An interesting story has been making the rounds about an alleged never-before-detected underground base near Area 51 picked up on a Zoom.Earth satellite map. It’s Area 51 so it certainly is a plausible idea. Even more interesting was the rapid rebuttal by another website which revealed what this huge expanse of puzzling ground surface actually is – a giant art project! Really!

“I found something in Area 51 that appears to be a newly-built underground base. But why would the US government need another underground base there? I’m not using Google Maps, because they block out a lot of stuff. Look at this facility, it is really quite incredible.”

This analysis is part of the audio presented by Scott Waring on a YouTube video associated with his revamped ET Data Basesite (formerly Ufo Sightings Daily). Always controversial for his far-fetched assurances that the photos he posts are actual alien bases, actual alien spacecrafts, actual aliens and the like, the site is entertaining for both his vivid imagination and the occasional tidbit of reality. We have both here with his proposal that this surface anomaly located 55 miles to the north-east of Area 51’s official perimeter is some sort of underground base under construction that, in order to make this idea plausible, is on “private government land.” (Zoom.Earth image) (Google Earth image)

It’s not a base.

But the actual explanation for the anomaly is even better, more imaginative … and real.

“As long as you’re going to make a sculpture, why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge.”
– Michael Heizer

If you’re going to think big, artist Michael Heizer would be a great role model. He’s a pioneer of a contemporary form known as Land Art in which he makes massive surface sculptures using earth-moving equipment. Are you figuring this out yet? A few YouTube commenters and Tyler Rogoway at The Drivepointed out that the image in the Zoom.Earth photo is ‘City’ – a project Heizer has been working on since 1972.

“City comprises five phases, each consisting of a number of structures referred to as complexes, and in total measuring approximately a 1/4 mile in width and a 1-1/2 miles in length.”

As described on Heizer’s website, City was inspired in part by Native American traditions of mound-building and the ancient cities of Central and South America. Located in Garden Valley in Nevada’s Lincoln County – the same county where Area 51 resides — it was initially self-funded but is now getting money from multiple foundations and is scheduled to be completed in 2020.

Area 51 looks nothing like art

If you’re looking for a conspiracy associated with City, here’s the closest you’ll get. Garden Valley has long been attractive to the federal government as a location for rail lines connecting secret missile silos or the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository for nuclear waste – acquisitions of land which would have prompted Heizer to put an end to City. However, in 2014, then U.S. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada (of the Pentagon UFO study fame) introduced the “Garden Valley Withdrawal Act” to preserve the land around City. In 2015, a group of top American museums joined together to urge preservation of the area and in that same year, the area became part of the newly-created Basin and Range National Monument, thus protecting it from development – federal, military, alien or otherwise.

Was Harry Reid protecting City or possibly hiding something else? Scott?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 17:54 geschreven door peter  

The Barberton Greenstone Belt

(Fyre Mael/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

The Makhonjwa Mountains in eastern South Africa may end up being one of the most significant locations in the history of our planet. Scientists this week announced the discovery of organic molecules found deep in the Earth inside volcanic sediment from over 3.3 billion years ago. While primordial organic matter is exciting in it’s own right, the origin of this organic matter is what makes it unique. As it turns out, this organic matter comes from outer freakin’ space. Will one of these discoveries one day confirm the panspermia hypothesis?

The panspermia hypothesis posits that life is spread throughout the universe on space dust, meteors, asteroids, comets, and other traveling celestial bodies. According to this hypothesis, life was introduced to Earth after one of these life-bearing objects crashed into the surface of the planet or exploded in the atmosphere like a biological piñata. There is some archaeological and scientific evidence to confirm those theories, with recent discoveries even suggesting cosmic radiation was the ‘spark’ that brought Earth’s organic compounds to life. Now, these latest volcanic rocks dug up in South Africa seem to confirm that panspermia is indeed a possibility by proving that extraterrestrial organic matter indeed came to Earth from space at some point in our past.

“This is the very first time that we have found actual evidence for extraterrestrial carbon in terrestrial rocks,” says astrobiologist Frances Westall from the CNRS Centre for Molecular Biophysics in France. “The organic matter from the carbon-rich meteorites must have been raining down at quite a high rate.”

A study of the organic matter has been published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta for other scientists to review. According to the study, the extraterrestrial compounds likely fell to Earth as part of a micrometeorite swarm which exploded in the atmosphere and mixed with volatile volcanic ash. If confirmed, this discovery may prove to be some of the first evidence we have so-called “soft panspermia” or “molecular panspermia” theories which argue that rather than full-on lifeforms landing on Earth aboard comets, perhaps merely the chemical building blocks landed here and eventually began the reactions that led to abiogenesis.

There are several variations of the panspermia theory, the most popular being lithopanspermia – the theory that organic molecules or organisms embedded into meteorites crashed into Earth and seeded life.

Did life come to Earth from space? Could 3.3 billion year-old volcanic dust contain evidence which might answer that question? Like most scientific discoveries, it could be years before the full ramifications of this recent find are known.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 17:27 geschreven door peter  

The much anticipated six-part series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” airs on History Channel on May 31^st. A joint venture between A&E and UFO mogul Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars, the show promises to blow the doors wide open on the government’s recent examination of the UFO phenomenon. Having the opportunity to see the first episode early, I was also able to sit down with Anthony Lappé‏, the program’s showrunner and executive producer, to talk about some of the ‘behind the scenes’ moments which led to the creation of this project. Please note that this review DOES contain ‘Spoilers.’

The show opens with the audience meeting a former Pentagon staffer and intelligence agent, Luis Elizondo, who left his position in US intelligence to pursue the UFO enigma full time. We learn more about some of his background, as well as the now famous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. We also learn about “the team,” the small collection of experts put together by Tom DeLonge and To the Stars Academy. This group is comprised of Steve Justice, Chris Mellon, and Hal Puthoff. Leading this band is Luis Elizondo and DeLonge himself.

Lappé‏ explained that this team is what really makes the show compelling. He stated,

“What we really try to do with this show was to turn the UFO genre on its head. We almost never say the word ‘alien’ in in the show. We’re really just trying to look at it from a really hard journalistic point of view…And that’s one of the key things that we really try to understand, and that is what’s so fascinating. We have these guys who are from the inside, helping us, guiding us, and introducing us to more people on the inside. I think people, when they see the series, are really going to have a much better understanding of what’s going on inside the military and our government. It’s very complicated. I’ve reported on the military intelligence world many times before, and what people don’t realize is there is no such thing as the US government. There are seventeen intelligence agencies. Everyone has different agendas and information, and especially information like this, it is highly siloed…”

Tom DeLonge

(image: courtesy A&E/Andrew Cagle)

The episode provides a brief explanation of how DeLonge began contacting these individuals but does not go into much detail as to how some of these connections were made. After leaving Blink 182, DeLonge plunges himself into the UFO world full time and begins to form bonds with some very important people. We are left to wonder how he did it, but as George Knapp states in the episode, “he used shoe leather,” made phone calls and knocked on doors. A little awkwardly, the episode poses the question as to whether DeLonge is a pawn in a bigger government intelligence game, and Knapp states that he is not. That entire conversation felt a little forced, but it clearly is meant to address some of DeLonge’s critics and their belief that the musician is another Paul Bennewitz. The episode touches upon the Wikileaks hack where DeLonge’s e-mails to former White House staffer John Podesta became public, Chris Mellon’s work as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a little about Area 51 and Politico’s Bryan Bender just generally being a cool guy with whom I would like to go for beers with. Maybe he can come to my next UFO-themed viewing party? Open invitation Bryan.

The bulk of the episode, however, deals with the recounting of a specific UFO event, known as the 2004 Nimitz Tic-Tac incident. Luis Elizondo travels to meet with two key witnesses regarding the encounter, retired Navy pilot Commander David Fravor and the (kinda) anonymous female pilot who was Fravor’s wingman during the incident. I won’t go over all the details of the event, and you can read more about it here, but in November of 2004, the USS Nimitz battle group encountered a series of strange unidentified flying objects that resembled forty-foot Tic-Tacs. It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting modern UFO cases to grace the discourse, and the source of the “Flir Video” which was taken by one of the F-18 Super Hornets in the air that day, and features an odd object accelerating quickly off to the left. A retired Top Gun pilot and aviation expert, as well as a retired commercial pilot with 35 years’ experience,  turned consultant assess the footage in the episode. Only a week ago, new claims have surfaced full length uncut and higher quality versions of the videos featured in the episode, the “Flir Video” included, not only exist but are in the possession of private citizens.

USS Nimitz

Lappé expressed that the show has a clear objective,

“There is no doubt that this is a real phenomenon. What is it? That is still a gigantic question mark. But I think you won’t be able to watch this series of six episodes and walk away saying this is some weather phenomenon or even an American military test. I think we really put that to bed…”

I asked Lappé about how his personal opinion of the UFO phenomenon has changed as a result of producing this program. He explained,

“It’s definitely changed my life. This is a topic that I had a sort of a mild curiosity about especially when the New York Times article came out…but I never really had any direct evidence to make me believe…but this process of working on it, and it really has less to do with Luis Elizondo and Chris Mellon than it has to do with people like that female wingman pilot…and other pilots that we met. I mean, when you’re sitting in a room with these people who are so credible and have dedicated their lives to serving their country and keeping us safe. And they’re freaked out by it. You can’t help but get freaked out. It definitely changed my life. It really opened my eyes to what’s going on. On a personal level, I had nightmares in the first few months of working on this and meeting these pilots.”

Compared to other UFO documentary programs, this show is definitely one of the better ones. It does not go into the dark and nebulous ideological pit of extraterrestrials or interdimensional beings, at least in the first episode. It spends its time primarily on the cases themselves and doesn’t rely on the alien trope. While hardcore UFO researchers will find nothing startling or new in the first episode, members of the general public will find it quite compelling. We can only hope that this show will provide some more content that has never been seen before by both the public and the UFO research community. With that being said, I know I plan to keep watching.

• Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation airs on May 31^st on History Channel.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 17:18 geschreven door peter  

A new study from Western University posits proof to the possibility that an oncoming swarm of meteors – likened to the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot by some extraterrestrial experts – may indeed pose an existential risk for Earth and its inhabitants this summer. (That's us.)

When considering catalysts for catastrophic collision, there are two main sources Near Earth Objects (NEOs) like asteroids and meteoroids and interlopers from the outer solar system, which are typically comets.

The Taurid swarm is a third potential source of risk that changes the probabilities of possible catastrophic impacts.

  

An almost catastrophic impact happened last week in Australia when a rogue meteorite has near-missed the coast of Australia, striking the Great Australian Bight with the force of a nuclear bomb.

According to Express.co.uk the incredible meteor lit up the night skies as it passed over the south coast of Australia on Tuesday, May 21.

According to NASA’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the meteor entered the atmosphere at 11.5km per second or 25,724mph. 

The meteor then partially broke up and crash landed in the waters of the Great Australian Bight bay some 186 miles (300km) west-southwest of Mount Gambier. Before this happened, however, the fireball released enough energy in the sky to equal a “small nuclear bomb”.

NASA said that the meteor entered the atmosphere with the force of 1.6 kilotons or 1,600 tonnes of TNT, it’s in the range of a small nuclear weapon but because it exploded at an altitude of 31.5 km it didn’t do any damage.

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 17:00 geschreven door peter  

The Moon's Ryder Crater Pyramid And Triangular Spacecraft, UFO Sighting News.

This is a post by the late great Streetcap1, a friend of mine that became famous on my site and then died mysteriously after doing an intervene with a beautiful Russian news caster that had also been trying to contact me. I wanted him against it, but he let them into his house. A few months later...the family notified me that he had passed of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. She...tried contacting me again for a sixth time a few days ago. It gave me shivers. 

Its been 11 months since he passed and I have to say the UFO community is feeling it. 
Scott C. Waring

Streetcap1 states: 

I am convinced that at one time the Moon had an Intelligent Civilization. Something happened to wipe out that Society. Some evidence remains as a testimony to these people who were perhaps destroyed by some awful disaster. SC1.

Source: http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/432

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 16:16 geschreven door peter  

UFOs Caught In Slow Motion Over Arizona Mountains, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: April 16, 2019
Location of sighting: Estrella Mountains, Arizona, USA

Here is a video by Youtuber UFOmania. He got a report sent into him of a UFO shooting in front of a low mountain ridge in Arizona. The disk is very flat and long. Its not a perfect circle, but more like a diamond shape. The original poster of the video, Preach Zona says says its a slowed down video showing two UFOs coming down out of the sky over Arizona. Both videos below. UFOmania has a great close up of it. 
Scott C. Waring 

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 16:07 geschreven door peter  

Two UFOs Cloaked In Clouds During Sunset In Spain, May 29, 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: May 29, 2019

Location of sighting: Puerto Veneciam, Spain

 

These two UFO cloud photos were sent into me today by email. The eyewitness said that the shape of the cloud appears to be two disks, one big and one small in front of it. That they hovered over the area very slowly for about half an hour during sunset. 

 

He's right, if you look closely you can see a smaller cloud ring attached to the larger one. Its very possible that this is two UFOs that made a cloud around its and sunset lit it up like a roman candle blowing their cover. 

 

You see alien are out there and they want to study us. Why? Most alien species are so old, so ancient that their past history at our level was long forgotten billions of years ago. You know how books confuse history even after a few decades...so imagine writing a history book about what happened a billion years ago at the birth of your people on the planet. Yeah...thats a bit hard. The study, they learn, and knowledge is move valuable to them than anything. So...they study us. Now the real question is...did they create us to study us? Are we all just an experiment? 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

30-05-2019 om 16:00 geschreven door peter  

As magnetic north shifts increasingly away from the geologic north pole – towards Siberia – studies suggest the northern lights could move with it.

Northern lights over Lake Lappajärvi in Finland.

Image via Santeri Viinamäki.

By Nathan Case, Lancaster University

Like most planets in our solar system, the Earth has its own magnetic field. Thanks to its largely molten iron core, our planet is in fact a bit like a bar magnet. It has a north and south magnetic pole, separate from the geographic poles, with a field connecting the two. This field protects our planet from radiation and is responsible for creating the northern and southern lights – spectacular events that are only visible near the magnetic poles.

However, with reports that the magnetic north pole has started moving swiftly at 50km (31 miles) per year – and may soon be over Siberia – it has long been unclear whether the northern lights will move too. Now a new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, has come up with an answer.

Our planetary magnetic field has many advantages. For over 2,000 years, travellers have been able to use it to navigate across the globe. Some animals even seem to be able to find their way thanks to the magnetic field. But, more importantly than that, our geomagnetic field helps protect all life on Earth.

Earth’s magnetic field extends hundreds of thousands of kilometers out from the center of our planet – stretching right out into interplanetary space, forming what scientists call a “magnetosphere”. This magnetosphere helps to deflect solar radiation and cosmic rays, preventing the destruction of our atmosphere. This protective magnetic bubble isn’t perfect though, and some solar matter and energy can transfer into our magnetosphere. As it is then funneled into the poles by the field, it results in the spectacular displays of the northern lights.

A wandering pole

Since Earth’s magnetic field is created by its moving, molten iron core, its poles aren’t stationary and they wander independently of one another. In fact, since its first formal discovery in 1831, the north magnetic pole has travelled over 1,240 miles (2,000 km) from the Boothia Peninsula in the far north of Canada to high in the Arctic Sea. This wandering has generally been quite slow, around 9km (6 mi) a year, allowing scientists to easily keep track of its position. But since the turn of the century, this speed has increased to 30 miles (50 km) a year. The south magnetic pole is also moving, though at a much slower rate (6-9 miles, or 10-15 km a year).

This rapid wandering of the north magnetic pole has caused some problems for scientists and navigators alike. Computer models of where the north magnetic pole might be in the future have become seriously outdated, making accurate compass-based navigation difficult. Although GPS does work, it can sometimes be unreliable in the polar regions. In fact, the pole is moving so quickly that scientists responsible for mapping the Earth’s magnetic field were recently forced to update their model much earlier than expected.

Will the aurora move?

The aurora generally form in an oval about the magnetic poles, and so if those poles move, it stands to reason that the aurora might too. With predictions suggesting that the north pole will soon be approaching northern Siberia, what effect might that have on the aurora?

The northern lights are currently mostly visible from northern Europe, Canada and the northern U.S. If, however, they shifted north, across the geographic pole, following the north magnetic pole, then that could well change. Instead, the northern lights would become more visible from Siberia and northern Russia and less visible from the much more densely populated U.S./Canadian border.

Fortunately, for those aurora hunters in the northern hemisphere, it seems as though this might not actually be the case. A recent study made a computer model of the aurora and the Earth’s magnetic poles based on data dating back to 1965. It showed that rather than following the magnetic poles, the aurora follows the “geomagnetic poles” instead. There’s only a small difference between these two types of poles – but it’s an important one.

Magnetic versus geomagnetic poles.

Image via Wikipedia.

The magnetic poles are the points on the Earth’s surface where a compass needle points downwards or upwards, vertically. They aren’t necessarily connected and drawing a line between these points, through the Earth, would not necessarily cross its center. Therefore, to make better models over time, scientists assume that the Earth is like a bar magnet at its center, creating poles that are exactly opposite each other – “antipodal”. This means that if we drew a line between these points, the line would cross directly through the Earth’s center. At the points where that line crosses the Earth’s surface, we have the geomagnetic poles.

Positions of the north magnetic pole (red) and the geomagnetic pole (blue) between 1900 and 2020.

Image via British Geological Survey.

The geomagnetic poles are a kind of reliable, averaged out version of the magnetic poles, which move erratically all the time. Because of that, it turns out they aren’t moving anywhere near as fast as the magnetic north pole is. And since the aurora seems to follow the more averaged version of the magnetic field, it means that the northern lights aren’t moving that fast either. It seems as though the aurora are staying where they are – at least for now.

We already know that the magnetic pole moves. Both poles have wandered ever since the Earth existed. In fact, the poles even flip over, with north becoming south and south becoming north. These magnetic reversals have occurred throughout history, every 450,000 years or so on average. The last reversal occurred 780,000 years ago meaning we could be due for a reversal soon.

So rest assured that a wandering pole, even a fast one, shouldn’t cause too many problems – except for those scientists whose job it is to model it.

Nathan Case, Senior Research Associate in Space and Planetary Physics, Lancaster University

• This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
• Bottom line: Studies suggest that the northern lights could move as the Earth’s magnetic north pole heads towards Siberia.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

30-05-2019 om 01:50 geschreven door peter  

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