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...
05-03-2020
First Extraterrestrial Protein Discovered, Scientists Claim
First Extraterrestrial Protein Discovered, Scientists Claim
As far as we know, we’re the only life in this solar system. While there are other places in the solar system where we think life could exist, nothing has been proven or even been close to proven. At this point we can’t say for sure it’s even possible for extraterrestrial life to exist outside our little bubble. That might soon change, however. Researchers claim that they have recently discovered the first-known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite that fell to Earth 30 years ago.
Over the last few years, other building blocks of life have been discovered in meteorites from our Solar System. Cyanide, ribose, and amino acids have all been discovered in space rocks here on Earth. This latest find would be the first-ever whole extraterrestrial protein.
The paper detailing the discovery was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, and it has yet to be peer-reviewed, so bear that in mind. The discovery sill has to be replicated by other scientists to prove that it is, in fact, an extraterrestrial protein. If it does check out, it would be a clue that there very well could be extraterrestrial life (of some sort) here in this solar system. While it wouldn’t be direct evidence of extraterrestrial life, proteins are necessary building blocks of life and it would show that they can form outside of Earth.
The meteorite that contains the alleged extraterrestrial protein fell in Algeria in 1990
The meteorite, named Acfer 086, landed in Algeria in 1990. Since then, it has been kept in a museum. It had been analyzed previously, but the authors of the paper decided to attack it again with “state-of-the-art” mass spectrometry. According to ScienceAlert, astronomer and chemist Chenoa Tremblay of CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science in Australia, who was not involved in the research says:
“In general, they’re taking a meteor that has been preserved by a museum and has been analysed previously. And they are modifying the techniques that they’re using in order to be able to detect amino acid inside of this meteor, but in a higher signal ratio.”
According to the paper, the researchers found the amino acid glycine, which had already been discovered in the meteorite, at a higher signal ratio than previously found. They also found that the glycine was bound to other elements including iron and lithium. After modeling the structure they realized that they had an entirely new alien protein, which they named hemolithin.
The protein has a chemical composition found in long-period comets.
While hemolithin is similar in structure to proteins found on Earth, its ratio of deuterium to hydrogen isn’t found on Earth. It is found, however, in long-period comets. The researchers argue that this protein likely formed in the proto-solar disc, some 4.6 billion years ago.
They do acknowledge that they may be completely wrong, although they don’t think it’s likely. Another explanation is that this isn’t a protein at all, but some other type of polymer, but the researchers say this is an outside possibility.
It’s a bit too early to get over-excited about this. After all, it still has to pass peer-review. But there’s a good chance that this is actually an extraterrestrial protein. That would mean that the chances of extraterrestrial life in our Solar System just became a bit more plausible.
A snapshot of a distant exoplanet gives astronomers an idea of what it looks like. A snapshot of a distant exoplanet as it passes in front of its sun and light shines around it gives astronomers an idea of what the planet and its atmosphere are made of. If we assume there’s intelligent life on some of these planets, we can also assume that they’re looking back at us and trying to figure out the same thing. If we could only look back from deep space at Earth as it passes in front of the Sun, we could see the signatures of life that would tell us if an exoplanet is our cosmic twin – identical or fraternal. Last year, astronomers figured out a way to do without the need for a spaceship looking back. Instead, they looked into a giant mirror during a lunar eclipse. Wait … what?
“Observations of the Earthshine off the Moon allow for the unique opportunity to measure the large-scale Earth atmosphere. Another opportunity is realized during a total lunar eclipse which, if seen from the Moon, is like a transit of the Earth in front of the Sun. We thus aim at transmission spectroscopy of an Earth transit by tracing the solar spectrum during the total lunar eclipse of January 21, 2019.”
As described in a paper published this week in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and summarized in a press release, lead author Klaus Strassmeier from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam firgured out that a total lunar eclipse on January 21, 2019 – when the Earth passed directly between the Moon and the Sun — was a total ‘solar’ eclipse to anyone looking at the Sun (with protective glasses, of course) from the lunar surface. Since we know (or at least can confidently assume) that no one did that, Strassmeier and astronomers using the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona took advantage of the dimmed yet reflective surface of the Moon and looked into a mirror image that showed Earth’s atmosphere as sunlight passed through it around the edges – a filtered light with the appropriate name “Earthshine.”
Large Binocular Telescope
(Credit: NASA)
“The Earth’s atmosphere contains many by-products of biological activity, such as oxygen and ozone in association with water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide. These biogenic molecules present attractive narrow molecular bands at optical and near infrared wavelengths for detection in atmospheres of other planets.”
Our Earthshine also showed traces of sodium, calcium and potassium — all elements generated by or needed by human life on the planet. A similar planetshine would thus indicate that an exoplanet has or is capable of hosting similar life forms or even humans, once we figure out how to travel that far.
Besides the Large Binocular Telescope, the astronomers needed the Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument (PEPSI) to separate tiny spectral-line absorptions of the Earth’s atmosphere from the normal solar spectrum. That combination allowed them to find two elements that don’t belong in Earth’s atmosphere — manganese and barium. Instead of from Earth, the astronomers believe these two chemicals came from the Sun.
Lunar eclipse
“To understand this phenomenon further, the researchers plan to study the Sun’s atmosphere more closely to trace those two conspicuous chemical elements. Doing so will reveal how they traveled from the center of the Sun to its limb, leaving an imprint on Earth’s upper atmosphere, the researchers say.”
In an interview with Inverse, the astronomers admitted they have much more to learn before they’ll feel confident identifying an exoplanet as a potential Earth clone. That should not take anything away from the fantastic accomplishment of using the Moon as a mirror to check ourselves out.
When astronomers decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, many who memorized the names of nine planets in in school and spent hours building models of them for science projects were upset that all of this high-quality education was for naught. This was never a concern with the Moon, which didn’t have a name to memorize nor any competition in orbit around the Earth … until recently. Astronomers have discovered the second known mini-moon circling the planet, and there’s probably more. Will there be time to add it before the next science fair? Will it still be around by then?
Kacper Wierzchos @WierzchosKacper Feb 25 BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images. https://twitter.com/i/status/1232460436634656769
On February 15, 2020, astronomers Kacper Wierzchos and Teddy Pruyne at the Catalina Sky Survey operating out of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson spotted what they believed to be a mini-moon orbiting Earth. They quickly made over 30 more observations in two days to confirm the discovery of a space rock measuring a mere 6 to 12 feet (1.9 to 3.5 meters) in diameter – so small that it may not have been discovered had it not been reflecting sunlight like its really big brother. They quickly commissioned a photographer and captured the first image of the mini-moon – now called 2020 CD3 or C26FED2 – and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Minor Planet Center announced it to the world.
“Orbit integrations indicate that this object is temporarily bound to the Earth. No link to a known artificial object has been found. Further observations and dynamical studies are strongly encouraged.”
Wait … what? “Temporarily bound”? Maybe you should scrap the ‘Earth and its Moons’ project completely and go with an old reliable volcano. It turns out that 2020 CD3 and the only other mini-moon — 2006 RH120 – don’t stay in Earth orbit forever. In fact, they don’t even stay for a few years. 2006 RH120 was only in Earth orbit from September 2006 to June 2007, and 2020 CD3, while it’s been around since around 2017, will probably leave by April 2020. That’s no joke – merely a sign of what the two mini-moons really are — tiny near-Earth asteroids that get captured by Earth’s gravity for a short time before slipping back out into space or being consumed by the atmosphere.
Or are they something else?
“Although we still have no idea entirely what the object is, experts believe it is either a rare space rock or a manmade object that has become locked by our planet’s gravity.”
Curiosmos reports that the highly-reflective surface of 2020 CD3 has some questioning whether it’s truly a space rock or if it might be a missing satellite, rocket part or other piece of space junk. It may be difficult to identify 2020 CD3 before April because it’s moving away from Earth.
“It came just in time to witness humanity fight the coronavirus. Coincidence…I think not.”
If it’s not an NEO and not one of ours, Scott Waring of ET Data Base suggests it’s one of theirs – with ‘them’ being aliens monitoring the spread of the coronavirus on Earth. Farfetched? Not much more farther to fetch than the theory that the virus came to Earth on a recent meteor which traveled over Wuhan before crashing in China. Yes, most people would not reject ‘coincidence’ as fast as Waring does and the dots are pretty far apart. What would help is a better photo of 2020 CD3 or the discovery of more mini-moons – something astronomer Amy Mainzer sees happening as soon as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is operational in 2022 and recording images of the entire sky every few days to produce a time-lapse movie of the universe.
“We can only see what we have the technology to see. And necessarily, that’s not everything all of the time.”
Type that up, put it on your ‘Earth and its Moons’ science project and maybe the judges will give you a break … this time
WETENSCHAP & PLANEETCuriosity, de robotjeep van NASA die de rode planeet Mars aan het onderzoeken is, heeft zijn scherpste panoramafoto ooit van het martiaanse oppervlak genomen. Opgebouwd uit meer dan 1.000 zorgvuldig samengestelde foto’s bevat het geheel maar liefst 1,8 miljard pixels aan Mars-landschap.
Curiosity Rover✔@MarsCuriosity
How’s this for 2020 vision? Over the holidays, I took a series of high-res photos of my hometown on #Mars. This panorama is made up of a crisp 1.8 billion pixels. It’s my most detailed view to date.
De foto’s werden genomen met de ‘Mastcam’ van de bekende rover, die zijn telefotolens gebruikte om het spectaculaire vergezicht vast te leggen. Een groothoeklens voegde een panorama van onder meer het dak van de Marsjeep en de robotarm toe, goed voor bijna 650 miljoen pixels. Beide panorama’s samen tonen ‘Glen Torridon’, een gebied aan de kant van Mount Sharp, de berg die Curiosity volop aan het bestuderen is.
Leuk detail: De beelden werden gemaakt tussen 24 november en 1 december vorig jaar, toen het bevoegde missieteam van het Amerikaanse ruimtevaartagentschap enkele dagen verlof had rond Thanksgiving. Met weinig taakjes voorhanden tijdens het wachten op de terugkeer van het team en nieuwe commando’s, had de Marsrover de zeldzame kans om af en toe even rustig achteruit te zakken en zijn omgeving vanuit exact hetzelfde punt te kieken.
(Lees verder onder de foto)
Focus
Uiteindelijk was Curiosity meer dan 6,5 uur - verspreid over 4 dagen - zoet met de speciale fotoshoot. Om een consistente verlichting te krijgen, werd telkens bewust enkel tussen de middag en 14 uur lokale Marstijd geklikt. Achter de goeie focus van het totaalplaatje zat een complex programma.
“Terwijl velen van ons team thuis kalkoen zaten te eten, maakte Curiosity dit feestmaal voor de ogen”, zegt projectwetenschapper Ashwin Vasavada.
Wil je Mars graag van nog wat dichterbij bekijken? Met deze speciale tool kan je verder inzoomen.
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Russia's Roswell, Alien Autopsy, Unexplained Abduction Cases Globally, Philip Mantle
Russia's Roswell, Alien Autopsy, Unexplained Abduction Cases Globally, Philip Mantle
Once Upon a Missing Time, About the Author
Philip Mantle is an international UFO researcher, lecturer and broadcaster. His books have been published in six different languages around the world. He is the former Director of Investigations for the British UFO Research Association and former MUFON representative for England.
Philip has written articles and features for numerous publications around the world and has been both editor and assistant editor of high street UFO publications.
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Nikola Tesla: 13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
Nikola Tesla: 13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
13,000 Year Old Black Knight Satellite UFO That NASA Knows About
Something highly secret is being monitored by NASA, an ancient satellite orbiting earth that’s not ours! First detected by Nikola Tesla and then by astronomers around the world, this strange polar orbiting craft may still be producing signals…
Presented by David Wilks at Awakening UFO & Conspicuous Life Expo, Manchester, UK.
Giant UFO Moves Through Or Solar System, NASA Footage, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Giant UFO Moves Through Or Solar System, NASA Footage, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 19-20, 2020 stereo A camera Location of sighting: Earths sun Source:NASA Here is a really interesting video of a circular craft with a diamond shaped center. It was moving through a NASA SOHO video and got caught. The UFO is there for only 4 seconds, but if slowed down, we can see its detail well. This is 100% proof that aliens are in our solar system right now. This ship is massive, moon size or bigger and moving incredibly fast. I'm sure NASA would never mention it because if they did, they would have to tell the public the truth about aliens existing. They don't want to cause any panic. So they wont. Scott C. Waring
Black UFO Seen In The Daytime Over Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Black UFO Seen In The Daytime Over Mexico, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: Feb 16, 2020 Location of sighting: Queretaro, Mexico This dark black UFO is moving over a central Mexico during the daylight which gives us great detail. The object is coming down behind some trees and appears to be interested in the surround area foliage. Past UFOs have been seen to do similar things...flying over the surface of water, bushes and trees. Perhaps its running biological tests on the plants. Awesome daytime raw footage. Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
We do not know what it was. It was recorded in Querétaro, Mexico. A friend said that he looked like a flying vochito.
Do You believe the Earth is flat? 11 million Brazilians believe in the Flat Earth theory
Do You believe the Earth is flat? 11 million Brazilians believe in the Flat Earth theory
According to Anderson Neves, the Earth is flat and does not rotate, the sun and the moon are close to the world, within a large dome that surrounds our flattened planet.
A malignant pseudo-science has corrupted the education system around the world,It calls the idea of a round Earth "humankind's greatest lie, dictated by the global elite."
"Just look at the horizon. Climb a mountain and take pictures. You can see the Earth isn't curved," says Neves, clutching a level to illustrate his point.
The Flat-Earthers are brimming with counter-factual questions: If the Earth is rotating at 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) per hour at the equator, why doesn't the movement make everything fly off? If it's a sphere, why can't we see the curve from an airplane, reports Phys.org.
A recent survey out of Brazil suggests that around seven percent which is about 11 million residents in the country have become believers in the controversial concept.
Unidentified flying object changes shape next to the ISS before disappearing into space
Unidentified flying object changes shape next to the ISS before disappearing into space
An unidentified flying object appears close to the International Space Station on March 4, 2020. Then, The UFO changes shape, moves away from the ISS before it disappears into space.
Many UFOs and other strange space vehicles have been observed on the ISS live feed lately, they come and they go and nobody knows where they come from.
The Unexplained UFO Cover Up Cases and The End of Project Blue Book
The Unexplained UFO Cover Up Cases and The End of Project Blue Book
On December 17, 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOs. The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects;” a review of the University of Colorado’s report by the National Academy of Sciences; past UFO studies; and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the past two decades.
Ever wonder what kinds of unusual objects pilots see from the air?
With a truly unique vantage point, they've reported a range of strange sightings, including UFOs, geoglyphs, and drones. But they've also had unobstructed views to some of nature's most incredible sights.
Here are 10 wild things that pilots have seen while flying.
1. Several pilots have claimed to have seen UFOs.
Pilots have claimed to see UFOs (unidentified flying objects) for decades – sightings usually involve bright lights or objects flying in a formations. In June 1947, for example, pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine glowing blue objects flying in a V over Mount Rainier in Seattle, Washington. In November 2018, pilots reported seeing UFOs off the coast of Ireland.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pilot Terry Lynch recalled his experience of flying near a hurricane to Popular Mechanics.
"I could see the lights of Charleston going out, and I knew they were catching hell down there. I'd much rather be in the air. When the wind pushes, a plane gives," he said of flying over the South Carolina coast during Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
Commercial flights typically go higher in the air than a hurricane, so aircraft can sometimes just fly over them. Meteorologist and pilot James Aydelott told The Points Guy, "Each storm is different, but down low, near the eye, where the C-130 and P-3 'Hurricane Hunter' flights fly, there is often turbulence. High above, from all accounts I've seen, the ride is smooth. As far as flying goes, there should be no issues flying above a hurricane in an aircraft equipped to monitor radar echo tops."
3. NASA pilots have seen rectangular-shaped icebergs.
NASA pilots spotted a rectangular iceberg while flying over the northern Antarctic Peninsula. Such icebergs look as if they have been purposefully cut, and they are rarely seen. Of the experience, one pilot told Mysterious Universe:
"I thought it was pretty interesting; I often see icebergs with relatively straight edges, but I've not really seen one before with two corners at such right angles like this one had."
4. Some lucky pilots get to fly over pink lakes as part of their day job.
So many people want to see pink lakes that scenic flights over them are now offered. The most famous is Lake Hillier in Western Australia. There are also pink lakes in British Columbia, Spain, and Canada. The lakes get their pink color from a high level of salinity along with algae that make carotenoids, or organic pigments, turning the water pink. These lakes create such great amounts of salt that locals harvest and use it.
5. Geoglyphs can also be seen from the sky.
Geoglyphs are designs built into the natural landscape via mounds of earth. Most geoglyphs are large crosses, squares, and rings. Some geoglyphs can be as wide as 1,300 feet. The structural designs can be found in northern Kazakhstan, Russia, Brazil, Peru, and other places.
6. Pilots have experienced lightning striking their planes.
It's not uncommon for a plane to get hit by lightning. Aircraft are made of aluminum, which conducts electricity, but their design ensures the lightning current stays on the outside of the plane. Some private planes are not made of the same materials as commercial planes, so pilots flying those aircraft need to be cautious about getting near thunderstorms.
NASA pilot Conway Roberts described flying a jet into a cold front to the New York Times:
''I was flying at about 40,000 feet over Amarillo, when I first started seeing lightning from this front several hundred miles away. The thunderstorms that the front was generating were just like a picket fence. They had very little depth and were shoulder-to-shoulder, hundreds of them, and they all had almost continuous lightning.''
7. St. Elmo's Fire is a phenomenon similar to lightning.
A phenomenon that only some pilots are lucky enough to see, St. Elmo's Fire is similar to lightning.
It's a branch-shaped discharge of atmospheric electricity into the sky that's caused by heavy thunderstorms in combination with a plane flying through an exceptionally high-intensity electric field.
But how exactly does this phenomenon happen? When there is a difference in the concentration of electrons between two objects, the potential difference induces an electric field. This electric field can become so strong that air can no longer suppress it and electrons jump through the air creating a visual spark. This occurrence happens on a lesser scale when you touch a doorknob and give yourself a minor shock. But because thunderstorms create such a powerful electric field, there becomes a dramatic difference in charge between the air and the pointed tip of an airplane, that a continuous spark is created, namely St. Elmo's Fire.
Unlike lightning, St. Elmo's Fire isn't the movement of electricity, but the shot of electrons into the air, aka a "corona discharge."
The flashes in the sky look like dancing lightning bolts. St. Elmo's Fire is usually blue or purple in color, but can also appear to be green. It can also be heard "singing" on the plane's radio — a hissing sound that goes up and down the musical scale.
8. Some claim they have flown over rainbows.
People have claimed to have flown over rainbows, but the laws of physics tell us that this is not possible. Rainbows are formed when sunlight hits water. The water splits the light into its various colors, reflecting them at an angle of 42 degrees. Since the rainbow is only seen when that consistent angle is maintained, it's impossible to see a rainbow in front of you and then also fly over it. It is possible, however, for a rainbow to appear to the side of or below a plane.
9. Balloons have appeared at high altitudes.
High-altitude balloons have caused trouble for pilots and airports, since they can obstruct flight sensors and create other problems. A passenger flight over London (flying 10,000 feet over the city) once hit a helium balloon, but it did not have any adverse effects on the flight. However, these high-altitude balloons could potentially cause a collision — they are certainly not something a pilot wants to see at eye level when mid-flight.
10. Drones have also been getting a little too close to planes, according to pilots.
Pilots have seen drones get very close to their planes. In London earlier this year, a pilot reported spotting a drone flying just 20 feet below the plane. There are strict regulations for drones in flight – they can't come within 50 meters of people or structures or within a kilometer of airports, and can't get higher than 400 feet. The pilot reported the following, which was announced by the UK Airprox Board, according to ITV:
"He had no doubt that it was being deliberately flown under the flight path in an attempt to collide with an aircraft."
In 2018, a modest 3395 people in the U.S. and Canada submitted their accounts of UFO sightings to the National UFO Reporting Center. In 2019, that number jumped to 5971.
Apparently, aliens are especially fond of flying their aircrafts over California, Florida, and Washington; according to ABC News, they were the three most popular states for UFO sightings in 2019, with 485, 385, and 222 reports, respectively. Nevada, home of the infamous Area 51, totaled only about 70 for the year.
Peter Davenport, director of the Washington-based organization, told ABC News that he didn’t have any insight as to why the number had jumped nearly 76 percent in just one year.
"One of the mysteries of ufology is there is a fluctuation in the number of reports over the years," he said. "Some years it’s been low, but it’s gotten higher recently."
American Astronomical Society spokesman Rick Fienberg, on the other hand, offered a few ideas to ABC News: Not only were Jupiter and Venus extra-visible last year, but SpaceX sent a total of 180 new satellites into space. Since the National UFO Reporting Center simply catalogs reports—it doesn’t investigate them—it’s likely that many are actually planets, satellites, or other easily explainable phenomena. As Fienberg pointed out, the u in UFO stands for unidentified, not unidentifiable.
"If you’re not keeping up with the news and not familiar with the skyline, you might mistakenly see an unidentified flying object. It may be unidentified to you, but known to others," Fienberg said.
We’re not ruling out the possibility that extraterrestrial beings are getting more careless about concealing themselves and their vehicles as time goes on—they’ve supposedly been slipping up as far back as 1400 BCE. Find out about 12 notorious UFO sightings from history here.
In 1947, a pilot spotted a fleet of “saucer-like” aircrafts speeding across the sky. It was only a matter of time until paranoia set in.
IN 1947, KENNETH Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000?
Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he watched, rapt, nine objects flew through the air in formation.
That’s nothing crazy, really. You’d call it a fleet and go on with your day. But the craft appeared to be traveling much faster than the jets of the time. Arnold allegedly clocked them, as they flew between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, at significantly more than 1,000 miles per hour. When he landed back on the ground, he—he claimed later—told an East Oregonian reporter that the objects skipped like saucers on water, referring to their motion and not their shape. The reporter wrote, however, that the craft appeared “saucer-like.” That line soon rushed out on the AP wire. The term “flying saucer” showed up a day later—the first time of many times to come—when the Chicago Sun ran the headline “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” The actual path of the saucer description, from Arnold’s mouth to our modern ears, is more complicated: The reporter held fast to the transcription, and as a National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena analysis notes, Arnold had plenty of opportunities to correct the record earlier.
“It seems impossible, but there it is,” the article ended, quoting Arnold.
Arnold’s sighting marks the origin point of modern UFO lore and terminology. His story contains several archetypal characteristics (which it would, of course, itself being the archetype): lights in the sky, spotted by a pilot who knows the sky and what should be in it (what insiders call “a reliable observer”), moving fast and with erratic, intelligent-seeming choreography. You could almost swap Arnold with the pilots in the videos from the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which ran secretly from around 2007 to 2012, and the military personnel who have come forward since, saying (probably honestly!) that they have seen quick, creepy, inexplicable things up there. Their status as hardened fighter jocks is what lends their stories credibility and unnerves the softer and less experienced rest of us.
For talking about his story, Arnold got more—and different—attention than he would have liked: People didn’t believe him. It was only a reflection on the glass, a meteor. He had made it all up. In his own book, Coming of the Saucers, Arnold wrote, “I have been subjected to ridicule, much loss of time and money, newspaper notoriety, magazine stories, reflections on my honesty, my character, my business dealings.” He was not happy about it, and according to the 1975 book The UFO Controversy in America, Arnold said: “If I saw a 10-story building flying through the air, I would never say a word about it.” (This statement, though, remains hard to reconcile with the fact that he published his own book, today’s edition complete with pulpy cover art showing bathing-suit-clad women holding pictures of outer space up for some saucer pilots to see.)
Arnold’s sighting, however he felt about it, began an epidemic. Soon, other people around the US started to see their saucers. The night sky opened up, kicking off a ufological period insiders refer to as a “flap”: a period of increased sightings. The term also has the contextual tinge of the word’s other definition, “an increased state of agitation.” Edward Ruppelt, an Air Force officer who would go on to be part of governmental UFO investigations, wrote that “in Air Force terminology a ‘flap’ is a condition, or situation, or state of being of a group of people characterized by an advanced degree of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions.” In this case, the people were not yet panicking about strange sights in the sky.
If Arnold hadn’t said a word, history probably would have nevertheless been set on a similar course. Someone else’s sighting would likely have catalyzed a similar flap—a year later, maybe two, or five. All events unfold in a cultural medium, after all. And the medium of Arnold’s time—colored by the fear of outsiders, fear of invasions, and awe of technology, just like today—was fertile ufological ground. Perhaps, in a world without Arnold’s encounter, people would have described “the phenomenon” differently. Perhaps we wouldn’t have the term “flying saucer” at all. Maybe it would have been pancakes or spheres. But Arnold and saucers are what we’ve got. So the flap that followed—and, really, all flaps to follow—bear his imprint, however faint.
WHILE WE HUMANS like to feel that we choose our own actions autonomously, math and geometry can actually describe their collective nature quite well. So our waves of UFO sightings tend to take one of two distinct shapes: a sharp peak or a bell curve. The first type is explosive, with lots of people reporting lots of UFOs at once, and then sightings dropping off around the same time. The second has a more tame, tapered onset and a more gradual offset.
Maybe, during either kind of crest, more people really do see truly strange things, as could be the case if spaceships or air forces are actually descending. Or maybe the upsurge happens because of what social scientists call “perceptual contagion”—a catching disease, whose sole symptom is that you suddenly notice things that have always existed and interpret them differently because someone else pointed them out. It’s like if a friend said to you, “Everyone who wears Abercrombie and Fitch has something to prove.” Maybe you’d never noticed anyone in an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt before at all. Now, though, you not only see them but also feel like you know something about them.
Either way, a clear relationship also exists between flaps in the general population and the onset of government programs—a symbiosis that former NASA employee Diana Palmer Hoyt has mapped out. When you view the citizens’ sightings and the feds’ research side by side, she noted in a thesis paper on the topic, “the dose-response mechanism becomes clear”: When the population begins to see saucers, the press begins to say so in the papers. Faced with citizens who expect their leaders to demystify the potentially dangerous mystery, the government has historically tried to (not always in good faith). When the flaps were fierce, its agents looked into UFO cases, adding their investigations to the quotidian explanations for the majority of sightings. Citizens are meant to believe that whatever may fly by in the future has a similarly prosaic origin. Don’t worry: It’s just a weather balloon, a too-twinkly star, Venus, atmospheric physics at play.
When a big flap pops, in other words, codified programs crop up. You can see this happening today, when in April 2019, the Navy confirmed that, given the number of unauthorized or unidentified craft that military personnel had encountered recently, it was “updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities,” as Politico reported. Long before that, the first official program came together the year after Arnold’s sighting. Like the two programs that would immediately follow, spanning more than two decades of federal effort, this initial effort aimed to soothe—and redirect—the masses, while also more quietly attempting to determine whether these saucers were something the military should worry about. The ethos in general? “Publicly debunk and treat the matter lightly,” Hoyt noted, “and privately investigate, and take the matter seriously.”
THE GOVERNMENT’S FIRST UFO investigation program began the year Scrabble became a game, and the year the US passed the Marshall Plan, an effort in part to stop the spread of communism in Europe. Also, it was around the time the country began rampant missile testing in New Mexico, thanks in no small part to the German scientists and engineers. After World War II, the government gave German scientists (often from the Nazi party) new identities and fresh lives in America, as part of an initiative called Operation Paperclip. It aimed to bring American rocketry to former German heights, while keeping that same achievement from the Soviet Union. With their Teutonic know-how, our aero-flight program could catch up with the Russians, who had also stolen some scientists from across the border.
Initially called Project Saucer (an obviously bad PR idea), the government quickly renamed its first UFO program Project Sign. It began in January of 1948 and ran for just one year. At the time, rockets from the Operation Paperclip scientists were not for spacefaring; they were weapons. But some of these stolen scientists (and their non-Paperclip peers) reasoned that with a little more thrust, the rockets could enter orbit. And with a little more oomph than that, they could leave orbit. Despite the less warlordy dream, the country wouldn’t send rockets to orbit till the late 1950s. It’s interesting that looking out into the universe, we saw our own future and foisted it onto others, already successful.
In the Arnold era of almost-kind-of spaceflight, fears about who might take over or destroy the world pervaded the US. The country had just gotten out of a war, using planet-destroying bombs that the Soviets would also soon possess. The globe felt cold and tenuous. And Project Sign attempted to find out whether the potential conquerors included experimental enemy aircraft or hostile aliens. We’re in a similar situation today, with worries about whether America will be overtaken by China, about the influence Russia has over our world-leading government. The shadow of international tension looms large, and it’s a little like those focused on the threat of UFOs have managed to capture and redirect our existential fear outward (way outward), while tinging it with awe.
Three months after Arnold’s sighting, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining sent a message called “AMC [Air Materiel Command] Opinion Concerning ‘Flying Discs’” to the commanding general of the Army Air Force.
The disputed document outlined the Lieutenant General’s belief that, while some may have been the result of “natural phenomena, such as meteors,” the objects reported were, in fact, real. Twining detailed the appearance of the objects—disc-like, and as large as a man-made aircraft—and suggested the possibility, based on reports of their movement, that “some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.”
These objects, he continued, tended toward the metallic, usually leaving no trail. They were normally soundless and fast. Given a lot of money and development time, the US could build aircraft with these characteristics, so maybe these UFOs were just UF-Ours, part of a classified project he wasn’t privy to. Also possible was that they were another country’s. But also possible: They didn’t exist at all.
The Air Force had undertaken low-level, unmandated investigation already, but Twining’s memo, some claim, ushered things into officialdom. A few months later, Project Sign was born. It hoovered in UFO reports and sent investigators to determine the hypothetical objects’ natures and their threat level.
As the investigations went on, the Sign group split into the two fervent factions, occupying different ends of the ideological spectrum and jockeying for power over the project. Some thought these UFOs weren’t really real, and so couldn’t be dangerous. This project was thus silly and inconsequential. Another subset of researchers, though, thought the opposite. And some of these believers soon developed what was later called the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, a term that has stuck around since and whose meaning remains self-evident.
That leadership polarization—“it’s dumb” versus “it’s aliens”— has historically posed a problem for Air Force pilots who wanted to submit UFO reports. They never knew to which pole their case would go, or which way that pole’s boss was leaning. If one of the naysayers got their hands on it, they might think the pilot was mentally unfit—in general, and especially to be flying planes bearing guns and missiles. If their report went into the hands of an alien enthusiast, meanwhile, maybe the pilot would become known as one of them, and end up a Kenneth Arnold-type casualty.
IN 1953, IN response to the international climate and the rising tide of UFO reports, the CIA sponsored a four-day meeting called the Robertson Panel, whose findings echo ominously into the present day.
The panel’s conclusions, its very existence, and especially its CIA sponsorship remained classified at the time and for several years after. The agency didn’t want people to know the government worried about their worries about UFO reports. But they did worry, according to declassified copies of the report, which provide a cold-toned assessment of their fears. If foes could use UFOs—real or simply reported—to sow panic among the populace, causing chaos and distrust, that could prime the US for physical or psychological invasion. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which the Russians saturate America with UFO sightings: They could launch a weapon and maybe no one would notice because the warning system would be busy chasing ghosts. Even without deliberate foreign malfeasance, if too many people got too amped and called in a panic about Venus, the government would have fewer available resources to sort the MiGs from the chaff.
Watch, the panel also advised, those UFO clubs, the civilian investigator groups that had cropped up. Should a flap occur, these groups might have the ears and minds of the people. Keep in mind “the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes.” To this day, some ufologists take this surveillance and disinformation suggestion as evidence of the virtues of their work. (If there’s nothing to worry about, why worry about us?)
Everything you need to know about SETI, the Drake equation, ’Oumuamua,
and hot tubs.
BY SARAH SCOLES
The panel further reaffirmed some of the conclusions from Project Sign, which was later renamed Project Grudge—most notably that whatever UFOs were or were not, they did not seem to represent a national security threat. The overload was dangerous, as was the panic, along with the fact that soldiers might see a foreign spycraft and think it was merely one of those UFOs.
But we can fix this, suggested the panel. All they had to do was train people and do some very public debunking. Agencies could educate employees on how to recognize high-altitude balloons hit by moonlight, fireballs that look like floating orbs, noctilucent clouds that resemble extraterrestrial neural networks.
The debunking should happen in public. Mass media, the panelists said, could also illuminate real UFO stories and their mundane explanations. When people saw something strange, then they would assume it, like the fireball they saw on a prime-time special, was just a terrestrial phenomenon they weren’t yet acquainted with. If you want to know why people read malicious, secret-keeping intent into the Robertson Report and the investigation programs, you need only read some of the panel’s concluding statements, with an ear for their timbre: “The continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does, in these perilous times, result in a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic. ... National security agencies [should] take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”
Any time the government decides, behind closed doors, to strip something of any quality, that’s pretty much a propaganda campaign. And any time the government decides something might disrupt its tightly grasped order, that can read as a license to impose order. Given this, it’s understandable that the agency didn’t want word of its work to get out. It looked bad. It looked like something powerful had taken hold of the American public, and the government not only disliked it, but was going to finagle an end to it. If you believe UFOs are a “phenomenon,” you can read the report and see a cover-up campaign.
In keeping the panel secret, the CIA actually sowed the very seeds of distrust it had tried not to plant by keeping secrets in the first place. When word of the Robertson Panel’s existence came out years later, the public called for the report’s full release. At first, the CIA put out what National Reconnaissance Office historian Gerald Haines called a “sanitized” version. Later, the complete record was declassified. The UFO-verse was never the same again.
A new study from researchers in the Netherlands shows how scientists can detect exoplanets orbiting red dwarf stars, and learn about their environments, from the radio waves generated by auroras on those worlds.
Artist’s concept of the atmosphere of a rocky planet interacting with the strong magnetic field of its nearby red dwarf star. This would create auroras in the planet’s atmosphere powerful enough for their radio waves to be detected from Earth.
Exoplanets orbiting distant stars are hard to detect, but there are several ways to do it. The most popular method is to watch for a dip in a star’s light when an exoplanet transits in front of it. Other exoplanets are found via a tiny shift in a star’s movement through space, caused by the tug of an exoplanet’s gravity. Rarely, some exoplanets are found via direct imaging. Now there’s another novel technique that scientists are testing: finding radio waves from auroras caused by interaction between a planet and its star, red dwarf stars in particular. And now scientists using this new technique have their first candidate exoplanet.
Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, scientists in the Netherlands have detected unusual radio waves coming from the nearby red dwarf star GJ1151. These radio waves are just what would be expected from auroras on a planet, caused by the interaction of the star and a strong magnetic field around a planetary body.
Harish Vedantham, the lead author of the study and a Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) staff scientist, said in a statement:
The motion of the planet through a red dwarf’s strong magnetic field acts like an electric engine much in the same way a bicycle dynamo works. This generates a huge current that powers auroras and radio emission on the star.
Basically, the radio waves generated by auroras on a planet could be considered evidence that the planet exists, even if it hasn’t been detected yet by other methods. For this study, that would be planets orbiting red dwarf stars, since they have stronger magnetic fields that could generate auroras powerful enough to be detected.
Auroras at the poles of Jupiter on October 2, 2011. This image is a composite of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. Similar auroras would be more powerful on planets orbiting close to red dwarf stars and could be detected by their radio waves.
Image via NASA/ CXC/ UCL/ W. Dunn et al./ STScI/ Sci-News.
This doesn’t work in our own solar system, as the sun’s magnetic field is weaker and the currents generated in planets’ atmospheres are therefore not as strong. According to Joe Callingham, co-author of the study:
We adapted the knowledge from decades of radio observations of Jupiter to the case of this star. A scaled up version of Jupiter-Io has long been predicted to exist in the form of a star-planet system, and the emission we observed fits the theory very well.
The researchers now want to look at other red dwarfs for similar emissions. Many exoplanets have already been found orbiting red dwarfs, and red dwarfs are the most common type of star in our galaxy. It stands to reason then that many more exoplanets are waiting to be found around these stars. According to Callingham:
We now know that nearly every red dwarf hosts terrestrial planets, so there must be other stars showing similar emission. We want to know how this impacts our search for another Earth around another star.
Many planets orbiting close to red dwarf stars would likely be uninhabitable due to the strong solar radiation. But not all. The TRAPPIST-1 system has at least seven Earth-sized rocky planets, of which at least three are thought to be potentially habitable. This illustration compares them (artist’s concepts) to the four rocky planets in our solar system.
To do this, the researchers will use images from the ongoing survey of the northern sky called the LOFAR Two Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS), also called the LoTSS wide area survey. Tim Shimwell, co-author of the study, said:
With LOFAR’s sensitivity, we expect to find around 100 of such systems in the solar neighborhood. LOFAR will be the best game in town for such science until the Square Kilometre Array comes online.
Not only could this be a unique new way of detecting exoplanets, it could also help to better understand the environment of those planets. According to Vedantham:
The long-term aim is to determine what impact the star’s magnetic activity has on an exoplanet’s habitability, and radio emissions are a big piece of that puzzle. Our work has shown that this is viable with the new generation of radio telescopes, and puts us on an exciting path.
For many planets orbiting red dwarfs, habitability may be severely compromised. Red dwarfs, with their intense magnetic fields, generate powerful solar radiation, which can strip the atmospheres away from planets that are too close, rendering them uninhabitable, at least on the surface. But not all planets will necessarily suffer that fate, and there should still be planets that are far enough from their red dwarf stars to avoid that problem, while also being not too far away, allowing them to possibly have liquid water.
Harish Vedantham at ASTRON, lead author of the new study.
The TRAPPIST-1 system is a good example of this. There are at least seven Earth-sized rocky worlds orbiting this red dwarf, and at least three of them are thought to be potentially habitable with the possibility of having liquid water on their surfaces. It will be very interesting to see what further study of these worlds reveals.
Detecting planetary auroras by the radio waves they emit will be an exciting new way to find and study exoplanets, including ones that may be missed by other methods. Stay tuned!
Bottom line: A study from the Netherlands shows a new way scientists can detect exoplanets from the radio waves generated by auroras on those worlds.
Retired FBI Agent Reveals His UFO Experiences, One Involving Missing Time
Retired FBI Agent Reveals His UFO Experiences, One Involving Missing Time
He was later invited to discuss them at a meeting attended by other government employees and higher-ranking military personnel
ByRobert Hastings - The UFO Chronicles
In November 2019, Dr. Bob Jacobs and I published our book, Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed, in which we divulged our secret status as “experiencers”. Prior to this voluntary outing of ourselves, I was known for my investigations of nuclear weapons-related UFO cases—including incursions at ICBM sites during which the missiles were knocked offline—and Bob was publicly associated with one of the key events, the 1964 Big Sur Incident, when a UFO was inadvertently captured on motion picture film during the test launch of a dummy nuclear warhead. Almost unbelievably, the domed, disc-shaped craft was seen to circle the warhead and shoot it down with four beams of light! The film was quickly classified Top Secret and confiscated by two CIA officers.
Following our book’s publication Bob and I have each been contacted by other experiencers who wished to relate their own encounters to us. In early February 2020, I was approached by one such person, a retired FBI agent—whom I have vetted—who agreed to let me publish his account as long as he remained anonymous. He told me:
A “war baby,” I was born in 1942 while my Dad was flying missions against the Japanese in the South Pacific. Upon his return home and during my formative years, he steered me towards the U.S. Air Force—if not as a career, then at least the experience. And so upon completion of high school I enrolled in and eventually graduated from a military institution, was commissioned, and reported for active duty overseas with an Air Force flying unit in 1965.
Still single and while quartered in the base Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ) in 1966, I experienced the following: My suite consisted of a living room and a bedroom, connected by a bathroom. The living room and bedroom each had a door opening out into a long second floor hallway of the barracks/dormitory; my suite was approximately in the middle.
While asleep one night, tucked-in beneath my blanket, I awoke to what appeared to be a person standing beside the bed and to my immediate right. Because the room was darkened the image was indistinct. There was no sound and, since my arms were pinned beneath the blanket, I had no option but to stay still. The person/image moved away and out the nearby door. I immediately jumped out of the bed, moved to that door and opened it. There was no one in the hallway, which startled me because the second floor corridor was 50-75 feet long in either direction from my bedroom door.
Fast-forward to 1974. Upon completing four years active duty with the Air Force and returning to the United States following a combat tour in Southeast Asia, I had joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), completed new-agent training, and was assigned investigative duties at a large East Coast field office. Now married, but without children, and living in a single family residence just outside Mount Holly, New Jersey (McGuire AFB/Fort Dix were nearby), I experienced the following:
My wife, myself, and another couple had enjoyed a Saturday night dinner at our house and were in the finished basement recreation room area when someone called to our attention a strange light over the tree-line beyond the back yard, visible through the rear sliding glass door. Our friends—I’ll call them “Dave” and “Michelle”—were educated, responsible and professional. He was a former college quarterback and at that time a staff assistant to a highly respected college football coach. She was a schoolteacher, friend and colleague of my wife.
The “light” appeared highly strange and unrecognizable to me as any conventional aircraft and was moving in an erratic, unpredictable manner that alarmed us. Michelle immediately became highly agitated and demanded (to me) “get your gun!” I immediately ran upstairs to the master bedroom, retrieved my issue .357 sidearm, and ran back downstairs to where the other three had been standing at the doorway. However, strangely, I have no recollection as to what happened from that point forward until the following morning when, our friends apparently having returned to their home, my wife and I proceeded with our normal activities. Several weeks later, while dining out with the same couple, I mentioned the strange event, but none of the others could recall anything beyond seeing the light. I was the only one who could recall me leaving the group and returning to the basement armed.
Later, also in 1974, I had reconnected with an Air Force friend, formerly a maintenance officer in my old squadron. A chance meeting on a commuter train brought Jim and his wife Diane to our home, again on a Saturday night, where we had dinner followed by relaxation and conversation in the downstairs recreation room. I subsequently lost touch with Jim until, years later and after my transfer to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., I got a call from him as he was in the capitol area for a business conference. We agreed to meet for lunch and a tour of the nearby Air and Space Museum. Afterward and while walking back across The Mall, I remarked to him that, while extensive and interesting, there was no reference to or displays of [NASA] spacecraft or the UFO phenomenon. He responded, and I’ll never forget, “Like that UFO we saw out in back of your house in New Jersey that night.” I then had and still have absolutely no recollection of the specific event to which he was referring, beyond the fact that he and Diane had actually visited us in Mt Holly.
(RH: The earlier incident involving the agent retrieving his gun clearly qualifies as a missing time event. However, as regards the second incident mentioned above, the agent only says that he could not, at a much later date, recall anything about it. One might argue that this memory lapse was mundane in nature due to the passage of time. That said, in my view it’s likely that it too involved missing time.)
Moving forward into the late 1980s, I was scheduled to travel to Connecticut on Bureau business, and was able to reconnect with our other friends, Dave and Michelle, who had by then relocated from New Jersey to the Hartford area. Upon my arrival and greeting them for dinner at a local restaurant, Michelle reminded me of “the UFO we saw that night” in Mt Holly. Once again, none of us could remember anything else about that event.
I asked the retired agent, “Did you or your wife ever find odd, unidentifiable marks or scars on your bodies at any point in time?” He responded, “No, nothing like that.”
Continuing, he then said something that I found absolutely remarkable:
Around the decade’s turn (1989-91), I was made aware of a meeting of ‘experiencers’, involving persons in government and/or the military who had experienced events involving unexplained lights/strange aircraft, missing time and memory failure. I proceeded to the meeting, held at a facility in Northern Virginia near but not at the Pentagon, which was attended by numerous others, most of whom appeared to be government officials and higher-ranking military officers. I was asked to tell my story—actually, stories—and was thereafter assured that I was “not alone” and that others present at the meeting had had similar if not identical past experiences. I was subsequently provided a list of publications to read to perhaps better understand the phenomena and, as I recall, at the top of that list was Communion by Whitley Strieber.
I then asked, “Who told you about the meeting?” He responded:
I cannot recall how I was advised about the meeting in Northern Virginia but information about it, as well as its location, was probably provided by an FBI associate as I had little or no contact with other government agency personnel during my 15-plus years at FBI Headquarters.
The strange experiences I had were something best left unsaid due to fear of ridicule and of job security concerns, not to mention curtailment of professional advancement. However, by the time of the meeting, I was nearing mandatory retirement age—at that time age 55 for all FBI Special Agents—and had “capped out” salary-wise so I had little to no concern regarding future administrative advancement. I had obviously told a colleague about my encounters and he in turn apparently told someone else who decided that I should attend the meeting.
I then asked, “Were you the only member of the audience to speak about your strange experiences?” He replied:
I do not recall any other specific stories, just that I did relate mine in detail to the group and was told afterward by one or more persons that they had experienced similar events. The purpose of the meeting was obviously to share similar experiences and information, perhaps in part to allay our fears, and by directing our attention to recent publications detailing the phenomena.
This account is stunning! Having interviewed 167 former/retired U.S. Air Force personnel over the years, I’ve never heard anything like it. Those veterans made clear that their commanders—and sometimes Air Force Office of Special Investigations agents—had sternly warned them not to share their nuclear weapons-related UFO encounters with others, even their spouses. Severe penalties were mentioned should a security breach occur.
However, in this case, we have a retired FBI Special Agent stating that he was asked by a colleague, presumably a superior, to address a gathering of government officials and higher-ranking members of the military regarding his strange, suggestive experiences. This implies that, as of the 1989-91 time-frame, some number of high-level persons in the U.S. intelligence community and the military were aware of reports involving the UFO abduction phenomenon—that were obviously considered credible—and had authorized certain presumably self-confessed experiencers within their own organizations to attend a meeting during which the subject would be openly discussed. If this were not enough, information about it—found in various books and articles—would be disseminated to the attendees. As far as I am aware, such an account is unprecedented! Was this gathering a one-off event or did this happen more than once over the years?
Any individual who has had a similar experience who wishes to speak with me about it may contact me at ufohastings@aol.com. Please note that I will ask such persons to provide records substantiating their former U.S. government employment or military service.
For the first time ever, astronomers have identified molecular oxygen in a galaxy outside the Milky Way.
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, led by Junzhi Wang.
The team identified the presence of molecular oxygen by analyzing light waves that had reached Earth from Markarian 231, a galaxy around 581 million light years away.
Light wave readings taken at the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Granada, Spain (pictured above) helped scientists detect signatures of molecular oxygen in the Markarian 231 galaxy, the first time the compound has been detected outside the Milky Way
Ironically, the presence of oxygen in our own atmosphere, along with other gases, have traditionally made it difficult to get accurate light wave readings from distant galaxies, according to a report in Vice.
Those light waves are typically absorbed or redirected by the various gas elements contained in our atmosphere, making it nearly impossible to get accurate readings.
The light waves from Markarian 231, however, came from what’s called a quasi stellar object, or QSO.
QSOs are distant objects that have a star-like appearance but emit light that’s been redshifted, traveling at a lower wave frequency than conventional.
Because the light readings from Markarian 231 originated from a QSO, they had a significantly lower wave frequency than standard light waves, which allowed them to pass through Earth’s atmosphere without any distorting effects.
The light wave readings were taken at two different locations: the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Granada, Spain, and the Northern Extended Millimeter Array telescope in the French Alps.
Markarian 231 is a galaxy 581 million light years away from Earth, and is believed to have 100 times as much oxygen as has so far been detected in the Milky Way
Based on the readings, the team estimates there could be more than 100 times as much oxygen in Markarian 231 galaxy as has so far been observed in the Milky Way.
Over the last 20 years, molecular oxygen has been detected on two other locations in the Milky Way: the Rho Ophiuchi cloud and the Orion nebula.
Humans can breathe pure oxygen for short periods--it's used as a common treatment for some health conditions, including people afflicted with the bends--but our respiratory systems depend on other elements in air, like nitrogen and carbon dioxide, to function normally.
Breathing pure oxygen for prolonged periods can cause permanent lung damage and oxygen toxicity, resulting from blood hemoglobin being overwhelmed with more oxygen molecules than it can carry.
Still, oxygen is believed to be one of the key elements necessary for the development of life.
The team believes further research could help them understand how oxygen distributions factor into the development of galaxies and how that can create some of the necessary preconditions for the formation of life.
For the first time in history, scientistshave discovered breathable oxygen in another galaxy.
A team of astronomers at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory made the incredible find, which points towards the potential for life elsewhere.
With oxygen being one of the most common elements known to man, scientists have long since believed it would be relatively easy to spot it in the universe. But until now, it had eluded them.
Using radio telescopes, researchers at the observatory spotted signs of it in a galaxy called Markarian 231, an incredible 560 million light-years away from Earth.
The telescopes showed radiation at a wavelength of 2.52 millimetres, which is the sign of breathable oxygen.
Usually, oxygen is incredibly difficult to detect from Earth because the kinds of signals that should alert us to it are absorbed by the planet's atmosphere.
It was possible on this occasion because the light from Markarian 231 was redshifted, which means it was stretched into longer wavelengths as it travelled towards Earth, allowing it to pass through the atmosphere.
Writing about the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers confirmed it was the 'first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen', and the most oxygen ever seen outside of our own solar system.
And while the idea of travelling to Markarian 231 is totally out of the question, it represents a potentially major breakthrough in the search for life.
However, one place where man has gone, and plans to go again, is the moon. And who knows, maybe you could go there soon.
Hiring next month, they will be training a bunch of newbies up to take part in future missions to the moon, with the aim of jetting off into space in just four years time.
Speaking about the recruitment drive, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said: "We're celebrating our 20th year of continuous presence aboard the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit this year, and we're on the verge of sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024.
"For the handful of highly talented women and men we will hire to join our diverse astronaut corps, it's an incredible time in human spaceflight to be an astronaut.
"We're asking all eligible Americans if they have what it to takes to apply beginning 2 March."
However, before you get too excited about the chance of walking on the moon, the role comes with a fair few requirements - I mean, they're not just gonna let anyone go messing about in space, are they?
Firstly, you have to have US citizenship and have a master's degree from an accredited institution in any one of the following: computer science, mathematics, engineering, biological science or physical science.
And you may also need to have at least two years' experience in a PhD program related to science, in technology, engineering or mathematics.
You are also eligible if you have completed a doctorate in medicine or are a doctor of osteopathic medicine.
Bosses at NASA will even consider you if you have completed - or are set to complete - a nationally recognised test pilot school programme.
You must also have either at least two years of 'related, progressively responsible professional experience', or 1,000 hours of pilot-in-command time in jet.
All applicants must also pass NASA's long-duration spaceflight physical.
The surface of the Red Planet trembles with Marsquakes, scientists report, one of several first results from the NASA InSight lander’s visit to Mars.
“We’ve finally established for the first time that Mars is a seismically active planet,” said mission lead Bruce Banerdt, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., during a February 20 news teleconference.
InSight landed on Mars on November 26, 2018, on a two-year mission to probe the planet’s interior (SN: 11/26/18). The goal is to reveal more of Mars’ history and answer questions about the formation of rocky planets in our solar system and beyond.
To achieve that goal, InSight carries three main science experiments. A temperature probe sunk several meters into the Martian soil will track heat welling up from far below (though that probe has been having trouble burrowing its way down). Radio transmissions track InSight’s position and hence how much the planet wobbles around its axis. Results from those experiments aren’t yet ready for prime time.
However, InSight’s seismic experiment, along with some ancillary equipment, has turned up a wealth of new intel. Mission scientists present results from the first 10 months of these experiments online February 24 in Nature Geoscience and Nature Communications.
It’s too early to know what all the new revelations mean. “We’re really in the same situation as geophysicists were for Earth in the early 1900s,” Banerdt said. “We’re in the wild west of understanding what’s going on.”
In the meantime, here are four things that InSight has revealed about Mars so far.
1. Mars likes to shake things up
InSight’s seismic probe is like a stethoscope listening to the surface of Mars for rumblings deep underground. While researchers have long suspected that quakes gently rattle the surface of Mars, no probe before InSight had definitively detected one (SN: 4/23/19). As of September 30, 2019, the lander had recorded 174 Marsquakes, likely caused by tectonic activity.
“The general cause of Marsquakes is the cooling of the planet,” Banerdt said. “The details of any particular Marsquake are still difficult to figure out.”
Mars appears to be more active than the moon but less active than Earth. The quakes have been very gentle, said Philippe Lognonné, a planetary scientist at Paris Diderot University, during the teleconference. Unless you were standing right over the epicenter with two feet firmly on the ground, he said, you’d probably not feel most of them.
Most of the quakes have been too subtle to pinpoint their origins. But two seemed to originate from a region known as Cerberus Fossae, a geologically young landscape about 1,600 kilometers east of InSight strewn with landslides, several-million-year-old volcanic flows and dried-up water channels.
And the quakes just keep on coming. To date, the lander has cataloged about 450 events, and the frequency is mysteriously increasing.
2. Mars has a highly magnetic personality
Unlike Earth, Mars no longer generates a magnetic field — but it did billions of years ago, and ghosts of that magnetic field remain imprinted in the planet’s rocks today.
Satellite images of InSight’s landing site indicate that the rocks there are too young to have been strongly magnetized by that ancient field. And yet, InSight measured a magnetic field coming from the surrounding rocks 10 times as strong as expected.
Given the age of the landscape, “the magnetization has to come from rocks beneath the surface,” said Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. InSight’s measurements combined with satellite imagery suggest that the magnetic field is encased in 3.9-billion-year-old rocks buried up to 10 kilometers underground.
“The fact that we’re seeing a much larger magnetic feature near the surface means there’s a wealth of magnetization that has been invisible to us so far,” Banerdt said.
3. Mars feels a magnetic beat from space
InSight also picked up numerous magnetic “pulsations” — relatively quick changes in the strength of the ambient magnetic field. Some of these bursts, the first ever detected on Mars, last for just a second while others last for minutes. But unlike the anomalously high magnetization that comes from deep underground, these pulsations likely originate far above the atmosphere.
The researchers suspect that electrical fluctuations in a planetwide magnetic envelope induced by the sun — not the planet itself — is to blame. Intel from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, which is currently checking out Mars’ upper atmosphere, may help the team connect changes on the ground to changes in the planet’s space environment.
4. Beneath the surface, Mars is all broken up
Marsquakes can be used as probes of the Martian subsurface. Since different types of seismic waves are deflected and slowed down by underground materials in different ways, the Marsquakes act like a kind of planetary X-ray, revealing how far down the planet’s crust goes and the likely makeup of that material.
A disappointing lack in large Marsquakes has so far prevented the team from peering as deep as they’d like. But they are starting to get a picture of the upper 10 kilometers or so of the planet. There is likely water — not huge aquifers, but molecules clinging to solid mineral grains. And hidden beneath the top layers of soil, the crust appears to be fractured by eons of impacts from space.
The fracturing is “something that originally was thought to be the case for Mars,” said Suzanne Smrekar, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But researchers moved away from that idea after evidence of now-dormant volcanism suggested that perhaps remnants of that pummeling had been largely smoothed over. InSight, she says, “is telling us that maybe [the crust] is a bit more broken up than people have thought recently.”
All five remaining instruments on NASA's venerableVoyager 2 spacecraft are back to gathering science data after power overuse in late January interrupted the probe's operations.
NASA made the announcement yesterday (March 3), over a month after the incident occurred. Troubleshooting for the spacecraft is a slow process because of its distance from Earth; it takes 17 hours for each command to reach the probe and for data indicating its efficacy to reach engineers.
"Voyager 2 has returned to normal operations following the anomaly on Jan. 25, 2020," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "The five operating science instruments, which were turned off by the spacecraft's fault protection routine, are back on and returning normal science data."
Voyager 2, like its twin Voyager 1, launched in August 1977 and has been exploring ever since. Such extensive space travel takes its toll; as the spacecraft have long exceeded their mission expectancy, engineers have needed to improvise ways to keep the probes going, particularly as their power supplies dwindle.
The January problem occurred when Voyager 2 missed a spin maneuver to calibrate its magnetic-field instrument. That glitch left two power-hungry systems on simultaneously; the spacecraft recognized the risk of the situation and triggered a preprogrammed fault-protection mode.
Since then, mission engineers have been working to turn off the power-sucking systems and to get Voyager 2's five remaining science instruments back to work. Those instruments are helping scientists understand what happens beyond the heliosphere, the bubble of space influenced by our sun. Voyager 2 left that bubble in November 2018, entering interstellar space.
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