On December 29, 2012, a meteorite fell from the heavens to crash into an area near the city of Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, after having travelled who knows how far across the sea of stars. One of the first to arrive on the scene was Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham in England, who collected the fallen shard and had it studied. The meteorite was thoroughly scanned and analyzed before the team came to the conclusion that this piece of space rock harbored within it one of the most groundbreaking discoveries in human history – that of life beyond the stars.

After carefully studying the rock with electron microscopes, Wickramasinghe’s team claimed to have found something that had never been seen before. There, embedded in the rock, which he would dub “Polonnaruwa,” were supposedly fossilized phytoplankton of some type, basically microscopic aquatic algae called diatoms, meaning that if these findings were correct then they had found the first solid physical evidence ever of extraterrestrial life. Indeed, the team itself went about boldly proclaiming it to be such, touting the discovery as the first indisputable concrete proof of life beyond the confines of planet Earth, they immediately went about publishing papers on their findings in papers such as the Journal of Cosmology, which were met with quite a lot of speculation and debate. It is interesting to note that Wickramasinghe is a big proponent of the theory of “panspermia,” which entails the seeding of life across solar systems through biological life carried upon comets and meteorites, and he has said of the finding:

We conclude that the identification of fossilized diatoms in the Polonnaruwa meteorite is firmly established and unimpeachable. Since this meteorite is considered to be an extinct cometary fragment, the idea of microbial life carried within comets and the theory of cometary panspermia is thus vindicated.

The Sri Lanka meteorite

There was of course plenty of criticism of these findings, such as that of diatom expert Patrick Kociolek, who speculated that the sample had been merely contaminated with regular freshwater here on earth and showed no signs of fossilization. Another evolutionary biologist named PZ Myers pointed out that the “fossils” were remarkably similar to Earth diatoms, and said:

Why a space organism would evolve to look exactly like a species that evolved in a completely different environment, and how it could have converged in all its details on such remarkable similarity to a specific Earthly species? Why, we might even suggest that it clearly looks like contamination.

In response, the team that had found the meteorite defended their position by asserting that the algae were too deeply embedded into the surrounding mineral matrix to be the result of mere contamination, and that any similarities to Earth diatoms was the result of convergent evolution, or the tendency for disparate lifeforms to evolve similarly in response to similar environmental demands. They also pointed out that tests for nitrogen content and oxygen isotope analysis showed that the anomalous fossils originated well off Earth, probably from a passing comet. Yet other scientists have not been so eager to believe it all. Astronomer Phil Plait has been quite vocal about the case, criticizing the methods employed by Wickramasinghe’s crew and saying:

They provide lots of technical data that gives their work a veneer of credibility, but when you look a bit deeper you find they didn’t do a lot of critically necessary tests to establish the veracity of their claims. All the technical stuff obfuscates the fact that they missed the boat in some very basic ways.

Indeed, there are many who have said that it is not even a meteorite at all, but rather just a piece of terrestrial rock that has been misidentified, possibly altered by lighting strikes, which was the verdict handed out by such esteemed research organizations as the Peradeniya University Geology Division, the Department of Forensic Medicine, and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies in Sri Lanka. In the end, it hasn’t even been established if this rock is even a meteorite at all, let alone whether it holds evidence of actual alien life. Phil Plait has said of this:

They examined the rock using various methods, but none of them establish the sample as being a meteorite. Quite the opposite, in fact. One method was an oxygen isotope analysis. Basically, there are different isotopes of stable oxygen—ones with eight, nine, or ten neutrons in the atomic nucleus. In general, the ratios of these isotopes will be different from rocks that have origins in different parts of the solar system. If you collect a bunch of Earth rocks and get the ratio, and compare it to the ratios from rocks from, say, Mars, you’ll get different ratios. This allows you in principle to say that a given rock must not have formed on Earth.

It is pointed out that there are no mentioned efforts or constraints at preventing contamination by earthly sources even if it is a meteorite, and the rock itself was found in a rice field, which would have been in the water and perfectly open to some sort of biological contamination. Wickramasinghe’s team’s claims that the fossils are too deeply embedded into the rock to be this have had holes poked in them with the fact that these small lifeforms can worm their way surprisingly deeply into such a matrix through tiny cracks, bubbles, and fissures. It doesn’t help that there is little elaboration on how the sample was collected at all, and the journals in which the team has published their findings is rather notorious for making sensational claims that have proven to be unsupported by stringent evidence. In the end, Phil Plait says:

Their claims are, down to a one, extraordinary, with pretty underwhelming evidence to support them. So the idea that these are ordinary rocks found in wet conditions under no control that have been sitting around a long time and are therefore loaded with diatoms that evolved here on good ol’ planet Earth seems just a tad more likely to me. In my opinion, Wickramasinghe and his team are not just wrong, they are precisely wrong: Life didn’t crawl from this rock onto the Earth, life crawled into this rock from the Earth.

The debate still rages from those who doubt the original findings and the original team who made it and their believers. Did a meteorite really fall down into this place, and if so did it really hold the answer to the question of whether we are alone in the universe? Is this a genuine groundbreaking discovery or a miscarriage of science and the result of sensationalism? It seems to have not been adequately settled, and is left for the readers to decide for themselves.

The faces of the Earth and all of the other observable celestial bodies make it clear: things that zoom through space tend to bump into one another from time to time. A meteor impact likely killed off the dinosaurs, and there’s no reason to believe that another world-ending impact couldn’t happen again at any moment, particularly given that there have been plenty of near-misses and minor impacts in the last decade alone.

Luckily, the U.S. government has begun taking the threat of near-Earth objects seriously over the last several years, releasing asteroid preparedness plans and conducting impact simulation drills. This year’s drills just took place amid dire warnings from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, warnings which add to the gravity of these simulations and what they may foreshadow. During a speech at the 2019 IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Maryland last month, Bridenstine told his audience that major asteroid impacts tend to happen about every 60 years; thus, while we haven’t had any major impacts recently, we’re likely due for one soon. “I wish I could tell you that these events are exceptionally unique,” Bridenstine said, “but they are not. We have to make people understand this is not about Hollywood, it’s not about movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life and that is the planet Earth.”

We’ve been lucky so far in recent history, but we’ve had our share of close calls like the Tunguska Event of 1908 and the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 just to name a few. If a major impact happened in a heavily populated area, the outcome could be catastrophic. To simulate what would happen in such an impact, NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) held drills this week to test strategies for responding to a potential strike. The test began at the moment a hypothetical asteroid the size of a small skyscraper was detected by astronomers, allowing the asteroid emergency team to calculate risk of impact.

After that, the team simulated an impact in which a 300-meter asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere on April 29, 2027, producing a massive fireball that released up to 20 megatons of energy in a catastrophic air burst that scorched 32 square miles (68 sq km) of the ground below and anyone who happened to be in them.

Curiously, European Space Agency scientists at this simulation placed “coordinate pre-impact access to the area by scientists placing sensors to monitor the impact” before “prepare for any casualties & recovery” in their list of priorities for pre-strike preparations once a strike location had been determined. Let’s make sure we appoint some experts from the humanities to balance out these teams out whenever the real thing happens.

Every time these drills occur, I can’t help but think back to a paper published in 2018 by theoretical physicist, inventor, and former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft Nathan Myhrvold. Myhrvold published an article claiming NASA engaged in scientific misconduct by releasing false data about near-Earth objects like asteroids that may have downplayed the risk we currently face. Could there be any truth to his claims? Do any other recent events suggest that someone may already be planning for such an impact and its aftermath?

Think about it: if the government knew that an asteroid was going to wipe us out ten years from now, would they tell us? Would they want the world to devolve into anarchy as people give up any incentive for paying their mortgages, staying in school, wearing pants, obeying the law, etc.? Of course they wouldn’t. They’d want things to go on as planned as long as possible so that the elite have a chance to move into inflatable space station pods where they can safely watch the rest of us burn down below.

I gotta get one of those pods.

Each red dot is a potential path the fictional asteroid might take as it passes the Earth in 2027. Clearly, this would be an asteroid worth worrying about.

Image: NASA

After they’ve exhausted all other available means—abduction, engaging military aircraft, shutting off our nuclear missiles—maybe the aliens finally figured out how to get our attention: Facebook live. Everyone and their uncle seems bent on broadcasting themselves into the uncaring void that is the internet, so it’s about time the aliens jumped on board as well.

Daniel Patterson of Liberty, North Carolina was filming one such Facebook live broadcast earlier this year when a UFO briefly flew overhead. According to WMFY 2 News in Greensboro, North Carolina, Patterson didn’t see the object as he was filming, but was made aware of it afterwards. Patterson says:

“I didn’t know it was there it was brought to my attention by someone else that’s on in the video and said, ‘Hey Dan, did you see the UFO?’ and I said no.”

The UFO in question only appears briefly in the video. A bright light appears over Patterson’s head and flies away.  It lasts only a couple of frames in the 13-minute video.  WMFY slowed the video down and took some screen shots, and it does look like it could be an object. It also looks like it could be a spot of glare. The incident is being investigated by MUFON, but they have not yet released a determination of what the object is.

If it’s actually a UFO in the video, then the closest thing to what it looks like is this bad boy.

For Daniel Patterson, the incident was a spiritual experience. He says:

“For me, the Holy Spirit was present in those moments.”

In the video, Patterson stands on his property and says he doesn’t have much to say but felt compelled by God to film a video. He talks about his love for his family and decries the tendency of people to judge others. It’s a video of a man appreciating his life, giving thanks, and hoping to do good. It’s pretty heartwarming. It’s also fairly interesting that of all the times a UFO could show up on a Facebook live video, it does so when the person felt compelled by a higher power to start filming and talking about that sort of stuff. Of course, that added spiritual weight may have contributed to the interpretation of the object as a UFO. If it was just a guy showing off his property, would the UFO be immediately and automatically written off as a spot of glare?

Considering that the video was filmed with the sun directly behind Patterson’s head, I’m inclined to believe that the UFO is just glare from the sun. But who knows? Maybe if we all just start streaming every waking moment of our lives, we’ll finally have some definitive proof. So get out there, hit record, and maybe a UFO will show up and I’ll grossly misrepresent you as a person.

The original Star Wars Death Star (for any of you just emerging from 35 years in a cave) was a massive moon-like space station armed with a superlaser capable of vaporizing a planet. Could there possibly be a more useful purpose for such a powerful tool? We may find out soon, as engineers in Romania announced the successful test of a 10-Petawatt laser. That’s 10 million billion watts or 1/10th the energy produced by the sun on Earth. We’re still here, so it’s not capable of destroying a planet … yet. But China (uh-oh) is already working on a 100-Petawatt laser. Is life (or death) about to imitate sci-fi again?

“After demonstration of a beam delivering pulses of 7 PW for more than 4 hours continuously, the Thales system generated its first pulses with a record power level of 10 PW on 7 March 2019. Thales has thus achieved an unprecedented level of performance, which means that the Romanian National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH) and ELI-NP now have the most powerful laser in the world.”

In a press release that is mysteriously just now getting attention, Thales – a French multinational company that designs and builds electrical systems for the aerospace, defense, transportation and security markets – announced the successful test of the Extreme Light Infrastructure for Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) at a facility in Măgurele near Bucharest. The 10 PW pulse was the most concentrated power ever generated.

“This laser will support research in nuclear physics and help advance human understanding of the physics of matter.”

Not to mention the physics of vaporizing matter. The ELI project was started in the mid-2000s by French scientist and Gérard Mourou, the 2018 Nobel prize winner for his work on high-energy laser pulses, and was initially funded by the European Commission to build the world’s largest lasers in Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

“It may help investigating and controlling aging processes in materials under extreme conditions, such as in nuclear reactors, and help protecting the environment by offering new ways to treat nuclear waste.”

Vaporizing nuclear waste sounds like a good thing, until one thinks about what else a power of that magnitude could vaporize. In fact, how did it not vaporize its own lab – or at least the wall it was pointed in the direction of? The answer is somewhat vague. ExtremeTech quotes Dr. Nicolae Zamfir, project director at ELI-NP, saying that “The beam is focused on mm2 only in the interaction [chamber].” We’re still here and there’s no hole in the wall because the pulse was infinitesimally brief.

That will change soon by an order of magnitude. While the ELI project has plans for a fourth lab with a 100 PW laser, is hasn’t even chosen a location for it. Meanwhile, Chinese physicists are said to already be building a 100 PW laser at the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (SULF). Using a single cylinder of titanium-doped sapphire about 12 inches wide, the researchers believe it will be long enough (possibly a minute) and powerful enough to break a vacuum and create antimatter. Testing is estimated to begin in 2023.

That’s not all. Laser testing is going on around the world in quests to harness its tremendous power. Are the goals noble or just paths to a real Death Star? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, The Titanium-Doped Sapphires would make a great name for a band.

Something strange is in the skies above New Zealand. Over the last few weeks, multiple eyewitnesses have reported seeing a red or orange glow either in the skies or just on the horizon out at sea. It all began on March 31 when a couple in west Auckland on New Zealand’s North Island had what they described as the “craziest experience.” Reddit user ufomystery123 described the experience to the New Zealand subreddit, writing that the experience left the couple terrified:

We were on the beach, my boyfriend and I, and saw two bright orange/red lights far on the other end of the beach. In a matter of seconds, one of the lights started moving at full speed, in a straight line, no more that 200m above the water until directly in front of us. The UFO had changed from having a red light to a bright white light, somewhat like a torch, shining directly at us. We were lying down looking at the stars for a while and then stood up to leave, before realizing there were five surrounding us in different areas of the beach. One of them was flying up and down and another from side to side. The others were just still switching between red and white spotlights. This was when we decided to leave, scared shitless.

Reddit users were characteristically cynical about the description of the events, arguing that the couple likely saw a balloon or some form of LED toy. However, the New Zealand Herald reports that other witnesses have seen similar lights in recent weeks.

Mysterious lights in the sky are some of the most commonly-reported unidentified aerial phenomena.

Much farther to the south in Dunedin and Oamaru on the South Island, eyewitnesses have described similar lights along the coast. After several reports of a “mysterious red light in the sky” came in early this month, law enforcement and public safety officials were dispatched to the coast to search for stricken boats. Oamaru Police Sergeant Tony Woodbridge says that enough reports came in for police to take the case seriously, although nothing has been found.

The famous Moeraki Boulders on New Zealand’s South Island.

”Through investigation, we’ve had another resident of Kakanui who was out walking and someone from Hampden Beach who have both seen a bright orange-red light in the sky about the same time,” Woodbridge told reporters. “We’ve got no reports of anybody missing, so it’s a bit of a mystery what was seen, but we’ve been out and had a good look.”

So what do we have? Multiple eerily similar reports of red lights in the skies above New Zealand, given weeks apart. Could these reports be related? Is this someone having fun with drones, or might there be something more mysterious afoot? For now, with little else to go on, these reports remain a mystery.