Why Are Two Stars in Our Galaxy Suddenly Acting Very Strange?

This illustration shows what a binary star system with a red giant feeding material into a white dwarf might look like.

(Image: © European Southern Observatory)

In the past, AG Draconis' active periods almost always followed a simple pattern: The first couple of outbursts are "cool," with the temperature of the white dwarf appearing to drop during each of its outbursts. Then, sometimes, the next set of outbursts are "hot," with the star's temperature rising. Cool outbursts tend to be much brighter than hot ones.

Researchers suspect that a cool outburst happens when the white dwarf starts to expand, its outermost, atmosphere-like region growing and cooling at the same time. That doesn't happen during hot outbursts, which are less well-understood.

But this current cycle is weird. Occurring just seven years after a minor outburst in 2008, it's been made up entirely of "hot" outbursts.

"Such behavior is considerably peculiar in [the] almost 130-year history of [the] observing of this object," the researchers wrote, offering no explanation for why it might be happening.

Why does any of this "outbursting" happen at all? No one knows for sure.

The researchers pointed to a paper from 2006 posted to arXiv that offers one popular explanation, derived from a different star system. As the white dwarf's gravity captures material from its giant twin, an "accretion disk" forms — made up of material circling the dwarf and waiting to fall onto its surface. But the disk is unstable, with the giant sometimes feeding more material into it and sometimes less.

Every once in a while, too much material falls onto the dwarf's surface and there's a spike in thermonuclear burning on the outside of the star, where there should be fairly little. That hellish blaze spits material out into the system, forming a brief, hot shell around the white dwarf. From Earth, this all looks like a slight tweak in the light across a few wavelengths.

"The future evolution of AG Dra[conis] is an open question," the researchers wrote. In 2019, they asked, "can we expect (finally) a major, cool or (again) minor, hot outburst?"

It's also possible, the researchers suggested, that this period of minor outbursts will simply end. That happened once before, during the relatively minor activity period of 1963 to 1966.

Long term, they said, this illustrates the importance of keeping a careful eye on stars like these, so that astronomers may one day crack the code of their behavior. It also demonstrates the difficulty of parsing events in solar systems light-years away.

• 11 Fascinating Facts About Our Milky Way Galaxy
• Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events
• Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Photos That Will Blow Your Mind

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

29-05-2019 om 00:56 geschreven door peter  

29-05-2019 om 00:37 geschreven door peter  

29-05-2019 om 00:28 geschreven door peter  

Archeologists have recently discovered the remains of a group of large ancient buildings at the bottom of Fuxian Lake in Yunnan Province, China.

Also found were placed stones with carvings that can be classified as mysterious. These findings question previous assumptions by experts. According to Chinese newspaper outlets, recorded in historical documents was a city named Yuyuan. Yuyuan was founded in the Fuxian Lake demographic during the Western Han Dynasty from 206 BC to 24 AD. Yuyuan disappeared from the historical record during the Sui and Tang Dynasty from 589 AD to 907 AD. Urban legend claims the city sank to the bottom of Fuxian Lake.

An Ancient Undocumented City

These recent findings suggest otherwise since the remains of the buildings were made of stone. Yuyuan buildings were found to be mostly built with wood.

Through Sonar surveys, it was revealed that the architecture found at the bottom of Fuxian Lake covered around 2.4 square kilometers. This constitutes a large city that was never documented in history.

A Pyramid and Enigmatic Carvings

Also found at the bottom were the remains of a pyramid thought to be more complex than the famous Egyptian pyramids.

One of the many stones found has gathered some special attention. On the top right section of the stone is a small circle that was carved with seven radial lines surrounding it. This carving resembles the sun. A smaller circle is carved on the left side of the same stone, but with only four radial lines. These types of carvings are considered rare by experts and are estimated to be over 1,800 years old. No such similar carvings are known in that time frame.

Also found on the stones were carvings resembling masks. These masks do not resemble masks that were made for humans based on the teeth marks.

Experts are stumped as to what these findings mean, as more research is needed.

{ https://www.disclose.tv/ }

29-05-2019 om 00:13 geschreven door peter  

(Scree shot)

When the New York Times published the piece titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” on Dec. 16 2017 it was a paradigm shift in the way the public and mainstream press outlets presented stories on UFOs. Since that initial story by veteran journalists Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean a lot has happened in bringing this topic away from fringe. When the first Times article hit, we went behind the scenes of the story with Blumenthal when he discussed how they considered Luis Elizondo credible, and wanted to purse the story. Blumenthal was able to talk to Punk rock and UFOs again on the Times latest offering, and how editorial leadership sees these stories.

“The good news is the Times is receptive to this story,” Blumenthal said.” They have to be done in a New York Times  way where everything is on the record. In this case we did, we were able to talk to several pilots without using names. Everyone else was on record. The Times takes the subject very seriously with its editing standards, which is why the stories have gotten such credible resonance. When people see it in the Times it’s not fake news, (and) it’s not speculation. We are very careful to stick to what we know, and lay out what we don’t know. The editing process is very rigorous, and it is not easy for reporters like us to get these stories through because we are held to a very high standard given the subject I would say properly so.”

The New York Times isn’t the only journalism giant taking this seriously all of a sudden. Politico, Washington Post, The Hill, New York Mag, and other large media companies are following suit with similar stories, which makes the journalists at the Times prideful from what started as the Pentagon UFO story to now.

“We love to see it lighting up the Internet,” Blumenthal said. “It is the most e-mailed , most watched and most everything’d story of the day. It is really dominating Times coverage, so it is a part of pride because we do think the subject is important, and we love to see people follow us since sometimes we need to follow other people, but in this case I think we have set the pace.”

Ralph Blumenthal is a 45-year veteran of the New York Times.

(Twitter)

With the new NYT story “‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects” that dropped May 26, Blumenthal, Kean and Cooper return to feature two new witness testimonials from military officials with the biggest takeaway being that these baffling UFOs appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to 2015 off the East Coast. The article features quotes from Lt. Ryan Graves ( a 10-year Navy vet) who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress, Lt. Danny Accoin and three others (who asked not to be named) spoke on record to the times on what they saw. Graves and Accoin are mentioned in the story to also appear on upcoming episodes of History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” ( read our spoiler free review of episode one here). The sightings reported here seem to mimic the descriptions of the 2004 Nimitz UAP case.

Some detractors of efforts of To The Stars, and these stories in general are quick to paint a picture as the release of the story is timed to collaborate with the debut episode of “Unidentified.”

“We knew the History Channel had put this series together, and we watched that and give them credit in the piece, and saw what they said in the series and went after them (witnesses) because obviously we weren’t going to take it from the TV; we wanted to conduct our own interview, so we did meet with Ryan Graves in New York, and Helene spoke with Danny Accoin over the phone,” Blumenthal said.”  There are many places in the paper for shows to be reviewed and featured. This was not the purpose of this article. We wanted to establish the credibility of these witnesses on our own, and not part of any other effort, program or institution. It was not reliant on anybody but our own reporting.”

Blumenthal is aware of the infighting, division and skepticism among the UFO community, but ultimately believes this story is one “of the biggest of our time.”The effort from the journalists at the New York Times continues to be done by journalists only.

“We really try to keep out distance from To The Stars because we think it helps our credibility to be separate,” Blumenthal said.” They are doing what they are doing, and they’ve done some really interesting, important things, but we have to do what we do at the New York Times. To maintain our standards and credibility we have to do it our own way. We are doing it by our interviews the way we always do everything, and it keeps our reporting pure and obviously respected elsewhere. We aren’t taking anything from anybody; we are investigating ourselves.”

-By MIKE DAMANTE

{ https://www.punkrockandufos.com/ }

29-05-2019 om 00:05 geschreven door peter  

Footage from 2004 shows an encounter between a U.S. fighter jet and "anomalous aerial vehicles," which is military jargon for UFOs. (To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science)

By Daniel W. Drezner

The term “UFO” automatically triggers derision in most quarters of polite society. One of Christopher Buckley’s better satires, “Little Green Men,” is premised on a George F. Will-type pundit thinking that he has been abducted by aliens, with amusing results. UFOs have historically been associated with crackpot ideas like Big Foot or conspiracy theories involving crop circles.

The obvious reason for this is that the term “UFO” is usually assumed to be a synonym for “extraterrestrial life.” If you think about it, this is odd. UFO literally stands for “unidentified flying object.” A UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet. It is simply a flying object that cannot be explained away through conventional means. Because UFOs are usually brought up only to crack jokes, however, they have been dismissed for decades.

One of the gutsiest working paper presentations I have witnessed was Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall presenting a draft version of “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.” They argued that the real reason UFOs have been dismissed is because of the existential challenge that they pose for a worldview in which human beings are the most technologically advanced life-forms:

UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility.... The puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.

When Wendt and Duvall made this argument, there were a lot of titters in the audience. I chuckled, too. Nonetheless, their paper makes a persuasive case that UFOs certainly exist, even if they are not necessarily ETs. For them, the key is that no official authority takes seriously the idea that UFOs can be extraterrestrials. As they note, “considerable work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of ridicule and scorn.”

• [The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?]

In recent years, however, there has been a subtle shift that poses some interesting questions for their argument. For one thing, discussion of actual UFOs has been the topic of some serious mainstream media coverage. There was the December 2017 New York Times story by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was tasked with cataloguing UFOs recorded by military pilots. DoD officials confirmed its existence. Though this story generated some justified skepticism, it represented the first time the U.S. government acknowledged the existence of such a program.

What we know — and don't know — about aliens and UFOs

The Post's Cleve R. Wootson Jr. explains why a recent admission from the government is like pouring kerosene on UFO conspiracy theories. (Video: Monica Akhtar/Photo: Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)

Then, there were the reports last November about Oumuamua, “a mysterious, cigar-shaped interstellar object [that] fell through our solar system at an extraordinary speed,” according to New York’s Eric Levits. Oumuamua’s shape and trajectory were unusual enough for some genuine astrophysicists to publish a paper suggesting the possibility that it was an artificial construction relying on a solar sail. Again, this prompted skeptical reactions, but even those skeptics could not completely rule out the possibility that extraterrestrial activity was involved.

• [Why scientists sometimes make extraordinary claims]

Then, on Monday, the New York Times came out with another story by the same reporters who broke the 2017 story:

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”....

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

The Times reporters broke new ground by getting pilots on record. What is interesting about this latest news cycle, however, is that DoD officials are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict. Indeed, Politico’s Bryan Bender reported last month that, “The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with ‘unidentified aircraft,’ a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them.” My Post colleague Deanna Paul followed up by reporting that “Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, told The Post that the new Navy guidelines formalized the reporting process, facilitating data-driven analysis while removing the stigma from talking about UFOs, calling it ‘the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.’ ”

What appears to be happening is that official organs of the state are now acknowledging that UFOs exist, even if they are not literally using the term. They are doing so because enough pilots are reporting UFOs and near-air collisions so as to warrant better record-keeping. They are not saying that these UFOs are extraterrestrials, but they are trying to destigmatize the reporting of a UFO.

Still, the very fact that this step has been taken somewhat weakens the Wendt and Duvall thesis. This was always a two-step process: (a) Acknowledge that UFOs exist; and (b) Consider that the UFOs might be ETs.

In recent years, the U.S. national security bureaucracy has met the first criterion. What happens to our understanding of the universe if great powers meet that second one?

{ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ }

28-05-2019 om 23:57 geschreven door peter  

Mysterieuze ufobeelden slaan Amerikaanse legerpiloten met verstomming: “WTF is dat ding?” - HLN.be

Bron: Washington Post, New York Times

De clip duurt twee minuten en is sensationeel. Legerpiloten filmden een ufo vanuit een F-18 van de US Navy, die op een hoogte van 25.000 voet vloog. “What the fuck is dat ding?” roept een piloot. De video werd online gepost door de To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science, een privaat onderzoeksbedrijf. 

De vrijgegeven beelden werden in 2015 geschoten aan de Amerikaanse Oostkust. Hoe het onderzoekscentrum eraan geraakte, zei het niet. Maar iedereen zou ze kunnen opvragen. Vorig jaar werden twee gelijkaardige video’s openbaar gemaakt.

Volgens Christopher Mellon vormen de video’s “het bewijs voor het bestaan van vliegtuigen die ver boven alles staan waar de VS of haar bondgenoten over beschikken”. Mellon is adviseur bij de To the Stars Acacemy en werkte voor de geheime dienst onder Bill Clinton en George W. Bush. Hij vindt dat de overheid te weinig onderzoek doet naar dat soort bewijsmateriaal: “Als het een mysterie is waar die vliegtuigen vandaan komen, dan is de passiviteit van de overheid tegenover zulke bewijzen dat ook”. 

Hij verwijt het leger en de overheid dat ze “dat soort incidenten beschouwen als geïsoleerde feiten en niet als onderdeel van een patroon dat op een ernstige manier aandacht en onderzoek vraagt”. Hij vergelijkt die houding in de Washington Post met de inspanningen van de CIA en de FBI tegen terrorisme vóór 9/11, toen beide diensten wel informatie hadden over de kapers maar die voor zich hielden en niet met elkaar deelden.

Mellon vraagt zich af of “Rusland of China technologisch haasje-over doen met de VS” dan wel dat de beelden “het bewijs kunnen zijn van een buitenaardse beschaving”. Hij schrijft dat Poetins recente gepoch over een Russische doorbraak in voortstuwingstechnieken misschien wel niet zomaar bluf is. Mellons besluit: “Helaas hebben we geen idee, omdat we zelfs geen antwoorden zoeken.”

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

28-05-2019 om 22:06 geschreven door peter  

Navy-piloten zagen bijna dagelijks ufo’s in 2014 en 2015 - HLN.be

Bron: New York Times

Luitenant Ryan Graves was tien jaar lang piloot van een F/A-18 Super Hornet bij de Navy. Hij lichtte het Pentagon en het Congres in over zijn ervaringen. “Die dingen bleven een hele dag in de lucht”, aldus Graves. “Een vliegtuig in de lucht houden kost bakken energie. Met de snelheden die wij zagen, is twaalf uur in de lucht elf uur langer dan we zouden verwachten.”

Lees ook

Mysterieuze ufobeelden slaan Amerikaanse legerpiloten met verstomming: “WTF is dat ding?”

Navy-woordvoerder Josh Gradisher geeft aan de New York Times toe dat ze niet alle waarnemingen van Graves en zijn collega’s kunnen verklaren. Sommige vliegende objecten zouden commerciële drones kunnen zijn, voor andere “weten we niet wie erachter zit, hebben we niet genoeg gegevens om ze op te sporen”, legt Gradisher uit. Maar niemand beweert dat het daarom om aliens zou gaan.

De onthullingen komen er na de aankondiging in april van nieuwe, geheime richtlijnen om “onverklaarbare luchtfenomenen” te rapporteren, “als middel om het delen van informatie uit de stigmatisatiehoek te halen en de verslagen meer datagedreven aan te pakken”.

Piloten rapporteerden de waarnemingen aan hun oversten. Ze “speculeerden over geheime, extreem geavanceerde droneprogramma’s”, maar sloten dat weer uit omdat de waarnemingen op bekend militair oefenterrein tussen Virginia en Florida plaatsvonden. 

Een van hen vertelde eind 2014 aan Graves dat hij “bijna botste met zo’n ding”. De ufo beschreef hij als iets dat leek op “een bol rond een kubus”. Het vliegende voorwerp manoeuvreerde zich tussen twee gevechtstoestellen die op amper 30 meter van elkaar vlogen. Luitenant Danny Accoin beweert dan weer dat hij een ufo op zijn radar, op zijn raketsysteem en op zijn infraroodcamera had, maar dat hij die toch niet kon waarnemen met zijn ogen.

Van sommige waarnemingen bestaan ook videobeelden. Daarop zijn volgens Graves en zijn collega’s “objecten te zien die optrekken tot een hypersonische snelheid, die plots halt houden en scherpe bochten maken - wat de fysieke beperkingen van een menselijke bemanning overstijgt”. Graves bedoelt dat menselijke piloten de G-krachten niet zou aankunnen. “Snelheid doodt je niet, halt houden wél, of accelereren.”

Sinds het radarsysteem van de gevechtsvliegtuigen, dat nog uit de jaren 80 stamde, geavanceerder werd, namen de ufo-waarnemingen van de piloten toe.

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

28-05-2019 om 21:54 geschreven door peter  

Featured photo: NASA

Extraterrestrial Organic Matter Found in 3.3-Billion-Year-Old Volcanic Rock

The researchers analysed a pair of postage stamp-sized samples gathered during field campaigns, sliced them into a few dozen pieces, and analysed them with electron microscopes, protons from a particle accelerator and continuous-wave electron paramagnetic resonance (cw-EPR). In essence, the researchers measured how the samples’ electrons responded to a slowly changing magnetic field. They found different kinds of signals in the slices – most of them corresponded with carbon signals found elsewhere on Earth but, for one slice, it looked more like the signal from carbon-containing meteorites.

It didn’t surprise the researchers to find extraterrestrial material in their sediments – as they do today, micrometeorites likely fell on ancient Earth, bringing organic carbon molecules. What did surprise them is that somehow, there was enough of these materials present in the area to still be detectable 3.3 billion years later. They proposed that maybe the layer they analysed formed after a meteor impact produced a layer of dust in the atmosphere that then settled beneath a layer of volcanic ash.

This is just one piece of evidence, and not a literal molecule that was deposited 3.3 billion years ago. But it’s still an important thing to know. New Scientist reports that finding layers of extraterrestrial organic carbon from asteroids might complicate efforts to find similar-looking biosignatures on other planets, like Mars, since the signature an asteroid deposited might look like the signature of life.

Research continues to show that our planet’s rocks preserve an incredible history – not just our own history, but the history of the entire solar system.

{ https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/ }

28-05-2019 om 20:29 geschreven door peter  

28-05-2019 om 18:44 geschreven door peter  

The origin of the pyramids of Egypt has fired the human imagination for centuries, and it is often asked who the true pyramid builders were. Those who 'want to believe' now speculate that the answer can be found on our planet's only natural satellite.

Alien conspiracy theories are swirling after an E.T. enthusiast spotted traces of intelligent life on the Moon.

The 'discovery' was made by a YouTuber going by the handle Pacitto Dominique, who was apparently exploring old high-resolution photos of the Moon's surface taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

One of the photos shows what looks like a pyramid-shaped object sitting at the centre of a huge crater.

"It was a three sided pyramid with a single dark window going along one side," self-styled UFO expert Scott C. Warring wrote on his popular conspiracy theory website etdatabase.com.

"The question remains, is this definitive proof that the pyramids in Egypt were built by aliens from our moon? It seems so," he concluded.

While the origin of the object in question is yet unclear (it could be a simple boulder), this is not the first time the possible existence of pyramids on the Moon has had alien hunters in a frenzy.

An actual grainy photograph snapped by one of the Apollo 17 mission members in 1972, which shows a dark pyramidal structure in a light background, sparked claims several years ago that there has been a civilisation on the Moon.

However, considering the sequence of pictures in the mission's repository of images, it appears that the "pyramid sighting" was in fact a low-quality photo of the floor of the lunar rover.

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

28-05-2019 om 18:41 geschreven door peter  

28-05-2019 om 18:34 geschreven door peter  

Alien Bases on the Moon, This Astronaut Saved the Astonishing Evidence!

He kept the evidence! A NASA image, AS11-41-6155, reveals what appears to be an alien base on the far side of the moon. The object appears to be on the moon’s surface and is well illuminated. It is symmetrical with a long shaft separated at each end by a small sphere with another in the center.

The spheres appear to be living quarters with connecting corridors. An important part of Johnston‘s duty was to provide photographic and preliminary analysis of the lunar samples to the contributing scientists from around the world. The photographic documentation was to document the lunar samples exact location and orientation insitu. In addition to the photos he provided copies of the lunar sample information catalogs to the scientists.

As such, he had in his office several sets of photographs taken by Apollo astronauts with their chest-mounted Hasselblad cameras. When the lunar sample distribution wound down, he was instructed by Bud Laskawa, his boss, to destroy what remained of the photo archive, but Johnston kept one set as a personal collection for a work portfolio.

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

28-05-2019 om 18:25 geschreven door peter  

'These things would be out there all day': US Navy pilots say they saw UFOs that 'flew at hypersonic speeds at altitudes of 30,000ft over Virginia and Florida almost every day'

• Several U.S. Navy aviators come forward to claim UFO sightings during training 
• They say objects were spotted over Eastern seaboard between 2014 and 2015 
• Pilots say objects flew at hypersonic speeds without leaving engine exhaust 
• They said that the UFOs were also able to stop quickly and turn suddenly 

By ARIEL ZILBER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and JAMES PERO FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

A number of pilots in the United States Navy reported seeing unidentified flying objects (UFOs) over American airspace between 2014 and 2015.

One of them, Lt. Ryan Graves, said he saw UFOs on an almost daily basis in the airspace off the Eastern seaboard between Florida and Virginia.

These UFOs would reach altitudes of up to 30,000ft and flew at hypersonic speeds without leaving any visible engine exhaust, Graves told The New York Times.

Graves said he reported what he witnessed to the Pentagon and Congress.

The Times story features video of two encounters Navy pilots allegedly had with UFOs.

The videos include visual radar and voice recordings by pilots who are amazed at what they see.

'What the [expletive] is that thing?' one pilot is heard saying as he is unable to positively identify an object in his radar

A number of pilots have reported seeing objects flying at altitudes of up to 30,000ft above the Eastern seaboard between 2014 and 2015

Pilots said that the flying objects were able to stop suddenly and turn quickly while reaching hypersonic speeds

‘These things would be out there all day,’ Graves said.

‘With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.’

Graves said the most unusual thing about these UFOs was their ability to stop suddenly, turn on a dime, and immediately accelerate to hypersonic speeds.

‘Speed doesn’t kill you,’ Graves said. ‘Stopping does. Or acceleration.’

In 2014, a pilot operating a Super Hornet fighter jet reported that he nearly collided with a UFO.

The pilot recalled that something which resembled a ‘sphere encasing a cube’ flew in between two fighter jets that were flying around 100ft apart from each other.

Another pilot, Lt. Danny Accoin, said he noticed a flying object on his radar, missile system, and infrared camera, but he wasn’t able to see it in his helmet.

‘I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,’ Accoin said.

‘[But] I could not pick it up visually.’

The pilots began to notice more activity after their radar systems were upgraded, but most thought they were false radar tracks.

The UFOs were spotted in areas that were designated for fighter jet training, which makes it unlikely that these were commercial drones or other objects that are classified.

But none of the pilots or the Pentagon would speculate as to what they believed the objects were.

'We’re here to do a job, with excellence, not make up myths,' said Lt. Accoin.

The pilots' claims come a week after a Department of Defense spokesperson reportedly confirmed the Pentagon's interest in UFO's, citing the agency's investigation of 'unidentified aerial phenomena.'  

According to a report from the New York Post, a representative confirmed that the U.S. government studied and investigated the occurrence of mysterious and unexplained aircraft as a part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that was made public in 2017.

Media commentator and former British defense official Nick Pope told the Post that the specific choice of words marks a major step in the way that the government talks about unidentified aircraft. 

'This new admission makes it clear that they really did study what the public would call ‘UFOs,’ he told the Post.

'It also shows the British influence, because UAP was the term we used in the Ministry of Defence to get away from the pop culture baggage that came with the term ‘UFO.'

The shift in terminology comes just weeks after the U.S. Navy unveiled new guidelines on collecting information about UFO sightings.

As reported by Politico, the guidelines are designed to make it easier for sailors to report UFO sightings amid fears that mysterious unidentified flying objects could actually be 'extremely advanced Russian aircraft.' 

The Navy has reported an uptick in the number of 'highly advanced aircraft' encroaching on its air space.

Last week, the Pentagon admitted it had studied 'unidentified aerial phenomena'

Among the sightings were reports from pilots of two U.S. Navy Super Hornet fighters who spotted a UFO on a training mission

'There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years,' a spokesperson for the Navy said to Politico in April.

Throughout the last several years, the U.S. Government has shown an increasing willingness to acknowledge its investigation and interest of UFO's.

In 2017, former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo made headlines when he detailed the existence of the UFO-focused Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program - a $22million government operation that studied UFOs.  

The secretive program sought to identify UFO sightings through U.S. surveillance and eyewitness reports and then 'ascertain and determine if that information is a potential threat to national security.' 

Among the sightings were reports from pilots of two U.S. Navy Super Hornet fighters who spotted a UFO on a training mission.

The pilots reportedly spotted a mysterious vehicle, around 40ft long, oval-shaped and whitish, hovering erratically above the ground.

The craft 'had no plumes, wings or rotors,' but traveled at a mile per second. When pilots approached the object, it easily outran the military jets.

Elizondo resigned from his post in 2017 in protest over what he has termed excessive secrecy and internal opposition to the project. 

Although the Pentagon officially stopped funding the project in 2012, reports from the New York Times suggest the program is still operating.   

Read more:

• ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects - The New York Times

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

28-05-2019 om 18:08 geschreven door peter  

‘Wow, What Is That, Man?’ US Navy Pilot Ryan Graves Reports Seeing UFO Flying at Speeds Unsustainable for Human Making Sudden Stops and Instantaneous Turns

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East coast.

US Navy pilot 

Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who flies an F/18 Super Hornet that has a top speed of 1,190 mph, reports seeing objects that he cannot explain that are flying so fast that it makes his plane appear to stand still. More than that, he has observed these UFOs perform maneuvers that his top-level training tells him could not be performed by human beings. And he didn’t just see them appear for a few minutes, it was sometimes as long as 12-hours straight that he watched them fly. Let that sink in for a moment before reading the rest of this story.

“And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” Luke 17:26 (KJV)

Navy pilots have 

been seeing UFOs flying at speeds that even our fastest jets cannot keep up with, and for years they have been silenced from speaking. Now they are coming forward and telling their amazing stories. We are absolutely being prepared to accept aliens and UFOs, and you can fully expect that our first ‘alien encounter’ might be only a few years away. Little green men, you say? The grays are coming to visit us, is it? No, it is the Nephilim, for they know that their hour, and the power of darkness, ir right around the corner.

‘Wow, what is that?’ Navy pilots report unexplained flying objects

FROM MSN: 

Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014,

a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were captured on video, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department 

is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance. But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage, and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

The program, which began in 2007, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it investigates military reports of UFOs, and Elizondo and other participants say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other forms. The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Leon Golub,

a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and Lieutenant Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.

Graves and Accoin 

spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.

The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.

But Graves said the objects persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level. Then pilots began seeing the objects.

What was strange,

the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

Asked what they thought the objects were, the pilots refused to speculate. READ MORE

UFO spotted by US fighter jet pilots

UFO Spotted: The video was filmed in 2004 and investigated as part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It’s not clear if the object was ever identified. The New York Times reports that the US Department of Defense programme was shut down in 2012.

The post ‘Wow,What Is That, Man?’ US Navy Pilot Ryan Graves Reports Seeing UFO Flying At Speeds Unsustainable For Human Making Sudden Stops And Instantaneous Turns appeared first on Now The End Begins.

Source: 

• https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/us-navy-pilot-ryan-graves-reports-seeing-hypersonic-ufos-advanced-aerospace-threat-identification-program/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

28-05-2019 om 17:48 geschreven door peter  

According to a July 1994 executive summary report available at NSA.gov, titled “Report of Air Force Research Regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’,” officials who revisited the case in the 1990s had mixed feelings about one of the most famous–and contentious–stories of alleged alien contact in the 20th century.

The report suggests that, apart from initial descriptions by newspapers of a “saucer” captured by the USAF on the ranch of Mac Brazel, the case was not considered to be relevant to UFO sightings that were making news at the time. This shift in public attitudes about the case occurred only after civilian investigators revived the story several decades later.

According to the NSA report:

In February, 1994, the General Accounting Office (GAO), acting on the request of a New Mexico Congressman, initiated an audit to attempt to locate records of such an incident and to determine if records regarding it were properly handled… Research revealed that the “Roswell Incident” was not even considered a UFO event until the 1978-1980 time frame. Prior to that, the incident was dismissed because the AAF originally identified the debris recovered as being that of a weather balloon. Subsequently, various authors wrote a number of books claiming that, not only was debris from an alien spacecraft recovered, but also the bodies of the craft’s alien occupants. These claims continue to evolve today and the Air Force is now routinely accused of engaging in a “cover-up” of this supposed event.

Despite this, over the years many hopeful UFO investigators have lived in the shadow of this famous case, which was once taken for being the very “gold standard” of UFO investigative work. Though many still look to Roswell as being among the all-time great cases, enthusiasm has certainly dwindled over time, and not just on account of government agencies issuing “official” dismissals. In fact, some of the leading researchers who once championed the case now argue that there appears to be far less to the entire affair than many once thought.

Kevin Randle, who authored a number of books on the subject, expressed his concerns with those who continue to view Roswell as “evidence” for an extraterrestrial crash landing at his blog, where he wrote:

“For those believing Roswell involved the crash of an alien spacecraft, this has to be worrisome. It is arrayed against testimony that suggests otherwise. The problem is that it is just testimony and over the years much of that testimony has been found to be inaccurate. The longer we investigate the more of these testimonies have fallen by the wayside.”

Kevin Randle appearing in an investigative report on Roswell titled, “Alien Encounters: The Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Connection”

(Credit: Public Domain/National Archives and Records Administration)

Such is the case with much of ufology, and as Randle correctly notes, often with time and further reflection, many of those “gold standard” cases that were once the pillar of ufological interest have to be reexamined, theories revised, and much of the “evidence” does end up being refuted. This tendency to gravitate toward skepticism with time isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion… in fact, it’s what any responsible researcher should do. 

However, stories like the alleged “UFO crash” in North Carolina that I shared in Part One of this series illustrates the longer lasting problems associated with cases like Roswell. While some serious researchers do begin to challenge their once-hopeful views on such cases, others do not. Add to this the aspiring ufologists who jump in the game at a much later time, and work to try and secure new evidence in support of older, now-questionable cases; and yes, some even go so far as to create narratives that resemble smaller-scale versions of “Roswell” of their very own. 

In short, one could argue that the “mythos” surrounding Roswell has persisted well beyond the actual evidence that supports it. The result is that hopeful ufologists living in the long shadow cast by New Mexico’s most famous UFO case aspire to find evidence of similar ground-breaking conspiracies; but the Roswell incident, if we’re being honest here, hasn’t aged very well… and in likelihood, neither will the majority of similar claims of crashes, cover-ups, and conspiracies related to UFO phenomenon that have continued to follow in its wake.

None of this is to say that there aren’t justifiable reasons for the study of UAP (as evidenced by recent developments in relation to U.S. military interest in the subject). However, as we learned in the first part of this article series, people do sometimes mistake simple things like meteors for planes going down… and in some rare instances, even Roswell-style flying saucer “crashes.” Our senses can easily mislead us, and it is a natural human tendency to seek patterns and “order” in things; however, the result can be the furtherance of a UFO narrative that simply may have no part in reality.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

28-05-2019 om 15:00 geschreven door peter  

Researchers estimate that if the massive ice deposits melted, they’d cover the planet in 5 feet (1.5 meters) of water.

A view of Mars showing the planet’s northern polar ice cap.

Image via ISRO/ISSDC/Emily Lakdawalla.

Scientists have discovered remnants of ancient ice sheets buried in sand a mile (1.6 km) beneath Mars’ north pole, they report in a new study.

The team found layers of sand and ice that were as much as 90 percent water in some places. If it melted, the newly-discovered ice would be equivalent to a global layer of water around Mars at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) deep, which could be one of the largest water reservoirs on the planet, according to the researchers.

A vertically exaggerated view of Mars’ north polar cap.

Image via SA/DLR/FU Berlin; NASA MGS MOLA Science Team.

Stefano Nerozzi is a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and lead author of the new study, published May 22, 2019, in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, He said in a statement:

We didn’t expect to find this much water ice here. That likely makes it the third largest water reservoir on Mars after the polar ice caps.

The researchers made the discovery using measurements gathered by an instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, called SHARAD, that emits radar waves that can penetrate up to a mile and a half (2.4 km) beneath Mars’s surface.

The layers of ice are a record of past climate on Mars in much the same way that tree rings are a record of past climate on Earth, according to the researchers. They suspect the layers formed when ice accumulated at the poles during past ice ages on Mars. Each time the planet warmed, a remnant of the ice caps became covered by sand, which protected the ice from solar radiation and prevented it from dissipating into the atmosphere.

Here’s more from a statement from the researchers:

Scientists have long known about glacial events on Mars, which are driven by variations in the planet’s orbit and tilt. Over periods of about 50,000 years, Mars leans toward the sun before gradually returning to an upright position, like a wobbling spinning top. When the planet spins upright, the equator faces the sun, allowing the polar ice caps to grow. As the planet tilts, the ice caps retreat, perhaps vanishing entirely.

Until now, scientists thought the ancient ice caps were lost. The new findings show that in fact significant ice sheet remnants have survived under the planet’s surface, trapped in alternating bands of ice and sand, like layers on a cake.

The photograph, taken with the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, was adjusted to show water ice as light-colored layers and sand as darker layers of blue. The tiny bright white flecks are thin patches of frost.

Image via NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Jack Holt is a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona and co-author of the new study. He said:

Surprisingly, the total volume of water locked up in these buried polar deposits is roughly the same as all the water ice known to exist in glaciers and buried ice layers at lower latitudes on Mars, and they are approximately the same age.

Studying this record of past polar glaciation could help determine whether Mars was ever habitable, according to Nerozzi.

Understanding how much water was available globally versus what’s trapped in the poles is important if you’re going to have liquid water on Mars.You can have all the right conditions for life, but if most of the water is locked up at the poles, then it becomes difficult to have sufficient amounts of liquid water near the equator.

The findings were corroborated by an independent study using gravity data instead of radar, also published today in Geophysical Research Letters.

• Bottom line: Scientists have discovered remnants of ancient ice sheets on Mars buried in sand a mile (1.6 km) beneath Mars’ north pole, which, if melted, could cover the entire planet 5 feet (1.5 m) deep in water.
• Source: Buried ice and sand caps at the north pole of Mars: revealing a record of climate change in the cavi unit with SHARAD
• Via AGU

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

28-05-2019 om 14:45 geschreven door peter  

Black Square UFO Seen Over West Virginia Waching Graduation, May 23, 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: May 24, 2019

Location of sighting: Farmington, West Virginia, USA

 

The eyewitness was attending a students graduation ceremony when they noticed a black hovering object in the distance. The object is hovering in place as if it is watching the graduation ceremony. You can see that the black thin UFO is far behind the tree line, which means this object is close to the size of motorcycle Its also possible that this is a drone, but I have never seen a drone this style or this size before. You know that the eyewitness was intrigue with this object, because they totally ignored the graduation ceremony for a minute to get a good look at this UFO. 

 

I believe this is the same black square UFO I have reported several times over the last few months. It has also been seen over Las Vegas, Springdale Ohio and Conyers Georgia. 

Scott C. Waring

Below are close ups of UFO at Farmington, West Virginia. 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

28-05-2019 om 14:30 geschreven door peter  

Ex Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary of Intelligence For The United States Speaks Out About UFOs

{ https://www.collective-evolution.com/  }

28-05-2019 om 01:52 geschreven door peter  

What happens when young stars brush past each other? A lot, according to a new study suggesting our solar system contains comets stolen from another star 4.5 billion years ago.

I love the video above. It shows what happens when two young stars – still surrounded by their disks of planetesimals, or planet-building blocks – encounter each other. It’s based on recent computer simulations, part of a newly published study by astrophysicists at the University of Zurich, describing how our solar system likely contains comets stolen from a star that swept near our sun 4.5 billion years ago. Stars like our sun are born in clusters. Our sun is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old. So we’re talking about the very young sun here, newly emerged from the cloud of gas and dust that created it and its sister stars. The new study says that, when two young stars meet, their encircling disks mix it up, literally. In particular, the outer planetesimals of the smaller star are heavily disrupted by its higher-mass sibling. Some planetesimals – chunks of rocky or icy material – switch from one star system to the other. They are “stolen,” in other words.

And some planetesimals leave both star systems behind entirely. Tom Hands, who led the new study, explained:

[The encounter] causes a bunch of planetesimals to be ejected, flying away to become things like ‘Oumuamua [the small interstellar object that recently swept near our sun]. I was surprised by the number of ‘Oumuamua-like free-floating objects that can be generated in an environment like this on a relatively short time-scale.

‘Oumuamua is a now-famous object among astronomers, who noticed it and began tracking its movement through our solar system in 2017. Though many free-floating objects are thought to exist, ‘Oumuamua is the only small interstellar object seen moving in our solar system so far. It’s not attached to our sun, or any star. That’s how it received its name, which is Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.” Astronomers don’t know where ‘Oumuamua came from, exactly. Speaking about the new study, Tom Hands and his colleagues’ statement said:

… it is clear that free-floating planetesimals, comets and asteroids should be ubiquitous in the galaxy.

This diagram shows the path of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua – the first known interstellar object to pass through our solar system – as it was sweeping toward our sun in late 2017, rounded the sun, and then began moving outward again. ‘Oumuamua passed the distance of Jupiter’s orbit in May 2018. It passed the distance of Saturn’s orbit in January 2019. It will reach a distance corresponding to Neptune’s orbit in 2022, according to some studies.

Image via SpaceTelescope.org.

‘Oumuamua made headlines after it was discovered in October 2017. Many theories have been suggested to explain its origin, including the possibility of its being an alien spacecraft.

Researchers at the University of Zürich used large computer simulations to show how ‘Oumuamua-style objects can be set on their solitary paths through space. They calculated what happens when multiple young stars are born together in a stellar cluster, much as our sun is thought to have been 4.5 billion years ago. Most of what astronomers call planetesimals – the building blocks of planets – ultimately do become planets, comets and asteroids while the stars are still in their infancy. But not all do. Tom Hands commented:

Coming into close contact with other stars can have a profound effect on these planetary systems.

I was also surprised by the ease with which stars can steal material from their stellar siblings at a young age.

Artist’s concept of the cigar-shaped interstellar object ‘Oumuamua.

Image via ESA/Hubble, NASA, ESO, M. Kornmesser, NCCR PlanetS.

Even now, our sun might retain alien comets stolen from another star in these early phases. Hands said:

Even if alien material is really there, there likely isn’t much of it. But we might be able to detect it based on the strange orbits this stuff could be on.

Hands said his research has relevance to the ongoing search for a ninth planet in our solar system, which is based on an odd alignment of orbits of small objects in the outer solar system. He said the results of his study suggest that a large, unseen ninth planet isn’t the only plausible explanation for this observed alignment. Hands commented:

People should keep an open mind when considering how these things might have ended up on the orbits they are on.

Finally, he commented:

This is the first time we have been able to get a feeling for how the cluster environment could affect our Kuiper belt, or similar structures in exoplanetary systems

And I don’t think he’s boasting there. It seems like novel research to me. Forty-plus years ago, when I started writing about astronomy, we’d sometimes hear astronomers say that comets in the Oort Cloud could be dislodged by “passing stars” and thereby be sent hurtling in toward our sun. I always wondered which passing stars, and when, and what went on there? To my knowledge, this study doesn’t relate specifically to Oort Cloud comets; it does talk about objects in the Kuiper Belt, though, which are also in our solar system’s outer reaches, at a lesser distance from our sun. Both Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt material would surely be affected by an encounter with another star 4.5 billion years ago. It’s great to have an actual simulation, at last, that provides concrete images of this long-discussed encounter.

And, by the way – on an entirely different subject – I found a second super cool video at Tom Hands’ website, also based on his computer simulations. You might enjoy it, too, so I posted it below. It’s an exoplanet visualization, based on data from the Open Exoplanet Catalog. He described the video below as:

… a flyby of all known exoplanets around single stars. The systems are ordered according to the largest semi-major axis (planet-star separation) within each of them, from largest to smallest. The systems that you fly past first contain planets which takes hundreds or even thousands of years to orbit their stars, while by the end they take mere hours or days. Designed to give the viewer an overview of the current distribution of exoplanets.

Amazing, right? Thanks, Tom!

You’ll find Tom Hands on Twitter as @TomHandsPhysics.

• Bottom line: A new study from Tom Hands and colleagues at the University of Zurich suggests our solar system contains comets stolen from another star 4.5 billion years ago. The interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua might be an example of an object dislodged from its original solar system in that way. According to this study, there might be many free-floating objects like ‘Oumuamua in our galaxy.
• Source: The fate of planetesimal discs in yung open clusters: implications for 1I/’Oumuamua, the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud and more
• Via NCCR PlanetS

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

28-05-2019 om 01:27 geschreven door peter