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 13 YEARS AND 2 MONTH.
ON 06/08/2024 MORE THAN 2.161.100
VISITORS FROM 135 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...
27-08-2019
White Domed Disc captured above Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico
White Domed Disc captured above Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico
UFO accidentally captured in photograph by David Studer while vacationing in Merida, Yucatán Mexico on August 26, 2019. Mr. Studer has submitted the image to Mufon for further investigation.
If you look at the top center of the photograph and just above the clouds you will see it. A second unknown object flies close to the white domed disc.
The white domed disc was directly above the clouds and moving East and did not change direction.
NASA engineers are working on a new family of space robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains on other worlds. Meet the family, here.
The climbing robot LEMUR rests after scaling a cliff in Death Valley, California in early 2019. The robot uses special gripping technology that has helped lead to a series of new, off-roading robots that can explore other worlds.
From uncovering the first clues of liquid water on Mars to crossing our solar system, NASA’s missions have been adventurous, to say the least. Ranger 3 was NASA’s first attempt to land a rover on the moon in 1962. Since then, numerous robots have followed Ranger 3 from Earth into space. Yet the surfaces of planets and moons in our solar system remain largely unexplored, partly because current space robots haven’t been capable of scaling cliffs, gripping icy surfaces and otherwise conquering hard-to-reach places.
This month (July 10, 2019), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory described its work on a new family of robots that can roll, climb, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate around obstacles in rough terrains. These robots are currently being tested on Earth and will later be sent to places that are otherwise inaccessible by humans, helping scientists do meaningful science along the way.
A tiny climbing robot rolls up a wall, gripping with fishhooks – technology adapted from LEMUR’s gripping feet.
This new class of space robots will have functionalities inspired by the Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot (LEMUR), which was originally conceived as a repair robot for the International Space Station. In the video below, NASA describes LEMUR’s last field test, in Death Valley, California, in early 2019. The robot used hundreds of fishhooks to climb walls and AI to avoid obstacles that it could not climb. It also used its suite of scientific instruments to scan the rock for ancient fossils, and, as the video explains, it found some!
A direct application of this LEMUR field test would be searching for biosignatures – substances that provide evidence of life – on the planet Mars, perhaps in lake beds thought to hold signs of Martian life from the distant past.
While the LEMUR itself will not be sent into space, the engineers did adopt much of its AI and structural features into the next generation of robots that will act as our eyes and ears beyond Earth. Each one of them has unique features built into it to tackle harsh conditions and uncertain environments. Keep reading, to meet this new generation of space explorers.
Ice Worm was put to its first field test in the cave walls at Mount St. Helens in August 2018. The robot was belayed with a rope to ensure that it wasn’t damaged if it fell.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are developing a robot called Ice Worm in an attempt to navigate slippery surfaces. True to its name, the robot – adapted from a single limb of LEMUR – compacts its body before extending it to move forward. It proceeds an inch at a time by drilling one end of a limb into an icy surface, uses a grip to steady itself, then brings in the second limb to join the first using the same technique.
To move forward, it unscrews one foot, lengthens its body and screws it back into the ice a few meters ahead. Using the pressure sensors that instruct it how hard to drill into the ice, it repeats this over and over again to “inchworm” forward. Ice Worm also uses this method to anchor itself while analyzing the surface beneath to collect material in its legs that can be used to test salinity concentrations for microbial life.
Aaron Parness, an engineer at JPL, has trained Ice Worm in the remote regions of Antarctica, which is the harshest place they could find on Earth. The slippery ice coupled with the harsh environment will prepare the robot for similar conditions on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Another set of tests are lined up in glaciers on Mt. Rainier in Seattle. Parness commented:
Field testing shows you things that are hard to learn in the laboratory.
This 1.4-meter (4.6 foot) long robot is also being equipped with pattern recognition and machine learning – aspects of AI that allow it to learn from past mistakes and make optimal decisions. The robot will need to investigate patterns left behind by life in cave formations. In order to do so, it needs to be tiny and mobile enough to scuttle through the cave’s tiny gaps. For this, Parness and his team are working on miniaturized remote sensing and data analysis instruments that Ice Worm can wear like a backpack. Once ready, robots of this kind will be sent to the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter to bring back samples for further analyses.
While this four-legged robot is also inspired by LEMUR in its size and build, RoboSimian has supple wheels made of music wire in contrast to LEMUR’s gripping ones, thus having greater flexibility on rough terrains. This concept first materialized as a part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which promoted robotic technology for disaster-response operations. The robot is built and trained to operate in dangerous environments, so it’s not surprising that RoboSimian – a four-legged robot that can walk, crawl, slide on its belly, and even do cartwheels – will most likely be sent to Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Saltwater oceans are theorized to be present under the icy surface of that distant moon. Its geysers may also contain signs of microbial life.
Nicknamed King Louie after a character in the film “Jungle Book,” RoboSimian is equipped with spectroscopic instruments that could explore Enceladus’ polar regions.
NASA engineers were inspired by gecko feet, such as the one shown here, in designing a gripping system for space. Just as a gecko’s foot has tiny adhesive hairs, so the JPL devices incorporate small structures that work in similar ways.
You can use tape only so many times before the adhesion wears off. Geckos, on the other hand, offer inspiration for glues that stick even after multiple uses. These tiny lizards have hair on their feet that allow them to cling to a wall with ease. Parness and his team designed a robot with similar features – gecko-inspired adhesives – synthetic hair that sticks to any surface.
These grippers can sustain up to 150 Newtons of force and have been tested in simulated microgravity environments. The gecko material itself was tested 300,000 times to make sure the stickiness does not wear off. This robot will one day repair satellites, service them, and even snatch space garbage.
Yet another robot inspired by LEMUR, the Underwater Gripper, adopted LEMUR’s 16 fingers and 250 fishhooks to hold on tightly to surfaces and drill into formations. This is particularly useful in environments where there is little to no gravity, especially underwater where the force of the drill could push the robot away.
As of now the robot is working with Nautilus – an underwater research vessel – to collect samples from water that are a mile below the surface. Eventually, it might be sent to explore the surfaces of asteroids and other similar bodies.
A tiny, solar-powered helicopter will accompany the Mars 2020 rover. Arash Kalantari, a JPL engineer, modified LEMUR’s design to build a robot that lands not just horizontally, but also vertically by clinging to rocks like a dragonfly.
MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said:
Nobody’s built a Mars Helicopter before, so we are continuously entering new territory.
The Mars Helicopter is expected to reach Mars by February 2021 and will conduct geological assessments on the landing sites, assess natural resources and hazards for future space missions.
Bottom line: A new class of space robots have functionalities inspired by the Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot (LEMUR). While each design is unique in its abilities, there is one common goal that unites them all: the hunt for life beyond Earth.
Conspiracy theorists spotted what they think is the gigantic ship zoom through the Sun after a solar flare exploded from the surface. By analysing a series of NASA images, alien hunter Scott C Waring said the craft, which looks like it has a huge wingspan and a dipping tail similar to an angel, was there one minute and gone the next. This led Mr Waring to conclude it was travelling at the speed of light – something which no known thing in the Universe can do, apart from light.
Mr Waring also believes the UFO is the size of Jupiter – which has a diameter of 88,695 miles, 11 times that of Earth.
Mr Waring wrote on his blog ET Database: “I found this angelic UFO exiting our sun this week. The UFO came out right after a giant explosion happened.
“The UFO itself is huge compared to our sun. The angelic UFO is close to the size of Jupiter. This has to be one of the largest UFOs ever recorded exiting our sun.
“It moves really fast, because just a few minutes later, the photo of the same area shows it no longer there. Nothing that big could move that fast unless it has the ability to travel at light speed.
UFO SIGHTING: Angelic alien space ship the size of JUPITER seen near Sun – shock claim
(Image: NASA • GETTY)
“That my friends, is an alien craft.”
This is not the first time an alleged alien spaceship has been spotted near the Sun.
In September 2018, Maria Hill from Salem, Indiana, snapped images of the Sun, which she believes show a huge UFO followed by a massive fleet of smaller crafts passing behind.
The UFO flew out of the Sun
(Image: NASA • YOUTUBE)
Ms Hill wrote on Facebook alongside the images: “This is what showed up in my camera after I took a picture of the sun in the eastern sky this morning. iPhone 8 with a camera lens adapter.
“A green circular door-like object is at the centre of the vortex/worm hole and a serpent snake at the top right above it, by a circular disc. I am sure this has a symbolic meaning with the snake and the disc.”
Nat Geo Photographer Says He Encountered Advanced Underwater Aliens
Nat Geo Photographer Says He Encountered Advanced Underwater Aliens
National Geographic director of underwater photography, and member of OceanX has revealed in a recently published video he has encountered 'underwater aliens' that were much more advanced than humans.
Nat Geo Photographer Says He Encountered Underwater Aliens “More Advanced Than Humans”
The UFO subject has become an entirely liberal one in the last few months.
Never before have people had the freedom to speak out about Unidentified Flying Objects, Close Encounters, and potential alien sightings on Earth.
A Subject that was once deeply shrouded in a conspiracy, has now become the subject of study not only for science but the military and governments around the globe.
Videos have surfaced where we see pilots chasing down flying objects that are able to perform outlandish maneuvers; accelerating at incredible speeds, making nearly impossible turns, or stopping mid-air.
Shutterstock.
Pilots have described the objects they’ve encountered in the air as “unlike anything they’ve ever seen.”
But stories about aliens and UFOs don’t seem to plan on stopping anytime soon.
Now, it has been reported by the IBT that a Nat Geo photographer and member of the OceanX team has encountered underwater aliens during his diving assignments.
According to the photographer, the alien beings resemble stingrays although they appear to be much more advanced than humans.
This is according to Luis Lamar, National Geographic’s director of underwater photography, and member of OceanX.
According to his website, the underwater photographer “has sent robotic camera systems into one of the deepest ocean trenches on earth & he has logged hundreds of hours in manned submarines, including on five expeditions with the U.S. Navy’s deepest-diving manned research submersible ALVIN, diving beyond 12,000 feet deep in the abyss to photograph environments at the edges of the ocean frontier.”
The claims made by Lamar were presented in a short video made by his company, where the underwater photographer speaks about the different lifeforms he has encountered beneath the surface.
And while describing the numerous strange marine species he saw beneath the ocean, he discussed encountering what appeared to be alien beings, much more advanced than humans.
“I’ve seen giant deep sea arachnids, venomous sea snakes far offshore with, like bright-yellow heads,” Lamar revealed.
“Sharks in a frenzy, Orcas swarming all around me,” the underwater photographer continued.
“Some sort of you know, hyper-advanced aquatic alien creatures inhabiting the shallow waters, which almost look like stingrays.”
But although he has faced many ‘terrifying’ creatures while cataloging the beauties of our oceans, Lamar still argues the oceans are an incredible place to explore and be in.
But the claims made by Lamar are the first encounters.
US Navy Encounters
In fact, a report released in January of 2019 suggested that United States Nuclear Submarine have had their fair share of encounters with 0unidentified submerged objects, also known as USOs.
The report, released by the War Zone details encounters of US Navy personnel with Unidentified Submerged Objects.
One encounter, as detailed in the report, reveals how an attack submarine patrolling the North Atlantic picked up a fast moving object in the water.
Despite the fact that the military personnel could not identify the object, the report does suggest whatever it was, it was moving through the water at a speed of several hundred knots.
Sunken Alien Spaceships?
In 2018, it was reported that a shipwreck explorer and star of Discovery Channel’s documentary series “Cooper’s Treasure,” Darrel Miklos, encountered the crashed remains of an Alien spaceship inside the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
Using maps drawn by former NASA Astronaut Gordon Cooper to identify magnetic anomalies, Miklos has been hunting for shipwrecks in the Caribbean.
It was revealed that during one particular dive in the Bahamas, the Discovery Channel explorer came across a massive unidentified submerged object.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Miklos revealed: “It was a formation unlike anything I’ve ever seen related to shipwreck material, it was too big for that.”
Meme invaders: How #StormArea51 became our new UFO reality
Meme invaders: How #StormArea51 became our new rreality
Ken Layne Special to DESERT magazine
The desolation of Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway gives you plenty of time to think "what if?"
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
When you get mixed up with the UFO people, your life becomes deeply weird. Ask Matty Roberts, the 20-year-old engineering student from Bakersfield who created the #StormArea51 meme. He posted something dumb and funny on Facebook, proposing a nighttime invasion to “see them aliens,” and millions of people immediately signed up.
Most know it’s a joke. A few do not. More than a few will be headed up the Extraterrestrial Highway on Friday, Sept. 20, just to see what happens.
The Netflix documentary "Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers" has a lot of people thinking about that mysterious desert military installation 150 miles north of Las Vegas.
In 1989, Bob Lazar appeared on the KLAS-TV news to claim he worked on backward-engineered flying saucers. There were a few hundred holes in the story, but it hit a nerve. Area 51 became a meme of the first kind, a mythology that burrowed into the collective consciousness and never really left. "The X-Files" and "Independence Day" brought the paranoid tales to life. Video games, pop music and comic books elaborated the theology. Like Roswell before it, Nevada’s Area 51 became a dreamland of extraterrestrial secrets.
In this July 22, 2019 photo, Terris Williams visits an entrance to the Nevada Test and Training Range near Area 51 outside of Rachel, Nev. The U.S. Air Force has warned people against participating in an internet joke suggesting a large crowd of people "storm Area 51," the top-secret Cold War test site in the Nevada desert.
John Locher, AP
Pilots had been referring to the top-secret Air Force base at Groom Lake as “Dreamland” for years. Strange things were seen over this easternmost extension of Edwards Air Force Base, wonders in the sky. Some of these aerial oddities were later revealed as SR-71 Blackbird and U-2 spy planes. Some were Russian jet fighters stolen from Soviet airfields. And some remain unexplained: Lights dancing in the sky, things that hover with no visible or audible means of propulsion, sinister black triangles making 180-degree turns and shooting off like meteors.
Nevada is mostly federal land, and Area 51 is part of a vast, secret complex that includes the nation’s nuclear testing grounds at Yucca Flat, Nellis Air Force Range and the proposed nuclear waste dump within Yucca Mountain. Storming the base from all sides, as proposed by #StormArea51’s deliberately goofy battle plans, is impossible. But on the northeast side, where Highway 375 skirts the base’s buffer zone, tourists have been coming for a quarter-century to drink alien-labeled bottles of beer at the Little A’Le’Inn and take some pictures by the rural mailbox that marks a dirt road leading to the edge of the base. There’s the Alien Research Center down the road in Hiko, too, with a giant metallic space alien standing sentry outside the souvenir shop.
That’s where Roberts decided the millions would meet before the half-suicidal mob stormed Groom Lake under cover of darkness. Only those who could run like a beloved anime ninja named Naruto would survive to “see them aliens.” Woe to the Kyles, energy-drink-loving bros who would all be sacrificed to Area 51’s ruthless security forces so the speedier runners could slip through.
When a meme is embraced by the masses, jokes cease to exist. People are coming, and Roberts has now endorsed a peaceful festival on the fated day — hopefully the UFO Woodstock and not the Alien Altamont.
State of emergency: 'Storm Area 51' event pushes rural Nevada county to declare emergency
But it’s happening, there is no longer any doubt. Come Sept. 20, it’ll be bumper-to-bumper on the E.T. Highway from Las Vegas to the lonesome high desert of Lincoln County. It’s an easy two-hour drive from the suburban Vegas grid to Dreamland. Of course people are coming. The handful of mobile-home motel rooms were all booked up in Rachel, behind the Little A'Le'Inn, long before the U.S. Air Force and Nevada Highway Patrol were compelled to acknowledge at least some kind of looming invasion on the last weekend of summer. A media and tourist invasion, at least. A lot of people who didn’t quite get the joke, at worst.
If you couldn’t follow the anime character references or recognize the intentionally bad grammar and spelling, well maybe it sounded like a perfectly good idea, to storm the most mysterious military installation on the planet. It’s a natural and insane evolution of our current snarling discontent, the gleefully self-destructive populism, the impotent bafflement as everything actually falls apart, and the unavoidable awareness —especially in the desert with yet another power outage leaving you sweltering without air conditioning — that it’s getting harder to live on this Earth. It makes people loopy, makes people look for messiahs.
A souvenir shop that houses a brothel in an annex beckons visitors near a junction that leads to Area 51 on July 19, 2014 at Amergosa Valley, Nevada. Area 51 is another name for a portion of Edwards Air Force Base that UFO enthusiasts have theorized contains evidence of visitors from outer space.
Sean Gallup, Getty Images
The UFO phenomena is deeply weird and chaotic, like the subculture around it.
A close-range encounter shakes a person’s very soul. During the 1997 Phoenix Lights event, people pulled over on the freeways, gazing up in astonishment and horror at mile-wide silent aircraft that appeared to be right on top of them. The sense that the government is lying about UFOs is hard to avoid when, as happened in Phoenix, former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington made fun of the event and concealed his own up-close sighting on that otherworldly night of March 13, 1997. (Symington eventually admitted all, a decade later on CNN.)
There’s a baffling strangeness to these events. They rarely make any practical sense. The laws of physics are routinely and absurdly broken. And yet they are objectively real to the witnesses, regardless of what’s really behind the flying saucers and black triangles and other bizarre apparitions that haunt our skies and our social media. Military pilots chase them. Commercial pilots nervously report them. Millions of people around the world see Unidentified Aerial Phenomena every year. Maybe we are reaching a new level of global acknowledgement. Something is happening.
September event: After 'Storm Area 51' gets 2 million RSVPs, its creator announces alien-themed music fest
Wanna get away? Belize offers free trips to residents of Nevada town who want to escape 'Storm Area 51'
Rachel, Nevada: Hunting for Area 51's aliens along Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway
UFOs are socially disruptive. The effects are unpredictable. An obvious meme or a science-fiction story can be taken at face value. Absurdities become reality. Jokes, hoaxes, lies, con-men and chaos are not bugs in the UFO operating system. They’re a feature.
Around the world but most vividly in the indigenous culture of the American Southwest, the trickster wreaks havoc for good or ill or just for the hell of it, right here in our everyday world. The trickster isn’t condemned to rule an underworld, because the trickster is an equal among gods. A lot of credible people have looked at Lazar’s story and rationally concluded that he made it up, as he claimed to have fanciful academic credentials — simultaneous masters degrees from MIT and Caltech, of which no trace can be found. He was convicted of felony pandering in Nevada, the year following his wild claims about working on alien saucers. And since childhood he has courted local publicity, first for his rocket-powered bicycle. Yet for 30 years, he has mostly stuck to the details of his flying saucer story.
That tale was mostly forgotten outside of the small and graying contingent of late 20th-century UFO researchers — and they had mostly dismissed it. Jeremy Corbell, an independent filmmaker who lives part-time near Pioneertown in the California desert, is fascinated by Lazar. Corbell has made a trio of feature-length documentaries about the UFO world, but the Lazar movie blasted right out of the flying-saucer cult and became a full-on pop culture phenomenon. "Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers" spent much of the summer as the No. 1 documentary on Netflix, right there on the home screen for millions of subscribers worldwide. It was already doing well when the monstrously popular podcaster Joe Rogan brought Corbell and Lazar to his show.
A still from the documentary "Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers," which will play at the 2019 Freep Film Festival/
FFF2019, Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Sauc
'Bob Lazar: Area 51': In documentary, director investigates UFO whistle-blower's story
'Dangerous': Air Force responds to plans to 'storm Area 51' and 'see them aliens'
Roberts, our meme lord of Bakersfield, caught some of the Rogan episode. He watched the documentary. Inspired, he posted his meme to a Facebook group dedicated to nonsense. That should’ve been the end of it. Instead, Roberts became a global meme himself.
“It seems like a very Bakersfield thing to come out of here,” he told his hometown newspaper on July 27, with nearly four million people pledging some sort of interest in the formerly fake event. "I’ll just be scrolling through Facebook and I’ll just see my face photoshopped on the Extraterrestrial Highway.”
Roberts is now a part of UFO culture. Corbell sought him out as soon as the meme took off in July, and Las Vegas television reporter George Knapp interviewed him; Knapp is the reporter who originally interviewed Lazar. And Roberts now finds himself lord of a real UFO festival, his counsel and approval sought by these well-known names from the UFO world.
Reece D'Silva (holding camera) and Alexis Esparza take a selfie outside the entrance to Area 51 in Nevada while on a tour of the Extraterrestrial Highway.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
I have become part of the UFO world, too. It always loomed large in my private life, even if mostly kept out of my work as a reporter and journalist. But five years ago, I left my last media job and started Desert Oracle, a small periodical and weekly radio show/podcast from Joshua Tree. UFOs are an inescapable and crucial part of desert history and culture: Roswell, Groom Lake, the Integratron, Gram Parsons and Keith Richards watching for flying saucers from a barber’s chair they dragged up Cap Rock. It wasn’t long before Corbell introduced himself to me, in the high desert restaurant La Copine, and said we needed to know each other. He was right.
Six weeks before #StormArea51 took over social media, Corbell and I were in the back seat of a Toyota 4Runner headed straight up a mountain dirt road just beyond Area 51. Knapp and his KLAS I-Team partner, chief photographer Matt Adams, were up front. They had joined me for an archeological field trip. I was seeking Pahranagat Man, the distinctive figure found only in the ancient rock art of Lincoln County around Groom Lake. This entity is so similar to the popular conception of “space aliens” supposedly kept at Area 51 that I thought it might be worthwhile to gaze upon these remote petroglyph panels, and contemplate the ridiculous synchronicity.
A giant alien sculpture looks out onto Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway from the Alien Research Center.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
What is Area 51?: We made contact with experts
Area 51: We visited Amargosa Valley where a brothel, truck stop await 1.7 million people
Jeremy, George and Matt had just returned from a UFO festival in Oregon, where they had appeared with both Lazar and Top Gun fighter pilot David Fravor, who chased fantastic unidentified craft all around the USS Nimitz carrier group training off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Because alongside the Lazar furor, the U.S. Navy has picked this time in history to reveal some of the interesting incidents its pilots have experienced over the past 15 years, including “Tic Tac” UFOs that supposedly hover just beneath the ocean’s surface and then shoot up to 30,000 feet in the blink of an eye. It’s a weird time.
And when the meme became reality, it was Jeremy on the phone to tell me that I would be emcee of the Sept. 20 festival at the Alien Research Center, owned by local businessman George Harris. It had all been decided. The UFO world works that way, sometimes. Who knows what interesting characters I’ll get to introduce to thousands of the faithful and curious. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, any world.
“Through all the joking, all this laughter, all the memes, I truly believe we have an opportunity to shine a light on the secrecy,” Corbell told me at the end of July. “We can have an impact on the way the topic is handled. Whatever’s going on is bigger than we can imagine.”
He doesn't look happy, but this little green man welcomes visitors to the Little A'Le'Inn on Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
It was only a year or two ago when the easiest argument against the reality of Unidentified Aerial (or Underwater) Phenomena was to mention camera phones. If everybody’s got a camera in their pocket, why aren’t we inundated with UFO photos and footage?
And then, despite a phone camera’s infamous inability to even get a clear picture of the full moon, the videos and photos began flooding Instagram and YouTube. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean. Not the obvious CGI fakes with science-fiction spaceships, but the humble backyard footage of mysterious lights doing weird things in the evening or even daylight sky, traveling against the wind, forming diamonds and triangles and then just blinking off like somebody hit a switch, often with the perplexed audio commentary of a nearby child as the adult struggles to find and focus upon the weirdness overhead: Is it aliens? Are we gonna get abducted?
It took new imaging technology in the Navy fighter jets to produce those weird videos we saw on the front page of the New York Times. And when an East Coast-based carrier group was outfitted with the new gear, the oddball mystery craft began buzzing the training exercises on the Atlantic coast. Yet pilots saw the things with their own eyes, too — including a “sphere encasing a cube” that flew right between a pair of F/A-18s in close formation. Raytheon was so pleased with the media coverage that “UFO-spotter” systems are now mentioned in the aerospace contractor’s marketing materials.
Of the great historical waves of sightings, the most dramatic can predict future Earth technology, like the aerodynamic marvels seen up and down California during the mystery airship flap of 1896. Within 20 years of that hysteria, such airships were ferrying passengers across the skies, but they could never maneuver like those bizarre airships over San Francisco and Sacramento, with their impossibly bright spotlights and ability to vanish.
The black triangles predicted the shape and color if not the performance of the B-2 stealth bomber, which lacks the ability to hover silently over shocked motorists on a desert highway before shooting off into the atmosphere without producing so much as a breeze. (I have witnessed one of these peculiar craft, on the 395 in the Eastern Sierra, as have thousands of other California drivers who will never forget that particular road trip.)
This mural along Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway reminds visitors of rumors of cow mutilations.
Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Now, maybe, our technology is making it a little easier to capture some of these phenomena on video. The U.S. Navy has announced it will no longer scorn pilots who file reports. The History Channel has a nearly all-UFO schedule, especially focused on the military sightings. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — a native of Searchlight, Nevada — has come out of retirement not to stump for Democrats, but to encourage serious work on the UFO enigma.
And then there’s the networking technology, in large part based on UFO researcher Jacques Vallée’s work on the early Internet. You no longer need to submit a UFO report to some amateur or for-profit organization and await their judgment or investigation. Just post it on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter or YouTube. If it’s compelling, it will soon be seen by thousands, maybe millions.
And if you’re Matty Roberts, trying out your meme skills, you might just win a permanent place in the culture. None of us know exactly what will happen on Sept. 20 out in tiny Hiko, Nevada, but none of us will be all that surprised if a fleet of UFOs buzzes our impromptu desert festival.
Ken Layne lives and works in Joshua Tree, as publisher of Desert Oracle and host of its companion podcast and radio show on Z 107.7 FM. Find out more at DesertOracle.com.
A painting on the side of the Little A'Le'Inn along Nevada's Extraterrestrial Highway hints at the reason for tourists to visit.
The U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane just broke its spaceflight-duration record.
At 6:43 a.m. EDT (1043 GMT) today (Aug. 26), the robotic X-37B sailed past the program mark of 717 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes, which was set by the previous mission, known as Orbital Test Vehicle 4 (OTV-4).
The current mission, OTV-5, began on Sept. 7, 2017, with a liftoff atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It's unclear what the space plane is doing up there now, or what it has done on past flights; X-37B missions are classified, and the Air Force therefore tends to speak of the vehicle and its activities in general terms.
"The primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold; reusable spacecraft technologies for America’s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth," Air Force officials wrote in the X-37B fact sheet.
"Technologies being tested in the program include advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, advanced propulsion systems, advanced materials and autonomous orbital flight, reentry and landing," the officials added.
The test campaign seems to involve pushing the X-37B's endurance, because each of the five missions has lasted longer than its predecessor. OTV-1 launched in April 2010, and returned to Earth that December after 224 days in space. OTV-2 ran for 468 days, from March 2011 through June 2012. OTV-3 launched in December 2012 and landed in October 2014, racking up 675 days of spaceflight. And OTV-4 landed in May 2017 after nearly 718 days in orbit.
OTV-5 is nowhere near the overall spaceflight-duration record, however. Earth-observation and communications satellites commonly operate for five years or more, as do robotic planetary explorers. NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring Mars for more than seven years, for example, and the agency's twin Voyager probes are still going strong in interstellar space more than four decades after their launches.
The Air Force has at least two X-37Bs, both of which were built by Boeing. The solar-powered vehicles look like NASA's old space shuttle orbiters, but are much smaller; an X-37B could fit entirely within the shuttle's cavernous payload bay.
Each X-37B measures 29 feet (8.8 meters) long by 9.6 feet (2.9 m) tall, with a wingspan of about 15 feet (4.6 m). The space plane's payload bay is about the size of a pickup-truck bed.
Like the space shuttle, the winged X-37B launches vertically and lands on a runway. All five X-37B missions have lifted off from Florida's Space Coast. The first three landings took place at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but OTV-4 touched down at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated byKarl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom orFacebook.
NASA astronaut Anne McClain on Saturday (Aug. 24) refuted claims that she inappropriately accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse after details of their divorce were made public in the New York Times this week.
While in the middle of their separation process, McClain's spouse Summer Worden has claimed that McClain accessed her bank account from a NASA-affiliated computer network, according to a report from the New York Times on Friday (Aug. 23). Worden has accused McClain of identity theft and claimed the astronaut accessed the account from aboard the International Space Station during a recent space mission, and that the agency's Office of the Inspector General is looking into the matter.
"We've been going through a painful, personal separation that's now unfortunately in the media," McClain continued. "I appreciate the outpouring of support and will reserve comment until after the investigation. I have total confidence in the IG [Inspector General] process."
There’s unequivocally no truth to these claims. We’ve been going through a painful, personal separation that’s now unfortunately in the media. I appreciate the outpouring of support and will reserve comment until after the investigation. I have total confidence in the IG process.
The matter is currently being investigated and, according to this tweet by McClain, she will not be speaking about the claims any more until the investigation concludes and is resolved.
NASA has also responded to the claims made against McClain. The agency praised her accomplishments and career accomplishments while stating that they cannot comment on personal matters.
"Lt Col. Anne McClain has an accomplished military career, flew combat missions in Iraq and is one of NASA's top astronauts. She did a great job on her most recent NASA mission aboard the International Space Station. Like with all NASA employees, NASA does not comment on personal or personnel matters," NASA officials said in a statement to Space.com.
According to the New York Times report, an attorney representing McClain has stated that she accessed the account to provide financial support for Worden's 6-year-old son. The attorney stated that she had historically provided financial support for Worden's son and accessed the account before with the same password, without any direction from Worden to stop doing so.
McClain is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and veteran of one long-duration spaceflight to the International Space Station. She joined NASA's astronaut corps in 2013.
McClain has spent 204 days in space during her space station mission. She launched to the orbiting lab on a Soyuz spacecraft in December 2018 as part of the Expedition 58/59 crew and returned to Earth in June of this year. She performed two spacewalks as part of that mission.
In March, McClain was tapped to join crewmate Christina Koch on the first all-female spacewalk at the space station, but that plan was called off due to a lack of appropriately-sized spacesuits for the two women.
NASA astronaut Anne McClain is at the center of what may be the first-ever crime committed in space.
On Friday, The New York Timesreported that McClain’s estranged wife, Summer Worden, discovered that someone had accessed her bank account while McClain was on board the International Space Station — and the computer network that person used was registered to NASA.
Two Sides
According to the NYT’s story, Worden has since filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission accusing McClain of “identity theft and improper access to Ms. Worden’s private financial records,” while her family has filed a complaint with NASA’s Office of Inspector General.
During an under-oath interview with the Inspector General, McClain admitted that she accessed the bank account, but said she had Worden’s permission to do so.
Old Problems, New Venue
It might seem odd that the first space crime accusation has nothing in particular to do with space — it’s the type of marital dispute that happens regularly here on Earth.
However, Mark Sundahl, director of the Global Space Law Center at Cleveland State University, sees the allegation as an expected development given humanity’s increasing number of off-world endeavors.
“The more we go out there and spend time out there,” he told the NYT, “all the things we do here are going to happen in space.”
Like many NASA missions, Clipper will be looking for potential signs of life.
"We are building upon the scientific insights received from the flagship Galileo and Cassini spacecraft and working to advance our understanding of our cosmic origin, and even life elsewhere," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.
NASA hopes to have Clipper ready to launch by 2023, but the space agency is giving it some leeway to take off as late as 2025. Here's hoping for smooth sailing.
Ex UFO-chief claims he quit US government over alien encounter ‘cover-up’
Ex UFO-chief claims he quit US government over alien encounter ‘cover-up’
Debbie White
A FORMER X-Files boss says he quit a secret US government programme over an alien encounter “cover-up”.
Luis Elizondo swears that the existence of aliens, travelling at speeds of up to 8,000mph, has been proven "beyond reasonable doubt”.
Former head of the Pentagon’s real life X-Files programme, Luis Elizondo
Credit: YouTube
The distinguished former intelligence officer ran the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Programme in the US, which looked into UFOs
Credit: Getty - Contributor
New TV series explores UFO sightings
Elizondo has spoken up as part of a crack team of UFO researchers exposing the incredible secrets of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the American government’s secret UFO operation.
He features in a new six-part TV show, "Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation".
It sheds new light on unidentified flying phenomena in the US and around the world, according to television network History, which is airing the show in the UK from August 26.
The show has uncovered “shocking revelations from sources close to the Pentagon, the FBI and the US government”, History claimed.
Elizondo, a distinguished former intelligence officer, was the head of the secretive AATIP, run by a team of 12 in the Pentagon.
MORE WORK ON UFOS
But he quit the job in 2017, telling military bosses that the government was not taking sightings of unidentified craft by American warplanes seriously enough.
His letter, which was leaked, asked why more time wasn't being spent on the issue, to work out "capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation".
Elizondo claims that several countries, including Britain, have been visited by beings in extremely advanced and unidentified aircraft, given that UFOs observed had "extreme manoeuvrability and hypersonic velocity".
In an interview with The Sunday Times last year, he said that there were UFO sightings where "performance parameters were so off the charts" they could not have been dismissed as a drone, missile or aircraft.
History said 'Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation' exposes 'incredible secrets'
The show also features revelations from former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge
One such example was an encounter between US commander David Fravor and an alien aircraft "shaped like a 40ft Tic Tac sweet".
The retired Navy pilot said: "It was rounded on both ends and had a cylindrical body."
Although he tried chasing it, the UFO sped off faster than any other aircraft and disappeared. Elizondo recently revealed a cockpit video of Fravor's 2004 encounter.
The alien aircraft was shaped like a 40ft Tic Tac sweet.
Retired US Commander David Fravor
After quitting the clandestine government UFO investigation unit, the X-Files expert joined like-minded people in the "To The Stars Academy", led by Blink-182 co-founder Tom DeLonge.
A public benefit corporation set up in 2017, the academy is a “collaboration between academia, industry and pop culture to advance society’s understanding of scientific phenomena and its technological implications.”
History's 'Unidentified' show features UFO-believer DeLonge and researchers such as Elizondo, who reveals details of the US government’s awareness, and cover-up of, extra-terrestrial lifeforms on earth.
The network said that the episodes include “footage recorded from the cockpit of supposed encounters and testimony from pilots whose planes flew by these 'craft' as well as classified reports from foreign governments”.
Former US commander David Fravor was flying an F18 fighter when he spotted a white unidentified craftCredit: ABC
'CREATURE OF THE SHADOWS'
Elizondo said: “I am a creature of the shadows; I spent my entire life in the shadows and it was a matter of survival for me.
“Being able to have the conversation now with the American people so they can finally know what’s going on… is a great privilege and honour for me.”
He admitted, however, that as ex-military intelligence, “I have a non-disclosure agreement with the US government. I still can’t talk about classified things.”
DeLonge told History he hoped the show would help switch the conversaton about UFOs “from being a fringe subject for the tin-foil hat brigade to a legitimate subject for discussion.
“My hope for the future is that people are no longer discussing if this is real or not.”
History UK tweeted: “This series is going to change people’s perception and it’s going to change it quickly.”
The show starts on History, August 26, in the UKCredit: Twitter/@HistoryUK
Tom DeLonge tweeted about the research, uncovered on 'Identified: Inside America's UFO Investigation'
Voormalige UFO-baas Amerikaanse overheid nam ontslag vanwege cover-up rond aliens. Wat weet hij?
Voormalige UFO-baas Amerikaanse overheid nam ontslag vanwege cover-up rond aliens. Wat weet hij?
Een voormalige X-Files-baas heeft gezegd dat hij het Amerikaanse UFO-programma heeft verlaten omdat contact met aliens ‘in de doofpot is gestopt’.
Luis Elizondo, die jarenlang aan het hoofd stond van het geheime UFO-project van het Pentagon, stelt dat het bestaan van aliens onomstotelijk is bewezen, schrijft The Sun.
Elizondo is te zien in een nieuwe tv-serie getiteld ‘Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation’.
Niet serieus
De serie werpt een nieuw licht op onbekende vliegende objecten die in de Verenigde Staten en de rest van de wereld worden gezien.
Bronnen dicht bij het Pentagon, de FBI en de Amerikaanse overheid doen in de serie ‘schokkende onthullingen’, aldus zender History.
Elizondo nam in 2017 ontslag omdat de overheid UFO-waarnemingen door gevechtspiloten volgens hem niet serieus nam.
Wezens
In zijn ontslagbrief vroeg hij waarom er niet meer tijd werd gespendeerd aan het fenomeen.
Hij claimde verder dat verschillende landen, waaronder Groot-Brittannië, zijn bezocht door wezens in extreem geavanceerde vaartuigen.
In een interview met de Sunday Times afgelopen jaar zei hij dat er UFO’s waren die zulke gekke dingen deden dat het geen drone, raket of vliegtuig konden zijn.
Geheimhoudingsverklaring
Onlangs sloot hij zich aan bij een onderzoeksgroep onder leiding van medeoprichter van de band Blink-182 Tom DeLonge.
In de tv-serie onthullen DeLonge en Elizondo wat de Amerikaanse overheid weet over buitenaardse levensvormen op aarde en hoe dit in de doofpot is gestopt.
Elizondo wees er wel op dat hij een geheimhoudingsverklaring heeft moeten ondertekenen, wat betekent dat hij nog niet kan praten over dingen die geheim zijn.
“There have been signs, symbols and objects in the skies of earth described as snakes, swords, lights and rockets. Slow-moving so-called meteors have zig-zagged their way above the clouds, and stratospheric explosions have rocked the land below. Mysterious rays stopped airplane motors over the world’s largest city as unidentified phantom planes puzzled the war departments of four nations. Ships and men were observed to drop from the heavens in isolated areas only to vanish.”
The rather bombastic passage above may bear a certain familiarity for some readers, particularly among those who have enjoyed the work of Charles Hoy Fort, that reclusive and often recalcitrant chronicler of all things “Damned” by the sciences. During the early part of the 20th century, Fort wrote of unusual phenomena in nature, penned in an idiosyncratic style of prose that paired florid passages with quick, jerky sentences. Ultimately, his unusual style of offerings would define an entire genre, and inspire other writers to seek out similar “forbidden” knowledge in the decades to come.
The quoted passage at the outset was not one of Fort’s offerings, however. These had been the words of one of Fort’s many admirers and imitators, although one that is perhaps too-often overlooked for his influence: Vincent Hayes Gaddis, an American writer who was perhaps best known for coining the term “Bermuda Triangle.”
Vincent Gaddis
Gaddis, born in Ohio in 1913, had worked as a writer in a number of career professions throughout the 1940s and 50s, before becoming a freelance writer. He also authored a number of books, among them American Indian Myths and Mysteries, a sensational contribution to the enduring genre of ancient mysteries, which was once described by Rutgers University historian William K. Powers as “histrionic and sensational, differing from Greek tragedy only in that it requires a deus ex machina beginning, rather than ending,” and an altogether “outrageous and intolerable book” similar in effect to the works of Erich von Däniken.
In his article “Creators of the Paranormal,” Joe Nickel noted in the May/June 2016 edition of Skeptical Enquirer how Gaddis ultimately gave a name to the allegedly mysterious region of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and planes were said to go missing:
His article in the February 1964 Argosy landed on major American newsstands and gave the mystery area a definitive name and ominous tone: “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle.” Gaddis followed a year later with a book on sea mysteries, Invisible Horizons (1965), in which a chapter gave an alternate, even more ominous name for the area, “The Triangle of Death.”
It might be argued, however, that the Bermuda Triangle had not been the only paranormal concept that Gaddis had helped to develop with his writing. In the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories, an edition of the popular pulp magazine famous for having put the so-called “Shaver Mystery” on the map, Gaddis contributed an article entitled “Visitors from the Void,” in which he described a number of instances of unexplained aerial phenomena. For example:
“In April a light was observed at Jefferstown, Ky., in the midnight sky. It was over Fisherville, to the east, size of a large cantaloupe, glowed and receded in brillance like a heart throb, casting its light like a lampshade over the town. After ten minutes it vanished. On May 4 in the early morning there was a flash of light and an explosion reported over six states. Visible for three seconds. Buildings shaken.”
The emulation of Fort is obvious, right down to the sentence fragments and omission of copula (i.e. connecting words). However, what makes Gaddis’s 1947 article interesting apart from its unabashed Fortean derivation is the timing of the subject matter. In June of 1947, around the same time that his article appeared in print, the modern UFO phenomenon first entered the public zeitgeist with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s report of seeing “flying saucers” over Mount Rainer, Washington, on June 24th.
Obviously, Gaddis had to have written his article prior to June 1947 for it to have been included for publication in the edition of Amazing Stories for the month in question. Hence, his selection of subject matter could not have been influenced by the sudden media attention the “saucers” would be getting after Arnold’s sighting, which occurred just weeks later.
Another sample of Gaddis’s offerings from Visitors from the Void reads as follows:
“At 7:30 p. m. on the evening of June 1, 1945, something whizzed through the sky over Morganton, N. C, traveling northwest,” Gaddis reported in the article. “Tubular in shape, shiny, gleaming in the light as if covered with aluminum, five or six feet long, with a blue flame spurting from its tail. It disappeared in the vicinity of the mountains near Lake James and shortly later an explosive sound was heard.”
This description sounds almost reminiscent of the now-famous “Tic Tac” object or aircraft observed by Navy pilots in 2004, in association with the radar-visual UAP encounter reported by the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group at that time off the coast of southern California. With the exception of the “blue flame” the object produced, it is eerily similar in description to the object pilots Dave Fravor and others at the time of the 2004 incident described seeing.
It is also notable for the location, since Morganton, NC and the nearby Lake James are both near the area of Brown Mountain, which has long been associated with sightings of unusual nocturnal illuminations. This fact was not missed by Gaddis either, who noted the following:
“Near Morganton is Brown Mountain, scene of mysterious lights since the Civil War that are so puzzling that government geologists have conducted fruitless investigations. In my files is a long article on the Brown Mountain mystery that appeared in the Literary Digest for Nov. 7, 1925. These lights are about the size of a toy balloon, vary in color, move about, and appear and disappear abruptly.”
In addition to writing about aerial phenomenon in a way that seemingly anticipates modern UFOlogy (and only weeks before the appearance of flying saucers in the American media), Gaddis also notes a number of locations in his 1947 article which would later become staples of paranormal books and other media. For instance, Point Pleasant West Virginia also makes an appearance, as Gaddis describes an incident from October 11, 1931, where the alleged wreck of a dirigible was observed in the sky. “There were many witnesses who stated that the crash had occurred in the hills south of the city,” Gaddis wrote, noting that “White objects, believed to have been parachutes, fell with it,” as the mystery airship–of which no wreckage was ever found–allegedly went down.
John Keel, circa 1967
(Credit: Doug Skinner/JohnKeel.com)
More than two decades later, the town of Point Pleasant would become the famous epicenter of writer John Keel’s investigation into a mysterious “Mothman,” which became the focus of his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies.
It is interesting (although very likely just coincidental) that Gaddis had managed to anticipate several aspects of the modern UFO craze, which would erupt in the months and years following his article in Amazing Stories. Thus, Joe Nickel’s acknowledgment of Gaddis as one of the many “creators” of modern paranormal subjects certainly appears to be accurate, and might even be extended beyond just his “naming” of the Bermuda Triangle.
The cause of elongated skulls – alien intrusion aside – is generally accepted to be the sadistic practice of binding a baby’s skull during its early soft state through subsequent growth years to curse the person with a long pointed head that was funny on Saturday Night Live but caused a life of pain and possible mental illness, with the only fame coming centuries later when the strange skulls were unearthed by puzzled archeologists. The reasons anyone would inflict such torture on innocents (as opposed to other tortures humans inflict on innocents to this day – a topic for greater philosophical and psychological minds) are still a mystery. However, a recent discovery of elongated skulls in Croatia points to a strange ancient nomadic culture that may have spread the practice as it traveled.
“We were inspired to study these individuals based on their unusual burial context as well as the identification of two different types of artificial cranial deformation in two of the individuals.”
Example of an elongated skull
In a press release announcing the study published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, co-author Daniel Fernandes, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at University of Vienna, describes the recent discovery of the remains of three young males age 12 to 15 in a burial pit in the city of Osijek in eastern Croatia. (Pictures here.) What caught his eye was that two of the three had different types of elongated skulls and that that seemed to have been placed together deliberately with pottery and dead animals. Further analysis of these 5th century CE skeletons at first added to their mysterious appearance and burial because it appears the three came from widespread locations.
“Results of ancient DNA analyses indicate that the individual without artificial cranial deformation shows broadly West Eurasian associated-ancestry, the individual with the elongated skull has East Asian ancestry and the third individual has Near Eastern associated-ancestry.”
Ron Pinhasi, head of the ancient DNA laboratory at the University of Vienna and co-director of the study, reveals that the young man with an elongated skull from East Asia is the earliest East Asian to be found in Europe. This means the so-called Migration Period – the era from about 375 CED to 538 CE when the declining Western Roman Empire was invaded by Germanic tribes and the Huns – also included intrusions by East Asians as well. But why an East Asian with an elongated skull?
“Based on the presented results, we propose that the type of artificial cranial deformation may have been a visual indicator of membership in a specific cultural group, and that these groups were interacting closely on the Pannonian Plain during the Migration Period.”
Because of the rich artifacts found in other tombs of individuals with artificial cranial deformation, many researchers believe elongated skulls were a sign of nobility. However, these Croatian skeletons and their artifacts indicated they were poor, undernourished, nomadic and part of a common cultural group despite being from distinctly different geographic locations and having different (or no) forms of elongation. What does it mean that they all ended up in the Pannonian Plain during the Great Migration Period? Were they novices in the Distinguished Gentlemen of the Elongated Skull?
“This leads us to ask: is this a random peculiarity or part of a larger-scale pattern of association between ACD type and group membership? We believe that future multi- and inter-disciplinary studies combining archaeology, bioarchaeology, history, stable isotopes analysis, and ancient DNA, conducted on a larger skeletal sample from a wider region will aid us in answering this question.”
Ah! A new question requiring more research to compare elongated skulls around the world in a completely different way. These archeologists definitely know how to create job security. We await their future answers.
Millions of years ago, some of the most remarkable creatures ever to walk the earth would begin to emerge out of East Africa. Loping along with ease, their forelimbs could just as easily carry them at speed along the ground as they could into the heights of trees. These remarkable creatures were adept in several different kinds of locomotion: in addition to their climbing prowess and their four-legged movement across the ground, they could also stand upright and, perhaps stumbling at first, carry themselves aloft on two legs for impressive distances.µ
With time, these arboreal creatures began to learn that standing upright gave them several advantages; no less among them had been the ability to see greater distances and to spot predators when they were further out. On such occasions, the little creatures could emit sharp whistles and other sounds that, with time, became more and more complex as the sounds turned from shrill warnings to outright mimicry of the sounds produced by the other creatures around them.
Over the passing of generations, these arboreal apes also began to create unique sounds of their own, which they could use to communicate with a depth and clarity no other creatures in the animal kingdom had ever mastered.
These early apes where hungry, like all creatures in nature, but they had something else that motivated their actions apart from a sheer desire for food: curiosity. As they moved about, they began to master their environments, first using stones to break open nuts, seeds, and shells and to grind simple grains that grew in their habitat. Pounding these rocks against hard surfaces often caused them to fracture; there is little doubt that these creatures soon realized how much more could be done with a stone that bore chipped, sharpened edges.
Their curiosity carried them further and further along, and by around 2 million years ago, early migrations by the upright walking ancestors of modern humans out of Africa and into other parts of the world were well underway. These early humans spread first into parts of the Middle East, and then into Europe; by around 25,000 years ago, the genus Homo could be found on each of the world’s continents, with the exception of Antarctica.
The debate has continued as to when, precisely, modern humans first arrived in the Americas. With each new discovery that pushes back the timescales on such migrations to the new world, all new controversies ensue; but this is by no means anything new in the history of anthropological study.
Even at the time of the groundbreaking discoveries of the Folsom and Clovis cultures in the American Southwest during the early part of the last century, which clearly showed that humans had arrived in America by the end of the last ice age (and perhaps even earlier), much doubt was expressed by experts in the anthropological field. Most notably, Aleš Hrdlička, founder and first curator of physical anthropology of the U.S. National Museum (later renamed and known today as the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History), presumably went to his grave having never acknowledged the discoveries, preferring to believe that humans simply couldn’t have been on the American continent any earlier than 3000 or so years ago.
Today, archaeological sites like the Gault site in Texas, as well as Bluefish Caves in Alaska, clearly show that humans were there well in advance of 13,000 years ago, and perhaps even tens of thousands of years ago. Compelling discoveries at locations like Monte Verde, Chile—where radiocarbon dates may indicate a human presence as far back as 33,000 years—continues to tempt us with the idea of much earlier human arrivals in the Americas. Even more controversial sites like the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, suggest dates going even further back to 50,000 years for human occupation, an idea which, understandably, remains controversial today.
But could there have been even earlier arrivals than these?
In 2017, one of the most controversial archaeological papers in recent memory was published in the journal Nature, having to do with a possible early human site in San Diego County, California. Known as the Cerutti Mastodon site, the paleontological remains found at the site, which the 2017 research team found close to stones they believe were used as hammerstones and anvils, boast a seemingly incredible radiocarbon date of 130,700 years.
“To demonstrate such early occupation of the Americas requires the presence of unequivocal stone artifacts,” said archaeologist Michael Waters of the claims. “There are no unequivocal stone tools associated with the bones… this site is likely just an interesting paleontological locality.” Detractors made the reasonable assertion that marks on the mastodon remains that indicated possible butchering were likely to have been the result of highway construction projects underway at the location in recent years. Adding to the extraordinary nature of the claimed discoveries at the site is the fact that along with an absence of any human bones, or irrefutable tools in context with extinct megafaunal remains that can be reliably dated, the site remains an outlier: where are the other sites of similar age in the region, let alone in North America?
Interestingly, less than three hours from the Cerutti site is what had once been the most controversial archaeological site in North America: the Calico Mountain site, located near Barstow, California. Proponents of the site’s legitimacy contend that it is the oldest archaeological site anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, where more than 60,000 possible lithic tools were recovered during excavations, which led to a shocking discovery: some of the tools from Calico appeared to date as far back as 200,000 years.
If true, this presents a number of problems. In addition to their incredible age, this is around the same time that anatomically modern humans begin to appear in the fossil record in Africa. Hence, if tools found at the Calico Mountain site were to be reliably dated back to 200,000 years, it could only mean that their makers must have been an earlier archaic human ancestor such as Homo erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, or even the latter’s close relatives, the enigmatic Denisovans (an implication which would equally apply to the Cerutti site).
Understandably, the extraordinary nature of these claims was not received well by the anthropological community at large. However, neither were they met with complete opposition, as J. M. Adovasio notes in his Strangers in a New Land: The First Americans:
“The Calico site was by no means unanimously discredited at the time—indeed, news of the findings there garnered interest among the growing ranks of archaeological scholars whose criticism of the Clovis First model had been gathering through the 1970s and 1980s. But Calico is now held in widespread disregard among professional archaeologists, largely due to the lack of indisputable artifacts in the Lake Manix and Calico Lithic Industry assemblages, the lack of valid cultural features, a suspicion that the age of any valid archaeological deposit at the location is radically younger than that proposed, and the site’s apparent position as a secondary deposit in an alluvial fan.”
Needless to say, both the Calico site, and the Cerutti site just a few hours further south, will continue to have their proponents—particularly among those advocating controversial ideas about earlier arrivals in the Americas (notably, author Graham Hancock discusses these locales, and others like them, in his new book America Before, which has no doubt introduced the controversy to an all-new audience). To be able to accept such incredible antiquity for sites like these, as noted earlier, calls for more than just an open mind as to when modern humans arrived on the continent: it would also appear to require acceptance that our early hominid cousins were more highly mobile than once thought.
Interestingly, new studies in the field of genomics are helping to shed light on some of the mysteries of human ancestry. Today, traces of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA can be found in human populations around the world; however, the notable prevalence of Denisovans in Southeast Asia up until their demise around 40,000 years ago would likely have placed them closer to the Beringia land bridge that would have existed for a time during the Pleistocene, suggesting these mysterious archaic humans as possible contender for sites like Cerutti and Calico.
That is, of course, if they are ever reliably proven to represent conclusive evidence of a hominid presence in the early Americas. By that time, perhaps other sites will have emerged, and we will ultimately have gained a more broad understanding of humanity’s arrival in the Americas… and whether the first immigrants were really “human” in the same sense that we would recognize today.
Here is a report that was turned into Coast To Coast about a deer that was found on top of a power line. The power line is 22 feet up and seems to have been dropped from above. I don't believe an each is big enough to carry such an animal. That is one big deer. So the question is...did a UFO drop the deer out after doing experiments on it? I think to know that for sure we need a closer look at the deer to examine it for puncher woulds, cuts, bites and such. That would be the only way to learn what it was that caused this to happen. UFOs are known to sometimes abduct a person or explore and examine things in nature.
There was even an old UFO report about such an incident being witnessed in the mounts of the US. Its was Feb 25, 1999 in the Cascade mountains near Mount St Hellens, Washington. A team of forest workers watched as a UFO came down from the sky and hovered over a elk. Then the UFO rose up and lifted the elk with an invisible force. The forest workers watched as it moved higher and higher vanishing above. (redition photo below). So you see, its very possible a UFO abducted the deer and its even backed up by past sighting evidence. Not to mention thousands of animal mutilation incidents caused by aliens doing medical research on the animals.
Scott C. Waring
Coast to Coast states:
Conservation worker and C2C listener Bruce shares this bizarre photo of a deer that somehow wound up atop a power pole in a rural area somewhere in the northeast. According to Bruce, the most likely explanation for how the deer wound up there is that it was hit by a train, since there are train tracks several yards away. However, he notes, "the deer would have to have traveled in the air approximately 45 feet (across) to the pole and reach a height of approximately 22 feet (up) to reach the top of the pole."
Amazing Entities Or Mega Structures? On Sky Map, Taurus Constellation, UFO Sighting News.
Amazing Entities Or Mega Structures? On Sky Map, Taurus Constellation, UFO Sighting News.
I was looking over Taurus constellation using a sky map and found these two giant orbs objects. They are actually moving and there is a glowing trail behind them from where they came. That means they were moving very fast, and then came to a stop. I see a lot of similarities between these donut objects and the pulsing donut UFOs seen by NASA during the Tether incident. The objects that looked like this actually broke the 5 mile long tether in the middle by passing through it. The UFOs during the tether incident were huge! Several miles across! Many people mistakenly assume the objects were just inches in size. I am also thinking that they could be mega structures, space station like spacecraft that jump from location to location. Its really hard to tell unless we can send a space craft to investigate it, but I'm sure its long gone by now. This thing travels fast, but these seems to be a lot out there according to the tether incident NASA video. Watch my video and please subscribe to my Youtube channel ET DATA BASE. Scott C. Waring-Taiwan
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Snake-Like UFO Returns as New York Resident Captures the Latest One On Video Over Clayville
Snake-Like UFO Returns as New York Resident Captures the Latest One On Video Over Clayville
A conspiracy theorist has claimed that a snake-like UFO has been captured on camera for the first time in several weeks.
Last month, UFO conspiracy enthusiasts were rocked about the videos of cylindrical objects flying over the US.
With the last clip appeared on July 13, it seemed the sightings had dried up.
But now, a Clayville, New York resident in the US believes they may have recorded one on camera.
YouTube username beamsinvestgations1 posted the footage showing a black cylindrical UFO hovering in the sky. The incident reportedly happened on August 6.
The witness said it was a gigantic snake UFO moving like it was alive.
Online UFO conspiracy theorists said the UFO has segments or spheres with the mysterious articulated body.
It appears in the video the camera struggles to focus, but the object in question is said to be at a high altitude, so it must have been massive as the witness described.
Some UFO enthusiasts believe captures like this should be treated with great scientific importance, but academics do not seem to take such material seriously.
Sceptical observers of UFO sightings such as this one have claimed in the past that they could be just strange-shaped balloons across the sky.
Others think that this kind of objects may be advanced spacecraft of the United States Air Force.
Scientists have been keeping a close watch on ‘Oumuamua, the cigar-shaped object from far beyond our own solar system that wandered toward us in 2017. Soon after, Harvard scientists proposed that it could be an alien probe sent from far away, stirring up even more interest in the mysterious object. A new article published Monday in Nature Astronomy, however, officially rules out the alien probe hypothesis — but that doesn’t mean we’ve learned all we can from ‘Oumuamua.
When scientists first took a close look at ‘Oumuamua in 2017, its strange shape raised eyebrows, as did its unexpected acceleration, which at first could not be explained by gravity alone. Those observations, among other strange characteristics, are what led the Harvard team to propose their alien hypothesis. But the new analysis, led by Matthew Knight, Ph.D., a research scientist at the University of Maryland’s astronomy department, leverages years of observations to argue that even ‘Oumuamua’s most suspicious qualities can be explained by the impressive natural forces that govern our universe.
Knight tells Inverse that our work on objects like ‘Oumuamua is just getting started. By 2022 he believes that new technology will help us answer a bigger question: Is ‘Oumuamua weird, or is it our solar system that’s unusual?
“We might have to rethink what is normal and instead think of our solar system as being weird!” says Knight.
Oumuamua was first detected by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS1 telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii.
How Do We Account for Oumuamua’s Weirdness?
Research published in March 2018 suggested that Oumuamua came from a binary star system with a hot, high-mass star. Knight and his team also propose that it was flung our way from its home system. They believe that it’s a planetesimal, which is a building block of a planet (or, at least, a piece of one). Knight favors the idea that it’s “a comet-like body that contained buried ice with a rather unusual composition
With its origin established, the paper then offers natural explanations for Oumuamua’s weirder aspects.
The strange upticks in speedcan be explained by outgassing, as a 2018 study also noted. Outgassing is a release of gasses from an object, like a comet, as they are heated by the sun. That process likely propelled the Oumuamua along, resulting in a speed boost.
Artist's concept of interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 ('Oumuamua) as it passed through the solar system after its discovery in October 2017. The aspect ratio of up to 10:1 is unlike that of any object seen in our own solar system.
Its strange, cigar-like shape can be explained in a few ways.
One idea is that ‘Oumuamua was reshaped passing close by a giant planet or a low-mass star that “tidally disrupted” its structure (essentially tore it apart using gravity). There are also two related theories proposing that it was either pelted by loads of tiny dust grains moving at high speeds or was squished between two other, large planetesimals.
Knight admits that he and his co-authors aren’t satisfied with any of these explanations so far, which is why they concede that ‘Oumuamua’s shape is still an open question. He is hopeful that we’ll have answers soon, though, because he thinks we will detect more objects like ‘Oumuamua.
A New Barometer for What Is “Weird”
Knight explains that ‘Oumuamua’s oddness raises a bigger question about what we consider odd. Is Oumuamua weird, or is our own solar system strange?
That, he says, depends on your reference point. We’re only beginning to have the capability to scan the skies for strange objects of all sizes. As our technology improves, we may start to notice many more objects like ‘Oumuamua before they come wandering into our view by accident.
“If we start seeing an appreciable number of interstellar objects and they frequently display properties that seem unusual compared to things in our solar system (such as their shapes being highly elongated or having seemingly exotic compositions), then we will be forced to reconsider how representative our solar system is compared to other solar systems,” says Knight.
The team is excited about a new telescope project called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is intended to begin operations around 2022. It’s slotted to take a 10-year survey of the sky and collect 15 terabytes of data every night. “LSST will be more powerful than any existing surveys,” says Knight, and thus will allow us to see fainter, more distant objects that come from faraway systems.
Those far-flung systems may be a lot different from our own, and there is some evidence that they too may have giant planets orbiting close to their stars. Because giant planets like our own Jupiter likely played a role in shaping the nature of comets and asteroids in our own solar system, these “hot Jupiters,” as Knight calls them, could be shaping objects in their own way that’s totally foreign to us since our solar system isn’t configured that way.
“It wouldn’t be terribly surprising to me if we started seeing evidence that our comets and asteroids are unusual,” he adds.
In the future, it may become clear that it’s not ‘Oumuamua that’s weird. It might just be us.
Abstract: The discovery of the first interstellar object passing through the Solar System, 1I/2017 U1 (‘Oumuamua), provoked intense and continuing interest from the scientific community and the general public. The faintness of ‘Oumuamua, together with the lim- ited time window within which observations were possible, constrained the information available on its dynamics and physical state. Here we review our knowledge and find that in all cases, the observations are consistent with a purely natural origin for ‘Oumuamua. We discuss how the observed characteristics of ‘Oumuamua are explained by our extensive knowledge of natural minor bodies in our Solar System and our current knowledge of the evolution of planetary systems. We highlight several areas requiring further investigation.
The eerie, hellish glow coming from the Moon may seem unreal in this image, since it’s invisible to our eyes. But instruments that detect gamma rays tell us it’s real. More than just a grainy, red picture, it’s a vivid reminder that there’s more going on than meets human eyes.
It’s also a reminder that any humans that visit the Moon need to be protected from this high-energy radiation.
From Cosmic Rays to Gamma Rays
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope captured these images of the Moon’s gamma rays. In this part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Moon is actually brighter than the Sun. That’s because the Sun produces most of its energy in other parts of the spectrum, though it does emit some gamma rays, especially during solar flares.
Most gamma rays in our Solar System come from distant sources like quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGN.) The Moon is an indirect source of gamma radiation, and produces gamma rays through its interaction with cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are a type of high-energy radiation that for the most part is produced outside our Solar System. They’re produced by things like supernovae and active galactic nuclei. When cosmic rays strike matter, like the surface of the Moon in this instance, they create gamma rays.
An artist’s concept of an active galactic nuclei hosting an energetic blazar. Active galacitc nuclei are one source of cosmic rays. When those rays strike the Moon, gamma rays are created. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.
Two scientists at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics, Mario Nicola Mazziotta and Francesco Loparco, have been studying the Moon’s gamma radiation as a means to understand cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are fast-moving particles, and they gain their acceleration from their sources, like the aforementioned supernovae and AGN.
“Cosmic rays are mostly protons accelerated by some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, like the blast waves of exploding stars and jets produced when matter falls into black holes,” explained Mazziotta in a NASA press release.
The particles that make up cosmic rays are electrically charged. When they strike a magnetic field, like the Earth’s magnetosphere, they’re mostly deflected. But the Moon lacks a magnetic field. As a result, even the weakest cosmic rays strike the Moon’s surface directly, and that produces gamma rays. The Moon actually absorbs most of the gamma rays it creates, but some escape out into space.
And the Fermi Telescope can see them, turning the Moon into a kind of inadvertent particle detector.
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope (FGRST) has been at work for 11 years now. Mazziotta and Loparco have studied images of the Moon from the length of the telescope’s mission, and over that time, the view has improved.
“… the Moon would never go through its monthly cycle of phases and would always look full.”
Francesco Loparco, Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
The strength of the Moon’s gamma rays is not always consistent. It varies over time. Mazziotta and Loparco gathered together data of the Moon’s gamma rays that exceeded 31 million electron volts, which is 10 million times more powerful than visible light, and organized them over time. That resulted in the following image, which shows the view improving over time.
These images show the steadily improving view of the Moon’s gamma-ray glow from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Each 5-by-5-degree image is centered on the Moon and shows gamma rays with energies above 31 million electron volts, or tens of millions of times that of visible light. At these energies, the Moon is actually brighter than the Sun. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays. This image sequence shows how longer exposure, ranging from two to 128 months (10.7 years), improved the view. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
“Seen at these energies, the Moon would never go through its monthly cycle of phases and would always look full,” said Loparco.
The fact that the Moon emits these gamma rays is cautionary. NASA’s Artemis Program will see more astronauts on the Moon for potentially longer periods of time than other Moon missions. They’ll have to be protected from both the cosmic rays that strike the Moon, and the Moon’s gamma rays that result.
A Complex Interaction
The interplay between cosmic rays, gamma rays, the Moon and the Sun can be complex. Gamma rays can have different energy levels. For instance, these FGRST images only capture gamma rays that exceeded 31 million electron volts (MeV) by a certain amount. But gamma rays can be far more energetic than that, and can be in the billions or even trillions of MeVs.
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Observatory is not the only observatory to see the Moon’s gamma radiation. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory captured this image of the Moon’s gamma rays. Image Credit: By D. J. Thompson, D. L. Bertsch (NASA/GSFC), D. J. Morris (UNH), R. Mukherjee (NASA/GSFC/USRA) – ur=http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cgro/epo/news/gammoon.html., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19838942
Since the electrical charge of cosmic rays means they can be deflected by magnetic fields, and the Sun has a powerful magnetic field, only the most powerful ones can strike the Sun. In turn, these powerful cosmic rays strike the dense part of the Sun’s atmosphere and create very powerful gamma rays. So the Sun is actually brighter in gamma rays above 1 billion electron volts than the Moon is.
The Sun’s 11-year cycle also affects the cosmic rays that strike the Moon, and the gamma rays that result. During that cycle, the Sun experiences variations in its magnetic field. As a result, sometimes more cosmic rays strike the Moon than other times. This variability in cosmic rays striking the lunar surface creates a variability in lunar gamma rays. According to Fermi data, it can vary by 20%.
The Sun’s magnetic field varies in both strength and complexity during its 11-year cycle. This comparison shows the relative complexity of the solar magnetic field between January 2011 (left) and July 2014. In January 2011, three years after solar minimum, the field is still relatively simple, with open field lines concentrated near the poles. At solar maximum, in July 2014, the structure is much more complex, with closed and open field lines poking out all over.
Gamma rays coming from the Moon, and the cosmic rays that cause them, both pose a threat to astronauts because both are ionizing radiation with great penetrating power. It takes a lot of shielding to prevent them from striking astronauts. Materials with high atomic numbers are effective shields. Lead (atomic number 82) is a good shield because it’s also very dense.
For lower energy gamma rays, the risk to astronauts is due to exposure over time. Think of an x-ray technician vs. an x-ray patient. A patient’s lifetime exposure to x-rays is not very high, so a patient accepts the risk. For the technician however, things are different. They’re exposed each work day, so they leave the room and are shielded from the x-rays by materials like lead.
It’s similar for astronauts. The more time they spend on the Moon in a gamma ray/cosmic ray environment, the more they need to limit their exposure. Not only by shielding, but by timing.
Trying to Understand the Moon’s Radiation Environment
This Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope data is helping scientists understand the gamma ray/cosmic ray risk on the Moon. If there are times when the Moon emits 20% less gamma radiation because of the Sun’s 11-year cycle, then it may be sensible to make use of that time.
If we saw the sky in gamma rays, the same way the Fermi Space Telescope does, it would be unrecognizable. This image was constructed from six years of Fermi observations. It shows the entire sky at energies between 50 billion (GeV) and 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). The bright band in the middle is the central plane of the Milky Way. Some of the brightest sources are pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants within our galaxy, as well as distant galaxies called blazars powered by supermassive black holes. Labels show the highest-energy sources, all located within our galaxy and emitting gamma rays exceeding 1 TeV. Image Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
Exposure to radiation is one of the main barriers to space travel and long-term space missions. Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere are both radiation shields. But even in Low-Earth Orbit, astronauts risk exposure to greater radiation.
If we’re going to have a human presence on the Moon, it’s imperative that we understand the radiation environment there. NASA has been looking into the lunar radiation environment as far back as 2005 in anticipation of a human outpost on the Moon. When they launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in 2009, it contained an instrument called the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER).
CRaTER’s job is to characterize the Moon’s radiation environment and the biological impact it will have on astronauts. It uses plastics to mimic human tissue and placed them behind different shielding materials. At the time, Harlan Spence, the Principal Investigator CRaTER said, “Not only will we measure the radiation, we will use plastics that mimic human tissue to look at how these highly energetic particles penetrate and interact with the human body.”
The Fermi images of the Moon’s gamma rays are another piece of the radiation puzzle. And that’s a puzzle that has to be solved before there’s a realistic hope of a long-term lunar base, or crewed missions to Mars.
On Earth, methane gas is often associated with microbial life. Scientists find methane in Mars’ atmosphere, too. Could it be life-related? We still don’t know, but a new study shows wind erosion is likely not the cause.
Mars is a rocky world, and some scientists have theorized that erosion by wind causes Mars rocks to produce methane. But a new study from Newcastle University refutes that.
What is producing methane on Mars? That is a question that scientists have been trying to answer for quite some time now. There are various possibilities, both geological and biological, but narrowing them down has been a challenge. Could it really be a sign of … life? Now, a new study has shown that at least one of the geological scenarios is very unlikely: wind erosion of rocks.
Researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. published their peer-reviewed findings in Scientific Reports on June 3, 2019, and a new press release was issued on August 12, 2019. From the article abstract:
Seasonal changes in methane background levels and methane spikes have been detected in situ a metre above the martian surface, and larger methane plumes detected via ground-based remote sensing, however their origin have not yet been adequately explained. Proposed methane sources include the UV irradiation of meteoritic-derived organic matter, hydrothermal reactions with olivine, organic breakdown via meteoroid impact, release from gas hydrates, biological production, or the release of methane from fluid inclusions in basalt during aeolian erosion. Here we quantify for the first time the potential importance of aeolian abrasion as a mechanism for releasing trapped methane from within rocks, by coupling estimates of present day surface wind abrasion with the methane contents of a variety of martian meteorites, analogue terrestrial basalts and analogue terrestrial sedimentary rocks. We demonstrate that the abrasion of basalt under present day Martian rates of aeolian erosion is highly unlikely to produce detectable changes in methane concentrations in the atmosphere. We further show that, although there is a greater potential for methane production from the aeolian abrasion of certain sedimentary rocks, to produce the magnitude of methane concentrations analysed by the Curiosity rover they would have to contain methane in similar concentrations as economic reserved of biogenic/thermogenic deposits on Earth. Therefore we suggest that aeolian abrasion is an unlikely origin of the methane detected in the martian atmosphere, and that other methane sources are required.
A history of key methane measurements on Mars from 1999 to 2018.
One of the more recent theories was that wind erosion of rocks could produce the methane detected in the lower atmosphere. But the team’s findings showed that it wouldn’t be able to produce methane in the amounts observed, according to Jon Telling, a geochemist at Newcastle University:
The questions are – where is this methane coming from, and is the source biological? That’s a massive question and to get to the answer we need to rule out lots of other factors first.
We realized one potential source of the methane that people hadn’t really looked at in any detail before was wind erosion, releasing gases trapped within rocks. High resolution imagery from orbit over the last decade have shown that winds on Mars can drive much higher local rates of sand movement, and hence potential rates of sand erosion, than previously recognised.
In fact, in a few cases, the rate of erosion is estimated to be comparable to those of cold and arid sand dune fields on Earth.
Using the data available, we estimated rates of erosion on the surface of Mars and how important it could be in releasing methane.
And taking all that into account we found it was very unlikely to be the source.
What’s important about this is that it strengthens the argument that the methane must be coming from a different source. Whether or not that’s biological, we still don’t know.
Artist’s concept of ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter, part of the ExoMars mission, analyzing the Martian atmosphere.
Observations from both orbiting spacecraft and the Curiosity rover, as well as telescopes on Earth, have shown that methane levels in the Martian atmosphere appear to be seasonal, peaking in the summer and fading again in the winter. Just why that is isn’t known yet, but it indicates a regular process is occurring, whether geological or biological. Oddly, ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) hasn’t detected any methane yet, although that is one of its main objectives. But that may simply be because of the seasonality of the methane, or because TGO focuses its observations on the upper levels of the atmosphere, and most of the other methane detections have been closer to the ground.
Most scientists now think the methane originates from underground, perhaps as ice clathrates that thaw in the summer and release methane, or maybe a biological source that responds to the warmer temperatures. Even if the methane is bound up in clathrates, the actual origin of it could still be either geological of biological (ancient life). Or it may be produced by warm groundwater interacting with olivine in rocks. If so, that would indicate that there is still some residual geological activity below Mars’ surface, and that itself could provide a habitable environment for microorganisms, even if they didn’t actually produce the methane. Other causes, such as meteorites or comets, probably wouldn’t produce enough of the gas to match observations, either, according to recent studies.
Last April, a new report showed that a spike in methane levels was detected at the same time – for the first time – by both the Curiosity rover and the orbiting Mars Express back in 2013. And last June, Curiosity detected its largest-evermeasurement of methane so far. Why are there these peaks in methane emissions, only for the gas to virtually disappear afterwards? There is still a lot we don’t know, as Emmal Safi, a postdoctoral researcher at Newcastle University, indicated:
It’s still an open question. Our paper is just a little part of a much bigger story.
Ultimately, what we’re trying to discover is if there’s the possibility of life existing on planets other than our own, either living now or maybe life in the past that is now preserved as fossils or chemical signatures.
Illustration depicting what processes could create and destroy methane on Mars. The methane most likely originates from below the surface and is released into the atmosphere through subsurface cracks.
The idea that Mars’ methane might come from life is an exciting one, of course, since most of the methane on Earth is produced by living organisms. But non-biological explanations would need to be eliminated first. The research from Newcastle University shows that at least one of the possible geological explanations for the methane is unlikely, but there is still a lot of work for scientists to do to determine just what is producing it.
Bottom line:This new study would seem to eliminate one possible source of Mars’ methane: wind erosion of rocks on the surface. This bolsters the probability that the methane originates from underground.
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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.