Batman Existed in Mesoamerican Mythology and His Name Was Camazotz

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

30-05-2019 om 01:38 geschreven door peter  

On May 26, 2019, the New York Times published a story about five US Navy pilots reporting UFO sightings in 2014 and 2015 off the coast of Florida. The story cites their descriptions of unknown craft that could fly at hypersonic speeds and hover over the ocean. Their reports were handed off to the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

The five Navy pilots were interviewed by the New York Times reporters about the UFO sightings that occurred while they were conducting training maneuvers off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt before deployment to the Middle East. The Times reporters said that due to the 2014 and 2015 sightings, that the Navy upgraded its classified guidance for how pilots are to report UFOs, which now are officially referred to as Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP).

A video was included of one of the UFO incidents where the pilots could be heard exclaiming: “Wow, what is that, man? Look at it fly!” The video had been released over a year earlier and was the subject of a March 12, 2018, Fox News interview with Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official, who headed AATIP from its 2007 up to 2017 when he retired in protest over the lack of support the program was receiving.

In the Times story, the pilots made clear that no known piloted aircraft could perform the UFO’s complex aerial maneuvers:

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.

They speculated that the UFOs might be part of a highly advanced drone program that raised several safety issues due to the possibility of a midair collision. They refused to speculate further about the UFO’s origins. Earlier in April 2019, the Navy issued new guidelines for reporting UFO sightings, and cited safety concerns as a factor for the need to improve the reporting process.

There are several important takeaways from this latest New York Times story that follows a December 16, 2017 story that analyzed similar sightings reported by Navy pilots back in 2004.

The first is that the US Navy is allowing its pilots to go on the public record about UFO sightings that have national security implications. This has effectively reversed a decades-long military policy dating back to 1954 called JANAP 146(C), which forbade military and civilian pilots discussing UFO sightings that were deemed to have national security implications. JANAP 146 referred to possible prosecution under Espionage Laws for unauthorized transmission of UFO sightings reported by military and civilian pilots that fell under the official reporting mechanism established by JANAP.  

The second takeaway is that the Pentagon is allowing official military surveillance video to be leaked to the public about a phenomenon which on the surface appears unknown, at least to the pilots witnessing them. It is more than likely, however, that the phenomenon is very well known to the military hierarchy who have sanctioned the leaking of the videos, which it needs to be emphasized are official Navy videos whose unauthorized disclosure carries severe penalties as JANAP 146 makes clear.

Third, the fact that the New York Times has released the story is sending a clear signal to other mainstream media sources that it is OK to discuss UFO sightings and their national security implications. We can, therefore, expect many more mainstream media stories about UFOs/UAPs in the near future as evidenced by multiple news sources immediately reporting on the Times story.

What can be concluded about the mainstream media’s newfound enthusiasm to discuss pilot reports of UFO?

It’s important to emphasize that there is no way the Pentagon would reverse its decades-long policy (JANAP 146) unless it was convinced that it could adequately explain the national security implications of UFO sightings. It’s more than likely the video leaks and pilot interviews are part of an official disclosure process of advanced aerospace technologies that are well known to US military leaders.

The Pentagon is slowly educating the public about advanced technologies it has secretly developed. There is abundant and compelling evidence that both the USAF and US Navy have developed secret space programs that utilize the kind of advanced aerospace technologies witnessed by the Navy pilots in the 2014/2015 and 2004 incidents.

It is most likely, however, that the US Air Force’s arsenal of advanced aerospace technologies will be the first secret space program that is to be revealed given the abundance of evidence proving its existence as I have documented in the US Air Force Secret Space Program. While the Navy program focused on deep space operations, the Air Force focused on near Earth operations and its craft deployed technologies that will be easier to explain as human engineered.

It will help the unfolding UFO disclosure narrative greatly if US Navy pilots are bewildered by the advanced technologies they are witnessing, thereby pointing to such technologies belonging to another military service. This will deflect attention away from the Navy SSP to the Air Force’s SSP.

It’s becoming very clear that the Pentagon has decided to move forward with preparing the general public for future announcements of advanced aerospace technologies that have been secretly developed in highly classified programs. This will be used to explain the origins of many UFO sightings over the decades, including those witnessed by military pilots that were studied by AATIP. I for one, don’t believe all UFO sightings can be explained as terrestrially developed advanced technologies, but certainly a great many are.

The advanced aerospace technologies secretly developed by the Air Force, as I explain in the US Air Force Secret Space Program, will be gradually disclosed with the official launch of Space Force, which is part of a long term strategic plan to eventually disclose and merge all advanced aerospace technologies developed by different branches of the US military.  In the meantime, to get more information about AATIP and multiple military pilot reports of UFOs since 2007, you can tune in this Friday to the official launch of the History Channel’s, “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation”.

© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice

Further Reading

• New Book! US Air Force Secret Space Program – Shifting ET Alliances & Space Force
• Do We Need Space Force to Protect us from Space Pirates?
• Trump’s Plan for US Space Force challenges Deep State Secrecy
• Trump call for Space Force a Step towards Disclosure of USAF Secret Space Program
• Is US Congress Proposal for a Space Corps a Red Herring?
• Partial Disclosure and Competing Secret Space Programs

{ https://www.exopolitics.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 01:21 geschreven door peter  

US Navy orders laser cannon to be mounted on active warship within a year

A fully operational laser cannon is about to be fitted to a US destroyer. It will be the first time such a weapon will be carried by an active warship.

Jamie Seidel

It’s big. It’s bright. It’s dangerous. And it will go to sea on a front-line warship for the first time before 2021. The US Navy has announced it has ordered Lockheed Martin to fit a High Energy Laser Integrated Optical weapon with Surveillance (HELIOS) aboard a destroyer in its Pacific fleet.

The 60-kilowatt laser cannon is capable of burning holes in boats and melting vital components on drones. Ultimately, it’s hoped the defensive weapon will be able to sear incoming hypersonic missiles out of the sky.

The US Navy has placed a $US150 million order for two of the devices.

But Russia is already rolling out a similar system to defend its ground-based installations.

Artist’s rendering of Lockheed Martin’s HELIOS system.

Picture: Lockheed MartinSource:Supplied

ALL ABOARD

“We are going to burn the boats if you will and move forward with this technology,” Rear Admiral Ron Boxall told the 2019 Directed Energy Summit.

One laser cannon will be installed at the White Sands Missile Range for testing, Lockheed Martin says. The other will be installed upon a modern Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer.

• MORE: The future of combat, according to the US Air Force
• RELATED: Australia’s Air Force buys flying ‘killer robots’

“The HELIOS program is the first of its kind, and brings together laser weapon, long-range ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and counter-UAS (Unmanned Aerial System) capabilities, dramatically increasing the situational awareness and layered defence options available to the US Navy,” says Lockheed Martin spokesman Michele Evans.

The challenge will be getting it to work in harmony with all the other sensors and weapons systems attached to the destroyer’s complex AEGIS computer network.

“The problem I have today is the integration of that system into my existing combat system. If I’m going to burn the boats, I’m going to replace something I have today with that system doing that mission with these weapons,” Admiral Boxall said.

“If I have this system that can kill and I have a system that can actually sense, then I have to make sure it integrates with the other things I have on my ship that can sense and kill, namely the Aegis weapon system.”

It’s not the first time the US Navy has sent a laser weapon to sea.

It did so with the USS Ponce, amphibious transport ship converted to test new technologies, in 2014. Named LaWS (Laser Weapon System), that experimental cannon had only one third the strength of the new device.

HELIOS, however, is hoped to meet a new generation of threats.

A group of Arleigh Burke Class Destroyers fire missiles during a training exercise. One of these ships will soon be fitted with the world's first operational laser cannon to go to sea.

Picture: US Navy Source:Supplied

BABY STEPS

It’s hoped HELIOS will be fast enough and strong enough to cripple swarms of armed speedboats, such as those used by Iran in the Persian Gulf.

It’s also hoped it will be accurate enough to counter swarms of cheap drones — whether through the raw power of its laser or its ability to ‘dazzle’ some sensors.

These capabilities are nothing new. Current generation automatic Phalanx gattling-guns and Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) systems do the same thing.

It’s just that it takes time to reload these defensive weapons, and only limited stocks of ammunition can be carried. A Phalanx can only fire for a total of 20 seconds before it is emptied. And RAM launchers only come with 21 missiles each.

• DELVE DEEPER: Why the US wants to battle among the stars
• EXPLORE MORE: How hypersonic weapons changed war forever

What both RAM and Phalanx can do that the HELIOS can’t is shoot down attacking cruise missiles.

Nevertheless, facing a threat potentially involving hundreds of cheap drones and dozens of small attack boats, the US Navy finds the ability for HELIOS to be recharged any number of times by the ship’s own engines appealing.

And it hopes ongoing development of the laser will soon give it an antimissile capability.

“It’s a crawl, walk, run approach,” Admiral Boxall told the US Naval Institute.

A third, less defined, feature of HELIOS is an ability to provide long-range surveillance. This may involve the weapon’s new targeting system, or a digital scan mode for the laser itself.

Russia's Peresvet laser cannon unfolds from the back of a truck. It is believed to be an area-defence weapon, similar to the US Navy's HELIOS system.

Picture: Russian Ministry of Defence Source:Supplied

RUSSIA’S LASER CANNON

One of President Vladimir Putin’s six new ‘superweapons’ announced a year ago is now rolling out into active service.

It’s called Peresvet. It’s a truck-mounted laser cannon probably intended to defend an area from hostile drones and missiles.

Exactly what it is capable of is unknown.

But Moscow is hyping its new weapon, releasing a series of videos and reports on the advanced technology.

“Peresvet laser systems, based on new physical principles, entered combat service in [a] testing regime with the Russian armed forces,” the Russian Defence Ministry’s news service said in December.

{ https://www.news.com.au/ }

30-05-2019 om 01:06 geschreven door peter  

30-05-2019 om 00:55 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Cook Up a New Way to Make Breathable Oxygen on Mars

By Elizabeth Howell 

The tech could someday aid crewed Red Planet exploration.

Mars, as imaged by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in the 1970s.

(Image: © NASA/JPL/USGS)

Scientists have found a new way that future Mars explorers could potentially generate their own oxygen.

Mars is a long way from Earth, so being able to create breathable air on-site would save money and effort in having to haul oxygen all the way from our own planet.

A research team discovered this new oxygen-generating reaction by studying comets. Most of these small icy worlds originate in a distant area of the solar system known as the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbit of Neptune. If a comet's orbit brings it close to the sun, heat begins pushing cometary ice off into space. This reaction produces long tails that can stretch for thousands of miles.

• Related: 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars

A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena found a new way to explain how comets generate molecular oxygen, the two atoms of oxygen that come together to form breathable air.

One already-known method is through kinetic energy. A sublimating comet is a busy environment, where the solar wind (the constant stream of particles emanating from the sun) can push floating water molecules into the comet's surface at high speed. If there are oxygen-containing compounds on the surface, careening water molecules can rip oxygen atoms off and produce molecular oxygen.

Molecular oxygen can also be produced through carbon dioxide reactions, the team found. (Carbon dioxide contains a single carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.) Former Caltech postdoctoral fellow Yunxi Yao and current Caltech chemical engineering professor Konstantinos Giapis simulated this reaction by crashing carbon dioxide into gold foil. Since gold foil cannot be oxidized, by itself it should not produce any molecular oxygen. But when carbon dioxide careens into the foil at high speed, the gold surface emits molecular oxygen. 

(Image: © Caltech)

"This meant that both atoms of oxygen come from the same CO2 [carbon dioxide] molecule, effectively splitting it in an extraordinary manner," Caltech representatives said in a statement.

To better understand how carbon dioxide can break down into molecular oxygen, Caltech chemistry professor Tom Miller and postdoctoral fellow Philip Shushkov created a computer simulation.

One challenge in modeling the reaction is that the reacting molecules are very "excited," meaning they vibrate and rotate in a complex way, the researchers said.

"In general, excited molecules can lead to unusual chemistry, so we started with that," Miller said in the statement. "But, to our surprise, the excited state did not create molecular oxygen. Instead, the molecule decomposed into other products."

Rather, the scientists discovered that extremely "bent" carbon dioxide molecules —  those with an unusual geometry — can be created without exciting the carbon dioxide. This in turn would produce oxygen.

When Yao and Giapis smashed the carbon dioxide molecules into gold foil, they electrically charged the individual carbon dioxide molecules and then accelerated them using an electric field. However, Giapis said the reaction could take place at a slower speed as well, which could account for why there is some oxygen floating high in the Martian atmosphere. 

"You could throw a stone with enough velocity at some CO2 [carbon dioxide] and achieve the same thing," he said in the statement. "It would need to be traveling about as fast as a comet or asteroid travels through space."

• Related: How Living on Mars Could Challenge Colonists

Before, scientists thought that Mars' tiny concentration of atmospheric oxygen is probably generated after ultraviolet light from the sun hits carbon dioxide molecules in the Red Planet's air. Giapis theorizes, however, that Martian oxygen could also be generated when dust particles, accelerated to high speed in the atmosphere, crash into molecules of carbon dioxide.

The reactor Giapis used is very low-yield, generating only one or two oxygen molecules for every 100 carbon dioxide molecules careening through the accelerator. Giapis said, however, that perhaps his reactor could be modified one day to create breathable air for astronauts on Mars. And on Earth, the reactor may be useful to pull carbon dioxide (which is also a potent greenhouse gas, and the main driver of global warming) out of the atmosphere and convert it into oxygen.

"Is it a final device? No. Is it a device that can solve the problem with Mars? No," he said. "But it is a device that can do something that is very hard. We are doing some crazy things with this reactor."

A paper based on the research, led by Yao, was published last week in the journal Nature Communications.

By the way, NASA is about to give oxygen-generating tech a test run on Mars. A technology demonstrator called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment) will fly aboard the agency's 2020 Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch next summer and land on the Red Planet in February 2021. MOXIE will split atmospheric carbon dioxide electrochemically, and NASA wants to see if the method could be scaled up to help support people on the Red Planet.

• Mars Myths & Misconceptions: Quiz
• A Crewed Mars Mission: How NASA Could Do It
• NASA's Mars Rover 2020 Mission in Pictures (Gallery)

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 00:31 geschreven door peter  

A hotter Arctic means more extreme weather elsewhere on the globe

BY MIHAI ANDREI 

A new computer model confirms that the warming Arctic produces strong winds and extreme weather in the northern hemisphere, where 90% of Earth’s population is living.

Clouds along a jet stream over Canada.

Image credits: NASA.

We often talk about climate change as if it’s a uniform thing, but the planetary average is not representative of all the places on Earth. Since 1901, the planet’s surface has warmed by 0.7–0.9° Celsius, but the Arctic area has warmed up almost twice as much, and Alaska and western Canada’s temperatures have risen by 3 to 4 °C.

At first glance, you might think that’s a good thing. After all, very few people live in the Arctic, and its ecosystem also isn’t particularly rich. However, what’s happening in the Arctic can have cascading effects on the rest of the planet. For instance, it means that snow and ice will melt at an accelerated pace, giving way to darker soil and water, which absorb even more solar energy and create a warming feedback loop. Melting ice also causes sea level rise, as well as the release of methane trapped in the Arctic permafrost. Also, a warming Arctic can mess up the global wind circulation, particularly something called the jet stream.

Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering air currents, typically marking the boundary between the cold polar air and the warmer air mass to the south. For decades, researchers have tried to assess the impact that climate change has on the Arctic jet stream, and the cascading effects this impact will have on local weather in the northern hemisphere.

In recent years, wind data shows that these jet streams increasingly faltering. They are also changing course, being less often parallel on the Equator, and instead, sweeping across different areas of the northern hemisphere. This does not only cause strong winds locally, but also injects cold Arctic air into lower latitudes, as was the case with the extreme coldthat struck the Midwest of the USA in late January 2019. At the same time, a weakened jet stream can lead to prolonged heatwaves and drought, as was experienced in Europe in 2015 and 2018. In other words, although some politicians seem to have difficulties grasping this concept, climate change altering the jet stream can produce more extreme weather — both cold and warm.

However, while the general principle was clear, the observations did not exactly fit the existing climate models — until now. The breakthrough came when researchers incorporated ozone chemistry into their model using a new machine learning algorithm. When this was added to existing models, the results fit the observations perfectly.

“We’ve developed a machine learning algorithm that allows us to represent the ozone layer as an interactive element in the model, and in so doing, to reflect the interactions from the stratosphere and ozone layer,” says first author and atmospheric researcher Erik Romanowsky. “With the new model system we can now realistically reproduce the observed changes in the jet stream.”

The reason why ozone is important is that sea-ice retreat creates an area of ozone-amplified warming in the polar stratosphere. This warming is counterbalancing the frigid temperatures which act as the engine of the jet stream, essentially weakening these air currents.

In turn, this indicates that it’s not just the warming directly, but the loss of sea ice that’s causing changes in the jet stream.

“Our study shows that the changes in the jet stream are at least partly due to the loss of Arctic sea ice. If the ice cover continues to dwindle, we believe that both the frequency and intensity of the extreme weather events previously observed in the middle latitudes will increase,” says Prof Markus Rex, also an author of the study. “In addition, our findings confirm that the more frequently occurring cold phases in winter in the USA, Europe and Asia are by no means a contradiction to global warming; rather, they are a part of anthropogenic climate change.”

The study also represents an important technological achievement — the use of machine learning to substantially improve climate models and improve our understanding on the planet we live on.

• Journal Reference: Romanowsky et al. The role of stratospheric ozone for Arctic-midlatitude linkages. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-43823-1

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

29-05-2019 om 22:43 geschreven door peter  

Mysterious gassy 'Forbidden Planet' discovered 920 light years from Earth shouldn't exist so close to its host star as its 1,832°F atmosphere should have burned away, experts say

• 'Forbidden' is the moniker for the planet known formally as NGTs-4B
• Is 3 times the size of Earth, 20 times the mass and found 920 light years away 
• Atmosphere is hotter than Mercury with temperatures exceeding 1,000°C
• Found in a 'Neptunian Desert' which is a region around a star where Neptune-sized planets were thought not to exist

By JOE PINKSTONE FOR MAILONLINE

A gaseous planet roughly the size of Neptune which was recently discovered is being cited as an astrological anomaly because it shouldn't exist.

NGTS-4B, dubbed the 'Forbidden planet', was found in a region referred to as a celestial 'desert' 920 light years from Earth.

The planet has a surface temperature of 1,800°C and defies all previous research by existing so close to its star that its atmosphere should have evaporated. 

This wasteland around a star caused by immense levels of radiation was thought to create a swath of space devoid of any gassy planets. 

But 'Forbidden' has been spotted in the middle of this zone orbiting every 1.3 days around a star 920 light years away from Earth.  

Scroll down for video 

NGTS-4B, dubbed the 'Forbidden planet' (artist's impression, pictured), defies all previous research by existing close so close to its star that its atmosphere should have evaporated

The Neptunian planet, known formally as NGTs-4b, was found by telescopes run by the University of Warwick in an international collaboration of astronomers. 

It is 20 per cent smaller than Neptune, about three times the size of Earth and has a surface temperature of more than 1,000°C (1.800°F) - hotter than Mercury. 

Nick-named 'The Forbidden Planet' by researchers it orbits around the star in only 1.3 days and is the first exoplanet of its kind to have been found in the Neptunian Desert.

It was thought a large planet the size of NGTs-4b would not be sustainable this close to a host star as the immense radiation would cause the gases to evaporate and disappear, leaving just a rocky core behind. 

Researchers at the University of Warwick are unsure why the planet defies logic and exists in its current location. 

They speculate the planet either wandered to its current position recently - within the last million years or so - or it was previously even larger than its current girth and the atmosphere is still evaporating. 

Experts discovered it when it orbited in front of the star and caused its brightness to dip by just 0.2 per cent. 

Dr Richard West, from the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick comments: 'This planet must be tough - it is right in the zone where we expected Neptune-sized planets could not survive. 

'It is truly remarkable that we found a transiting planet via a star dimming by less than 0.2 per cent - this has never been done before by telescopes on the ground, and it was great to find after working on this project for a year.

'We are now scouring out data to see if we can see any more planets in the Neptune Desert – perhaps the desert is greener than was once thought.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

29-05-2019 om 22:32 geschreven door peter  

Researchers find ‘Forbidden Planet’ orbiting closer to its parent star than we thought it could

BY ALEXANDRU MICU

Astronomers have discovered a Neptune-like exoplanet in an area where it shouldn’t be able to hold its atmosphere together. Pictured: Neptune.
Image via Pixabay.

The rogue exoplanet, which comes complete with its very own atmosphere, has been discovered by an international team of researchers, a collaborative effort that included members from the Universities of Warwick, Leicester, Cambridge, and the Queen’s University Belfast, together with Observatoire de Genève, DLR Berlin, and Universidad de Chile.

What’s strange about this planet is that, according to our understanding of astrophysics, it shouldn’t be able to exist on its current orbit — yet, it does. NGTS-4b, also nicknamed ‘The Forbidden Planet’ by its discoverers, is a Neptune-like exoplanet about three times the size of Earth. It orbits its star in what is known as the Neptunian Desert, an area where planets of its ilk cannot remain stable.

The Desert Wanderer

“This planet must be tough — it is right in the zone where we expected Neptune-sized planets could not survive,” says Dr. West, from the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, first author of the study describing the findings.

“We are now scouring out data to see if we can see any more planets in the Neptune Desert — perhaps the desert is greener than was once thought.”

NGTS-4b has around 20 times the mass of Earth, and is about 4/5ths the size of Neptune. It’s also around 1000 degrees Celsius.

That temperature is the product of how close NGTS-4b orbits around its star — the two are so close that NGTS-4b does a full orbit around it in 1.3 days. To give you a rough comparison, the Earth takes 1 year to move around the Sun. This orbiting time increases proportionally with distance.

Because it’s so close to its host star, NGTS-4b falls into what is known as the Neptunian Desert, which is understandably quite unexpected for a Neptunian planet. This is a region close to stars where no Neptune-sized planets are found. It’s highly irradiated and swept by solar winds, meaning that any planets in this area are stripped of their atmosphere, leaving behind just a hot, rocky core (similar to Mercury). However, NGTS-4b still retains its atmosphere.

The rogue planet was identified through the NGTS (Next-Generation Transit Survey), a ground-based robotic search for exoplanets carried out at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in the heart of the Atacama Desert, Chile. When looking for new planets, astronomers hone their telescopes on a particular star and then wait for a dip in the light it’s putting out. These dips are caused by planets orbiting said star and blocking the light. Usually, only dips of 1% and more are picked up by ground-based searches, but the NGTS telescopes can pick up a dip of just 0.2% — as was the case for NGTS-4b.

“It is truly remarkable that we found a transiting planet via a star dimming by less than 0.2% — this has never been done before by telescopes on the ground, and it was great to find after working on this project for a year.”

Researchers believe the planet may have moved into the Neptunian Desert recently, in the last one million years, or it was very big and the atmosphere is still evaporating.

• The paper “NGTS-4b: A sub-Neptune transiting in the desert” has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

29-05-2019 om 22:19 geschreven door peter  

AI can create convincing talking head from a single picture or painting

 BY TIBI PUIU 

Researchers used machine learning to create an amazing AI that can create eerie videos of people talking starting from a single frame — a picture or even a painting. The ‘talking head’ in the videos follows the motions of a source face (a real person), whose facial landmarks are applied to the facial data of the target face. As you can see in the presentation video below, the target face mimics the facial expressions and verbal cues of the source. This is how the authors brought Einstein, Salvador Dalí, and even Mona Lisa to life using only a photograph.

This sort of application of machine learning isn’t new. For some years, researchers have been working on algorithms that generate videos which swap faces. However, this kind of software required a lot of training data in video form (at least a couple of minutes of content) in order to generate a realistic moving face for the source. Other efforts rendered 3D faces from a single picture, but could not generate motion pictures.

Credit: Samsung

Computer engineers at Samsung’s AI Center in Moscow took it to the next level. Their artificial neural network is capable of generating a face that turns, speaks, and can make expressions starting from only a single image of a person’s face. The researchers call this technique “single-shot learning”. Of course, the end result looks plainly doctored, but the life-like quality increases dramatically when the algorithm is trained with more images or frames.

Credit: Samsung.

The authors also employed Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) — deep neural net architectures comprised of two nets, pitting one against the other. Basically, each model tries to outsmart the other by creating the appearance of something “real”. This competition promotes a higher level of realism.

If you pay close attention to the outputted faces, you’ll notice that they’re not perfect. There are artifacts and weird bugs that call out the fakeness. That being said this is surely some very impressive work. The next obvious step is making Mona Lisa move her lower body as well. In the future, she might dance for the first time in hundreds of years — or her weird AI avatar, at least.

• The work was documented in the preprint server Arxiv.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

29-05-2019 om 22:09 geschreven door peter  

UFOs are not the same thing as extraterrestrial life. But we should start thinking about that possibility.

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

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

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/ }

29-05-2019 om 21:15 geschreven door peter  

29-05-2019 om 21:01 geschreven door peter  

29-05-2019 om 20:58 geschreven door peter  

WAAROM MOGEN PILOTEN NU VRIJUIT PRATEN OVER UFO'S? ( VIDEO )

Tot nog niet zo gek lang geleden hielden de meeste piloten, zowel burger als militaire, hun kaken stijf op elkaar als ze iets vreemds in de lucht zagen. 

Nu verschijnt er een uitgebreide reportage in de New York Times waarin Amerikaanse marine piloten vertellen wat ze hebben gezien.

Dat was toen revolutionair, ook al vond de gebeurtenis plaats in 2004, want nog nooit eerder was er in de verste verte ook maar iets bekendgemaakt door de overheid over onbekende niet geïdentificeerde vliegende objecten. 

Velen vonden het gebeuren opwindend en eindelijk de eerste stap naar volledige Disclosure. 

Anderen maanden tot grote voorzichtigheid en zagen in dat wat er gebeurde meer als een poging tot het langzaam maar zeker bekend gaan maken van de geheime ruimtevloot, zoals wij toen schreven: 

Hoe dan ook, het proces van meer openheid over onbekende vliegende objecten zette zich voort en vorige maand schreven wij een artikel over hoe de Amerikaanse marine nu nieuwe procedures heeft ontwikkeld voor het melden van onbekende objecten door piloten. 

Dit is alweer een stap in de goede richting en nu deze week verschijnt er een uitgebreid artikel in de New York Times, waarin een aantal marine piloten vertellen over de vrij recente ontmoetingen die ze hebben gehad met onbekende vliegende objecten. 

Objecten die manoeuvres uitvoeren die door geen enkel menselijk vliegtuig mogelijk zouden zijn, zoals het versnellen in enkele seconden tot hypersonische snelheden en het maken van onmogelijke bochten. 

Zelfs het verhaal over een aantal vliegers die bijna in botsing kwamen met een dergelijk object en hoe deze wel zichtbaar waren op de radar, maar niet met het blote oog. Dit wijst erop dat ze beschikken over een techniek die ze “cloaking” noemen, het onzichtbaar maken. 

Het bovenstaande verhaal wordt verder besproken en toegelicht in onderstaande video van Tyler van Secureteam, door Paul Harmans voorzien van een Nederlandse ondertiteling (dank!). 

Paul schrijft er het volgende bij: 

Het Pentagon heeft niet zo lang geleden nieuwe regels opgesteld waarbinnen militaire piloten met hun UFO-waarneming uit de weg kunnen. Voorheen stond op het publiekelijk bekend maken door militaire piloten van een dergelijke waarneming 10 jaar gevangenisstraf of 10.000 dollar boete of beide! Geen wonder dat je van militaire piloten weinig of niets hoorde betreffende hun ervaringen met het UFO-fenomeen. Dat er duizenden burgerpiloten zijn die wel over hun UFO-waarneming praten (vraag vooral je krantje waarom zij daar nooit aandacht aan besteden!), geeft wel aan dat nagenoeg elke piloot tijdens zijn jarenlange carrière wel een vreemd object, of zelfs meerdere, in de lucht heeft waargenomen. En militaire piloten zullen daar veel intensiever mee geconfronteerd worden, omdat zij erop af worden gestuurd om poolshoogte te nemen en het object te dwingen te landen. Iets dat voor zover bekend nog nooit is gelukt. Wel bekend is dat het in de jaren '50 aan honderden piloten het leven heeft gekost, omdat de UFO zich verweerde door de militaire jet te laten neerstorten. 

Nu met de nieuwe regels komen er meer militaire piloten naar buiten met hun waarneming. Het UFO-fenomeen is voornamelijk sinds vorig jaar en dit jaar in een wat beter daglicht komen te staan dankzij de onthulling dat het Pentagon al jaren onderzoek doet naar het fenomeen en het vrijgeven door het Pentagon van een aantal video's van militaire piloten die UFO's achtervolgen en waarbij de UFO duidelijk is te zien en de betreffende piloten hun verhaal mogen doen. 

Sceptici blijven tegen beter weten in beweren dat het toch echt uitsluitend gaat om geheime techniek van de overheid en/of verbeelding en grappenmakerij. Maar waarom dergelijke techniek dan zonder medeweten van het leger en de marine opduikt tijdens hun oefeningen en de kans loopt neergeschoten te worden door notabene de eigen troepen, is een vraag die sceptici negeren. Ook het feit dat onderzoekers op het Pentagon toegeven in het duister te tasten omtrent de herkomst van de objecten en bedekt toegeven dat het beslist niet is uitgesloten dat het om een buitenaardse aanwezigheid gaat, dringt tot de harde kern van sceptici niet door, lees: ze willen dat niet weten, ze dienen een macht (de Deep State) die alle kennis en techniek die eventueel aan dit fenomeen valt te onttrekken voor zichzelf wil houden. Sceptici die stomweg geloven dat het Pentagon een miljoenenkostend en jarenlang onderzoeksprogramma opzet om onderzoek te doen naar de herkomst van hun eigen objecten die twee deuren verder in de gang zijn uitgedacht!? Onderzoeken naar het UFO-fenomeen die de Amerikaanse luchtmacht al in de jaren '40 begon en die tot op de dag van vandaag dus nog steeds bestaan, nu onder het beheer van het Pentagon. Overigens is het niet alleen de VS die dat onderzoek in het geheim doet, nagenoeg elke luchtmacht van ieder land doet het, ze willen allemaal een deel van de techniek en kennis bemachtigen. 

Bedenk dat het hier beslist kan gaan om kennis en techniek die de hele wereld ten goede kan veranderen. Als UFO's van buitenaardse herkomst zijn, vliegen ze niet op stookolie die je niet verder dan halverwege de maan zal brengen omdat dan de tank al leeg is. Niet met een boordcomputer met daarop windows die al gecrasht is voordat je in een baan om de aarde zit. Niet met een TomTom die je meldt: 'indien mogelijk keren' als je de dampkring nog niet hebt verlaten en niet met een medicijnkistje gevuld met aspirine en pleisters. Ze vliegen dan op een exotische vorm van voortstuwing waarmee de op fossiele brandstoffen gebaseerde aardse wijze van voortbewegen subiet wordt weggevaagd als bekend wordt hoe hun aandrijving werkt. Windows en computers kunnen op de schroothoop als we weten hoe de bemanning van UFO's informatie verwerken. En TomToms die niet weten hoe je een bestemming op lichtjaren afstand moet vinden kunnen bij het grof vuil. Chemische medicijnen met uitsluitend bijwerkingen zullen door een vergevorderde beschaving allang vervangen zijn door een totaal andere vorm van genezen. 

Alles waar de aardse Deep State jaarlijks triljoenen dollars aan verdient, staat op het spel als ze toegeven dat het UFO-fenomeen van buitenaardse herkomst is en onze wetenschap er daadwerkelijk serieus onderzoek naar gaat doen. Geen wonder dat de Deep State al sinds de jaren '40 van de vorige eeuw het fenomeen in de doofpot stopt en het bewust belachelijk heeft gemaakt zodat de meeste mensen er ver vandaan blijven, bang om ook uitgelachen te worden. En dat geldt ook voor de gevestigde media, die lopen al aan het handje van de Deep State, maar in het geval van UFO's durven journalisten daar sowieso niet serieus over te schrijven, bang om door collega's voor gek gezet te worden en bang om abonnees te verliezen die ook niet beter weten dan dat UFO's het terrein zijn van compleet van de pot gerukte idioten. 

{ http://niburu.co/ }

29-05-2019 om 20:50 geschreven door peter  

THIS IS NOT “NORMAL”: THERE HAVE BEEN MORE THAN 500 TORNADOES IN THE U.S. DURING THE LAST 30 DAYS

Since 1998, there has been an average of 279 tornadoes during the month of May.  So the fact that we have had more than 500 over the last 30 days means that we are running way, way above normal…

29-05-2019 om 20:40 geschreven door peter  

Alert! F-15 Eagles Splash Fast-Moving Craft 300 NM Off Florida

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

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

Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge
Waking Times

After upgrading the radar systems on F/A-18 fighter jets, several Navy pilots operating from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt began to see unidentified flying objects that appeared to defy the laws of physics.

Between 2014 and 2015, the strange objects – one of them spinning like a top as it traveled against the wind, appeared almost daily in the skies above the East Coast. The crafts had “no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes,“ and “could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds” according to the New York Times.

Lt. Ryan Graves

To be clear, these craft were reported in March of 2018 so this is not a new report, however the accounts of five pilots who witnessed them have never been published until now.

“These things would be out there all day” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been in the Navy for a decade. Graves 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 videotaped, 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!”

–New York Times

“There were a number of different reports,” said Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher, who said that while some cases could have been commercial drones, 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 recently acknowledged “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)” which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts from senior officers aboard the Roosevelt at the time.

According to military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until resigning in 2017, the sightings are “a striking series of incidents.”

The program, which began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it currently investigates military reports of U.F.O.s, and Mr. 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.

–New York Times

Lieutenant Graves is still at a loss to describe what he saw in the summer of 2014, when he and Lt. Danny Accoin – another Super Hornet pilot, were part of the “Red Rippers” VFA-11 squadron. Operating out of Oceana, VA, they were training for redeployment to the Persian Gulf.

Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. 

(Photo: Adam Ferguson for The New York Times)

Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to the Times, while three other pilots spoke on condition of anonymity.

It all began following an upgrade from their 1980s-era radars to  Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pods – one of the most advanced imaging devices in use by the military which can locate and designate targets at distances over 40 miles.

AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared

(ATFLIR)

One fighter pilot after another began picking up the objects, initially ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks.

“People have seen strange stuff in military aircraft for decades,” said Graves. “We’re doing this very complex mission, to go from 30,000 feet, diving down. It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there.”

Graves added that the objects were an ongoing phenomenon – showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet and even at sea level. The craft could “accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds,” according to the report.

Lieutenant Accoin said that he had two encounters with the objects – the first of which he tried to intercept the craft’s course by flying 1,000 feet below it. And while he couldn’t see it with his helmet camera, his radar told him it was there. In the second encounter, Accoin says a training missile on his jet locked onto the craft, which his infrared camera picked up as well.

“I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said, adding “I could not pick it up visually.”

The pilots chalked it up to some sort of classified and extremely advanced drone program. Then they began to see them with their own eyes.

In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”

He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube. 

–New York Times

After the near miss, Graves and the other interviewed pilots said the squadron were no longer convinced of the classified drone theory – as government officials would know fighter pilots were operating in the area and, they reasoned, would not operate them nearby.

“It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue,” said Graves, adding “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair” collision.

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.

“Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

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

“We have helicopters that can hover,” Lieutenant Graves said. “We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” But “combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.”

–New York Times

In March of 2015, the Roosevelt departed the coast of Florida for the Persian Gulf to help fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, after which the incidents “tapered off,” according to the pilots.

• By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge

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

Huge UFO Secret Discovered - There Are Alien Bases Under The Ocean

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

29-05-2019 om 18:35 geschreven door peter  

Today’s article tells a strange story that began in 1952 with a man named Harold H. Fulton, who died in 1986. Back in fifty-two, Fulton was a sergeant in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and established the New Zealand-based Civilian Saucer Investigation. It was an organization dedicated to investigating the UFO phenomenon. The CSI proved to be an extremely successful venture for Fulton: in less than a year, he had more than five hundred subscribers to his journal, which went by the title of Flying Saucers. It wasn’t long after the revelations concerning Albert Bender’s torturous encounters with the Men in Black surfaced that Fulton contacted Bender. A lengthy period of correspondence between the two duly followed. Indeed, Fulton had established a connection with numerous UFO researchers in the United States, including Gray Barker, who, in 1962, published Albert Bender’s MIB-themed book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men.

The letters between Fulton and Bender (in my possession) make it very clear that Fulton was concerned that whatever it was that had got its grips into Bender was, by the summer of 1953, now doing exactly the same with him. Fulton told Bender (and MIB investigator/author Gray Barker, too) that on several occasions he experienced in his home the very same overpowering odor of sulfur-meets-rotten-eggs that Bender had talked about. Equally disturbing, Fulton began to see vague, shadowy, human-like figures out of his peripheral vision – and usually late at night, and always when he was engaged in his UFO research. They were wizened, goblin-like things that crept around Fulton’s home, in what amounted to almost a taunting fashion: they wanted to be seen, but not too closely. A bad sign that the Shadow People were on the move, perhaps?

Then, in August 1953, Fulton and his wife both experienced that overpowering odor together – and which filled their entire house. Only a couple of nights later, the pair was woken by the sounds of something pounding hard and violently on one of the walls of their home. And, just a couple of nights after that, Mrs. Fulton saw an orange-pink ball of light hovering near the door to their bedroom. It was a period of highly disturbing proportions and unsettling manifestations, all rolled into one. Fulton, however, was not the only New Zealand-based UFO investigator to find himself up to his neck in supernatural weirdness. There were others too. And their encounters were no less worrying.

Late one night in 1952, Fulton confided in Albert Bender that a researcher from Hamilton, New Zealand named John Stuart – author of UFO Warning – had a somewhat unsettling, recent experience that had severely messed with his nerves. Midnight was closing in when Stuart – at the time, fast asleep in bed – was jolted awake by the sound of the phone ringing. Of course, and quite naturally, the first thing to cross Stuart’s mind was that it was someone calling him with bad news. Well, in a very strange way, it was. But, not the kind of bad news that you might expect to receive in the early hours. The eerie and almost-robotic voice at the other end of the line warned Stuart to quit digging into the UFO mystery. Or be prepared to pay a very heavy price. The phone then went dead. Gray Barker later wrote that after the call, Stuart poured himself a stiff drink to calm his nerves. No doubt! Robert S. Ellwood, the author ofIslands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand, said of the mysterious voice that it was if “some kind of machine had learned to talk.” That, however, was not the only encounter of the sinister kind that Stuart found himself in.

In 1953, Stuart worked closely with a woman named Doreen Wilkinson, who shared Stuart’s passion for UFOs. There may have been other passions at work, too. Certainly, there were hushed rumors among New Zealand’s closely knit UFO research community that Stuart, a married man, and Doreen were far more than just good friends. They were rumors that both vehemently denied. Maybe, they denied those same rumors just a tad too vehemently. We’ll never now know.

What went unknown for a long time was that on a number of occasions in the early hours of the morning – which was typically when the pair did their research – Doreen seemed to take on a different personality. It was one of a sexual seductress. Stuart was, at first, of the opinion that this was due to the manipulative powers of aliens, who he believed may have been interested in the nature of human sexuality, and who were somehow actively controlling Doreen’s mind and body. Stuart soon came to think something very different, however: that Doreen was periodically under the possession of a literal demonic entity that was masquerading as an extraterrestrial – according to Harold Fulton, at least, who had picked up on various portions of the story and then passed them on to Albert Bender.

Things only got progressively worse: late one night a wild and diabolical, hair-covered humanoid creature manifested right inside Stuart’s home. The thing made a move on terrified Doreen – but then inexplicably vanished. Then, a couple of nights later, when she was alone, Doreen was reportedly assaulted by an invisible creature as she lay naked on her bed. There was, however, evidence that this was not just the product of the human mind: Doreen was covered in small, unexplained scratches. Perhaps not surprisingly, both John and Doreen walked away from Ufology. Maybe, even, they ran. After all, who could blame them for that?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-05-2019 om 18:25 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX Satellites Could Block Extraterrestrial Radio Signals

Brett Tingley

Elon Musk did what Elon Musk does best this week and made headlines around the world. The entrepreneur and future supervillain launched a payload of 60 Starlink satellites this week to begin the ambitious goal of getting 12,000 of the tiny satellites into orbit. Once in place, the massive system of satellites will provide the world with ultra-high-speed internet. “Starlink will connect the globe with reliable and affordable high-speed broadband services,” SpaceX tweeted just before the launch  That’s the plan, anyway.

As with all things SpaceX, there are sure to be some surprises and controversies with the Starlink plan. Musk intends Starlink broadband access to be affordable, so he’ll likely have to fight off his fair share of corporate sabotage as telecom giants see their future profitability fade into the wind like the exhaust from a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Musk can handle ’em. Dude put a freakin’ car in space.

Aside from competition, Musk will have to face the objections of the astronomical community who warn that filling the skies with thousands of satellites could have loads of unintended negative effects. Already, several astronomers have warned that Starlink satellites pose a threat to the search for extraterrestrial radio signals. Alan Duffy, an astronomer with the Royal Institution of Australia, says that a ring of 12,000 satellites would create so much radio interference as to make all radio telescopes useless:

A full constellation of Starlink satellites will likely mean the end of Earth-based microwave-radio telescopes able to scan the heavens for faint radio objects. The enormous benefits of global internet coverage will outweigh the cost to astronomers, but the loss of the radio sky is a cost to humanity as we lose our collective birthright to see the afterglow of the Big Bang or the glow of forming stars from Earth.

Astronomers are continuing to discover all sorts of mysterious radio sources in deep space, and some believe that there is a possibility these radio bursts could one day be the means through which we make first contact with an extraterrestrial species. Is removing that possibility worth affordable high-speed internet access worldwide ? It’s a truly tricky question.

Another astronomer caught a breathtaking video of the 60 Starlink satellites trailing across the night sky like a row of ducks crossing the street. Very bright ducks. Will the skies began to become increasingly filled with artificial objects? Who could have imagined that our roads would one day be lined with giant advertisements on 100-foot poles? A Japanese startup is already looking to create psychedelic artificial meteor showers by dropping rocks of different chemical compositions from space, and another Russian startup wants to put billboards in orbit. Is this what the skies of our cyberpunk future will look like? That is, if we can even see through the air pollution at all.

Turn off the TV tonight, go outside, and look at the stars for as long as you can. We may have to one day describe them to generations who have never known them.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

29-05-2019 om 18:10 geschreven door peter  

Investigative Reporter And Producer Of History’s Unidentified: “Holy Shit! This Is Like, The Biggest Story In The Universe!”

Anthony Lappé is a New York-based showrunner, director and investigative journalist and was a producer on History Channel’s upcoming docu-series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.” He was a guest today  on “Podcast UFO.” Watch/listen at the YouTube link above.

Below are my notes from the show. And if I thought it was important, I transcribed it. As you’ll see, most off it was important! And below that are my note from Lappé’s appearance on “Open Minds UFO Radio” with Alejandro Rojas.

Podcast UFO Notes…

“Unidentified” wasn’t AL’s brainchild.

He’s an independent filmmaker, and television producer.

History Channel had been talking to Lue Elizondo, Tom DeLonge and Chris Mellon for a little while after the New York Times article came out in December of 2017. Folks at History were just very excited about figuring out a way to do a show with them. And AL was brought on in the spring of last year. They had exclusive access to everything that TTSA were doing over this past year.

It has to have been the most fascinating, mind-blowing project I’ve ever worked on. It was absolutely incredible.

After working on the show, I definitely have many more questions than I have answers. We’re trying to reinvent the genre of UFO television. Other shows come in with a pre-conceived notion of what these things are.  That they’re somehow extraterrestrial and they leave out countervailing information.

“Unidentified” takes a cold look at what these military witnesses are seeing. And that alone is gonna blow your mind.

He mentions the Navy’s new guidelines for pilots and others to report their UFO encounters. That Navy guideline is a tacit admission that what these pilots are seeing are not U.S. military. Once you rule out that it’s U.S. military, you’re really only left with only one plausible explanation: It’s either a foreign adversary or maybe an ally. But for anyone who knows anything about propulsion and recent advancements in aircraft and where the Russians and Chinese are, it’s very hard to square that circle.

What “Unidentified,” does is look at all this test cases and try to talk about them in a very investigative way and hear directly from the pilots, radar operators and others. And then let the viewers make up their own minds about what they could be.

Martin Willis: We’ve said many times on the show that if somebody tells you they know what these things are, run away. (I agree! ~Joe) MW says he thinks our government covers up this subject because they don’tknow what it is.

AL: I’ve reported on the government for many years. In particular, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. And people need to understand that there is no such thing as the U.S. government. Just in the intelligence world alone you have 17 different intelligence agencies.

He thinks that the Navy announcement shows us that they don’t have answers at hand. And that’s the significance of these two major pillars in the whole story of UFOs that have happened over the last year and a half. It began with the release of the three videos in 2017 and then the Navy announcement.

Regarding the Navy shift in policy towards UFOs…

“That’s a big thing that many of the pilots we talked to – and there’s many more pilots…One of the interesting things – when you watch our series – you’re gonna meet and see several pilots, including the pilots who were involved in the other two videos that were released by the DoD. And we’re gonna shed some new light on that incident or incidents. There’s many more pilots that I talked to who didn’t want to go on air, who confirmed their stories.

“One of the things that really struck me was David Fravor’s wingman pilot who spoke to us for the first time. She’s the female pilot that you see in the first episode. One of the things that she told us…and I can’t remember if this is in the episode. It might be in the following episode where we kind of circle back to her. One of the things she said to us is, ‘If I was alone, and was a single-seat pilot and I was just out on a patrol or something and I saw this? I probably wouldn’t have told anyone.’ The only reason they came back and said what had happened was because all four of them saw it. The two pilots and their weapons systems operators.

“That is the reason why this wingman pilot and David Fravor are coming forward..is because they want it to be okay to report this. This is an incident that happened in broad daylight. That’s the other thing that is a huge difference for me in the sort of veracity of these stories. These are pilots intercepting things in broad daylight. So many things can happen at night, whether that’s a weather inversion or reflections or all the other weird things that happen at night. But when you’re seeing things up close and personal during broad daylight on a perfectly clear day, over the Pacific. And it’s being confirmed by all these different pilots…

“And here’s the other thing that I’m gonna tell you that we do in this show. I don’t want to give too many spoilers away. But we find many civilian witnesses, in the same area where the Nimitz incident occurred, who tell of ongoing incidents. Very similar to the Nimitz incident.”

Martin Willis: It’s strange that there are reoccurring flaps and it makes you wonder why they’re in one area.

AL: Really good point and one of the topics that they get into on the show. “We clearly are seeing that there are, some sort of, what they calls hot spots, for these incidents that are happening in certain parts of the world. And I believe you see in Episode One, AATIP even created a map in 2009 that we reveal…that shows just a very small smattering of plot points on a global map where the military had reported seeing incidents. So that is one of the ensuing mysteries of this whole thing which is fascinating and we delve into that question. Probably raising more questions than we have answers.

“This show, I hope, will push the needle forward in this conversation. Because primarily, and obviously, this was a strategic decision by Elizondo but also us as filmmakers. Making the series was…by focusing on these military witnesses, several of which are active duty people who have everything to lose. When you’re an F-18 pilot, it’s very easy to be grounded. One slip up and you can basically lose your…have your driver’s license taken away…for lack of a better word.

“And these guys are the creme de la creme of the military. To be an F-18 pilot in the Navy, is a dream of thousands of pilots that go and…even just to be a C-130 pilot is a dream. But to be a fighter pilot in the Navy, flying an F-18, you’ve really reached the pinnacle. So to risk that by coming forward and talking about something that could potentially brand you as, you know, some kind of…puts you in some sort of psych eval situation, is just an incredibly brave thing for them to do.

“As I said, I talked to many more pilots than you see in the show, who spoke to me off the record, confirming the larger details of this other main incident that we look into. But those guys did not want to go on camera. And listen, I can’t blame them. If you worked all your life and you had a dream of becoming a fighter pilot and you wanna serve your country, it’s a very risky thing.

“So what is interesting now is the Navy is saying, ‘Hey, you don’t have to be afraid any more.’ What we’re hoping is, when our show goes on the air, we actually have, at the end of every episode, an email address for military witnesses to contact us because we want to continue this investigation. Because as I said, even though we have a ton of new, really fascinating information that you’re gonna see in this series, we’ve touched the tip of the iceberg. This is an ongoing situation. These events are happening all over the world. They’re happening all the time. They may be increasing. We don’t know that for sure. But there are people who say they are. It’s exciting and I think George Knapp said it best. He said, ‘It’s exciting and it’s a little scary.’

“We brought along Commander Fravor to meet another pilot from another incident. And you’ll see him, Lue Elizondo and this new pilot, that no one’s heard from before, talk about another incident. We wanted to bring Fravor along, both to help this pilot feel comfortable and knowing that Fravor’s career wasn’t harmed by coming out. And he still works in the private sector now but still as a respected person in the military community. But also what was fascinating was just to hear them talk about aeronautics and all the physics about what this guy saw. And compare and contrast the craft that he was seeing with what Fravor saw. And it was just absolutely fascinating. That’s in episode four.”

Did AL have an interest in this subject before he started working on the show? What does he think about the theories that these are our own, secret craft/technology?

You can hear his answers and the rest of the interview at the YouTube link I posted above at beginning of this blog post.

Open Minds UFO Radio Notes…

Lappé was also the guest on Open Minds UFO Radio with Alejandro Rojas yesterday. Once again, here are my notes and a transcript when I felt it was important information.

AL: The show is almost like a chronological, year in the life of Elizondo, Mellon and the guys at To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science. He started following them last spring.

He’s a filmmaker and investigative journalist and did an eight-part series on the history of the war on drugs for History Channel two years ago. The show dug deep into the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade. He’s done a lot of work around the intelligence world and the military.

He used to run a website called “Guerrilla News Network,” which focused on alternate news. They covered Steven Greer and “The Disclosure Project.” He’s always been really interested in the UFO subject but never took the time to dig deep.

Last year, while working for A+E Originals and after the guys at TTSA were signed to an exclusive deal with them, he met Chris Mellon and Luis Elizondo. And he was like, “Holy shit. This is like, the biggest story in the Universe.”

His first impression after hearing about the Pentagon’s UFO program was skepticism since he knows a lot about how the intelligence agencies work. He’s studied and reported on things like MK Ultra, Operation Paperclip and “the CIA’s involvement in all sorts of nefarious coups and operations and actually, what counter-intelligence is.” He was extremely skeptical and asked a lot of questions that a lot of people ask when confronted with this information. Questions like, “Isn’t this just some sort of advanced aircraft that we just don’t know about yet?” That was his first question and it began a dialogue with the guys at TTSA, who very patiently began to break down why they believe that’s not the answer.

Throughout the series, they’re asking the counterfactual questions: “Can this be explained by this? Or can this be explained by that?” They really tried to take an independent look at it and try to let people make up their own minds.

Elizondo and Mellon are vessels for the testimony of these military personnel. The challenge as a filmmaker comes because these guys still have security clearances and are still very connected with what’s going on inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. They’re not whistleblowers. “They’re both very cognizant out of loyalty and commitment to the government but also in terms of their own legal situation. They try very hard not to disclose any classified information.”

Alejandro Rojas asked AL if he was surprised to see these kind of credible people doing this kind of work and doing it publicly.

AL: “That was the first thing that attracted me to this project was who these guys were…what their backgrounds were. In particular, Chris Mellon’s background as a high ranking, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and his role on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He had visibility over these special access programs that even top generals didn’t have access to see. This was a guy, as Lue says, who knew all the secrets and who was famous internally as someone who also was very much into going to sites. Going to places like Area 51 at Groom Lake and going to other black sites and meeting with the people who are running these programs. He was a very hands on guy. And frankly, just like Lue Elizondo, much of what he did was highly classified. Their lives are definitely still shrouded in mystery in terms of what exactly they were doing and where they were deployed. All that stuff is still…these guys were guys who worked in the shadows.

“So, for them to come out, especially someone like Chris Mellon, who has his family legacy as we all know, and to be speaking so candidly and putting his reputation, both in sort of, you know, his social circles…his political circles and his family legacy circles…it’s a pretty big deal.”

AR: Have you come to the conclusion that there is a genuine mystery?

AL: “Yeah, I have. And it definitely was a process to get there. But as Chris calls it – run all the traps (explore all options ~Joe). As I’ve talked to other experts…there’s many more pilots – for instance, that I’ve talked to personally, off the record, than you see in the show…that I was able to talk to who weren’t comfortable coming on the air – who confirmed things about some of the other incidents that we look into.

“I generally believe that the U.S. Navy does not know what these things are. And that’s what’s so interesting about this new April 2019 announcement of the new guidelines and the policies that they’re putting in place for reporting unidentified craft. You don’t have to read between the lines to say that that is a tacit admission that…it’s not our own craft. So, you’re really only left with two possibilities…which is, it’s an adversary, or I guess it could be an ally, but that would be fairly strange. But you’re left with it could being some sort of terrestrial adversary. And for these guys, that’s almost even a scarier concept. If Russia, for instance, has the capability to fly hypersonic craft in and around our carrier strike groups, that’s just a very scary prospect. (bad audio here so quote may be off) If they could zip and nuke and drop it on the White House and disappear before they even open up the anti-ballistic guns from the lawn there…

“And then that’s where Steve Justice from Skunkworks comes in. I’ve had long, on the record conversations with him and off the record conversations with him about technology and about the evolution of technology and where we are today with propulsion systems. Things like the (X-43) Scramjet and other hypersonic jets that are being developed. And even though we are on the edge today of a new realm of hypersonic craft, all those craft are still using conventional…or somewhat conventional propulsion systems. They’ll have huge heat signatures, for instance, coming off of them. So, for Steve Justice, it just doesn’t add up that even an adversary working in secret could leapfrog us to that degree and have something that could do the things that these pilots are saying that they’re seeing.

“It’s not only the pilots. It’s also…we speak with radar operators as well. It is a genuine mystery. I think a big…one of the people that was extremely helpful in our investigation and who plays a big role in the show, as you see, is Bryan Bender, national security correspondent for Politico. He doesn’t get a lot of credit because his story ran the same day as the New York Times story did back in 2017. He was reporting things fully and really got deep into it. Spent a lot of time personally with Elizondo and Mellon. And he just has incredible contacts inside the Pentagon…inside the intelligence community…inside the technology community and weapons contractors. And he and I have become friends. And he’s been extremely helpful for me because he’s someone who’s just at a whole nother level in terms of just understanding what’s going on inside the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies. And he independently has come to the same conclusion that he believes that the Pentagon clearly does not know what’s going on with these craft. That there is a growing sense inside the Pentagon that it’s something that needs to be studied more.

“And that’s really the story that we show. The series has a pretty incredible arc to it. As I said, it really is like a linear, year in the life of these guys and begins shortly after the New York Times article comes out. And it ends… what was really incredible about the April 2019 Navy announcement – that they were going to be establishing new policies and guidelines for reporting UAPs and they’re going to be analyzing the data – is that we kind of have a front row seat to how that policy was established. I can’t really say what we see had a direct result because we don’t really know the sort of cause and effect. But, as you’ll see in the series, we, both Chris Mellon and Lue Elizondo, are both closely involved with what’s going on inside the Pentagon over the course of this last year. And they consider that Navy announcement to be a huge victory for sort of everything they’ve been doing behind the scenes. And we’re able to chronicle that.”

AR: “What impact do you hope this show has on the public?”

AL: “Thats a great question.

He goes on to say that they want the show to be super accessible to everyone.

You really get to know Elizondo as a person over the course of the series and learn the challenges and risks he faced for coming out publicly about this subject.

He hopes that people will watch the series and become intrigued and have their minds opened. He feels the strength of what they’ll show is the credibility of the military pilots and their encounters that are corroborated by their radar operators when they get back to their ship.

Reiterates what these pilots have to lose by coming forward and sharing these stories. They can be grounded for very small infractions.

AL: “For these guys and women to come forward to say things about what they’ve seen in the air and to talk about how they’re feeling like that the Navy really isn’t studying it and that they’re feeling that there’s a danger that’s not being addressed, is pretty dramatic. And that’s what you see in this series. You’re gonna see people who have everything to lose. They’ve worked their whole lives to reach where they are and they’re coming forward saying that they feel like there’s a potential threat here that needs to be addressed.”

As a journalist, AL is worried about when this airs. He’s nervous because it’s a tricky thing to be associated with and it could affect his reputation.

AL: “We’re on a precipice here. There’s definitely a change. There’s a change that’s going on inside Washington right now at the highest levels of power that you will see happen before your eyes and over the course of the six episodes of ‘Unidentified.’ You will see these guys working behind the scenes to change both policy but also just to open people’s minds about what’s going on.

“These things are being seen all over the world and they have been seen over the world at least for 70 years. So, to explain them by some simple, black budget, secret program is very difficult.”

Once again, here’s the link to the entire show. It’s a must listen:

{ http://www.ufojoe.net/ }

29-05-2019 om 18:02 geschreven door peter