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...
21-02-2020
Noah’s Ark Found? A Researcher's Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Noah’s Ark Found? A Researcher's Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Technology and ancient lore converge in an attempt to unearth the final resting place of Noah’s ark. Satellite imaging and ground penetrating radar may give credence to anecdotal accounts attesting that the legendary ark rests atop Mt. Ararat. Aaron Judkins recounts the trials and tribulations of his valiant quest in search of Noah’s Ark.
Noah’s Ark is the vessel in the Genesis flood narrative through which God spares Noah, his family, and examples of all the world’s animals from a world-engulfing flood. The story in Genesis is repeated, with variations, in the Quran, where the ark appears as Safina Nūḥ.
Noah’s Ark FOUND? A Researchers Journey to Mount Ararat, Turkey
Archeologen vinden in Wichelen grootste grafcirkel ooit in Vlaanderen: "Hij is even oud als de piramides"
Archeologen vinden in Wichelen grootste grafcirkel ooit in Vlaanderen: "Hij is even oud als de piramides"
Archeologen hebben twee grafcirkels gevonden onder de voetbalterreinen van KVV Schelde in Schellebelle bij Wichelen. De oude grafmonumenten stammen uit de bronstijd en zijn meer dan 3.000 jaar oud. Een van de gevonden grafcirkels is de grootste ooit gevonden in Vlaanderen.
Manon Dupont
Duizenden jaren geleden woonden in Schellebelle, bij Wichelen, al mensen. Dat bewijzen gevonden grafmonumenten uit de bronstijd. Ze bevatten verbrande restanten van botten.
Geen skeletten, wel urnen
Archeologenbedrijf Ruben Willaert voert de opgravingen uit en is erg enthousiast over de vondsten. "Ze zien er misschien niet zo spectaculair uit, je ziet eigenlijk enkel verkleuringen op de bodem maar ze wijzen wel op eeuwenoude beschaving. Ze leren ons ook veel over de begraafrituelen toen", zegt Clara Thys van het archeologenteam. “In die tijd werden doden gecremeerd. We vinden wel urnen, assen en verbrande botten terug.”
De grafcirkels zijn even oud als Stonehenge en de piramides van Gizeh
Grootste grafcirkel ooit
In Vlaanderen zijn er al vaker grafcirkels gevonden, maar toch zijn die in Schellebelle opmerkelijk, zegt Thys: “Een van de gevonden cirkels heeft een diameter van 55 meter, dat is de grootste ooit in Vlaanderen.”
(Lees verder onder de foto.)
Radio 2
Voetballen op heilige grond
Ondanks de ongebruikelijke vondst kunnen de spelertjes van KVV Schelde binnenkort toch weer voetballen op de site. “Wij meten alles op en houden dat netjes bij. Iedereen zal kunnen nalezen wat er hier ooit heeft gestaan of gelegen”, zegt Thys. Voor alles opnieuw onder de voetbalvelden verdwijnt, mogen alle scholen van Wichelen wel nog langskomen voor een rondleiding door de archeologen.
UFO Recorded Flying Over Car In Santa Clara, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Recorded Flying Over Car In Santa Clara, California, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:Feb 16, 2020 Location of sighting: Santa Clara, California, USA Source:MUFON #106274 Here is an interesting video just into MUFON a few hours ago. Someone was recording themselves in the car and accidentally caught something white moving above him. The object shoot across the sky and has a white cloud like color, although its shape and speed is nothing like a cloud. The long shape and the reflective white surface of the craft reflects the details of many past UFO reports. Also compounded with the fact that Santa Clara is connected to the ocean, its highly probable that this UFO came from an under water base not far away. There is a very high probability that this is a real UFO. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
Strange space vehicles seem to appear out of flashes of light - There is a big cover up underway?
Strange space vehicles seem to appear out of flashes of light- There is a big cover up underway?
Strange things going on in space lately.
The following video recorded from the ISS live feed cam shows multiple flashes of light in space on which several unidentified flying objects seem to appear out of these flashes.
Where do these strange space vehicles come from and who are the pilots? They were teleported through time from another dimension?
And could it be that these advanced machinery have anything to do with the strange green / yellow anomalies / craft that have been seen in space in recent weeks? if so, then what could be the reason for their arrival?
Now, there are rumors that there is a big cover up underway, these green/yellow craft and the strange space vehicles are but a few of of these types of alien spacecraft. It seems there are larger spacecraft en route to Earth and the global military powers, British, USA, China, Russia, etc. are gearing up for a code red alert "Status unknown spacecraft."
The following video recorded by Jujubee's Adams last week, using the ISS live feed app, shows at first the green/yellow anomalies/craft, then (starting around the 5.45 mark till the end of the video before NASA shut down the live feed) a series of flashing lights on which several UFOs seem to appear out of these flashes.
UFOs caught on tape over Seattle, Washington 20-Feb-2020
UFOs caught on tape over Seattle, Washington 20-Feb-2020
This footage of a multiple unidentified flying objects flying over Seattle, Washington was submitted to me through our Facebook page. This happened on 20th February 2020.
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
USS Nimitz captain reveals Navy pilots DO have to watch out for UFOs after one of the carrier's planes captured secret unreleased video of 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac-shaped' mystery aircraft
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs
'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle),' he says
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO
The video was related to the notorious USS Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO
The encounters remain a mystery and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial
The commanding officer of the US Navy supercarrier, the USS Nimitz, has revealed his crew has an 'obligation' to make sure the airspace is clear of UFOs.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Captain Max Clark said it's important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) - the term for UFOs used by the Navy.
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video relating to the Nimitz carrier group's 2004 encounters with a 'Tic Tac'-shaped UFO.
The existence of the video was revealed in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by researcher Christian Lambright, and published by Lambright's friend Paul Dean.
The video is likely the full version of a leaked 76-second video clip that the Defense Department admitted in 2017 was authentic.
Captain Max Clark, commanding officer of the USS Nimitz, tells DailyMail.com it is important his ship and everybody on it is kept safe from UFOs after the Nimitz carrier group had an encounter with a UFO in 2004
This comes just weeks after the Office of Naval Intelligence revealed the existence of a classified, unreleased video of a UFO. The classified video is likely the full version of the leaked 76-second clip (above) which circulated online from 2007, and was confirmed as authentic in 2017
The footage was taken by a pilot using a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) gun-pod camera on an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on the bridge of the Nimitz, Captain Clark said of the bizarre encounter: 'From my perspective we have an obligation to make sure the airspace is clear, whether it's UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) or UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), this is part of the air space.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise because there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident
'It adds another level of... from a pilot's point of view, to see and avoid, and also our radar systems looking for things like that too, just to make sure everybody's safe.'
Philadelphia native Captain Clark, who assumed command of Nimitz on August 1, 2019, wasn't on board the Nimitz when the unusual sighting was recorded 16 years ago.
And the experienced officer wouldn't be drawn further on the video or the Navy's close encounters of the third kind.
Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs in an official capacity for Britain's Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, said Captain Clark's comments come as a surprise.
The commentator told DailyMail.com: 'These are fascinating comments and it's interesting they were made at all, because the Department of Defence recently took over responding to all UFO-related questions from the media, following some tension between them and the US Navy.
'But ship's captains are strong-willed characters who don't take kindly to being muzzled.
'That said, the captain was totally on-message, because the official line involves talking in general terms about the need to guard against unauthorized incursions into restricted military airspace, with the aim of promoting safety.
'What's being downplayed by everyone is the staggering fact that the US government still doesn't know what these objects are.
'The DOD's line is that the objects seen by naval aviators during the USS Nimitz incident remain "unidentified".'
Pope added that there are 'huge sensitivities' over the Nimitz incident and the recent admission by the US Navy that it has the secret unreleased video has put the affair back in the spotlight. And Captain Clark's comments further fuel the speculation surrounding the footage which has baffled the world.
At least six Super Hornet pilots made visual or instrument contact with the UFO on November 14, 2004.
The encounters, which are documented in numerous interviews with first-hand witnesses, remain a mystery, and the object's incredible speed and movements have led to speculation that it was extraterrestrial in origin.
Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence last month in an interview with New York Magazine
Underwood was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet as part of the USS Nimitz (above) carrier group when he encountered an 'unidentified aerial phenomena'
A map shows the rough location of the USS Nimitz carrier group during the 2004 encounter
The original FLIR video from the Nimitz encounters leaked online as early as 2007.
Witnesses say that clips of the video had been circulated widely on the Navy's intranet - used to communicate between ships in the carrier group - and an unknown sailor in the group likely first leaked it.
The clip became one of the most-touted pieces of evidence in the UFO community when the Pentagon confirmed its authenticity in 2017.
Last month, Chad Underwood, the former Navy aviator who shot the famous leaked video clip, broke his silence in an interview with New York Magazine.
He said the oblong, wingless 'Tic Tac' shaped object was spotted off the coast of Mexico over the Pacific.
He also revealed that for about two weeks, the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Princeton, part of Carrier Strike Group 11, had been tracking mysterious aircraft intermittently for two weeks on an advanced AN/SPY-1B passive radar.
The radar contacts were so inexplicable that the system was even shut down and restarted to to check for bugs - but operators continued to track the unknown aircraft.
Then on November 14, Commander David Fravor says he was flying in an F/A-18F Super Hornet when he made visual contact with the object, which seemed to dive below the water, resurface, and speed out of sight when he tried to approach it.
As Fravor landed on the deck of the Nimitz, Underwood was just gearing up to take off on his own training run.
Fravor told Underwood about the bizarre encounter, and urged Underwood to keep his eyes open.
He recalls how he suddenly saw a blip on his radar before tracking it on his FLIR camera.
'The thing that stood out to me the most was how erratic it was behaving,' Underwood told the magazine.
'And what I mean by “erratic” is that its changes in altitude, air speed, and aspect were just unlike things that I’ve ever encountered before flying against other air targets.'
The FOIA response letter above revealed that Office of Naval Intelligence has 'TOP SECRET' briefing slides and 'SECRET' video related to the 2004 USS Nimitz carrier group encounters
Underwood says the object wasn't obeying the laws of physics and dropped from 50,000 feet altitude to 100 feet in seconds, which he says, 'isn't possible'.
Underwood added that he saw no signs of an engine heat plume or any sign of propulsion.
The pilot refuses to speculate as to whether the object is an alien spacecraft or not, however.
'That’s not my job. But I saw something. And it was also seen, via eyeballs, by both my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, and the Marine Corps Hornet squadron commanding officer who was out there as well.'
DailyMail.com spoke to Nimitz commanding officer Captain Clark about the incident after being invited onboard the awesome 95,000 ton vessel earlier this month.
We joined the crew on a five day training mission in the Pacific Ocean and witnessed first hand it's awesome capabilities.
Capable of reaching more than 30 knots (35mph) the Nimitz-class supercarrier is one of ten nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the US Fleet.
We observed flight operations as F/A-18 Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers and a handful of F-35C stealth strike fighters were launched off the ship and brought in to land.
The Nimitz is the lead ship of her class, one of the largest warships in the world and the flagship of Carrier Strike Group Eleven (CSG-11) with Carrier Air Wing Seventeen (CVW-17) embarked.
Its homeport is Naval Base Kitsap in Washington and the vessel is named for legendary fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966), who helped the US defeat the Japanese Navy in World War II.
An illustration of Lightsail 2 being tested above Earth.
JOSH SPRADLING / THE PLANETARY SOCIETY
It has long been a dream of humanity to travel among the stars. Perhaps someday, if we survive as a species, we can explore the galaxy on great starships. It's a big dream, and it would be a tremendous engineering feat.
One of the greatest challenges is how we could even reach other stars. Our solar system is vast, but it is dwarfed by stellar distance. Even light takes years to reach the nearest stars. For humans to make such a journey in a reasonable timeframe, our starships will need to travel at relativistic speeds. But this would take far more energy than we currently produce.
While engineers have envisioned powerful rockets to reach relativistic speeds, they have also looked at alternatives such as solar sails to harness the momentum of light, or ways to capture the stream of charged particles that stream through interstellar space. After all, there are powerful natural energy sources in the universe. Why not harness them?
Recently a team looked at these ideas and explored one step further. If humans someday use natural powerhouses to travel the stars, wouldn't other advanced civilizations? If they did, could we see evidence of advanced aliens sailing between the stars?
Their paper looks at two technologies: light sails, which use light to push a starship into space, and electric sails, which use an electric field to deflect charged particles in space to accelerate the starship. They found that with light sails, the maximum speed of a starship depends upon the luminosity of the light source. By harnessing the light of a star, a light sail ship could only reach a small fraction of light speed. However, harnessing the light of microquasars or supernovae could accelerate a ship up to a few percent of the speed of light. An electric sail could achieve similar speeds from a star but performs better with powerful sources. By harnessing a microquasar, for example, an electric sail could achieve more than 10% of light speed.
Even at these speeds, a starship would take decades or centuries to reach another star. But forward-thinking species, it could be worth doing. If aliens are using such technology, how might we detect them? The team notes that one way would be to focus on powerful astrophysical sources such as microquasars. If aliens are reflecting light with a solar sail, or deflecting streams of ionized gas with an electric sail, there could be signatures in the light spectra hinting at an artificial source. But the team also notes that the best way to see these starships would be to look for radio signals.
Finding evidence of aliens in this way is a long shot. Even a galactic fleet would be very difficult to detect. But it is interesting to speculate about what we might find. And someday we might be pleasantly surprised.
Reference:
Lingam, Manasvi, and Abraham Loeb. "Propulsion of Spacecrafts to Relativistic Speeds Using Natural Astrophysical Sources." arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.03247 (2020).
Chris Mellon: Our Government Is “Lethargic And Risk Averse” In Assessing Possible Threat From UFOs
Chris Mellon: Our Government Is “Lethargic And Risk Averse” In Assessing Possible Threat From UFOs
JAZZ SHAW
Chris Mellon was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He’s also a policy advisor for To the Stars Academy. The guy has been working on military intelligence and policy for a long time from both inside and outside of the halls of the federal government. In other words, when it comes to the military, he knows a thing or two.
One thing that Mellon knows now is that he’s getting frustrated with the seeming lack of coherent response on the part of the Pentagon to the revelations of incredible craft that have been seen violating our military airspace, first revealed to the public in December of 2017. These UFOs (and we should just be calling them that because that’s what they are) are described in detail by Mellon in a new article he’s published at the website of the American Legion titled “A threat unmet.” But despite all of the available data and expert military witnesses, Mellon finds that almost everyone in the United States government and the upper echelons of our military is turning a blind eye to what he sees as a very real, potential threat to our national security. The lack of action on the part of so many agencies that should be cooperating in the collection and analysis of data has led to a condition Mellon describes as “paralysis.” (Emphasis added)
This paralysis is occurring at a time when the scientific community increasingly recognizes the possibility of humanity encountering probes from spacefaring civilizations. In fact, last year the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology directed NASA to begin looking for “technosignatures,” by which it means alien space probes. This is happening because many exobiologists now recognize probes are more efficient and effective than radio waves for purposes of space exploration or contact. As unlikely as it may seem, there is no denying the possibility that some UFO/UAPs encountered by our military are probes launched by distant civilizations.
While military personnel such as [Cmdr. David] Fravor and Lt. Ryan Graves – an F-18 pilot who said UFOs followed his Navy strike group for months – are awed by the technology they observed, they are undeterred, eager to give chase both literally and figuratively. Reflecting on his encounter, Fravor told me, “I want to fly that thing!” He naturally expects his country to figure out where these things come from, why they are here and how they work. Fravor and his colleagues at least still have the right stuff, even if the hierarchy above them is lethargic and risk-averse.
I wanted to highlight that portion of Mellon’s article in particular because you’ll notice that he’s coming out and saying what so many people have been thinking since this story first began developing. At least some of the UFO/UAPs our military has been running into may indeed be “probes launched by a distant civilization.” In other words… aliens. There. We said it.
This is something that a few of us were batting around on social media this week. Virtually nobody with a deep background in either science or the military really thinks that those things were built by the Russians or the Chinese at this point. If either of those countries had developed the technology to build aircraft that can defy gravity and fly at Mach 25 deep in the atmosphere without us catching up, they’d have attacked us by now. Or at least shown off their cool new technology to impress everyone. And the Navy and the Pentagon have already said they aren’t ours.
So if that’s not our hardware and it’s not Russia’s and it’s not China’s… then what? I don’t care if you want to say it’s aliens, time travelers from the future or humans from some parallel dimension. As Mellon says when quoting Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations, “whatever they are, they are real, they aren’t ours, and they continue to violate U.S. airspace with impunity.” We have identified a technology gap between us and someone (or something) and our government has an obligation to try to close it.
For my part, I will just say that I’m not entirely convinced that the Pentagon is doing as little as Mellon says. He’s been out of the loop there for a while and there could well be things going on that he’s simply not aware of. Of course, that’s because they keep this huge veil of secrecy over everything and anything to do with the UFO topic, as we’ve discussed here repeatedly. And even when they do tell us something, they frequently contradict themselves and obfuscate when they’re not flat-out lying.
So what does Mellon want to see happening? He would like to see a coordinated effort across multiple agencies including NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, and DHS to develop a process for collecting and integrating pertinent information about UFO/UAPs. We need to assess the level of the risk that’s presented. (The pilots who went up against the tic-tac during the Nimitz encounter told Mellon “We didn’t stand a chance against it.”) And then, with all the available data being coordinated, figure out a plan as to what we’re going to do about it.
If I can add one more item to Mellon’s wish list it would be to tell the government that the public has a right to know what’s going on and what they’re doing, particularly if they’re fairly sure it’s not the Russians or the Chinese. They should come out and tell us everything they know short of exposing sources or methods.
One hundred million years ago, a bee got trapped in tree resin. Over time, geological forces converted the resin to amber. Now a scientist arrives on the scene, to tell us this bee’s story.
Primitive bee trapped in amber. It lived in a tropical jungle 100 million years ago, when flowering plants were just beginning to diversify. It’s thought that bees and flowering plants co-evolved. This specimen has traits from modern bees and their evolutionary ancestors, the carnivorous apoid wasps.
About 100 million years ago, a femalebeewith young beetle larvae crawling all over her body flew haplessly into a glob of sticky tree resin where she became trapped. Over time, the resin fossilized to become amber, preserving the bee and its parasites in exquisite detail within the clear honey-colored rock. As rare as it is, this fossil bee isn’t the first to be found entombed in amber. But it is the only known known amber-encased bee that has pollen on it. And it’s the only fossil bee with parasites, providing a fascinating glimpse into a predator-prey relationship that continues to this day. And the entomologist who studied this doomed bee? He is George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University (OSU), whose work helped inspire the movie “Jurassic Park.”
Poinar’s work also showed that the bee – which he named Discoscapa apicula – belonged to a new family, genus, and species. His findings were published in the January 29, 2020, issue of BioOne Complete.
George Poinar, Jr. is a renowned expert in animals and plants fossilized in amber. He’s also credited with popularizing the idea of extracting DNA from these primitive insects. This idea received widespread attention when Michael Crichton incorporated it into his blockbuster Jurassic Park franchise. In the movie, dinosaur blood is extracted from mosquitoes encased in amber from the age of dinosaurs, and DNA in the blood is used to clone living dinosaurs.
In the real world of science, researchers study insect pollinators, such as bees, because they’re critically important to the reproduction of flowering plants, some of which are key to humans’ food supply.
There are more than 16,000 known bee species worldwide, from seven taxonomic families. Bees feed primarily on nectar and pollen, in contrast to their evolutionary ancestors, apoid wasps, that preyed on other insects.
A new species of bee, trapped in amber for about 100 million years. Can you spot the parasitic beetle larvae it carried?
The newly studied bee fossil, from Myanmar, dates to the mid-Cretaceous period. This bee’s world was a tropical forest of mostly conifers, ferns, cycads, ginkgo, and horsetails. Angiosperms – flowering plants – were just beginning to diversify, along with the primitive bees that pollinated their flowers. These ancient bees shared traits seen in both modern bees and their evolutionary forebearers, apoid wasps.
In a statement about this new research, Poinar commented on one of the most interesting features of the bee:
Something unique about the new family that’s not found on any extant or extinct lineage of apoid wasps or bees is a bifurcated scape.
The scape is a base section of the antenna, closest to the bee’s head. In this bee, it branches into two sections, one ending as a small spur. This feature has never before been seen in either living or fossil bees.
An image of the “scape” on one of the bee’s antennae, divided into 2 parts. This bifurcated scape has not seen before, in any known fossil or living bee. The scape is labeled “Sc” and appears divided into 2 branches, with 1 side ending as a small spur, labeled “S.” Other labeled parts are “T” for torulus (basal socket joint that allows antenna movement), “R” for radicle (antenna joint attached to the head), and “P” for pedicle (antenna segment that creates an elbow-like joint with the scape).
The fossil record of bees is pretty vast, but most are from the last 65 million years and look a lot like modern bees. Fossils like the one in this study can tell us about the changes certain wasp lineages underwent as they became palynivores, or pollen eaters.
There were pollen grains on the bee, indicating it had visited some flowers not long before it died.
Also present were very young beetle larvae on the bee. These parasitic larvae were not feeding on it, but were hitching a ride from one of the flowers visited by the bee to its nest. At the nest, the parasitic beetle larvae would continue to develop, feeding on bee larvae and the food left by the adult bee.
Microscopic imaging reveals pollen on the bee’s pollen-catching hairs. It had visited flowers shortly before becoming trapped in tree resin.
Additional evidence that the fossil bee had visited flowers are the 21 beetle triungulins – larvae – in the same piece of amber that were hitching a ride back to the bee’s nest to dine on bee larvae and their provisions, food left by the female.
It is certainly possible that the large number of triungulins caused the bee to accidently fly into the resin.
One of the young larval beetles. Poinar counted a total of 21 larvae on this bee. These larvae are carried by the adult bee from a flower to the nest, where the larvae parasitize bee larvae and eat the food collected by the adult bee.
Bottom line:A bee that lived during the age of dinosaurs became entombed in tree resin about 100 million years ago. It was identified as a species new to science, and is the only known fossil bee encased in amber to carry parasitic beetle larvae and pollen.
Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities
Some early urban areas may have been spread out and socially egalitarian
Farmland in Ukraine now covers most of an ancient settlement called Nebelivka that some researchers consider to be one of the earliest known cities. Here, Nebelivka’s site plan is superimposed over where it once stood.
Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon.
It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense size and mysterious origins. Now, some scientists are arguing the settlements represent a distinct form of ancient urban life that has gone largely unrecognized.
Megasites were cities like no others that have ever existed, says archaeologist John Chapman of Durham University in England.
For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what’s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world’s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands of city dwellers packed into neighborhoods connected by dusty streets. Social inequality was central to Mesopotamia’s urban ascent, with a hierarchy of social classes that included rulers, bureaucrats, priests, farmers and slaves.
Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities. Chapman, along with Durham colleague Marco Nebbia and independent, Durham-based scholar Bisserka Gaydarska, is part of a movement that views low-density, spread-out settlements in several parts of the world as alternative form of early city life.
An artist’s reconstruction shows what an assembly house may have looked like at Nebelivka. Communal gatherings were likely held in these structures.C. UNWIN (BASED ON DATA FROM S. JOHNSTON), B. GAYDARSKA, M. NEBBIA AND J. CHAPMAN/CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 2020
Ukrainian megasites were built by members of the Trypillia culture between about 6,100 and 5,400 years ago. Typically covering a square kilometer or more, some of the sites are bigger in area than Manhattan.
Megasites may have been built so that people could better defend against invasions by rival villages or foreign forces. Based on that assumption, some estimates of population at these places run into the tens of thousands. But recent work by Chapman, Nebbia and Gaydarska indicates megasites in general may have had only a few thousand inhabitants.
And Nebelivka appears to have lacked a class of elites ruling over hordes of common folk who did the dirty work. Instead, excavations suggest that the site was organized to promote shared rule among groups of equal social standing. Thus, Nebelivka demonstrates that urban development doesn’t automatically split people into haves and have-nots, Chapman and colleagues argue, a common assumption among those concerned about social and economic inequality in modern societies.
Nebelivka novelty
In the 1970s, archaeologists began excavating several Trypillia megasites in fertile soil between the Southern Bug and Dnieper rivers in Ukraine. Aerial photography and geomagnetic surveys on the ground revealed outlines of buried structures. At least two dozen megasites have been located in the country since then.
Ukrainian archaeologists have excavated small parts of several of the sites. But it’s a daunting task. Researchers working at one location have unearthed about 50 houses over the last 25 years, Chapman says. “They have another 2,150 houses to go.”
At Nebelivka, Chapman, Gaydarska and Nebbia have reconstructed the megasite’s entire layout. This settlement blueprint, the first of its kind for a megasite, appears in the February Cambridge Archaeological Journal.
Over six years of fieldwork since 2009, the researchers have excavated and mapped Nebelivka structures located over more than a square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures dubbed assembly houses. Residential houses, some intact and most in ashes after having burned, were grouped into 153 neighborhoods, a majority containing three to seven houses. Neighborhoods, in turn, formed 14 quarters, each with one or more assembly houses situated in an open area.
This blueprint of the Nebelivka megasite is based on excavations and geomagnetic surveys (orange lines mark the areas of those surveys). About two-thirds of houses had been deliberately burned at different times, perhaps as part of ceremonial burnings, researchers say. Purple lines denote borders of residential quarters made up of neighborhoods.Y. BEADNELL (BASED ON DATA FROM D. HALE), B. GAYDARSKA, M. NEBBIA AND J. CHAPMAN/CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 2020
During about 200 years of occupation, Nebelivka served as both a dwelling site and, oddly enough, a kind of cemetery for incinerated houses, Gaydarska says. About two-thirds of Nebelivka houses had been deliberately burned at different times, creating mounds of charred debris across the site. Sediment and pollen excavated in and around Nebelivka display no signs of wildfire, a clue that the houses were intentionally set aflame.
In 2015, the researchers built and then burned a replica of a Trypillia house, producing lumps of ashy clay residue like those found where actual Nebelivka houses once stood. Only after filling the replica with much more dry timber than had been used to build the house did the experimental conflagration reach temperatures high enough to raze the entire structure and produce Nebelivka-like residue mounds. Nebelivka’s ancient residents must have gone to great lengths to gather enough wood for what was likely ceremonial house burnings, Chapman says.
“Burning a house down in this way created a spectacle that could be seen from many kilometers away,” he says.
Scientists built a wooden version of a Nebelivka house and set it on fire (left) to investigate how and why ancient residents burned down many of their houses. Burned remains of the experimental house were examined in a 3-D image (right).FROM LEFT: B. GAYDARSKA; M. NEBBIA
No signs of a centralized government, a ruling dynasty, or wealth or social class disparities appear in the ancient settlement, the researchers say. Houses were largely alike in size and design. Excavations yielded few prestige goods, such as copper items and shell ornaments. Many examples of painted pottery and clay figurines typical of Trypillia culture turned up, and more than 6,300 animal bones unearthed at the site suggest residents ate a lot of beef and lamb. Those clues suggest daily life was much the same across Nebelivka’s various neighborhoods and quarters.
Although Chapman and colleagues agree Nebelivka’s city life differed from that of Mesopotamian metropolises, the researchers disagree about the details.
Chapman suspects the megasite was a permanent settlement in which, at any one time, 2,000 to 3,000 people occupied up to 400 houses. Residents likely came from 10 regional groups, known from previous investigations of smaller Trypillia villages, that had traded goods and formed some common cultural beliefs and practices, he says. Members of the 10 groups established the neighborhoods and quarters outlined in Nebelivka’s site plan, Chapman speculates. Given the need to ease inevitable tensions among groups living unusually close together, a council recruited from throughout Nebelivka may have made political decisions. Council leadership might have even shifted annually from one group to the next, he says.
Nebbia thinks it’s more likely that perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 people inhabited Nebelivka for around one month each year. During that time, people who assembled at the megasite made new contacts, shared knowledge and goods, and conducted communal activities such as house building and burning. Perhaps 100 to 150 guardians lived at and maintained Nebelivka year-round, he speculates.
Yet another possibility, favored by Gaydarska, portrays Nebelivka as a large center for religious pilgrims from throughout the Trypillia world. Over a roughly eight-month pilgrimage season, presumably scheduled for seasons when the weather permitted long-distance journeys, between 1,000 and 2,000 pilgrims per month inhabited Nebelivka. Ritual leaders from various Trypillia communities maintained the settlement and organized construction projects, she suspects, including the raising of assembly houses where religious ceremonies were held.
Middle Eastern sites for large, periodic gatherings date back at least 10,000 years and could have set the stage for similar but larger get-togethers at Nebelivka, however they were organized, Gaydarska says. While Nebelivka’s site plan can’t unveil the exact nature of social life there, it reveals a large open space in the center of the megasite where researchers previously assumed many people lived. Earlier estimates that Nebelivka housed 10,000 people or more are thus way too high, the three researchers contend.
Power sharing
As at Nebelivka, an increasing number of archaeological sites in Asia, Europe and the Americas are being classified as low-density urban settlements, says archaeologist Roland Fletcher of the University of Sydney. For instance, settlements comparable in size and population to megasites, known as oppida, emerged elsewhere in Europe more than 2,000 years ago. Whether people inhabited oppida year-round or seasonally, these sites contained households of roughly equal status that participated in collective decision making, Fletcher says.
Aerial laser mapping has uncovered much larger examples of urban sprawl that date to around 1,000 years ago at Greater Angkor in Cambodia (SN: 4/29/16) and roughly 2,000 years ago at Maya outposts in Central America (SN: 9/27/18). In those cases, kings and other power brokers ruled spread-out populations that cultivated crops such as rice and maize using sophisticated irrigation techniques.
Aerial laser mapping has revealed much larger examples of urban sprawl around Maya outposts in Central America than previously thought. Here, a representation of the site of Naachtun in what’s now Guatemala is shown. Yellow dots indicate ancient structures.M.A. CANUTO ET AL/SCIENCE 2018, L. AULD-THOMAS AND M.A. CANUTO
Though some of these sprawling sites had social inequality, egalitarian cities like Nebelivka were probably more widespread several thousand years ago than has typically been assumed, says archaeologist David Wengrow of University College London. Ancient ceremonial centers in China and Peru, for instance, were cities with sophisticated infrastructures that existed before any hints of bureaucratic control, he argues. Wengrow and anthropologist David Graeber of the London School of Economics and Political Science also made that argument in a 2018 essay in Eurozine, an online cultural magazine.
Councils of social equals governed many of the world’s earliest cities, including Trypillia megasites, Wengrow contends. Egalitarian rule may even have characterized Mesopotamian cities for their first few hundred years, a period that lacks archaeological evidence of royal burials, armies or large bureaucracies typical of early states, he suggests.
Megasite mystery
Not everyone views Nebelivka as emblematic of an alternative branch of early city life.
“Nebelivka may be an interesting example of a ritual, ceremonial or defensive gathering place rather than an ‘all-purpose’ city or a distinctive pathway to urbanism,” says archaeologist Monica Smith of UCLA.
Unlike bustling Mesopotamian cities, which featured walls or other prominent structures along their borders, Nebelivka contained lots of apparently open space and was encircled by only a ditch, Smith observes. And from the start, cities brought together large numbers of people who had to cooperate with strangers and heed the edicts of political and religious leaders, Smith argues. Ancient cities typically included massive official structures and were densely occupied for thousands of years, unlike megasites that drew smaller crowds for several hundred years at most, she says. Smith reserves judgment on the nature of city life at Greater Angkor and the Maya sites, where further excavations might reveal higher-density occupations than currently suspected.
Some investigators regard densely populated Mesopotamian settlements from around 6,000 years ago, such Tell Brak in Syria, as the world’s oldest cities. The remains of a Tell Brak palace are shown.BERTRAMZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY 3.0)
Smith suggests calling permanent and temporary gathering spots — a category that, in her view, includes Trypillia megasites — “collective settlements.” In her 2019 book Cities: The First 6,000 Years (SN: 4/16/19), Smith provisionally identifies the oldest known city as Tell Brak, a roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian site in northeastern Syria.
But Nebelivka and other Ukrainian megasites transcended Trypillia village life too dramatically to be classified simply as gathering places, Gaydarska argues. Trypillia people, she maintains, engaged in one of several early experiments in large-scale urban living, even if for only part of the year. It’s time to revamp traditional ideas of what makes an ancient settlement a city, she says.
For now, the next challenge is to explain why the Tyrpillia megasites arose in the first place and lasted no more than around 700 years. To get a better grip on that mystery, Gaydarska plans to excavate Trypillia villages dating to just before and after Nebelivka’s heyday. “We have nothing to compare Nebelivka to at this point,” she says.
It was a hot and humid evening on August 19, 1952, and hardware store clerk and Boy Scout Scoutmaster Dunham Sanborn “Sonny” DesVergers was driving a group of Boy Scouts home on a coastal highway near West Palm Beach, Florida, that winds right alongside the vast swamp wilderness of the South Florida Everglades. As he made his way down a darkened side road towards the home of one of the boys, his attention was captured by a bright flash in the sky out over the gloomy swamp near a dense grove of palmettos. His first thought was to just keep on driving, but then it occurred to him that an airplane had possibly gone down out there in the wilderness, so he turned back, stopped the car, and after some moments of thought peering into the dimness of the swamp he decided to grab a machete and start hacking his way through towards where he believed the accident to have occurred. And so would begin a strange odyssey that has remained one of the weirder UFO encounters on the books.
DesVergers told the Boy Scouts to stay behind, and if they did not hear from him in 15 minutes they were to make their way to a farmhouse off the road and fetch help. He then gripped his machete, hoisted his flashlight, and began penetrating the murky, snake and alligator infested wilderness. As he progressed through the choking brush he allegedly noticed an unpleasant smell in the air, which got steadily worse as he progressed. He continued hacking his way through the vegetation and thickets through the fog of stench that pervaded the air until he reportedly came to a clearing, where he signaled to the boys with his flashlight and then turned to notice what he would describe as an intense heat, as if an enormous oven door had suddenly opened to belch forth its fire. Disoriented, he looked up to see something blocking out the sky above, which he claimed was a large disc-like object measuring around 30 feet in diameter and ringed with glowing lights, and when the beam of his flashlight hit it he could ascertain that it was smooth, metallic, and had a concave bottom. This is where things would get really weird.
As the frightened scoutmaster started backing up in a growing panic, he claims that he heard a grinding sound like metal upon metal, which he soon realized was a hatch of some sort opening on the side of the unearthly craft. From within emerged what he describes as an intense red light that approached him and then transformed into a red mist, which engulfed him and caused him to instinctively cover his face. According to him, he then lost consciousness. Back at the car, the Boy Scouts, who had been tracking their scoutmaster’s progress by watching the glow of his bouncing flashlight beam in the gloom, purportedly saw a “big red ball of fire” through the trees, as well as “a series of red lights … a lot like flares.” That was when they decided to go for help.
Police arrived on the scene not long after, and were about to launch a search through the swamp for DesVergers when he came stumbling out of the thicket in a kind of daze, disoriented, mumbling incoherently and quite obviously very shaken, to the point that deputy sheriff Mott Partin would later say, “In all my 19 years of law-enforcement work, I’ve never seen anyone as terrified as he was.” Closer inspection of the man showed that his skin seemed lightly burned and the hair on his forearms singed, as well as a strange series of three burn marks in his scoutmaster’s cap. Making it all even odder still was that when some of the officers went to the clearing that DesVergers had come from they found his flashlight lying on the ground and a flattened ring of grass they could not explain.
DesVergers would be brought back to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office and that was when the case would attract the attention of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who was at the time part of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book, which was with investigating and analyzing UFO-related incidents in the name of national security. Ruppelt, who would later call it “one of the weirdest UFO reports that I came up against,” took his team to Florida in order to interview the witnesses and investigate the area of the alleged UFO encounter. Talking to the Boy Scouts he learned that they stood by their story of seeing bright red lights, and DesVergers also seemed very sincere, which impressed Ruppelt at first and of which he said he had the “immediate impression he was telling the truth.” The team also were able to find anomalous singed grass in the clearing where it had all gone down, which lab tests were unable to find an answer for, especially since in many instances the samples showed burned roots but intact upper leaves. Nor was there any conventional medical explanation for the victim’s singed hair, slightly burned skin, which was determined to have been caused by a “flash heat source,” or his damaged cap, thought to have been the work of “sparks of some kind,” all of which made it all even more promising, but cracks would slowly start to reveal themselves.
Red flags started going up when DesVergers began drumming up media attention for his alleged encounter, even going so far as to hire a press agent, and the story got more and more exaggerated the more he told it, adding in details such as that he had seen alien beings and even fought with them. A little digging into DesVergers’ past also brought up some warning signs, as he was found to be an insufferable teller of tall tales and as well as having gone AWOL during military service and also a convicted car thief. In other words, honesty was not really his thing, and although dishonest people can still potentially have a strange UFO encounter, Ruppelt was starting to get suspicious. Although there were certainly many oddities that could not easily be explained, and he couldn’t see how they could have been faked, Ruppelt would nevertheless eventually label it “the best hoax in UFO history.” He would go on to write of the account in his 1956 book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, and as much as he liked to think of it as a hoax, some of the aspects have never been satisfactorily explained, such as the weirdly singed grass roots and physical evidence, and so the debate has remained open as to whether it really happened or not, with one researcher Jeffrey Wilson saying:
Something unusual happened to the guy, and the physical evidence backed him up. That’s why I put the effort into checking this out. Why would you go to the trouble of faking something like this?” Why, and how, would he stage that? It doesn’t make any sense.
The case is still quite remarkable for the physical evidence left behind and the assertion by the witness even in later years in the face of withering criticism that this was all real. Regardless of whether DesVergers was a known liar or not, there seems to be a lot to unpack here, and it is important to remember that strange phenomena do not always necessarily happen to the most honest or reliable of people. What are we to make of his burns or the scorched grass, or the corroborating reports of the Boy Scouts he was with at the time? Was this perhaps a real event that he merely embellished and took advantage of over time, or was it merely the rantings and scheming of a known liar? The case was certainly enough to catch the attention of Project Blue Book and other researchers since, still unexplained, and whether it is real or not has managed to lodge itself firmly within some of the more curious and puzzling UFO cases there are
A great name for a band, an intriguing plot for a movie … but a scary thing to find out your military has developed. Yes, they claim it’s for bomb-sniffing … just like gunpowder was originally developed for medicinal purposes. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s find out.
“Finally, we developed a minimally-invasive surgical approach and mobile multi-unit electrophysiological recording system to tap into the neural signals in a locust brain and realize a biorobotic explosive sensing system. In sum, our study provides the first demonstration of how biological olfactory systems (sensors and computations) can be hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach.”
“Hijacked to develop a cyborg chemical sensing approach” means the brains of locusts – made famous by so many plagues – are connected via electrodes in their brains to tiny packs on their backs which transmit sensory images picked up by the locusts’ antennae and send them to a computer, which monitors the signals and sees when the grasshoppers detect the vapors of one of many different explosives, a process that takes a mere few hundred milliseconds, thanks to the 50,000 olfactory neurons in those sensitive antennae. That’s a brief summary of “Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots,” a non-peer-reviewed paper published this week in BioRxiv describing four years of research by a team led by Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now. — Exodus 10:3–6
7- They will come out of the graves with downcast eyes like an expanding swarm of locusts. (54- The Moon, 7)
And as when beneath the onrush of fire locusts take wing to flee unto a river, and the unwearied fire burneth them with its sudden oncoming, and they shrink down into the water; even so before Achilles was the sounding stream of deep-eddying Xanthus filled confusedly with chariots and with men. The Iliad
Yeah, yeah, yeah … they know all about your biblical, Quran and Iliad locust plagues, but that didn’t stop the U.S. Office of Naval Research from investing $750,000 back in 2016 to develop cyborg locusts … or was that the reason for the investment? While it’s accepted that cheap bomb detectors are in demand by police, the military and airport security for dealing with terrorists, and by governments like Vietnam and South Korea who still have active minefields left over from not-so-recent wars, it’s easy to imagine other uses for these bionic bugs whose main claim to fame is not bomb-detection but swarming crop devastation of the plague kind. Back in 2016, Raman saw other uses for the cyborg locusts as well.
“But the real key, he says, is the relative simplicity of the locust’s brain. That’s what allows it to be hijacked, which, if all goes right, will allow for remote explosive sensing. Raman believes that eventually cyborg locusts could be used for other sniff-centric tasks, even medical diagnoses that rely on smell.”
Send them to countries with bombs and mines right before the crops are ripe. Have them do their jobs detecting the explosives, then reward them by letting the cyborg locusts detect the wheat fields and let the destruction begin.
What could possibly go wrong?
“Something neither your fathers nor your forefathers have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
DE MAGISCHEGEBEURTENISSEN RONDOM MOUNT SHASTA ( VIDEO )
DE MAGISCHEGEBEURTENISSEN RONDOM MOUNT SHASTA ( VIDEO )
Er zijn van die speciale plekken op aarde en één daarvan is de Amerikaanse vulkaan Mount Shasta in Californië. Er wordt gezegd dat er zich onder de vulkaan een buitenaardse basis bevindt en de Indianen die ooit het gebied bevolkten spraken van de mystieke krachten van Mount Shasta.
Voor veel mensen is Mount Shasta een heel bijzondere plek en zij schrijven dan ook dingen zoals het volgende:
De vijfde chakra (gerelateerd aan onze keel), is gelegen in het gebied genaamd Mount Shasta, Noord-Californië. De eigenschappen van de keelchakra zijn communicatie, uitdrukking en verbinding tussen je geest, emoties en ziel. Wij hebben veel mensen horen vragen waarom Amerika het centrum van nieuwe ideeën en gedachten lijkt te zijn. De energie van Mt. Shasta is de poort waardoor communicatie kan worden gechanneld in ons collectief bewustzijn. Wij hebben het nu over communicatie van een hoger bewustzijnsniveau, communicatie over de geest en communicatie over het menselijk potentieel. Enkele van de zeer fundamentele leringen kwamen uit de streek van Mt. Shasta. Dus, de verantwoordelijkheid van Mount Shasta is het kanaliseren van de energie van wereldwijde communicatie.
De Mount Shasta is een vulkaan in de Cascade Range in Noord-Californië, VS. Hij heeft een hoogte van 4.317 m. De kegelvormige top is in sterke mate vergletsjerd en vertoont een zeer symmetrische vorm. In de buurt van de top vindt men verschillende zeer hete zwavelbronnen.
Er zijn vele engelen, lichtmeesters en hoger dimensionale wezens aanwezig en er is een sterke verbinding met Lemurië voelbaar, welke je ook kunt voelen en ervaren in Nederland op de Elohim Krachtplaats.
Zes jaar geleden schreven wij het volgende over Mount Shasta:
We hebben het afgelopen jaar veelvuldig voorbeelden gezien van UFO activiteit rondom vulkanen. Zoals de spectaculaire opnames rond de Popocatepetl vulkaan in Mexico.
In Amerika hebben we ook een vulkaan die veelvuldig in verband wordt gebracht met UFO activiteiten en dat is de Mount Shasta in de Amerikaanse staat Californië. Het is niet alleen bekend vanwege UFO’s, maar wordt ook wel één van de heilige plaatsen op deze planeet genoemd. Dit was reeds het geval in de tijd dat de indianen dit gebied bevolkten en ook vandaag de dag worden er mystieke krachten toegeschreven aan Mount Shasta.
Ook hier gaan al decennialang geruchten dat er zich onder Mount Shasta een buitenaardse basis zou bevinden en er worden uiteraard ook regelmatig UFO’s waargenomen.
Een voorbeeld hiervan zie je op de volgende foto, die geloof het of niet, gemaakt is door Google.
En nu komt Mount Shasta weer in het nieuws vanwege een bijzondere foto die op sociale media werd geplaatst door een medewerker van de Amerikaanse overheid.
Het is een foto die valt in de categorie: wolken die allesbehalve wolken lijken te zijn en waarvan we recentelijk meerdere voorbeelden hebben gezien. Wolken in een meestal wolkeloze hemel soms helemaal geen wolken blijken te zijn.
Wat het ook moge zijn, het is een prachtige opname en voor ufo onderzoeker Scott Waring bestaat er dan ook geen enkele twijfel en hebben we hier te maken met een gecloakt buitenaards ruimteschip.
In het licht van alle mysterieuze zaken rond Mount Shasta, geen vreemde conclusie en in de volgende video vertelt hij meer waarom hij denkt dat we hier te maken hebben met een ruimteschip.
Hij vertelt verder over het enorme ondergrondse gangenstelsel dat zich onder Mount Shasta bevindt en hoe daar op mysterieuze wijze mensen zijn verdwenen. Compleet verdwenen zonder dat er ooit iets van hen is teruggevonden.
Soms komen er volgens Scott mensen uit de tunnels die geheel in het wit gekleed zijn en omringd door een vreemd gloeiend licht. Deze mensen worden in verband gebracht met Saint Germain en er schijnt zelfs een soort complete religie te zijn rondom Mount Shasta.
Voor Scott is duidelijk dat degene die voor Saint Germain wordt aangezien niemand anders is dan een buitenaardse die afkomstig is van de ET basis diep onder de vulkaan.
En tot slot nog een deel uit een eerder artikel over iemand die een buitenaardse ontmoeting heeft in de buurt van Mount Shasta.
Ik reed op Highway 31, afkomstig van Klamath Falls. Toen ik het stadje Merril binnenreed zag ik een fel vierkant licht dat vanuit "iets" naar buiten scheen. Het licht leek te fel om afkomstig te kunnen zijn van een keukenvenster ofzo.
Op de achtergrond zag ik de silhouetten van een aantal huizen. Het licht leek afkomstig te zijn uit een veld dat ongeveer 25 meter bij mij vandaan lag, langs de kant van de weg. Alhoewel het donker was kon ik zien dat er een object stond dat de vorm had van een bord/schotel met een doorsnee van ongeveer 7 meter waarbij het leek alsof het aan één kant een soort inkeping had.
Het was ook aan die kant van het object dat ik meer dan twee, maar niet meer dan vier, kleine personen ontdekte. Ik kreeg de indruk dat ze aan het werk waren. Ik besteedde er niet al te veel aandacht aan, maar begon toch langzamer te rijden om beter te kunnen kijken.
Plotseling kreeg ik een gevoel dat ze geschrokken waren omdat ik ze had gezien. Ik tuurde in het donker, maar kon ze niet goed zien. Ik dacht dat het misschien een mix was van volwassenen en tieners. In ieder geval stopten ze met wat ze aan het doen waren en bleven stilstaan.
Ondertussen was ik de stad ingereden en verloor ik ze even uit het zicht. Ik reed in een gehuurde bestelbus met daarachter een aanhanger. Waarom weet ik niet, maar ik besloot om te keren en terug te gaan om beter te kunnen kijken. Het viel niet mee om om te keren met die aanhanger en tegen de tijd dat ik weer op die plek terug was, waren er ongeveer drie minuten verstreken.
Tot mijn verbazing was het object weg, er hing alleen nog een soort mist. Ik hing met mijn hoofd uit het raam om naar de lucht te kijken en ik zag een rood knipperend licht zoals je dat ziet op torens en dergelijke, als waarschuwing voor vliegtuigen. Het hing ongeveer op een hoogte van twintig meter. Ik staarde ernaar en besefte dat er niets was waar dit licht aan vastzat, het was alsof het los in de lucht zweefde.
Toen stopte het licht met knipperen en verschenen er rode en witte lichten rondom de hele omtrek van het object. Ze flitsten aan en uit in een bepaalde volgorde, waardoor het leek alsof de lichten bewogen rondom het object. Dat was het moment waarop ik zeker wist dat het een schotel was.
De voorkant, tenminste ik neem aan dat het de voorkant was, hing onder een hoek van 20 graden naar beneden en toen begon het langzaam weg te vliegen, ongeveer met de snelheid van een helikopter. Ik moest lachen in mijzelf, want ik bedacht dat ze dit misschien wel deden om mij te laten geloven dat het een helikopter was. Ik luisterde met gespitste oren om te horen wat voor soort geluid het maakte, maar er was nauwelijks iets te horen.
Eerst vloog het naar het zuidwesten. Toen een paar kilometer verder veranderde het van koers naar een richting waar Mount Shasta ongeveer ligt, schat ik. Ik kon het object nog een tijdlang volgen en toen verdween het uit zicht.
Ik bleef nog een beetje in de buurt rondrijden aan de rand van de stad, de plek waar het object was geland. Ik merkte toen nog een paar dingen op die ik vreemd vond, maar die misschien niets met mijn waarneming te maken hadden.
Zoals een man die voor een groot raam zonder gordijnen zat in het huis dat het dichtst bij de landingsplek stond. Hij leek totaal niet te merken dat ik probeerde met een grote combinatie een honderdtachtig graden draai te maken op zijn gazon. Het leek alsof hij in een soort trance was of iets dergelijks.
Ik vervolgde mijn trip. Toen ik een stukje verder was verloor de auto bijna alle vermogen en was niet vooruit te branden. Ik ging zo langzaam dat ik bijna stilstond. Ik had nog nooit eerder in dat gebied een probleem gehad met een signaal voor mijn mobiele telefoon, maar nu was dit wel het geval. Ik kon niet bellen en ook geen sms versturen.
Tijdens het vervolg van de rit naar Reno voelde ik dat ik geobserveerd werd en dat ik niet alleen was. Ik heb dat gevoel nog steeds, tot op de dag van vandaag. Als ik nu ’s morgens vroeg in het donker buiten loop voel ik me niet op mijn gemak. Ik begrijp dat niet want toen ik die ontmoeting had voelde ik helemaal geen angst.
Sinds die ontmoeting werkt mijn nieuwe camera ook niet meer. Ik had er die dag helaas geen batterijen in en die heb ik nu al een paar keer vervangen, maar hij doet helemaal niets meer. Ik denk dat ze die op de één of andere manier kapotgemaakt hebben.
Tot zover het verhaal van die vreemde ontmoeting in de buurt van Mount Shasta.
Iemand die ook veel ervaringen heeft met UFO’s rondom Mount Shasta is de auteur Brian Wallenstein. Hij heeft er een dik boek over geschreven van ruim 600 pagina’s met de titel “Mount Shasta Sightings”.
Hieronder volgt een vorig jaar opgenomen interview met hem over zijn boek en zijn eigen UFO waarnemingen.
What's wrong with this satellite image of Saunders Island?
What's wrong with this satellite image of Saunders Island?
There is a list of satellite map images with missing or unclear data. Some locations on free, publicly viewable satellite map services have such issues due to having been intentionally digitally obscured or blurred for various reasons.
Now take a look at the imagery of Saunders Island, a crescent-shaped island 8.8 km (5.5 mi) long, lying between Candlemas Island and Montagu Island near Antarctica and you see that the images having been intentionally digitally obscured by Google Earth.
We may wonder why they have digitally obscured a part of the island or it must be that they have to hide something!
Something like a never-seen-before lake of bubbling lava under the island?
The shocking discovery was made by the British Antarctic Survey using powerful satellite imagery of the Southern Hemisphere.
The Antarctic survey confirmed not only the presence of molten lava in the crater of Mount Michael, an active volcano on Saunders Island but this lava lake is the eighth of its kind to be found on Earth.
This UFO video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It was recorded over Winnipeg, Canada on 13th February 2020.
Witness report:
My daughter and I recorded a UFO last Thursday night in the sky to the west of our home. It was a sphere of light in the sky. Two other light spheres appeared as well shortly after we began recording. The lights would fade in and out. White lights seem to briefly shoot out from one side of the middle light. The lights stayed in the same location until a military aircraft began flying toward it. The lights started to fade more to the west after 9 minutes or so when the plane was flying toward it. We stopped recording when it wasn’t visible. If I edited it to shorten the clip, could I send somewhere for someone to look at it? I apologize in advance for my daughters disgusting language.
Amysterious event takes place, in a land considered “far away” by most. Hundreds of children witness something they cannot explain, but no one believes them. The few adults present, teachers no less, are coerced into silence. Students vanish into thin air. The presence of a foreign unknown military force. An idealistic American scientist travels to the under side of the world looking for answers, eventually disgraced, he takes his own life. UFO sightings fluctuate, a man reports a UFO sighting and unusual experience, claiming that his car is being sucked into ethereal lights on an isolated road. Three days later, a fatal car accident occurs at the exact location where the strange event took place. You might be thinking I’m describing the events of some sci-fi drama series, only a great many individuals, to this day, would attest that all, if not most of these claims were entirely true. The least disputed detail of all the strangeness, is the sighting of an unidentified flying object, a flying saucer.
It was 11:00 am, Wednesday, April 6th, 1966, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. What no doubt may have presented itself as an ordinary day at Westall High school, would have drastically changed the moment voices began to shout, “look up in the sky, it’s a flying saucer!”
Immediately, a sense of frenzy, fear, wonderment and exhilaration resonated among the students, because as many eyewitnesses will tell you, as they looked to the clear blue morning sky, there was a silver flying saucer performing aerial feats beyond the capabilities of the (publicly known) aircraft of the day.
As hundreds of students charged toward an area nicknamed ‘The Grange’ where a paddock converged onto a grove of pine trees (today a nature reserve) beyond the edge of the school, numerous eyewitness reports claim that the flying saucer actually lowered into the tall grass. Causing a circular impression that remained after the UFO ascended, some noting also a swirling inner pattern. The UFO was not alone in the sky, according to many eyewitnesses, a number of small airplanes (claims as high as 5) were tailing it. (Though there were no reports of any unusual activity made by Air traffic control or the Royal Australian Air force. To this day, the alleged ‘5 pilots’ have never come forward).
There have since been claims that children, one girl identified only as “Tanya” and others that were closest to the unidentified object when it made its descent, passed out and lay unconscious on the ground around it. Eyewitnesses make the claim that even an ambulance attended the scene to see to the students seemingly suffering physiological effects of the experience. It is claimed by one eyewitness, that “Tanya” was never seen again, after succumbing to some physiological effect from the experience, never returning to school after the event on April 6th.
All up, it is believed the aerial chase, the landing and high speed escape/disappearance happened within a window of approximately 20 minutes. 20 minutes, according to most of the vocal eyewitnesses that has profoundly effected their lives.
(Dr. James E. McDonald)
In interviews conducted by American Physicist/Ufologist, Dr. James E. McDonald roughly one year later, he managed to speak with science teacher Andrew Greenwood who was there that fateful day. Greenwood upon realizing the frenzy sweeping up outside among the students, headed outside to get a look at what they were reacting to. Andrew Greenwood described the UFO as a “round, silver object about the size of a car with a metal rod sticking up in the air.” He then remarked that one of the first things to occur after the event took place, was the headmaster instructed all students to return to their classrooms, after which Greenwood said “he [the headmaster] gave the school a lecture and told the children they would be severely punished if they talked about this matter and told the staff they could lose their jobs if they mentioned it at all.”
From there, according to those who tried to speak out about the event, an element of secrecy and suppression arose. Military vehicles were seen around the area, the site was under total lockdown. Ironically, exactly as virtually every film surrounding such an event would have you believe. Men in camouflaged uniforms were reportedly seen by dozens of the eyewitnesses still vocal on the issue now more than half a century on. The unusual thing about men in camouflage is that in Australia during the 1960’s, neither the Australian nor the British had incorporated it into the military uniforms. Suggesting a possible involvement of either a group, outside of a national government, or even the U.S government which did/does have a presence on Australian soil.
There is talk of suppression of information surrounding this incident. I don’t know how things were managed at the time, perhaps due to the nature of news in the 1960’s it simply did not receive the coverage it might if it occurred today. Though, anecdotally, I would have to agree that something does seem unusual about the records. In researching the event through the usual channels, archives of Australian public newspaper records, the entire year of 1966 in Australia seems oddly slim. Searching terms like “UFO”, “Westall”, “Flying Saucer” were actually proving fruitless. So then I changed the search purely based on date.
In Melbourne, 1966, possibly by coincidence, 1966 draws a blank. So then I started checking other states, in case stories made it to further away Newspapers. When I looked up ‘The Canberra Times’, checking through dates around early April I didn’t find any mention of the Westall UFO event (though perhaps I was just lazily looking in all the wrong places). I did however, find this story, reported in Canberra, about a story that happened in Victoria, approximately 2 hours NW from the Westall incident, mere days after the UFO was sighted at the back of the school:
“MELBOURNE, Monday. — The current world-wide spate of sightings of flying saucers was brought closer to home today by a report by a Maryborough man. Mr Ronald F. Sullivan, a 38-year-old builder of Victoria Street, Maryborough, said he had seen an unidentified flying object on the Bendigo to St Arnaud Road last Monday. Three days later a youth was killed when his car ran off the road at the place where Mr Sullivan said he had seen the object.
Mr Sullivan said, “the headlights on my car were suddenly diverted to the right, for no apparent reason. And if I had followed them I would have run off the straight stretch of road. The fact that I am an experienced driver, and know the district well, saved my life. I managed to stop before I crashed.
Then I saw a display of gaseous lights in all colours of the spectrum in a nearby paddock. The object rose about 10 feet in the air. It later disappeared”, Mr Sullivan said.
Mr Sullivan said he drove on to Wycheproof where his headlights were checked and found to be in perfect order. He went to the crash scene with police on Friday. “We all noticed there was a depression about five inches deep in the freshly ploughed paddock, about 50 feet from the fence. It was about five feet in diameter.” Mr Sullivan said. Police at Maryborough, Castlemaine, Bealiba and Newstead said today they had all heard reports of flying saucers in the area. They have not been able to find the cause of the accident in which the youth, Gary Taylor, 19, of Carnegie, died.”
—THE CANBERRA TIMES, TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1966
It’s also claimed that the chemistry teacher at Westall High, Barbara Robins, had access to a camera and was hastily snapping photographs of the UFO during the 20 minute frenzy. There are a great many photographs claiming to be taken during this event, but when I cross referenced them (reverse google search) every single one was linked to other UFO sightings, though that is common in many news stories, surrounding issues even outside of the paranormal. It’s been suggested that Barbara Robins had her camera and film confiscated and was coerced into silence.
Ultimately, in my opinion, this is more a story about suppression than anything else. It has endless possible explanations, but these are the top four I could come up with.
Mass Hysteria, somehow something potentially non-existent has been blown way out of proportion. Disingenuous recollections of a misinterpreted reality. This is actually the least likely scenario, in my mind.
Extraterrestrial or Ultraterrestrial life with access to highly advanced technology, presented itself to hundreds of Australian schoolchildren. For whatever reason, some “agency” (government or otherwise) wants to keep it a secret, suppressed knowledge.
Certain groups on this planet have access to technology that far surpasses what is currently available to the masses. Information is power, and the power is being kept from the general people. Those that rule the world don’t want individuals to be self-sufficient and able to thrive off of the nipple of “the system“.
The whole thing was setup. The entire experience was orchestrated. “They” wanted to test how a group would react to something like this, then how they could suppress it.
Some estimations to the total number of witnesses of UFO phenomenon (of varying levels and vicinity of encounters) in Victoria around the 6th of April, 1966 are approximately 300 individuals. 300 individuals that saw “a flying saucer” at a very low altitude. This wasn’t a craft people were squinting to see through the clouds, this was something narrowly avoiding telegraph poles (as one witness claimed). All said and done, in this account of strange events, there is one major thing to ask yourself. Someone in all of this is lying, that much is certain. The question that only you can truly ask yourself is, who? Did the students decide to create some charade? For the fun of it? For fame? They didn’t achieve any, the story barely got out. Or is the reason that seemingly “military” types were involved almost instantly, liaising with the powers that be, because certain people know certain things, that the rest of us are not allowed to understand.
If you think time will reveal the answers naturally, that the truth will rise to the surface on it’s own accord, like cream, remember this event happened over half a century ago. Many of the eyewitnesses have spent their entire lives waiting to make sense of what they saw, like something would emerge from the woodwork and link the pieces together. That day, unfortunately, has yet to come. Unless something changes, something gives out, the secrets will remain secrets, dormant and unknown.
According to UFO-Hunters.com as of the year 2020, there are over 200220 sightings reported and that number expected to continue to grow as more people around the world continue to more avidly monitor and record the activity of the skies.
Iron Age Temple Uncovered in Jerusalem Challenges Biblical Claim
Iron Age Temple Uncovered in Jerusalem Challenges Biblical Claim
The famous Temple of Solomonmight not have been the first or only temple in the Holy Land.
Dating to around 900 BC, an Iron Agetemple located near Jerusalem negates the long-held idea the ancient Kingdom of Judah (southern Israel) only had one temple, the First Temple, better known as Solomon's Temple, which was operational between 10th century BC until it was destroyed in 586 BC.
The Iron Age site of Tel Motza, about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) outside Jerusalem, has been known of since the early 1990s and archaeologists found the remains of a settlement dated to the Neolithic period (about 6000 BC). In 2012 a settlement from the First Temple period was discovered containing a cultic structure and 36 wheat granaries, indicating that Motza was part of an ancient economic center, and it is the presence of this one ancient religious complex that challenges the history of Judah presented in the Bible.
The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem.
Judah Was Not As Well Established As The Bible States
A new study of the temple by co-researcher Shua Kisilevitz, a doctoral student of archaeology at Tel Aviv University in Israel and an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and review co-author Oded Lipschits, the director of the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, was published in the January/February issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review magazine. In the article the researchers say the temple had been built about 900 BC and that they think it operated until the early 6th century BC.
And where this discovery is controversial is that the existence of this temple means that people living close to Jerusalem had their own place of worship, a cultic temple, which in itself suggests the rule of the Jerusalem high priests was “not so strong”, and that the kingdom was “not so well established” as the Bible leads us to believe, Kisilevitz and Lipschits, told Live Science .
Oldest Known Horse Depictions In Judah
A report in the Daily Mail detailing the study says the ancient temple could have held about 150 congregants who worshiped the god Yahweh, but they also used idols to communicate with the divine in the same period as the First Temple. This contradicts the Jewish Bible that details the religious reforms of King Hezekiah and King Josiah, who consolidated worship at Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, and allegedly stopped ‘all’ cultic practices out of its walls.
Kisilevitz told Live Science that the temple was a rectangular building with an open courtyard at the front that would have been a focal point for cultic worship, and inside they found a stone built sacrificial altar near pits for dead animal bodies. Two human-like and two horse-like clay figurines were discovered smashed and buried in the courtyard, which was thought to have been associated with a rainfall, fertility and harvest ritual of some kind. The researchers added that the horse-like figurines may be the “oldest known depictions of horses from the Iron Age of Judah.”
Figurine of a horse found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple in excavation site.
The teams of archaeologists at Tel Motza unearthed dozens of grain storage silos (granaries) and associated administrative and religious buildings. This informs us that Tel Motza sold grain to the nearby Jerusalem. Over time, the settlement is believed to have become an agricultural and economic “powerhouse,” the researchers wrote in the magazine piece. They also speculate that perhaps the temple was permitted to exist by the high priests at Solomon’s Temple, because it was part of the granary and didn’t threaten centralized control of the kingdom.
During the time this temple was functional, new political groups and alliances emerged in the Levant, and it is believed that in the face of these changes people maintained traditional religious practices. The researchers said this was evident in the temple’s artifacts and architecture, which they say are reminiscent of religious traditions from the ancient Near East that had been practiced since the third millennium BC.
Figurine of a ram found in Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site.
The discovery and analysis of this ancient Iron Age temple not only enlightens historians on the state formation of Judah during this period. It also determines that the state was nowhere near as centralized as it would later become and that in its formative days it depended not solely on the administrative elite at Solomon’s Temple, but on trading relationships with nearby settlements like Tel Motza, and maybe others yet to be discovered.
Top image: Main: The Tel Motza Iron Age temple excavation site in Jerusalem. Source: Skyview / Israel Antiquities Authority . Inset: Ancient figurines of people found at Tel Motza. Source: Clara Amit / Israel Antiquities Authority
De neanderthalers waren een stuk verfijnder en beschaafder dan eeuwenlang werd aangenomen, blijkt eens te meer uit een nieuw onderzoek.
De wetenschap verwijst het cliché van de neanderthaler als een menselijke ondersoort in alle betekenissen van dat woord almaar nadrukkelijker naar de prullenmand. Nieuw onderzoek stelt dat beeld van een primitief wezen, dat alleen maar met een steen in een hand gruizige keelklanken zou brommen, nog wat meer bij aan de hand van een gelijkenis met een wel erg menselijk aanvoelend ritueel.
Bloemen en kransen
Voor het eerst in twintig jaar werd in het eldorado van de neanderthalexperts, de Shanidargrot in de Koerdische Autonome Regio in Irak, weer een geleed skelet opgegraven: een geraamte waarvan botten, beenderen en andere lichaamsdelen nog grotendeels met elkaar verbonden waren. En dat opent nieuwe onderzoeksperspectieven rond een hypothese die specialist Ralph Solecki in de jaren 50 van de vorige eeuw formuleerde. Uit de aanwezigheid van pollen in begraafplaatsen leidde deze Amerikaanse archeoloog toen af dat neanderthalers, net zoals de mens, met bloemen afscheid namen van een overledene.
De botten van de linkerhand van een neanderthaler, gevonden in de Shanidargrot. Credits: Graeme Barker
Dat leidde tot een decennialange controverse, want niet alle wetenschappers waren ervan overtuigd dat de bloemen wezen op doodsrituelen, laat staan begrafenissen tout court. En bij uitbreiding twijfelden zij sterk aan de veronderstelling dat neanderthalers ook maar enige culturele verfijning van die orde hadden. De nieuwe vondst door een team van de universiteiten van Cambridge, Birkbeck en Liverpool (John Moores) maakt het nu mogelijk dit stukje neanderthalerbeschaving verder te verkennen met de nieuwste technieken, zoals CT-scans en DNA-onderzoek.
Culturele complexiteit
‘Inscripties in grotten, decoratieve schelpen en klauwen van roofvogels… De voorbije jaren zijn er steeds meer aanwijzingen en bewijzen gekomen dat neanderthalers een stuk gesofisticeerder waren dan werd gedacht,’ stelt onderzoekleidster Emma Pomeroy. ‘Wat hun dodenrituelen betreft waren we tot nog toe aangewezen op decenniaoude resten en onderzoeken met intussen verouderde technieken. Maar als nu blijkt dat zij de Shanidargrot inderdaad gebruikten als een kerkhof, met bijhorende rituelen bovendien, dan wijst dat op een culturele complexiteit van een nog net iets hogere orde en een grotere gelijkenis met de mens dan verondersteld.’
Findings From NASA's Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery
Findings From NASA's Juno Update Jupiter Water Mystery
The JunoCam imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this image of Jupiter's southern equatorial region on Sept. 1, 2017. The image is oriented so Jupiter's poles (not visible) run left-to-right of frame. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill › Full image and caption
The mission publishes its first stream of data on the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere - the first findings on the gas giant's water since the agency's 1995 Galileo mission.
NASA's Juno mission has provided its first science results on the amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere. Published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy, the Juno results estimate that at the equator, water makes up about 0.25% of the molecules in Jupiter's atmosphere - almost three times that of the Sun. These are also the first findings on the gas giant's abundance of water since the agency's 1995 Galileo mission suggested Jupiter might be extremely dry compared to the Sun (the comparison is based not on liquid water but on the presence of its components, oxygen and hydrogen, present in the Sun).
An accurate estimate of the total amount of water in Jupiter's atmosphere has been on the wish lists of planetary scientists for decades: The figure in the gas giant represents a critical missing piece to the puzzle of our solar system's formation. Jupiter was likely the first planet to form, and it contains most of the gas and dust that wasn't incorporated into the Sun.
The leading theories about its formation rest on the amount of water the planet soaked up.Water abundance also has important implications for the gas giant's meteorology (how wind currents flow on Jupiter) and internal structure. While lightning - a phenomenon typically fueled by moisture - detected on Jupiter by Voyager and other spacecraft implied the presence of water, an accurate estimate of the amount of water deep within Jupiter's atmosphere remained elusive.
Thick white clouds are present in this JunoCam image of Jupiter's equatorial zone. At microwave frequencies, these clouds are transparent, allowing Juno's Microwave Radiometer to measure water deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.
The image was acquired during Juno's flyby on Dec. 16, 2017. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill Full image and caption
Before the Galileo probe stopped transmitting 57 minutes into its Jovian descent in December 1995, it radioed out spectrometer measurements of the amount of water in the gas giant's atmosphere down to a depth of about 75 miles (120 kilometers), where the atmospheric pressure reached about 320 pounds per square inch (22 bar). The scientists working on the data were dismayed to find ten times less water than expected.
Even more surprising: The amount of water the Galileo probe measured appeared to be still increasing at the greatest depth measured, far below where theories suggest the atmosphere should be well mixed. In a well-mixed atmosphere, the water content is constant across the region and more likely to represent a global average; in other words, it's more likely to be representative of water planetwide. When combined with an infrared map obtained at the same time by a ground-based telescope, the results suggested the probe mission may have just been unlucky, sampling an unusually dry and warm meteorological spot on Jupiter.
"Just when we think we have things figured out, Jupiter reminds us how much we still have to learn," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Juno's surprise discovery that the atmosphere was not well mixed even well below the cloud tops is a puzzle that we are still trying to figure out. No one would have guessed that water might be so variable across the planet."
Measuring Water From Above
A rotating, solar-powered spacecraft, Juno launched in 2011. Because of the Galileo probe experience, the mission seeks to obtain water abundance readings across large regions of the immense planet. A new kind of instrument for deep space planetary exploration, Juno's Microwave Radiometer (MWR) observes Jupiter from above using six antennas that measure atmospheric temperature at multiple depths simultaneously. The Microwave Radiometer takes advantage of the fact that water absorbs certain wavelengths of microwave radiation, the same trick used by microwave ovens to quickly heat food. The measured temperatures are used to constrain the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, as both molecules absorb microwave radiation.
The Juno science team used data collected during Juno's first eight science flybys of Jupiter to generate the findings. They initially concentrated on the equatorial region because the atmosphere there appears more well-mixed, even at depth, than in other regions. From its orbital perch, the radiometer was able to collect data from a far greater depth into Jupiter's atmosphere than the Galileo probe - 93 miles (150 kilometers), where the pressure reaches about 480 psi (33 bar).
"We found the water in the equator to be greater than what the Galileo probe measured," said Cheng Li, a Juno scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. "Because the equatorial region is very unique at Jupiter, we need to compare these results with how much water is in other regions."
Northward Bound
Juno's 53-day orbit is slowly moving northward, as intended, bringing more of Jupiter's northern hemisphere into sharper focus with each flyby. The science team is eager to see how atmospheric water content varies by latitude and region, as well as what the cyclone-rich poles can tell them about the gas giant's global water abundance.
Juno's 24th science flyby of Jupiter occurred on Feb 17. The next science flyby takes place on April 10, 2020.
"Every science flyby is an event of discovery," said Bolton. "With Jupiter there is always something new. Juno has taught us an important lesson: We need to get up close and personal to a planet to test our theories."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Italian Space Agency contributed the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ka-Band translator system. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.
The Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico will gather data to be analysed by the Seti Institute. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty
Astronomers will sweep the entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life for the first time, using 28 giant radio telescopes in an unprecedented hunt for alien civilisations.
The project is a collaboration between the privately-funded Seti Institute and the Very Large Array observatory in New Mexico, one of the world’s most powerful radio observatories. Gaining real-time access to all the data gathered by VLA is considered a major coup for scientists hunting extraterrestrial lifeforms and an indication that the field has “gone mainstream”.
Normal astronomy operations will continue at the VLA, which was featured in the 1997 film Contact, but under the new arrangement all data will be duplicated and fed through a dedicated supercomputer that will search for beeps, squawks or other signatures of distant technology.
“The VLA is being used for an all-sky survey and we kind of go along for the ride,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley Seti centre. “It allows us to in parallel conduct a Seti survey.
“Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and [our] telescopes can play a major role in answering it,” said Tony Beasley, director of The National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which runs the VLA.
The first phase of the project, installing new cables, has been funded by John Giannandrea, a senior Apple executive and trustee of the Seti Institute, and Carol Giannandrea.
The VLA project is one of a wave of upcoming Seti initiatives sketched out at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Seattle on Friday.
Jill Tarter, an emeritus researcher at the Seti Institute, gave updates on Panoseti, a proposed observatory in the prototype stage of development designed to continuously watch a large portion of the sky. If funding is secured, Panoseti will comprise two geodesic domes covered in half-metre lenses, giving it the appearance of a giant pair of insect eyes. The ability to simultaneously watch a vast expanse of sky would make it uniquely suited to spotting transient signals, such as the flash of a distant powerful laser. “To catch that kind of thing you really do want to be looking when the signal comes your way,” said Tarter ahead of her talk.
The veteran Seti scientist said the field had been boosted in the past decade by the discovery that about a fifth of stars host planets in the “habitable zone”.
“Now that there might be more habitable real estate out there than we ever imagined early on … it seems to make this next question about intelligent life more realistic,” she said. “It’s not as far on the fringes as it once was – it’s almost mainstream.”
Others are hunting for less intelligent varieties of alien life. Speaking at the same session at AAAS, Victoria Meadows, who leads Nasa’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington, described observations planned with the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch next year.
Three Earth-sized planets orbiting a cool, dim star called Trappist-1 in the constellation of Aquarius will be high up on the hit list. Computer models suggest the Trappist-1 system is among the most promising for finding planets with atmospheres and temperatures that would enable liquid water to exist on the surface.
“The James Webb Telescope will be able to tell us whether they have atmospheres like the Earth or Venus,” said Meadows. “It gives us our first real chance to search for gases given off by life on another planet. We’re basically going to get to study Earth’s cousins.”
Siemion also announced the second tranche of results from the $100m (£76m) Breakthrough Listen Initiative: no alien transmissions have been detected so far.
The latest survey, the most comprehensive to date of radio emissions, included the first search of the “Earth transit zone”. The transit zone search targeted 20 stars in positions where the hypothetical inhabitants of these solar systems would be able to observe the Earth’s shadow flickering across the sun. This method of detection has allowed astronomers to identify thousands of exoplanets and determine whether their conditions are potentially habitable.
“This turns that around and says, ‘What if some other civilisation were watching our sun?’” said Siemion.
If there is, it is either watching quietly or watching from some of the other 200bn stars in the Milky Way.
As the latest technology advances bring scientists a step closer to answering the question of whether anyone or anything is out there, there are still issues to be ironed out over best practice in the event that an alien civilisation is detected.
Stephen Hawking warned against attempting any form of contact, suggesting the outcome for humans would not necessarily be good. Siemion disagrees. “Personally I think we absolutely should and I think without a doubt, we would,” he said. “Part of being human is wanting to reach out into the unknown and wanting to reach out and make connections.”
He is less decisive about what Earth’s message should be, however. “I don’t know … I spend absolutely zero time thinking about that,” he said. “I guess I would just say, ‘Hello’.”
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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.