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

If you name your baby “Hitler,” you can’t escape the fact that you’ve doomed him (or her, if you’re really strange) to a life of derision at best, hate or violence at worst. However, if you name it Wernher, you may be hoping they associate him with the Wernher von Braun who pioneered rocket technology for NASA, not the same Wernher von Braun who developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. That may have been the idea behind NASA choosing to name a faraway, snowman-shaped, Kuiper Belt asteroid discovered by the New Horizons spacecraft Ultima Thule.

This composite image of the primordial contact binary Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 (officially named Arrokoth) was compiled from data obtained by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it flew by the object on Jan. 1, 2019. The image combines enhanced color data (close to what the human eye would see) with detailed high-resolution panchromatic pictures. (Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko)

Pronounced ‘ultima thoo-lee’, the announcement press release explained that: “Thule was a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography. Ultima Thule means “beyond Thule”– beyond the borders of the known world.” However, it didn’t take long for the media and neo-Nazis to point out that Thule is believed by some to be the ancient birthplace of the “Aryan race” – a concept first revealed in the Oera Linda Book, which was allegedly discovered in the 1800s and inspired the occultist and racist Thule Society and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the main architect of the Holocaust. Is it any wonder that modern Neo-Nazis adopted this Ultima Thule asteroid as their own?

“Most people don’t hear the word Ultima Thule and think Nazis, Aryan myths, and strange ghostly white people living at the pole.”

Benjamin Teitelbaum, an ethnomusicologist who researched a Scandinavian band called Ultima Thule that taps into this racially charged definition, defended the nickname to Newsweek after it was announced in early 2018. However, he points out (as you may have already discovered for yourself), a quick Google search says otherwise. 20th century philosopher Julius Evola, whom Steve Bannon and other alt-right leaders like to cite, used the term frequently. At the time, Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and investigator on the New Horizons mission who led the naming process, said the new name for 2014 MU69 was accepted because:

“We’re very, very tired of talking about 2014 MU69. Any name is better than 2014 MU69.”

Well, almost any name. On November 12th, NASA decided enough was enough and gave 214 MU69 a new moniker.

“In a fitting tribute to the farthest flyby ever conducted by spacecraft, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 has been officially named Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

With consent from Powhatan Tribal elders and representatives, NASA’s New Horizons team – whose spacecraft performed the record-breaking reconnaissance of Arrokoth four billion miles from Earth – proposed the name to the International Astronomical Union and Minor Planet Center, the international authority for naming Kuiper Belt objects.”

To link Arrokoth to the asteroid, the announcement points out that the Hubble Space Telescope (at the Space Telescope Science Institute) and the New Horizons mission (at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) are operated out of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, region to the Powhatan people.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the distant Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule (2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019. The object, the most distant ever visited by a spacecraft, is now called Arrokoth.
(Image: © NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory)

The team used this connection to associate the culture of the native peoples who lived in the region where the object was discovered; in this case, both the Hubble Space Telescope (at the Space Telescope Science Institute) and the New Horizons mission (at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) are operated out of Maryland — a tie to the significance of the Chesapeake Bay region where descendants of the indigenous Powhatan people still reside.

Naming an asteroid Arrokoth shouldn’t be controversial to many people, other than those who preferred the Nazi-connected name. Naming your child Arrokoth shouldn’t doom them to a life of therapy either. Naming your band Arrokoth sounds pretty cool. This looks like a good choice all around.

Between 1896 an and 1897, a famous swarm of airship sightings occurred in the United States. The initial reports began occurring in November, 1896 over Sacramento, and involved many townsfolk (including some city officials and members of the Sacramento mayor’s staff) claiming to have seen a dark body with a bright illumination resembling an arc light fitted at the front of the craft as it passed overhead in the stormy winter skies.

Several more sightings would occur in the Sacramento area before the airship flap took off toward the east, with sightings continuing throughout the Midwest and southern United States into the middle of 1897. Then, as quickly as the mysterious aerial visitor had appeared, it was gone again.

Scholars on subjects ranging from the history of aviation to UFO sightings debate what these “mystery airships” might have been. Were they actual airships, invented by some clever engineer just years in advance of the earliest successful attempts at manned flight? Were they hoaxes perpetrated by pranksters with fire balloons, and/or bored newspapermen conjuring tall tales, or could there have been something more to the reports?

While the airships of the 1890s remain a mystery, less often mentioned in the literature is the fact that a second, shorter wave of sightings along the pacific coast occurred a little more than a decade later, which bore many characteristics of the 1896-1897 flap.

Tacoma, Washington, as it appeared in a postcard from around the time of the “airship” flap of 1908 (public domain).

The earliest report dates to February 1st, 1908, beginning with sightings of a bright light moving through the sky over the Pacific coast. Tacoma area newspapers gave the following description:

“…(a) mysterious flying object described as three times as bright as the planet Jupiter, displaying colors of dark red, pale green, yellow and brilliant white… cruising the evening skies over the region around Tacoma between the hours of 7 and 9 o’clock… Rumors in such towns as Kent, Crays Harbor, and Tacoma had the phenomenon explained as a Japanese airship spying out the Pacific coast. On one occasion something like a rocket was seen discharged from the apparently unknown object.”

Two nights later on the date of February 3rd, the aerial phantom reappeared over Kent, Washington. The object was described as a bright light seen at apparently low altitude in the western sky, and brighter than the planet Jupiter. Weekend observers near Kent watched the light appear between 7 and 9 PM local time on both Saturday and Sunday nights, just as it had appeared over Tacoma two nights earlier.

Many telephone calls to local newspapers were made reporting the appearance of the strange western light. “At times the strange light did not appear to be more than 10 to 12 miles distant,” one newspaper account read. “All sorts of conjectures are ventured as to the mysterious illumination.”

Admittedly, these descriptions don’t seem to preclude the planet Jupiter rising over the western horizon after sundown as a possible explanation. The same was offered of some of the 1896-97 airships, which had similarly first appeared as a bright aerial apparition out over the Pacific; however, the strange light was seen again the following night on February 4th, this time by a group of passengers on the Northern Pacific train at the Fifteenth Street Bridge in Tacoma.

The engineer had been the first to observe the object, looking up to behold “a strange multi-colored light in the evening sky,” which appeared to be traveling from north to south. “So prominent was the light, the trains conductor and some of the passengers left the coaches and ran down the track to get a better look. One person had field glasses and said he discerned a cigar-shaped mass.”

The cigar shaped mass would indeed seem to be something apart from Jupiter’s nightly appearances off over to the west. Little more was said of the Washington airship after this, apart from a peculiarly-worded editorial which discussed capturing the airship “by the usual method of salt on its tail,” having a bit of fun with the reports of the previous several nights.

Venus appearing brightly in the western sky over the Pacific

(Wikimedia Commons).

As to the possibility that some residents had been observing a planet, sky mapping software made available at www.in-the-sky.org indicates that Jupiter would have been positioned relatively high in the sky in the early days of February 1908. However, the planet Venus would have been visible between 7 and 8 PM, disappearing below the western horizon shortly after 8:10 PM local time. The less brilliant planets of Mars and Saturn would have remained visible for several hours before passing below the horizon.

It is possible that some observers shortly after 7 PM might have been observing Venus on its westerly course over the Pacific. Further, the fact that some of the newspaper reports mention that the light appeared “two to three times as bright as Jupiter” would seem to indicate that the object had been observed in some region of the sky apart from Jupiter (which would have appeared overhead as the sky darkened at around this time), and that observers were aware of Jupiter’s location at the time. Venus setting over the western horizon might indeed have appeared brighter than Jupiter; however, it would have had the appearance of moving gradually toward the North, whereas newspaper accounts describe the object “moving slowly from north to south.”

Had the residents of Washington merely seen a bright planet as it passed through the night sky in early February of 1908? Had they still been afflicted with a touch of “airship fever” in the aftermath of events from one decade earlier? Or had there actually been more to the sightings of what at least one observer called “a cigar-shaped mass” to which the unearthly light had been attached?