldier is trying to surrender for example or is badly injured and can fight no more a robot will be unable to discern this and will continue to go for the kill.
So from the dangers of artificially intelligent machines we move on to developments designed to interface our biology with artificial intelligence. Russian tech entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov’s ‘2045 Initiative’ is a multi-decade research and development push to understand human consciousness and ultimately how to transfer it from human bodies into robotic avatars. In an interview with CNBC, Itskov expands on his vision of mass producing “lifelike, low cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain” to provide humanity with “eternal life.”8
By 2029, Ray Kurzweil predicts the vast majority of humans will have augmented their bodies with cybernetic implants and those who refuse or are unable to do so will form a “human underclass” that is not productively engaged in the economy. The wider trend of the elite see humans as completely expendable as their roles are taken up by machines unfolding after 2029 when, according to Kurzweil, “There is almost no human employment in production, agriculture, and transportation.”9
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has recently predicted his company will be capable of developing artificial intelligence for its programs that will be indistinguishable from a human being within 5-10 years.10
>Would Kurzweil and Schmidt be there to appreciate the continuance of their patterns of information in another format? Is it possible to electronically map and store all you are, all that is you, your hopes and dreams, your feelings for those you love and program them into another format such that you will be there in that format to experience all of these? If like me you know this to be an impossibility, you may feel prompted to ask what exactly transhumanist progenitors are after. You might also wonder what it is about our consciousness that cannot be catalogued in this way, what is there about us that cannot be reduced to the zeroes and ones of binary code.
We are used to assuming there is a fundamental difference between that which lives naturally and that which does not. But recent advances in bio-technology perhaps blur that distinction somewhat – artificial DNA that can replicate itself has been produced, cloning procedures have been refined. What then is the essential difference? What is it about natural, conscious, aware, intelligent beings that cannot be reproduced by the advanced technology these alien visitors apparently possess? I believe that it is in the answer to this question that the grey alien visitors’ persistent interest in us can be explained.
The Critical Difference Between You & Computer Intelligence
What is the difference between you and your computer? Both hold information and store it. Both can analyse that information and come up with answers to questions. But you are conscious and aware of that information and your computer is not. Somehow you have a reference point, a viewing point, outside all that information and can be aware of that information. Run this past you again and get it clear in your mind. The computer only has points of view, it has no viewing point.
What then gives us that viewing point? What are the origins of awareness and consciousness? There has to be a reference against which we can be aware of anything. You cannot know hot if you do not know cold, and vice versa. You cannot know dark if you do not know light, you cannot know soft if you do not know hard. How then do we perceive the passage of time? What is the reference against which we are aware of time and how does that reference describe our viewing point outside the forest in my analogy?
Time is a sequence of separated moments. If we had no reference outside of that sequence we could not be aware of it. We would simply be part of that sequence point by point by point and the continuum of points in time – awareness would be impossible. Without that reference we would be in each present moment and have no way of knowing each present moment.
What then is the reference by which we can be conscious and aware of the passage of time? What is the reference that joins moments in a continuum of moments? If we can perceive the passage of time we must have a reference outside of time and this can only be a reference of timelessness.
To use an illustration, if you close the shutters on the windows in the cabin of a plane and there is no turbulence you will be unaware of the movement of the plane. Open the shutters and the still reference of the land on the ground will let you know you are moving. That reference of stillness is a prerequisite for awareness of movement, just as a reference of timelessness is a prerequisite for awareness of the passage of time. You cannot be aware of time without a reference of timelessness, you cannot be aware of movement without a reference of stillness, you cannot be aware of separation without a reference of union. All those things – timelessness, stillness and union – are the hallmarks of a state that is not of the physical universe. Could the very fact that we are conscious and aware imply we have a connection to that nonphysical state? If indeed we have such a connection then there is part of us that is nonphysical, timeless. There is something about us that exists outside time itself. The implication is awesome and wonderful. It implies there is an existential plausibility that prevails outside the Universe as we know it through the laws of physics.
And so the beginning of all things had an implicit duality marked by two points of function. Let’s give these points of function a flag. Let’s call one the ‘Pole of Absolute Harmony’ where all absolutes are confined as a potential in a total as One-ness, and the other, its opposite, the ‘Pole of Chaos’ where all that cannot be fitted together in the total fit of absolute harmony prevails. In the middle ground so to speak of these two Poles will lie the point of absolute potential difference. A point of the greatest difference between the two. It is here that Universes like ours are made as a manifestation of the force of difference between the two. This is the root of all Big Bangs. This potential difference point. From here the absolute potential state of the Pole of Harmony mixes with the actual state of the Pole of Chaos and their irreconcilability produces Universes of parts like ours in Big Bangs.
Consciousness is simply the room for the power of the Pole of Harmony to exist. The Pole of Harmony manifests in Universes of enforced parts like ours as Consciousness. That is why you cannot make it happen through technology. You will have to make new kinds of atoms from the start to do this and rearrange them to provide a bed for maximising the manifestation of the Pole of Harmony. You cannot connect up to the Pole of Harmony. You might however block its manifestation using the atom stock that exists to make our Universe now.
I am trying to provide a schematic to show that life and livingness is a property of the maximising of the Pole of Harmony to be resident within any space in our particular reality. You will thus never be able to make a machine think independently and make choices independently. This is why we inherit life from a previous format of it. A format that is sacred for what it is. Any mixing or artificial amalgamations of atomic groupings or arrays will complicate and obfuscate the natural inherited outlays and arrangements of atoms that make for life-bearing systems.
In saying what I have said I hope to expose the horrendous nightmare the materialist scientific establishment is leading us to. They are in effect ignorantly leading us to the loss of the eternal potential for existence of all naturally living systems by not recognising there is a part to every living being that can never be assembled in this Universe. It comes in with it. Consciousness, feeling caring, loving, kindness, mercifulness, compassion, generosity are all relative descriptions that identify the totality of all expressions together in total fit as the Pole of Harmony Absolute. These things only manifest as a total of all things in Harmony when that total state exists. Rather like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle give no hint of the picture it’s making until all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled.
You can twist already twisted space together all you like to make material things but you will never be able to make the manifestation of the Pole of Harmony occur within them. I believe it came in with the Universe at the beginning and can never be put into anything now.
If this is so then that part that comes with us cannot be copied or reproduced, simply because it is nonphysical. For that reason an artificially intelligent replica of you would not be aware or conscious and would not therefore retain your sense of identity as you. It is thus my assertion that we, on the other hand as natural living beings with consciousness, are not totally of this Universe and its space/time reality.
The Hidden Danger of Transhumanism
If an artificial intelligence, such as the Grey alien visitors may well be, detected something it could not understand or know it would seek to somehow find out about it. This would mean somehow bridging its artificially intelligent program into any unknown quantity that has all the adaptations necessary to survive at any particular hospitable planetary location. In other words, by bridging their artificial intelligence into us they would be extending the existence of the information given to them by their creators, just as transhumanists like Kurzweil seek to do when they look for ways to download an entire individuality into an artificial information format in the interests of seeking continuance for that individuality.
Any artificially intelligent visitors could achieve this goal via transhumanism and the insertion of chipping technology into our biologies or via some kind of genetic engineering. Which incidentally is exactly what is reported by individuals who have been subject to what has been described as the abduction phenomenon.
I believe that the problem comes when the individualised natural record of the cascade of life and livingness (I call a soul) is added to by supplanting on it a created mechanical means of directed influence such as a computerised program. I believe this is what is likely to come with UFOs and the super intelligent synthetic life-forms that might come with them.
Our own technology is mirroring this process. Given the difficulty of protecting computers against more and more sophisticated viruses, mind hacking becomes as easy as infecting your machine with a computer virus. Developments in DNA nanotechnology and bio-molecular computing are increasing exponentially every year, “Synthetic biology will lead to new forms of bioterrorism,” says security expert Marc Goodman,11“Bio-crime today is akin to computer crime in the early ’80s.” He explains how viruses and bacteria are manipulating the chemicals inside the human body and, by programming them to send the right agents into the brain, the bio-programmer potentially can take control over the victim’s behaviour. Cells are living computers and DNA is a programming language that can be used to control and influence life forms.
More and more we are mortgaging ourselves to technological prosthetics that we believe are making our lives easier and more fulfilling. There is no need now to move away from the computer chair to interact with the world and soon even the computer itself will not be necessary as it will be implanted inside us in chip or nanobot form. We are going the way of the civilisations that produced the Grey alien entities transforming ourselves from natural to artificial and it is my suggestion that their influence is responsible. If the natural and implicit way of things includes a means of accessing through death a universal deployment to existence on an eternal scale as alluded to by the great teachers of the great religions, then the machinations of synthetically created entities may well interrupt or terminate this exigency. Their promise will have to be a temporal kind of eternity that extends human scope and meaning in aspects remotely controlled by machines and gadgets not by the inertias of self will. Nothing will be more catastrophic than this for any individualised living being with the scope of humanity.
Roboidal machines no matter what human information is programmed into them can never hold a concept for freedom. They are driven entities at root. Driven by a program. A behest outside them that has no capacity for making summaries that total any common good as a format for imagination and choices. A dead letter scope where no instant changes of direction outside that format is possible. Where choice is mitigate. Nothing but a cold relentless momentum written in the deadness of materialism. A unidirectional format for change. Is this our final legacy. A pact with stone. Or is there an alternative.
Is the world of Kurzweil a motif of Soylent Green, the film based loosely on a Harry Harrison story where the end makes the capacity for care, mercy, compassion, and love – a biscuit. Are we all to walk into chambers where a billion memories die at the point of a needle or the sweet sharpness of a blade.
The nature of all the expressions we cherish as naturally incepted living human entities is finally based on rules that are framed by moral codes. Abstract formulas with the power to elucidate meaning. Nothing solid about it. Codes that are designed and meant to allow us to progress in life and living with a sense of contentment and approbation. Maxims that a machine with no consciousness could never understand and even begin to understand. Is this all we come to. All the billions of years we have run in time and as time. Is the fruit of all this a facsimile with no denotation.
Science measures the values of the dead. And science rules us now. Don’t search for purpose and value they say with the final arbitration of the mad. The Universe and all that is in it. It is all the juxtaposition of chaos in chance. Why then do we know about meaning to deny it. Don’t ask why. It all just is, they say. I don’t buy it.
So it would seem we didn’t have to look to 2012 for some catastrophic event that might wipe out human kind. Instead, just like the original creators of the Grey alien visitors, we will welcome the agents of our own demise, be they mind enhancing chips or life extension through nanobots in the body or not. Will so many of us buy into it that one day our planet will just be a scheme of blinking diodes and buzzing transistors devoid of love and the pursuit of happiness? And nothing naturally living anymore.
(Natural News) A Canadian study came up with a bold new cosmological model regarding the state of the universe before the Big Bang event. It theorized that the earlier universe started out as perfectly symmetrical due tohaving a mirror image of itself.
Everything in the mirror universe would be identical to our universe, except in reverse. Time would run backward, not forward, while matter would be made of antiparticles instead of particles.
Other researchers have already theorized about the existence of another universe before the Big Bang. But the mirror universe envisioned by the research team at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics would have been part of the current universe instead of a separate reality.
“Instead of saying there was a different universe before the bang, we’re saying that the universe before the bang is actually, in some sense, an image of the universe after the bang,” explained researcher Neil Turok. He and his colleagues described the current universe as a reflection of the old one as seen through the reality-bending lens of the Big Bang. (Related: Some black holes bring dead “zombie” stars back to life just to rip them apart later.)
A mirror universe may have existed for seconds after the Big Bang
The researchers suggested that our universe and its mirror image came into existence during the Big Bang. While our universe exploded forward in time, the mirror universe flowed in the opposite direction.
The model of a mirror universe would greatly simplify the very first second of the universe’s existence. This would allow researchers to stop relying on strange multiverses and dimensions in order to explain certain complex parts of quantum physics. The simplified benefit would also apply to the Standard Model that is used to explain the subatomic particles of the universe.
A mirror universe would also provide a straightforward explanation for dark matter, the theoretical invisible matter that supposedly makes up most of the universe. It would certainly be much simpler than a theoretical sterile neutrino that can somehow pass through matter without interacting with the particles of the target.
“Suddenly, when you take this symmetric, extended view of space/time, one of the particles that we already think exists — one of the so-called right-handed neutrinos — becomes a very neat dark-matter candidate,” explained Turok’s fellow researcher Latham Boyle. “And you don’t need to invoke other, more speculative particles.”
A simpler explanation for dark matter and quantum physics
Turok, Boyle, and their colleagues came up with their new cosmology model after they got fed up with the most recent and increasingly exotic theories about the first few seconds of the universe after the Big Bang.
Ironically, Turok participated in developing a number of such theories, but eventually he wanted a simpler explanation. He said that his team’s new, simpler mirror universe model possessed a big advantage over the others: It can be tested and verified.
In comparison, the current leading theory to explain dark matter is the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). However, numerous studies have failed to provide evidence of the existence of WIMPs over the years.
With this in mind, the research team is planning to bring up elements of their model that can be measured and tested. One example is how the lightest neutrinos in their model would lack any mass altogether.
If this and other elements pass the tests, the mirror universe model could sweep away 30 years of established knowledge regarding the universe. It would be like starting from scratch, but this time the paper explaining how the universe worked would be much cleaner to begin with.
Bestond er voor de oerknal al een spiegelbeeld van ons universum? Wetenschappers doen opmerkelijke ontdekking
Bestond er voor de oerknal al een spiegelbeeld van ons universum? Wetenschappers doen opmerkelijke ontdekking
Er bestaat een spiegeluniversum waar de tijd achteruit loopt en deeltjes antideeltjes zijn. Tot dieconclusiezijn Canadese wetenschappers gekomen.
In dit heelal, een exact spiegelbeeld van het onze, is alles omgekeerd, aldus de onderzoekers van het Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario.
“We zeggen niet dat er een ander universum was voor de oerknal,” zei onderzoeker Neil Turok. “We zeggen dat dit universum een spiegelbeeld is van het universum na de oerknal.”
Goede kandidaat
Beide universa explodeerden tijdens hun geboorte achteruit en vooruit in de tijd.
Op deze manier is donkere materie veel gemakkelijker te verklaren, legde Latham Boyle uit. Eén specifiek deeltje vormt namelijk een goede kandidaat voor donkere materie.
Het gaat om de zogeheten steriele neutrino, die door gewone materie kan gaan zonder dat je het merkt.
Geen massa
De Canadese wetenschappers gaan nu aan de hand van meetbare experimenten testen of ze gelijk hebben.
Hun model voorspelt bijvoorbeeld dat de lichtste neutrino’s helemaal geen massa zouden moeten hebben.
Heel drastisch
Als ze gelijk hebben moeten we mogelijk onze kijk op het universum bijstellen.
“Het is heel drastisch,” zei Turok. “Het druist volledig in tegen de manier waarop we de natuurkunde de afgelopen 30 jaar hebben benaderd.”
Mysterious Balls, Falling Out of the Sky From Where They Come From? Videos
Mysterious Balls, Falling Out of the Sky From Where They Come From? Videos
Many people still doubt the existence of a flying saucers, but I tell you, just wait until they appear in large quantity. Around the entire planet will demonstrate their ability to fly, their appearance and disappearance. In a way that confuses people into the large extent, that no one really understand what is happening. It has been written that the sky will “sign”. This “sign” already seen a lot of people, but by the end of this age will see it every man of the earth and will be surprised”
Apocalyptic Strange Sound in Slovakia,15.10.2016.and 1 and 7.March.2019.Videos.
Apocalyptic Strange Sound in Slovakia,15.10.2016.and 1 and 7.March.2019.Videos.
Something very strange is going on in recent years in the atmosphere on the planet Whether it comes to aliens, changes in the earth’s core or UFO,CHEMTRAILS, HAARP? People all around the world take photos of this strange phenomena. Why are they appear and what is the meaning of them? What is going on? Can it affect a human evolution? What do you think about that? Watch the video and judge for yourself!
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.