Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 12 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS.
ON 06/05/2024 MORE THAN 1.972.210
VISITORS FROM 134 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
22-07-2019
Are moons forming around this distant gas giant planet?
Are moons forming around this distant gas giant planet?
After many years of searching, astronomers have finally found what appears to be a circumplanetary disk – that is, a disk of gas and dust – surrounding a young exoplanet. Evidence suggests that moons may be forming there.
Composite image of a disk around the young star PDS 70, 370 light-years away. The system’s 2 planets are marked. Astronomers have found that the young planet designated PDS 70 c has a circumplanetary disk, a possible birthplace of exomoons.
It’s well-known that planets are born in circumstellar disks of gas and dust that surround young stars, and many of these have been observed by astronomers. Likewise, moons are thought to form in similar disks surrounding planets, but these have been more difficult to find. This month (July 11, 2019), astronomers announced the discovery of just such a disk surrounding a young gas giant planet in the PDS 70 star system, 370 light-yearsaway. It’s the first-ever observation of the kind of circumplanetary disk that is believed to have given birth to the moons of Jupiter in our solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
The peer-reviewed discovery paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 11.
Scientists think it is similar to the kind of disk that once surrounded Jupiter and gave birth to its many moons because it surrounds a still-developing young gas giant planet, called PDS 70 c. As astronomer Andrea Isella from Rice University explained:
Planets form from disks of gas and dust around newly forming stars, and if a planet is large enough, it can form its own disk as it gathers material in its orbit around the star. Jupiter and its moons are a little planetary system within our solar system, for example, and it’s believed Jupiter’s moons formed from a circumplanetary disk when Jupiter was very young.
As Isella also noted in an article for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO):
For the first time, we can conclusively see the telltale signs of a circumplanetary disk, which helps to support many of the current theories of planet formation. By comparing our observations to the high-resolution infrared and optical images, we can clearly see that an otherwise enigmatic concentration of tiny dust particles is actually a planet-girding disk of dust, the first such feature ever conclusively observed.
Comparison of the circumplanetary disk and PDS 70 c, as seen by ALMA (left) and earlier by VLT (right). The infrared image from VLT showed the second planet PDS 70 b, but not PDS 70 c or the disk.
These kinds of circumplanetary disks are thought to not last very long, about 10 million years at most, so to find them astronomers need to look at very young star systems, where planets are still forming. Only a few candidate planets have been found before. According to Isella:
There are a handful of candidate planets that have been detected in disks, but this is a very new field, and they are all still debated. (PDS 70 b and PDS 70 c) are among the most robust because there have been independent observations with different instruments and techniques.
The astronomers made the discovery using the huge 66-antenna Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile; millimeter wave radio signals revealed the presence of dust grains where PDS 70 c and its sister planet, PDS 70 b, are still forming in the larger circumstellar disk.
PDS 70 b had first been observed in 2018 by the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). SPHERE used infrared light to see the forming planets in the dust disk. In June of this year, astronomers used a different VLT instrument called MUSE, which observes in a visible wavelength of light called H-alpha. This wavelength is emitted when hydrogen falls onto a star or planet and becomes ionized. This was even better for confirming that the planets really were there, as Isella explained:
H-alpha gives us more confidence that these are planets because it suggests they are still drawing in gas and dust and growing.
ALMA image of the PDS 70 system, showing the larger circumstellar disk surrounding the young star. The two small smudges are the two still-forming planets.
The new ALMA observations add to this previous evidence, showing that not only are the planets real, but they have the kind of disks surrounding them that should eventually form moons. Isella added:
It’s complementary to the optical data and provides completely independent confirmation that there is something there.
The ALMA observations are valuable since they are less limited than those of VLT. As Isella explained:
This means we’ll be able to come back to this system at different time periods and more easily map the orbit of the planets and the concentration of dust in the system. This will give us unique insights into the orbital properties of solar systems in their very earliest stages of development.
The newer ALMA data also shows that there are distinct differences between the two planets. The innermost, PDS 70 b, is about the same distance from its star as Uranus is from our sun, and has a tail-like mass of dust behind it. According to Isella:
What this is and what it means for this planetary system is not yet known. The only conclusive thing we can say is that it is far enough from the planet to be an independent feature.
PDS 70 c, the outermost of the two planets, shines brightly in the infrared and hydrogen bands of light. This means it is likely pretty much a fully-formed planet, although additional nearby gas is still being siphoned onto the planet’s surface. PDS 70 c lies about the same distance from its star as Neptune is from our sun, and its mass is estimated to be anywhere from 1-10 times that of Jupiter. If it is on the larger end of that scale, it could have planet-sized moons, according to Isella:
If the planet is on the larger end of that estimate, it’s quite possible there might be planet-size moons in formation around it.
One possible planet-sized moon has – maybe – already been found, orbiting the gas giant planet Kepler-1625b, 8,000 light-years away. This moon, if real, is about the size of Neptune, something unheard of in our solar system. This potential discovery is still a subject of much debate, however, and has not been confirmed yet.
These findings are exciting because planetary scientists have long thought that planets in other solar systems should have moons, just like in our own solar system. But finding them is difficult, and none have been confirmed yet, because they are much smaller than their host planets. If circumplanetary disks like the one surrounding PDS 70 c are common, then that would mean that moons are probably common as well. Some, or perhaps even many, of those might be ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus in our solar system, where life could conceivably exist.
Finding more such circumplanetary disks will also help astronomers better understand how planetary systems form overall, according to Isella:
There’s much that we don’t understand about how planets form, and we now finally have the instruments to make direct observations and begin answering questions about how our solar system formed and how other planets might form.
Artist’s concept of the circumplanetary disk of gas and dust surrounding the young gas giant planet PDS 70 c. Evidence suggests there may be moons forming in this disk.
Bottom line: For the first time, astronomers have confirmed a circumplanetary disk of gas and dust around a young gas giant planet, where alien moons might be forming.
Area 51-klokkenluider waarschuwt tegen bestormen geheime basis. Dit is volgens hem de enige plek waar buitenaardse technologie werd bewaard
Area 51-klokkenluider waarschuwt tegen bestormen geheime basis. Dit is volgens hem de enige plek waar buitenaardse technologie werd bewaard
Klokkenluider Bob Lazar, die in 1989 tijdens een tv-interview onthulde dat hij vlak bij Area 51 had gewerkt, heeft mensen via Instagram gewaarschuwd dat de geplande bestorming van de basis tijdverspilling is.
“Ik heb begrepen dat het Facebookevenement begonnen is als grap,” schrijft hij. “Maar een aantal mensen is toch van plan om er naartoe te gaan. Dat is een misplaatst idee.”
Lazar legt uit dat ‘er geen aliens of buitenaardse technologieën op de basis zijn te vinden’.
Verplaatst
De enige plek waar ooit buitenaardse technologieën werden bewaard was Site S4, ten zuiden van Area 51, en dat was 30 jaar geleden, aldus Lazar.
Area 51 is volgens hem slechts een geheime onderzoeksbasis.
S4 is mogelijk decennia geleden al verplaatst of wordt wellicht niet meer gebruikt voor het project, zegt Lazar verder nog.
Neergeschoten
“Ik steun deze ‘beweging’ dan ook niet,” voegt hij toe. “Dit is niet de manier om te proberen meer informatie te krijgen.”
De laatste keer dat iemand probeerde Area 51 binnen te komen, werd diegene neergeschoten, merkt de klokkenluider op.
“De interesse in het onderwerp is wel goed; de wetenschap en technologie,” besluit Lazar. “Dat is wat de wereld waarin we leven per direct zou veranderen.”
Half a century ago, the first humans stepped foot on Earth’s lonely natural satellite. Achieved over the course of several days and manned by three intrepid astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins—the lunar landing of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a project more than a decade in the making, and which involved more than 400,000 participants.
After fifty years, we are still seeing the influence of Apollo 11, which historian Arthur Schlesinger called the single greatest achievement of the 20th century. But what are the longer lasting implications of the 1969 moon landing?
I recently spoke with Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra, the official publication of the National Space Society and author of First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience(for which Buzz Aldrin wrote the introduction). According to Pyle, understanding the longer-lasting influence of Apollo 11 requires a look back at the mindset behind United States leadership more than half a century ago.
“Apollo was a geopolitical program,” Pyle says, “but it was really designed to make a point: which was ‘We’re better than the Soviets. We have better scientists, we have better technicians, we have better engineering and better education, better systems of government.’ It achieved that handily and trounced them as a lunar effort, and they were trying and weren’t able to do it with people. So, it achieved that goal.”
However, Pyle also says that the speed at which Americans were able to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 placed some limitations on the usefulness of Apollo-era innovations for future projects.
“The problem was, it was done so quickly, and with such finesse, and was so purpose driven that although there were plans to use the Apollo hardware for other things, it was kind of a closed-end system. By 1972, we were done with the lunar missions. They had enough hardware left for three more: Apollo 18 through 20, [and] Nixon cancelled that shortly after the Apollo 11 flight.”
That isn’t to say that there weren’t still many applications for Apollo-era innovations, as well as those which came later under similar influence. “We had Skylab,” Pyle notes, “[and we had] the Space Station, and that was a legacy; we had the first cooperative flights between the U.S. and the Soviet Union with Apollo/Soyuz in 1975, and then it slowed down.
“We started working on the shuttle, which is a whole different approach,” Pyle also said. “It was supposed to be reusable—and it kind of was—it was suppose to be cheaper, and it kind of wasn’t. It wasn’t as safe as Apollo.”
However, it could be argued that in addition to being the single greatest achievement of the 20th century, the Apollo moon landings may have also been the most inspirational, in terms of the future of space exploration; whether directly or indirectly.
“I think the legacy of Apollo, besides the philosophical achievement, the sense of adventure, and so forth, is a couple of things,” Pyle told me. “Even pessimistic projections about the money spent say that there’s anywhere from between five dollars and twenty-one dollars returned for every dollar invested in Apollo. And that’s just talking in money terms. That kind of program—a space program—is one of the few things in which government money is all pumped back into American labor; there’s no outsourcing. It’s all happening in the U.S., with U.S. workers, so that’s a benefit.
“They’re developing technologies that have benefited us to this day; everything from computing, to medical—kidney dialysis, artificial joints—anti-scratch coating on the lenses of your glasses,the dust buster was a design descended from the vacuum they designed to vacuum inside the lunar module! So all kinds of spin-offs and benefits—including our cell phones, by the way—that have persisted through the years.”
But above all, Apollo 11 continues to inspire us.
“If I go up to the Jet Propulsion Lab, where I work from time to time, and I sit at a table in the cafeteria and [ask the employees], ‘what got you into this kind of work?’ Some people are gonna say Star Trek, some are gonna say Star Wars… but they all say the Apollo Program. ‘I wasn’t even alive then,’ in many cases they’ll say. ‘The Apollo Program really inspired me to do this’.”
The Eagle landing module, photographed by Michael Collins from Columbia.
I also asked Pyle about future missions to the moon, as well as our eventual journeys to Mars, and what we might be able to predict about the future of space travel based on our experience with the Apollo program.
“If we [look at] this planned return to the moon that Vice President Pence announced a few months ago, that hardware looks a lot like Apollo because it’s gotta do the same thing. So we’re not talking about winged space shuttles and things like that, we’re talking about a conical capsule—a blunt-body capsule just like the Apollo capsule, but a little bigger (that’s the Orion)—we’re talking about the Space Launch System (SLS), and possibly using the Falcon Heavy and one of Jeff Bezos’ rockets (which are all heavily derivative of the Saturn V). We’re talking about moon suits that are derivative from what was built for Apollo, and we’re talking about a lunar lander: the best candidate so far is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon lander which he’s been working on for a few years, which derives a lot of its technology core from the [Apollo] lunar module.
“So between us and the Soviet Union, we did a ton of the heavy lifting, and the picking of the low-hanging fruit back in the 1960s, and now we’ve come full circle and we’re revisiting all that technology, to try and get back beyond Earth orbit, back to the moon, land on that south polar region where we know there’s big deposits of water ice, and see if we can use that water ice to stay there, and go beyond. Because where you’ve got water, you’ve got drinkable water, you can make breathable oxygen, and critically you can make rocket fuel out of it—you can make hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel.
“And with that, because you’re already out of the gravity well of the Earth, the solar system is your backyard! So that kind of is the big goal right now, and it all stems directly from the Apollo missions.”
In essence, the legacy of the Apollo missions remains veryrelevant today, and in likelihood, they will remain so for decades to come. Even with the passing of half a century, the achievements of the Apollo 11 lunar landing continue to shape the way we study space… and help to sharpen our sights for future avenues toward exploration of the cosmos.
For millennia the moon held a powerful place in out consciousness, entrenched in myths and legends around the world since our brains were able to comprehend and wonder on such things, and inspiring awe and wonder. As our species evolved and learned of the universe and how planets worked the moon lost none of its allure, becoming a target for our next age of discovery, only now rather than some mysterious landmass out past the vast ocean this was an alien place lying through the cold stretches of space, a specter that for so long seemed unreachable. In 1969, we finally made it, conquering the moon with the first man to set foot upon it, American astronaut Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 mission, and opening a new chapter into a brave new world of discovery. It would only be a matter of time before someone would be buried there, and there is one man who is. This is his story.
Back in the 1960s, there were few planetary scientists as illustrious or esteemed as the great Eugene Merle Shoemaker. A gifted scientist, he had been enrolled in CalTech, in California, at the tender age of just 16, and went on to earn his bachelor’s degree at 19, after which went on to earn his his Ph.D. degree at Princeton. He became involved in doing research for the United States Geological Survey in 1950, for which he scouted out uranium deposits in Utah and Colorado and did investigations into volcanic processes and deposits, before going on to study meteor impact craters, notably the 570-foot-deep (173-meter) Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona. Indeed, he would be the one to prove that it was the actual impact of a meteorite, and this is just one of his many major accomplishments.
Neil Armstrong on the moon
Shoemaker became an expert in impact craters, and was instrumental in not only progressing our understanding of terrestrial craters but also analyzing the craters of the moon, in the process providing the first map of the moon and revolutionizing our understanding of lunar geology, and in fact many of the craters and geological features of the moon were named by him. Shoemaker would also be the one who first came up with the hypothesis that a meteor impact was what had killed the dinosaurs, now accepted as scientific fact, and shed much illumination on our understanding of meteor impacts in general. So important were his contributions to his field that Shoemaker is considered one of the fathers of the emerging discipline of planetary science and astrogeology, and in 1960 he founded the Astrogeology Research Program within the United States Geological Survey. He would also have a hand in training astronauts, and he would have been an astronaut himself if he had not been diagnosed with an adrenal gland disorder known as Addison’s disease and disqualified.
During his career, Shoemaker earned various awards and accolades, notably he was awarded the the John Price Wetherill Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1965 and the National Medal of Science by then-president George H.W. Bush in 1992, he was also a prominent commentator on the space missions Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, and he was the lead geologist and investigator for Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 13 findings. However, what would really propel his shining star into the stratosphere was his 1994 discovery of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 Comet, which crashed into the planet Jupiter, the impact of which left a gaping wound on the surface and was televised around the world to make him a household name.
In his later years, Shoemaker became involved in traveling around the world looking for undiscovered impact craters in far-flung remote places along with his wife and fellow scientist Carolyn, but his main object of interest was always the moon, a place he had been denied a chance of ever actually going to. On July 18, 1997, Shoemaker and his wife were on one of these excursions at a remote and rugged place called the Tanami Track, in the desolate wilds of the Australian Outback, when they were tragically involved in a car crash. The crash would kill Eugene Shoemaker and seriously injure Carolyn, and thus one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century was lost to us. However, he still had one more pioneering achievement in him, even in death.
Eugene Shoemaker
To help Shoemaker finally reach his beloved moon, which he had long been unable to go to because of his medical condition, a space burial company called Celestis was tasked with designing a specialized urn which could hold the late scientist’s ashes and be outfitted onto a spacecraft to launch them into space. The capsule holding the remains was then put aboard a space probe called the Lunar Prospector on Jan. 6, 1998 and sent to the moon bearing a brass foil wrapping upon which is laser etched images of image of the Hale-Bopp Comet and the Arizona crater he had long studied, as well as the quote from Romeo and Juliet:
And, when he shall die Take him and cut him out in little stars And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.
The probe would make it to the moon, where it was crashed into the lunar South Pole along with its cargo, burying it there forevermore. It was a momentous occasion, because although there had been human remains sent to space before, most notably those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1992, these actually almost always had fallen back to earth to burn up on reentry. This was the first time, and still the only time, these remains had actually been taken to land and rest on an extraterrestrial planetary body. It was Eugene Shoemaker’s final mission, and he had made it to the moon after all, with his wife saying, “It brings a little closure, in a way, to our feelings. We will always know when we look at the moon, that Gene is there.”
Although Shoemaker was the first and so far only person to ever be buried on an off world body, this is set to change in the coming years, as the same company has ramped up its program to send human remains to the moon, for a price. For the princely sum of $12,500 per gram of cremated remains you too can be sent off to the moon to make history, and it seems like only a matter of time before there are more people up there to join Shoemaker in his eternal rest. For now it is only him out there in the void, just as groundbreaking in death as he was in life, and it seems like it is a fitting resting place for such a pioneer of space sciences.
Sir Richard Branson — the billionaire business magnate, airline executive, space plane pioneer, possible space traveler and avowed thrill seeker – weighed in recently on the possibility that UFOs seen my military pilots are crafts from another planet, and his answer may surprise many who admire his accomplishments, particularly in private space travel.
“There’s no question that there are millions of other civilizations out there, but none of them are within reach of Earth and therefore, my instinct is: extremely unlikely.”
Is he saying that there are millions of other Richard Bransons out there, but none of them – including him – have figured out how to leave their planet’s gravity and travel to another world? Actually, Branson HAS figured out how to pilot a UFO (more on that later), but he’s of the opinion that distance defeats brainpower and technology in the quest to cross the galaxy. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Branson also expressed his doubts that governments or militaries are hiding evidence of it from the public.
“I can’t understand why these UFO discussions are always behind closed doors and done in secrecy. It just creates even more suspicion. If people had really discovered a UFO, you can’t keep things secret in this day and age, it would be everywhere.”
Take that, Area 51 Stormers! In fact, it’s already well-known what Branson thinks of those who believe UFOs are spaceships from other planets. At 4 am on the morning of April 1, 1989 (note the date), Branson took off in London in a custom hot air balloon shaped like a flying saucer, complete with strobe lights that blinked every ten seconds. (Great photos of the balloon here.) The balloon flew over London’s M25 highway as the morning rush hour was commencing, bringing traffic to a halt and causing TV and radio stations and local police departments to be flooded with calls reporting a UFO. Branson was loving every minute of it.
It was the early morning of April 1, 1989. Under the cover of darkness, Richard Branson took off in a custom hot air balloon shaped like a UFO. It was 4am and the strobe lights on board were blinking every ten seconds.
As the sun began to rise the UFO was making its way over London’s M25 highway. Drivers on their morning commute were stunned. Cars pulled over, police forces mobilized and the army was alerted. TV and radio stations were being flooded with reports of an Unidentified Flying Object…
The original plan was to land in Hyde Park but poor weather conditions blew him off target. Branson was forced to land in Surrey Field instead, as police forces followed in hot pursuit.
As the UFO prepared for landing the police surrounded the field and sent a lone officer to approach the strange aircraft. Branson had one more trick up his sleeve…
As the UFO door opened dry ice billowed out. It was then that a dwarf—also on board—emerged down the platform in an ET costume.
Unamused, the officers initially threatened arrest, eventually deciding against any formal action. Pictured above you can see Branson wearing the ET mask the dwarf came out in.
Branson, the billionaire entrepreneur and founder of the Virgin Group is well-known for his elaborate pranks and publicity stunts, but this one may go down as one of his best.
For those curious, the UFO was built in Bristol by Don Cameron of Cameron Balloons Limited. Codenamed “Project Wedgewood”, only a handful of people knew about the stunt which is what made it such a huge success.
“We could see every single vehicle grinding to a halt and hundreds of people looking up at the UFO flying over them. It was great fun watching their reactions.”
His original plan was to make a dramatic landing in historic Hyde Park but the craft was blown off target, so the skilled balloonist brought it down in Surrey Field instead, which was quickly surrounded by police. Just like in a bad sci-fi movie, the cops sent a lone officer out to meet the ‘spaceship’. Branson was ready for him.
“The UFOs door opened very slowly, with tonnes of dry ice billowing from it. A dwarf that we had carried on board, dressed in an ET outfit, walked down the platform towards the bobby. He promptly turned and ran in the opposite direction! The police initially didn’t see the funny side of it and threatened to arrest us for wasting their time. But they soon joined in the general merriment of it.”
Branson with his late test pilot Steve Fossett.
So Sir Richard Branson doesn’t believe that recent UFO sightings are extraterrestrial ships, doesn’t believe any have ever visited Earth and are being hidden from the public, and doesn’t think much of those who get excited about UFO sightings in general. However, being the good entrepreneur that he is, Branson tries to save face and not ‘alienate’ his customer base.
“And so I don’t think there’s any credible sightings yet. It would be wonderful if it were true.”
Before you report your next UFO sighting, check to see if Richard Branson is in town.
Stonehenge: a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England, consisting of a ring of standing stones each weighing around 25 tons.
Mystery: how were these 25-ton stones moved in 3000 BCE from the Preseli Hills, 150 miles (240 km) away?
Tallow: a rendered form of beef, mutton or pig fat, used in making candles and soap.
Greasing the sled: a method of moving heavy objects over rough ground by rubbing grease or fat on logs.
What’s the missing piece in this picture? Solid evidence that the builders of Stonehenge actually “greased the sleds” or logs or planks they used to move the stones from what is now Wales to what is now the biggest mystery in monoliths. According to a new study, the answer is pots of pig fat. Wait … what?
“I was interested in the exceptional level of preservation and high quantities of lipids – or fatty residues – we recovered from the pottery. I wanted to know more about why we see these high quantities of pig fat in pottery, when the animal bones that have been excavated at the site show that many of the pigs were ‘spit roasted’ rather than chopped up as you would expect if they were being cooked in the pots.”
Dr Lisa-Marie Shillito, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology, Newcastle University, and co-author of a new study in the journal Antiquity, explains her “Ah ha!” moment in a university press release. She was not researching how Stonehenge was built but how the workers were fed as part of the Feeding Stonehenge project. One way to do that is to analyze the organic residues on the shards of pots found at Durrington Walls, the large Neolithic settlement 2 miles (3.2 km) north-east of Stonehenge where it is believed the people from all over Britain who worked on building Stonehenge, including bringing the stones to the site, lived and ate.
“Until now, there has been a general assumption that the traces of animal fat absorbed by these pieces of pottery were related to the cooking and consumption of food, and this steered initial interpretations in that direction.”
Of course the workers used the pots with the pig fat residue to cook pork. What other reason could there be for the pork fat residue in them? Being a good scientist (and possibly a fan of pig roasts), Shillito didn’t see a connection between the pig bones with obvious evidence of spit roasting and the greasy pots. That means the fat was used for something else. She noticed that the shards were from pots that were much than those used for cooking.
“But there may have been other things going on as well, and these residues could be tantalising evidence of the greased sled theory.”
One of those “other things” may have been making tallow or grease, not just for candles but for greasing the logs that most historians now believe were used to enable as few as 20 people each to move one of the giant stones across miles of Britain. While “greasing the sled” – which means greasing the runners on the bottom of the sled for speed – is the phrase used in the report, “greasing the skids” might have been more appropriate. “Skid” may have come from the shipbuilding industry as a term for the logs or planks that were laid on the ground in order to pull ships from where they were built to the water, or from the logging industry where they were used for moving heavy logs over ground.
“Greasing the skids” eventually entered common usage as a term for making a difficult job easier or making it easier to achieve a goal, like employment at a prestigious company – particularly when one is not the best candidate. “Skid road” was the name of the path of planks for moving logs, and it eventually became Skid Row when the paths were abandoned and become symbolic lines of demarcation between the rich neighborhoods and the poor ones where the mill workers lived – which explains why the first Skid Row was in Vancouver, not New York.
Do these big pots of pig fat mean Durrington Walls was the Skid Row of Stonehenge builders? Dr. Shillito believes they definitely reinforce the “greased sleds” theory but are not yet definitive proof. However, they show that while pots are important tools in archeology, they can have multiple purposes.
“Archaeological interpretations of pottery residues can sometimes only give us part of the picture. We need to think about the wider context of what else we know and take a ‘multi-proxy’ approach to identify other possibilities if we hope to get a better understanding.”
Thank goodness for those Stonehenge guys who refused to wash the pots when their significant other asked them to.
Bio: Ted Roe is a co-founder and the Executive Director of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, NARCAP.org, which was established in 1999. He was born and raised in Great Falls, Montana during the 1960s and 70s and his interest in UAP and UAP research arose from local events and direct experience. Alongside his work with Dr. Richard Haines and the team at NARCAP, he has established and administrates the International Association of UAP Researchers, IAUAPR.org. Currently he resides on the Big Island, Hawaii, where he teaches freediving, martial arts (Iaido), and Zen meditation in addition to his duties administrating NARCAP.org and IAUAPR.org.
The National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, NARCAP, has been a leading innovator in aviation-related UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) research since its inception in 1999. NARCAP defined and established the use of the term UAP in the US as a more accurate description of things seen in the sky and to differentiate objective research of UAP from the general paradigm of UFOlogy. NARCAP has participated in briefings of Congressmen and the Podesta team that led to use of the term UAP by the Clinton campaign, and a 2005 Congressional hearing. NARCAP, formerly a private investigative team until it became a public nonprofit research group in 2014 (now 501(c)(3) charitable organization), has established several international branches and has developed relationships and written agreements with several of the official foreign government and non-government UAP research teams of the world. NARCAP has conducted in-depth studies of UAP profiles including “Project Sphere”, an examination of UAP that present as spherical lights and objects.
NARCAP has published many groundbreaking papers at www.narcap.org, including the first ever survey of commercial aircrews revealing that pilots and aircrews do experience sightings and incidents that they do not report. Through focusing on careful image management and business practices, established aviation investigative techniques and careful examination of the data, NARCAP has been able to acquire some important findings about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that raise equally important questions regarding aviation safety, the role of UAP researchers and teams with respect to the ETH, and the future of UAP research.
Huge City Found On Moon Using Google Moon Map, Will Musk Or Bezos Take It Over? UFO Sighting News.
Huge City Found On Moon Using Google Moon Map, Will Musk Or Bezos Take It Over? UFO Sighting News.
Here is a alien base I found using Google Moon map. The alien structure is huge, over 15 km long and wide. The structure is seen on only one area of photos. Others photos of this crater have it edited out. In my video of this object at the end, I show how easy it is for NASA to edit out such alien artefacts. It took me a whole 4 seconds to remove it and make it appear natural. Its obvious to me that NASA missed editing out this huge structure, but after reporting it, I give it 6 months before Google edits it out for the US government. I believe that this structure is still in working order and can easily become the new home to thousands of humans that want to live on the moon. I am sure big companies like Amazons Jeff Bezos and SpaceXs Elon Musk are currently looking for such prime areas for mining the moon. Imagine walking in and taking over an abandoned city on the moon 15km across! You would become the #1 company in the world not just with the mining you could do, but with the alien tech built into this city. Scott C. Waring
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Amazing UFO evidence recorded over Nellis Test Range, Nevada 16-Jul-2019
Amazing UFO evidence recorded over Nellis Test Range, Nevada 16-Jul-2019
Check out this amazing footage of a bright UFOs filmed in the sky above Las Vegas Nevada. This happened on 16th July 2019.
Witness report:
I shot this video from my backyard in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas, Nevada on the night of July 16, 2019. Here’s one more in a long line of UFO videos that were captured above the Nellis Test Range. At this point in time, it is doubtful that you will see anything just like this anywhere else. It may not seem spectacular but it is because you and a handful of others on this YouTube Channel may be the only people on the planet observing them.
72 Years After Roswell: Here’s How the UFO Phenomenon Changed
72 Years After Roswell: Here’s How the UFO Phenomenon Changed
The UFO phenomenon is no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of serious scientific study.
July 8 marked the 72nd anniversary of the Roswell Case; the day when an alleged alien ship (Flying Saucer) crashed near the city of Roswell in New Mexico.
In particular, on July 8, 1947, the United States Army had announced in the newspapers the “recovery” of the remains of a “flying saucer” on a ranch near Roswell.
The communication officer at the Roswell Army air base, Walter Haut, issued a press release writing that the 509 Operations Group personnel had recovered a “flying disc,” which had crashed on a ranch near Roswell.
Mac Brazel, a farmer from New Mexico, discovers scattered remains on his ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and on July 5 reports what he had found to the authorities.
After the release of the military communique on July 8, and the visit to the area of a military high command, the version abruptly changes and the facts are atrophied to the impact of a large military balloon belonging to Project Mogul.
Several subsequent military reports seemed to corroborate this version.
Roswell Case
Eventually, people forgot about the case altogether and until 1978, the Roswell incident received little attention
That changed when UFO researchers Stanton T. Friedman and William L. Moore compared the results of a series of interviews that each had conducted separately.
The official version of the crashed balloon theory was reconsidered and people started taking into consideration the possibility that the Army had actually recovered highly advanced technology from a crashed alien spaceship, together with ‘various’ corpses, of the alleged extraterrestrial beings.
Edgar Mitchell’s claims
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, although not a direct witness, has also stated numerous times that Roswell was a true UFO case, based on his high-level contacts within the government. “I have seen the secret UFO files, and there is no doubt that there was contact with extraterrestrials,” he said.
Interestingly Mitchell also believed that there is a government organization that is parallel and independent to the government that conducts experiments with extraterrestrial technology “and that is why all these incidents cannot be brought to light”.
Mitchell died in 2016 without having provided any evidence to corroborate his claims.
Birth of UFOlogy
The Roswell UFO case is widely recognized as the birth of modern ufology and has led to numerous debates, theories, and speculations about the existence of extraterrestrial life that many others consider totally unfounded.
Those who remain skeptical about the alleged flying saucer that crashed in Roswell are keen to accept the ‘revised, official version’ that tells us that instead of an aliens spaceship, what had crashed on the Roswell farm was actually a secret military weather balloon.
The phenomenon has had a great weight in popular culture and is mentioned in numerous works of fiction, as well as in documentaries.
But despite Roswell being the starting point of modern ufology, it wasn’t the first recorded sighting in the United States.
On February 24, 1942, the Famous Battle of L.A. took place, and many people claim that the military had shot at a UFO that night.
But if you are willing to dig deeper in historical records, you will find that evidence of UFOs can be traced back to antiquity and classical antiquity.
An ancient Egyptian text dubbed the Tulli Papyrus, dated to circa 1440 BC describes ‘fiery disks’ in the sky above Egypt.
Shutterstock.
After Roswell
Years following Roswell were turbulent for anyone serious in Ufology.
In fact, up until recently, it was all just a giant conspiracy.
Efforts to study the subject in a serious way have failed miserably, mostly because people find something very hard to believe if it’s not in the mainstream news.
That, of course, was until piece by piece, and very slowly, details of UFO sightings started being filtered to the public.
It was as if people were being prepared for the motherlode.
Numerous UFO sightings occurred after Roswell. Some of them even made a stronger case for alien technology than the alleged flying saucer that crashed in New Mexico.
But again, the evidence was tucked away, until it was eventually forgotten altogether.
One stunning case that occurred after Roswell was the Phoenix Lights: a series of widely sighted unidentified flying objects or UFOs observed in the skies over the U.S. states of Arizona, Nevada, and the Mexican state of Sonora on March 13, 1997.
UFO Disclosure
For the past five years, the UFO phenomenon has been actively pushed to the masses. As much as 95 percent of all Americans have at least heard or read something about Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), and as much as 57 percent believe they are real.
Countless declassified documents detailing the Government involvement in UFOs have surfaced, and many people started coming forward with their specific story on UFOs.
Astronauts, Military Officials, and Highly ranked Government officials spoke out about a subject that for years was classified a conspiracy.
Videos recorded by Navy Pilots chasing UFOs were made available to the public, and all of a sudden, the UFO phenomenon was no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of study and attention.
We learned about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), and how the government was actually very interested in UFOs for quite some time, despite contrary beliefs.
We learned that this project was well funded, and its goal was to study unexplained aerial phenomena. The project generated a stunning 490-page report that documents alleged worldwide UFO sightings over several decades.
As revealed by the New York Times in 2017, AATIP was headed by Luis Elizondo, who resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 to protest government secrecy and opposition to the investigation, stating in a resignation letter to US Defense Secretary James Mattis that the program was not being taken seriously.
The AATIP revelation helped the “To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science,” a non-profit organization committed to studying the UFO phenomenon with the best available tools.
Founded in 2015 by former Blink 182 musician Tom DeLonge, the organization became quickly recognized as a pioneer in the study of UFO sightings and alien life.
Artists illustration of a UFO following an Airplane. Shutterstock.
The push for disclosure also helped reveal the CIA’s role in the study of UFOs between 1947 and 1990.
But during the years, and without giving the rest of the world any hints, the Government conducted a number of studies on UFOS. Project Blue Book was one such program, but not the first.
Project Blue Book started in 1952, the third study of its kind, following projects Sign (1947) and Grudge (1949). The goal of all three projects was clear: the determine whether on nor UFOs posed a direct threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO data.
The projects eventually yielded thousands of reports and files. However, the Condon Report of 1968 went on to conclude that there was nothing ‘anomalous’ about UFOs. The Condon Report was endorsed by the National Academy of Scientists.
Interestingly, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) disagreed with Condon’s conclusion, explained that as many as thirty percent of cases studied remained unexplained and that scientific benefit might be gained by continued study.
Project Blue Book resulted in 12,618 UFO reports and concluded that most of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena (clouds, stars, etc.) or conventional aircraft.
This comes as a surprise, known that after 1968, the government continued to actively monitor UFOs and study them.
As of 2019, the UFO phenomenon is no longer a conspiracy, but a subject worthy of serious scientific study.
China has unveiled its latest plans for the world's biggest radio telescope—to look for habitable planets beyond our solar system by finding out if they have a magnetic field.
Published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the team behind the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has announced its ambitions for the next decade—including the hunt for exoplanets.
FAST, as the name suggests, is a 1,600 feet wide telescope. It sits in the Dawodang depression of the Guizhou Province and it achieved its first light in September 2016.
One of the main scientific missions of FAST is to listen out for pulsars and other interstellar radio signals—including any coming from hypothetical extraterrestrials. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar (spinning neutron star) is approaching us," Qian Lei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CCTV in 2016.
Many scientists looking for potentially habitable planets are focused on its composition (rocky), distance from its star (so liquid water can exist) and its atmosphere (that it has one). These are the requirements for life on Earth to exist—so may also be true of other planets.
But in their latest publication, FAST researchers from China and France said they are planning to look for exoplanets within 100 light years from Earth with magnetic fields.
Our own magnetic field protects the planet from the solar wind—a stream of charged particles from the Sun that would strip away our atmosphere without the magnetic field to deflect them.
The team believes that because Earth's magnetic field provides protection to life on the planet, it is reasonable to think the same may be true on other distant worlds.
The world's biggest telescope in China's Guizhou Province.STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
"There is a scientific bug in the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, that is, the Earth stops rotating. If that happens, the magnetic field would disappear," FAST chief scientist Li Di told Xinhua. "Without the protection of the magnetic field, the Earth's atmosphere would be blown off by the solar wind. As a result, humans and most living things would be exposed to the harsh cosmic environment and unable to survive."
Li said they could search for magnetic fields around exoplanets by looking for the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere—an interaction that should generate radio radiation: "All the planets with magnetic fields in our solar system can be found generating such radiation, which can be measured and studied by radio telescopes. But research on the planets' magnetic fields cannot be realized through optical and infrared astronomical observation. Do the exoplanets have magnetic fields? If they have, they should also generate radio radiation under the influence of the wind of their parent stars."
He said if they can confirm the presence of a magnetic field using FAST, they would be able to study it to find out whether it was habitable or not. "It would be a very important discovery," he said.
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover can be seen in this image taken from space on May 31, 2019, by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech › Full image and caption
A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside of Gale Crater.
The image was taken on May 31, 2019, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck. Vera Rubin Ridge cuts across the scene north of the rover, while a dark patch of sand lies to the northeast.
Look carefully at the inset image, and you can make out what it is likely Curiosity's "head," technically known as the remote sensing mast. A bright spot appears in the upper-left corner of the rover. At the time this image was acquired, the rover was facing 65 degrees counterclockwise from north, which would put the mast in about the right location to produce this bright spot.
Mirror-like reflections off smooth surfaces show up as especially bright spots in HiRISE images. For the camera to see these reflections on the rover, the Sun and MRO need to be in just the right locations. This enhanced-color image of Curiosity shows three or four distinct bright spots that are likely such reflections.
The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
It is possibly the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world. But while it is one of the world’s most famous monuments, the prehistoric stone circle known as Stonehenge in south west England remains shrouded in mystery.
That is, until now. Thanks to state-of-the-art research pioneered and led by Belgian academic Christophe Snoeck, we now know rather more about the mysteries of Stonehenge. He returned to work in his native Belgium after completing his PhD in archaeological science in 2015 at Oxford University. His research suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument’s construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.
While there has been much speculation as to how and why the iconic collection of stones was built, the question of who built it has received far less attention. That is where Dr Snoeck, still aged just 32 and based at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), comes in. His innovative research has made it finally possible to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. In partnership with colleagues at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris and University College London, he led the Stonehenge research, which combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.
Dr Snoeck, who pioneered the techniques during his doctoral research, said the discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation (up to 1,000 degrees Celsius), offers the “exciting possibility” to finally study the origin of those buried at Stonehenge.
In an interview with The Brussels Times, he explained how his team went about their work and the significance of their findings. The Antwerp-born researcher said, “Stonehenge is one of the most iconic archaeological sites in the world, and when I had the opportunity to carry out research on the site it was an immense privilege. Before we started our study, we knew, from previous work, that the bluestones used to build the earlier phases of the monument came from west Wales. By working directly on the human remains found at the site we hoped to gain insight, not on the origin of the stones, but on the origin of those using the site and being buried there.”
The work involved analysis of small fragments of cremated human bone from an early phase of the site’s history around 3000 BC, when it was mainly used as a cemetery. “Most research on Stonehenge focused on the stones,” he explains. “Little was known about the humans buried at the site. This is mostly due to the fact that they were cremated and only small cremated bone fragments remained. It is only very recently that new methods have been developed to study cremated human remains.”
During his doctoral research he developed a method to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. This method, he says, “was applied to 25 cremated individuals from Stonehenge and our results show that 40% (10 out of 25 analysed individuals) did not live near Stonehenge in the last decade or so prior to their deaths but came from further away. Some might actually have originated from west Wales where the bluestones came from, some 250km away,” he adds. “This shows the importance of the site in the British landscape during the Neolithic period.”
Photo of Carn Goedog in western Wales. The dolerite bluestones from these hills are thought by many geologists and archaeologists to be the source of several of the stones erected in the early stage of Stonehenge’s construction with dates of quarrying around 5,000 years ago.
His personal contribution to the study was mostly in the scientific analyses including isotope, elemental and infrared analyses. The results were then discussed and interpreted with the rest of the team. But the challenges of handling tiny fragments of burnt bone should not be overlooked. “Working on cremated bone fragments can be very tricky as they are very little and brittle. However, with proper care, we were able to carry out all the analyses planned.”
Understanding the past
So, why does all this matter? Well, according to Dr Snoeck, the results emphasise the importance of inter-regional connections involving the movement of both materials and people in the construction and use of Stonehenge. This, in turns, provides rare insight into the large scale of contacts and exchanges in the Neolithic era, as early as 5000 years ago.
Dr Snoeck
Dr Snoeck, who specializes in archaeology and chemistry, says it us crucial to understand the lives of past animal and human populations, including diet, mobility, landscape use and environmental conditions. The techniques used on the Stonehenge project could be used, he hopes, to improve our understanding of the past.
He said, “Understanding our past is, to me, of crucial importance to better understand where we are now and how we reached this stage. I think both Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt (and many more sites) are fascinating. They are markers of our past and unravelling the mysteries around their construction and use is definitely helping us better understand our past. The importance of archaeological sites cannot really be classified in my opinion.”
On the importance of learning more about people from the Neolithic period, he said, “By gathering more information about them, we can start to understand the place of such sites in the wider landscape and how they shaped societies and beliefs through time and space. We were very excited to see that not all individuals lived near the site and that many actually moved over quite large distances to come to Stonehenge. Clearly we are not going to cure disease with this but understanding how people and societies changed trough time and space helps us understand current societies and how they might change and interact.”
The results of his work were published in Scientific Reports in 2018 and have received global media attention with news reports in more than 100 Belgian outlets (incl. Radio 2, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, De Morgen, EOS Wetenschap, Le Soir) and international media (BBC, Guardian, CNN, National Geographic, Current Archaeology and the Washington Post).
Following this ground-breaking study, he has been nominated as one of the three candidates for the Archaeologist of the Year 2019 Award by the British magazine Current Archaeology. For him and many others there is an enduring fascination with Stonehenge that will continue. The reason? “Well, it is still there after 5000 years! And there is still so much we don’t know. Mysteries are fascinating,” says Dr Snoeck.
His archaeological work does not end with Stonehenge, and he is now engaged on a project on the famous Belgian iguanodon collection (a genus of dinosaurs) at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science. “The aim of this work is to better understand why so many Iguanodons were found at Bernissart in Hainaut. The research is still in progress.” Christophe Snoeck also plans to study cremated remains in other countries. “They’ve been kind of forgotten and put aside. And I thought that was quite sad, because in huge parts of the world, especially in prehistoric Europe, people were cremated.”
This week, the internet is going crazy with talk of a mass People’s Invasion of Area 51. More than one million people have signed up on Facebook to breach the gates of the most famous top secret government facility in the world. The event, which sprang to life as a joke started by social media shitposters, has now racked up an enormous amount of publicity worldwide, with media outlets taking it utterly seriously and others as the joke it always was. Unless you want to do it for real. In which case, settle in.
The event, Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, was created by the Facebook group Shitposting cause I’m in shambles. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Despite its humble origins the event has taken on a life of its own, with 1.3 million people having declared they are going to the Nevada desert to participate in the September 20 raid and another one million having expressed interest in the event.
Alleged Area 51 attack plan spread on social media. Disclaimer: author is notparticipating as part of the Kyle group.Illustration: Social Media
The American public has long had a fascination with Area 51 and allegations that the secret U.S. government air base is harboring flying saucers, bits of crashed saucers, and actual aliens. Public trust in government remains at historic lows. Just 17 percent of the American people “trust the government in Washington all or most of the time.” Given those factors, it’s not hard to see why “Let’s see them aliens” has become such an appealing rallying cry.
Interest in Area 51 has also been bolstered recently by New York Times articles reporting sightings U.S. Navy fighter pilots in 2004 and 2015. The U.S. government is also reportedly sitting on metallic alloys and UFO scrap allegedly recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
What are the alloys? No one can say. They are simply The Alloys.
Say you are actually willing to participate in the raid. The trip will be difficult and conditions not ideal. You will be arrested and sent to federal prison, or possibly shot, all to see things that may not actually exist. Still want to go? Okay.
The best place to start your federal incarceration is at Las Vegas, Nevada. Event organizers have designed the unofficial Area 51 Visitor’s Center,approximately 1 hour and 22 minutes west of Vegas, as the meetup point.The Visitor’s Center was owned by Nevada brothel magnate Dennis Hof and includes a mini-mart, picnic areas, and the Alien Cathouse, and an ET-themed brothel, which is pretty much everything you need before anyone goes a-raiding. Satellite views of the Visitor’s Center show parking for 200 cars at most, so arrive early or consider catching a Lyft.
The Alamo Fireworks Megastore next door could open their lot to event parking but don’t count on it.
From the Visitors Center to Area 51, you have two ill-considered routes to choose from.Illustration: Google Maps
Once you depart from the Visitor’s Center it’s an hour and 52 minute drive north to Area 51, and there are two routes to choose from, the first via Cane Spring Road, or I-95 and then the Mercury Highway. Both merge at “Sugar Bunker,” which is presumably where the government stores the alien food pellets, then proceed north through what looks like a moonscape of gigantic craters. These are the remnants of U.S. nuclear weapons tests and are closed to the public for a very good reason—and not because neither AT&T nor Verizon report cell phone coverage there.
Like we said, not ideal conditions.
Gun-wielding “camo dudes” in an encounter recorded by the YouTube channel MacADVentures.Screenshot: MacADVentures (YouTube)
At a certain point, early invasion participants will be stopped cold by base security. The main security force, known over the years as the “camo dudes,” are civilian contractors that patrol the base perimeter wearing camouflage uniforms and driving pickup trucks.
The “camo dudes” are generally known to UFO watchers as a humorless lot that take their job very seriously. They are quite well armed, and in one case in 2016 drew their firearms on a pair of motorcyclists. It has also been alleged for years that Area 51 is ringed with sensors, including seismic intrusion devices designed to detect the rumble of vehicles, and that explains how the camo dudes often respond so quickly to trespassers.
He’s waiting for you to free him...or not.Photo: Justin Norton (AP)
Traditionally, trespassers at Area 51 can expect to be detained by the “camo dudes” for hours on end until a Lincoln County sheriff arrives on the scene, at which time they are issued a $750 ticket for trespassing. That’s a relatively tame response: the base is also ringed with signs citing the Internal Security Act of 1950, and stating “Use of deadly force authorized,” and Section 21 of the act states that
Whoever willfully shall violate any such regulation or order...for the protection or security of military or naval aircraft, airports, airport facilities, vessels, harbors, ports, piers, water-front facilities, bases, forts, posts, laboratories, stations, vehicles, equipment, explosives, or other property or places subject to the jurisdiction, administration, or in the custody of the Department of Defense, any Department or agency of which said Department consists, or any officer or employee of said Department or agency, or of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or any officer or employee thereof, relating to fire hazards, fire protection, lighting, machinery, guard service, disrepair, disuse or other unsatisfactory conditions thereon, or the ingress thereto or egress or removal of persons therefrom, or otherwise providing for safeguarding the same against destruction, loss, or injury by accident or by enemy action, sabotage or other subversive actions, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be liable to a fine of not to exceed $5,000 or to imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.
Deadly force is authorized even for a misdemeanor offense. Maybe that’s bit unusual, but then again, this is Area 51 we’re talking about. A smart defendant in federal court could argue that there is no mention of “alien hospitality suites” in the Internal Security Act, forcing the government to drop the charges-or produce the aliens.
There is also the prospect of federal conspiracy charges, as you have stated your intent on a public Facebook page to conspire to invade a federal military facility. Like any MMO boss the federal government’s legal powers stack, making it a formidable opponent indeed.
The Nevada Test and Training Range (of which Area 51 is a part) is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. Any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous.
The statement is weirdly ominous, leaving it ambiguous what the source of the “danger” is. Rattlesnakes? Falling rocks? Accidental bombings? It doesn’t say. It’s probably best to never find out.
Once you’re inside the base there’s no telling what you might find. You might find a variety of secret test aircraft, including F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters recently seen sporting “aggressor camouflage”, the legendary and elusive Aurora Mach 6 spyplane, or a Russian fighter jet owned and operated by the U.S. government dogfighting with American planes. And maybe aliens and their UFOs. Bigfoot, too.
The event already has produced one unexpected result from the U.S. government: indirect confirmation that the base actually exists. As late as 1995 the Feds were perfectly willing to argue that Area 51 did not exist: that abruptly changed around in 2013, but the government rarely addresses the topic. The Air Force’s warning acknowledges that Area 51 is a real facility. That’s quite a feat for a social media shitpost.
Correction: This post originally said the Area 51 Visitor Center is owned by Dennis Hof, but since he passed away in 2018, we should have said it “was” owned by Mr. Hof. The line has been corrected; apologies for the error.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses for a photograph beside the U.S. flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Associated Press/July 20, 1969
By Alex Horton The Washington Post
As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the "fine, sandy particles" that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.
A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home.
The unmanned spacecraft's mission would be an epic coup: Get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.
That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, 1969, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises -- before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.
NASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.
It signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when "the Eagle" landed, as most believe.
"The race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes," William P. Barry, NASA's chief historian, told The Washington Post.
The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during re-entry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
In the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.
Luna 15's design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.
That was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.
On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.
"I'm sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample," Barry said.
The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and "did not know about Luna 15 or its goal," Armstrong said in 2009.
No one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.
The moon's surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon's equator were best -- potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.
There was only one unlikely solution to all of this: Get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.
During the Cold War.
In the midst of the moon race.
And yet, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.
What came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.
Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.
Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.
That opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.
The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land -- which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.
Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.
It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC -- a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.
"I say, this has really been drama of the highest order," a British astronomer said afterward.
The Post reported the crash the next day. "Thus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle 'wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' ended in an irony," Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to "remove its carcass from lunar orbit," he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.
The Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.
Luna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.
More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth -- the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.
The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. "Distinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard."
We meet our guide, Pear Månsken, at the Company's No. 5 airlock. Pear's only instructions: Keep them in sight at all times and let them know immediately of any concerns. Beyond that we're free to roam. Stay safe and live. Or do something stupid and die. Not their problem. We've signed the waiver. This is the frontier.
It's July 20, 2044: 75 years to the Earth-day since Apollo 11put moonboots on the ground. But that was way up, near the equator. Today, we're setting out at high lunar latitude, close to the pole. Where the cold and dark lies just steps away from the hot and bright. This is where the action is: A handful of companies and a few nations variously competing and cooperating on a mostly friendly quest, mostly for ancient ice. It's not for making margaritas. It's for rocket propellent and life support; what market futures analysts call Cosmic Consumable Commodities: "Triple C's."
Those first landings happened long ago, but it's still early days in lunar development. There's a lot of moon to go around. And a lot of businesses going to get it. Some, like Chevron, Maersk, Mitsubishi, Lockheed Martin and Siemens, have been well known for decades. A few, like Astrobotic, Moon Express, Masten, Orbit Beyond and the not-for-profit Draper Lab, have been quietly working since the moon-surge began, around 2018. Others, like Nyota ya Fedha, Lunapole and Polarvarg (for whom our chaperon, Pear, works) are well-capitalized startups. India’s Sampanna Candrudu, formerly part of the nation’s space agency, has now been reincarnated as a public corporation. Blue Origin partners with everyone whereas SpaceX and its sisters, Tesla and The Boring Company, prefer to work as a self-contained conglomerate. (Some would say: "cult.")
Co-located in a few lunar enterprise zones, most of these companies respect — and sometimes protect — one another. Way out here, 238,900 miles (384,470 kilometers) from Earth, with a very high cost of operation, it's difficult for authorities to patrol and enforce restrictions. Safety is in everyone's interests. Frontiers produce good citizens. Or dead ones. Hardly any in between.
Your suit boots up in seconds. The electronics and helmet-immersive display actually came online in much less than a second, but the gas-mixture-and-atmospheric-pressure diagnostics take one complete loop to verify. The suit and a few of your tools checked in with "Moon Mama." Every smart object on Luna (except certain police and military) knows who, where and what every other one is; all are connected through the ubiquitous 8G awareness-net.
Pear shoos us into one of Polarvarg's short-haul trans-landers. Small rocket-hoppers run like a shuttle-bus service here. The worksites are widely scattered. There's not that much risk of damage to neighbors' personnel or property, if things go south. The moon is a palace of robots; many fewer people live herethan science fiction writers and space advocates of bygone days expected. So, most nations and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are taking a mostly hands-off, "laissez-faire" approach.
The United States Space Guard looks after the interests of American flagged vehicles and facilities. China's military-industrial monolith keeps to its indecipherable, but so far, serene, self. And the GC (Gendarmerie Cosmos) tends to the emergency needs of European Union company vessels. Outer space is proving to be the quintessentially asymmetric battlespace. The "Mutually Assured Paralysis" of cyberwarfare has, so far, proven a highly effective peacekeeper. A fully armed Deep Space Force — equipped with overwhelming firepower to intimidate bad actors by ensuring, in advance, their total destruction — has proved too costly a solution to a problem that hasn't yet developed. Of course, it someday might.
Where, exactly, Luna fits in humanity's story is still unwritten. Some on Earth worry that, without a tightly preconceived legal framework, unfair distribution of the moon's resources is inevitable. (It is.) Others counter that there's no incentive to develop resources that cannot be owned free and clear. (There isn't.) A few are concerned that moon workers could become easy targets for exploitation. But right now, it's moon-boom times and hardly anyone is complaining.
The corporations have seen that ethical behavior tends to enrich their investments. And it keeps them off the homepages of news sites. Fair treatment of labor (which is mostly robotic anyway), deference to international norms of the mining industry, respect for historical sites (e.g., Apollo and Lunokhod), and basic environmental awareness all turn out to be good corporate marketing strategies, the storyboards of slick stock prospectuses.
Because the risks are so gloomy — and the potential benefits so sunny — everyone on the moon is playing, more or less, on the same team. But there will, almost inevitably, come a time when they aren't. Then, solar system civilization will have lots of ethical dragons to slay. We have time to think about some of these issues as we drop from the hopper to continue on foot.
Digging for paydirt
Back in the Apollo days, our easy ramble around these moon rocks would have been a lot more arduous and dangerous, with just primitive paper maps and no space-based positioning system. Digging samples was all manual labor then. No robots around to help. Just simple tongs, scoops and rakes. The mightiest machine was a Black & Decker cordless electric hammer-drill. With a lot of effort, astronauts could bore up to 10 feet (3 meters) down through the compacted surface dust called regolith.
To ice-mine the moon, you need much heftier tech. The deep frozen water is rock-hard and often rock-bound. You are there to find out just how hard it'll be to free up that paydirt at a new site. Before you arrived, Polarvarg survey drones, carrying imaging spectrometers and radar, flagged the site as promising.
Then, a small army of Company rovers explored the nearby "cold traps." They found some tiny particles of ice lying on the surface, like dusty snow. More turned up, buried about half a meter down, in larger, purer crystals, like gravelly hailstones. And some appeared in much larger, deeper blocks — harder to get to but much more rewarding. By tradition and law, a human (that's you) must come to verify the find on-site, so he or she can attest to it later, should there be a territorial challenge. Despite all your high-tech gear, you are really just a simple scratch-ass prospector, looking to stake a claim on a parcel of moon.
But you're also here to do some new science. About half of it is "economic geology." That, historically, has been to understand where certain rock aggregates form in order to fast-track commercial quarrying. Aside from the 1970s Apollo data set, and some rover work on Mars, we've had only one planet to study in detail. Your work on how the moon made its minerals will help mining companies to locate ore bodies on Earth.
And, of course, here on Luna itself: Nearly everywhere you look, you can find titanium and aluminum, for building space structures. Mature companies like Made In Space and Tethers Unlimited, which started in LEO (low Earth orbit), are here on the surface drawing feedstocks for their space-based flexible fabricators. There's also plenty of silicon for circuitry — especially photovoltaic solar collectors (though small nuclear reactors provide local power to most lunar worksites).
All those craters punched into the crust conveniently reveal differentiated metals. Essential for small electronics and large power systems, local concentrations of rare-earth elements abound. The moon is a miner's paradise, and it's of vital strategic international trade importance to the nations and transnational corporations that dig and refine it.
The biggest player is China. The moon's gentle light has long signified aspiration and the promise of abundance in several Asian cultures. With a long-range view — free from the frequent course changes that buffet democratic societies — the Chinese Communist Party government has carefully, over decades, woven lunar development into its identity. China's effects on the activities of other nations and corporations working in space have been less adverse than some Western military planners had feared, but more disruptive than many internationalists had hoped.
Next year (2045), the People's Republic of China celebrates its 100th anniversary. The state-backed Chinese Academy of Space Technology Corporation is very close to completing two large solar-power satellites, fabricated from mostly lunar materials. Each will downlink a steady stream of up to 500 megawatts of electricity, harvested above Earth's atmosphere, from high orbit, clear of weather and nighttime darkness. The power comes down via low-density microwaves to large receiving antennas in China's countryside. It would have been more efficient to send energy down by laser, but China — for now — seems to respect international agreements crafted to prevent directed-energy weapons in space.
These big satellites are just the next step in a program China began 30 years ago, to beam growing quantities of energy over ever-increasing vertical distances. If "the 500s" prove out, China will immediately begin work on a pair of much larger solar-energy satellites, each 10 times more powerful. Neither will be so much a gargantuan spacecraft as a constellation of several hundred thousand very small ones. Each subunit a clone of the last, all built mostly of materials from the moon, by an army of robotic fabricators. Certain industries scale magnificently in space: the ones that don't need people.
It’s a lossy proposition: Converting sunlight to electricity, then back to electromagnetic waves for the downlink, then back to electricity is not very efficient. Chinese government economists are well aware that it will take many decades to fully recoup construction costs. But they are investing in future generations. They are not accountable to impatient shareholders. And they are focused far beyond the moon.
Roadhouse high
Some space moguls are focused squarely on Earth: In lower orbits, with grand views of the planet below, a number of high-end boutique hotels have sprung up. "Blown up" would be more accurate; most of these are very large inflated structures. But don't think lightweight "balloons" or "blimps." Their skins are actually much tougher than the metal hulls of traditional spacecraft. These expanded envelopes are built by sandwiching strong, lightweight synthetic fabrics tightly together. Layering with different densities protects against micrometeors and human-made space junk. Sewn into this hardy hide are impressively large windows. You'll get to look through them, in a few days, as you change vehicles on your way back to Earth.
Bigelow Aerospace (BA) is the dominant — but not the only — company to offer rentable "space in space." The nightly rack rates are, well, astronomical. And there's no such thing as a "walk-in." But there's a sufficient population of well-heeled leisure guests and B2B travelers to make a business. And lodging modules are not BA's only offering. You can find variously sized BA blow-ups popping up wherever pressurized volumes are needed. These elegant edifices come up from Earth tightly packed, in the large payload fairings of heavy-lift launchers. But they run on Triple C's from the moon.
Drumming up business
Back here on the lunar surface, that affable dude in the purple-striped moon suit, working a few meters to the west of us, is Seok Wolgwang Choi. An American of Korean heritage, he encourages English speakers to call him "Sammy." He talks and moonwalks with an easygoing manner. But that bright orange bag over his shoulder reading "Danger: Explosives" looks more than a little ominous.
On Earth, geophysicists employed by mining companies thump the ground, reading the resulting sound waves to map what lies beneath. Astronauts on Apollo missions 14 and 16 did a bit of that. They emplaced mortars to fire rounds into the nearby terrain. And they deployed seismometers to capture the resulting moon wiggles. On Apollo 17, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt — the only geologist to walk the lunar terrain during Apollo — went farther. Jack, and his commander Gene Cernan, placed explosive charges in the regolith a few kilometers from a geophone array at their landing site. The igniters were set for several days; the guys had long since left the surface by the time the explosions were triggered.
More than half a century later, Sammy, too, likes making the moon go boom. His hazardous but lucrative career is about blowing stuff up in the name of "Lunar Active Seismic Tomography." He revels in leaving LASTing lunar impressions, mostly because the company cuts him in for profit-sharing on the find.
But you and Sammy are also out here to do some pure, not-for-profit science. Understanding the moon's evolution reveals the grand story of the solar system's formation. As you select rock samples, with the help of a keen-eyed geology team on Earth peering through your suit-cams, you are again moonwalking in the footsteps of giants:
Before Apollo, just about everyone thought all those shady holes seen from Earth had been built by volcanoes. By the time John Young and Charlie Duke left behind Apollo 16's Lunar Module lower stage, in April of 1972, most scientists were rapidly realizing that the surface of the moon is mostly about impacts.
The moon itself appears to be the child of a gargantuan crash between a Mars-size protoplanet and the early Earth. Fathoming the implications of that event, astrophysicists realized that the planets we see today are not the first ones this solar system has had (except, perhaps, giant Jupiter). Nor do the planets now orbit where they originally formed. This revolutionary recognition arose directly from studies of the moon rocks hand-picked, packed and shipped home by 12 people between July 1969 and December 1972.
They made it look easy. It was not easy. On the downlinked slow-scan video stream, you see the Apollo moonwalkers bouncing merrily around in gravity only 16% that of Earth. But, listen closely and you'll hear them breathing pretty hard at times. Swaddled in layers of nylon, neoprene, aluminized Mylar, Dacron, Kapton, Teflon-coated fabric — and pumped with air pressure — each guy was fighting the suit with every move.
Each Apollo A7L "moon suit" — called the Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU — was rated for 30 trips outside. None got more than three. Apollo was a spare-no-expense program before the eyes of the world. Risks to the astronauts were minimized at astronomical costs. With President Kennedy's directive to "return him safely to the Earth" ringing in every program manager's ears, everything was expendable, except the crew.
But you and I, working our industrial jobs here on Future Moon, need a suit capable of hundreds of excursions before refurb or retirement. We need to go outside often — even if just to check, or fix, the machines that do most of the work. So, our suits have shape-memory materials on the inside for comfort and haptic feedback "pulsers" in the fingertips for touch. And self-healing polymer layers guarding against tool punctures and micrometeoroids. Look closely at your suit's outside layer. It's a patchwork of panels, each hosting a network of tiny wires. That's your electrodynamic dust armor. It periodically sparks away clingy motes of lunar soil. Or tries to. Dust is a constant headache here on the moon.
Btw. It's time for a new acronym, isn't it? EVA — "extravehicular activity" — has served for people exiting and reentering capsules, shuttles, stations and movable modules. But what shall we call a stroll outside a permanent habitat on a planetary surface? I nominate simply: "a stroll outside." People are really living in space now — on the moon, around asteroids, in growing settlements in a plethora of orbits. I say: If you have a gravity vector, it's a "walk." If you don't, it's a "float" or a "fly." If the atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, it's a "swim." See? Easy!
We climb onto a "flatbed" to save some steps. A direct descendant of Apollo's Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), our ride is basically just wheel motors and a big battery with a platform and a bit of open truss work to keep items (including humans) on board. Every other need — including navigation and video — is already built into our moon suits.
Well connected
Apollo moonwalkers could look down at their chest-mounted Remote-Control Units and easily see small square "flags" — status indicators — warning if oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, pressure or vent conditions drifted out of normal operating ranges. Comfy, here, in our 2044 lunar couture, we see mini-gauges floating before our eyes on the HUD (heads-up display).
But suit health is the least of our inputs. We find ourselves immersed in a serious expanse of augmented reality. Active mapping with locators, task checklists, action prompts, graphical instructions; these all rotate, prioritized for our sensory consumption by the AI agents our Company bosses have trained to help us live our best space lives.
Essential to that life: your psychological health. Extended stays in sterile monochromatic environments demand colorful, life-affirming cues. So, you brought the Earth with you to the moon. All those task-oriented cues share your sight and sound field with social messaging, and with a bit of art from time to time.
The claustrophobic confines of a helmet are emotionally expanded by well-designed AR, the harsh landscape outside softened by the occasional visual or auditory reminder of your lush homeworld. You find it's comforting — indeed, vital — to travel with live avatars of friends and family. They pop up from time to time, and you're always glad to interact with them, despite the 2.5-second delay time to and from Earth. On the barren, insensitive moon, you find you frequently want to phone a friend.
And you'll have local friends here too: human and robotic. The "Buddy Team" approach — pair bonding — is wired deeply within us. It's the secret sauce of humanity's success. Watching the paired Apollo crews in action, you could see it immediately. They could improvise on the fly, clear each other's cables, be one another's eyes.
You call up a video clip from 1971 — one of Apollo 15's sorties. Projected on your HUD: The sloped flank of Spur Crater. Dave Scott is using tongs to lift rock sample No. 15415 up from the lunar regolith. He's saying to Jim Irwin: "OK, babe; open the bag," which, of course, Irwin has already started doing. That chunk of anorthosite will come to be known as the Genesis Rock — a window 4.1 billion years back, a geologic time capsule from just after the moon's origin.
Tantalizing fusion
For all that long stretch since its formation, the moon has never had much of an atmosphere. Nor much of a magnetic field. So, whatever particles the sun threw at Luna tended to stick to the fine-grained surface.
Some of that residue has been helium-3 (He-3), implanted by the solar wind. A bit more helium-3 has been deposited here by cosmic rays from deep space. It's a tantalizing substance: two protons and a neutron, the only stable isotope that contains more protons than neutrons, besides simple hydrogen itself.
In the bad old Cold War days, when the nations of Earth had more than 70,000 active nuclear weapons pointed at each other's cities, helium-3 was a headache. It would build up as tritium decayed in the stored warhead, actually reducing its explosive effectiveness. Missile maintainers would siphon off the He-3 to be sold for medical imaging and other peaceful uses.
But helium-3 can be put to work in a fusion reactor, liberating high levels of energy, without throwing off radioactive byproducts. At least in theory.
Neil Armstrong inadvertently collected the first sample of lunar helium-3 in 1969 — about 25 parts per billion of the soil he scooped up to fill out one collection box. Other Apollo missions brought some back as well. But the potential for power generation by helium-3 fusion wasn't realized until researchers at the University of Wisconsin put the clues together in 1985.
Like water ice, helium-3 survives in greater abundance in the shadows. Here on Future Moon, prospectors have found concentrations up to three times greater than the Apollo samples in the deep, dark zones of polar craters, coincidentally where most water ice is mined. Getting both He-3 and H2O out requires heating the soil up. So, it makes sense to harvest both in these unique polar locations, where spots in nearly constant sunlight at 257 degrees Fahrenheit (125 degrees Celsius) lie adjacent to practically permanent shade at minus 274 F (minus 170 C).
The north pole of the moon turns out to be a slightly easier place to work, because more of the high ground is illuminated, more of the time. And it's easier to negotiate the gentler northern topography down into the mining sites.
But the economics of helium-3 fusion don't appear to be as bright as the idea. Concentrator-bots must sift through more than 100 tons of lunar soil to yield a single gram of helium-3. It takes more than 100,000 times that quantity to operate a 1-gigawatt reactor for a year. The power that comes out is worth about $175 million (mid-21st century value). So you need to run your reactor for more than 25 years to pay off its cost.
These reactors are so expensive because helium-3 doesn't really like to fuse with itself, which is the "cleanest," least radioactive process. Getting He-3/He-3 fusion to work requires immensely high plasma temperatures, achieved by smashing atoms together extremely fast. It takes a supermassive, highly precise machine. And, although helium-3 itself isn't radioactive, no one has shown that significant secondary radiation breeding will not compromise safety over time.
There are richer sources of helium-3 in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. But that's a long way to go. Someday, fusion-driven rockets might use some of their own helium-3 payload to push the rest inward to Human-space and outward to the Deep System.
For now, helium-3 remains a provocative potential fuel in search of a practical way to burn. Still, it is poetic to imagine the fusion fire of our primal star giving its offspring (us) a means to ignite local fusion power for our own sustenance, and carrying that fire into places the sun does not reach.
We've rolled upslope to the rim of Haworth Crater. Looking through her spotting scope, Janelle Oladele, director of Ops at the rock-ice extraction site, is speaking: "Alexa, bring the west thermal group online." (A lot of lunar AI is named Alexa because, well, Blue Origin, which was started by Amazon founderJeff Bezos.) We watch her array of parabolic mirrors, set along the peaks, focus sunlight down into the shadows. As the beams converge, they dazzlingly light up a few square meters of the crater floor for the first time in three billion years.
We realize they've slewed the long way around to avoid cooking a pod of extractor-bots and a pair of human overseers stationed nearby. We the people — and they the machines — are essentially a single organism now, extending life into lifelessness. A way for intelligence to populate the universe — a mission begun on the grasslands of East Africa about 2 million years ago.
Back in 2016, United Launch Alliance (ULA) posted a standing offer of $1,360 per lb. ($3,000 per kilogram to any individual or company who could deliver hydrogen and oxygen made from the moon to LEO (low Earth orbit). It was a "cash-on-the-barrelhead" proposition for Lunar Triple C's, made by the most experienced rocket company on Earth at a time when no on-orbit propellant transfer machines existed.
ULA's bid jump-started an industry — one based on using material from space to get around and build things in space. It is much cheaper to get mass "up" off the moon than from "down" the deep gravity well of Earth.
Still, getting off the moon does require rockets or electromagnetic launchers. Civilization in the inner solar system is forming from the moon, but is not, for the most part, being built on the moon. Nor on the surfaces of Mars or Venus. Dream of terraforming all you want, but physics, economics and human needs will drive us into free orbits between Earth and moon for a very long time to come.
A self-coordinated phalanx of bots is swarming in just behind the beam as it tracks southwest. They fade beneath a growing bank of fog in front of them, and a cloud of dust behind. We thank Director Oladele for letting us watch the parade. Now it's off to a waiting hopper for the bounce back to town.
Home, home in the moon
Town, it turns out, is mostly underground. The same exposed conditions that allowed the moon to accumulate helium-3 leave humans naked to the killing, cancerous effects of solar energetic particles (SEPs) and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). When you're out moonwalking, you're a sitting duck for the first energetic protons following a very large solar flare, which can travel at nearly the speed of light. But it takes at least 20 hours for the most dangerous bulk of acoronal mass ejection(CME) to reach the Earth-moon system. And most CMEs are not directed toward us. So, we can usually count on some warning.
A meter or so of dirt piled on top of your habitat keeps you safe. It matters most for long-contract dwellers who build up cumulative doses over time. They've taken to saying they live "in" the moon, not "on" it. Gopher-bots, built by the SpaceX-spawned Boring Company, have been worming their way between landing/launching zones, residential towns and processing plants, creating networks of transport and storage tunnels. Small "hidey holes" are dug (or mounded) at every worksite: If the solar flux suddenly jumps, humans can shelter-in-place.
Pear points out a long ridge as the hopper climbs to clear it; a lava tube lies beneath its hump. Built, in the moon's hot youth, by flowing magma, these hollow structures offer intrinsically shielded open spaces, and naturally occurring access through "skylights" where bubbles or meteoroids have popped open the surface. Apollo 15 explored Hadley Rille — probably a lava tube with a collapsed roof — whose floor was more than a kilometer wide, with walls up to 1,000 feet (300 m) high. Many large lunar lava tubes have been surveyed. Temperatures inside them are much more even than out on the surface. Someday people may live comfortably in them. But, here in 2044, we still seem a long way from a human population explosion on the moon.
You'll probably sleep well back at Company quarters tonight, once you've had a shower and a drink. Both are possible, courtesy of that ice you saw liberated today.
Looking around the bar, you realize miners haven't changed much in centuries. Smudges of soot go along with the job, no matter how disconnected and suit-protected one tries to be. Moon dust is nasty stuff. Not as toxic as Mars' dust, but dirty, abrasive and pervasive. And always that specific odor: Apollo astronauts likened it to spent gunpowder. This place even smells like a frontier town.
The dark side
The "Wild West," pioneering mentality of this moon rush can't last. Someday — perhaps soon — there will tougher questions to answer:
The first time a dead tourist's family sues the spaceship line that brought him there, which justice system will adjudicate?
If a rogue nation — or a private mercenary army — destroys a competitor's ice refinery, whose retaliatory force will respond? And who makes sure that response will be proportional?
Will children born here on Luna be afforded the citizenship rights of their parents? Would they even be physically capable of living on any higher-gravity world?
As genetic and genomic engineering grows ever more powerful, what ethics will apply to human or animal testing performed in, say, a lunar company town?
For that matter, what if a bug born in a bio-lab on Luna turns out to be virulent on Earth?
As every military planner knows, you take the high ground as soon as you can: Who's in charge of the moon-based ability to throw or purposefully divert big rocks around the sky?
When does a defense system against asteroids become an offensive weapon?
Who decides when the risk of diverting an asteroid close to Earth, in order to mine it, outweighs the benefit?
A long, long time from now — when civilization on the moon has become fully self-sustaining — residents may wish to claim sovereignty over that world's resources. If, say, a solar-power satellite serving Earth is made of lunar materials, do the daughters of the moon workers who built it get stock in the Earth-based utility company that profits from it? Old contracts and treaties may be torn up in the process. Hot, cold or social disinformation wars may be fought. Given our human history, all of those are likely.
The bright side
You're going home. For all but a very few people, "home" still means "Earth." Like the Apollo teams, 75 years ago, you caught a lift to LLO (low lunar orbit) aboard a high hopper. You transfer to an OTA (orbital transfer vehicle). Unlike Apollo, the OTA will drop you at one of those flying flophouses with the big windows in low Earth orbit. You're not waiting around on Luna for an Aldrin Cycler, the cheaper way to travel. But you're also not jumping a "starship-class" luxury direct liner, which is rated for direct travel between all worlds.
You drop from the High Hyatt Hotel in a dedicated atmospheric transfer vehicle (ATV). Some of that lunar ice is still with you: Your ATV is fully refueled with propellent mined on the moon.
Safely slowing down on powered descent, you get set to touch down on dirt that's full of life — unlike the lunar regolith. Some call our old world by its old name, "Terra," which means "land." By far the best planet for tens of kiloparsecs in any direction. Though the price declines with each launch, it still costs a bundle to get you to and from the moon. You wrestle with justifying your journey. While you were off ego-tripping through the cosmos, how were you helping Earth?
Your excursion was mostly — but not entirely — carbon-neutral. You launched on engines burning cold methane, "cryo-CH4." Once you got to low Earth orbit, however, lunar hydrogen and oxygen — and free sunlight — took you everywhere else. Had you gone deep into the solar system, you'd probably have been on nukes (nuclear electrical or nuclear thermal propulsion).
The old idea that Earth must deal with an ever-increasing population by shipping billions of us off-planet to colonize elsewhere will not, and cannot, work. But opening the resources of space can, in time, unburden Earth of much of the industrial impact of humanity. As Bezos, and Gerard O'Neill before him, (and Ehricke before him, and Tsiolkovsky before him) suggested: Move heavy tech off-planet, get better habitat on-planet.
Sadly, the only other way to ensure our species' success seems to require cultivating a cancerous body of increasingly restrictive rules, with ever more ironclad enforcement. Hardly anybody, outside of a few authoritarians with badly damaged personalities, wants that.
There is one additional emerging cause for hope: "the population plateau." Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, some nations have seen their populations peak and begin to recede. This trend correlates with the spread of certain nonmilitary technologies. As this permeates worldwide, it reverses the human population burst, which began with the rise of agriculture and the unintended terraforming of planet Earth. Machine proliferation on farms means we don't have to breed as many human farmhands. Birth rates continue to decline in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. The U.S., Canada and even China are tiptoeing toward population stability.
Though technology implies increased energy use, cleaner ways to get that power are emerging. Some of the most promising — solar satellites and like fusion power — correlate with space development.
Beyond tech, the empowerment of women is vitally important for maintaining a healthy civilization. Advanced education, self-determination, wage equality, child care: It is not, of course, necessary to go to space to do these. But, thanks to social networks of (mostly) female and non-binary engineers, most space industries have baked a responsibility to fulfill each of these requirements into their companies' cultures. And the mass of these exerts a beneficial gravitational pull on societies in general.
There's a grand virtuous cycle at work here: A maturing space-based infrastructure to lighten the burden on Earth's biosphere also happens to further open the solar system's resources. It looks like while offloading stress from our home planet, we get opportunities in the rest of space for very little additional investment. Starting with Triple C's from the moon, we can go anywhere.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Mission commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70-millimeter lunar surface camera.
Plait — known as "The Bad Astronomer" to his many thousands of readers on Syfy — told Space.com he is frustrated that he and others like him still have to debunk the hoax theory from time to time, 50 years after the first moon landing. Then again, Plait became famous because he's so good at debunking in the first place.
Back in February 2001, Fox Broadcasting ran a documentary titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" Plait coincidentally had a pile of research ready from a book he was working on, and a friend sent him an advance copy of the show so that he had time to write up a response.
Plait's essay on his personal blog, which he published shortly after the show aired, quickly generated thousands of views years before Facebook, Twitter and today's social media even existed. Fox's TV show propelled Plait's writing to a large audience, and his 2002 book "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'" (Wiley) helped as well. Plait remains a popular science commentator nearly two decades later.
"I kind of wish it had never aired," Plait said about the Fox documentary, "because it opened a huge Pandora's box. On the other hand, it's exposing a wound to sunlight. That thing was there anyway, festering. Let it get out to the public, and let it heal, and let it kill the infection. But yeah, it's troubling. Just to know that if Fox hadn't aired that, who knows what my career path would have been."
Bond, Hyams and Mulder
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Even back then, some people were skeptical that the feat was technologically possible. The James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever," for example, had a joke about faked moon landings just two years later, in 1971.
But what really propelled the conspiracy theory into popular culture, Plait said, was the 1978 Peter Hyams film "Capricorn One," which portrays a faked human landing on Mars. (Also, a 1976 self-published pamphlet by Bill Kaysing, "We Never Went to the Moon," was popular among conspiracy-minded people of the day.)
That was 40 years ago, but moon-hoax enthusiasts are still with us today.
"The X-Files" brought all sorts of space conspiracies into the public consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s, and the rebooted version of the show addressed the moon landing in a 2018 episode. The conspiracy was also addressed in many other fictional TV shows, from "Futurama" to "Friends."
Meanwhile, some documentary films and reality-TV efforts — a 2008 episode of "MythBusters," for example — tried to chase away the conspiracy theory by educating people. Other filmmakers, such as the folks behind the 2002 mockumentary "Dark Side of the Moon," spoofed moon hoaxers.
Opinion polls over the years regularly show that around 5% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius recently told the Associated Press. That's more than 16 million people, assuming a U.S. population of 327 million.
NASA has done a lot of debunking work over the decades, including a 2018 offer to NBA superstar Stephen Curry to view moon rocks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston after Curry said he didn't believe in the moon landings. (A few days later, Curry said he made the comments in jest.)
Earlier this year, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel recited a pile of evidence supporting the moon landings to The Washington Post. He mentioned the returned moon rocks, the ability to bounce laser beams off gear the astronauts left behind and images NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took of the Apollo landing sites in 2011. Nevertheless, even former astronauts have found themselves in the fray.
Space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin tackled the topic in the 2019 Science Channel series "Truth Behind the Moon Landing," which also features Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik as a guest. And in 2002, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in the jaw during a taped confrontation. (Police later said Aldrin was provoked, and no charges were filed.)
Plait said there is a danger in talking about the moon-landing conspiracy and other clearly debunked conspiracies like it, such as vaccines causing autism or humans not being responsible for climate change. It's possible, he said, that by airing any of these debates, the media gives legitimacy to the conspiracy. Plait said he sometimes struggles about whether to address a conspiracy in his blog; he tries to discuss ones that are widely talked about already.
But it's a tough job in fast-moving social media. Plait said he recently commented on what appeared to be widespread Twitter backlash about the new version of "The Little Mermaid" starring black actress Halle Bailey, only to discover the backlash was itself likely faked. Plait took down his original tweet and wrote a correction. (The genesis of the viral tweet was from a troll account, according to a tweet by Buzzfeed's Brandon Wall.)
Plait said we should remember that conspiracy beliefs often have real-life effects. For example: "Because of the anti-vax movement, babies are dying, kids are dying, older people are dying, people with compromised immune systems are dying." Extreme weather events driven in part by climate change are killing people as well, he said.
Plait clarified that he did not blame any particular political position for this strife — not even the alt-right, as it doesn't "play into their ideology" (which he said targets people of certain religious groups). But nevertheless, he added, "All of this stuff has been corralling the imagination of the American public and forcing it in a direction to not think critically, and to react instead of sitting and thinking a moment about things, and to doubt — even when you can lay a paper trail from Point A to Point B right in front of someone. They won't believe it."
But Plait still tries. He remembers being on a radio show not too long ago, going over the usual arguments conspiracy theorists use — for example, why are there no stars in the sky in Apollo pictures of the lunar surface? (The reason is the cameras had fast exposure times and the stars were too faint to show.)
"Then somebody called in with some bizarre, trivial thing that made no sense at all," Plait recalled, "and bless him, the radio host jumped in and said, 'Listen. This guy said your 10 biggest claims are wrong. At what point do you back down?'"
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the film "Capricorn One" was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was directed by Peter Hyams.
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
Dr. Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
Photo: Seth Shostak
Concept graphic to illustrate a supposed unidentified object above Earth, created by Seth Shostak.
Photo: Steven Peters/Getty Images
Date: Jan. 1, 2018
Location: Richmond
Details:
“I was driving back home from work. I was at a red light, when suddenly, I look over the horizon, I saw an oval metallic shape UFO floating/steady over some power lines near some train rail track and overlooking the Chevron refinery.
“When I realized what I was looking at, I decided to turn around to recorded on my phone but it was too late, it was gone/disappear. But I can assure you it wasn't a drone.”
Photo: Richard Newstead/Getty Images
Date: July 7, 2018
Location: Oakland
Details:
“I was blowing bubbles with my son around 7:45 pm tonight and looked up and saw a light that appeared too high to be an airplane. I thought perhaps it was a planet as it was glowing brightly. I could tell it was moving, but quite slowly and could make out six less bright lights glowing around it.
“They were traveling southeast all in tandem, though the six lesser lights seemed to move slightly as well, but all seemed to be traveling around the main star.”
Photo: Aaron Foster/Getty Images
Date: July 18, 2018
Location: In-flight over California
Details:
“We are on a direct Alaska Airline flight 3377 from Albuquerque to San Francisco and during the trip I like to take pictures of clouds. My wife then [told] me have you seen those lights I said no but look back and there 3 objects each one with 2 bright lights that were above ground and were all lined up...
“The objects seems to remain in the same position not moving from one other. I have recorded a 4 minutes clip until I couldn't see any longer the objects from the plane window. We didn't advertised our observation to any flight personnel to avoid creating chaos on the plane.”
Photo: U.S DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, HO
Date: July 22, 2018
Location: Vacaville
Details:
“Went outside looked up towards the moon and moving slowly across sky were three bright lights in a triangle formation. Then all lights dimmed out simultaneously. This had to be a cloaked TR3B [black triangle UFO]! I am a believer.”
Photo: Lorenz And Avelar/Getty Images
Date: Sept. 10, 2018
Location: San Ramon
Details:
“It was as big or bigger than airliner.. no wings... no sound... clear as day... moving fast... not blimp speed... no visible means of propulsion... tried to get my phone cam out but had left inside.”
Photo: Joe McBride/Getty Images
Date: Dec. 23, 2018
Location: Kentfield
Details: “Very loud ongoing noise, similar to a hair dryer or leaf blower frequency, filled the Larkspur/Kentfield, CA, valley area near Marin General. Weather was clear with some light patches of fog. From our terrace, (400 ft. above city street level), in the distance I saw what looked like a huge drone, with a big green flashing light, bright white light with smaller red and yellow lights, but this was not a drone, pretty big aircraft.”
Is someone going to prove Fox Mulder right? Will somebody convincingly show that aliens have come to Earth?
That's the growing expectation of many members of the UFO community. For seventy years, they've been confidently insisting that some fraction of the strange objects seen flitting through the atmosphere are extraterrestrial craft, piloted by otherworldly beings on a junket to our planet. But while 100 million Americans give this claim a thumbs up – confident that our skies are peppered with interstellar intruders – few scientists agree.
It's not that they don't like the idea. After all, it's hard to think of anything that would be more interesting and important than aliens in our airspace, short of the cure for death. And scientists aren't skeptical simply because interstellar travel is stunningly expensive and time consuming, although it's both of those. They demur because the evidence for this idea is seriously iffy. None of it is unambiguous enough to sway their minds.
However, judging by the more recent remarks of UFO proponents, there seems to be a crescendo of confidence that things are about to change. Well-known fans of visitation – for example Steven Greer, Richard Dolan, and Stephen Bassett, all of whom publicly and frequently expound at the many UFO conferences held each year – are saying that "disclosure" is nigh. The federal government is finally going to come clean with solid evidence about alien UFOs.
That would change this subject from one that rolls eyeballs to an accepted fact-of-the universe.
At least some of the disclosure optimism derives from the revelation in 2017 of a secret $22 million government project, begun a decade earlier and innocuously named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The best-known results of this five-year effort were several videos taken by Navy pilots using their gun-sight infrared cameras. Some of these videos showed strange, elongated objects whose identity is uncertain. This was an encouraging sign for the disclosure enthusiasts. If the U.S. military was willing to trickle out such suggestive evidence about extraterrestrial visitors, perhaps they were on the cusp of admitting to a larger truth?
To the UFO crowd, that sounds encouraging. But it doesn't make sense.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them.
To believe the government has been keeping mum about the aliens since the 1940s – surely not an easy thing to do – requires asking why. What's the motivation? It's not credible that it's because of an official fear that the public would go berserk if they were told there are saucers in the skies. One-third of them believe this already, and most have remained berserk-free.
Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who now takes folks on escorted tours to witness purported alien craft, has suggested a deeper reason: Extraterrestrial hardware is an existential threat to humanity's global power structure. Greer maintains that reverse engineering alien technology would lead to cheap energy for all countries, first world through third, providing a significantly higher economic standing in parts of the globe that could pose a serious challenge to western dominance.
Consequently, the powers-that-be have kept the UFO phenomenon under wraps. According to Greer, the potential disruption of alien technology is worse than the difficulty and embarrassment of keeping secrets from the public.
But does it really make sense to believe that the federal government could keep a secret of this magnitude during two generations of civil servants? Could the feds really twist the arms of all other nations to participate in such schemery?
In addition, reverse engineering alien technology is about as plausible as the tooth fairy. Imagine giving a cell phone to Ben Franklin and telling him to "reverse engineer" it so George Washington's army could better stay in touch while fighting the British. Any aliens who can rocket themselves to Earth are far more advanced than we are – indeed, the technology gap is surely greater than that separating us from Franklin.
The real problem with the idea of disclosure is not whether or not the government has had a good reason, and an uncanny ability, to keep an alien presence quiet all these years. It's the faulty premise.
If extraterrestrial craft are really strafing the stratosphere, and in numbers sufficient to cause roughly ten thousand citizen reports annually in the U.S. alone, then why must we throw up our hands and claim "only the government can prove it's true"? What about the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who avidly observe the sky on clear nights, but don't seem to see any mysterious flying objects? What of the many thousand commercial satellites that make high resolution photos of our planet all day long without witnessing strange intruders? Are none of these data good enough?
One might argue that the military has better equipment. Of course it does, but if this phenomenon can only be proven with "better equipment," then that's not only a suspiciously convenient argument, it also degrades any claim that the countless saucer photos offered to the public for the past seven decades should be taken seriously.
Besides, does one really need military infrared cameras to find UFOs? Several of the Navy pilots who testified about encounters along the Atlantic seaboard in 2014 and 2015 said they observed these things "nearly every day." That sounds like an opportunity for any civilian with a good camera and a telephoto lens.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them. Mainstream scientists don't wait for government agencies to prove their theories. That ball's in the researcher's court. And yet UFO proponents are now saying that, deus ex machina, the government will soon book some network air time and fess up about the aliens.
That's both an unconvincing argument and a mentally lazy one.
Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
FIRST ON THE MOON There are two astronauts in this 1969 photo. Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon near the Apollo 11 lunar lander while Neil Armstrong, reflected in Aldrin’s visor, takes the picture.
“We didn’t know what kind of pictures we’d get, when we would get them, who we would get them from,” says Kendrick Frazier, who joined Science News as a writer just two months before Apollo 11 touched down on lunar soil. So the staff took pictures of their home television screens during the July 20, 1969 broadcast of the moon landing. “It didn’t work out very well,” he says.
Fortunately, images from NASA sufficed. On the cover of the July 26, 1969 issue — just 25 cents! — the words “At last the moon” ran atop a raw, black-and-white image of two blurry forms standing on desolate terrain, with the spidery outline of the lunar lander in the background. A description of the photo — Frazier’s one contribution to the coverage — captured the scene: “Ghostly they were, those two figures gliding over the surface of the moon. But, with all the world watching, it was certain. The dream of the ages had been fulfilled: Man was on the moon.”
QUICK WORK The July 26, 1969 cover of Science News showed an image — taken from a video feed about 40 minutes after the historic first step — of Neil Armstrong (right) walking toward Buzz Aldrin (left). Aldrin is inserting a solar wind collector into the ground.
SCIENCE NEWS
Throughout the Apollo program, Science News kept a watchful eye, reporting on the successes, setbacks and skepticism. From 1967 to 1973, the magazine published more than 100 stories about the United States’ quest to reach the moon, from the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts (SN: 2/4/67, p. 112) to the splashdown of the final mission, Apollo 17 (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404), plus later findings of moon-based experiments.
“Apollo was an epic achievement. We all were super excited,” Frazier says. Yet the magazine never went overboard, he adds. “We managed to cover all the other things going on in science.” The July 26 issue devoted just five of its 24 pages to the Apollo 11 landing. Other stories included advances in predicting the sex of an unborn child and urban influences on precipitation.
The job of covering Apollo 11 fell to staff writer Jonathan Eberhart. He most likely traveled to Cape Kennedy (now called Cape Canaveral) in Florida for the launch and then to Houston for the rest of the mission, Frazier suspects, filing stories by phone or telegram. In describing the mission, Eberhart’s prose soared: “Now the moon is man’s. The incredible accomplishments of Apollo 11 have changed it irretrievably in the eyes of humankind.” Then he quickly got to work recounting the well-rehearsed descent, the harrowing landing, the hesitant first steps — before spending much of his time, of course, on the science.
Eberhart, who covered space exploration for Science News for three decades, painstakingly described three experiments installed by the Apollo 11 astronauts: a metal foil for snagging solar particles, a seismometer for tracking moonquakes and a mirror array for reflecting lasers back to Earth.
Some geologists, he noted, were miffed about the sample collection: The astronauts didn’t know precisely where they landed and were snatching soil from areas where they had already trod, thus collecting samples from potentially disturbed terrain (SN: 7/26/69, p. 72).
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
But Eberhart’s coverage wasn’t just about timelines and equipment. In a sidebar tucked in the corner of a page of Apollo 11 coverage, Eberhart asked: “What has happened to awe?” He expresses the challenges of a writer conveying the enormity of the moment while pleading with readers to contemplate what humans had just accomplished.
“Try, briefly, to ignore the flashy rockets and the heroic astronauts. Try to feel the smallness of man and the vastness of what he is doing,” Eberhart wrote. “After two million years, man has stepped out of this world onto another. And, by incredible fortune, we are alive at the instant he did it.”
Eberhart can’t explain what he was thinking; he died in 2003 (SN: 3/1/03, p. 134). But Frazier says that this sidebar captured “Jonathan’s sense of wonder and awe amidst all of his professionalism.”
Early on, magazine editor Warren Kornberg pondered the value of this adventure amid the heavy challenges of the time (SN: 7/26/69, p. 71). “Nothing can mar the glory earned by the astronauts,” Kornberg wrote in a special commentary. But “[t]he verdict of history may well be that, while the world erupted, we ignored the real challenge and chased a rocket trail to the moon.” It’s a sobering note. But Apollo’s achievements overlapped with assassinations, race riots and the unpopular Vietnam War, a truth that Science News had to acknowledge.
“We felt we had a special role of reporting on the science part of the … mission as well as putting it into the broader context,” says Frazier, who became the magazine’s editor in 1971. Kornberg’s editorial, he says, reflected widespread “antipathy about spending this money to go to the moon while the whole country was falling apart socially and politically.”
Letters to the editor published that September echoed Kornberg’s concern (SN: 9/13/69, p. 194). “We are frustrated and ashamed,” wrote one reader.
Three years later, in his own — more optimistic — editorial as Apollo 17 drew near, Frazier wrote: “The misfortune of Apollo is that it was conceived in one era of American history and fulfilled in another.… [I]n a future and less buffeted age, the tarnish will have disappeared, and the Apollo landings on the moon will stand as an unambiguous and unparalleled human achievement” (SN: 10/21/72, p. 259).
MOON MANIA Science News wrote more than 100 stories on the Apollo missions. Here are three of the many covers that ran between 1969 and 1972.
SCIENCE NEWS
Despite the public misgivings, Frazier says it was an incredible time to be writing about science. At his home in Albuquerque, he keeps a memento from his tenure at Science News: the engraving plate used to print the cover of the moon landing issue. He plans to display it in his home office this summer, a nod to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. “It is, to me, the greatest souvenir of that time,” he says.
Christopher Crockett, formerly at Science News, is a freelance science writer and editor based in Arlington, Va.
This story appears in the July 6, 2019 & July 20, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "How Science News covered the Apollo mission: The magazine reported on every facet of this scientific feat."
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
