We’re also reminded of what a desolate, cold, and utterly silent place the deep regions of space has proven to be; at least to date, no convincing evidence of life, or any forms of interstellar communication, have ever been found that withstood the scrutiny of modern science.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of unique and energetic things going on “out there” that keep us guessing. Short bursts of radiation of different varieties (and from a multitude of different places) have long been observed. Detection of everything from “bursts” in the infrared, to X-ray and gamma-ray radiative anomalies have been logged over the years… and those may not even be the most unique and perplexing of the bunch.

As far back as 1983, New Scientist reported on a unique experiment that involved the placement of a cosmic-ray telescope beneath 1800 feet of rock, which led to an illuminating discovery: the detection of cosmic ray bursts which appeared to come from specific regions of the sky, rather than at random, and over an even distribution. Two key areas that were identified in this study were the galactic north pole, as well as the constellation Cygnus, the celestial swan. The idea that these cosmic rays would emanate from key locations in this way would seem to run counter to the idea that cosmic rays hitting the earth are distributed more or less at random with help of the galaxy’s magnetic field.

More recently, there has been a renewed discussion about another kind of radiative phenomenon emanating from deep space: the ever-perplexing fast radio bursts, or FRBs. A recent entry in the journal Nature Astronomy raised new questions about what these unusual bursts might entail, and why there appear to be so many of them.

According to Vikram Ravi of Caltech, FRBs appear to be occurring at a rate that is much higher than that of anything scientists would expect to produce them on a single occasion, let alone in the clusters which have been reported in recent months. Ravi guesses this means that there is no single type of known source for the FRBs—cosmic explosions, stellar collisions, etc—that can fully account for their number and frequency.

“The rate of FRBs appears to be higher than the rate of anything we can really think of that can make an FRB just once,” Ravi told New Scientist. “If we’re doing our jobs right, we should be able to figure it out in the next five years.”

Ravi has suggested that by looking very specifically at the regions in space where FRBs are most frequently observed, we might be able to pinpoint what sorts of galaxies they are most likely to emanate from, and more specifically, what locations in those galaxies appears to be their point of origin. 

While radio bursts and other kinds of non-visual celestial phenomenon remain of preeminent interest to astronomers, there is some literature pertaining to alleged “optical bursters”, which constitute quick flashes of light that were actually seenin various regions of the night sky by astronomers over the years. In 1984 and 1985, a series of 24 bright flashes were reportedly detected near the border between the constellations of Aries and Perseus. The observations were logged by a group of eight observers, located across a total of 12 different locations in Canada during the period in question.

On one occasion a photograph was obtained of one of these flashes of light, while on another the source of illumination was logged at the same region in the sky by two separate observers. An article by Bill Katz, “Optical Flashes in Perseus,” appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, number 307, the following year, where it was noted that “The brightest of the flashes was of magnitude -1 and lasted about 0.25 second” (even this author, on two separate occasions, recalls having observed a strikingly similar phenomenon in the night sky during skywatching sessions). 

Despite all that we know about the cosmos through the steady progression of astronomical knowledge, there are, and will no doubt remain, many mysteries about deep space. The ultimate answer to many of these, as famously echoed on televisions all around the world over the years, “to go where no one has gone before”… space, that is; the final frontier.  

Footprints that could be as ancient as 950,000 years old have been found on a beach in Happisburgh, Norfolk County, England. The line of footprints – the oldest ever discovered in all of Europe and the oldest in the entire world outside of Africa – were found by archaeological enthusiast Paul Macro. The world’s oldest footprints were found in Tanzania and they date back to around 3.5 million years ago.

Mr. Macro was surveying the beach’s coast for a 3D scanning company called ScanLAB Projects when he discovered the footprints (pictures of the footprints can be seen here). “They don’t last long because of the layer they are in, and the sea. We made a 3D scan, and two days later they were covered in sand,” he explained.

The footprints are believed to have been made by a human ancestor called Homo Antecessor, also known as “Pioneer Man”. Close to that same location, other footprints from around the same time period were also discovered in 2013 as well as some ancient tools. “They had simple stone tools. They used flint and raw materials to flake tools. We’re dealing with the earliest types of stone tool technology,” explained Professor Simon Lewis from Queen Mary University. With the discovery of the footprints as well as tools, researchers are hoping that they will eventually find bones of the ancient human ancestor.

Skull of a Homo Erectus

Homo Antecessor was an advanced form of Homo Erectus.They were believed to have been between 5.5 and 6 feet tall and weighed around 90 kg (just under 200 pounds). Their brains were smaller than those of today’s humans, measuring between 1,000 and 1,150 cm³ (the average size of a modern human’s brain is 1,350 cm³). Dating as far back as one million years ago, they are one of the earliest humans who have ever been found in Europe.

According to archaeologists who found remains in Burgos, Spain, in 1994, Homo Antecessor was believed to have been right-handed and communicated with each other by possibly using symbolic language. While it’s still unclear what other ancient humans Homo Antecessor was related to, numerous anthropologists think that there was an evolutionary link between Homo Ergaster and Homo Heidelbergensis, while others believe that it was a completely other separate species that came from only Homo Ergaster. Another debate is that some believe that Homo Antecessor is in fact the same species as Homo Heidelbergensis, as they lived in Europe during the Pleistocene Era between 600,000 and 250,000 years ago.

Neanderthals

Dr. Matthias Meyer, who is a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, weighed in on the debate, “The evolutionary history of archaic humans in the Middle Pleistocene was quite complex,” adding, “It could be that both the ancestors of the Sima people and Denisovans interbred with another archaic group like Homo Antecessor or Homo Erectus.” He also said, “Or it is possible that the mitochondrial DNA we know from late Neanderthals came in from another group that left Africa.” And the debate continues…

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.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

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.

Sources

– Richard Branson’s Virgin Blog: UFOs
– OpenMinds: Virgin’s UFO prank frightens police on April Fools’ Day in 1989
– Airship & Balloon: Richard Branson’s April Fools Day UFO

“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.