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...
16-02-2020
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania 15-Feb-2020
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania 15-Feb-2020
Multiple lights were seen and filmed over Pennsylvania on 15th Februar 2020.
Witness report:
Personally observed with my family on the way home from the King of Prussia Mall, heading eastbound multiple bright lights in the sky remaining stationary. Have video taken in car while observing. This is unexplainable unless there is some type of unknown military aircraft I am unaware of.
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle: Vatican UFO Disclosure - Light Orbs Phenomenon
Steve Quayle Interviews (02/01/2020) — The Responsibility Of The Vatican For The Flow Of Disclosure Information
Steve Quayle is a researcher and author of over a dozen books dealing with advanced ancient technology and civilizations. His documentary film production company Gensix Productions films the “True Legends The Series” all over the world in search of the Lost Cities and the giants of history who were the builders of the great megalithic structures of the ancient world.
Steve is a former talk radio show host who has been warning against genetic armageddon and the end of the human race for decades. He claims transhumanism and the hybrid age is the most dangerous advancement in the technological war against humanity in history.
The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.
As I sit in a small cafe in the shadow of the ancient Roman gates in Trier, Germany, talking to a person whose credibility seems beyond reproach, but who will only agree to talk to me if provide absolute assurances of anonymity, I can’t help but feel like I’m trapped in a Dan Brown novel. The Da Vinci Code, however, never dealt with unidentified flying objects.
“Was it about UFOs? Of course,” this person whispers with a grin of melodrama.
After almost a year of investigating the U.S. government’s interest in UFOs, what they’ve just said should neither be shocking, nor revelatory. Unbeknownst to them, they’ve only further confirmed what over a dozen other people with backgrounds inside the government and the now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) have already admitted to me.
Just like the fictional Robert Langdon, the path to understanding these mysterious government programs has taken me through the catacombs of informal secret societies, whose surprising memberships include accomplished professionals from the military, aerospace, academic, medical, and intelligence communities.
Though diverse or abstinent in how they define exactly what it all means, each of these enigmatic characters shares one common belief: unidentified flying objects are neither myth nor figment of overactive imaginations. With absolute conviction, they’ve all told me that UFOs are real.
Now, after two years of scant details and a myriad of contradictory statements, Popular Mechanics is ripping open the U.S. government’s massive UFO problem. What follows is a deep, unprecedented well of information that’s only been known by a very small select group of insiders—until now.
PART I. THE DISCLOSURE
On December 16, 2017, the New York Times disclosed that the Pentagon had secretly funded research into UFOs through the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. As if the U.S. government quietly investigating UFOs wasn’t enough, for the first time, the public also got a chance to see three videos captured by the U.S. Navy showing what has been claimed to be “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” or UAP.
In an instant, UFOs were no longer relegated to society’s nihilistically curious, and for the first time in decades, droves of the mainstream public suddenly found themselves peering skyward with wonder.
But almost as quickly as the excitement of mysterious black budget UFO programs crashed ashore, so, too, came vexing waves of criticism, confusion, and controversy.
From the onset, disarray and debate raged on whether the second “A” in AATIP officially stood for Aerospace or Aviation, with the former “Aerospace” eventually proving to be correct. Adding to the chaos, an entirely different program moniker emerged: the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program, or AAWSAP. For over two years, no one has been able to adequately explain whether AAWSAP and AATIP were two separate programs, or the same intuitive under two separate names.
To muddle matters more, a revolving door of Pentagon spokespeople have successfully issued waves of contradictory statements about what the Department of Defense (DoD) did or didn’t do when it came to studying UFOs.
Initially, the Pentagon said, AATIP had indeed investigated UFOs under the leadership of Luis Elizondo, a former senior member of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSDI). Eventually, in a complete reversal of official stances, the Pentagon’s newly crowned UFO point person, Senior Strategic Planner and Spokesperson Susan Gough, recently told The Black Vault, “neither AAWSAP nor AATIP were UAP related,” “Elizondo was not the director of AATIP,” and he didn’t have “assigned responsibilities” within the program.
In some consolation to the UFO faithful, the DoD has consistently been willing to say they consider the curious objects shown in the 2017 videos to be unexplained UAP. What exactly that means, however, has been open for interpretation and debate.
After months of conducting interviews and uncovering previously undisclosed materials, Popular Mechanics is revealing here that the U.S. government does indeed have a definite interest in UFOs.
Provided, of course, that nobody says it out loud.
The Bigelow Aerospace headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada.
PART II. THE SEEDS
The path to truly understanding the Pentagon’s current UFO problems doesn’t begin in 2008 with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the AAWSAP, but rather, a decade earlier and some 2,000 miles from the nation’s capital at the doorstep of a billionaire Nevada entrepreneur.
Robert T. Bigelow, the owner of Budget Suites of America and founder of the space technology company Bigelow Aerospace, has never shied away from amplifying his interest in UFOs. In a 2017 interview, Bigelow told CBS’s 60 Minutes he was “absolutely convinced” aliens exist, before passionately declaring, “I don’t give a damn!” when asked if it was risky to publicly say he believes in UFOs and aliens.
In 1995, four years before founding his aerospace startup, Bigelow established the National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS). From the company’s cached website, NIDS described itself as “a privately funded science institute engaged in research of aerial phenomena, animal mutilations, and other related anomalous phenomena.
The cached website of the now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Sciences.
Before ultimately disbanding in 2004, NIDS conducted research into a host of various paranormal topics, such as cryptid encounters, cattle mutilations, and especially UFOs. The group’s most recognized research was the investigation of a purported paranormal Utah homestead owned by Bigelow called Skinwalker Ranch, which would later play a significant role in the DIA’s UFO interest.
Robert Bigelow.
NASA/BILL INGALLS
In a 2018 interview with New York magazine, former Nevada Senator Harry Reid told an interesting tale about a curious letter Bigelow received from a senior official from a federal national-security agency. “I’m interested in talking to you, Mr. Bigelow. I have an interest in what you’ve been working on. I want to go to your ranch in Utah,” Reid recounted.
After vetting the letter’s author, the individual Reid described as a “very low-key scientist” was granted a pass to visit Bigelow’s ranch. In a lecture at “UFO MegaCon” in 2019, KLAS Las Vegas reporter George Knapp told the crowd these events occurred in 2007, and claims the person, described by Knapp as a “DIA scientist,” had an “experience” while visiting the supposed paranormal site.
In an interview with researcher Joe Murgia, former AAWSAP contractor and astrophysicist Eric Davis shared what colleagues had told him of the DIA scientist’s experience:
“In the living room of the former NIDS double wide observation trailer/staff quarters. A 3D object appeared in mid-air in front of him and changed shape like a changing topological figure. It went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius strip shaped. It was 3D and multi-colored. Then it disappeared.”
According to Reid, whatever happened at Skinwalker was enough to convince the DIA to seriously investigate paranormal and UFO phenomena. “‘Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it.’ I was convinced he was right,” Reid told New York.
In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Hal Puthoff, a former subcontractor for the AATIP, confirms the scientist’s visit, but was unsure how significant a role it played in the origins of AAWSAP.
“Reid is correct that early on there was a DIA scientist who expressed interest in hearing of the Skinwalker Ranch and did visit,” Puthoff says. “The degree to which this influenced initiation of the AAWSAP Program, however, or was just a side issue, I don’t know.”
While we don’t know how pivotal the Skinwalker visit was in the formation of the DIA’s UFO studies, we do know AAWSAP and AATIP were already taking shape almost a year before funding was established and the solicitation was issued.
Navy fighter pilot Cdr. David Fravor has arguably become the face of the famous UFO encounters by the Nimitz Strike Carrier Group, it was actually Marine Lt. Col. Douglas “Cheeks” Kurth who was first directed to investigate the strange airborne contacts that radar operators captured in November 2004.
On his LinkedIn profile, Kurth indicates he worked as a program manager for Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS) until June 2013. Interestingly, Kurth began working for BAASS in December 2007—a month before Bigelow officially established his LLC in January 2008. That might be because Nevada state records show BAASS was technically a subsidiary of another business owned by Bigelow: International Space Hardware Services (ISHS). According to the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office, ISHS was incorporated on October 31, 2007.
Hal Puthoff.
TO THE STARS ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCE
Puthoff, who entered the BAASS fold in 2008, tells Popular Mechanics he was aware that Kurth was involved in the Nimitz events in 2004, but he didn’t believe BAASS specifically recruited Kurth because of it. “I think that it was just because of his experience he reached out to join [BAASS],” says Puthoff, who later founded and now runs the advanced concepts research
Puthoff says he believes the DIA had expressed a need for what would become AAWSAP in 2007, but isn’t sure if the organization ever made a formal request. “I think that anything from 2007 was likely quite informal—discussions, letters, emails—but I’m not certain,” he says.
Regardless, roughly six months after BAASS opened up shop, with the support of late senators Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye, Reid set up funding for AATIP and the AAWSAP contract in the Supplemental Appropriations Bill of July 2008. “It would be black money, we wouldn’t have a big debate on the Senate floor over it,” Reid told New York. “The purpose of it was to study aerial phenomena. The money was given, a directive was given to the Pentagon, to put this out to bid, which they did.”
On August 18, 2008, the contracting arm of the DIA issued a 32-page solicitation/contract/order for commercial items for the AAWSAP. When bidding closed three weeks later on September 5, as the sole bidder, BAASS was awarded $10 million dollars for the guaranteed first year, of a five-year option, for the contract.
On September 13, 2008, Bigelow Aerospace began listing career opportunities with BAASS in 14 different disciplines related to aerospace and research sciences.
A statement of objectives for AAWSAP.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
Absent from the AAWSAP solicitation is any language related to UFOs or UAP. Instead, as originally outlined in the July Supplemental Appropriations Bill, the “primary focus is on breakthrough technologies and applications that create discontinuities in currently evolving technology trends. The focus is not on extrapolations of current aerospace technology.”
In past interviews, Reid has indicated the interested parties at the DIA felt it prudent to avoid any language that might cause someone to realize the underlying focus of the AATIP program was UFOs. According to Reid, a representative with the DIA told him, “What I will do is prepare something for you that anyone can look at it that wants to, it’s strictly science.”
On multiple occasions over the past two years, both the government and former contractors have used the terms AATIP and AAWSAP almost interchangeably. This has caused significant confusion of whether AATIP and AAWSAP were two separate programs, or the same activity under differing names. In a recent statement, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told longtime researcher John Greenewald, “[AATIP] was the name of the overall program. [AAWSAP] was the name of the contract that DIA awarded for the production of technical reports under AATIP.”
While all sources associated with the programs confirm Gough’s statement with Popular Mechanics—AAWSAP was the contract component of the broader umbrella program dubbed ATTIP—they dismiss the latter sentiment expressed by Gough that “neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related.”
The evidence collected here overwhelmingly suggests the government was indeed studying UFOs and not, as the Pentagon has said, “investigating foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”
The cover of BAASS’s Ten Month Report, issued in July 2009.
PART III. THE REPORT
In July 2009, BAASS provided a comprehensive report to the DIA at the conclusion of the first-year option of the AAWSAP contract. The 494-page “Ten Month Report,” as it’s called, is chock full of strategic plans, project summaries, data tables, charts, descriptions of biological field effects, physical characteristics, methods of detection, theoretical capabilities, witness interviews, photographs, and case synopses—each one entirely, explicitly about unexplained aerial phenomena.
Throughout the report, “the sponsor” is mentioned, however, the DIA is never explicitly named.
The first pages list the names of every contractor working for BAASS with appropriate security clearances to have access to the program. Amongst dozens of credentialed names, some of those listed are very familiar to the UFO community, including Puthoff, Davis, Jacques Vallee, and Colm Kelleher. Regardless of one’s existing opinions of the UFO phenomena, the sheer volume of content in the BAASS Ten Month Report is astounding.
Some of the notable content of the 2009 BAASS Ten Month Report includes:
Overview of the BAASS Physics Division’s efforts to conduct research on advanced aerospace vehicles, including the development of standardization for measurement of physical effects and signatures associated with UAP.
Overview of BAASS research for measuring and gleaning the effects on biological organisms from UAP.
Mention of Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”
Strategic plans to organize a series of intellectual debate forums targeted to broad audiences pertaining to the “potential disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence.”
Plans to create a “medical physiological UAP effects program.”
Mention of BAASS program dubbed “Project Northern Tier,” which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.
A possible UAP landing reported to BAASS by the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and its STAR Team (rapid response field investigators funded by BAASS in March 2009).
Project databases of UAP-related materials compiled through various partnerships, and the intent to expand these databases by coordinating with foreign governments.
Summaries of multiple UAP events both inside the U.S. and in foreign countries.
Photographs of UAPs provided by various sources, including foreign governments.
Photograph of page 317 of the BAASS Ten Month Report.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
From cover to cover, the BAASS report references the government’s new buzzword for UFOs: UAP. However, nowhere could Popular Mechanics find a single reference to foreign (terrestrial) advanced aerospace weapon systems, or projected technological innovations based on current industry trends.
Sources tell Popular Mechanics the BAASS Ten Month report was only a sample of the materials the organization provided to the DIA. “Monthly reports were being sent to the Pentagon, in addition to annual program updates, that were all about UAP or anomalous phenomena,” says one former BAASS contractor.
Chris Bartel, a security officer and investigator for BAASS (later Bigelow Aerospace) from 2010 to 2018, confirms the accounts of former BAASS and AATIP employees with Popular Mechanics. He says he indeed encountered some fairly dramatic paranormal events while working at the Skinwalker Ranch, and says he’d also heard mumblings of BAASS being interested in studying paranormal activity in hopes it could lead to technology research. However, Bartel says he didn’t know anything about AAWSAP or AATIP until last fall. “I was a bit taken back, to say the least,” he says.
Photograph of page 17 of the BAASS Ten Month Report.
BIGELOW AEROSPACE
Though unaware of any formal contract with the DIA, Bartel confirms that reports generated about paranormal events on the ranch were being faxed to both Bigelow and the Pentagon on a regular basis. (“I would hate to think my experiences up there were somehow manipulated by outside man-made forces,” Bartel says. “I truly believe the ranch to be hallowed Native land.”)
Some have suggested the “paranormal” events associated with Skinwalker Ranch or AAWSAP could be associated with secret and highly advanced weapons testing. While Bartel says it’s possible weapons were being tested, nothing he observed was consistent with his experiences of top secret testing.
Puthoff also says he saw no evidence that BAASS was involved in weapons testing during his tenure with the organization—“a statement I’m certain Mr. Bigelow would support,” he says. (Bigelow could not be reached for comment.)
Jesse Marcel, who initially investigated the Roswell UFO site 1947.
PART IV. THE SECRETS
The revelations in the BAASS report beg the question: Why is the government now insistent it never studied UFOs, and why aren’t these documents being discussed or made available through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests?
Individuals who worked on the AATIP program say the current uncertainty and confusion was by design and involved a dizzying shell game that’s entirely consistent with how black budget intelligence programs are run. “What you’re dealing with is the very core of government secrecy and how things they absolutely don’t ever want to discuss are kept hidden away,” one former AATIP contractor tells Popular Mechanics.
Sources say the key to understanding current denials of UFO studies in AATIP comes from a phrase stamped on each page of the BAASS Ten Month Report obtained by Popular Mechanics:
“The information is proprietary and cannot be disseminated or used without prior written consent from the Operating Manager of BAASS.”
According to several former AATIP contractors, the “product” being produced for the DIA was technical reports on exotic and potential “game-changing” aerospace technologies, and the manner of determining what areas these radical airborne breakthroughs might emerge was through the research of UFOs.
In exchange, not only would the DIA get the agreed-upon technical reports, but it would also gain access to the extensive research BAASS was gathering on UFOs. While the DIA had access to the volumes of UFO data, the materials were actually commercial property of BAASS, as a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace.
The idea of using an aerospace research project as a cover for a secret UFO program may seem unscrupulous. “But this all rings very familiar,” Neil Gordon, an investigator with the Project on Government Oversight, tells Popular Mechanics.
“WHAT YOU’RE DEALING WITH IS THE VERY CORE OF GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND HOW THINGS THEY ABSOLUTELY DON’T EVER WANT TO DISCUSS ARE KEPT HIDDEN AWAY.”
Gordon, whose area of expertise is in federal contractor misconduct, contractor accountability, and government privatization, says running the “commercial in confidence” program through AATIP is consistent with how the DoD deals with programs it wants to keep secret. “Whether it’s right or not is another story,” Gordon says, “but everything sounds very common for how black budget programs run.”
The DIA may have had extensive access to the UFO materials, but because all of the data technically belonged to BAASS, under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, disclosing or releasing proprietary materials provided to the government in confidence is a federal crime. Essentially, the DIA’s UFO program was set up to circumvent FOIA requests and avoid having to discuss UFOs publicly.
Out of concern for providing Popular Mechanics access to the 2009 BAASS Ten Month Report, the person who made these materials available did so only under the guarantee of anonymity. It’s worth noting this person is not a current government employee, nor were they involved with BAASS or the AAWSAP contract.
“Unfortunately, the government attempting to evade FOIA by contracting out its responsibilities is nothing new,” Josh Budray, an attorney who specializes in FOIA and First Amendment cases, tells Popular Mechanics. “Both federal and state FOIA statutes strive to eliminate such obvious gamesmanship—avoiding transparency and disclosure obligations by contracting out functions—but whether they are successful in doing so is an entirely different story.”
Davis, the astrophysicist and former AAWSAP contractor, says his work on the AATIP program was entirely consistent with all of the technological intelligence programs he’d previously worked on over the last 30-plus years. “Indeed, science is applied, but right now there’s not enough data on UAP to make examining it a scientific endeavor. It’s an intelligence issue, not a scientific endeavor,” he says.
Puthoff, meanwhile, says BAASS produced “stacks of material to the ceiling,” but because of the way things were done, he was surprised to hear any of it had become public. “To be honest, I didn’t think this stuff would ever see the light of day,” he says.
“TO BE HONEST, I DIDN’T THINK THIS STUFF WOULD EVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.”
When reached for comment, Colm Kelleher, the former Deputy Director of BAASS, said, “I am unable to discuss this topic.” Multiple other requests to Bigelow Aerospace for comment went unanswered.
The entire manner in which the DIA partnership allegedly operated raises an important question: Could the reason for the Pentagon’s recent denials of AATIP or AAWSAP conducting UFO research be the result of the current DoD administration being naive to the program’s underlying and commercially secret hidden purpose? It seems like a plausible theory … if it wasn’t for something else Popular Mechanics uncovered.
PART V. THE ADMISSION
Last year, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists obtained via FOIA request and published a January 2018 letter that the DIA Congressional Relations Division sent to members of Congress. In the letter, the DIA provided “a list of all products produced under the AATIP contract for the DIA to publish.” The referenced list includes 38 technical papers, called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents (DIRDs), which cover a range of advanced, exotic, and theoretical aerospace topics.
Given what’s been said about the commercially confidential nature of AATIP, the phrase “for the DIA to publish” may be a critical play on words. Nevertheless, a source with access to the materials provided Popular Mechanics with a copy of a previously unreleased technical paper listed as one of AATIP’s products.
While the DIA refers to the paper as “Field Effects on Biological Tissue,” the original title for the submitted paper appears to actually have been “Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues.” According to the study’s introduction, the paper is an examination of “clinical medical signs and symptoms and biophysics of injury known and expected from near-field (mostly ultra-high), NIEMR Microwave, Thermal, from unintended exposure to anomalous systems.”
You can read the entire study below.
In light of the cumbersome clinical language, just a cursory scan reveals the entire focus was on examining injuries that may have occurred after contact with UFOs or UAP. In fact, the very term “UFO” appears 16 times in the report; the word “anomalous” is used 27 times (most often with the word “aircraft,” “aviation,” or “aerospace” immediately following); and the phrase “Advanced Aerospace Systems Applications Program” is mentioned in bold on four occasions.
Popular Mechanics spoke with the study’s author, Christopher “Kit” Green, a forensic clinician and neuroscientist. Green was surprised to learn his research paper had become publicly known, because he was under the impression it was never included in the distributed set, nor was it finally peer-reviewed.
Green confirms his paper wasn’t cited correctly in the letter to Congress, however, he says the 54-page document Popular Mechanics obtained appeared to be the same paper he was requested to provide as a product of AAWSAP.
“This focused on forensically assessing accounts of injuries that could have resulted from claimed encounters with UAP,” says Green. “I didn’t work for BAASS, other than as a contractor for my paper, and I wasn’t a part of AAWSAP. However, it is my understanding this program was a UFO study that outwardly was not supposed to look like it had anything to do with UFOs.”
“THIS PROGRAM WAS A UFO STUDY THAT OUTWARDLY WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE IT HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH UFOS.”
Green cautions some past speculations about his paper were inaccurate, including the claims it was an effort to understand or reverse-engineer UAP technology. Green also stresses that while his work focused on encounters with unknown or unidentified aerial objects, all of the injuries he assessed could be accounted for by known terrestrial means, and did not provide any evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.
Could the 38 technical reports BAASS produced for AATIP represent what it determined accounted for UAP?
“Many of the topics could be called ‘dual-use’ given that, say, papers on advanced plasma propulsion and invisibility cloaking could apply to our own advanced aerospace development as well as possibly some UAPs,” says Puthoff. But his “spacetime metric engineering paper, the warp drive and wormhole papers, and specifically the Statistical Drake Equation paper are essentially applicable only to UAPs.”
Davis, who worked with Puthoff and authored four of the DIRDs, offers a particularly intriguing detail about the DIA’s 38 reference papers.
“This wasn’t focused on whether or not [UAP] are real. It’s already been well established that UAP are real by a preponderance of evidence. Some classified and some proprietary [that] I can’t talk about,” he says.
Instead of investigating if UAP are real, the 38 technical papers for the AAWSAP contract were also an intelligence assessment to measure just how far advanced UAP could be from current and projected scientific understandings. “Me, Hal [Puthoff], and an aerospace executive who had access to materials worked on that assessment for the DIA,” Davis says.
Ultimately, aside from the wealth of BAASS proprietary evidence, Green’s study alone—which the DIA told Congress was a product of AATIP that it would “be happy to provide upon direct request”—seems to completely dispute the Pentagon’s recent claims that neither AATIP or AAWSAP were related to UFOs.
In an exchange of emails between Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson, and Swedish research Roger Glassal, which were provided and published by research analyst Keith Basterfield, Gough said AAWSAP commenced in the fiscal year (FY) 2008 with a designated $10 million dollars of funding. Since the bid solicitation wasn’t issued until August 2008, we now know that Gough was mistaken, and the program actually began in FY2009, which began October 1, 2008.
In the same email exchange, Gough indicated the first 26 technical reports were completed in late 2009 and an additional $12 million dollars was designated in the FY2010 Defense Appropriations Act for 12 additional reports. (Editor’s note: In the original email, Gough indicated “late 2008.” It’s assumed this was also said in error since BAASS didn’t receive the AAWSAP contract until September 2008 and Green’s technical paper is dated May 2009.)
“After an OSD/DIA review in late 2009, it was determined the reports were of limited value to DIA and there was a recommendation that upon completion of the contract the project could be transited to an agency or component better suited to oversee it.
Funding for the program at the DIA ended in 2012 and DoD elected not to continue the program after the work contracted under the FY2010 NDAA was completed.”
Indeed, every source Popular Mechanics spoke to for this story agrees the partnership between BAASS and AAWSAP had concluded by 2012.
But here’s where things get messy: Gough says when DIA funding dried up in 2012, the overarching AATIP program closed up shop as well. Every source we spoke to, however, says not only did AATIP not end in 2012, but the program is still ongoing to this day.
Core to the contention of whether or not the government maintained an interest after 2012 is the man the DoD says “had no responsibilities” with AAWSAP or AATIP: former senior Pentagon intelligence executive Luis Elizondo.
Who, exactly, is Elizondo? A patriotic whistleblower putting his reputation at stake for something he says the American public must know about? Or a huckster using his former position for his own benefit, as the Pentagon seemingly implies?
The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.
Left: Luis Elizondo in South Korea in 1996. Right: Elizondo in Kandhar in late 2001.
PART VI. THE LEADER
After serving a stint as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. Army, in the late 1990s, Elizondo would be recruited into the ranks of the enigmatic U.S. intelligence community.
Elizondo’s first stop as an intelligence operations specialist was running counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations in Latin America. “We dealt with a lot of stuff, like coup d’etats, black market terrorism, violent drug cartels, all that kind of stuff,” Elizondo says.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Elizondo was then redirected toward East Asia, where he served an advisor of a small intelligence unit assigned to support General James Mattis during his command of Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) Task Force 58 (TF-58) in the War on Terrorism. In a case study published by the Naval War College in 2016, Lt. Col. Damian Spooner describes the analysis and products produced by intelligence sections under Gen. Mattis as being “indispensable” in driving TF-58 planning and operations.
Later, while continuing to support the U.S.-led war on terrorism, Elizondo, the son of a Cuban exile, found himself in Cuba dealing with some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world at Guantanamo Bay’s infamous “Camp Seven,” the prison constructed for the sole purpose of housing 14 “high-value detainees.”
In early 2008, James Clapper, then the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, asked Elizondo to come to the Pentagon to help coordinate information sharing and partnership engagement being run by the Secretary of Defense’s Office. Though the promise of cutting his daily commute in half was one of the biggest selling points, Elizondo’s decision to set up shop at the Pentagon would end up putting him directly in the path of recruitment for a special program the DIA had just started running: AAWSAP.
Though the BAASS Ten Month Report includes an abundance of UAP information, nothing within the text contains any data or information provided by the U.S. government. Conversely, there are a number of requests made by BAASS for access to specific UAP information being held within the DoD and other U.S. agencies. Sources say this is key to understanding how Elizondo entered the picture.
“If they [BAASS] wanted access to info that I’m not saying does exist, but it might have been highly classified, you need someone who had the tickets to make sure the contractors weren’t actually looking at Special Access Program (SAP) stuff thinking it was UFOs,” says an intelligence official who is not authorized to speak on the record.
“Plus,” the official tells Popular Mechanics, “I’m not saying it was, but they might have been looking into something that was of significant interest to foreign advisories and a high-value target for espionage. Bottom line, you needed a counterintel guy.”
Elizondo tells Popular Mechanics that he never wanted to be a part of AATIP. However, as a senior official at OUSDI with a background in counterintelligence, he found himself being recruited into the ongoing UFO effort.
“In 2008,” Elizondo says, “two guys came by my office and said, ‘Are you Lue Elizondo?’ The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh no, what did I do?’ They told me, ‘You came highly recommended as a former senior CI guy with some background in advanced avionics.’ Which is true—I worked some on the Open Skies Treaty. I worked with Raytheon, Boeing, and some other stuff. That was my portfolio.”
Elizondo was told AATIP needed a counterintelligence support and security guy for a very special program. Within a month, after a series of meetings, Elizondo finally met with the then-director of AATIP, who asked him what seemed like a strange question at the time:
“What do you think about UFOs?”
Elizondo was flummoxed. “I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I thought it was a test or something. So I told the truth: I don’t. I don’t think about UFOs. I don’t know if they’re real or not. I don’t think about them. I’m too busy trying to catch terrorists and bad guys.”
Elizondo’s ambivalence was evidently exactly what those running the program wanted to hear. Soon enough, Elizondo joined AATIP. “Seriously, for awhile, I still didn’t know if it was a test,” he says. “It wasn’t until I started examining the security posture of the portfolio that I suddenly realized these things are really unidentified.”
One of Elizondo’s performance evaluations.
Not long after Elizondo was on board, in June 2009, Sen. Harry Reid submitted a letter to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn III requesting AATIP be granted restricted SAP status. Though ultimately denied, had Reid’s request been granted, it would have further tightened security and secrecy around AATIP.
Last year, KLAS Las Vegas reporter George Knapp published Reid’s letter showing Elizondo’s name on the list of “preliminary government personnel” who would have had access to AATIP. In addition to Elizondo, Reid, and the late Senator Daniel Inouye, seven other names of government employees (which have not been released) would have had access to the proposed AATIP SAP. Notably, only three “contractor personnel” made the cut.
According to a source with knowledge of the letter, the three contractor personnel Reid wanted to grant preliminary access to were Bigelow, Kelleher, and Puthoff. Puthoff confirms with Popular Mechanics that he was one of the three approved contractors on the list. The Pentagon later confirmed the letter published by Knapp was authentic.
Sources say the limited number of contractors listed with access is yet another breadcrumb left on the trail of secrecy showing AATIP was indeed slightly different from the AAWSAP contract.
According to multiple sources, including individuals working within the Pentagon—and confirmed by Elizondo—in 2010, when the DIA cut off funding for AATIP’s contract, a DIA program manager asked Elizondo if he would keep the UFO project running. “I wasn’t a DIA employee,” Elizondo says, “so I’d have to run it wearing my OSD hat at the Pentagon. We all agreed this was the best thing to do, so that’s what we did.”
By all accounts, Elizondo was now “bootstrapping” AATIP from the OUSDI, meaning he added the program to the list of his existing intelligence portfolios.
Popular Mechanics has learned the post-BAASS era of AATIP was an even more closely guarded program and consistent with how highly classified intelligence projects are conducted.
“Ninety percent of people don’t understand how the general government runs, and even less understand the intelligence community,” a former senior Special Operations and Intelligence Officer tells Popular Mechanics. “Because this program would have now been out of the Front Office, your guy [Elizondo] would have had the ability to muster up people from various areas of the Intelligence Community. You would have wanted to include the least possible, but best people for the specific mission. You could have had people from the DIA, ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence], and OSI [Office of Special Investigations] all working separately, but together on the same mission.”
Elizondo says when he took over the AATIP, he ran it like a traditional government effort. “We greatly reduced the number of contractors to just what we might have needed, but this was going to be government to government, looking on government systems at government data,” he says.
According to Elizondo, unlike most of the BAASS personnel, the post-2012 AATIP crew did have access to highly classified government information to adequately assess the situation. While the Pentagon denies that AATIP continued after 2012, Elizondo says the post-BAASS AATIP was not unsanctioned, and not just a group of government UFO enthusiasts. “Very, very few people in the building knew what we were doing, but the Front Office (Office of the Secretary of Defense) was in the loop,” he says.
Popular Mechanics has learned the ONI was one of the major backers that wanted to see AATIP continued, which sources say is why the Navy has been so willing to take the most public lead on the UAP issue today.
Elizondo’s critics have repeatedly asked an important question: If AATIP was such a secret program, why is Elizondo now talking about it publicly?
By denying AATIP SAP status back in 2009 and not ever officially blanketing it under a security classification, Popular Mechanics has learned that the government effectively allowed for the program itself to now be discussed.
“There’s a lot they can’t talk about, like sources, methods, etc., but the program itself is unclassified and fair game for public disclosure,” a source with knowledge of the program tells Popular Mechanics. Elizondo confirms this is correct. “I’ve never once violated, nor am I willing to violate my security oaths, so anything I’ve discussed is indeed unclassified,” he says.
In one of Elizondo’s employee performance evaluations, which Popular Mechanics obtained, it lists his primary “mission goals” as managing and administering information, access controls, and security of national-level SAPs for the Secretary of Defense. Elizondo confirms his position allowed him access to the most highly secretive and reclusive programs being run by the U.S. “The stuff we were seeing was truly unidentified. It wasn’t related to anything we were doing,” he says.
In October 2017, Elizondo resigned from the DoD to join former Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge’s UFO research group To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which would soon release the Navy’s “Flir1” video to the world and properly kick off a ufological renaissance. Elizondo now works as the company’s Director of Global Security and Special Programs.
Why did Elizondo leave his government job? Because he realized the Pentagon’s top brass would never treat UAP with the importance they deserved. A senior Pentagon official tells Popular Mechanics they were aware that Elizondo briefed a White House intelligence aide and two senior aides to Mattis, then the Secretary of Defense, in the spring of 2017.
The official, who is not authorized to speak on the record, says the White House aide was uncomfortable with the prospect of UFOs being real. To their knowledge, the White House aide did not pass the information along. The aides to Mattis, meanwhile, acknowledged UFOs were a real issue, but they were concerned with the political optics should it ever come out that the Secretary of Defense had been briefed about them. Elizondo confirms the accuracy of these accounts. “I resigned only after multiple attempts to brief the Secretary [of Defense] failed,” he previously told Popular Mechanics.
Finally, while the Pentagon has denied AATIP’s existence after 2012 and that Elizondo was never involved in looking into UFOs, Popular Mechanics has obtained documentation that seems to unambiguously show AATIP was active after the closing of the BAASS AAWSAP contract, Elizondo was running this extension of AATIP, and the efforts to examine UFOs are still currently underway.
Though the documents were unclassified, they contained sensitive information, and the person sharing them did so only under the guarantee that Popular Mechanics would not make them publicly available. The person said they only were willing to share the materials to support Elizondo’s claims, which they say have been unfairly challenged over the last two years. The individual, who is not a government employee, did approve the release of a small section from one of the documents showing the changing of responsibilities before Elizondo left the DoD.
F-35Bs begin night flights on HMS Queen Elizabeth.
PART VII. THE UNKNOWN
In June 2019, the Office of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s office, confirmed that closed door meetings on UAP have occured. More recently, last December, when asked by Conway Daily Sun reporter Daymond Steer about the Navy UAP encounters, recent presidential candidate and current member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Michael Bennet, was cautious in saying he wouldn’t share anything he’d learned on the Intelligence Committee. However, Bennet said, “Our guys are seeing stuff that’s unidentified. They don’t know what it is, I don’t know what it is … We’re trying to learn more about it. The Air Force is trying to learn more about it.”
Popular Mechanics has since learned in October 2019, staffers with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Armed Service Committee were briefed on current UAP issues. According to people with knowledge of these briefings, some former BAASS contractors and current AATIP leadership were in attendance.
Insiders also say this past year, during a closed-door meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brigadier General Richard Stapp, Director of the DoD Special Access Program Central Office, testified the mysterious objects being encountered by the military were not related to secret U.S. technology. The Pentagon did not respond to requests by Popular Mechanics to confirm Stapp’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee.
In only the second time publicly discussing the event, Popular Mechanics spoke with the Navy fighter pilot who was Cdr. David Fravor’s wingman during the now-famous 2004 Nimitz UFO encounter. Agreeing to talk only under the condition of anonymity, the fighter pilot confirmed they testified in front of congressional leadership about their encounter. “I’ve been requested repeatedly to go to the Pentagon and asked, ‘Is this what you saw?’.”
During a series of email exchanges, Popular Mechanics provided specific information to Gough, the Pentagon spokesperson, in an effort to see if this might influence the DoD’s current position. Initially, Gough said she would examine the information and see if she could provide a statement in response. However, Gough has not responded to repeated follow-up requests from Popular Mechanics.
“IT WOULD BE HARD TO ARGUE THAT EITHER THE MILITARY OR THE PUBLIC GOT THEIR MONEY’S WORTH.”
On its own, the evidence showing the Pentagon is interested in UFOs is unlikely to change the minds of many who are skeptical of the idea that mysterious, apparently intelligent, and possibly otherworldly objects might be buzzing around the skies above Earth.
“The whole contracting process for this program was irregular from start to finish,” Steven Aftergood, Director for the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, tells Popular Mechanics. “[The AAWSAP contract] sounds like it was a good deal for the contractor. But it would be hard to argue that either the military or the public got their money’s worth.”
Meanwhile, William Culbreth, an engineering professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas who authored two of the 38 technical papers provided in the AAWSAP contract, offers a different opinion. He says he was unaware of the UFO background of AAWSAP, but very familiar with BAASS’s UFO interest.
“I had some graduate students who worked for BAASS during that time and I know Bigelow has an interest in the topic, but no one mentioned anything about UFOs when they asked me to write the papers,” Culbreth says.
Regardless of where the underlying motivation may have come from, Culbreth says his work on the two papers—“Detection and High Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities” and “Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion II”—led to his examination of new approaches to nuclear propulsion technology, which might not have been inspired otherwise.
“We’re looking into these propulsion technologies today, and this area alone led to several of my students pursuing PhDs who I don’t think otherwise would have,” Culbreth says.
With the wealth of data collected by BAASS, and almost assuredly more information being gathered by AATIP, it raises the question: Is the UAP issue being closely guarded because we don’t believe it’s real, or because we’re afraid we can’t understand it?
Mick West, the author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect, suggests the public availability and confirmation of rigorous empirical studies by AATIP could change the entire UFO dynamic. “It would be fantastic if there was some good evidence of something new to science. So far there isn’t,” he tells Popular Mechanics.
While he faces considerable angst for trying to debunk UFOs, West says he’d be as thrilled as anyone else if he was able to actually come across something that was truly unexplainable and unknown. “There’s no hard feelings,” he says. “I understand people are passionate—especially experiencers.”
So was this a matter of the government discovering something it didn’t understand, and therefore opting to avoid it altogether? Nick Cook, the former aviation editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly and author of The Grid, tells Popular Mechanics this idea reminds him of a conversation he had with Ben Rich, the former director of Lockheed Skunkworks and the “father of stealth.”
Cook says Rich told him when the ability for stealth aircraft was discovered, but not yet understood, there was considerable debate on what to do next. “Do you put a bunch of money into developing something and end up not being successful because you don’t understand it, or do you table the entire idea until you have more science, which runs the risk of someone else figuring it out first?”
With stealth technology, the U.S. military ultimately made the decision to move forward, which led to the development of the world’s first stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk. “I guess it would depend on how wide a knowledge gap you thought there was and how high was the risk for success,” Cook says. “Could I see how something could come up, and the decision would be made to tuck something away like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Yes, I could see how it could be possible.”
“Throughout history, many inventions have preceded an understanding of the science that makes them work,” Matthew Hersch, a history of science and technology professor at Harvard University, tells Popular Mechanics. “Engineers often ‘do science’ in the course of their work, just as scientists ‘invent.’ It’s inevitable that we as a species will continue inventing things without a real understanding of how they work, at least until our science catches up.”
Being unable to explain something with current science, Hersch says, is merely an invitation to do more science—not a rejection of the scientific worldview as a whole. “Suppressing good, non-fraudulent science because it challenges our beliefs is extremely dangerous,” he says. “Nobody has a right to do that, and it is contrary to the interests of humanity—that’s what science is for. Fortunately, there is no vast scientific conspiracy to suppress divergent ideas. More often, good science is suppressed by non-scientists for political reasons.”
Any discovery of extraterrestrial science or technology, then, is no reason to flush our political norms down the toilet, says Hersch.
“Human beings have believed in the existence of extraterrestrial life for millennia,” he says. “I suspect that any revelation that [UFOs] exist would be met with something close to a shrug.”
This week, NASA is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a sensitive spacecraft that has shown the world never-before-seen imagery of the sun.
The mission launched on Feb. 11, 2010, and during the spacecraft's first decade in orbit, it has viewed planets crossing in front of the sun, studied the activity of sun's scorching outer atmosphere (known as the corona) and witnessed nearly an entire 11-year solar cycle.
To celebrate 10 years of solar science from SDO, NASA has highlighted the top 10 most amazing discoveries to come out of the data and scientific imagery collected by the spacecraft over the past decade.
SDO has spotted raging solar flares erupting from the sun's surface. The spacecraft's cameras and science instruments are zeroed in on the sun to catch these scorching filaments of solar plasma when they appear. The $850 million observatory studies Earth's closest star through multiple wavelengths of light to produce incredible footage of the sun's activity. According to NASA, SDO saw nearly 200 solar flares in its first 18 months, allowing scientists to spot a "late phase flare" pattern and thus help them better understand how much energy the sun releases during a flare.
This image shows an M1.5-class solar flare (lower left) on July 3, 2013. The solar flare erupted at about 3 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) and was spotted by SDO, which snapped a photo of that month's solar storm.
Though Earth tornadoes can reach powerful speeds of up to 300 mph (482 km/h),tornado prominences far outrank the terrestrial storms with speeds of up to 186,000 mph (300,000 km/h), according to NASA.
The video above shows a close-up view of a magnetic tornado in the sun's atmosphere, as seen by SDO in February 2012.
EIT waves are the peaks and valleys of hot and electrically charged gas, called plasma, that roll across the sun's surface, according to NASA. The waves are named after the instrument that discovered them: the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope onboard an SDO predecessor called the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
SDO's observations of EIT waves during its first year in space showed for the first time how the EIT waves move across the star's surface, according to NASA. Coronal mass ejections, or volatile stellar "burps" that carry solar plasma out from the sun and into the solar system, might be what triggers EIT waves, the space agency said.
4. Comets
(Image credit: NASA/SDO)
Icy comets that originate in the outskirts of the solar system sometimes swing by the sun, and scientists like to watch these approaches to see which comets survive the close encounters and which ones evaporate and disintegrate.
In December 2011, SDO caught images of Comet C/2011 W3 Lovejoy as it skimmed over the sun's surface. SDO's images of Lovejoy were the first to show a comet traveling so low in the sun's atmosphere, according to NASA, and SDO's instruments collected new information about how the sun interacts with comets.
5. Global circulation
(Image credit: Stanford)
SDO helps scientists learn more about the sun's plasma. The sun is more complicated than scientists once thought, SDO data suggest. The spacecraft's Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instrument, which is operated by scientists at Stanford University, watches the motion of plasma waves, just like scientists study seismic waves that travel below the surfaces of Earth and Mars The observations revealed new details about the conveyor-like mechanism that transports plasma throughout the sun, called meridional flow.
The sun's meridional circulation is shown in this artist's illustration, which is based on research at Stanford's Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory. This circulation pattern is linked to sunspot production and may explain why one solar hemisphere might have more sunspots than the other at certain times, according to NASA.
6. Coronal mass ejections
(Image credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC)
SDO took this image of the sun on Jan. 28, 2011, as it fired off two solar flares. The midsize M-1 flare on the right was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) that blasted into space.
A CME is an outpouring of material that can be hazardous to astronauts and spacecraft if it erupts in Earth's direction. NASA researchers have used SDO data to predict how these blasts could affect Earth and to model the solar wind's three-day journey to Earth.
7. Coronal dimming
CMEs can be accompanied by coronal dimmings. CMEs, like the one depicted in this video from a solar storm in 2012, can send billions of tons of plasma particles into space, and this evacuation of solar stuff is linked to dimming regions on the sun.
To predict when this charged material might head toward Earth, scientists developed a statistical analysis of several events spotted by SDO. Researchers also hope to use the science of coronal dimming to view CMEs from stars that are too far away for scientists to directly measure the eruptions, according to NASA.
8. Almost an entire solar cycle
(Image credit: NASA/SDO/GSFC)
SDO has been in space for a decade, so it has viewed nearly a complete 11-year solar cycle. This year, the sun is exiting its dormant period, or solar minimum, and will slowly reawaken to its more active period, or solar maximum.
These side-by-side images, taken by SDO, show the sun when it's at almost opposite ends of its 11-year cycle of activity. Solar minimum is on the left, and solar maximum is on the right. SDO's years of observations are helping scientists understand the evolution of a solar cycle, according to NASA.
9. Polar coronal holes
(Image credit: NASA/SDO)
Massive coronal holes on the solar surface, like the one seen in this March 24, 2016, image taken by SDO, are interesting to scientists because charged particles can escape from these gaps in the sun's outer atmosphere.
Scientists also focus on these features because, when these holes disappear after forming near the sun's north or south pole, it can hint to scientists that the star's magnetic field has reversed, marking a more exact moment of solar maximum, according to NASA.
A previously unknown kind of solar process, called forced magnetic reconnection, was seen for the first time in SDO imagery. The spacecraft's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument captured the X-shaped event that happened on May 3, 2012. It's a type of magnetic explosion caused by a solar prominence, a large loop of material that erupts over the sun's surface.
Although scientists had predicted over a decade before its discovery that forced magnetic reconnection did, in fact occur, SDO was the first to view it directly. This new finding was made just a few months ago, in December 2019.
NASA's automated asteroid tracking systems have their eyes on a potentially cataclysmic rock dubbed 163373 (2002 PZ39), which is estimated to measure up to about 3,280ft (one kilometre) across. The asteroid is barreling through space at speeds of more than 35,500mph (57,240km/h).
At this rate, NASA said the asteroid will make a "close approach" to Earth tomorrow before noon (Saturday, February 15).
According to the space agency, any rock this big has the potential to kill untold millions upon impact.
NASA said: “If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25m but smaller than one kilometre – a little more than half-a-mile – were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area.
“We believe anything larger than one to two kilometres – one kilometre is a little more than one-half mile – could have worldwide effects.”
Asteroid alert: A potentially cataclysmic rock is heading past Earth next week
(Image: GETTY)
Asteroid alert: NASA is tracking the rock on an 'Earth close approach' trajectory
(Image: GETTY)
The destructive potential of such asteroids was also outlined in a 2018 White House report on so-called near-Earth objects or NEOs.
The National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan warned asteroids up to 3,280ft (1km) across can initiate a chain of devastating natural cataclysms.
The report reads: “Objects close to and larger than one kilometre can cause damage on a global scale.
“They can trigger earthquakes, tsunamis, and other secondary effects that extend far beyond the immediate impact area.
“An asteroid as large as 10 kilometres across is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs when it struck the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago.”
On February 15, Asteroid 2002 PZ39 is expected to approach the planet around 11.05am GMT (6.05am EST).
Objects close to and larger than one kilometre can cause damage on a global scale
National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan
When this happens, the rock will swing by the planet at speeds of about 15.19km per second or 35,567mph (57,240km/h).
Based on its observations of the rock’s trajectory, NASA estimates the asteroid measures somewhere between 1,443ft and 3248ft (440m to 990m) in diameter.
At both ends of the scale, any impact with the asteroid could be absolutely devastating.
NASA said: “Since their orbital paths often cross that of the Earth, collisions with near-Earth objects have occurred in the past and we should remain alert to the possibility of future close Earth approaches.
“It seems prudent to mount efforts to discover and study these objects, to characterise their sizes, compositions and structures and to keep an eye upon their future trajectories.”
But does the US space agency expect the asteroid to come crashing into Earth this week?
Thankfully the colossal rock will miss our planet by a safe margin of about 0.03860 astronomical units.
Leaked Documents Show Pentagon Was Studying UFO-Related Phenomena
Leaked Documents Show Pentagon Was Studying UFO-Related Phenomena
Newly leaked documents published by Popular Mechanics show that a shadowy Pentagon program produced reports investigating phenomena such as injuries from 'exotic' propulsion that mention UFOs.
Newly leaked documents show that the Department of Defense funded a study concerning UFOs, contradicting recent statements by the Pentagon.
In 2017, The New York Times revealed the existence of $22 million dollar UFO investigation program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. A twist came two months ago, however, when Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told John Greenewald—curator of the Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents—that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs. Greenewald also wrote that the Pentagon told him that another program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program or AAWSAP, was the name of the contract that the government gave out to produce reports under AATIP.
In a new Popular Mechanics article, journalist Tim McMillan acquired documents from Bigelow Aerospace’s exotic science division, Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or BAASS, indicating that the organization did explore strange phenomena under the auspices of the AATIP program.
One BAASS report, leaked to McMillan by an unnamed source, previously appeared on a list of products produced under the AATIP contract "for DIA to publish" that was obtained via FOIA laws. The report was cited incorrectly on that list, but Popular Mechanics tracked down its author, who confirmed its authenticity. The report investigated "exotic" propulsion via injuries sustained by people who experienced "exposure to anomalous vehicles." The text mentions UFOs several times.
"What can not be overly emphasized, is that when one looks at the literature of anomalous cases, including UFO claims from the most reliable sources, the extent and degree of acute high but not necessarily chronic low-level injuries are consistent across patients who are injured, compared to witnesses in the far-field, who are not," the report states.
Notably, the report's author—Christopher “Kit” Green—told Popular Mechanics that he was not contracted by BAASS except to produce this report and that it provides zero evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies.
Another BAASS report from 2009 and published by Popular Mechanics that doesn't mention DIA by name, only a "sponsor," is even more explosive. It shows that, around the time that BAASS would have been producing reports under AATIP, it explored a vast assortment of strange phenomena including “physical effects” of unknown aerial phenomena, or UAP; the “biological effects” of UAP encounters on biological organisms; a request for documents from the Air Force’s UFO investigation program, Project Blue Book; the mention of several UAP incidents, including violations of restricted airspace near a nuclear weapons facility; and that Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch is a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”
Last month, Motherboard was granted exclusive access to Skinwalker Ranch. Currently, the ranch is owned by an anonymous individual engaged in private scientific research. “Skinwalker Ranch continues to be one of the best locations to study and record UAP activity,” the owner told Motherboard in an interview. “Where else in the world do you have constant monitoring with instrumentation recording across a broad spectrum?”
A curious side note in this story is the role of Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon staffer who claims to have run the AATIP program. In statements earlier this year, the Pentagon told Motherboard that Luis Elizondo was in no way involved in AATIP. McMillan received documentation from an unnamed source that allegedly supports Elizondo's claims, but did not publish them in full, only a snippet of a memo that alludes to responsibilities under AATIP but does not mention Elizondo by name.
In a statement to Motherboard, Elizondo claimed that while the AAWSAP and AATIP programs are no longer active, the Pentagon is still engaged in investigating sightings of and encounters with unknown aerial phenomena under a different program portfolio. He also said he believes the largely unpublished documentation is "vindication," adding, "the truth always prevails."
Motherboard reached out to the Pentagon for an official statement on the leaked documents and Elizondo's alleged role in the program. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough told Motherboard that the Pentagon will release a new public statement in the following weeks concerning the AAWSAP/AATIP programs.
Ancient aliens? NASA’s Mars 2020 mission landing site could contain fossilized signs of life
Ancient aliens? NASA’s Mars 2020 mission landing site could contain fossilized signs of life
The landing site selected for NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover could well be one of the best chances we have of discovering whether the Red Planet was once home to life and whether it could be again.
The 28-mile (45km) wide Jezero crater was selected as the landing site for the new rover in late 2018, and has been found to contain vast deposits of hydrated silica and minerals called carbonates, according to a newly published study.
Once the site of a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago, scientists now believe that Jezero, thanks to its carbonate supplies, will likely contain structures that can survive for billions of years, such as shells, coral and certain types of rock formed by microbial life.
Deltas here on Earth are known to be hubs for preserved biomarkers and signs of life, and the presence of the hydrated silica suggests Mars is likely to be even better in this regard.
“Using a technique we developed that helps us find rare, hard-to-detect mineral phases in data taken from orbiting spacecraft, we found two outcrops of hydrated silica within Jezero crater,” said the study’s lead author, Jesse Tarnas, a PhD student at Brown University in Rhode Island, US.
We know from Earth that this mineral phase is exceptional at preserving microfossils and other biosignatures, so that makes these outcrops exciting targets for the rover to explore.
The intel about the site, and the surrounding delta, replete with mineral deposits, was provided by data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“The material that forms the bottom layer of a delta is sometimes the most productive in terms of preserving biosignatures,” explained Jack Mustard, professor at Brown and study co-author.
“So if you can find that bottomset layer, and that layer has a lot of silica in it, that’s a double bonus,” he added.
The rover will land on Mars on February 18, 2021 when it will begin taking rock core samples that will be deposited in metal tubes on the Martian surface, waiting to be shipped back to Earth for analysis during a later mission.
“I’m not saying it was aliens … but it was aliens” is the quote by Giorgio A. Tsoukalos that launched a thousand memes and will probably be on his tombstone. While Tsoukalos has somewhat backed away from the saying, another scientist has picked up the philosophy, if not the actual quote, and applied it to interstellar comets and asteroids, unexplained radio signals from deep space and other strange space phenomena. That scientist is Abraham “Avi” Loeb — theoretical physicist, Professor of Science and Chair of the Harvard Astronomy department.
Loeb has previously stated that he’s open to the idea that the cigar-shaped interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua could be an alien spaceship, saying ““the more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien civilization.” More recently, he’s been studying the fast radio bursts that are being discovered at an accelerated pace now that astronomers have better equipment and no longer have to rely on after-the-fact analysis – they now know approximately where to look. In 2017, Loeb speculated that fast radio bursts are signs that extraterrestrials are using massive laser beams to propel some form of giant light sail-powered ships to traverse the stars. Loeb defends the idea like this:
“Science isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence. Deciding what’s likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. It’s worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge.”
Not quite … but you get the idea
That sounds like a “throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks” kind of astronomy and astrophysics. But that hasn’t stopped Loeb when it comes to fast radio bursts, and the theory seemed to be reinforced when it astronomers recently discovered repeating radio burst coming from the same source were able to trace a few back to their galaxy. However, the patterns seemed to be random – not the kind one would expect when propelling a ship through space. That changed last week when astronomers revealed that FRB 180916, which had recently been traced to a medium-sized spiral galaxy, is sending its signals in a regular, predictable pattern of bursts and pauses in 16-day repeating cycles. All together now … it’s aliens!
“But at the moment we do not have a smoking gun that clearly indicates the nature of FRBs. So all possibilities should be considered, including an artificial origin.”
In an email to Futurism discussing the discovery, Loeb threw his alien stuff against the wall once again. He’s right – the regular repeating bursts from FRB 180916 are not a smoking gun, but they’re the kind of signals one would expect from a civilization sending propulsion power to a sailing ship traversing the galaxies.
Waiting for the next burst from home?
Avi Loeb is a highly respected theoretical physicist in the fields of astrophysics and cosmology, with an obvious emphasis on “theoretical.” Many of his theories have eventually been proven, such as his prediction that there are stars moving near the speed of light throughout the universe, He doesn’t have wild hair, a fake tan and his own television show … in other words, he’s not meme-worthy. But he just may be worthy of attention. At the rate new fast radio bursts are being discovered, he may be proven right on this one too.
If that happens, which will he change first – his hair or his tan?
What sank the lost continent of Zealandia? If you said its crust was too thin to support this land mass – only recently (2017) confirmed to be a continent and not a piece broken off of the ancient supercontinent original continent of Gondwana – then you’re a follower of the conventional wisdom shared by most modern geophysicists (a good crowd to be in). However, this conventional wisdom may have been upended by an unconventional new theory that the demise of Zealandia was actually caused by the birth of something we’re still dealing with – not to mention fearing – today … the circle of active volcanoes known as the Pacific Ring of Fire.
“We propose a “subduction resurrection” model in which a subduction rupture event activated lithospheric-scale faults across a broad region during less than ~5 m.y., and tectonic forces evolved over a further 4–8 m.y. as subducted slabs grew in size and drove plate-motion change. Such a subduction rupture event may have involved nucleation and lateral propagation of slip-weakening rupture along an interconnected set of preexisting weaknesses adjacent to density anomalies.”
Run that paragraph, from a new study published in the journal Geology, through Google’s Geophysicist-to-English translator, and you’ll find it means that one tectonic plate converged on another and sank it (subduction) back deep into the earth, causing violent plate movements that enlarged a ring of pre-existing small ruptures until they simultaneously created a string of new supervolcanoes that became the Pacific Ring of Fire. If your browser doesn’t support the Geophysicist-to-English translator, study authors Rupert Sutherland, Professor of tectonics and geophysics and Victoria University of Wellington, and Gerald Dickens, Professor at Rice University in Houston, do a nice job in The Conversation of explaining what happened next.
“The subduction rupture event included unique geological phenomena that that have no present-day comparison, and there may have been fewer than 100 such massive events since Earth formed. Our new evidence from Zealandia shows these events can dramatically alter the geography of continents.”
“Alter” in this case means turn a continent into a lost continent. Zealandia today is 94% submerged under the Pacific, making it difficult to study. This is why it took until 2017 to confirm it was actually a continent. That’s when Sutherland, Dickens and a team of 32 scientists formed the Tasman Frontier Subduction Initiation and Paleogene Climate International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition (try fitting that on a T-shirt) to obtain new fossil samples that might better explain what sank Zealandia. They drilled holes up to 864 meters (2835 feet) deep where the water was up to 5 km (3.1 miles) deep at six remote sites to collect sediment samples from the center of the lost continent. Those samples contained the birth announcement of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
“We don’t know where or why, but something happened that locally induced movement, and when the fault started to slip, like in an earthquake the motion rapidly spread sideways onto adjacent parts of the fault system and then around the western Pacific.”
As Sutherland explained in a press release, this movement caused portions of northern Zealandia to rise 1-2 km (.6 to 1.2 miles) while other parts dropped underwater by the same amount sections until the entire continent sank to twice that depth and more. The study shows that this event coincided with “the bend in the Emperor-Hawaii seamount chain, the reorientation of numerous mid-ocean ridges, and the onset of subduction—and the related volcanism and seismicity” – events that signified the birth of the Pacific Ring of Fire, where today about 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur and where all but three of the world’s 25 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 11,700 years have taken place.
If the Ring of Fire caused one continent to sink, can it happen again? Sunderland admits that similar subduction rupture events have not been found … yet. But, now that they know what kind of geological records to look for, that may change. In the meantime, his group will be studying Zealandia to determent precisely how and why it sank and “what the consequences were for animals, plants, and global climate.”
Sutherland has an excellent philosophy that we all should consider:
“Geologists generally assume that understanding the present is the key to understanding the past. But at least in this instance, this may not hold.”
In the farthest, most frigid region of our planet’s southern hemisphere, sprawls the highest, coldest, driest, and most isolated place on earth. Antarctica is a vast land of mountains, ice, tundra, and extreme, inhospitable cold that has kept it relatively unexplored and uninhabited even nearly 200 years after its initial discovery. Yet as technology improves and humankind’s ever growing desire to push at the boundaries of our understanding of our planet propels us forward, we are just starting to scratch at the surface of Antarctica’s myriad mysteries. What we are finding is that Earth’s most remote and extreme continent is even stranger than we had ever thought. All manner of weirdness, everything from Nazi bases, to crashed UFOs, to hauntings, to ghost ships that seem to have appeared from nowhere have been claimed in this remote place, and here we will look at the time alien skulls were apparently found here as well.
Before getting into it, it is perhaps important to first understand just how much of a vast, forbidden, inhospitable realm this is. Antarctica covers an area of 14.0 million km2 (5.4 million sq. mi), which is roughly twice the size of Australia or one and a half times the size of the United States, making it the fifth largest continent in the world. Although it is 98% covered with ice, which is well over a mile thick in most places, Antarctica is considered to be one of the driest places on earth, with only 200 mm (8 inches) of annual precipitation along its coast and even less inland. The cold in this wind-blasted land is staggering, with recorded temperatures reaching a deadly −89 °C (−129 °F). For this reason, human habitation of the continent is limited, and there are no permanent settlements. For the most part, the extent of human habitation consists of research stations representing many countries found peppered throughout the continent and engaged in various scientific pursuits.
For such a large landmass Antarctica long remained a mere myth, a lost land that was once known as Terra Australis Incognita, or the “Unknown Southern Land,” the existence of which for a long time remained almost a legendary quest and the doom of many failed expeditions to locate it. Although speculation and legends of its existence go far back, and there were discoveries of some of its satellite icebergs and islands, the Antarctic mainland was not really properly discovered until 1820, when a continental ice shelf was spotted by a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev aboard the Vostok and Mirny. Even upon this discovery, the icy continent remained mostly neglected and forgotten at the bottom of the world since no one was willing to brave the extremely hostile conditions of this uncharted, extreme wilderness. It wasn’t until 1911 that the first human beings successfully penetrated the interior of Antarctica, when Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and four other expedition members became the first to reach the South Pole after a perilous overland journey.
In the ensuing century, Antarctica largely remained an unexplored, poorly understood realm of cold and ice, and it has only been recently that improving technology and satellite imagery have helped us to really start scratching the surface of its frigid mysteries. Even so, Antarctica’s mysteries run deep, and what we are uncovering here at the very bottom of the world is mostly posing more questions than answers. As we look deeper into the ice and probe more thoroughly at the edges of what we know about this hostile and perilous place, Antarctica is proving to be much more than the enormous chunk of ice it was once thought to be. Yet among all of the genuine discoveries being made all of the time are the more fringe accounts, and here is where we come to the alien skulls.
In 2014 a seemingly amazing and shocking story began making the rounds when it was announced that out in this bleak frozen wasteland, supposedly in the area of what was called La Paille, Antarctica, there had been discovered three unusual skulls, described as having elongated craniums and enlarged eye sockets and as being possibly up to a thousand years old. Giving the story weight was that not only were these bizarre skulls dug up in the first place, but they had been discovered by respected Smithsonian archaeologist Damian Waters and his intrepid team. Waters was quoted in initial articles on the matter as excitedly proclaiming:
We just can’t believe it. We didn’t just find human remains on Antarctica, we found elongated skulls. I have to pinch myself every time I wake up, I just can’t believe it. This will redefine our view of mankind’s history as a whole.
As soon as the story got out into the open, there was immediate speculation as to what it could all mean. One idea was that these were the remains of ancient people who practiced skull deformation, a tradition present in some cultures in which the skull is bound or otherwise impeded in its growth to cause it to become misshapen for various religious or cultural reasons. If this were true, it was seen as a mind blowing discovery as the age of the mystery skulls would suggest that humans had visited Antarctica far before the earliest known human discovery of the frozen continent. Of course there was also the idea that these weren’t human skulls at all, but rather the remains of alien beings or even human-alien hybrids of some sort. This is a notion thrown around for a variety of anomalous elongated skulls that are discovered from time to time all over the world, in such far flung places as Peru, Egypt, Malta, the United Kingdom, and others, and the archeologist Waters himself supposedly believed this possibility, saying of the Antarctica skulls:
These elongated skulls are much, much larger than normal human skulls would be. Purposeful cranial deformation can change the shape of a skull, but it cannot increase the volume of the skull. In addition, these skulls have quite a few other important physical characteristics that greatly set them apart from normal human skulls.
Anomalous skulls on display in Peru
The bizarre story soon became viral and was being discussed all over the place, but if you are skeptical of the possibility of ancient alien skulls being found buried in Antarctica then you are not alone. While many on the Internet were buying the fantastical tale hook, line, and sinker, only helped along by the purported scientific pedigree of the one who discovered them and his seemingly authoritative statements on the matter, others were not satisfied and began to see cracks in the whole thing. One of the things that was noticed is that it is unclear whether the place where the skulls were claimed to have been found, La Paille, is even a real place at all. Jason McClellan of openminds.tv has said of this “Approximately ninety eight percent of the continent of Antarctica is covered by ice. Antarctica has research stations, but not cities, so it is unclear where La Paille, Antarctica is supposed to be.” Blunter still is an article on the site Skeptophilia, which dismisses it as a real place outright, saying,
There seems to be no region called La Paille in Antarctica. Paille is French for straw, something I haven’t seen much of in photographs I’ve seen of Antarctica, so it’s a little hard to see why someone would name a place down there La Paille.
If this is not a real place, then it already sends up a red flag on the veracity of the report. Perhaps more glaring still is that the story originates with an article titled “3 Elongated Skulls Found in Antarctica,” posted on April 2, 2014 on an entertainment news site called American Live Wire, which has been criticized for publishing fake news in the past, and this piece was followed by an almost identical article on World News Daily, which is also not considered to be the most reliable source. Both articles show the same pictures of the skulls and make the same claims, and neither one of them gives any concrete source for their information, which is made even more interesting in that it has been found that the Smithsonian itself has never published an account of the discovery. If it is such a groundbreaking discovery, then why would it only be published on these two questionable news sites and not in the Smithsonian’s Newsdesk? Instead every story on the Antarctic skulls can be traced back to these two original articles, the first of which was posted on April 2, right around April Fool’s Day.
There is more. When Skeptophilia did its own investigation into the story they did not have to do much digging to find out that not only were the pictures of the skulls in the two original articles actually pictures of completely different elongated skulls kept at the Regional Museum of Ica in Peru, but nowhere could they find any evidence of a Damien Waters with the Smithsonian. Taken with everything else that is off about the whole thing and it becomes easy to imagine that this was probably a completely fabricated account that managed to worm its way into people’s minds with the promise of alien mysteries in this far away frigid domain and then took on a life of its own. Skeptophilia would rather amusingly say of Waters and his Antarctica alien skulls:
I suspect that he (Waters) was made up, along with the skulls and La Paille and everything else about the story. It’s a shame, really. Given the cachet that Antarctica has, it would be cool if there was some kind of weird mystery down there, or at least something other than penguins and leopard seals and high winds and a crapload of ice.
Yes, it would certainly be cool, and Antarctica is one of those places that sparks the imagination on such things. Despite all of the skepticism, there are still plenty of people who entertain the idea that these skulls are the real deal, and one does not have to look far to find chatrooms and threads devoted to such talk, with accusations of cover-ups thrown around liberally. In the end, all of the evidence shows it is most likely that this was an elaborate hoax of some sort, yet it is curious to see how much the public is willing to latch on to such fake stories and hold them up as real without really checking the facts. Were there ever any alien skulls in Antarctica? Maybe, maybe not, but regardless of what the truth may be, this vast expanse of barren land far from civilization will no doubt continue to drawn to itself such tales for some time to come.
Puma Punku: een nog groter mysterie dan de piramides
Pumapunku of Puma Punku is onderdeel van een tempelcomplex in Bolivia waar de afgelopen tijd steeds meer aandacht voor is gekomen. De naam betekent volgens archeologen ‘deur van de poema’.
De enorme blokken steen waar Puma Punku uit bestaat, zijn met uiterste precisie vervaardigd.
De megalieten behoren tot de grootste die op aarde zijn gevonden. Sommige wegen enkele tonnen en zijn meer dan zes meter hoog.
Lego-doos
De meeste liggen verspreid over het complex, waardoor onderzoekers moeite hadden een beeld te vormen van hoe Puma Punku er vroeger uitzag.
Daar kwam verandering in toen wetenschappers van de Universiteit van Californië – Berkeley het complex met behulp van een 3D-printer en een virtuele reconstructie van archeoloog Alexei Vranich namaakten.
Vranich zei dat de ruïnes hem deden denken aan een gigantische Lego-doos.
15.000 jaar oud
Spaanse conquistadores die het complex in de 16e en 17e eeuw bezochten, omschreven het als een ‘wonderlijk bouwwerk met poorten en ramen die uit één blok steen waren gehouwen.
Vlak na de Tweede Wereldoorlog claimde de Oostenrijkse archeoloog Arthur Posnansky dat Puma Punku veel ouder was dan algemeen werd aangenomen.
Hoe is Pumapunku gebouwd en door wie? Wetenschappers hebben meer vragen dan antwoorden.
Een ander opmerkelijk aspect is dat de mummies van Puma Punku bewijzen dat de bewoners van het complex – van kinderen tot ouderen – geregeld psychoactieve, hallucinogene planten gebruikten.
Kan een bacterie die alleen op Paaseiland is te vinden veroudering genezen?
Kan een bacterie die alleen op Paaseiland is te vinden veroudering genezen?
In de jaren zestig reisden onderzoekers af naar Paaseiland, waar de mythische Moai staan, om bodemmonsters te verzamelen.
Eén van de onderzoekers ontdekte er de sleutel tot de genezing van veroudering.
De Canadese microbioloog Suren Sehgal bracht een bacterie genaamd Streptomyces hygroscopicusmee terug, die hij rapamycine noemde, naar de oorspronkelijke naam van Paaseiland: Rapa Nui.
Gesloten
Deze bacterie is alleen te vinden op Paaseiland.
Hij bestudeerde de monsters jarenlang en raakte geïntrigeerd door de eigenschappen van de bacterie.
Zijn laboratorium werd uiteindelijk gesloten en Sehgal moest al zijn onderzoek vernietigen.
Hij zette zijn onderzoek buiten het laboratorium voort.
Tegen kanker
Sehgal isoleerde uit één van zijn bacteriekweken een nieuw middel tegen schimmelvorming.
De stof bleek te helpen tegen afstootreacties tegen donororganen.
Hij wordt ook ingezet tegen kanker, aangezien hij de groei en vermenigvuldiging van kankercellen kan voorkomen.
Rapamycine onderbreekt namelijk de activiteiten van het enzym mTOR, dat kankercellen doet groeien.
Vijf jaar
De stof bleek bovendien de levensduur van vliegen, wormen en knaagdieren te verlengen.
Later in zijn leven werd Sehgal gediagnosticeerd met vergevorderde darmkanker. Artsen gaven hem nog twee jaar.
De microbioloog begon rapamycine in te nemen en leefde nog vijf jaar.
Hij besloot ermee te stoppen om te achterhalen of het de bacterie was die de kanker bestreed. Sehgal stierf twee maanden later.
De afgelopen tien jaar kom je het woord asteroïde steeds vaker tegen in het nieuws en dat is niet voor niets. In 2019 kwam er een record aantal van deze objecten richting onze aarde en het is een kwestie van tijd voordat er één ons gaat raken.
Het is misschien wel het meest onderschatte probleem van onze tijd, want het verdwijnt niet en wordt alleen maar ieder jaar groter wordt.
Grote en kleine stukken "ruimtepuin" die richting aarde stormen en ons soms op een haar na missen. Zolang een object nog in de ruimte verblijft en niet de atmosfeer van de aarde is binnengedrongen spreken we van een asteroïde of een meteoor en op het moment dat ze de dampkring binnenkomen worden ze meteorieten genoemd. De meeste meteorieten branden op in de atmosfeer en zijn dan zichtbaar als een soort vuurbol in de lucht.
Soms echter zijn de brokstukken dermate groot dat ze niet opbranden en inslaan op het aardoppervlak en dit zijn uiteraard de voor ons gevaarlijke situaties.
Steeds vaker komen asteroïden onze kant op en wij als mensheid merken sommigen op, maar ook velen worden totaal gemist, zoals dat bijvoorbeeld het geval was bij de explosie van een meteoriet boven Chelyabinsk in Rusland in 2015, toen NASA dit moest gewaarworden via Twitter.
Hoe meer vuurbollen wij in de lucht waarnemen, des te meer objecten komen er richting aarde. De waargenomen vuurbollen hebben dan geen schade veroorzaakt doordat ze zijn opgebrand in de atmosfeer, maar het geeft wel een goede indicatie van het aantal objecten dat richting aarde komt.
En wat dat betreft, was 2019 een absoluut recordjaar.
Wat opvalt bij de vuurbollen is dat er na eind 2012 een spectaculaire toename plaatsvindt van het aantal waarnemingen. Dit is vergelijkbaar met de ware explosie aan aardbevingen na eind 2012.
Eind 2012 was uiteraard ook de datum van de beruchte Maya voorspelling die door velen werd geïnterpreteerd als het einde van de wereld en waarbij iedereen dacht dat die Maya's het helemaal fout hadden, want er gebeurde "niets".
Er gebeurde wel degelijk heel veel en dat is dat eigenlijk vanaf dat moment alle heftige aardveranderingen in een stroomversnelling zijn terechtgekomen.
Er gaat tegenwoordig bijna geen week voorbij of je kunt wel berichten lezen over potentieel gevaarlijke objecten die richting aarde stormen en dan, gelukkig voor ons, langs onze planeet scheren. Zoals dat bijvoorbeeld gebeurde op woensdagochtend toen asteroïde 2020 CH langs kwam. Een asteroïde die pas op het laatste moment werd ontdekt en waarvan men eerst niet zeker was of deze wel of niet de aarde zou raken.
Enkele dagen daarvoor een vergelijkbare situatie met asteroïde 2020 BX12 die recht op de aarde leek af te koersen.
Zal het duren tot 2032 voordat de aarde werkelijk wordt geraakt zoals wij eerder schreven of zal dat toch eerder gebeuren omdat de kansen daarop ieder jaar nogal drastisch toenemen?
Echter, de dag dat één van de ons bekende asteroïden op aarde zal knallen, is al bekend.
In oktober 2013 wordt er in de wereldmedia melding gemaakt van het feit dat er een nieuwe asteroïde is ontdekt en dat de kans groot is dat deze in 2032 de aarde zal raken.
Het volgende is onder andere wat wij schreven in 2013:
Natuurlijk weet je dat wanneer iets dergelijks gebeurt NASA onmiddellijk zal ingrijpen en verklaren dat al die astronomen die dat hadden berekend het fout hadden en dat zij hebben gecalculeerd dat deze asteroïde niet of nauwelijks een gevaar zal opleveren.
Normaal gesproken is het dan een beetje einde verhaal, want NASA is voor de meeste mensen net de bijbel of de koran, wat zei zeggen, is waar.
Echter, er is nog een naar onze mening overtuigend argument om aan te nemen dat deze asteroïde wellicht de aarde wel degelijk zal raken in 2032.
En dat argument is afkomstig van een weblog dat in 2005 werd geschreven door een man die zei dat hij uit de toekomst kwam en op aarde was met een bepaalde missie en dat hij vanaf dat moment gerekend over enkele weken weer zou vertrekken naar waar hij vandaan kwam.
Al enkele jaren lang schrijven wij over een tijdreiziger uit het jaar 2063 die naar onze aarde is gekomen in het jaar 2005 op een speciale missie.
Die missie duurde niet zo gek lang en tijdens zijn verblijf in onze tijd schreef deze tijdreiziger onder de naam Scott op een blog waar hij diverse dingen onthulde betreffende onze toekomst.
Mijn codenaam is Qronos1 en mijn werkelijke naam is Scott. De eenheid waartoe ik behoor bestaat uit vier mensen die hier nu in deze tijd zijn. Wij zijn hier op een geheime missie. Er zijn in deze periode ook andere tijdreizigers en ongetwijfeld zullen er meer volgen in de toekomst. De wereld die ik ongeveer een jaar geleden verliet is anders en toch hetzelfde. De vooruitgang in tijdreizen heeft het mogelijk gemaakt dat we nu precies daar naartoe reizen waar we willen.
Er worden op dat blog berichten geplaatst in de periode van 10 september 2005 tot en met 21 september 2005. Daarna stopt het.
Het eerste wat men dan al snel roept is: “Ja, maar dat blog is net gemaakt en ze hebben de data veranderd om het oud te doen lijken”. Dit is echter niet het geval. Want al in de jaren 2006, 2007 etc. werd er op diverse fora al over dit blog gediscussieerd. Voor een voorbeeld van een forum uit 2007 klik hier. Als er dus in die jaren al over werd geschreven, mogen we aannemen dat het blog daadwerkelijk in 2005 is geschreven.
Als Scott geen tijdreiziger was dan wist hij toch heel nauwkeurig te voorspellen wat er de komende jaren zou gaan gebeuren.
Zo voorspelde hij dat 2007 een heel slecht jaar zou worden, dat er in 2009 in de VS een president zou worden geïnstalleerd die niet van Amerikaanse oorsprong was en dat er in 2010 een grote olieramp zou plaatsvinden in de Golf van Mexico.
Echter, iets dat hij ook voorspelt, is het volgende:
“Yes WW3 took allot from us and the asteroid that hit the earth in 2032 also did some bad things, but we have come out off all that ok”.
Het blog waarop dit geschreven is, stamt daadwerkelijk uit 2005, ver voordat asteroïde 2013 TV135 door astronomen werd ontdekt. Astronomen die hiervan schrikken en bekendmaken dat er een kans is dat deze asteroïde de aarde kan raken in 2032, hetzelfde jaar dat dit in 2005 door Scott de tijdreiziger wordt voorspeld.
In dit geval hopen we dat NASA een keer gelijk heeft, maar gezien de vele leugens die ze in de loop der jaren hebben rondgestrooid, houden we het er vooralsnog op dat onze tijdreiziger volkomen gelijk heeft.
Unknown Winged Creatures Angels Caught on Camera in Germany, Brazil and Argentina
Unknown Winged Creatures Angels Caught on Camera in Germany, Brazil and Argentina
A luminous apparitions tumbling to the ground and then soaring up again has been caught on a closed circuit television video in many countries. Mystics are claiming it to be an angels.
The “angels” appears for just a second but can be seen quite clearly.
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question... Time Travelers From the Future?
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question... Time Travelers From the Future?
Ancient Egypt excelled in construction, mathematics, and just about everything else they did. This evidence suggests that these advances were not independently achieved. Author Bruce Goldberg explains his findings that show people from the future, helped develop ancient civilizations.
The Big Ancient Egyptian Question…Time Travelers From The Future? What do you think about this theory? Sounds like they are definitely advanced but not so sure about time travelers.. Perhaps advanced souls from out there in the perimeter.
For someone who just stumbled upon this video, a short summary of the sources would be nice.Does he know this because of a dream, a book, a talk with aliens, an abduction or a LSD trip? NinjaDeathTrap
UFO Seen Heading To Mount Shasta, Holy Mountain, California, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen Heading To Mount Shasta, Holy Mountain, California, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 13, 2020
Location of sighting: Trinity National Forest, California, USA
Source: Twitter
This was posted by a US gov worker at the national forest at Mount Shasta. The photo shows a glowing orange UFO near Shasta. The UFO even has a rim all around it. The forest around Mount Shasta is named after the Trinity. The father, son and holy ghost...three parts of got divided into three. Funny the forest is named after it. I too have heard the stories of the famous Saint Germain with a ultraviolet light glowing around him coming out of the caves entrances and speaking to hikers on the trail. There are dozens of huge caves that go deep below the mountain, some never explored and many people have gotten lost down there never to be seen again. I believe Saint Germain is just a person, an alien being who heads the alien city that resides 4-7km below this volcano.
Weird UFO lands in canyon near coal mining site in Australia
Weird UFO lands in canyon near coal mining site in Australia
This video was captured by mining workers over two consecutive days last year and shows at least two UFOs from which at least one seems to land in the canyon near a coal mining site in the Middleton Queensland in Australia.
Day 1 - The first sighting shows a craft which almost looks like an upside down pyramid and is a few miles away from the coal mine and probably a couple of hundreds feet width when it goes down in the canyon
Day 2 - The second sighting shows another weird craft surrounded by some sort of energy field. This craft remains motionless in the air for a while before it appears to descend into the canyon too.
Listen to the mining workers when they talk about the craft which apparently seems to land in the canyon.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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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.