Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
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...
19-05-2019
Startup Hermeus Wants to Build a Hypersonic Jet That Flies at 5 Times the Speed of Sound
Startup Hermeus Wants to Build a Hypersonic Jet That Flies at 5 Times the Speed of Sound
A U.S. venture-capital firm recently led a round of seed investment for Hermeus Corp., a new startup looking to develop a hypersonic aircraft.
Hermeus also announced its advisory board in a statement issued Monday (May 13, the board includes the former president of Blue Origin and former associate administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
The mission of this aerospace startup is to increase the speed of air transportation by developing vehicles that can fly ''in excess of Mach 5 — over 3,000 miles per hour [4,800 km/h]. At Mach 5, flight times from New York to London will be reduced from 7 hours to 90 minutes,'' Hermeus officials said in the statement. Mach 1 is approximately the speed of sound traveling through Earth's atmosphere.
The idea is to connect the world's cities ''significantly faster than ever before,'' which Hermeus CEO A.J. Piplica likened to the broadband era of data transmissions.
The round of seed investment led by Khosla Ventures (with additional participation from private investors) will continue the development of Hermeus' hypersonic propulsion system, the statement said.
''Hermeus is developing an aircraft that not only improves the aviation experience with very reduced flight times, but also has the potential to have great societal and economic impact," Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said in the statement.
Hermeus will join a burgeoning field in aerospace. A year ago, NASA gave the aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin a $241.5 million contract to develop a quiet supersonic plane that could fly by mid-2022. In June 2018, Boeing unveiled its hypersonic plane concept at the Aviation and Aeronautics Forum in Atlanta. Two years ago, the startup Boom Technology partnered with Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson to create a carrier that could reach Mach 2.2.
In a computer simulation of spiral galaxy formation, a halo structure partially forms from a pileup of many small galaxies. Even after merged galaxies disintegrate, individual stars retain chemical traces from their original galaxies.
A star in the Big Dipper is an intergalactic alien, according to clues in its chemical fingerprints.
The star's unusual chemistry is unlike that of all known stars in the Milky Way and instead has more in common with stars in nearby dwarf galaxies, new research reveals.
Researchers suspected that the stellar oddball, named J1124+4535, originated in a dwarf galaxy that collided with the Milky Way long ago. According to that theory, when the dwarf galaxy fell apart, it stranded this star in our cosmic neighborhood. [11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy]
The star was first discovered in the constellation Ursa Major in 2015, by the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China. Higher-resolution images were captured in 2017 by the Subaru Telescope in Japan, the scientists reported April 29 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Spectrum readings from the star revealed that it was low in metals such as magnesium but had unexpectedly high levels of the heavy element europium; an element ratio that was unique in comparison to other Milky Way stars, the researchers wrote.
Elements in stars reflect the composition of the dust and gas clouds where the star formed. Stars that are close neighbors are usually shaped by the same materials and therefore have similar chemical signatures. When a star stands out from a group, scientists look elsewhere to see where it might have been born.
Prior studies have found that the Milky Way formed by colliding with and absorbing smaller galaxies. Metal-poor stars such as J1124+4535 are common in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way today, the scientists reported.
Their analysis of J1124+4535 provides "the clearest chemical signature" yet of the ancient galaxy mergers that shaped the Milky Way billions of years ago, according to the study.
And that's not the only cosmic evidence that hints at the Milky Way's turbulent past.
A distinctive bulge at the Milky Way's center is thought to be the result of a collision with a sausage-shaped dwarf galaxy about 10 billion years ago. That event inflated the Milky Way's core with an influx of billions of stars, some of which are among the oldest in the universe.
There may be an even bigger smashup in the Milky Way's future: Our galaxy is currently on a collision course with another spiral galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Luckily, that won't take place for at least another 2 billion years — and that collision is about 2 to 3 billion years before we're predicted to slam into the Andromeda Galaxy.
The famous Star Trek refrain — actually acommon misattribution— aptly describes humanity’s future on Mars. And as more and more tech entrepreneurs outline visions for how to erect settlements on the Red Planet by the 2050s, Rice University professor Scott Solomon is already starting to worry about what’s going to happen to the first Martian settlers and, more interestingly, their babies.
“What’s interesting to me as an evolutionary biologist is thinking about, what if we’re actually successful?” Solomon tells Inverse. “I don’t think there has been nearly as much discussion about what would become of the people that are living in these colonies generations later.”
Solomon’s 2016 book, Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution, argues that evolution is still a force at play in modern humans. In an awe-inspiring TEDx talk in January 2018 — which inexplicably still has fewer than 1,000 views — Solomon outlined how humans would change — literally — after spending a generation or two living on Mars.
Far from waiting thousands of years to witness minuscule changes, Solomon instead believes that humans going to Mars could be on the verge of an evolutionary rollercoaster. He expects, among other things, that their bones will be stronger, their sight shorter, and that they’ll, at some point, have to stop having sex with Earth-humans.
“Evolution is faster or slower depending on how much of an advantage there is to having a certain mutation,” Solomon says. “If a mutation pops up for people living on Mars, and it gives them a 50-percent survival advantage, that’s a hugeadvantage, right? And that means that those individuals are going to be passing those genes on at a much higher rate than they otherwise would have.”
Outside of Solomon’s field, discussion of this topic is relatively sparse. Elon Musk’s SpaceX team is holed up in Florida and Texas working on a stainless steel spaceship to send the first humans to Mars in the 2020s, establishing a city by 2050. Dubai has designed dramatic concepts for its own Martian city, and the Matt Damon sci-fi flick The Martian depicted how first trips to the Red Planet would take the form of research missions.
These are all fascinating ideas, but they’re curiously short on how humans may change under the treacherous, radioactive conditions of the solar system’s fourth planet.
Mars City: How Humans Could Change Over Time
Solomon outlined a number of ways — many of them covered in his Ted Talk — about how humans could change.
Humans may develop denser bones to overcome the effects of Mars’ gravity, which is just a third of Earth’s. The reduced force could make bones more brittle, which could lead to complications like fractured pelvises during childbirth.
The inhabitants of smaller spaces may become more near-sighted, as they no longer need to see as far as they would on Earth. Solomon cites cavefish in deep trenches that have gone blind with no need for vision, and studies that show children who spend more time indoors are likely to become more near-sighted.
Mars inhabitants may develop a new skin tone to adjust to the higher levels of radiation. Humans use melanin to fight against ultraviolet rays, while other species use carotenoids. Mars residents may some day have to develop another pigment entirely to fight off radiation.
Residents may perhaps learn to use oxygen more efficiently. A similar change has been observed on the Tibetan plateau, where oxygen is 40 percent lower than it is at sea level. To adjust, Tibetans have denser beds of capillaries to more efficiently move blood, and have the ability to dilate their vessels to get more oxygen to the muscles.
One change that could occur relatively fast? Non-Earth dwelling humans may quickly lose their immune system. In a sterile environment with no microorganisms present, the residents may have no need for a body capable of fighting germs. But this may not be such a bad thing, Solomon suggests it could be an opportunity to eradicate diseases, treating the ship flying to Mars as a sort of quarantine zone and ensuring the new inhabitants can lead healthier lives.
It’s this latter change that may force humans to eventually splinter irreversibly from their Earth-based counterparts. With no immune system, sex between Martian humans and Earthlings would be lethal. That could impose an artificial limit on how the two populations will be able to interact and co-mingle. The inability to form families or send offspring back and forth between the two planets could drive the two groups even further apart, assuming the whole issue of “who pays who taxes” hasn’t created an irreparable rift already.
Mars City: How This Human Takes Form
Solomon argues these changes will happen relatively quickly. Radiation on Mars is extraordinarily high, he notes, without any sort of magnetosphere to protect the humans. Children are normally born with between 20 to 120 genetic mutations, but radiation could cause this figure to spike and accelerate changes in genes.
Humans could also accelerate changes even more through gene editing. CRISPR/Cas9 is a tool that could enable humans to ready our bodies for Martian life more quickly, but with our current limited knowledge of the human genome, random changes could have unexpected consequences. Still, it could represent an avenue for alterations in the near future.
“Why wait around for this mutation to occur if you can just go in and make them yourself?” Solomon says.
Another is the founder effect, which is the theory that gene traits of the first inhabitants of a new area have a huge influence on the future trajectory of the species. That means if we send up the most physically capable humans to Mars, their offspring may be more genetically predisposed to physical strength than humans on Mars.
It also means Musk and others will need to consider genetic diversity, to ensure a good mix throughout the population. Solomon argues for around 100,000 people migrating to Mars over the course of a few years, with the majority from Africa, as that is where humans see the greatest genetic diversity.
“If I were designing a human colony on Mars, I would want a population that would be hundreds of thousands of people, with representatives of every human population here on Earth,” Solomon says.
Hopefully the architects of these new worlds are listening.
afpHet Voynich Manuscript is een bundel van 240 pagina’s, gevuld met een handgeschreven tekst, tekeningen van onbekende planten en ingewikkelde symbolen. De tekst is zo’n 500 jaar oud - dat staat vast - maar wat erin staat, weet niemand.
WETENSCHAP Zo’n twee weken geleden deelde de University of Bristol de veelbelovende boodschap dat het meest mysterieuze manuscript ter wereld eindelijk gekraakt zou zijn. Terwijl anderen er jaren over deden, zou een academicus aan de universiteit er op slechts twee weken tijd in geslaagd zijn de code te kraken. Maar die verklaring trekt de universiteit nu terug in.
Het Voynich Manuscript – vernoemd naar de Poolse boekhandelaar die het in 1912 ontdekte – was jarenlang het onderwerp van discussie bij cryptologen, taalwetenschappers, zelfs bij astronomen. Niemand slaagde erin om het te ontcijferen, al beweerden tal van geleerden dat dat wel lukte. Dat laatste clubje vervoegt Gerard Cheshire nu, de academicus die beweerde dat hij het manuscript op twee weken tijd ontcijferde.
Cheshire beweerde dat het om een proto-Romaanse taal ging, geschreven door de koningin van Aragon, Maria van Castilië. Bovendien zou het de laatst overlevende tekst van die taal zijn. Zijn vondst was “een van de belangrijkste ontwikkelingen binnen de Romaanse taalkunde”. Maar zijn vondst deed vooral wat wenkbrauwen fronsen.
“Sorry maar dit is nonsens”, klonk het bij een andere academicus, gespecialiseerd in de middeleeuwen, via een Twitterbericht. “Zijn conclusie is bullshit”, klonk het bij iemand anders.
Bristol academic cracks Voynich code, solving century-old mystery of medieval text
A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed - by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the...
eurekalert.org
112 people are talking about this
𝕄𝕒𝕥𝕥 𝔾𝕒𝕓𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕝𝕖✔@prof_gabriele
as a medievalist, I'm gonna say 1 thing about the recent Voynich nonsense and then I'm gonna be quiet.
His conclusion are bullshit and the journal should be ashamed that they published that article.#medievaltwitter#voynich
Na heel wat bedenkingen van experts, trekt de universiteit haar verklaring dan toch in. Hoewel Gerard Cheshire aanvankelijk nog als een “academicus aan de universiteit van Bristol” werd omschreven, distantieert de universiteit zichzelf nu volledig: “Het onderzoek van de auteur gebeurde onafhankelijk en is niet gelieerd aan de universiteit van Bristol, de kunstacademie noch het Centrum voor middeleeuwse Studies.”
Vooral eigenaardig aan de hele zaak is dat het wetenschappelijk artikel in het vaktijdschrift Roman Studies verscheen. Dat betekent evenwel dat het eerst gecontroleerd werd door collega’s. Cheshire blijft er dan ook van overtuigd dat hij het bij het rechte eind heeft: “Na verloop van tijd zal mijn oplossing gebruikt worden door anderen bij hun onderzoek naar het manuscript. En uiteindelijk zal de weerstand afnemen.”
Voynich Manuscript
Het Voynich Manuscript is een bundel van 240 pagina’s, gevuld met een handgeschreven tekst, tekeningen van onbekende planten en ingewikkelde symbolen. De tekst is zo’n 500 jaar oud - dat staat vast - maar wat erin staat, weet niemand. Wilfred Voynich deed zelf een dappere poging nadat hij de tekst vond, maar faalde in zijn opzet.
TwitterVoynich Manuscript
Beinecke Manuscript GalleryEen pagina uit het Voynich Manuscript
When does a disaster go from ‘natural’ to ‘the mother of all’ disasters’? When it’s the next eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. That’s according to a leading volcano expert from Poland who wants the United States to start thinking ‘when’ not ‘if’ and developing an evacuation plan for an eruption that he predicts could kill five billion people.
“The only thing you can do is evacuate people to another continent.”
In a recent interview with Poland’s WP Media, Dr. Jerzy Żaba,professor of geological sciences and head of the Department of General Geology at the University of Silesia in Katowice, explains why a Yellowstone “Superwulk” eruption would be far more destructive and deadly to life on Earth than most other experts are willing to consider. He starts by comparing it to a recent supervolcano event — the Toba supereruption about 75,000 years ago in Sumatra, Indonesia, which was one of the largest known eruptions.
“As a result of the Toby eruption in Sumatra, according to various estimates, 70 to 90 percent died. the then human population on our planet. More optimistic researchers believe that the outbreak was survived by tens of thousands of people, moderately optimistic that they survived 15,000, and the least – from three to five thousand. The population of a small village survived all over the world!” (Google translation)
Up to 90 percent of the Earth’s albeit small population at that time may have died. If you’re into odds, Żaba points out that there have been 42 similar supervolcano eruptions — on average once in less than a million years. So, as far as Yellowstone is concerned, we’re good for at least a few hundred-thousand years, right?
“Yellowstone is a powerful superwulkan whose explosions took place, to our knowledge, three times. The first took place over two million years ago, the second million 300,000. years ago, and the third, about which we know the most, took place 640 thousand. years ago.”
Żaba says volcanoes are erupting in different locations than in the past (Poland has one that was active 800,000 years ago) and geologists have learned that nearby volcanoes are often linked and can cascade into multiple eruption events. However, none have the destructive potential – both on the ground and in the air – of Yellowstone.
“It would destroy most of the United States. Discarded materials would cover everything with a meter layer within a radius of 500 km. And due to the emission of a huge amount of dust, gases or sulfur oxide to the atmosphere, there would be a temporary cooling of the climate. Sulfur oxide would create a thin veil of sulfuric acid around the planet reflecting sunlight. He would persist for many years. It is estimated that due to climate change about five billion people would starve to death.”
Żaba doesn’t think programs like NASA’s plan to drill a hole and cool Yellowstone’s magma will work due to the sheer size and volume of the magma tank. Besides, it’s not the lava that will kill us – it’s the dust and debris that will be thrown into the atmosphere. Żaba says the only way to escape falling chunks of rock and debris is to evacuate, but the space for holding the millions of people who need to move in a short period of time will require another continent and a monumental effort. And, once they get to their new home, they’ll have to deal with the death of all flora and fauna that will result in Żaba’s prediction that five billion people would starve to death.
Is there any good news, Dr. Żaba?
“There are forces over which people have no influence and have to observe with incredible humility.”
Fifty years after the first moon landings, a new generation of space travellers, from Xi Jinping’s taikonauts to Jeff Bezos, are racing to colonise our nearest neighbour. Is reality catching up with sci-fi?
Oliver Morto
‘Magnificent desolation’ … the moon.
Photograph: Chinese State Media/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
The moon is rising again above the horizon of the imagination, waxing into worldly relevance. Fifty years afterNeil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on to what Aldrin called the “magnificent desolation” of the Sea of Tranquility, the possibility of a human return to their dusty stamping ground is greater than it has been at any time since the Apollo programme reached its end just three years later.
The robot vanguard has already set forth. Later this year India will attempt to become the fourth nation to land a probe on the moon; an Israeli attempt to get there failed in April, but its backers plan to try again. China has landed two robot rovers on the moon’s surface in the past five years. One visited the near side, the familiar pockmarked face seen from Earth; the other went to the overflown-but-never-before-visited far side. The Chinese space agency has talked of sending humans in their wake, perhaps in the early 2030s.
They may be beaten to it. Last year Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur and art collector, signed a contract with SpaceX, the rocket firm founded by Elon Musk, for a flight around the moon. He intends to take a crew of as-yet-unspecified artists with him. The chances of this happening in 2023, as notionally planned, are small; SpaceX has yet to fly any humans anywhere. The chances of it happening sometime, though, are at least middling; for the most part, SpaceX has eventually delivered on its promises. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is spending some of the riches he has accrued as boss of Amazon on Blue Origin, a space company that aims to surpass SpaceX. Earlier this month he unveiled Blue Moon, a lander designed to place scientific equipment on to the lunar surface. After it has been upgraded, he says, it will be capable of landing people there, too.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes it is vital for humans to become a multiplanetary species. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
On 26 March vice-president Mike Pence told an audience at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama: “The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.” He challenged Nasa to make the first of these crewed missions by 2024. One of the clearest reasons he gave for this new commitment was that China had “revealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground”.
Our imagined moon has long inspired fear, excitement, hubris and political ambition – fact and myth, science and science fiction have always intertwined. Some of the engineers who advised Fritz Lang on his 1929 film, Frau im Mond went on to develop the first rocket capable of reaching space, Germany’s V-2. When they later moved to Huntsville, they took with them not just their know‑how but also Lang’s anticipation-quickening innovation of counting down the seconds before the rocket’s launch.
Science fiction is often seen as an anticipation – a fiction peculiarly expected to graduate into fact. But if technologies once found only in SF do sometimes become real they do not, in so doing, always cease to be science fictional. SF is not, after all, simply a literature about the future; it is a literature about the shock of new capacities and new perspectives, about transcendence, estrangement and resistance in the face of the inhuman. Its ideas shape and constrain the ways in which technological possibilities are seen, understood and experienced long after those possibilities are first tentatively realised. It illuminates the dreams of Musk, Bezos and all the other new moon-rushers.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the Moon in 1969. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL via Getty Images
Take the origins of Pence’s reference to the “lunar strategic high ground”. In one of the first moon novels written after the second world war, Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), an atomic scientist and his teenage crew discover, on what they believe to be the first mission to the moon, a base from which the Third Reich’s rump intends to rain nuclear vengeance on to Earth. Heinlein, an aeronautical engineer who was one of the first American science fiction writers to gain a mainstream audience, had seen the V-2 and the Manhattan Project make real the rocket ships and superweaponry that had been his prewar stock in trade. Such authors were highly exercised by the strategic implications. In the same month that Heinlein’s book was published, John W Campbell, the preeminent American science fiction editor of the age, published an essay by his and Heinlein’s friend L Ron Hubbard on the strategic necessity of America being the first nation to build such a moonbase for its missiles. A year later Colliers, a mass market magazine, was warning of a “Rocket Blitz from the Moon”.
The idea rode high for a decade. “He who controls the moon, controls the Earth,” General Homer A Boushey told the American press in 1958. The US air force investigated the possibility of demonstrating that control, and adding to the moon’s craters, by conducting a nuclear test on its surface, one that would be ominously and spectacularly visible to most of the world below (Carl Sagan, later to be prominent in the fight for nuclear disarmament, was one of those who worked on the project).
It did not happen. Though the Apollo programme was a crucial piece of cold war strategy, its goal was not to occupy the moon or use it as a missile base. Rather, it was to show the world the remarkable resources the US was willing to invest in advancing its technological power; the means, not the end, were the message. But Hubbard’s megalomaniacal dreams of an Earth controlled from the moon still lurks in that idea of the “strategic high ground”.
Rocket Ship Galileo used the moon not only as a way of thinking about the prospect of nuclear war, it also made it a way of understanding the aftermath. (“The moon people ... ruined themselves. They had one atomic war too many.”)
These visions of existential dread led Arthur C Clarke to argue in Prelude to Space (1947), a novel about the preparations for a moon mission, that “atomic power makes interplanetary travel not just possible but imperative. As long as it was confined to Earth, humanity had too many eggs in one rather fragile basket.” That feeling informs dreams of space travel today. Musk, in particular, talks of war, pandemics, rebel AIs and asteroid Armageddons all making it vital for humans to become a multiplanetary species. A more junior Silicon Valley space mogul told me he wants to help build a moonbase for the same reason that, before cloud computing, he would back up his files to a second hard disk: something might happen. (Of course, such plutocratic panic feels dangerously close to the idea of a bolthole for the select.)
As active proponents of the new space age, Clarke and Heinlein realised that linking the moon only with nuclear catastrophe would be a poor sales pitch. To get the public on board, a more fertile idea was the dream of building human settlements on the moon, which could somehow be portrayed as both wonderful and mundane. In Heinlein’s short story “Space Jockey”, the problem facing the astronaut protagonist is not Ming the Merciless or a swarm of comets but the amount of time he has to spend away from home; the resolution is his decision to take a desk job in comfortably domestic Luna City, built under the surface of the moon. A teenager whines that “nothing ever happens on the moon”. This dualism of the familiar and the fantastic is epitomised in the motif of Earth playing the same role in the moon’s sky as the moon does in Earth’s, lighting the landscape’s darkness.
Earthrise … captured by Apollo 8 in 1968. Photograph: Bill Anders/NASA/HANDOUT/EPA
It is not a new insight; Galileo realised that nights on the nearside of the moon would be earthlit, just as earthly nights are moonlit. All early lunar fiction draws the reader’s attention to Earth waxing and waning in the alien sky as the clearest possible indication of the revolutionary Copernican insight. Twentieth-century heirs made a similar use of the image of worlds reversed. Earthlight (1955), Clarke’s first moon-set novel, opens with the accountant Bertram Sadler, new to the moon, looking out of his train window at the “cold glory of this ancient, empty land” illuminated by “a light tinged with blues and greens; an arctic radiance that gave no atom of heat. And that, thought Sadler, was surely a paradox, for it came from a world of light and warmth.”
Clarke’s paradox was made plain to see in the famous image Earthrisecaptured by Apollo 8: a world of warmth and light rising above the cold glory of ancient emptiness. The contrast was strong enough – the blasted basalts below unworldly and unappealing enough – that the colonised, normalised moon which Clarke and Heinlein had imagined fell back into the realm of fancy, if not that of the absurd.
So why does returning to the moon now seem plausible again? For one thing, China, or any other country, can put a man or woman on the moon with far less effort than it took the US in the 1960s: as a way to claim parity with a fading superpower, that relatively modest effort has obvious attractions. And as the effort involved has been reduced the resources in the hands of private individuals have increased: Bezos may choose, in the near-term, to yoke his dreams of expansion into space – unlocking untold wealth – to the more parochial ambitions of the US government. But that is convenience, not necessity. Being the richest person on the planet brings with it its own superempowerment.
Science fiction, too, has cast space travel in economic, rather than political, terms. Once again it is hard to avoid Heinlein, this time his novella The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950). Its main character is DD Harriman, a tycoon who, having made his fortune from other technologies, persuades and cons investors of all sorts to provide the further resources he needs to realise his true dream, the founding of a moon colony. After the sheer Soviet Union-surpassing, 2.5%-of-GDP scale of the Apollo effort became manifest in the 1960s, the story seemed quaint. Moon missions were the work of nations, not cigar-puffing wheeler dealers. Now it seems oddly prescient.
Apollo 12 Lunar Module Intrepid descends to land on the Moon in 1969. Photograph: Science & Society Picture Library/SSPL via Getty Images
If strategic rivalry, existential fear and plutocratic caprice were the only narratives science fiction had lent the moon, one might feel justified in taking a dim view of the whole affair. But there is more. A lifeless world may again provide new insights into a living one, as it did with Earthrise. It is in such changed perspectives on worlds and their peoples that the true promise of science fiction surely lives. Heinlein’s most successful lunar novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1967), is driven by a thrilling plot. But the reason it continues to be loved by many, especially in Silicon Valley, is the strange, contradictory, savage but cosy, polyamorous, Malthusian, libertarian, utopian and carceral society it conjures as its cyborg setting. Similarly, the most striking recent novel about the moon, John Kessel’s The Moon and the Other (2017) sets itself in the “Society of Cousins”, a matriarchy inspiring and troubling, idealistic, indulgent and somewhat stifling. It is, to borrow the subtitle of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), an ambiguous utopia.
Which is as much as you can hope for. The moon, as it becomes a target for politicians, billionaires and enthusiasts inspired by science fictions past, should remain ambiguous, longed for and desolate, always the same and yet shockingly new, a strangeness sitting in the sky for all to see.
Oliver Morton’s The Moon: A History for the Future is published by Economist.
For years, scientists have been hunting for the stable lava tubes that are believed to exist on the Moon. A remnant from the Moon's past, when it was still volcanically active, these underground channels could very well be an ideal location for lunar colonies someday.
Not only would their thick roofs provide naturally shielding from solar radiation, meteoric impacts, and extremes in temperature. They could also be pressurized to create a breathable environment.
But until now, evidence of their existence has been inferred from surface features such as sinuous rilles – channel-like depressions that run along the surface that indicate the presence of subterranean lava flows – and holes in the surface (aka “skylights”).
However, recent evidence presented at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas indicates that one such stable lava tube could exist in the once-active region known as Marius Hills.
The presentation was led by Rohan Sood, a graduate research assistant from the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University in Indiana.
For some time now, Sood and his research colleagues have been examining data obtained from NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission in order to get a better sense of what the Moon's interior looks like.
Launched in 2011, the purpose of the GRAIL mission – which consists of two orbiters, Ebb and Flow, working in tandem – was to map the Moon's gravity with extreme precision.
Over time, the information it gathered has provided scientists with the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the Moon's subsurface features, particularly the buried lava tubes that are believed to exist.
In 2009, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Kaguya spacecraft (aka Selene) confirmed the presence of a skylight in the Marius Hills region, which has since come to be known as the "Marius Hole."
In 2011, it was photographed in more detail by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which showed that it was approximately 65 meters wide and 80 meters deep.
The fact that this hole sat between two rilles indicated that it was evidence that lava once flowed beneath the region.
Using the GRAIL gravity data that was collected at different altitudes, the Purdue team went about assessing the presence and extent of ancient lava tubes beneath the surface of Marius Hills.
What they determined was rather interesting. As Sood told Universe Today via email:
"Thanks to NASA's GRAIL mission, we now have derived the lunar gravity field to an unprecedented resolution and accuracy. The data allows us to dig below the lunar surface, with our objective being to recognize signatures that may correspond to those of empty lava tubes."
To assess the possibility of lava tubes, Sood and his team relied on a two-tiered strategy of gradiometry and cross-correlation specific regions.
Whereas gradiometry calculates the gravitational potential from a spherical harmonics data set, cross-correlation utilizes the individual track data based on the relative acceleration between the two spacecraft as they move along their respective orbits.
Much like Earth, the moon's gravitational field is affected by masses below the surface. "Any gravitational field is affected by the density of material," said Sood. "If you are flying the spacecraft over a block of dense material, it will experience an increase in gravitational pull in contrary to flying over a lava tube void, in which case there will be a decrease in gravitational attraction experienced by the spacecraft."
Where the Marius Hole is located, the team spotted a gravitational signature that was indicative of a subsurface cavity.
But that was not all. Distributed across the Moon's near side, Sood and his colleagues also noted that the GRAIL data indicated at least ten signatures that could resemble lava tubes.
All are located near the dark areas left by ancient volcanic seas, with some measuring more than 100 km long and several kilometers wide.
Naturally, there are some doubts as to whether or not the readings are indicative of actual lava tubes.
As the team indicated in their paper — "Detection of Buried Empty Lunar Lava Tubes Using Grail Gravity Data," which contains the findings they presented at the 47th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference — the structures they were looking for were similar or smaller in scale than the resolution of the gravity data.
As a result, it was difficult to determine whether or not the signals they spotted were in fact a sign of an underground recess, or a numerical artifact in the data.
Because of this, proving the existence of stable, subsurface lava tubes will require a next-generation mission, one that has instruments which will be able to penetrate the lunar surface and confirm the presence of recesses.
"[W]e have to remember that gravity is non-unique," Sood added, "which means, in order to support our findings and to add to our ongoing efforts, our team is considering a ground penetrating radar that will probe the lunar subsurface from orbit.
"The goal of the radar would be to confirm the presence of the potential lava tube candidates that we have detected so far, and in addition, look for smaller lava tubes that were beyond the resolution of GRAIL gravity data."
Designed to build upon the success of the GRAIL mission, the concept calls for a spacecraft equipped with ground-penetrating radar to conduct a sounding mission that would potentially confirm both the presence and size of the Moon's buried empty lava tubes.
This is not the first time that researchers from Purdue have presented a case for stable lunar lava tubes at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
These latest findings, which not only produced more evidence of such subsurface spaces, but indicated that they may be even larger than previously expected, is good news for advocates of lunar settlement.
It is also worth noting that since it began surveying the moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged over 200 pits that show signs of being skylights.
Each of these holes could lead to subsurface voids or caverns, which range in diameter from about 16 feet (5 meters) to more than 2,950 feet (900 m).
Assuming that just a fraction of these lead to underground tubes that are large enough to house an entire Earth city, there would be no shortage of possible settlement sites if and when it comes time to colonize the Moon.
After all, one of the biggest challenges in settling on a body where there is no atmosphere to speak of is creating a sturdy and airtight protective shelter.
Another major challenge is shielding the occupants of these and other shelters from incoming cosmic rays and solar radiation since their is no ozone layer to filter them out.
Where better than in an underground tunnel that will not only shield inhabitants from harmful radiation, meteoric impacts, and extremes in temperature, but also has immensely thick walls to keep the air in?
In all likelihood, if and when there is such a thing as "Lunies," they will dwell in elongated caverns beneath the Moon's surface.
Plans are being made for colonization of the moon and it must be ready before 2029.
Countries like the US, Russia, China as well as large private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are engaged in a sort of race to the moon. And it is not just a race, but more a total plan, in which human colonies will be built on the moon.
NASA revealed a new name for its moon program:Artemis. She is a Greek goddess of the moon and twin sister of Apollo. NASA astronauts are going to land on the surface of the Moon by 2024, including the first woman and next man.
Last week, Jeff Bezos, the founder of the Blue Origin, unveiled alunar landerat a mysterious invite-only event in Washington D.C. and suggests his firm will hit VP Pence's 2024 deadline for putting humans back on on the moon by 2024.The plan could ultimately serve as a stepping stone for colonization of the moon and deeper space targets, Bezos suggested.
Since 2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has spotted hundreds of conspicuous holes on the Moon. These steep-walled "pits" might lead to underground environments sheltered from radiation, meteorite impacts, and extreme temperatures, making them valuable sites for future exploration
As space agencies prepare to return humans to the Moon, top engineers are racing to design a tunnel boring machine capable of digging underground colonies for the first lunar inhabitants. Analysis of images of the lunar surface show lava tubes capable of housing large cities underground.
Rostami, director of the Earth Mechanics Institute at the US Colorado School of Mines said that the idea is to actually start underground, using a mechanism we already use on the earth, a tunnel boring machine, to make a continuous opening to create habitats or connect the colonies together.
Then, on February 22 Israel launched a lunar probe towards the moon. The small lunar probe carries a 30-million-page archive of human knowledge etched into a DVD-size metal disc. (See above image). The Lunar Library, as the archive is known, constitutes a ‘civilization backup’ to help ensure that our distant descendants never lose humanity’s collective wisdom.
We may wonder why all these organizations are in such a rush to go to the moon. Is it only a space race between the US, Russia and China or is it all about the survival of humankind and time is running out?
This pit in the Moon's Marius Hills is big enough to fit the White House completely inside.
Credit: NASA/ LROC/ ASU
These Kaguya images show the Marius Hills pit in the context of a meandering system of volcanic rilles. Because the pit is in the middle of a rille, it likely represents a collapse in the roof of a lava tube.
Credit: JAXA/SELENE [more]
This cavern in Mare Ingenii is almost twice the size of the one in the Marius Hills.
A declassified CIA document called The Adam and Eve Story has generated much controversy over predictions of an upcoming pole shift (aka crustal displacement) and catastrophic events that may sweep the planet in the not distant future. The57-page documentis based on abook authored by Chan Thomas in 1963. In it, Thomas proposed a pole shift scenario that differed in significant ways with what Charles Hapgood had earlier proposed in his pioneering 1958 book, The Earth’s Shifting Crust.
Hapgood’s theory, which was endorsed at the time by Albert Einstein, proposed that the geophysical poles periodically move by as much as up to 40 degrees through crustal displacements. This phenomenon was brought about by the increasing weight of the polar ice caps which accumulate more and more ice over the millennia until they eventually generate sufficient centrifugal force due to the planet’s rotation, to make the crust move over the mantle as Einstein explained in the book’s foreword.
In The Adam and Eve Story, Chan proposed that the pole shift was much greater, as much as 90 degrees with the poles shifting into the equatorial zone in less than a day. Chan has proposed the poles would flip back and forth in this way so that Antarctica would eventually return to the South Pole region, and the Arctic would do likewise.
Each time the geographical poles did one of these 90 degree flips, there would be catastrophic winds and tidal waves all over the planet, especially in the equatorial region where the Earth’s spin was 1000 mph. Water and wind would continue to move in the westerly direction through the law of inertia, sweeping over the landmasses that traveled over the equatorial region during the shift as Thomas explained:
In ¼ to ½ a day the poles move almost to the equator, and all hell lets loose. The atmosphere and oceans don’t shift with the shell – they just keep on rotating West to East – and at the equator that speed is 1000 miles per hour. It has to be, normally, to make one rotation per day. So, while the shell shifts with the poles going toward the equator, the winds and oceans go eastward, blowing across the face of the earth with supersonic speeds, inundating continents with water miles deep….
You can see, then, that ice ages are not a matter of advancing and retreating ice; it’s simply that different areas of the Earth are in polar regions at different times, for different durations of time, with the changes between positions taking place in a fraction of a day. [The Adam and Eve Story, pp.13-14]
The following video illustrates what happens during one of these 90 degree shifts, and what Thomas was proposing for what’s to come. One can easily see how devastating such a 90 degree shift could be and why the CIA may have been motivated to suppress such information.
According to Ben Davidson, author of the popular Earth Catastrophe series, this flipping back and forth would address paleomagnetic studies that show that the magnetic poles have been in their present locations for millions of years. Davidson concluded that this made Thomas’ pole shift theory much more compelling than Hapgood’s. In fact, Davidson believed Hapgood was putting out his theory as a “limited hangout” by the CIA in order to put the truth out in a way that later could be easily discredited.
Unfortunately for Davidson, ice core samples from Antarctica clearly support Hapgood and not Thomas’ theory. Ice core samples from East Antarctica date back as much as 1.5 million years. The following diagram illustrates ice core samples taken from different Antarctic regions and show how far back in time the ice sheets date.
Figure 1. Antarctic ice core drill sites with depth and record duration. From the US ITASE project.
The results from the ice core drill sites show that East Antarctica has been covered by ice for hundreds of thousands years, with Lake Vostok having some of the oldest discovered ice (220,000 years). Older ice core samples than those recorded in the above map have subsequently been found both at Lake Vostok (400,000 years), and the Dome C area (800,000 years) as shown in NOAA records.
A subsequent 2013 study asserted that ice core samples of up to 1.5 million years are most likely to be found in the Dome C area of East Antarctica. Put simply, scientists agree that East Antarctica has been covered by ice sheets for at least 1.5 million years, and likely much longer than that.
In contrast, the ice core samples in West Antarctica are only a few centuries old, with only one so far matching the age of many of the East Antarctic sites. This site is in the drilling area designated Boyd whose ice was found to be 70,000 years old as the above map illustrates.
The ice core records show conclusively that much of the Antarctic continent has been located in the polar zone (latitudes greater than 66 degrees) for at least 1.5 million years, and not in the equatorial zone (O-23 degrees latitude) as proposed by Thomas. Hapgood’s theory offers a better explanation for why only part of Antarctica has been ice-free for significant periods. But how do we explain the 70,000 year old ice sample found in the Byrd region of West Antarctica?
To find a definitive answer to where the geographical poles have been located and then move via crustal displacements to new positions, preserving some but not all the ice accumulated before the displacement, we can turn to the work of Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, authors of When the Sky Fell.
In their well-documented book, they used a range of archeological and fossil records to show where ice sheets have been found over the last 100,000 years, and how these positions had changed due to crustal displacements as first proposed by Hapgood. To date, I have found no other authors laying out such a compelling case for using available scientific data to track the respective positions of the geographic poles during the last 100,000 years.
Their findings provide a clear explanation for the varying ages found in the ice core samples extracted from different regions of Antarctica; and why Hapgood, rather than Thomas, provides a more accurate explanation for how the crustal displacement theory works.
First, I begin with Flem-Aths’ illustration of the positions of the North and South poles prior to 91,600 BC. It shows how the bulk of East Antarctica was inside the Antarctic circle, while West Antarctic lay in the temperate zone – similar to the present day location of New Zealand. Note the South Pole was located just off the coast of East Antarctica at the time, while the North Pole was located in Alaska.
Importantly, the Dome C area containing some of the oldest ice core samples found to date was located within the Antarctic circle, thereby preserving much of the ancient ice sheets acquired over the previous 1.5 million years or more.
Figure 2. p. 83 from Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell
The next diagram shows the Antarctic continent in relation to the South Pole after a crustal displacement led to a pole shift around 91,600 BC. Consequently, during the period from 91,600 BC to 50,600 BC, much of lower region of West Antarctica, along with the Transantarctic mountains, lay within the Antarctic circle, while the Palmer peninsula and significant areas of East Antarctica lay within the temperate zone.
Once again the physical South Pole was located over the ocean, rather than the Antarctic continent – this time off the coast of West Antarctica – adjacent to the Ross Sea. The geophysical pole had moved approximately 40 degrees from off the coast of East Antarctica to just off the West Antarctic coast during the 91,600 BC pole shift.
This is very close to what Hapgood had proposed was the crustal displacement that would occur during a pole shift. Significantly, it is far less than the 90 degree pole shift claimed by Thomas.
Importantly the Dome C area remained entirely within the Antarctic circle thereby preserving its ancient ice sheet. Furthermore, the Byrd area where the 70,000 year old ice sample was found, had been moved from its prior location in the temperate zone prior to the 91,600 BC pole shift, to deep inside the Antarctic circle. This allowed the accumulation of ice to begin, thereby accounting for its estimated age.
Figure 3. p. 84 from Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell
The next pole shift occurred around 50,600 BC, and an illustration provided by the Flem-Aths shows the approximate locations of the poles from 50,600 BC to 9,600 BC.
Around 50,600 BC, the South Pole has flipped back to the other side of the Antarctic continent, where it again lay just off the coast of East Antarctica. An approximate 30 degree pole shift had occurred, which is again consistent with Hapgood’s estimate for the cyclic crustal displacements that the Earth undergoes. It’s important to emphasize that the 50,600 BC pole shift was far less than the 90 degree shift predicted in Thomas’ theory.
Most of East Antarctica was again located inside the Antarctic circle, both preserving its ancient ice sheets and allowing them to expand. The Byrd region, containing the 70,000 year old ice core sample, was now located just outside the Antarctic Circle. Its marginal position marginally inside the temperate zone, which would allow the Byrd region to preserve the bulk of its ice sheets similar to the glaciers of southern New Zealand.
Figure 4. p. 85 from Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, When the Sky Fell
The period from 50,600 BC to 9600 BC is significant since it corresponds to the last time major portions of the Antarctic continent lay outside the polar circle. The bulk of West Antarctic lay in the temperate zone, and its coastal area would therefore have been ice free. Significantly, West Antarctica’s coastline and interior would have been navigable, just as the 1513 Piri Reis Map showed.
In the following diagram, the Piri Reis map is superimposed over a map of the globe showing how the Antarctic coastline from the tip of the Palmer Peninsula, all the way down its eastern flank to East Antarctica was known to ancient sea captains.
Fig 5. Piri Reis Map superimposed over map of the globe
Also vital to understand is that this period, 50,600 BC to 9600 BC corresponds to the Atlantean civilization that Plato wrote about in his famous dialogues, Critias and Timaeus. Plato explainedAtlantis’ extensive island system and waterways deep into its interior, and how it was the hub for a mighty empire that ruled over much of Africa, Europe, and Asia.
This finally takes us to the 9600 BC pole shift that led to the entire Antarctic continent, being moved to wholly inside the Antarctic circle. The magnitude of the Earth crustal displacement moving the South Pole from its previous location just off the East Antarctic coast to its present location was approximately 20 degrees. Again, significantly less than what Thomas was proposing in his crustal displacement theory.
The Flem-Aths contend that Atlantis was located in Antarctica and that the remnants of this legendary lost civilization today lie under the West Antarctic ice sheets. This is consistent with what several whistleblowers and insiders have been revealing concerning the discovery of a flash-frozen civilization under the ice sheets.
If the Flem-Aths and others are right that Plato’s Atlantis is buried under the Antarctic ice, this gives us a means of estimating the devastation that would be caused by a crustal displacement of approximately 20 degrees. It would be sufficient to wipe out the coastal regions all over the globe such as the low-lying archipelagos such as Atlantis, but allow those living in elevated or mountainous regions to survive the subsequent tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes accompanying a pole shift.
When ice core samples are examined in relation to what we know about Earth crustal displacement theories proposed by Hapgood and Thomas, they lead to a clear conclusion. The examination of ice core samples from different parts of Antarctica support Hapgood’s theory that earth crustal displacements happen periodically, and involve Pole Shifts of up to 40 degrees.
The Flem Aths book, When the Sky Fell, gives us a means of tracking the most significant pole shifts over the last 100,000 thousand years, and illustrates how these have occurred in a manner that is consistent with what ice core samples tell us.
Thomas’ theory that the Earth regularly experiences 90 degree pole shifts that flip the poles back and forth from equatorial regions is not supported by Antarctic ice core records. While it is comforting to know that the Earth is unlikely to experience anything like the cataclysmic 90 degree pole shift predicted by Thomas, it is sobering to know that even a 20 degree pole shift devastated the worldwide Atlantean civilization 11,600 years ago.
The likelihood that we will soon experience a pole shift due to another crustal displacement caused by solar activity, cosmic rays, collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field, activity from the Earth’s core, and/or a rapid melt off of the West Antarctic, appears to be quite high as I have suggested in previous articles examining Davidson’s Earth Catastrophe series.
This calls for an unprecedented level of transparency by governments in sharing data about Antarctica’s history, what is known about prior pole shifts, and the disclosure of suppressed technologies that would enable the bulk to humanity to prepare and escape from impending cataclysmic events.
At the end of 2017, The New York Times broke the story of a secretive Pentagon program with a budget of $22 million to investigate UFOs called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The man who exposed the existence of the program, Luis Elizondo, was the former head of the project. Elizondo’s ongoing efforts to investigate the UFO mystery with his new employer, the To the Stars Academy (TTSA), will be featured in a History Channel series premiering May 31 called Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.
However, what The New York Times apparently did not know when they published their story is that the program went by a different name at its inception, and the scope of the program was much broader than just UFOs. In fact, according to a senior manager on the project, the investigations included “bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light, animal and human injuries and much more.”
It is unknown whether Unidentified will cover the paranormal aspects of the program. Although Elizondo did work with this paranormal project, he only worked in the UFO division. By the time he was the head of the entire program, the UFO division was all that was left. The rest of the program had been shut down, and you will never guess why. It wasn’t because people inside the Department of Defense (DoD) thought the program was too weird, although some did. It was shut down because of demonic forces.
Don’t worry, demons didn't attack the Pentagon, but apparently, some people inside the government were afraid the potentially paranormal incidents being investigated could be demonic, especially scary occurrences taking place at a ranch in Utah, and they wanted no part of it. They didn’t want the government messing with demons either, so they lobbied for the program to be ended and it was.
This may sound extremely odd, but according to those involved, it's true.
The New York Timesstory that broke the Pentagon UFO program began when an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow “to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.”
That sounds innocent enough, but what the article did not cover is what Bigelow researched at this ranch in Utah. Bigelow was known for his interest in the paranormal and UFOs, and by the time the DIA official had approached him, Bigelow had already spent decades and large sums of money researching the paranormal. Bigelow’s first significant foray into the unknown was an organization created in 1995 called the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). Its purpose was to conduct scientific investigations of the paranormal.
After hearing rumors about paranormal phenomena occurring in the Uintah Basin in Utah, primarily focused on Skinwalker Ranch, Bigelow bought the ranch in 1996. It was the perfect place to conduct NIDS investigations. The ranchers who owned the property stayed for a while but left because they did not feel comfortable there. If their stories are to be believed, they had good reason to go.
The family, using the pseudonym Gorman, said they had several terrifying experiences. Among them was the sighting of a giant wolf-like creature that attacked cattle, could withstand multiple point-blank gunshots and seemed to disappear into thin air. The incident that caused them to leave for good, however, was when their beloved dogs chased glowing orbs of light into the forest at night never to be seen again.
The NIDS investigators had their share of experiences as well. As detailed in Knapp and Kelleher’s book, the strangest occurred in the middle of the night while two researchers were observing the ranch from the edge of a bluff. As they were packing up to leave at around 2:30 am, one of them noticed a light in the forest below. At first, they thought it might be a reflection. However, as they watched, the light began to grow. Once it became a couple of feet wide, they say it looked like a tunnel opening up, and they saw a creature within. It was large and black with no face. It crawled out of the light and into the dark forest. The light then began to disappear until it was gone.
Kelleher said years ago he felt whatever was going on at the Skinwalker Ranch outsmarted them and anticipated their actions.
John Alexander, a retired Colonel in U.S. Army Intelligence who also spent time working at Los Alamos Laboratories and still does some work as a defense consultant, helped organize NIDS investigations. In a YouTube interview for OpenMinds.tv in 2013, he describes what they encountered at the ranch as a “precognitive sentient phenomena.”
“What we learned was that the events were real and tangible, and definitely occurring,” Alexander explained. “These weren’t figments of someone’s imagination, or folklore or any of these sorts of things.”
“But, as for the etiology, nope,” says Alexander. ”We remained mystified.”
According to a recent interview with Knapp, Investigations into the ranch petered as the paranormal phenomena occurring on the ranch also waned. By the early 2000s, not much was going on. It was during this lull that Bigelow allowed Knapp to begin working on the book. Once the book was published, it brought a lot of attention to the ranch, but paranormal experiences were still rare.
So when the DIA official approached Bigelow in 2007 to visit the ranch, no one thought there would be anything to worry about. However, precognitive sentient forces on the ranch had other plans. Soon after arriving at the ranch, the DIA official had a paranormal encounter that Knapp described as “remarkable, and it made a very big impression on this guy.”
The New York Times says shortly after this visit, DIA officials met with Senator Harry Reid because they wanted to start a research program. It turns out Reid, a friend of Bigelow’s, was kept in the loop regarding Bigelow’s work researching the paranormal because he shared Bigelow’s interest in the topic.
Reid then found bipartisan support from a couple of fellow members of Congress, secured the funding, and got the project launched - all within 2007. Soon after, a requisition for a contractor to conduct research for the program was posted, and Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace won it. Bigelow created Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), lead by Kelleher, to manage the contract.
However, the project was not called AATIP, as The New York Times reported. Per Knapp and documents he obtained, it was called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System (AAWSAP), and it was set up to investigate not just UFOs, but primarily all of the weird stuff going on at the Skinwalker Ranch, including that list of weirdness at the beginning of this story.
Due to the nature of the project, it was kept as quiet as possible. Few in Congress knew it existed. However, it didn’t take long for religious factions within the government to raise concerns.
“They’re basically high-level people in different intelligence agencies who are fundamentalist Christians; who think that anything involving UFOs and the paranormal is satanic,” says Knapp.
“Certain senior government officials thought our collection of facts on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) was dangerous to their philosophical beliefs,” Elizondo wrote in a post on Medium. “They decided the data was a threat to their belief system.”
Elizondo explained to Den of Geek that by 2008, the negative attention their paranormal investigations received caused them to create a sub-group inside of AAWSAP that only focused on military UFO cases. This was AATIP. When Elizondo joined AAWSAP (the paranormal program), it was to work with AATIP (the UFO division). Eventually, the DIA closed AAWSAP, and only AATIP remained. Elizondo took over leadership of AATIP in 2010.
As for The New York Times, one of the authors of the article, Leslie Kean, told me via email "at the time, our focus was AATIP. This was the name on the documents that we had, and this is what Lue Elizondo had talked to us about in interviews with him, as did others associated with the program." Elizondo says that since his involvement was primarily with AATIP and the UFO side of things, he did not feel at liberty to share AAWSAP information with them.
Filmmaker Jeremy Corbell has recently completed a documentary titled Hunt for the Skinwalker. He worked with Knapp, who intended to make a film when the book came out in 2005. The footage Knapp obtained back then is a large part of the new documentary.
“That $22 million that was created to study the phenomenon was really inspired wholly by Skinwalker Ranch and what Bigelow had been doing there privately with NIDS,” Corbell told this reporter in a recent podcast interview. “The public is going to see by watching this film that connection very clearly and yes, our Department of Defense, specifically the intelligence organization within the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), they took this very seriously...Secrets have been kept, big secrets about this ranch for more than, I would say, two decades, and everybody wondered what has been going on there,” says Corbell. “This has been embargoed, this information. All of that has changed, and this story can now be told.”
These stories, although they sound fictional, are accounts from credible sources, and according to Corbell, Knapp, and Elizondo, there are still more shocking revelations to come. Elizondo recently told Den of Geek, “You ain't seen nothing yet, baby!”
Those of us following this story have been wondering when the time will come for us to find out more. Elizondo says much of what we have been waiting for will be included in the History Channel series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation premiering May 31.
The Pentagon recently passed a new guideline so US Navy pilots and sailors continue to report unidentified flying objects that they see.
The new rules are meant to encourage them to keep track of what they see.
This renewed interest in UFOs, says Iain Boyd, a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, is because the Pentagon needs to better understand flying objects that it can't now identify.
U.S. Navy pilots and sailorswon’t be considered crazy for reporting unidentified flying objects, under new rules meant to encourage them to keep track of what they see. Yet just a few years ago, the Pentagon reportedly shut down another official program that investigated UFO sightings.What has changed? Is the U.S. military finally coming around to the idea that alien spacecraft are visiting our planet?
The answer to that question is almost certainly no. Humans’ misinterpretation of observations of natural phenomena are as old as time and include examples such as manatees being seen as mermaidsand driftwood in a Scottish loch being interpreted as a monster. A more recent and relevant example is the strange luminescent structure in the sky caused by a SpaceX rocket launch. In these types of cases, incorrect interpretations occur because people have incomplete information or misunderstand what they’re seeing.
Based on my prior experience as a science advisor to the Air Force, I believe that the Pentagon wants to avoid this type of confusion, so it needs to better understand flying objects that it can’t now identify. During a military mission, whether in peace or in war, if a pilot or soldier can’t identify an object, they have a serious problem: How should they react, without knowing if it is neutral, friendly or threatening? Fortunately, the military can use advanced technologies to try to identify strange things in the sky.
What is this object?
Taking the ‘U’ out of ‘UFO’
“Situational awareness” is the military term for having complete understanding of the environment in which you are operating. A UFO represents a gap in situational awareness. At the moment, when a Navy pilot sees something strange during flight, just about the only thing he or she can do is ask other pilots and air traffic control what they saw in that place at that time. Globally, the number of UFO reportings in a year has peaked at more than 8,000. It’s not known how many the military experiences.
UFOs represent an opportunity for the military to improve its identification processes. At least some of that work could be done in the future by automated systems, and potentially in real time as an incident unfolds. Military vehicles – Humvees, battleships, airplanes and satellites alike – are covered in sensors. It’s not just passive devices like radio receivers, video cameras and infrared imagers, but active systems like radar, sonar and lidar. In addition, a military vehicle is rarely alone – vehicles travel in convoys, sail in fleets and fly in formations. Above them all are satellites watching from overhead.
Military vehicles bristle with antennas, cameras and sensors of all kinds.U.S. Army
Drawing a complete picture
Sensors can provide a wealth of information on UFOs including range, speed, heading, shape, size and temperature. With so many sensors and so much data, though, it is a challenge to merge the information into something useful. However, the military is stepping up its work on autonomy and artificial intelligence. One possible use of these new technologies could be to combine them to analyze all the many signals as they come in from sensors, separating any observations that it can’t identify. In those cases, the system could even assign sensors on nearby vehicles or orbiting satellites to collect additional information in real time. Then it could assemble an even more complete picture.
For the moment, though, people will need to weigh in on what all the data reveal. That’s because a key challenge for any successful use of artificial intelligence is building trust or confidence in the system. For example, in a famous experiment by Google scientists, an advanced image recognition algorithm based on artificial intelligence was fooled into wrongly identifying a photo of a panda as a gibbon simply by distorting a small number of the original pixels.
So, until humans understand UFOs better, we won’t be able to teach computers about them. In my view, the Navy’s new approach to reporting UFO encounters is a good first step. This may eventually lead to a comprehensive, fully integrated approach for object identification involving the fusion of data from many sensors through the application of artificial intelligence and autonomy. Only then will there be fewer and fewer UFOs in the sky – because they won’t be unidentified anymore.
In this photo provided by the US Navy, air traffic controllers aboard the USS Harry S. Truman monitor aircraft departures in the Carrier Control Approach suite in the Mediterranean Sea.
Curiosity will be coming 'round the Martian mountain when it comes — and a colorful new animation highlights where exactly the mission is headed.
Since 2012, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been exploring Mars with the car-size rover called Curiosity. A sixth grader named this robotduring a contest run by the space agency 10 years ago. And, oh, the places Curiosity will go!
The rover has been climbing Mount Sharp, which rises about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the base of Gale Crater, since 2014. Curiosity is currently analyzing rock samples in a place called the ''clay-bearing unit'' and might someday reach rocky cliffs with sulfate minerals, according to a May 15 statement by the space agency.
NASA officials say each region represents a different period in the mountain's history, and the ''sulfate-bearing unit,'' for example, might reveal if the area once had liquid water that dried up billions of years ago.
Curiosity isn't just studying the ground below. Two months ago, the rover's Mast Camera captured each of Mars' tiny moons crossing the face of the sun. The instrument is fitted with a solar filter that lets it look directly at the star.
CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVERS ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
CIA REMOTE VIEWING PROGRAM DISCOVERS ANCIENT CIVILIZATION ON MARS
By: Gaia Staff
DECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REMOTE VIEWING CIA DOCUMENTS REVEAL THE DISCOVERY OF AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION THAT ONCE INHABITED THE RED PLANET.
It’s hard to fathom the number of esoteric programs that the CIA has or is currently funding and researching. The clandestine organization has been known to explore myriad outlets for conducting its operations, ranging from sinister to strange. But often the strange ones, particularly those that become declassified because the general populace finds them too bizarre to actually be true, are the most intriguing. When certain programs come to light, it always begs to ask the question, what else are they doing that they aren’t telling us about and what else haven’t they disclosed?
During the Cold War, the CIA conducted several experimental programs involving the human psyche. MKUltra was one of the more malevolent programs aimed at mind control using drugs and other techniques for torture and interrogation purposes. One element of the program involved administering LSD surreptitiously to subjects with the goal of turning them into robot agents that they could then control. The horrific intent of the program eventually came to light and was exposed, despite an attempted cover-up and destruction of all evidence pertaining to it.
But one of the more intriguing (and humane) programs that produced some interesting results was one known as Stargate, which trained operatives in astral projection and remote viewing. These psychic abilities that allow for perception and, if you’re well-practiced, the ability for your astral body to travel anywhere, including distant planets, has cultivated striking imagery and details that often have been confirmed.
Secrets of Remote Viewing
A PSYCHIC JOURNEY TO MARS
During the Cold War, one of the members of Stargate, Joseph McMoneagle, was able to perceive details, which were later confirmed by satellite imaging, of a new type of Russian nuclear submarine being constructed, based simply on coordinates provided to him. The submarine was one of the largest ever built and when he described its magnitude to military engineers, he was scoffed at. It turned out that McMoneagle’s impression was right.
McMoneagle was one of a key group of remote viewing in CIA’s participants that focused on military targets, missing persons and occasionally attempts to see into different time periods. But those attempts were all mundane compared to an unexpected, otherworldly astral journey he would take in 1984. One day he was awoken from a nap and given a sealed envelope that couldn’t be opened until the end of a subsequent viewing session, during which his colleague dictated coordinates for him to view. Soon McMoneagle found himself astral projecting to an unfamiliar locale.
Somewhat recently, the CIA released the transcript of McMoneagle and an agent conducting the viewing. When McMoneagle went into his viewing state, he described a world inhabited by a civilization in dire shape. He described seeing an infrastructure consisting of intersecting roads, aqueducts, channels and pyramids. The transcript is interesting and describes a baffled McMoneagle who often struggles to report the ‘raw data’ his colleague consistently reminds him to stay focused on. Throughout the viewing his astonishment overtakes him leading to tangential periods, sometimes as long as 30 minutes, trying to maintain his focus.
When McMoneagle eventually reports contact with living entities his colleague tells him to initiate communication with them. He describes their situation as being in a critical state, seemingly on the brink of apocalypse. Having purportedly sent members of their civilization on a mission to find a new place to inhabit, these tall shadowed figures appear to be in a state of hibernation awaiting the return of their search party. When he asks if these entities can perceive him, they describe him as something of a hallucination. At the end of the viewing McMoneagle opened his envelope to see where he supposedly projected to – Mars, approximately 1 million years B.C.
Skeptics have written off Stargate and other programs of its ilk as diversionary tactics to steer the Soviets in the wrong direction during the Cold War. The logic being that if the U.S. could subversively convince the Soviets that they were having success in phony psychic programs, the Soviets might then waste time and resources funding similar programs. And of course, there’s no way to know if McMoneagle’s account has any validity without sending a manned mission to Mars to explore the coordinates he was viewing. This probably isn’t going to happen very soon, but McMoneagle said he’d be willing to go, though he is in his 70s.
Whatever the CIA’s original intent may be, many of the members of the Stargate program still practice remote viewing or are willing to talk about it an all seriousness. With the program now having been disclosed and that era of the Cold War being over, it seems there would be no need to continue to maintain secrecy or continue playing along. We would also be remiss to think that the Russians weren’t researching remote viewing long before the U.S. There’s even evidence that they were researching it before Stalin’s reign.
There are other declassified remote viewing CIA documents that were once deemed ‘top secret’ by the CIA, including some that resulted in accurate descriptions of secret Soviet bases on an esoteric island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and another in the middle of the Ural Mountain range. The viewer described details of the bases and their geographic locations in details that were later confirmed. Though the evidence surrounding these particular sessions is somewhat conflicting, the reports affirming the results show astonishment from agents analyzing the program at the amazing accuracy of some of these viewings. And while astral projection and remote viewing are similar in nature, but much different in their scope, the confirmation of results from the remote viewing CIA sessions increases the likelihood that astral projections could have significant accuracy.
NEMESIS STAR THEORY; DOES THE SUN HAVE AN EVIL TWIN?
NEMESIS STAR THEORY; DOES THE SUN HAVE AN EVIL TWIN?
By: Gaia Staff
Many people remain anxious about the threat posed from a hidden nemesis planet, known as Nibiru, that has been prophesied to collide with Earth. Though many of the proposed dates for this collision have come and gone, there is another celestial body that may be more likely to lead to an apocalyptic event: The Nemesis Star.
Clues of the Sun's Twin
THE NEMESIS STAR THEORY
Binary star systems occur frequently and are actually more common than single stars. At least that’s what we thought, until a recent hypothesis proposed the possibility that every star starts out as a binary pair or multi-pair system. While the theory hasn’t been confirmed, there is significant evidence that our Sun likely has a twin, an evil twin.
The majority of stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, which are a fifth of the size of the sun and up to 50 times fainter. These types of stars are pretty commonly paired with another star in a binary system, leading astronomers to believe that Nemesis would be the Sun’s red dwarf star companion. But due to the small size and faintness of these stars, they can be hard to find, making Nemesis all the more elusive.
binary stars courtesy wired.com
This star is thought to be responsible for 12 cyclical extinction events on Earth, including the one that killed the dinosaurs. The Nemesis Star Theory’s roots can be traced to two paleontologists, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski, who noticed that there was a periodicity to major die-outs throughout Earth’s history, occurring in 26 million year intervals. This led to a number of astrophysicists and astronomers, postulating their own Nemesis Star hypotheses.
So how would the sun’s twin be responsible for mass extinctions? The Nemesis Star Theory proposed the idea that the Earth’s binary twin must be in a large 1.5 light-year orbit, retaining just enough gravitational pull between it and the Sun so as not to drift off. But the issue with the orbit of Nemesis is the possibility that it occasionally passes through a cloud of icy debris on the fringe of our solar system, known as the Oort Cloud.
DON’T PERTURB THE OORT
The Oort Cloud is a theoretical sphere that is believed to orbit our solar system, consisting of planetesimals, the small icy building blocks of planets, comets, and asteroids. These planetesimals are sticky and collide with each other until they become large enough to have a significant gravitational pull, eventually becoming as large as a moon or a planet. They also create asteroids and comets which can be knocked out of orbit and sent hurtling toward the center of the solar system, crashing into planets.
There is a binary star system that once passed close enough to nearly perturb the Oort, and it was likely visible from Earth. Scholz’s Star made a flyby some 70,000 years ago, at a distance of 50,000 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance from Earth to the Sun. The Oort is thought to extend from anywhere between 5,000 and 100,000 AUs and is believed to contain up to two trillion celestial objects. Astronomers are 95% certain that Shulz’s star passed within half of a light year of us, possibly perturbing the Oort, though apparently not enough to cause a mass extinction event.
Comets are believed to exist within the Oort and are the product of a thief model, a give-and-take of celestial bodies between stars when they’re formed. In this process comets get pulled back and forth between the gravitational field of stars. It was for this reason that the Oort was theorized, due to the number of comets coming from it, there had to have been a sibling star that pulled them out to the Oort.
The Oort courtesy of space-facts.com
Astronomers also found a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, a region just before the Oort that also contains icy, celestial bodies. This planet, named Sedna, orbits the Sun in a long, drawn-out elliptical path and is one of potentially hundreds. Sedna may help to explain the Nemesis star theory, in that its far-flung orbit was likely caused by our Sun’s twin, pulling it out as it drifted off into the depths of space. Imagine if instead of 9 planets in our solar system, there were a few hundred?
So where is this Nemesis star? Several years ago, the E.U. launched the wonderfully named, Gaia satellite, to map out the stars in the Milky Way and look specifically at stars that have had a close encounter with our solar system or that might come close in the future. But whether or not Nemesis will be found is unknown; it’s possible that it could make a return for the next mass extinction, or it is possible that it drifted off, perturbing the Oort of another star.
It began as a routine naval training exercise. But it would soon become one of the best-documented—and most baffling—UFO sightings of the 21st century.
Witnesses included highly trained military personnel—among them several deeply experienced radar operators and fighter pilots—who at the time of the sightings were at the controls of arguably the most advanced flight technology ever created. And yet none can explain what they saw.
The date was November 14, 2004, and the location was the Pacific Ocean, about 100 miles southwest of San Diego, California. The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, which included the nuclear-powered carrier and the missile cruiser USS Princeton, were conducting a series of drills prior to deployment in the Persian Gulf.
At about 2 p.m., two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets from the Nimitzreceived an unusual order from an operations officer aboard the Princeton. Already airborne, the pilots were told to stop their training maneuvers and proceed to new coordinates for a “real-world” task.
More ominously, the officer asked if they were carrying live weapons. They replied that they were not.
An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter above the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, 2013.
Stocktrek Images/Getty Images
A puzzling presence at 80,000 feet
The Princeton’s highly advanced radar had been picking up mysterious objects for several days by then. The Navy called them “anomalous aerial vehicles,” or AAVs—a term the military preferred to unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, which had been tainted by its association with flying saucers, little green men and countless crackpots.
According to Kevin Day, the Princeton’s senior radar operator at the time, his screen showed well over 100 AAVs over the course of the week. “Watching them on the display was like watching snow fall from the sky,” he says in his first-ever on-camera interview, for HISTORY’s “Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation.”
According to Day, the AAVs appeared at an altitude greater than 80,000 feet, far higher than commercial or military jets typically fly. Initially, the Princeton’s radar team didn’t believe what they were seeing, chalking up the anomalies to an equipment malfunction. But after they determined that everything was operating as it should and they began detecting instances in which the AAVs dropped with astounding speed to lower, busier airspace, Day approached the Princeton’s commander about taking action.
“I was chomping at the bit,” he says. “I just really wanted to intercept these things.”
Two fighters were diverted to intercept one of the strange objects. When they first arrived on the scene, the pilots didn’t see any flying objects. But they did observe what the lead pilot, Commander David Fravor, later referred to as a “disturbance” in the ocean. The water was churning, with white waves breaking over what looked like a large object just under the surface.
Then they noticed one of the objects flying about 50 feet above the water. Fravor, the commander of the elite Black Aces squadron who was a Top Gun program graduate with more than 16 years of flying experience, described it as about 40 feet long, shaped like a Tic Tac candy and with no obvious means of propulsion: "It's white. It has no wings. It has no rotors. I go, 'Holy sh*t, what is that?'"
Even odder were its swift and erratic movements, which Fravor described to HISTORY as something he had never seen in his life: “This thing would go from one way to another, similar to if you threw a ping-pong ball against the wall.”
Another Navy pilot who served as Fravor’s wingman in the air that day—and who spoke to HISTORY on condition of anonymity—gave an account very similar to Fravor’s. Now a high-ranking Navy officer, she was a rookie pilot back in 2004. She remembered being terrified, watching as the more experienced pilot tried to intercept the strange craft: “It was so unpredictable—high G, rapid velocity, rapid acceleration. So you’re wondering: How can I possibly fight this?”
As Fravor flew around it, he says the craft ascended and came right at his plane: “All of a sudden it kind of turns and rapidly accelerates—beyond anything I’ve seen—crosses my nose, and…it’s gone.”
As the Tic Tac accelerated into the distance, according to Day, Navy jets began launching off the carrier to try and intercept the other mysterious objects the Princeton’s radar was tracking.
While Fravor wasn’t able to capture the encounter on video, one of the pilots who took off after he landed was able to track it down. He managed to capture video of a Tic Tac, using a highly sensitive infrared camera.
Renewed attention to the Nimitz incident
While the Nimitz incident seems to have been known in naval circles and to some UFO/AAV buffs, it didn’t come to wide public attention until 2017, when The New York Times ran an article about the sighting, and released the video of the Tic Tac shot by the Nimitz pilot that day.
The Timesalso revealed the existence of a little-known Defense Department initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The “shadowy” enterprise, as the Times referred to it, had a budget of just $22 million, less than 0.00004% of the department’s total budget. It was said to be a pet project of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had a longtime interest in UFOs.
Although the government told the Times that AATIP had officially shut down in 2012, its former director, Luis Elizondo, insisted it was still operating. Elizondo had left the program in October 2017, protesting that its work wasn’t being taken seriously enough within the Defense Department.
More eyes on the skies
Elizondo has since joined To the Stars Academy, an organization co-founded by Tom DeLonge, best known as guitarist with the band Blink-182. The group’s mission includes promoting UAP research.
Apparently they’ll have plenty to work with. According to Christopher Mellon, a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who is now national security adviser to the organization, and numerous pilots HISTORY has spoken with, the Nimitz incident was not an isolated event. There have been more than a dozen incidents off the East Coast—some as recent as 2015.
The Navy, which seems to have made little effort to investigate the Nimitzepisode back in 2004, also appears to be taking the subject more seriously now. In late April 2019, the Navy announced it was drafting new guidelines for reporting any sightings of “unidentified aircraft.” The initiative was intended to de-stigmatize such reports and make it easier for service members to come forward with less fear of ridicule.
According to a Navy spokesman: "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, it was announced, was “investigating each and every report.”
As with all things UFO, AAV and UAP, the Nimitz incident has its doubters. Some have suggested the crafts were advanced reconnaissance drones and that the churning water was caused by a submarine. But whatever the now-famous Tic Tac actually was, it’s hard to dispute that the pilots, the radar operators and the infrared camera had seen something. And chances are, it wasn’t just a big breath mint.
Life Beyond Earth? Scientific Community Making Search For UFOs Mainstream
Life Beyond Earth? Scientific Community Making Search For UFOs Mainstream
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The search for extraterrestrial activity is getting some credibility.
Notable scientists are getting behind a push to make contact with whatever might be out there.
“It was between a half mile and a mile away… it was big and quiet… moving very slowly,” UFO witness Robert Strong said.
Did the Hudson Valley resident really see a UFO?
(Credit: CBS2)
“Military pilots, army personnel… the U.S. Navy now… all of them have reported different types of sightings,” Christopher Deperno of MUFON said.
Even NASA is conceding it’s possible the universe contains different life forms.
“We do know that the phenomenon is real,” Sam Falvo of MUFON added.
Experts say the race is heating up to find answers as to who they are, where they’re from, and what they may want from us.
Deperno and Falvo investigate unidentified flying objects for the New York chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, a global organization established in 1969.
“Most of them… 95 percent or so can be identified… it’s those five or six percent that really stir your interest,” Falvo said.
What they do has long been considered a fringe field of science, but today, this search for answers has gone mainstream. Prestigious universities including Harvardand Penn State are dedicating some of their brightest minds to this as a new field of study.
“We believe the search for extraterrestrial intelligence needs a permanent academic home,” Penn State’s Jason Wright said.
Then there’s the private sector, funding everything from digital, interstellar communication, to a dish that emits radio waves.
These attempts to communicate with the extraterrestrial worlds are a bit more high tech than the recording of unique sounds scientists played from two space probes in the 1970’s.
Author and researcher Linda Zimmermann has investigated some 500 eyewitness accounts of UFO’s in the Hudson Valley.
“There is the possibility that they are drawn to the water here… the rivers, the lakes, and reservoirs, but also this area has a very unique magnetic field and gravitational field,” Zimmermann said.
Zimmermann and Falvo’s organizations have now formed a joint venture called Project Aries – with the hope of collecting as much human intelligence and data as possible, with your help.
“We need you to come forward and tell us of your experiences,” Zimmermann added.
There will be a town hall meeting in early June for Hudson Valley residents to find out more about the sightings in their region.
Een vrouw kreeg een paniekaanval toen ze plots drie vreemde stippen door de lucht zag flitsen tijdens een ritje ’s nachts. Ze was aan het filmen om haar zangtalent op te nemen toen de ufo overvloog, waardoor haar stem onmiddellijk stokte in haar keel. “Verdomme, verdomme, verdomme!”, klinkt het in toenemende paniek. De vrouw belt huilend naar haar echtgenoot om het relaas te doen, maar hij neemt niet op. Dat leidt tot een interessant - maar eenzijdig - gesprek, waarbij paniek, boosheid en smeken om de beurt de revue passeren.
User @sadeyezriri posted a thread on Twitter, sharing her wild encounter and the lack of support her husband showed as she freaked out
De vrouw postte haar paniekaanval op Twitter samen met de beelden van “het ruimteschip” die ze die avond maakte. “Het was een ruimteschip dat op een pizza leek”, schrijft ze bij de vraag waar ze kan melden dat ze de ufo zag. “Het ding had ongeveer dezelfde afmetingen als drie auto’s samen.” Volgens de vrouw was het ruimteschip “zwart” en had het een “strak ontwerp”.
“De lichten waren niet echt fel want ze weerspiegelden nergens in de auto”, aldus de vrouw die liever anoniem blijft. “Ik begon te huilen en ik was compleet in de war. Ik wist niet waar ik naar keek. Ik besefte plots dat het een onbekend vliegend object was.” Haar broer wees er nog op dat er niet één, maar twee ufo’s in beeld verschijnen.
De vrouw tast in het duister en weet nog steeds niet wat ze die avond zag. Wat ze wel weet, is dat ze zich enorm schaamt over hoe ze op de video en de voicemail van haar man klinkt. “Zo gênant, de buitenaardse wezens hadden me beter gewoon meegenomen.”
BEKIJK OOK
Mysterieuze ufo op plek waar ooit meteoor neerstortte: “Het was plots snikheet, net een gloeilamp”
Militaire piloten ontdekken ufo tijdens trainingsvlucht: “Er is een hele vloot van, kijk maar op de radar”
“I experienced a series of ‘eureka’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realised the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript.”
That was Dr. Gerard Cheshire announcing this week that it took him just two weeks to crack the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript – a Medieval illustrated codex written in an indecipherable language that has baffled cryptographers (the legendary Alan Turing tried unsuccessfully to decode it) since its discovery, including Wilfrid Voynich, who obtained the codex in 1912 and popularized it enough to have it tagged with his name. in “The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained,” Cheshire claims it is written in proto-Romance, an extinct ancestor of the Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, etc.) and he was able to translate enough of the document to determine that it was “compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon.”
“Sorry, folks, “proto-Romance language” is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense.”
“Ooooh, tough crowd” as comedians like to say when the audience boos rather than laughs. In Cheshire’s case, that crowd includes Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America (an organization promoting excellence in the field of medieval studies), who immediatelytweeted her analysis of the announcement. Davis comes by her expertship legitimately – she received her PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale University where the Voynich manuscript is held, and has handily debunked previous announcements of Voynich code-breaking.
“As with most would-be Voynich interpreters, the logic of this proposal is circular and aspirational: he starts with a theory about what a particular series of glyphs might mean, usually because of the word’s proximity to an image that he believes he can interpret. He then investigates any number of medieval Romance-language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-language word that fits his hypothesis, his hypothesis must be right. His “translations” from what is essentially gibberish, an amalgam of multiple languages, are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations.”
Davis explains her doubts to Ars Technica and pointed out that the idea of a proto-Romance language “is completely unsubstantiated,” as are Cheshire links between certain glyphs and certain Latin letters.
“One of the reasons the Voynich manuscript is so appealing is because of languages like hieroglyphics and linear B, which were deciphered. But they didn’t come out of nowhere, they were decades in the making and drew on lots of different scholarly expertise. You can’t just have one person saying: ‘I’ve cracked it.’ You have got to have the field, on the whole, agreeing.”
Dr. Kate Wiles, a medievalist and linguist and senior editor at History Today, told The Guardian that such a discovery, if it were true, would need verification by a number of experts before being accepted.
“Regarding the decipherment of the individual symbols, a number of people have come up with a mapping to Latin letters, but those mappings rarely agree with each other, or with this proposal.”
Greg Kondrak, a computer science professor at the University of Alberta who as also tried to crack the Voynich code, also points out that the Romance origins of some of the words in the manuscript has been well known for some time.
Finally, J.K. Petersen, keeper of The Voynich Portal, summarizes his problems with the alleged code-cracking:
But I have trouble accepting the translation in its current form because:
there are a lot of nonsensical word combinations,there’s almost no grammar, the letter distribution is quite different from Romance languages (it would take a whole blog to discuss this aspect of the text, but take 4 as an example, which almost exclusively is at the beginnings of tokens—Cheshire relates it to “d”, and “9” which is usually at the end and sometimes at the beginning, but almost never in the middle, which he designates as “a”), the words still match the drawings if the drawings are interpreted differently (which means the relationship isn’t proven yet), some of the transliterated “words” don’t show any relationship to Romance word-structures (and the author neglected to explain how specific non-Romance words were derived), and the same words (e.g., “na”) are sometimes interpreted differently.
A few things are certain at this point: there are a LOT of people interested in breaking the Voynich code, a large number working to verify the code-breakers and the attempts and debunkings are destined to continue.
Starlink, SpaceX’s ambitious plan to bring high-speed internet to practically anywhere in the world, is about to take shape.
On Wednesday, the company plans to launch 60 test satellites to help develop its planned giant constellation. Elon Musk, the CEO behind the plan, could help redefine how people think about internet access — no longer tied to fixed lines, where satellite internet moves from a last-resort curiosity to a viable service for tens of millions. With the FCC abolishingnet neutrality, Starlink also has an opportunity to save it for its customers — or continue to ignore the concept as terrestrial ISPs have done. There’slots of discussion, but we don’t know yet.
Starlink is a planned constellation of 12,000 satellites, eclipsing the size of existing satellite internet systems operating at a relatively low orbit. Musk has claimed that, unlike other systems, latency will be low enough to power the lightning-fast response times necessary for video games. Using a ground terminal, customers could get connected from practically anywhere in the world with a view to the constellation.
The prospect is so enticing it could eclipse SpaceX’s current revenue streams and rapidly transform the company — providing even more funds for flying to Mars and making humans a multi-planetary species.
SpaceX Starlink: When Is the Launch Date?
SpaceX is expected to launch 60 satellites on Wednesday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Weather conditions were at 70 percent favorable the Sunday prior to the launch. The booster will attempt to land on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Musk shared an image of the Falcon 9 packed with the 60 satellites ready to go.
The future of the internet?
When compared with the Tesla Roadster that Musk sent up on the Falcon Heavy’s maiden voyage, the sheer scale becomes clear.
Tesla Roadster, for comparison.
Unfortunately, it appears these satellites won’t be used for the final constellation. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at the Satellite 2019 conference in Washington, DC on May 7 that the first launch would lack the intersat links present in future crafts, meaning these 60 will only be used for tests.
“They’re capable, but there’s no intersatellite links on it,” Shotwell said at the event. “I call them ‘test class’ satellites. The antennas are pretty hot on these things. They are very capable systems.”
Although they’re test-class crafts, they should provide more information about how the constellation will work than previous trials. Musk confirmed the craftsare “production design, unlike our earlier Tintin demo sats.” The company previously launched two demo satellites in February 2018 to communicate with six ground stations.
If successful, it could pave the way for multiple Starlink launches later this year. Shotwell stated at the same conference that SpaceX could hold between two and six Starlink launches this year depending on the results from the May 15 launch.
Once SpaceX has completed a few launches, its network could soon take shape. Musk said on Sunday via Twitter that around six more launches of 60 satellites could be enough for “minor” coverage, while 12 launches would be enough for “moderate” coverage. That means by the end of this year, SpaceX could have a basic constellation up and running.
The satellites use lasers to communicate with each other. Mark Handley, a professor of networked systems at University College London, previously explained to Inverse that this could make communications between two points on the planet up to 50 percent faster, as the light would move faster through the vacuum than through fiber optic glass cables.
SpaceX plans to launch 4,409 satellites in its initial constellation. Each one weighs around 850 pounds. Around 1,584 of these will orbit 550 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, while the rest will run at 1,150 kilometers. The company was granted permission for this setup from the FCC in May.
As for space junk, the company claimed to the FCC that there is “zero” chance of pieces hitting anyone on Earth, as the satellites are expected to burn up through the atmosphere.
SpaceX Starlink: What Is the Price for Starlink Internet?
As Starlink has already slipped from its initial plans, it’s perhaps understandable that SpaceX has not yet released definitive pricing. FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s support for the plan draws to mind net neutrality horror stories, where firms charge higher prices for faster access to preferred sites.
Starlink could save consumers billions, even if they don’t choose to go with SpaceX for internet. A BroadbandNow report claims such constellations could save American households up to $30 billion per year. The logic is that increased competition will drive prices down. Around 104 million Americans have one wired broadband provider in their area, and prices cost around $68 per month. Around 75 million have two choices, and they pay around $59 per month. The 14 million with five or more choices pay just $47, so adding Starlink into the mix could push people into the next lower bracket as the competition increases.
The mean lowest price over time.
Existing satellite offerings come to around $50 per month for service. If SpaceX wants to compete with other providers, a price around this area may not be unreasonable.
SpaceX Starlink: Who Is Competing With Starlink?
SpaceX has a number of competitors vying to kickstart their giant satellite constellations. OneWeb, which launched its first six satellites back in February, is aiming for up to 900 satellites with a goal of switching on by 2021.
Another plan by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would send 3,236 satellites up as part of Project Kuiper. SpaceX and Blue Origin both have similar end goals of using their current projects to fuel space colonization, but Bezos envisions floating structures orbiting the Earth rather than cities on Mars. The success of one internet constellation over another could power these visions and bring them closer to reality.
Another factor working against SpaceX is time. The FCC gave the firm until March 29, 2024 to launch 50 percent of its planned constellation. Around three years later, the firm needs to complete its constellation.
Musk has just eight years to potentially kickstart the future of internet access.
Follow the route of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, as it moves to a new part of Mount Sharp, into an area scientists call the “clay-bearing unit”.
This NASA video,releasedWednesday (May 15, 2019), shows what it would be like to soar over Mars’ Mount Sharp, following the route of theCuriosityrover, which has been climbing Mount Sharp since 2014, and has now moved to a new area that the science team calls the “clay-bearing unit”.
In the video, Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada gives a tour of the rover’s new home in the clay-bearing unit – or “clay unit” for short – where Curiosity has just started analyzing rock samples. The clay-bearing unit has been an important scientific destination since even before Curiosity launched. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter(MRO) spied a strong clay signal in this region, suggesting that water might have played a role in its formation. On its long trek since landing on Mars in 2012, Curiosity has discovered many examples of mudstones containing clay minerals.
Curiosity has been on the road for nearly seven years. Finally drilling at the clay-bearing unit is a major milestone in our journey up Mount Sharp.
This animation shows a proposed route for NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is climbing lower Mount Sharp on Mars. The annotated version of the map labels different regions that scientists working with the rover would like to explore in coming years.
The aerial tour also shows the rover’s proposed path in the years ahead. Targets that are intriguing to scientists include the rocky cliffs of the “sulfate-bearing unit,” where sulfate minerals might indicate the area was drying up or becoming more acidic in ancient times, and an area called Gediz Vallis, where a river may have carved a path through the sulfate unit.
Each region represents a different period in the history of Mount Sharp, which rises about 3 miles (5 km) from the base of Gale Crater. Curiosity’s scientists want to visit these places to learn more about the history of water on the mountain, which slowly dried up as the climate changed.
Bottom line: Video shows current route of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
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