A giant asteroid nicknamed the God of Chaos will be passing dangerously close to Earth very soon and may actually collide with the planet on one of its future trips. Fortunately, we have Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, the Daily Express and NASA on the case … not necessarily in that order (also fortunate). Should we be worried? About the asteroid, I mean.

@joerogan
Asteroid shock: NASA preparing for ‘colossal God of Chaos’ rock to arrive in next 10 years
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1166919/NASA-asteroid-warning-Apophis-God-of-chaos-2029-earth-hit-news-Apep-99942-Apophis/amp …

Let’s start with Joe Rogan, since he gets more publicity that the rest of the parties combined. He tweeted that “asteroid shock” message on August 18 after reading an article in the Daily Express about asteroid 99942 Apophis – which measures 370 meters (.23 miles) in diameter and will make a well-publicized trip very close to Earth (within 19,000 miles away) in 2029. That’s a massive asteroid that would put the dinosaur-killing one to shame, which is why it caused a minor panic when it was discovered in 2004 and a miscalculation gave it a high probability (2.7%) of hitting Earth in 2029 and a higher probability in 2036. The error was found and new calculations reduced the odds on an impact substantially, although it will still be close enough for the best observations ever of an asteroid of that size, both by scientists and Earthlings. However, the nickname God of Chaos is still there, so publications like the Daily Express use it whenever they can, along with simulations showing what kind of damage an impact could do … it’s business, baby.

An illustration of the distance between the Apophis asteroid and Earth at the time of the asteroid’s closest approach. The blue dots are man-made satellites that orbit our planet, and the pink represents the International Space Station.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Great name! Wouldn’t worry about this particular one, but a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense.

https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1163198089328390145 …

Joe Rogan was probably betting that his doobie-smoking buddy Elon Musk would see his tweet, and he was right. As CEO of SpaceX, Musk should know his space stuff and he’s right that Apophis won’t live up to its nickname but another asteroid surely will sometime in the future … perhaps near, perhaps far. However, his assessment that we have “no defense” may not be quite right. While it’s probably true that a completely unexpected asteroid (and we see plenty of them) would leave us defenseless, one as well-known as Apophis with a similar lead time could conceivably be deflected by a current nuclear-tipped rocket or one developed specifically for it. That’s what Elon Musk may have his eye on with his SpaceX rockets. Some people could also be evacuated to Mars or the Moon on his rockets, assuming the upcoming impact was revealed to the public by NASA and world governments – or hidden to avoid panic and financial problems … which is conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan’s area of expertise.

The truth is, NASA is actually looking forward to studying Apophis on its flyby – both to learn more about it and asteroids in general and to get an even better handle on the probability of it hitting Earth in the future, not to mention what signs to look for with other potentially collision-possible near-Earth asteroids.

Apophis (he’s the serpent)

While it’s entertaining to poke fun at Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and the Daily Express, in this case they brought Apophis, asteroids, NASA and the reality of an asteroid impact and asteroid avoidance much brooder attention than they normally get. The only party who might be disappointed in all of this would be Apophis himself – the actual ancient Egyptian god of chaos whose namesake is refusing to live up to his reputation.

Too bad.

People have long speculated on the wonders that might be hidden deep within the Earth’s surface. While so far no one has found dinosaurs, an interior black hole, or a breakaway Nazi civilization, geologists have found evidence for a vast and mysterious reservoir of primordial magma that has been completely undisturbed for more than 4 billion years. They haven’t quite found it yet, but they’ve found some compelling and shiny evidence: a treasure trove of rare super-deep diamonds older than Earth’s moon.

The super-deep diamonds are recognizably different than the well-known diamonds formed at more shallow depths (you know, the ones we’ve been conned into caring about by the De Beers Group) and were discovered when volcanic eruptions in Brazil brought them to the surface. In their paper recently published in Science, researchers say that examining these diamonds has resulted in chemical proof that a magma reservoir which has remained stable and unchanging since the formation of planet Earth does in fact exist. Geochemist Suzette Timmerman of the Australian National University says:

“Diamonds are the hardest, most indestructible natural substance known, so they form a perfect time capsule that provides us a window into the deep Earth.”

Earth’s mantle is the layer that is squeezed between the molten core of our planet and the outer crust (where we live) and is nearly impossible to study. It’s hundreds of miles straight down and not only would it be impossible to drill down there, the heat and pressure would simultaneously crush and boil anything we might send down. We think that the Earth’s mantle is solid, but since the 1980’s there has been speculation that there may be a reservoir of the “primordial soup” that hasn’t been turned over and solidified in the few billion years the planet has been around.

There may be a reservoir of magma older than the Earth’s moon somewhere deep in Earth’s mantle.

The theory is based off isotopes of helium found in volcanic lava. Some volcanic lava has a remarkably high ratio of helium-3 to helium-4. This unusual ratio of helium isotopes is also found in extremely old meteorites that have fallen to Earth, but not in the rock an soil we find up here on the crust. But because the ancient helium signature is only found coming out of the hottest volcanoes, it’s impossible to tell where it originated.

According to researchers, this batch of super-deep diamonds offers proof that the primordial reservoir exists. The diamonds contain trapped remnants of helium that may have been formed before the collision that created the Earth’s moon. According to the researchers, finding the isotopic pattern in these diamonds means that the helium must have come from where the diamonds were formed, or even deeper. According to Tinnerman:

“My research is unique in that it gives the first direct depth constraints on where this primordial reservoir is located (more than 410 km depth), as we know the diamonds formed in the transition zone (410-660 km depth).”

Diamonds are nothing but rock poop, people.

Eargh scientist Matthew Jackson from the University of California Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the research but has studied the helium isotope patterns for decades, believes this is an important step forward. He says:

“This is an interesting result, with a lot of potential to ‘map out’ where elevated 3He/4He domains are located in the Earth’s deep interior

Helium can diffuse rapidly at mantle conditions, so it will be important to evaluate whether the ancient helium signature reflects compositions trapped at diamond-formation depths, or the composition of the host lava that transported to diamonds to the surface.”

It’s amazing how much we’re finding out about the composition of our own planet, and how much we still have yet to learn. It’s also amazing that we’ve been sold the idea of the extreme rarity of diamonds when they quite literally shoot out of the ground.

“If we find anyone guilty of wrongdoing, we will file a criminal case against them. If a UFO descends and parks here, that’s even better. We’ll capture them all.”

What kind of world do we live in when people who have been contacted by extraterrestrials can’t find a place on their own planet to meet and talk about it? That’s what happened in Thailand last week as dozens of police officers and park rangers twice stormed the meeting place of the UFO Kao Kala group – an assembly of UFO believers and claimed contactees who meet on Mount Khao Kala, considered to be one of the top UFO hotspots in Asia, to meditate, discuss their experiences, hear about the latest messages from extraterrestrials and train to become alien communicators. It’s no surprise that outsiders are suspicious of the group and its meeting place in the popular mountain park and recently forced these raids on the premise that the private group was getting too large for the building and encroaching onto public land. Fact, fallacy or fear?

Notification of Activities for Coordination for Warning Groups (Khao Kala) 

 

 

Saturday, August 17, 2019, the group invites everyone to join at

6:00 pm to host a meal for participants. Anybody can cook as well.
19.00 hrs. Dharma lecture, with video screenings by Ajarn Somchit Rueangpetch (responsible person in the area department).

We invite everyone interested in aliens and disasters. Join activities to meet and exchange experiences.

*** Can bring a tent to sleep on his shell. Or will go to sleep at the Scout camp Below are
*** Khao Kala, Khao Kala UFO Observatory,
Moo 10, Phu Ta Ching Sub-district, Phra Non Subdistrict, Mueang District, Nakhon Sawan Province

This innocent-sounding announcement (except for the “warnings” and “disasters” parts) triggered the raids on August 15 and 16 at the Khao Kala Meditation Center. The event was being held in part to celebrate the birthday of Somjit Reapeth, the founder of the group, who in 1997 received a call from her father to come to Khao Kala where she and her sisters claim to have seen the UFO he said contained aliens who were communicating with him while he meditated. Her father taught Somjit how to communicate with them and translate their messages. They then founded UFO Khao Kala to train more people and meet with other contactees.

“Each of us is assigned to do a different task by the aliens. The main mission is to learn how to deal with the upcoming disaster that will wipe out half the humans in the world. We are getting ready for that day.”

In a 2015 interview with the Bangkok Post, Dusadee Prasonsuk, one of 60 members trained by Somjit to be part of the group’s first alien squad, explained the alien messages and warnings of disaster that brings the group together. In the same article, Somjit described some of the aliens she’s interacted with. (Photos here.)

Mrs Somjit Raepeth, 56, member of Khao Kala group

Paranormal activity: Somjit Raepeth, 56, runs the UFO Khao Kala group. Her father was the first one in their family to make contact with aliens, she says.

Spooky spot: The UFO group meditate on top of Hill 145. The hill also allegedly hides a wormhole, which they say aliens use as a gateway to travel through dimensions.

“The aliens we contacted are from Pluto and a planet outside of our solar system called Logu Kata Paka Tigong. They have high virtues and morals. The only way to make contact with them is to practise dhamma to the highest levels.”

Pluto

At a UFO Khao Kala seminar in 2017, contactee and Harvard-trained doctor Dephanom Muangman revealed a prediction the aliens gave him:

“There will be a Third World War in the next five years because Trump is president. This will be true, because they told me that Bangkok would flood back in 1997.”

Is UFO Khao Kala a collection of real contactees, a heavy-duty Buddhist meditation group, just another New Age organization or something else? More importantly, no matter which they are, did they deserve to be raided … twice? Are locals concerned because the group may be camping on the mountain, afraid of people who think differently than they do or terrified that these are real alien contactees who may be facilitating disaster rather than predicting it?

The event apparently took place without incident on August 18.

What will happen at the next one?

Throughout human history there have been those who have claimed to have chanelled the higher knowledge of celestial or divine beings, much of which has ended up in volumes of texts for us to peruse and try to wrap our heads around, looking for some meaning in this chaotic cosmos we call home. One very strange such text showed up in the 1950s, purporting to give glimpses into secrets beyond our imagination, and whose contents remain disputed and authorship unknown to this day.

The incredibly weird story of the book known only as The Urantia Book supposedly begins back in 1911, when a married pair of doctors in Chicago, William and Lena Sadler, were approached by a woman who had a strange tale to tell. She claimed that her husband would go into unusually deep trances from which he could not be woken from, and during which he would seem to become possessed by outside forces. The Sadlers came to observe the man during these episodes, and indeed he seemed to be conveying verbal messages from spiritual beings he called “student visitors,” which would then be recorded on paper until there were voluminous transcriptions of these supposed communications. Sadler was deeply skeptical at first, as he was a long time debunker of psychic powers and spiritual mediumship, and in 1929 would even write a book on how fraudulent he thought it all was, entitled The Mind at Mischief. However, in this case he says he found that he was compelled and unable to come to a rational explanation for what he and his wife had witnessed, one of only two cases he had ever encountered that he could not explain, writing of it:

The other exception has to do with a rather peculiar case of psychic phenomena, one which I find myself unable to classify. I was brought in contact with it, in the summer of 1911, and I have had it under my observation more or less ever since, having been present at probably 250 of the night sessions, many of which have been attended by a stenographer who made voluminous notes. A thorough study of this case has convinced me that it is not one of ordinary trance. This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities. Psychoanalysis, hypnotism, intensive comparison, fail to show that the written or spoken messages of this individual have origin in his own mind. Much of the material secured through this subject is quite contrary to his habits of thought, to the way in which he has been taught, and to his entire philosophy. In fact, of much that we have secured, we have failed to find anything of its nature in existence.

The Sadlers would spend many sessions with this mysterious individual, becoming more and more convinced that something truly strange was occurring. The patient would come to the attention of a group of Sadler’s friends, who also came to observe these sessions after reading some of the transcripts, and at one point whatever entities were speaking through the man invited them to ask whatever questions they wanted of it. The group would compose 30 individuals, who called themselves “The Forum” and end up asking hundreds of questions to these “beings,” recording all of the answers. It is the original transcripts and the answers to these questions that would inevitably be compiled into what has come to be called The Urantia Book, with “Urantia” being the entities’ name for “Earth.” In 1925, The Forum made a pledge not to discuss what they had learned with the outside world, and the manuscript was largely hidden away, being revised and added to over the years with further communications with the spirits, in some cases even having whole sections purportedly just magically appear out of thin air.

This would go on for decades, with the book growing and being expanded and revised as these “celestial entities” were contacted through the original medium, all while it and the subject’s identity were kept a total secret, until in 1955 permission to publish it was granted by the spiritual beings that they had allegedly been in contact with. The Urantia Book was then finally released by a tax-exempt educational society in Illinois specifically formed for this purpose, called The Urantia Foundation. The copyright for the material would pass into public domain in 2006, and it has been widely published by others since then. Now that we have the origins of this bizarre book out of the way, you might be wondering what it is actually about, and that is a pretty strange story in its own right.

The Urantia Book is more or less essentially a very long, often rambling hodgepodge of spiritualism, philosophy, and pseudo-science, covering such heady topics as the nature of the universe, the origins of mankind, the meaning of life, the nature of God and the universe itself, the life of Jesus, a very bizarre and elaborate alternate history of Earth, a cosmology of extraterrestrial spirit beings, and extensive pondering on the relationship between God and humans. It is all far too detailed and long to really get into too many details here, but among the book’s many “revelations” is that there is a multiverse and “superuniverses,” that Jesus is the most important spirit being in this universe and shares much of his lore in other sources, although it is claimed here that he was born of natural means of conception rather than a virgin birth and did not perform many of the miracles he is credited with in the Bible, and that God is a being that operates on several levels of reality. There are also references to other celestial beings and entities. It is all presented in an extremely long, detailed text pervaded with numerous illustrations, and it is quite utterly mind-boggling on first look, and it is all presented as authoritative fact.

Of course considering the apparent paranormal source of the manuscript and its otherworldly claims, there has been quite a lot of skepticism aimed its way, and none of this is helped by the fact that many of the “scientific facts” it spews are flat-out wrong and very much a product of their time, not really in keeping with the supposition that this comes from omnipotent advanced beings. Nevertheless, this has not stopped the popularity of the book from spreading. In the 1970s, The Book of Urantia was popular among musicians, and it has its adherents to this day, some who believe it literally, with some channelers claiming to even be still in contact with the entities responsible for the original texts, and others who think it is the truth disguised as fiction, open to interpretation and requiring us to think it through. Still others take it to be nothing more than purely a form of science fiction, historical fiction or fantasy, although it is very well thought out, with noted skeptic Martin Gardner calling it highly imaginative, with “cosmology that outrivals in fantasy the cosmology of any science-fiction work known to me.” Less positive reviews come from a skeptic who says it is all “fascinating, inspiring, compelling, haunting, entertaining, annoying, incomprehensible, and always wordy,” although it is almost universally said to demonstrate a high level of writing ability despite its density.

To this day The Urantia Book remains much discussed and debated, with its original author completely unknown, its history unconfirmed, and the identity of the supposed original channeler of it all completely a mystery. It has been called the real deal, a message of divine inspiration from higher forces, as well as a piece of fiction or even a total hoax or propaganda pulled off by humans, maybe even Sadler himself, with much of it possibly plagiarized from other works. So what are we dealing with, a divine compilation of universal secrets bequeathed upon us by forces beyond our understanding, or a collection of absurd ramblings written by false prophets, charlatans, and hoaxers? Whatever the case may be, it sure is a strange odyssey all the same.

For the past several months, I’ve been conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a clearer picture of global UFOlogy today.

This week, our global UFO trek takes us to Sweden, and to Clas Svahn. The author of more than 25 books, Clas features regularly on TV, radio and in printed media as an expert in UFOs, astronomy and space research. He is the editor of UFO-Sweden’s quarterly magazine UFO-Aktuellt and has been Head of Education of field investigators since the late 1990s. He has personally investigated somewhere in the region of 1,500 reports of alleged UFOs.

Clas Svahn, International director for UFO-Sweden and chairman for the Foundation Archives for the Unexplained (AFU).

RG: Who have been the defining figures in Swedish UFOlogy over the past 70 years, for better or for worse, and why?

The first big name in Swedish UFOlogy was Gösta Rehn who published four books (one translated into English) between 1966 and 1976. Rehn, though an ET believer, advocated a more scientific approach to the topic as a reaction to the early-1960s Adamski-and-contactee-oriented debate. After Rehn, several more ET-oriented authors followed, like Staffan Stigsjöö and Boris Jungkvist. In the early 1990s, several new age-focused authors like Sune Hjorth and Kristina Wennergren took yet another step from the scientific approach suggested by Rehn. Since the middle o the 1990’s I have tried to change this and today the Swedish UFO debate is more balanced. My books have been read by tens-of-thousands of Swedes and I am often interviewed on TV, radio and in newspapers.

Gösta Rehn, a pioneer in Swedish UFOlogy.

RG: In terms of UFOlogy, Sweden is known for its historic ‘Ghost Rocket’ sightings of 1946. Could you explain the general nature of these sightings and share with us the best theories to account for them?

It is not possible to answer this question short and concise since the material covering the Ghost Rockets is huge and compelling. What I can say is that the Ghost Rockets are one of the truly mysterious phenomena connected to UFOs. They got their name from a Swedish newspaper editor in May 1946 since they looked like the V-bombs used by Nazi-Germany during the last years of WWII. On August 14th, Swedish Air Force pilot Lieutenant Gunnar Irholm and Corporal Möller were flying on a training mission between Malingsbo and Krylbo in Dalecarlia. The time was a couple of minutes after ten o’clock in the morning and the visibility was good with a rainstorm coming in from the southeast. The two men were flying a B18A bomber at 650 feet (200 meters) over a forest area 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) east-northeast of Malingsbo church when Gunnar Irholm suddenly saw an unknown aircraft coming from his left on a southeasterly course in front of their airplane. Gunnar Irholm remembered when interviewed in 1986: “Just over the horizon I could see an elongated object without the typical features of an aircraft. It had no tail fin, for example. What we saw was the picture of a cigar, a torpedo. We were close enough to be sure that this was not an aircraft.”

His report was filed just minutes after landing in Västerås. There, Gunnar Irholm wrote that after spotting the object they lost eye contact for a short period of time, but after adjusting their height it reappeared 20 seconds later. “I immediately put my aircraft on a parallel course and put on full power. The shortest distance we had to the craft was just over 3,000 feet [one kilometer] but I soon realized that we were not able to catch up with the craft which speed I estimate to between 370 and 430 miles [600 kilometers and 700 kilometers] per hour. Two minutes later it had vanished to the South East,” Irholm wrote in the official report. The unknown object vanished into the storm cloud.

The Swedish Ghost Rocket Committee

A full investigation was made and Lieutenant Irholm and Corporal Möller were both summoned to a meeting with one of the prime investigators from the Ghost Rocket committee, Eric Malmberg, eight days later. Eric Malmberg’s conclusion was that the object had not been a Swedish aircraft. But what was it? Malmberg later said in an interview: “He must have seen something. I later got to know Gunnar Irholm very well and he was always a very balanced person.” And Gunnar Irholm was a pilot with great experience. At the time of the observation he was in charge of a division of B18s and would later the same year fly to Britain in charge of bringing four J28 Vampires back to Sweden. He was later appointed to head the military testing grounds at Malmslätt where new aircraft, missiles and rockets were tested before being used by the armed forces.

Beside this report, the crashes are still one thing that puzzles me. I have spent days together with the witnesses of the July 19th crashes where four objects dived into lakes during four hours. Search teams from the Swedish military looked for them but found only holes at the bottom of the lakes, no debris. What did they see? I do not know but I am sure that they witnessed a real, physical phenomenon.

RG: What is the Swedish government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?

During the last five years or so the Swedish armed forces have distanced themselves from the topic and are not publishing any statistics anymore. I have even been denied a short summary of how many ”unknowns” the air force investigated during 2000 to 2018. This is a break with how the military used to handle UFOs. After the Ghost Rocket wave the military put a great effort into investigating sightings and did so for many years until 1965 when this responsibility was handed over to the Defense Research Institute (FOI). After that, real investigations ceased and the reports coming to the military were just filed without any interviews or investigations being conducted. Our proximity to Russia makes the military cautious to publish reports of unknowns since they could be used by other countries as a means to measure the capacity of the Swedish radar systems.

Rosenbad in Stockholm, the seat of the Swedish government.

RG: Does the Swedish Ministry of Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?

No, not any more. There is still a ”UFO desk” but it never investigates UFO reports from the public but sends the observers to UFO-Sweden instead.

RG: Has the Swedish government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?

Hard to say. A couple of years ago UFO-Sweden had all the reports in the FOI files scanned and handed over on a hard drive when I asked for them. And I have never had any problems with getting comments regarding UFOs when I have asked for them – until now. As I see it, the Swedish military doesn’t know much more about the origin a of the unknowns than I and UFO-Sweden do.

RG: Tell us a bit about your organisation, UFO-Sweden. How many members do you have, and what kind of activities do you engage in? How many smaller Swedish UFO groups are you aware of, if any?

UFO-Sweden started in 1970 (and we will be 50 years 2020) as an organization more inclined to publish cases that showed that we had an ET presence on Earth than to try and find explanations to those reports. Ten years later UFO-Sweden was divided into two groups, one that took a more scientific stance and one that continued on the ET path. It was a very painful process since most of the persons once founding UFO-Sweden were convinced that the UFO enigma already was solved and that all that now had to be done was to inform the Swedish citizens and our leaders that the Earth was visited by beings from other worlds. This standpoint made several serious investigators leave the organization or decide not to join it in the early years.

Today UFO-Sweden is a stable and very well maintained group of dedicated researchers. We have around 500 members and a circulation of our glossy magazine UFO-Aktuellt of 1,200 copies. Our report centre investigates between 250 and 300 reports every year.

UFO-Swedens delivers lectures and training courses, and, since 2019, also holds regional meetings with members. We publish yet another magazine beside UFO-Aktuellt called Rapport-Nytt aimed at members and field investigators (500 copies).

There are no other groups in Sweden anymore.

RG: What are the most active regions of Sweden for UFO sighting reports?

The most active regions are the regions where UFO-Sweden has field investigators or groups. Where people can find someone to report to. There are no “hotspots;” the reports are evenly distributed over Sweden. When UFO-Sweden, during several years, made a survey by knocking doors and asking people all over the southern part of Sweden if they had seen anything in the sky that they couldn’t explain ten per cent of the 1,600 we talked to said that they had. Just a few of them had reported their observation to the authorities or to UFO-Sweden which makes us think that there are one millions possible UFO observations out there (Sweden has a population of ten millions) that we still don’t know of. Today UFO-Sweden has 20,000 reports in our files.

RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings?

Since I am an amateur astronomer I have been standing outside beneath the dark and starry sky for hundreds of hours. I have seen a couple of strange lights and objects but only one that still baffles me. It was in November 1995 when me and my wife stood outside our house just after 1am after returning home from a friend looking to the East. A couple of minutes earlier we had passed two men standing at a bus stop pointing to the sky looking at something, which we at the time could not see. Trying to locate whatever it was we both scanned the sky but saw nothing but stars. Suddenly three white-glowing objects, all formed like a cross with even arms like plus signs, flew out of the darkness from East. They flew over us without changing positions and my first thoughts that they were birds reflecting the lights from the city below soon turned out to be wrong. As I ran around the corner of our house I could see the three objects vanishing from my sight. I have no idea of what they were or where they came from and the investigator that was assigned to investigate our observation never found an explanation.

Clas Svahn

RG: How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?

I started out as an avid amateur astronomer when I was eleven years old in the late 60s, and astronomy is still one of my biggest interests. But soon I got interested also in UFO anomalies. I started reading as many books as I could find and cut out newspaper articles and pasted them on paper (I still have them!). When I was 16, in May 1974, I started a local UFO group in my hometown and began to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects. Since then I have investigated around 1,500 cases but have not one simple single explanation for all of them. To me UFOs are not just one phenomenon but many, and I am cautious when it comes to saying what it all could be. But I think it is way too early to say that we have visitors from other planets coming here in spaceships. To me, the UFO enigma is much more complex than that.

I consider myself to be a critical investigator and all answers, as long as they could be substantiated, are good answers. To me there are no easy answers to be found when it comes to UFOs. If you stick with one favourite hypothesis, that could be ETH or many skeptics point of view that there is nothing to UFOs at all, you are bound to miss vital information. For me, UFOs are a label for many different phenomena. I do not think that what often is called The UFO Enigma has just one answer. Reading reports of strange lights, “crafts, ”“aliens” and other anomalies in books and newspapers from earlier days it is clear to me that the alien answer is not the only one. Some reports that I have investigated have had a very physical part which to me points to these objects being a real phenomena.

RG: How can Swedish UFOlogy, and UFOlogy in general, better itself?

In many ways of course. We are good at many things like educating our field investigators which we’ve done since the mid-1970s during yearly courses. But we need to get better in making them stay within the organization. But that is a problem we share with all other UFO organizations around the world. There are only so many very good and interesting reports every year and the field investigators must work with loads of mundane and not very exciting observations before getting to a ”good case.” That is a problem because many of the investigators get frustrated and drop out while waiting.

I am also chairman for Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), the world’s largest archive when it comes to the unknown. We are growing all the time, but so fast that we are lacking money for making our holdings available in the way we would like them to be. I hope that AFU (www.afu.se) will get more funding from interested persons around the world and maybe my new book (”Files of the Unknown) about AFU and a crowd funding effort we are starting soon will change that.  AFU is hugely important for researchers and I would like the archive to be used even more.

When it comes to UFOlogy, in general I think that we all must be better researchers and better educated in physics, psychology and the misinterpretations that may account for than 90 per cent of the observations. Real UFO phenomena are not as common as you may think.

For more information about UFO Sweden, visit their website.

Fast radio bursts – those mysterious short yet powerful signals from other galaxies – are pretty rare. While some people claim they’re signals from alien civilizations, others doubt that theory because only two of the dozens discovered so far were repeated from the same location. That theory may have just received some much-needed credibility with the discovery of eight different repeating signals, with one set coming from a nearby galaxy. Can we yell “It’s aliens!” now?

“There is definitely a difference between the sources, with some being more prolific than others. We already knew from FRB 121102 that the bursts can be very clustered: sometimes the source doesn’t burst for hours and hours and then suddenly you get multiple bursts in a short amount of time. We have observed the same thing for FRB 180916.J0158+65, for which we report ten bursts in this paper.”

Physicist Ziggy Pleunis (a top candidate for “Best Astronomer’s Name”) of McGill University is a co-author of the report accepted by the Astrophysical Journal Letters announcing the discovery of eight repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) signals using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope. CHIME has been optimized for finding FRBs by searching a wide section of the sky for a lower range of frequencies than most radio telescopes. In an interview with ScienceAlert, Pleunis explained that some of these FRBs repeated only once while one flashed 10 times. Because the intervals between repeating FRBs varied so much in length, some astronomers suspect that all FRBs repeat eventually.

Another interesting observation from these new FRBs is that their wave frequencies get successively lower over time – what the paper calls a “downward frequency drift.” While this could be a sign that whatever is generating the signal is fading away, researchers aren’t ready to call them distress calls from a dying civilization. The polarization of one of the signals showed it came from an extreme magnetic environment – most likely a black hole or a neutron star. Finally, the FRB signals varied in their dispersion. As expected, a highly dispersed signal indicates it has traveled a long distance. One of these eight FRBs had the lowest dispersion rate ever detected, meaning it could be located very close to our galaxy – astronomically speaking, of course.

Speaking of speaking astronomically …

“I think (and I hope!) the paper will prompt other astronomers to point their telescopes to these newly discovered sources. Then, there is a lot of information here for model builders to work with. I think it will help them figure out what produces repeating FRBs. Also, I think our findings will influence the search strategy of other teams that try to discover repeating FRBs.”

Pleunis and the large team of astronomers who co-authored the report are obviously excited about their discovery. Coupled with the recent announcement of development of an AI FRB-detection system, we could be hearing about a lot more repeaters very soon … and hopefully on their origin.

It’s aliens! (We hope!)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released its files on another famous name in the annals of ufology: George Van Tassel, alleged UFO contactee, and builder of California’s famous Integratron.

Van Tassel was like many in the 1950s UFO scene, who prior to his interest in visitations by “Space Brothers” had been heavily involved with metaphysical subjects and groups. What set him apart from many others, however, was Van Tassel’s legitimate involvement with mechanical engineering and aviation. Van Tassel was barely out of his teens when he relocated to California from his hometown in Jefferson, Ohio, to work in a garage owned by his uncle.

It was while working there that he met a German immigrant and part-time prospector named Frank Critzer. Staking his claim near Giant Rock, California, Critzer was later killed during a police raid that occurred at the location in 1942; it was later revealed that Critzer had been a suspected German spy.

Van Tassel in 1964

(Credit: KVOS Channel 12 Films, Center for Pacific Northwestern Studies, Western Washington University)

After Critzer died, Van Tassell took an interest in an abandoned airport near Giant Rock and was later granted a contract by the Federal Government to undertake a restoration of the property under the Bureau of Land Management. With his background in mechanical engineering and prospective airstrip near Giant Rock, Van Tassel went on to work for some of the more high profile names in aviation during the ensuing years; these included Lockheed, and flight innovator Howard Hughes’ own Hughes Aircraft, among others. Eventually, Van Tassel would also turn his airport and surrounding attractions near Giant Rock into a sort of “Mecca” for the soon-to-be-booming flying saucer craze.

The FBI’s file on Van Tassel, numbering 315 pages, is mostly concerned with photocopies of pamphlets Van Tassel co-authored, which includes one titled, “Proceedings from the College of Universal Wisdom” (Van Tassel was Director of the College of Universal Wisdom in the early 1950s, according to the pamphlet). The batch of documents opens with a letter by an individual (whose identity is redacted) sent to John F. Malone, the Special Agent in Charge at the FBI’s Los Angeles, California field office. The letter explains that the author is filing the information with Malone “at the request of my friend” (a name that is also redacted), who had been “Seeking some information concerning the activities of individuals and the group known as the College of Universal Wisdom.”

“The group ostensibly is devoted to a study of space ships and interplanetary communication,” the unnamed individual writes, “but its consistent ‘line’ in its publication is an attack upon atomic weapons and preaching of a nebulous peace. George W. Van Tassel is listed as Director of the College of Universal Wisdom, and I know nothing whatever concerning him.

“However, at least one of the prominent guests at the space ship convention at Giant Rock Airport, Sunday, April 4th, has been questioned about supposed communist affiliations,” the informant writes.

However, in addition to Van Tassel’s associations with the Giant Rock area and his organization, the files do elaborate on the Bureau’s concerns about Van Tassel’s airstrip, and the location’s former connections to a possible German spy during the war.

“You may recall that this area was the scene of some sensational happenings during World War II,” the author of the letter to Special Agent Malone writes, “when it was believed to be the projected site for refueling of suicide planes, possibly to be launched from Japanese submarines on the Gulf of California in an attempt to reach and bomb Hoover Dam’s penstocks and power houses to cripple the airplane industry here. Your office no doubt has the full story on what happened then including the destruction by dynamite in an underground room beneath Giant Rock of the then owner.”

Incidentally, Van Tassel and his family actually lived in quarters within these areas excavated by Critzer in the 1940s, and beginning in 1953, he began holding public meditation events in these underground chambers. The same year was the launch of the annual Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention, as referenced in the letter to Special Agent John Malone, which ran until Van Tassel’s death in 1978.

The Big Bang Theory hasn’t been having a good year. First, of course, the iconic television sitcom of the same name ended. Besides being a top-performing show right up until the end, it did wonders for convincing the general public that nerds can be cool while showing nerds that they can meet attractive soulmates as long as they don’t spend too much discussing Star Trek movies or string theory. Then last week, THE Big Bang theory itself was brought into question by new data which seems to show that an old star appropriately dubbed “Methuselah” is actually older than the universe. If that hit to its big ego was wasn’t big enough, a study released this week showing how dark matter, which was thought to have been created by the Big Bang, actually predates it. What next? Secret documents showing Dr. Sheldon Cooper cheated on his IQ test?

“If dark matter were truly a remnant of the Big Bang, then in many cases researchers should have seen a direct signal of dark matter in different particle physics experiments already.”

Tommi Tenkanen, a postdoctoral fellow in Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University and author of “Dark Matter from Scalar Field Fluctuations” published recently in Physical Review Letters, uses the enemy of many weak theories – mathematics – to put the Big Bang theory into question. Tenkanen developed a simple mathematical framework (graphs can be seen here) which illustrates a scenario where dark matter was produced in a period of cosmic inflation BEFORE the Big Bang, causing a massive production of scalars. Scarlars (also called scalar boson – you can see where this is going) are boson particles whose spin equals zero. The only boson particle ever found is the Higgs boson, also known affectionately as the ‘God particle’ because it gives all other particles their mass. In other words, it created the mass of the universe, which up until now was believed to have birthed the universe.

Figure 1

The parameter space relevant for the “fuzzy DM” scenario [25]. Contours show the value of $H_{\ast }$ required for $\chi$ to constitute all DM. The regions below the horizontal red dashed line and between the dotted green lines are in tension with observations of the Lyman-$\alpha$forest [26] and the recent Event Horizon Telescope data due to the black hole superradiance mechanism [27], respectively. See also Ref. [28] which placed tentative constraints excluding the entire region shown here. The lower limit for $x$ axis, ${\chi }_{\ast }/H_{\ast }\simeq 7\times {10}^4$, is given by the isocurvature constraint (14).

Figure 2

The region of the model parameter space where the scalar simultaneously constitutes all DM (along the red curve) and avoids the DM isocurvature constraints (blue region). Also the region $m\le 0.4\mathrm{GeV}$, $H_{\ast }\lesssim {10}^5\mathrm{GeV}$ in the lower left corner is allowed. The result is not sensitive to the exact value of $\beta$. Above the blue region, $m>H_{\ast }$, the scalar fluctuations during inflation are strongly suppressed.

Does this mean dark atter really existed before the Big Bang?

“We do not know what dark matter is, but if it has anything to do with any scalar particles, it may be older than the Big Bang. With the proposed mathematical scenario, we don’t have to assume new types of interactions between visible and dark matter beyond gravity, which we already know is there.”

Well, if the math says it did … then it did – although it would be nice to have some physical evidence to back it up. Tenkanen told Phys.org that’s coming in 2022 when the Euclid satellite is launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Euclid Consortium. It will be carrying a near-infrared space telescope that will accurately measure the acceleration of the universe as it expands, thus giving scientists the means to trace back to the origins of dark energy (the theoretical cause of the expansion) and dark matter (the content of up to 85% of the universe).

Or not.

“It’s going to be very exciting to see what it will reveal about dark matter and if its findings can be used to peek into the times before the Big Bang.”

That’s a BIG if … meaning the Big Bang theory — and the universe and all that is in it — is safe.

For now.

I like my black holes like I like my internal organs: doing what they’re supposed to and not surprising anyone. After all, we barely even understand black holes beyond descriptions that would fit perfectly in an H.P. Lovecraft novel—a dead star at the center of the galaxy, collapsed under its own tremendous mass to an impossible singularity, warping the very fabric of reality around it like a cloak blacker than the blackest night, as even light itself struggles feebly and fails to escape its terrible pull. Yeah, I don’t want any surprises from black holes.

But alas, the great old one has awakened and all humanity’s brightest minds know not for what weird purpose. According to astronomers, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has been acting really strange. Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) is a pretty quiet and mundane supermassive black hole (as far as they go). It’s fluctuations in the brightness of the “electromagnetic counterpart” are normally relatively small. This summer, however, that seems to have changed. Observations from the Keck telescope have recorded massive spikes in the brightness of Sgr A*, including one when the black hole spiked to 75 times its normal brightness and held there for a period of two hours.

Astronomer Tuan Do at the University of California Los Angeles, who observed the unprecedented spike in Sgr A* says:

“I was pretty surprised at first and then very excited. The black hole was so bright I at first mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sgr A* that bright. Over the next few frames, though, it was clear the source was variable and had to be the black hole. I knew almost right away there was probably something interesting going on wit h the black hole.”

Tuan Do’s research was recently published in the Journal of Astrophysical Letters, but astronomers still don’t know what’s caused these massive spikes. Black holes don’t emit light on their own (go figure), but the swirling disk of stuff around it does. The so-called accretion disk consists of dust and gas and busted up cosmic debris that is pulled towards the black hole but doesn’t make it past the event horizon. Sometimes unlucky stars passing through the neighborhood have their matter ripped out by the supermassive black hole’s enormous gravity and assimilated by the accretion disk. The working hypothesis for the spikes in Sgr A*’s brightness is that it got its claws on an unusually large object and pulled it into the accretion disk, though what the object could be is unknown.

Astronomers will keep studying Sgr A* and try to figure out just what it’s up to. The Keck telescope only has a few more weeks where it will have the right angle to observe Sgr A*, but there are four more telescopes that have been pointed at it all summer with their data yet to be released. After that, the center of our galaxy won’t be observable again until 2020. Which leaves an approximately six month blind spot, and as everyone knows, black holes only strike when you’re not looking.

One of America’s most secretive and yet also highly publicized research facilities sure knows how to stay in the headlines. As the hype surrounding the controversial and misguided “Storm Area 51” event continues to grow, the off-limits and extremely classified Air Force testing ground appears to have held a massive test of some kind this past weekend.

While there are no details coming from the Armed Forces themselves, several Notices to Airman (NOTAMs) which were published publicly seem to indicate that the skies over the Nevada Test and Training Range were occupied by something spooky this past weekend. NOTAMs are documents filed with aviation authorities like America’s FAA which notify pilots of potential hazards or off-limit airspace. 

Much of the airspace surrounding Area 51 was off limits over the weekend, even to military aircraft.

Beginning on August 8, several aviation enthusiasts and observers began noticing curious NOTAMs and posting them to Twitter. The notices indicated several massive blocks of airspace surrounding Groom Lake and Tonopah Test Range, some of America’s most secretive locations where the most cutting-edge and classified aerospace technologies are developed and tested. The airspace above those areas were restricted from August 10 until the early morning on August 12.

The NOTAMs all specified an unlimited ceiling for these areas, meaning the airspace above these ranges was off limits essentially all the way up to outer space. Aviation journalists around the internet speculated that this likely indicates a test of some type of space-to-surface or surface-to-space technology, although it could simply be a way of ensuring that nobody without the proper security clearances got to see whatever shiny new toys the Air Force was testing over the weekend.

Many speculate the exercise was a test of a directed energy weapon, rocket, or missile.

While there’s no telling what may have been tested over the weekend, some aerospace experts have suggested it was likely a classified drone exercise, a rocket launch of some kind, a test of an exotic directed energy weapon, or perhaps even an early flight of the B-21 Raider, the Air Force’s upcoming next-generation stealth bomber.

Whatever it was, this weekend proves why we won’t get anywhere close to the secretive test range next month when we try to storm Area 51. That entire complex is one of the most heavily-guarded and restricted places on Earth and the site of some of the world’s most sophisticated weapons development. Are a bunch of Naruto-running millennials really going to be able to storm the barriers and evade armed guards?