What’s the difference between an asteroid and a meteorite?

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU

On June 30th, 1908, the boreal forests of Tunguska, Siberia, were shaken (and subsequently flattened) by a massive explosion. It wasn’t man-made — an asteroid pierced our planet’s atmosphere and exploded before hitting the surface.

Artistic rendering of a meteorite.
Image via Pixabay.

This explosion, known as the Tunguska event, would make history. It was the largest impact event humanity has ever witnessed first-hand and would lead the UN to declare June 30th the International Asteroid Day.

While definitely awe-inspiring, the event didn’t lead to the massive loss of life that, say, the Chixulub Impactor caused (that’s the pebble that killed the dinosaurs). So why did one space-rock kill off the largest beasts to ever roam the Earth, while another merely flattened 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) of forest without causing a single human death? Well, the secret is all in the definition. Today, we’ll take a look at that simple yet oh so important distinction between an asteroid and a meteorite.

What is an asteroid?

The word itself gives us a glimpse into the nature of asteroids. “Aster” is the ancient Greek word for ‘star’, and the suffix “-oid” is used to show an incomplete or imperfect resemblance to the root word. “Asteroid”, therefore, means ‘star-like’ or, taken more literally, ‘star-like, but not quite’.

Keep in mind that for the ancient Greeks looking up into the night sky, planets and stars all looked the same; ‘aster’, therefore, can be understood as both ‘star’ and ‘planet’.

Artist’s concept of an asteroid belt around the star Vega. Oumuamua, the first object to pass through our solar system that was confirmed to come from outside it — originates from this system.
Image credits NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Asteroids are chunks of space rock ranging from one meter to almost a thousand kilometers in diameter. The larger ones may rightfully be considered minor planets (or dwarf planets/planetoids). Ceres is a good example of this latter category, and the largest known asteroid. These large ones closely resemble planets: they’re roughly spherical and have at least partly-differentiated core structures. They’re generally considered baby planets that didn’t quite make it to adult status.

Most asteroids, however, are quite petite. They also don’t seem to prefer a particular shape. To the extent of our knowledge, they either formed from the primordial matter of a stellar system or via subsequent impacts between its first rocky bodies. Most asteroids in our neighborhood today make a home in the asteroid belt (surprising, I know).

So, to recap: asteroids are chunks of rock or metal (or both) in space. They’re mostly made up of telluric elements (such as carbon, metals, and silica), which tend to be quite resilient. They’re either planets that couldn’t grow large enough or their shattered remnants. Most known ones hang out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but they can take on all sorts of orbits (or none at all!)

What is a meteorite?

The Hoba meteorite in Grootfontein, Namibia, is the largest meteorite known to have landed on Earth. Estimated to weigh around 60 tonnes, it has never been moved from the spot it was discovered in. Hoba is currently a very visited touristic attraction.
Image credits Sergio Conti / Wikimedia.

A meteorite is any space-borne body that enters a planet’s or moon’s atmosphere, survives the violent trek through it, impacts the surface, and leaves behind solid pieces of material. The name comes from the ancient Greek words “meta” and “aerio”, which put together roughly translate to ‘something hanging up in the air’.

Meteorites start their life as meteoroids (small meteors) or asteroids. On contact with an atmosphere, meteorites experience immense friction, causing them to spontaneously combust (at up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,649 degrees Celsius). These fireballs — colloquially called shooting or falling stars — are meteors.

The life of a meteor is short — and hellish. The friction they experience is enough to raise surface temperatures beyond the material’s boiling point, vaporizing it layer by layer. In fact, it’s enough to break apart its (and the atmosphere’s) constituent molecules into ionized particles (basically plasma), which then recombine, releasing energy as light. This is the tail you see on a shooting star.

Meteor over Sardinia, seen on the 8th of May 2016.
Image credits Migebuff / Wikimedia.

The extreme violence of the final impact generally shaves off much of a meteor’s mass — the remaining kernel is our meteorite. Keep in mind that geologists generally call impactors large enough to create a crater ‘bolides’, while astronomers tend to prefer ‘meteorite’.

Depending on chemical composition, angle and speed of atmospheric entry, as well as sheer happenstance (whether it breaks apart or not), a meteor needs to range in size between a marble and a basketball for even a tiny portion of it to reach our planet’s surface.

Meteorites under 2mm (0.07in) in diameter are called micrometeorites. Meteorites that impact celestial bodies apart from Earth (and thus don’t necessarily pass through an atmospheric layer, such as those hitting the Moon) are called extraterrestrial meteorites.

As a side note, these burning chunks also spawned the associated term ‘meteorology’, or ‘the knowledge of things happening up in the air’, the branch of atmospheric sciences involved heavily in the study and forecasting of weather events.

So… what’s the difference between them?

As a general guideline, most meteorites are asteroids — but very few asteroids are meteorites.

Ceres, for example, is a moon and an asteroid. We do NOT want it to be a meteorite, too!
Image credits NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA/ MPS / DLR / IDA.

The definitions tend to overlap a little. Let’s take size, for example. An astronomer will call any of these space projectiles ranging between a molecule and a chunk several hundred feet wide (usually up to 100m / 330ft in diameter) a meteoroid. Anything larger than that, generally, is considered an asteroid.

However, that leaves out chemistry, which is also a hard delineator for what is (and isn’t) an asteroid. Comets are globs of ice and dust formed in the freezing corners of the cosmos (i.e. outside of solar systems). They also have a little pocket of atmosphere around them (a distinctive feature for comets), generated by evaporation from this ice. Their interactionwith heat and particles generated by stars is what creates those long, elegant plumes that are quintessentially comet-y.

Comets can and do fly towards planets and moons. The beefier ones also generally make it through any atmospheric layer and impact the surface. What makes comets generally fall short of being termed ‘meteorites’ is that they’re made up of volatile materials that don’t survive post-impact. However, some do — and also leave behind traces of their impact in the form of impact glass or diamonds. While definitely traces of impact, it can be seen as a technicality to consider such elements remnants of the impacting body itself. I personally do. So, following the impact-and-debris definition, I’d consider comets impacting the surface to be meteors as well.

And herein lies the difference. To be a meteorite, one needs to impact a planet or moon and leave behind solid debris. To paraphrase Iain Banks (my favorite author) the meteorite only lives as it is falling. For asteroids, it’s sufficient to be. Have the right chemical make-up, don’t be too tiny, don’t sublime too much when around stars, and voila! You’re an asteroid.

Most asteroids are nice and never impact any planets or moons. The overwhelming majority of them, actually, are content to orbit around in their asteroid belts or on whatever path they’re set on. But we should never take their absence for granted; it only takes one to come visiting for humanity to become a thing of the past.

Just ask the dinosaurs.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

19-06-2019 om 20:53 geschreven door peter  

Some Martian clouds are made of ground-up meteors

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU 

Mars has clouds too — but some are formed by falling meteorites, not rain.

Rendering of Mars produced using MOLA altimetry data.
Image credits Kevin Gill / Flickr.

Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder have obtained new insight into the clouds that dot the Red Planet. While these clouds have long been documented in Mars’ middle atmosphere (which begins about 18 miles or 30 kilometers above the surface), little was known about how they form in the thin, dry ‘air’ there.

New research shows that these wispy bodies are actually accumulations of “meteoric smoke”, the icy dust thrown up when meteorites or space debris break up in the planet’s atmosphere.

Dust rain

“We’re used to thinking of Earth, Mars and other bodies as these really self-contained planets that determine their own climates,” said Victoria Hartwick, a graduate student in the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences (ATOC) and lead author of the new study.

“But climate isn’t independent of the surrounding solar system.”

The most peculiar fact about Mars’ clouds is that they exist. The Big Bang notwithstanding, you can’t make something out of nothing, and clouds subscribe to this rule as well. Down here on Earth, low-lying clouds form on the backs of tiny particles — things like grains of sea salt or dust that get blown high into the air. These act as anchors of sorts for water vapor to condense on, growing into larger and larger drops, forming the large puffs of white or gray you can see from the ground.

To the best of our knowledge, however, that same mechanism doesn’t exist on Mars. There’s no sea salt to be blown up, and even if there was, the atmosphere is less dense so it’s less able to hold particles aloft. So Hartwick’s team turned their attention to meteors.

Around two to three tons of space debris rain down on Mars, on average, every single day, the authors explain. As this material, ranging from meteorites to space dust, comes into contact with the planet’s atmosphere, it starts to burn and break apart. In essence, a torrent of space dust ‘rains’ down on Mars.

So far, the theory seemed plausible — now the team needed to test it. To find out if this dust could generate Mars’ mysterious clouds, the team employed massive computer simulations that attempt to mimic the flows and turbulence of the planet’s atmosphere. After introducing meteors into the simulations, clouds started to appear.

“Our model couldn’t form clouds at these altitudes before,” Hartwick said. “But now, they’re all there, and they seem to be in all the right places.”

The findings are supported by previous research showing that a similar mechanism may help seed clouds near Earth’s poles (where the magnetic shield is weakest), the team explains. However, we shouldn’t expect to see enormous, roiling thunderstorms of cosmic dust above Mars: the clouds Hartwick’s team studied are very thin, “cotton candy-like clouds” explains Space.

“But just because they’re thin and you can’t really see them doesn’t mean they can’t have an effect on the dynamics of the climate,” Hartwick said.

Depending on the area, these clouds could cause temperature swings of up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), the team’s model shows. The findings flesh out our understanding of Martian clouds and could help us better understand how ancient Mars regulated its climate, and how it was able to hold liquid water on its surface.

• The paper “High-altitude water ice cloud formation on Mars controlled by interplanetary dust particles” has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

19-06-2019 om 20:33 geschreven door peter  

The Formative Years: Giant Planets vs. Brown Dwarfs

It appears more and more likely that large planets and brown dwarfs have very different roots. That’s based on preliminary results from a new Gemini Observatory survey of 531 stars with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), 

Animation showing the 617 observations conducted during GPIES from November 2014 to April 2019 (right) and the location of the stars in the southern sky (left). Open circles indicate system (like 51 Eri at 2 o’clock) which have been visited multiple times. Stars indicated by a red dot have a disk of material. Blue dots are planetary systems (with one planet at least). Brown dot are binary systems with a brown dwarf. 

Credits: P. Kalas, D. Savransky, R. De Rosa and GPIES.

The GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES), one of the largest and most sensitive direct imaging exoplanet surveys to date, is still ongoing at the Gemini South telescope in Chile. “From our analysis of the first 300 stars observed, we are already seeing strong trends,” said Eric L. Nielsen of Stanford University, who is the lead author of the study, published in The Astronomical Journal.

In November 2014, GPI Principal Investigator Bruce Macintosh of Stanford University and his international team set out to observe almost 600 young nearby stars with the newly commissioned instrument. GPI was funded with support from the Gemini Observatory partnership, with the largest portion from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF, and the Canadian National Research Council (NRC; also a Gemini partner), funded researchers participating in GPIES.

Imaging a planet around another star is a difficult technical challenge possible with only a few instruments. Exoplanets are small, faint, and very close to their host star — distinguishing an orbiting planet from its star is like resolving the width of a dime from several miles away. Even the brightest planets are ten thousand times fainter than their parent star. GPI can see planets up to a million times fainter, much more sensitive than previous planet-imaging instruments. “GPI is a great tool for studying planets, and the Gemini Observatory gave us time to do a careful, systematic survey,” said Macintosh.

GPIES is now coming to an end. From the first 300 stars, GPIES has detected six giant planets and three brown dwarfs. “This analysis of the first 300 stars observed by GPIES represents the largest, most sensitive direct imaging survey for giant planets published to date,” added Macintosh.

Credit: NASA

Brown dwarfs are more massive than planets, but not massive enough to fuse hydrogen like stars. “Our analysis of this Gemini survey suggests that wide-separation giant planets may have formed differently from their brown dwarf cousins,” Nielsen said.

The team’s paper advances the idea that massive planets form due to the slow accumulation of material surrounding a young star, while brown dwarfs come about due to rapid gravitational collapse. “It’s a bit like the difference between a gentle light rain and a thunderstorm,” said Macintosh.

“With six detected planets and three detected brown dwarfs from our survey, along with unprecedented sensitivity to planets a few times the mass of Jupiter at orbital distances well beyond Jupiter’s, we can now answer some key questions, especially about where and how these objects form,” Nielsen said.

This discovery may answer a longstanding question as to whether brown dwarfs — intermediate-mass objects — are born more like stars or planets. Stars form from the top down by the gravitational collapse of large primordial clouds of gas and dust, while planets are thought — but have not been confirmed — to form from the bottom up by the assembly of small rocky bodies that then grow into larger ones, a process also termed “core accretion.”

Artist’s conception of how WISE 0855, a brown dwarf, might appear if viewed close-up in infrared light. 

Artwork by Joy Pollard, Gemini Observatory/AURA.

“What the GPIES team’s analysis shows is that the properties of brown dwarfs and giant planets run completely counter to each other,” said Eugene Chiang, professor of astronomy at the University of California Berkeley and a co-author of the paper. “Whereas more massive brown dwarfs outnumber less massive brown dwarfs, for giant planets the trend is reversed: less massive planets outnumber more massive ones. Moreover, brown dwarfs tend to be found far from their host stars, while giant planets concentrate closer in. These opposing trends point to brown dwarfs forming top-down, and giant planets forming bottom-up.”

More Surprises

Of the 300 stars surveyed thus far, 123 are at least 1.5 times more massive than our Sun. One of the most striking results of the GPI survey is that all hosts of detected planets are among these higher-mass stars — even though it is easier to see a giant planet orbiting a fainter, more Sun-like star. Astronomers have suspected this relationship for years, but the GPIES survey has unambiguously confirmed it. This finding also supports the bottom-up formation scenario for planets.

One of the study’s greatest surprises has been how different other planetary systems are from our own. Our Solar System has small rocky planets in the inner parts and giant gas planets in the outer parts. But the very first exoplanets discovered reversed this trend, with giant planets skimming closer to their stars than does moon-sized Mercury. Furthermore, radial-velocity studies — which rely on the fact that a star experiences a gravitationally induced “wobble” when it is orbited by a planet — have shown that the number of giant planets increases with distance from the star out to about Jupiter’s orbit. But the GPIES team’s preliminary results, which probe still larger distances, has shown that giant planets become less numerous farther out.

“The region in the middle could be where you’re most likely to find planets larger than Jupiter around other stars,” added Nielsen, “which is very interesting since this is where we see Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.” In this regard, the location of Jupiter in our own Solar System may fit the overall exoplanet trend.

But a surprise from all exoplanet surveys is how intrinsically rare giant planets seem to be around Sun-like stars, and how different other solar systems are. The Kepler mission discovered far more small and close-in planets — two or more “super-Earth” planets per Sun-like star, densely packed into inner solar systems much more crowded than our own. Extrapolation of simple models suggested GPI would find a dozen giant planets or more, but it only saw six. Putting it all together, giant planets may be present around only a minority of stars like our own.

In January 2019, GPIES observed its 531st, and final, new star, and the team is currently following up the remaining candidates to determine which are truly planets and which are distant background stars impersonating giant planets.

The next-generation telescopes — such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and WFIRST mission, the Giant Magellan Telescope, Thirty Meter Telescope, and Extremely Large Telescope — should be able to push the boundaries of study, imaging planets much closer to their star and overlapping with other techniques, producing a full accounting of giant planet and brown dwarf populations from 1 to 1,000 AU.

“Further observations of additional higher mass stars can test whether this trend is real,” said Macintosh, “especially as our survey is limited by the number of bright, young nearby stars available for study by direct imagers like GPI.”

Background:

GPI is specifically designed to search for planets and brown dwarfs around other stars, using a mask known as a coronagraph to partially block a star’s light. Together with adaptive optics correcting for turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere and advanced image processing, researchers can search the star’s neighborhood for Jupiter-like exoplanets and brown dwarfs up to a million times fainter than the host star.

In our Solar System, Jupiter is the largest planet, being about 318 times as massive as the Earth and lying about five times farther from the Sun than does the Earth. Brown dwarfs range from 13 to 90 times the mass of Jupiter; and while they can be up to a tenth the mass of the Sun, they lack the nuclear fusion in their core to burn as a star — so they lie somewhere between a diminutive star and a super-planet.

An early success of GPIES was the discovery of 51 Eridani b in December 2014, a planet about two-and-a-half times more massive than Jupiter, that orbits its star beyond the distance that Saturn orbits our own Sun. The host star, 51 Eridani, is just 97 light-years away, and is only 26 million years old (nearby and young, by astronomy standards). The star had been observed by multiple planet-imaging surveys with a variety of telescopes and instruments, but its planet was not detected until GPI’s superior instrumentation was able to suppress the starlight enough for the planet to be visible.

GPIES also discovered the brown dwarf HR 2562 B, which is at a separation similar to that between the Sun and Uranus, and is 30 times more massive than Jupiter.

Most exoplanets discovered thus far, including those found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, are found via indirect methods, such as observing a dimming in the star’s light as the orbiting planet eclipses its parent star, or by observing the star’s wobble as the planet’s gravity tugs on the star. These methods have been very successful, but they only probe the central regions of planetary systems. Those regions outside the orbit of Jupiter, where the giant planets are in our Solar System, are usually out of their reach. GPI, however, endeavors to directly detect planets in this parameter space by taking a picture of them alongside their parent stars.

The Gemini results support those from these other techniques, including a recent study of exoplanets discovered by the radial velocity method that found the most likely separation for a giant planet around Sun-like stars is about 3 AU. The finding that brown dwarfs occur with a frequency of only about 1%, independent of stellar mass, is also consistent with previous results from direct imaging surveys. 

Contacts and sources:

• Eric Nielsen, Stanford University
• Bruce Macintosh, Stanford University
• Franck Marchis, SETI Institute
• Peter Michaud, Gemini Observatory,
  

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

19-06-2019 om 17:48 geschreven door peter  

Linda Moulton Howe: Planet X Revelations

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

19-06-2019 om 17:31 geschreven door peter  

Clif High: UFOs, Alien Encounters, & Secret Space via Richard Dolan

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

19-06-2019 om 17:24 geschreven door peter  

There are plenty of people who believe crop circles are made by humans. There are plenty of crop circles that are so large and complex that even skeptics wonder if there’s something more going on in those fields. It turns out that in one field of crops circles in France – there is. A farmer went out to check on the beautiful circles he found covering two adjoining wheat fields and discovered a nude middle-aged couple who had just completed their application for admission into the “Crop Circle Club.” If you don’t know what that means, this may change the way you look at (or in) crops circles forever.

If you build it, they will come.

“At the beginning, from the ground, I could not see what it was, I went to Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg (castle on top of the plain) to take height, and there I discovered part of the land.I saw a work of geometric circles in 30 ares of field that are three hectares in Saint-Hippolyte. It is not ugly to see, it is very beautiful, but I can not be happy having lost part of my wheat crop.”

On June 12, Thomas Jehl got a call from a neighbor in Saint-Hippolyte, a commune (township) in northeastern France near the German border. The neighbor was letting him know that two of his wheat fields were now partially and geometrically covered with a series of crop circles measuring over 200 meters (656 feet) from end-to-end. (See the photos here and here.) He was obviously flattered to be flattened in a wheat sense, but had no idea what else he was in for, other than losing some of his crop to the circles and their mysterious makers.

“It would really surprise me if I could do something about it. It’s a shame, because this time it had been a great season for wheat.”

Jehl didn’t report the cercles de culture (cultural circles – the French term for crop circles) to the police because he’s not really sure if they can find the culprits.

“It is true that the wheat is not broken, as if something had come from above and cracked it, but I do not believe that it is the work of someone who is not an inhabitant of the Earth. Then I saw nothing, so I can not know.I do not even know when it was done, it was between this weekend and Wednesday, I guess.”

News of the artistic cercles de culture (the top figure has 5 circles aligned and an outer ring; the second figure has 19 aligned circles and a ring around the central group) spread quickly and by the weekend there were cars from France and Germany lined up to take in the sight. According to the news source L’Alsace, the spectators included a middle-aged couple Jehl stumbled upon in flagrante delicto … and in nothing else.

“The case even takes a crisp turn when we learn that the farmer would have fallen Friday night on a couple who was getting dressed, in the middle of ears of wheat. No doubt the two forty-year-olds wanted to profit directly and without any form of barrier, supposed positive waves.”

While crop circles aren’t generally thought of as aphrodisiacs or fertility aids, other paranormal sites are, including some stone circles and giant ground drawings like the Cerne Abbas (Cerne Giant) in Dorset, England, which is 180 feet tall and has a 20-foot penis (that may be a clue). The current crop circle crop in Europe is up to four this year,with two each in France and the UK. While this is the first one to host a couple joining the Crop Circle Club (like the Mile High Club, only a mile lower), this could be a new hidden compensation for farmers or a new category of amateur porn video.

On the other hand … what if the circle really WAS made by aliens? Are they entertained, mortified … or both?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

19-06-2019 om 17:16 geschreven door peter  

An unidentified flying object has been filmed from a mountain overlooking top secret US air base Area 51 by a hiker while hiking just miles away Area 51.

The hiker states: "Area 51 from Tikaboo Peak the base is very active. A great look into Area 51 just as the snow stopped."

"To get the best video, and pictures of Area 51 out there, I do feel the weather had a lot to do with the great shots I was able to get. Between the snowstorms, and clouds the base would just illuminate long enough for me to film, and take pictures."

 RT America’s Natasha Sweatte reports on this sighting.


See the original 22-minute video here:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q2HvCCtFkg

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

19-06-2019 om 16:56 geschreven door peter  

Aliens Find Curiosity Rover On Mars, Watches From Distance, UFO Sighting News.

Date of photo: June 16, 2019
Location of discovery: Mars 
Source: 

• https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?rawid=NRB_613927069EDR_S0760832NCAM00595M_&s=2438.52223036413
  
  

The white UFO was seen in the most recent photo taken by the NASA rover.  The UFO in the distance is watching the Mars rover...studying this primitive device.  I wonder if this is the closest they have come to the rover, or have they actually physically touched it in any way. I have seen many white glowing lights on Mars, but never one hovering and never one the shape of disk. This is new to me. I need to dig deeper into the photos to see if its been caught in any other photos. I would love to see this closer and at a different angle. 

Scott C. Waring

19-06-2019 om 16:48 geschreven door peter  

Alien Orb Size Of Car Close To Passenger Jet During Sunset, June 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: June 2019
Location of sighting: unknown

This UFO was recorded passing a passenger jet during sunset last week. The UFO is coming very close the the plane and if we compare size, then the UFO would be about the size of a car. That is no small object to be so close to an aircraft with so many passengers! I wonder if it even showed up on radar or not? Believe it or not, this does happen daily at most airports around the world. Than means it happens tens of thousands of times a day, but few ever look up and record a jet. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

19-06-2019 om 16:42 geschreven door peter  

UFO Shoots From Volcano In Live Cam Raw Footage, June 2019, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: June 16, 2019
Location of sighting: Volcano in Mexico

Here is a video recorded from the live cam of the famous Mexican volcano Popocatepetl. The video shows the UFO shooting up out of the side of the volcano almost as a rocket would. This is really extrodinary footage and important proof that an alien base does sit 5-6 miles below this volcano. 
Scott C. Waring

19-06-2019 om 16:27 geschreven door peter  

Absolute Proof Of USAF Flying UFO Disks In Area 51, June 2019, Video, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: June 2019
Location of sighting: Area 51, Nevada, USA

This is a short video of Area 51 viewed from a hilltop. The person is zooming in on a hanger there where they witness a whiteish UFO exiting the hanger. Everyone knows that they test alien tech over there. The disks they have they received from aliens and have converted them so humans can fly them. But the pilots need lots of practice time to learn to control these craft well. Amazing video. 
Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

19-06-2019 om 16:24 geschreven door peter  

American President Trump Reveals He Had Meeting on UFOs

In a new development that will either ignite dozens of more conspiracy theories or douse twice as many as new ones, United States President Donald Trump has said he met with officials about UFOs although he reiterated that he did not particularly believe in them.

Trump revealed that the military briefed him on UFO sightings.

He said that he had seen, read, and heard and did one very brief meeting on it. He pointed out that people were saying they saw UFOs, but he did not believe it particularly.

Despite Trump’s disinterest on UFOs, the military has been keeping an eye on the skies recently. After the increase in UFO reports, the Navy recently set new guidelines for reporting UFOs entering US aerospace, making sure all sightings get the proper investigations.

Last month, the Pentagon admitted that Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was involved in research and investigation of UFOs. Defense Department spokesman Christopher Sherwood revealed that the AATIP’s main focus was investigating UFO event.

The AATIP was shut down in 2012, but only in 2017, the AATIP’s existence was known. Sherwood claimed that the government still has a department until now to handle alleged sightings of alien aircraft.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 16:17 geschreven door peter  

Greenish-Yellow Pulsating Light UFOs Keep Pace With A Korean Airliner

The passengers onboard of a Korean airliner were left baffled after seeing a UFO flying beside them. Lucas Kim managed to snap pictures of the strange aerial event as it split into six separate objects leaving travelers confused.

The UFO kept pace with the airliner flying towards Thailand. Lucas Kim looked out of his window when he noticed something similar to the scene from The Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

Kim first thought it was just another jet, but he realized it was too close for comfort. Something was not right with the scene, so he grabbed his phone and started recording the UFO.

He could not believe what he was observing as it wasn’t a plane at all. He saw the UFO split into six mysterious objects surrounded by a greenish-yellow pulsating light.

The incident took place during the day.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 16:01 geschreven door peter  

Luis Elizondo – Former Head of the Pentagon’s UFO Project

Luis Elizondo is a career intelligence officer whose experience includes working with the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, the National Counterintelligence Executive, and the Director of National Intelligence. As a former Special Agent In-Charge, Elizondo conducted and supervised highly sensitive espionage and terrorism investigations around the world. As an intelligence Case Officer, he ran clandestine source operations throughout Latin America and the Middle East. Most recently, Elizondo managed the security for certain sensitive portfolios for the US Government as the Director for the National Programs Special Management Staff. For nearly the last decade, Elizondo also ran a sensitive aerospace threat identification program focusing on unidentified aerial technologies. Elizondo’s academic background includes Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology, with research experience in tropical diseases. Elizondo is also an inventor who holds several patents.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:58 geschreven door peter  

Daytime UFO over Austin, Texas 6-Jun-2019

New video of a bright unidentified flying object in the sky above Austin in Texas on 6th June 2019.

Witness report:

Fuzzy, cigar shaped object traversed across the sky in broad daylight.

Author (source: MUFON)

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:40 geschreven door peter  

Bright UFOs over Conway, Pennsylvania 4-Jun-2019

These bright lights were filmed in the sky above Conway, Pennsylvania on 4th June 2019.

Witness report: 

driving home when husband spotted 3 amber colored colored lights in the sky moving in a slow straight line, then one moved to make it a triangle,and after about 1 min approx. the first one disappeared, leaving 2 in a straight line, then one a little higher and they turned white, after about 2 min. more they just disappeared.

Author (source: MUFON)

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:37 geschreven door peter  

MJ Banias – The UFO People: A Curious Culture

MJ Banias is the author of “The UFO People: A Curious Culture.” He is an educator, writer and blogger. He was a former field investigator with the Mutual UFO Network, has been featured on multiple podcasts and radio shows, and contributes to Mysterious Universe and RoguePlanet. His work has been included in Fortean Times, FATE Magazine, and in a book entitled UFOs: Reframing the Debate. He lives in Canada with his wife, two children, and a massive cat. In this episode we talk to MJ about what he had found when taking a closer look at those who are interested in the UFO phenomenon.

Are UFO people a community on their own? How does the UFO topic effect the general public? What does MJ feel the future for the UFO topic holds? How is all of this changing as these recent UFO developments permeate the wider public? We will cover all of this and more in this fascinating episode.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:27 geschreven door peter  

Strange object filmed from a plane over Port of Prince, Haiti 1-Jun-2019

This strange partially invisible object was filmed from a plane over Haiti on 1st June 2019.

Witness report: 

unknown flying object at huge speed. the heading of the plane is 335 as on film, 
it looks like a could but according to plane position, and relative position of the object it can t be a cloud, cause that would say this could is supersonic…..rmk : aircraft speed is around 450kts at the moment….

Author (source: MUFON)

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:21 geschreven door peter  

Do these Pentagon pictures prove UFOs ARE real? TOM LEONARD investigates after US Navy pilots claimed to have spotted fast-flying objects during late-night training

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

By TOM LEONARD IN NEW YORK FOR THE DAILY MAIL

The fighter pilots could hardly conceal their surprise as they tracked the object moving at incredible speed above the waves. 'Wow, what is that, man?' says one excitedly. 'Look at it fly!'

Infrared cockpit-camera footage taken on a later sortie by the same U.S. Navy squadron reveals another immensely fast-flying object, this one spinning in mid-air and moving against a 120-knot wind, again accompanied by commentary from totally baffled airmen.

Although the footage shows only one of these objects, a pilot is heard to say: 'There's a whole fleet' showing up on his monitors. And as the one in the film turns slowly in the air, a shocked voice chimes in: 'Look at that thing! It's rotating!'

Between the summer of 2014 and March 2015, it's now emerged, these unexplained objects were spotted almost every day over the skies off the U.S. East Coast.

Highly qualified U.S. Navy pilots — flying from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and training for active duty in the Persian Gulf — told their superiors the objects seemingly defied the laws of physics.

About 30-40ft long and shaped like a Tic Tac mint, they had no wings or rotors — in fact, they had no discernible means of propulsion or flight — and, yet, they could hover in the sky, slow suddenly and accelerate almost instantaneously to hypersonic speeds of a mile a second.

Between the summer of 2014 and March 2015 these unexplained objects were spotted almost every day over the skies off the U.S. East Coast

Radar showed they could fly as high as 80,000ft. One pilot compared their remarkable manoeuverability to a ping-pong ball bouncing off a wall. The resulting G-force would crush any humans inside.

A near collision was recorded in an official mishap report, when, in late 2014, the pilot of a Super Hornet fighter jet almost hit one of them. The pilot said it looked like a sphere encasing a cube. 

'These things would be there all day,' said Lt Ryan Graves, a Super Hornet pilot of ten years' service. He and four other pilots reported their sightings to the Pentagon and to Congress, but only now have they spoken out publicly.

Their accounts — backed by the infrared camera footage and reports of a strikingly similar encounter that occurred a decade earlier — appear to have bounced the U.S. Navy into action.

Amid claims it has ignored or covered up sightings in the past, it has now been forced to admit it does investigate what it calls 'unexplained aerial phenomena', and that it has just introduced a formal, albeit secret, procedure for military personnel to report what the rest of us know as UFOs.

Former U.S. officials have welcomed the move, saying the government needs to take the issue seriously and remove the stigma attached to reporting incidents.

clearly this is not some giant hoax and, given the weight of evidence, it's hard to swallow the arguments of sceptics who say these newly publicised sightings can be explained by human error or equipment failure .

In which case, many experts agree, only two possible explanations remain: either someone or some country has secretly developed jaw-droppingly advanced technology, or the giant flying Tic Tacs don't come from this planet. 

Highly qualified U.S. Navy pilots — flying from the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and training for active duty in the Persian Gulf — told their superiors the objects seemingly defied the laws of physics

Nobody at the Pentagon is saying the objects were extraterrestrial, and scientists stress that more mundane explanations are often found for such incidents. (Last week, for instance, billionaire Elon Musk's company SpaceX, sent 60 satellites into orbit, prompting excited stargazers across the world to report UFOs.)

The pilots' evidence was sent for analysis at a secret Pentagon outfit called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates encounters between UFOs and U.S. military.

Angry that his government wasn't doing more to counter what could be a profound security threat, the boss of the Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, decided to release the footage of the UFO encounters into the public domain, and in 2017 resigned his post.

Mr Elizondo is believed to be the most senior U.S. official ever to say that the UFO phenomenon is real. 

And now, two years on from his release of the footage, some of the pilots involved in the encounters appear to corroborate his view, speaking to the New York Times and makers of a forthcoming History Channel documentary series, Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation.

They say they only started noticing the UFOs after their Eighties-era radar was modernised. Initially, they ignored them, thinking they were false radar tracks.

However, they kept appearing as the carrier group sailed between Virginia and Florida, at varying altitudes, at immense speeds far faster than any fighter jet.

Whatever fuelled the UFOs, it was clearly much more advanced than anything known to the U.S. Navy. They were able to tear around the sky for 12 hours at a time, when a navy jet could only manage an hour before having to refuel, says Lt Graves.

A fellow pilot, Lt Danny Accoin, says he encountered the objects twice. The first time he picked one up on his radar, he set his plane to head towards it, albeit flying 1,000ft below. 

Amid claims it has ignored or covered up sightings in the past, it has now been forced to admit it does investigate what it calls 'unexplained aerial phenomena', and that it has just introduced a formal, albeit secret, procedure for military personnel to report what the rest of us know as UFOs

Even though it was clearly visible on his radar, missile system and infrared camera, he couldn't see it through his helmet camera.

Then, the pilots started seeing the objects with their naked eyes. 'No distinct wings, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,' says Lt Accoin. 'It seems like they were aware of our presence, because they would actively move around us.'

Lt Graves said he once bumped into a squadron mate who had just returned from a mission 'with a look of shock on his face'. He told him he had 'almost hit one of those things' as he and another pilot flew just 100ft apart. Something suddenly flew right between them.

The pilots initially believed they had stumbled into a top-secret U.S. drone project, but, after the near miss, they reasoned the Pentagon wouldn't possibly behave so irresponsibly as to let them fly so close.

It's not the first time that U.S. Navy pilots have reported disturbing encounters in broad daylight with a 'giant Tic Tac'. 

In November 2004, two Super Hornets were on a routine training mission over the Pacific, 100 miles out from San Diego, when a cruiser, the USS Princeton, radioed them and ominously asked if they were armed.

The ship had spent two weeks tracking strange, unidentified aircraft that appeared suddenly at an altitude of 80,000ft, then plunged towards the sea. At 20,000ft, they stopped and hovered before either disappearing out of radar range or shooting straight up again.

Cmdr David Fravor and his colleagues only had dummy missiles, but they were directed to the last known location of one of the objects. In the sea, they saw a large object just below the surface of the water, and another, 50ft above, hovering erratically. They described it as 40ft long, white, wingless and shaped like an oblong pill.

As Cmdr Fravor flew towards it, the second object rose to meet him at a fast speed and acceleration. Flying with the other pilot was an unidentified weapons systems operator, who is now a senior naval officer. 

She told the History Channel: 'The hair on the back of my neck was standing up. I was thinking: 'I'm going to be watching a disaster here.' You're wondering: 'How can I possibly fight this?' '

Instead, the object suddenly peeled away at a speed that Fravor admits left him feeling 'pretty weirded out'.

He was even more 'weirded out' when the Princeton told him its radar showed the object had reappeared under a minute later, 60 miles away at the planes' precise rendezvous point. 

How did it travel so fast, at a speed of 3,700 mph (the Super Hornet's top speed is 1,190 mph), and how did it know his rendezvous point? Another jet was swiftly sent up with an infrared camera and captured a grainy 90-second film of the 'Tic Tac' flying slowly, then zipping away fast.

Sceptics question whether there are bugs in the planes' imaging systems, or whether the pilots were tricked by atmospheric effects and reflections. 

However, Kevin Day, the Princeton's senior radar operator at the time, says his screen showed well over 100 UFOs over the course of that week. 'Watching them on the display was like watching snow fall from the sky,' he says.

Cmdr Fravor says: 'There is a capability out there, I don't know where it's from. I'm not saying it's from outer space, but I'm not saying it's from here either.'

Some physicists have outlined how 'field propulsion' systems can move an object at astonishing speeds without any propellant, by creating external force fields so the space around the object moves rather than the object. 

However, the theory is purely speculative — perhaps even less feasible than little green men in physics-defying spaceships.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

19-06-2019 om 15:11 geschreven door peter  

Navy Pilot Says Fleet of UFOs Followed US Aircraft

During training missions between 2014 and 2015, seasoned pilots of the U.S. Navy experienced several encounters with UFOs. Impossible flying objects moving at hypersonic speeds at altitudes up to 30,000 feet were recorded on their aircraft cameras and radar. Pilots reported that these unidentified flying objects had no visible means of propulsion.

Six pilots reported seeing UFOs from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt between 2014 and 2015 during flights along Virginia to Florida.

Two of the involved pilots share their stories in a documentary series of History Channel featuring two aerial encounters. They show clips of one little white speck and one giant, dark blob. These unusual objects are later known as Go Fast and Gimbal, respectively.

According to Lt Danny Accoin, these UFOs had no distinct wing, tail, and exhaust plume and somewhat aware of their presence as these mysterious objects would actively move around them.

The lieutenant said that it was possible to say that it was just a false alarm when an unusual reading showed up on the radar for the first time, but it was another story as they got multiple sensors reading the exact the same thing.

Accoin stated that he encountered UFOs twice and his tracking equipment, radar and infrared cameras on aircraft detected UFOs both times but did not manage to capture them on his helmet camera.

F-18 pilot Lt. Ryan Graves claimed that a squadron of UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months in the eastern coast of the U.S. Graves said the UFOs reappeared in March 2015, after Roosevelt was deployed to the Arabian Gulf.

The lieutenant said that they had issues with the UFOs when they went out to the Middle East.

Following this spate of UFO sightings, the U.S. Navy issued official guidelines in 2015 for personnel to report and investigate UFOs. Earlier this year, those Navy protocols were updated, mandating that all data will be classified information and won’t be available to the general public.

{ http://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

19-06-2019 om 14:59 geschreven door peter