UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

We’ve all read the endless headlines. Millions of people may or may not be “storming” Area 51 next month only to find impenetrable roadblocks manned by heavily armed private security forces equipped with gear we didn’t even know existed. Regardless of what becomes of the “Storm Area 51” phenomenon, the highly classified United States Air Force research and testing facility located deep within the Nevada desert has become somewhat of a cause célèbre.

Companies large and small and celebrities from all walks of public life are jumping on the social media bandwagon to try and attach their name to the event which, if nothing else, has provided the year’s best memes and reminded us just how soullessly devoid of a sense of humor the Armed Forces are. But hey, maybe that’s their job.

There’s nothing funny about the business of killing people.

Case in point: declassified documents from the CIA’s CREST database were unearthed recently revealing the great lengths the USAF went to in an attempt to lure the nation’s best mindsto the desolate Area 51 facility. The documents were dug up by government accountability and transparency advocates MuckRock who regularly publish declassified FBI and CIA files.

The documents detail the difficulties the Air Force faced in both attracting and retaining personnel during the OXCART program, the above top secret research project which led to experimental aircraft such as the A-12 OXCART and its successor, the SR-71 Blackbird. That project required the extraordinary talents of the nation’s best aerospace engineers – engineers who weren’t too keen on moving to a remote facility in the middle of the scorching, desolate Nevada desert.

The internal CIA memo describes how the Air Force struggled to keep its best scientists for various reasons, although those who remained at the base did so solely to avoid taking their children out of school or avoid selling their houses during low-demand times:

That memo goes on to describe the Air Force’s attempts to avoid a “mass exodus” of scientists and engineers fed up with the bleak living and working conditions, noting that “personnel problems at Area 51 and throughout the OXCART project continue to be a point of issue”:

To help attract and retain the personnel necessary to keep the OXCART program running, the CIA put together a list of selling points which could be pitched to prospective Area 51 employees. These include descriptions of Las Vegas as “an affluent metropolis” full of “high-priced homes” and “a population as transient as a desert thunderstorm.” Sign me up!

For the Area 51 base itself, the CIA recommended promoting it to USAF staff by advertising free lodging and meals, television, air conditioning, and, I kid you not, “pies and cakes”:

Head over to MuckRock to read the whole trove of documents for yourself.

The USAF’s personnel retention campaign must have worked, because the CIA was able to successfully develop the A-12 and SR-71, two of the world’s most advanced spy aircraft. To this day, the SR-71 holds the world record for the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft and is likely the cause of many UFO sightings and much misinformation as the USAF and CIA worked to keep their most advanced aircraft in the dark.

Forget seeing them aliens. When we storm Area 51 next month, let’s go for the real prize: America’s unsung heroes, the pies and cakes of Area 51.

Let’s see them pies and cakes.

It the annals of “This changes everything!” discoveries, this story may be quickly charging to the top, potentially pushing one or more by Albert Einstein out of the way. An ancient star just 190 light years from ours is living up to its nickname of the “Methuselah star” after new calculations of the age of the universe put this star’s birthday slightly BEFORE the Big Bang. Is that vibration you feel Albert Einstein spinning in his grave or Dr. Sheldon Cooper banging on a Hollywood producer’s door demanding one more episode?

“Measurements made using relatively nearby galaxies suggest the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the age indicated by the heat still radiating outwards from the Big Bang. And the difference between them seems too large to dismiss as a fluke. Worse still, some of the results now imply that the universe is younger than the oldest known star.”

Which came first?

Physicist Robert Matthews, a member of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society writing for The National in the United Arab Emirates, digs deeper into a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy and presented at an astronomy meeting in California in July 2019. “A Hubble constant measurement from superluminal motion of the jet in GW170817” is obviously written for physicists and astronomers, so it’s nice of Matthews to break it down into simple-to-understand concepts – scary as they might be. Using Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, scientists have long traced the ever-expanding universe back to its origin point – the so-called Big Bang – put the age of the universe at around 13.8 billion years. That total has become accepted because … Einstein.

However …

“We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age.”

In 2013, Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University and a team of astronomers used the Hubble Telescope to determine that the age of HD 140283, — the Methuselah star – is
14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which makes it older than the universe. The study reviewed by Matthews was supposed to resolve this obvious dilemma for astronomers by using gravitational ways as an alternative method for determining the age of the universe and the date of the Big Bang. This method is based on the Hubble constant – which is the speed at which a galactic object is moving away from the Earth divided by the distance traveled. Unfortunately, using the collision of two stars in 2017 as the event they measured, astronomers found that the Hubble constant … wasn’t. As a result, it delivered a different age of the universe … one that’s still less than the age of the Methuselah star.

Could the age of HD 140283 be the problem?

“Astronomers now know it contains very little iron – which means it must have been formed before this element became common in the universe.”

Because of its close proximity to Earth, that measurement is considered reliable, meaning that its estimated age of 14.5 billion years is accepted. Now what?

“Unfortunately, it’s still too rough and ready to resolve the paradox of the Methuselah star or the mystery of the two cosmic ages. In the meantime, theorists have been busy dreaming up new physics that might solve the problem. And in another case of history repeating itself, one of the leading ideas is the “force-from-nowhere” dreamt up by Prof Hoyle, who was later knighted. Astronomers already think this so-called Dark Energy played a critical role in the Big Bang – although they still have no idea where it came from. But with one leading astronomer at last month’s meeting describing the current impasse as a scientific crisis, the time may have come to think the unthinkable.”

English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle coined the term “Big Bang” but later rejected the theory in favor of his steady-state model, which is based on a continuous creation of matter rather than one big bang, thus making the universe age-infinite. While this would resolve the Methuselah conflict, this theory was rejected by most astronomers and physicists as unthinkable.