17-09-2019 om 23:52 geschreven door peter  

Man who questions whether crop circles are all man-made to explain why in Burgess Hill talk

Are crop circles all man-made? Andy Thomas will explore the issue in his talk

By  CONNOR GORMLEY Email

Crop circles – sophisticated patterns hewn into crop formations seemingly overnight – have fuelled mystery in Sussex for decades.

The circles, which were first discussed as far back as the 17th century, appeared under mysterious circumstances in Sussex last year, when ‘map-like markings’. appeared in fields around Ifield, Crawley.

While pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley dispelled some of the mystery behind their appearance in the 1970s and 80s – one man still questions the assumption crop circles are all man-made.

Andy Thomas, one of the UK’s best-known mysteries researchers and authors, will visit Burgess Hill next week to explain why.

He said: “The belief that all the crop circles were invented by two elderly gentlemen with rope and planks in the 1980s – a story which has recently reemerged in the media – is provably untrue.

“The crop circles were there long before them, and continued long after they ‘retired’.

“Yes, some designs are indeed man-made, but it is very hard to explain all of them that way, as eye-witness sightings, scientific evidence, geometrical observations and bizarre circumstances make very clear.

“By looking at this year’s events, I will discuss many aspects of this very persistent and intriguing phenomenon.”

Andy has been researching and writing about crop circles for nearly 30 years but has a variety of specialisms.

His books – the most famous of which are The Truth Agenda and Conspiracies – also cover UFO landings, the origin of the pyramids and mystifying paranormal activity. He has also appeared on television, representing his views on The One Show, Richard and Judy and GMTV.

Andy, who discovered his passion for the crop circle controversy while on holiday in Wiltshire in 1991, is also a public speaker, having lectured everywhere from Eastbourne’s Congress Theatre to Rio de Janeiro.

In his talk, at Cypress Hall on Tuesday (September 17) from 8pm, he will explore crop circles in particular.

Entitled Crop Circles of 2019, he will look at all the crop circle formations of the last year, both in England and abroad, and share insights.

For more information on the talk and Changing Times themselves, visit https://www.changingtimes.org

{ https://www.midsussextimes.co.uk/ }

17-09-2019 om 23:44 geschreven door peter  

17-09-2019 om 23:33 geschreven door peter  

A Taos close encounter of the hunters and aliens kind

From left, Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero were out bow hunting for elk near Cerro de la Olla Monday (Sept. 2) northwest of Taos when they had a strange encounter with a gigantic white structure that then disappeared. A day earlier, Brinkley saw what he thought were two hunters, but later described as oddly clothed "very tall figures with oversized heads." The two men are still trying to figure out what they saw.

JESSE MOYA/TAOS NEWS

By Staci Matlock
editor@taosnews.com

Bow hunters Josh Brinkley and Daniel Lucero, dressed in camouflage gear, looked a little uncomfortable sitting in chairs at a local newspaper. 

The Santa Fe County residents had just come into Taos after several days in rugged terrain near Cerro de la Olla, also called Pot Mountain, northwest of town near Ute Mountain. 

They had a strange tale to tell and they weren’t sure of their reception. 

“We’re a couple of guys that don’t believe in much, but we believe now,” Brinkley said.

They went hunting for elk.

They encountered aliens or something else so strange they don’t know what to call it. 

Brinkley, 41, said he’s been going to the Pot Mountain area hunting for 15 years. He had never seen anything particularly odd.

He said he works construction and  on movie sets. He’s a family guy who doesn’t want anyone to think he’s crazy. 

He and Lucero have worked together for eight years. 

They say they aren’t prone to seeing things and didn’t particularly believe in aliens.  

Odd figures

Opening morning of bow hunting season was Sunday (Sept. 1). The two men had gone a couple of days early to scout the area for elk. Lucero, 26, had never been there. 

They set up along the tree line on different sides of a field and waited. After three hours and no elk, Brinkley became restless. It was about 9:30 a.m. 

“I take off walking, creeping around through the woods, looking for elk,” Brinkley said. 

He reached the top of the mountain where there’s a caldera, a kind of wide bowl left behind by a collapsed volcano. He went to the edge on the southwest side. As he walked to the edge he noticed two figures on his side of the caldera. He thought at first they were hunters. But, they were “very tall shapes of these beings, standing side by side, staring right at me,” he said. 

He walked toward them across the brushy field. He estimates they were about 35 yards away. As a bow hunter, where measuring distance is critical to hitting a target, he said he’s pretty adept at it. He went around the bush and looked again. The figures were gone.

He looked around and didn't see them. “Figured I would talk to them. They were gone, just gone,” Brinkley said.

He thought more about what he had seen: With their lower half concealed by bushes in the caldera, he had only seen them from the waist up. "The shape that would be like their heads, it looked like they had huge hoods on. It looked like two ribbons coming off either side to a point at the top and bottom (like a banana). The right side was black, left side was white and a little shiny. Torsos were kind of black, I couldn’t see many details. It definitely looked like clothes. In middle of the oval was just gray.”

He thought maybe it was the back of hunters' heads. “But it looked too strange, too crazy.”

Later, he drew what he could remember of them in a leather bound sketchbook he carries with him. And he drew what he saw next.

Weirded out

Brinkley hurried back to where Lucero was still waiting. Still no elk. “I was a little weirded out,” he told his friend.

He told Lucero he had seen a couple of hunters and that’s probably what had scared off the elk. He couldn’t bring himself at first to say what he might have just imagined. 

They went back to camp. “I couldn’t take it any more,” Brinkley said. “I told him what I saw was weird. They were too tall, their heads were too big to be hunters.”

“Anyone who knows me knows I don’t tell these weird stories.”

Lucero said he had known something was up when Brinkley had walked quickly and noisily up to his position at the field. Normally his friend is quiet, a hunter’s slower, more measured speed through the bushes. 

After Brinkley told him, Lucero felt a little weird, too. “I didn’t know what to believe,” Lucero said. 

Brinkley kind of wrote off what he saw. 

A strange structure

On Labor Day (Sept. 2), they headed out again to hunt early in the morning and hiked all around the area. No elk. They got back to their Jeep at about 2:30 p.m. 

“We couldn’t figure out why there was no elk,” Brinkley said.

They decided to drive to the other side of the mountain and see if there were other hunters or four-wheelers scaring off the elk. As they drove, the men saw no signs of any wildlife at all, they said.

They drove about 10 minutes, when they saw it. They both work with movie sets. At first they thought it was a movie base camp. “It’s this big tent structure, like a circus tent, 50-60 feet tall. Coming off the left of it was this long building, almost like what you would build for an archery lane for target practice. It was a third the height, but really long, maybe a couple hundred feet.”

They were about a quarter mile away and couldn’t see the bottom of the structure.

They watched it for about a minute as they drove. 

“What is it,” he asked Lucero, “a base camp for a movie? Or are they building an alien ship set?”

They drove down a little hill, lost sight of the structure for at most five seconds, Brinkley said. 

“When we topped the hill, it was gone. Just gone.”

Lucero said he was watching it the whole time while Brinkley drove except for those few seconds. “There was no dust, there was nothing,” Lucero said. 

They drove around the area searching for what they had seen until dark.

Nothing. 

“I just know it was real," Brinkley said. "It was huge and white and then gone.”

‘Profoundly unsettling’

When the two men reached a place with cell signal, they told a few friends what they had seen. They thought about calling the Air Force. A friend put them in touch with Peter Davenport, longtime executive director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Washington state. 

Davenport confirmed they had called him. “It was a dramatic story,” he said. “If it is true, it is profoundly unsettling.”

He said out of the thousands of calls he gets every year about supposed alien sightings, they rarely describe seeing aliens on the ground. 

They aren’t the first hunters to see something they can’t explain. Four hunters in Challis, Idaho, in 2000 described having a large triangular craft hover a couple of hundred feet above them before moving off over the mountains. 

After listening to some 350,000 phone calls over 25 years, Davenport thinks he can tell those that are credible. 

This was one of them, he said.

Brinkley and Lucero said they weren’t drinking and weren’t on drugs.

The hardest thing is telling their story. “People probably think we are insane,” Brinkley said

He said he didn’t believe in UFOs. “I sure do now,” he said.

Lucero said he doesn’t know about aliens. “I just know I’ve never seen anything that big just disappear.”

“The two aliens, you can say I imagined that. But you cannot explain something that big just — gone,” Brinkley said.

After telling their strange tale, the hunters did what they came to do - go try one more time to find elk. 

{ https://www.taosnews.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 23:25 geschreven door peter  

17-09-2019 om 23:16 geschreven door peter  

17-09-2019 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Monster at the Center of the Milky Way's Growing Rapacious Glow Never Seen Before

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don’t yet understand why.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”

Rendering of a star called S0-2 orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It did not fall in, but its close approach could be one reason for the black hole’s growing appetite.

Credit: Nicolle Fuller/National Science Foundation

A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers analyzed more than 13,000 observations of the black hole from 133 nights since 2003. The images were gathered by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team found that on May 13, the area just outside the black hole’s “point of no return” (so called because once matter enters, it can never escape) was twice as bright as the next-brightest observation.

They also observed large changes on two other nights this year; all three of those changes were “unprecedented,” Ghez said.

The brightness the scientists observed is caused by radiation from gas and dust falling into the black hole; the findings prompted them to ask whether this was an extraordinary singular event or a precursor to significantly increased activity.

“The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase — for example if the spigot has been turned up and the rate of gas falling down the black hole ‘drain’ has increased for an extended period — or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in,” said Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the paper’s co-senior author.

The team has continued to observe the area and will try to settle that question based on what they see from new images.

“We want to know how black holes grow and affect the evolution of galaxies and the universe,” said Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics. “We want to know why the supermassive hole gets brighter and how it gets brighter.”

•  UCLA astronomers discussed the project in a Keck Observatory video

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 22:39 geschreven door peter  

DAYS OF NOAH: US Navy Spokesman Makes Official Statement Confirming Existence Of UFOs, Says Videos Should Never Have Been Shown To Public

The United States Navy has confirmed three UFO bombshell videos of mysterious crafts taken by pilots do indeed show ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’.

The US Navy has now officially confirmed that the shocking videos showing Navy pilots chasing UFOs are indeed real and that they are unable after years of intense investigation to give an explanation for exactly what type of crafts they are. But the government refuses to use the term ‘UFOs’ and instead are now calling them ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’, or UAPs.

“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Daniel 12:4 (KJV)

For decades now, our government in general and our military in particular has not only refused to acknowledge UFOs, they went so far as to mock and belittle people who insisted that UFOs exist and interact with humans. But recent advances in military technology has let the proverbial cat out of the bag by allowing pilots to accurately record encounters with them in not one but in dozens of videos that were leaked to the public. We have included two of those pilot-captured videos at the bottom of this article. With apologies to Seinfeld, they’re real and they’re spectacular.

“But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Matthew 24:37 (KJV)

The book of Daniel was given a book of prophecy related to the end times, the time we now find ourselves in, and he was told to ‘seal it up’ until the ‘time of the end’. Jesus tells us in Matthew 24, the the time of Jacob’s trouble will be like the ‘days of Noah‘, where the fallen angels had sex with human women and created the race of evil giants known as the Nephilim. Now you know why pilots are all of a sudden chasing real UFOs around the skies, because those days are almost upon us. The event that will officially and formally usher in the end times is called the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church, the first item on the Day of the Lord checklist. Are you ready for what comes next?

US Navy labels mystery craft in famous videos as ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’

FROM THE DAILY STAR UK: The three groundbreaking clips were released back in 2017 as part of The New York Times’ report into the government’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Each video, shown above, saw US Navy pilots debating what the unidentified crafts were as they undertook aerial manoeuvres not possible with current aviation technology right in front of them.

• Have You Seen A UFO? Report it here. 

In one clip, for example, the object “appeared suddenly at 80,000ft and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000ft and hovering”. The release of videos sparked a fresh wave of interest in UFOs and the US Navy said they would be revising rules to encourage pilots to report sightings.

Earlier this year, the official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, John Gradisher, said the US Navy took the reports “very seriously” and were investigating “each and every one”.

‘WOW,WHAT IS THAT, MAN?’ US NAVY PILOT RYAN GRAVES REPORTS SEEING UFO FLYING AT SPEEDS UNSUSTAINABLE FOR HUMAN BEINGS MAKING SUDDEN STOPS AND INSTANTANEOUS TURNS

But it now appears these investigations have come to an end, with Mr Gradisher labelling the crafts in the three videos as “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”.

“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” he told The Black Vault, an online site that documents previously-classified material.

“The ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ terminology is used because it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.”

By using this description, the Navy is refraining from saying the objects are extraterrestrial in nature but can simply not be explained at this moment in time.

The Black Vault also revealed that, while the videos were unclassified, they were never cleared for public release.

“The videos were never officially released to the general public by the DoD and should still be withheld,” Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told the news site earlier this year. Mr Gradisher then confirmed the Pentagon’s position in the new report last week by adding: “The Navy has not released the videos to the general public.” READ MORE

UFO Spotted By US Fighter Jet Pilots

UFO Spotted: The video was filmed in 2004 and investigated as part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It’s not clear if the object was ever identified. The New York Times reports that the US Department of Defense programme was shut down in 2012.

Watch Navy jet lock scope on UFO

A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet encountered this apparent UFO off the East Coast of the United States in 2015.

Now The End Begins is your front line defense against the rising tide of darkness in the last days before the Rapture of the Church

• HOW TO DONATE:Click here to view our GoFundMe page

When you contribute to this fundraising effort, you are helping us to do what the Lord called us to do. The money you send in goes primarily to the overall daily operations of this site. When people ask for Bibles, we send them out at no charge. When people write in and say how much they would like gospel tracts but cannot afford them, we send them a box at no cost to them for either the tracts or the shipping, no matter where they are in the world. Even all the way to South Africa. We even restarted our weekly radio Bible study on Sunday nights again, thanks to your generous donations. All this is possible because YOU pray for us, YOU support us, and YOU give so we can continue growing.

Source: 

• https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/us-navy-spokesman-makes-official-statement-confirming-existence-of-ufos-calls-them-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-days-of-noah/

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 22:27 geschreven door peter  

17-09-2019 om 22:17 geschreven door peter  

The video was recorded on the night of 7 September 2019 by a soldier of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the position of the anti-aircraft.

The footage shows how the anti-aircraft artillery opens fire on an unidentified aircraft in the city of Saravan which is located on the border with Pakistan, in the border area of ​​Sistan and Iranian Baluchistan.

The military believe that it was a UAV spy drone but since this bright glowing UFO moves so fast, stops mid-air, turns instantly, and immediately accelerates to hypersonic speed it is more likely that it must have been something equipped with classified technology.

Original video clip of the Iranian military shooting on a UFO near the Pakistan border.

مقام معظم رهبری(عرواحنا فداه)@khaamenei_ir

پهپاد شناسایی آمریکا در مرز سراوان سیستان و بلوچستان، شب گذشته.
امکانات بیل و کلنگی سپاه برای سرنگون کردن پهپاد.

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{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 22:10 geschreven door peter  

Proof That UFOs Create Clouds And Can Destroy Them In Seconds, UFO Sighting News.

The location and date of this sighting are unknown, but it further reinforces the fact that UFOs can destroy and create clouds. As I have said before, the 80 page MUFON report of the O'hare airport incident back in 2006 indicated that eyewitnesses saw the UFO disk suddenly shoot up in a diagonal direction, bursting through the low cloud ceiling and leaving a round visible hole for over 15 minutes. Much documentation exists of similar events as the video of this orb. This is not new news, but clearly reinforces the facts about it. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 21:28 geschreven door peter  

Retangle Shaped UFO Over Athens, Greece On Aug 29, 2019, UFO Sighting News.

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 21:20 geschreven door peter  

Two UFO Seen Over New York City Tribute Lights On 911 Anniversary, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: 9-11, 2019

Location of sighting: Tribute lights, New York City, USA

 

These UFOs were recorded moving about in the 911 tribute lights on the anniversary just 6 days ago. They were recorded by Youtuber Orlando Bosca, a UFO researcher that keeps an eye on the live cams, checking them daily for possible catches. 

 

There is lots of evidence that UFOs are interested in historical events, but 911 also has evidence of UFOs in the videos of the actual crash of a plane into a building. Just as one plane is about to hit the building, a round object shoots past the plane hitting into the windows...what was it? An unknown...unidentified flying object. Often we see UFOs are historical locations...probably watch how the humans emotions and passion to keep such events in memories changes the cultures. 

Scott C. Waring

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 21:04 geschreven door peter  

UFO Found Landed On Moon May Be Over 20km Long! UFO Sighting News.

Date of discovery: 2013
Location of discovery: Earths moon, 

This photo is in the NASA collection at the University of Arizona...gota love them. ASU got them directly from Lydon B. Johnson Space Center.  Sure I found this back in 2013, but I wanted to go over it again and this time make the video HD. The object may be sitting on the surface of the moon. Which means its an abandoned mothership, probably sitting on the surface of the moon gathering dust for thousands or millions of years. Someone should lay claim to this. Even if it cant fly, it still will have tons of alien technology that would make any country on earth a world power. 

Scott C. Waring

 

Photo description below.

Image ID: AS17-160-23947

Subject area: Sea of Rains, Timocaris, E wall

Camera: Nikon

Film Type: 2485

Latitude: 23.9

Camera tilt: 51

Sun Elevation: 2.0

Magazine: 160

Lens: Focal 55

Camera Azimuth: 341

Mission Activity: REV 4

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 21:00 geschreven door peter  

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole. It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”

Artist’s concept of an object called S0-2 orbiting our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Astronomers tracked this object for years, hoping to catch it falling over the hole’s event horizon. It did not fall in, but its close approach in 2018 might be one reason for the black hole’s growing appetite now.

Image via Nicolle Fuller/National Science Foundation.

UCLA astronomers announced on September 11, 2019, that, last May, they caught the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust. They caught the feast on May 13 (although of course it happened some 25,000 years ago earlier, since the center of the galaxy is about 25,000 light-years away). What they saw was this. The black hole – called Sagittarius A*, pronounced Sagittarius A-star – became extremely bright in May 2019, growing 75 times as bright for a few hours. Yet, as of now, the researchers don’t yet understand why. Why did the area just outside the black hole’s event horizon – its point of no return – suddenly become brighter? What did it ingest, and why at that time?

Astronomer Tuan Do is lead author of new research describing this event, published September 11 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. He also produced the timelapse in the tweet below, which depicts the brightness changes at Sgr A*. Andrea Ghez, of the UCLA Galactic Center Group, is co-senior author on the new paper. She said:

We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole. It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.

In a statement, the researchers also said they:

… analyzed more than 13,000 observations of the black hole from 133 nights since 2003. The images were gathered by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team found that on May 13, the area just outside the black hole’s ‘point of no return’ (so called because once matter enters, it can never escape) was twice as bright as the next-brightest observation.

They observed large changes on two other nights this year; all three of those changes were ‘unprecedented,’ Ghez said.

They said the brightness surrounding the black hole always varies somewhat, but the extreme variations in brightness observed this year left them “stunned.”

So what is going on?

In an absolute sense, the increased brightness on a few nights in 2019 can be explained by radiation from gas and dust falling into the black hole. One hypothesis about the increased activity is that when a star called S0-2 made its closest approach to the black hole during the summer 2018, it launched a large quantity of gas that reached the black hole this year. Tuan Do, the study’s lead author, said:

The first image I saw that night, the black hole was so bright I initially mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sagittarius A* that bright. But it quickly became clear the source had to be the black hole, which was really exciting.

Another possibility involves a bizarre object known as G2, which is most likely a pair of binary stars, which made its closest approach to the black hole in 2014. It’s possible the black hole could have stripped off the outer layer of G2, Ghez said, which could help explain the increased brightness just outside the black hole.

Morris said another possibility is that the brightening corresponds to the demise of large asteroids that have been drawn in to the black hole.

Tuan Do@quantumpenguin

Here's a timelapse of images over 2.5 hr from May from @keckobservatory of the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. The black hole is always variable, but this was the brightest we've seen in the infrared so far. It was probably even brighter before we started observing that night!

• 5,431

3:53 AM - Aug 11, 2019

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The question for astronomers is, what does this activity mean? Is it simply an extraordinary singular event, or is it a precursor to significantly increased activity for Sgr A*? Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, is another author on the paper. He said:

The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase – for example if the spigot has been turned up and the rate of gas falling down the black hole ‘drain’ has increased for an extended period – or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in.

The team has continued to observe the area. They say they’ll try to settle the question based on what they see from new images. Ghez said:

We want to know how black holes grow and affect the evolution of galaxies and the universe. We want to know why the supermassive hole gets brighter and how it gets brighter.

By the way, these astronomers commented:

The black hole is some 26,000 light-years away and poses no danger to our planet. Do said the radiation would have to be 10 billion times as bright as what the astronomers detected to affect life on Earth.

Astrophysical Journal Letters also published a second article by the researchers, describing speckle holography, the technique that enabled them to extract and use very faint information from 24 years of data they recorded from near the black hole.

Ghez’s research team reported July 25 in the journal Science the most comprehensive test of Einstein’s iconic general theory of relativity near the black hole. Their conclusion that Einstein’s theory passed the test and is correct, at least for now, was based on their study of S0-2 as it made a complete orbit around the black hole.

Ghez’s team said it:

… studies more than 3,000 stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Since 2004, the scientists have used a powerful technology that Ghez helped pioneer, called adaptive optics, which corrects the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere in real time. But speckle holography enabled the researchers to improve the data from the decade before adaptive optics came into play. Reanalyzing data from those years helped the team conclude that they had not seen that level of brightness near the black hole in 24 years.

Ghez said:

It was like doing LASIK surgery on our early images. We collected the data to answer one question and serendipitously unveiled other exciting scientific discoveries that we didn’t anticipate.

• Twitter Talk: Flashing Supermassive Black Hole from Keck Observatory on Vimeo.
• Bottom line: UCLA astronomers announced on September 11, 2019, that – in May – they caught the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust. Why did the area just outside the black hole’s event horizon – its point of no return – suddenly become dramatically brighter? What did it ingest, and why at that time?
• Source: Unprecedented Near-infrared Brightness and Variability of Sgr A*
• Via UCLA

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

17-09-2019 om 01:13 geschreven door peter  

12 Possible Reasons We Haven’t Found Aliens

In 1950, a learned lunchtime conversation set the stage for decades of astronomical exploration. Physicist Enrico Fermi submitted to his colleagues around the table a couple contentions, summarized as 1) The galaxy is very old and very large, with hundreds of billions of stars and likely even more habitable planets. 2) That means there should be more than enough time for advanced civilizations to develop and flourish across the galaxy.

So where the heck are they?

This simple, yet powerful argument became known as the Fermi Paradox, and it still boggles many sage minds today. Aliens should be common, yet there is no convincing evidence that they exist.

Here are twelve possible reasons why this is so.

1. There aren't any aliens to find.

As unlikely as it seems in a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars and as many as 40 billion Earth-size planets in habitable zones, we could be alone.

2. There is no intelligent life besides us. 

(This assumes, of course, that humans count as intelligent.) Life may exist, but it could simply take the form of miniscule microbes or other cosmically "quiet" animals.

3. Intelligent species lack advanced technology. 

Currently, astronomers utilize radio telescopes to listen intently to the night sky. So if alien species aren't broadcasting any signals, we'd never know they existed.

4. Intelligent life self-destructs. 

Whether via weapons of mass destruction, planetary pollution, or manufactured virulent disease, it may be the nature of intelligent species to commit suicide, existing for only a short time before winking out of existence.

5. The universe is a deadly place. 

On cosmic timescales – think billions of years – life may be fleeting. All it takes is a single asteroid, supernova, gamma ray burst, or solar flare to render a life-harboring planet lifeless.

6. Space is big. 

The Milky Way alone is 100,000 light years across, so it's conceivable that the focused signals of intelligent aliens, which are limited to the speed of light, simply haven't reached us yet.

7. We haven't been looking long enough. 

Eighty years. That's the amount of time that radio telescopes, which allow us to detect alien signals, have been around. And we've been actively searching for aliens for maybe sixty years. That's not very long at all.

8. We're not looking in the correct place. 

As previously mentioned, space is big, so there are tons of regions to listen for alien signals. If we're not listening precisely in the direction from which a signal is originating, we'd never hear it. As Andrew Fain explained at Universe Today, it's like trying to speak with your friend on a 250,000,000,000-channel CB radio, without any knowledge of the frequency on which they are transmitting. You'll probably be channel flipping for a long time.

9. Alien technology may be too advanced.

Radio technology may be commonplace here on Earth, but on far-flung worlds, alien societies may have graduated to more advanced communication technologies, like neutrino signals. We can't decipher those just yet.

10. Nobody is transmitting. 

Instead, everybody may be listening. That's basically how it is here on Earth. Apart from a few paltry efforts to broadcast strong signals over a narrow frequency band towards the stars above, we've barely made our presence known in the universe. In fact, if aliens have radio telescopes similar to what we have on Earth, our television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable up to 0.3 light-years away. That distance doesn't even transcend the farthest reaches of our solar system.

11. Earth is deliberately not being contacted. 

On Earth, we have policies about contacting indigenous peoples; it's possible that the same thing could be happening with us. Just like in Star Trek, advanced alien societies may enforce rules that limit contact only to species that attain a lofty degree of technological or cultural evolution.

12. Aliens are already here and we just don't realize it. 

Conspiracy theorists love this unlikely explanation. While the chances are remote, it's not impossible that government agencies are concealing the presence of aliens. Although it's more likely that aliens are already amongst us, observing humanity in the clever and ironic guise of lab mice.

{ https://www.realclearscience.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 00:57 geschreven door peter  

Michio Kaku: We’ve Reached A Turning Point On UFOs

JAZZ SHAW

Even if not smoking-gun proof, the declassified videos — bolstered by confirmation of multiple sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles during 2014 and 2015, including at least one near-collision — are giving ufology new weight. “We’ve reached a turning point,” Kaku said. “It used to be that believers had to prove that these objects were from an intelligent race in outer space. Now the burden of proof is on the government to prove they’re not from intelligent beings in outer space.”

The possibility that they are vehicles from other planetary civilizations, Kaku told Yahoo, “now has to be put on the table.”

That’s a pretty hot take right there. “The burden of proof is on the government” to prove that these vehicles didn’t come from outer space.

By the way, that linked article at Yahoo is quite lengthy and has a ton of background information on the various players in this topic right now. If you’re interested, but not really up to speed on the government material, the To The Stars Academy and all the rest, it’s definitely worth a read.

But is Professor Kaku right? Have we really reached “a turning point” in the discussion of possible extraterrestrial intelligence and anomalous craft visiting our planet? I’m not quite there yet, but the discussion has certainly been expanding into the mainstream media a lot more, rather than just the dark halls of ufology websites and dens of conspiracy theories. (Confession time. Those are places I hang out anyway.)

I have a couple of issues with the stance that Kaku is taking, though I’m still very excited about the information that’s been coming out. First of all, stating that the burden of proof is now on the government to prove something relies on the rather dubious assumption that the government actually knows the answer. After all, one of the reasons they came clean with the Navy videos was that the pilots and their commanders were concerned and wanted a more thorough investigation done. Congress even demanded (and received) a briefing on the subject, so it doesn’t sound like they knew about it either. It’s entirely possible that the government doesn’t have a clue who built those things. Of course, if that’s the case, then who did?

I suppose it’s still conceivable (barely) that some super-secret group in the Defense Department cooked this up and just didn’t tell anyone else… even our own military. Or perhaps the Russians or the Chinese. But if you go back and watch my interview with Quantum Physicist Deep Prasad you’ll see there’s a problem with that theory. The amount of energy required to essentially defy gravity as at least one type of these UAPs have been observed doing, would probably require smashing two black holes together. If anyone was producing that kind of energy anywhere on the planet, somebody should have noticed.

Still, I’m heartened to see more people, including mainstream scientists, looking into these questions and expanding the discussion. It just feels as if we might finally be on the verge of learning something new and truly remarkable. And it’s something that could change the entire course of history and the future of humanity. Well… unless it turns out that the aliens are here to eat us and steal our planet. That would kind of suck.

{ https://hotair.com/ }

17-09-2019 om 00:44 geschreven door peter  

The Asteroid Impact That Doomed the Dinosaurs Also Spawned a Mega-Tsunami

By Elizabeth Howell

An artist's depiction of the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

(Image: © NASA/Don Davis)

The dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit the Earth around 66 million years ago probably generated a huge tsunami, according to new research.

A team of scientists dug into Chicxulub crater, which is the scar left over from the impact that is located on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. There, they retrieved rocks from between 1,640 feet and 4,260 feet (500 meters and 1,300 meters) beneath the surface.

"This research helps answer the tantalizing question of exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath of one of the most significant events in Earth's history," co-author Kliti Grice, a geochemist at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. This impact was not only deadly to the dinosaurs, Grice noted, but it also killed off about three-quarters of all animal and plant species around the world. 

• Related: Chicxulub Asteroid Impact: The Dino-Killer That Scientists Laughed At

The researchers analyzed samples of the peak ring of the crater core, searching for molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), which are organic compounds containing carbon and hydrogen. ("Aromatic" does not refer to the molecules' smell, but rather their ring-like shape.) In the samples, the scientists looked for a PAH called perylene, which comes from pigment made by wood-degrading fungi.

The compound's presence suggests that a tsunami several hundred feet (or meters) high "flooded the crater within days of the asteroid impact," Grice said. "The abundance of perylene within the crater is the result of it being transported there by the soil and land plant debris carried by the tsunami."

The aftermath of the impact was catastrophic: first, a quick inferno, then a long period of cooling. Most of the species alive at the time couldn't tolerate the dramatic temperature shifts and perished. "We fried them and then we froze them," lead author Sean Gulick, a geoscientist at the University of Texas as Austin, said in a statement. "Not all the dinosaurs died that day, but many dinosaurs did."

The research is described in a paper published on Monday (Sept. 9) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

•  If an Asteroid Hits the Ocean, Does It Make a Tsunami? (Probably Not) 
•  Are Ocean Asteroid Impacts Really a Serious Threat? 
•  Mega Tsunamis Rocked Mars Oceans Billions of Years Ago 
• Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.  

{ https://www.space.com/news }

17-09-2019 om 00:21 geschreven door peter  

Water Vapor Detected in Atmosphere of an Alien World Nearly Twice the Size of Earth

16-09-2019 om 23:32 geschreven door peter  

Mind-reading AI may spell end to humanity as we know it, but not because it will enslave us – Zizek

© Getty Images / Donald Iain Smith

Thought ‘transparency’ is biggest threat to our freedom today

I see it as the biggest threat to our freedom. We will literally become transparent. Let’s think about the everyday consequences of this. All flirting will be out. I meet someone and instead of all the lovely games of erotic hints she can read ‘I want to go to bed with you’ and the eroticism will disappear.

Another simple example is everyday politeness. Let’s say we know each other but we are not mega-close friends. I see you on the street and say the usual polite things like: “hello, how are you? I am glad to meet you.” But if you can read my mind this is nonsense because this is politeness and I do not mean it. Usually, I do not care how you feel. 

This intrigues me very much. What is happening? How will it affect our everyday manners, our old civilization social inventions? All our cultivated interactions are based on this.

There is another thing.

What new way of suffering and torture can be developed in this way? Can you even imagine someone controlling your mind? What can they do to you? What horrible thoughts can I implant into your mind? There might be images [of] your nearest terribly tortured, and so on.

I know this is not a joke. It is a very serious thing.

Lying will become more complicated and more privileged

If we imagine this happening in a society where economic and power relations are structured the way they are now, I think, this will mean that the privileged ones will be those who will be able to conceal their minds, who will exclude themselves from this network.

Not everybody will be controlled in the same way. That’s the first problem, who will control the game and who will be excommunicated?

It is always like this. The first thought when a new spying device is developed usually is ‘how can I escape it?’ The privilege is to be outside of it. Lying will become more complicated but it will also become more privileged.

Computers are smarter on mechanical level, but lack the ability to simplify

An idea of AI beating humans in the field of intellect in fact depends on how you define being smart. If by smart you simply mean a more complex mathematical or logical operation as well as knowing more data, computers are definitely smarter. Yet, there is still hope for us.

The greatness of [the] human mind is not in knowing all the details but in picking out from the multitude of data to catch the essence and simplify it.

A book by a Soviet psychologist Aleksandr Luria titled ‘The Mind of a Mnemonist’ describes a guy with perfect memory. He remembered almost everything that he read and saw. The psychological consequences of this were horrible because he knew so much [that] he could not decide anything, the moment he wanted to take a decision, hundreds of other data popped up in his mind. He lacked the great ability of simplification.

Computers can be smarter than us on some mechanical level – and even in learning – but I do not think they can deal with the phenomenon of simplification.

Robots will not take menial jobs, they will be tasked with planning

Today’s paradox is that we are afraid of robots that could supposedly take our jobs, but those of us who work, work more than ever. Second, we still have the idea that robots will do the primitive work for us and we will just plan what they are doing. In many companies, from McDonald’s to those which do day services, it is robots that do the planning and individuals that execute it.

In McDonald’s everything is programmed by robots and ‘stupid’ people just serve other people. It eventually depends on the social order, if we remain in the same capitalist order, in which we are, it will be even worse than today.

There is a possibility, a hope, that we will work less. Yet, many new stupid forms of amusement might fill our free time. I still believe in work and creativity. If we do not have enough things to do, even if we will feel happy just sitting, watching films and drinking, it will be a very stupid existence. It will soon get dire.

It is not technology as such, it is how we will use technology socially. 

{ https://www.rt.com/news/ }

16-09-2019 om 22:44 geschreven door peter