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 NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
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...
12-03-2020
Black UFO Over California, Daytime Footage, Video, UFO Sighting Global News.
Black UFO Over California, Daytime Footage, Video, UFO Sighting Global News.
Date of sighting: Feb 22, 2020 Location of sighting: California, USA This raw footage was recorded by Yotuber Esmeralda Martinez. The person witnessed a black cone shaped object moving across the sky in California. The object at first looks like a bird, but its not. The shape is not right for a bird, and it has no wings...and no flapping. I also notice at one point...the UFO stops...hovers in place, turns and then continues on its way. This means its intelligently controlled. It doest look like any drone I have ever seen before. This is a UFO. Perhaps aliens are scanning the public for numbers on how many people are carrying the coronavirus. This is a monumental problem the whole world is currently facing. That would spark the interest of aliens. Scott C. Waring
While looking over some Mars photos, I noticed a bowl that was cracked and full of dirt. A bowl might not seem important to a lot of people, but to me its 100% proof that the aliens that lived here were intelligent. You see, they made a bowl...a tool or instrument to help serve the family food. This bowl is thicker on the center sides but thiner on the top and bottom. The bowl also has finger push marks in its side still visible. I'm sure the rover almost ran over this bowl...so why couldn't they have driven over, and pushed it using the rovers arm? Or even examined it closer with its camera to see more detail? Thats NASA...on mars for the ride, not for the discoveries.
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Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun
Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind: Contact Has Begun
World Premiere of the film is April 6th in LA.
“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” is a feature documentary presented by Dr. Steven Greer, the global authority on extraterrestrials who created the worldwide disclosure movement and routinely briefs presidents and heads of state on the ET phenomenon. His previous works, Sirius and Unacknowledged, broke crowdfunding records and ignited a grassroots movement. In this film, Dr. Greer presents the most dangerous information that the architects of secrecy don’t want you to know: how forgotten spiritual knowledge holds the key to humans initiating contact with advanced ET civilizations. The film features groundbreaking video and photographic evidence and supporting interviews from prominent figures such as Adam Curry of Princeton’s PEAR Lab; legendary civil rights attorney Daniel Sheehan, and Dr. Russell Targ, who headed the CIA’s top-secret remote viewing program. Their message: For thousands of people, contact has begun. This is their story.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:ALIEN LIFE, UFO- CRASHES, ABDUCTIONS, MEN IN BLACK, ed ( FR. , NL; E )
Solar Killshot and the Worldwide Cover-Up
Solar Killshot and the Worldwide Cover-Up
In 2013, Edward A. Dames, Major, U.S. Army (ret.) well known for his remote viewing capabilities, stated that he is very concerned about unprecedented events that will take place in the near future which will affect the whole world.
Edward A Dames - Quote from 2013: "I am far more concerned with a global pandemic breaking out, concomitant with a worldwide economic collapse, and leading to a devastating solar flare hitting the planet. To that end, the emergence of the H7N9 bird flu in China really fits as a candidate for the pandemic."
Seven years later, the year 2020: World Health Organization declares Coronavirus as a pandemic break out -The world economy is on the brink of a financial and economic collapse and yes the H7N9 bird flu fits as a candidate for the pandemic.
In 2013, the Coronavirus in its current form was not yet known, so Edward A. Dames called it the H7N9 bird flu, or would he be right after all?
Now, Ufospotlight.wordpress.com published a disturbing report in which “A Chinese Intelligence Officer reveals true magnitude of China’s fake “Coronavirus” Crisis”?
Quote: “I am a senior Chinese military intelligence officer and I know the truth about the “corona virus” outbreak. It is far worse than the media are telling you.”
Quote: “It is currently flu season in China. When we realized that we could no longer control the spread of the biological agent, we sent our men to all the hospitals and instructed all doctors to diagnose every case of the common flu as “Coronavirus”. We came up with a new name - 2019 - nCoV — and handed out “fact sheets” that described a made-up illness.”
So far it seems that Edward Dames got it right with his predictions but what about a devastating solar flare will hit the planet.
Currently we transit from Solar Cycle 24 to Solar Cycle 25. Quote: “While we are not predicting a particularly active Solar Cycle 25, violent eruptions from the sun can occur at any time,” said Doug Biesecker, Ph.D., panel co-chair and a solar physicist at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
About the strange Ezekiels Wheel like UFO spotted next to the sun. This specific object is also depicted in ancient hieroglyphs, mentioned in the Mayan culture as well as in the Aztec culture and also depicted in crop circles.
It is a reference to the very nature of its existence, in ancient scrolls translated Eziekels Wheel posses immense power of destruction. According to scholars, when Ezekiels Wheel is near the sun it has the power to disrupt the sun.
We also have reported several times about the large formations of UFOs caught on the ISS live feed. So far it is unknown why they appear, only to pass Earth to travel further into space to all directions, or it must be that they are fleeing for something, because they know what's coming.
As Edward A. Dames predicted in 2013, there will be a precursor (Ezekiels Wheel?) to a solar storm, which will lead to a devastating solar flare, similar to the Carrington Event in 1859.
What is happening now, it looks like they use 'the worldwide Coronavirus (read biological agent) outbreak’ as a mind control tool for various purposes to further restrict people's rights and freedom, including to distract and to prepare the world population for a devastating solar storm in the near future.
Ed Dames will get it right with his prediction about an expected solar killshot? Time will tell!
Meanwhile, two days ago again a formation of UFOs appeared on the ISS live feed while passing - at a safe distance - the planet Earth.
What is mutilating cows in the Midwest? FBI probed thousands of reports of cattle killed with 'surgical precision' since the early 1970s - with the deaths blamed on satanic cults, the government and ALIENS
What is mutilating cows in the Midwest? FBI probed thousands of reports of cattle killed with 'surgical precision' since the early 1970s - with the deaths blamed on satanic cults, the government and ALIENS
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Since the early 1970s, thousands of cow murders and mutilations have reportedly taken place in the Midwest
Reports include cattle having ears, lips, eyes, noses, anuses and genitalia removed with 'surgical precision'
Conflicting theories abound - some believe either aliens or the government are responsible for the mutilations, or 'mutes', which have also been reported across the US and abroad
The FBI attempted to investigate the incidents but were largely unsuccessful due to 'lack of jurisdiction'
On a bright, sunny morning in the summer of 1973, Ron and Paula Watson, two farmers in Springfield, Missouri, witnessed something that changed their lives forever.
It was an alien abduction, they say. But not of a human – of cattle.
They said they saw a 'green, cone-shaped craft' – next to which two 'silver little beings' were standing over a large black cow.
'I told Ron, 'My god, they got a cow! What are they doing to it?' Paula said. 'It had its eyes open and its tongue was like, hanging out a little bit. But it just laid there and it didn't move.'
She described in detail how she saw the aliens running their hands over the cow and then inspecting their long fingers before they 'floated' it into their large ship in the distance.
Their neighbors never believed their story, though one did admit to having one black cow left unaccounted for. The Watsons' story sounds like something out of an early science-fiction film – but it became one of many stories of alien and UFO sightings used to explain the thousands of cow mutilations reported across the United States in the 1970s.
Since the 1970s, bizarre murders and mutilations of cattle have been reported across the nation, primarily in the Midwest. In this photo (left) of a cow in Saguache County, Colorado in 1975, a female cow's utters have been removed with surgical precision. In the image on the right, a cow was found with its tongue removed in July 2013 on a farm in Missouri
News reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases
Within the depths of the FBI's database of unsolved mysteries lies the graphic tale of these cattle murders, which outraged and petrified farmers for decades, and is still continuing today.
Speculation surrounding who – or what – might be responsible for the killing and mutilation of thousands of cows has ranged from satanic worshipers, government agents, and even aliens.
The most curious aspect is not that the cattle have died, but the way in which they did. Since the early 1970s farmers have discovered their treasured (and expensive) animals dead with various organs excised – including eyes, noses, tongues, hearts, livers, anuses, and genitalia removed with laser precision.
Though many theories have been offered it's a phenomenon that no one – not even the FBI – have ever been able to solve.
In 1974, newspapers started to catch wind of these bizarre mutilations, which first took place primarily in extremely rural farmlands in the Midwest. Instances were reported across the nation but were mostly scattered among South Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, and Nevada.
The news reports make up the bulk of the FBI's 32 page report on the subject, which is prefaced by a brief explanation that their investigation was hindered by a lack of jurisdiction in most cases.
The FBI told DailyMail.com that this was due to the fact that at the time there was no federal law declaring animal mutilation a federal crime, which didn't allow the department to continue investigating.
Many residents reported seeing helicopters circling the areas where cattle later turned up dead and sliced up with seemingly surgical accuracy. This prompted concerns that the mutilations, nicknamed 'mutes' by those familiar with the subject, were being propagated and covered up by the government.
in this image on the left, the cow's heart was excised with expert care - and was the third of three cattle mutilated on the same farm in Missouri beginning in 2011. Theories of who, or what, might be responsible have ranged from satanic cults, aliens, and the government. In the image on the right, ranchers found an animal with its sex organs and anus removed
Linda Moulton Howe is a former Miss Idaho turned investigative journalist and regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who has been a primary proponent of the 'alien argument'
This was around the same time of the height of alien paranoia in the United States – when UFOs, or balls or discs of floating light, were being spotted in similarly rural areas, often preceding or following the cow mutilations.
Many who have dedicated their lives to the subject believe, in fact, that aliens are responsible for the mutilations and that the government has been attempting to cover up their crimes (and existence) for years.
One such person is Linda Moulton Howe, the regional Emmy-winning filmmaker who the Watsons shared their story with for her documentary Earth Mysteries: Alien Life Forms. She has been one of the most steadfast supporters of the alien argument.
Her research conjures the images of what we picture as the stereotypical alien abduction – flying saucers beaming animals up into space with light.
At least two people even reported being abducted by aliens at that time – including one woman named Judy Doraty and her daughter Cindy.
In a 1990 symposium proceeding Howe wrote: '…I found in so many eyewitness accounts of orange glowing objects the size of football fields hovering above pasturelands where mutilated animals were later found. Or beams of light observed shining down from 'silent helicopters' that lighted pastures 'brighter than daylight' and the next day mutilated animals were found. And eyewitness reports of strange craft and/or non-human creatures involved with animals.
'There was Judy Doraty who in 1973 watched a brown and white calf rise in a pale beam of yellow light. Inside the craft, she saw tissue cut from the eye, tongue and testicles by two small grey-skinned creatures. They had four fingers, instead of five, and those long, thin fingers tapered into dark nails. Their eyes had vertical pupils like a cat or a crocodile's.
'Judy's daughter, Cindy, also described in a 1990 hypnosis session seeing a calf rising in a beam of yellow light.'
In a rare winter mutilation, this calf was found in Hooper, Nebraska in 1975 with its jaw completely cut out all the way up to its right eye socket. Eyewitnesses often reported seeing beaming lights or suspicious helicopters near where mutilated cows were later found
US Senator Floyd Haskell from Colorado pleaded with the FBI to become involved with the mutilations in August 1975 after receiving more than 130 cases in the state alone, and farmers had taken to arming themselves out of fear
Supernatural explanations were the only ones that made any sense at the time – given that the technology of the era was not advanced enough to have performed what appeared to be the use of localized lasers.
The areas surrounding the excisions, often around the anus of the murdered animals, had a blackened and burned appearance to them – suggesting the use of a high-powered laser. Other researchers, however, proposed different conclusions.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and investigative journalist on the subject, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'.
Christopher O'Brien, an author and who has investigated the subject for decades, said that in his 200 cases of dealing with cattle death, about 40 of those were done by 'something with intelligence'. He is pictured researching left in 1993 and right in 2012
This Hooper, Nebraska calf also had its anus cut in a 10-inch wide diameter and 18-inch deep. O'Brien told DailyMail.com that he didn't believe aliens were responsible - because 'who would fly thousands of light years to collect cow butts?'
He is more skeptical of the alien explanation – saying that Howe's research doesn't incorporate many of the scientific findings that have been made.
He told the DailyMail.com that when a cow decomposes, the vegetable matter contained in one of its four stomachs makes the animal bloat. As the moisture leaves the body it then starts to deflate – causing the exposed edges of the animal to stay hard and darkened.
'To someone who doesn't know what they're looking at – it looks like a burn,' he said.
O'Brien feels that the alien argument is one used to sensationalize the topic and are only looking at a small portion of the total data.
He can't deny, however, how disturbing the number of 'high strange' cases are that he's seen – the ones that involve otherworldly circumstances.
On one occasion which O'Brien calls his 'strangest case' – he was called to the scene of a mutilated calf in Del Norte, Colorado.
'It was really freaky, it wouldn't rot,' he said. 'It was found in a complete pristine, five inch snow field without one drop of blood on the snow. All the blood had been taken from the animal. The heart and liver had been expertly excised and left in the body cavity.
'The chief medical veterinary pathologist said "it wasn't an animal that did this",' he continued.
In O'Brien's book, Stalking the Heard, he writes that the month-old calf was also missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated.
Two witnesses also reportedly saw a large beam of light near the house the previous evening before the calf was found.
O'Brien's 'strangest case' was this month-old calf that was missing its spine from the hips to the skull and the brain was gone. It's right front leg was also gone, and the vast majority of its ribs, both eyes, ears, intestines, reproductive tract, and lungs had been removed. Its rectum was also mutilated and its heart and liver were excised but left inside the body cavity
He hits on another popular argument for the cattle deaths – though arguably the least plausible explanation. Many believe that the excisions were being done simply by other animals – scavengers such as vultures or coyotes.
O'Brien is quick to discredit this based off of his own experience.
'The first thing I look for is cut hair follicles,' he said. 'When birds or coyotes rip they rip between the lines of hair they don't cut the hair. If I find a 2-3 inch section of cut hair follicles I know that someone or something with a sharp implement did that. It wasn't done by birds or scavengers.'
These 'high strange' cases are less likely to be reported by ranchers, according to O'Brien.
'The freakier the case the less likely the rancher is to report it – they're so freaked out they won't even tell their family or neighbors. He doesn't want people in the community to think he's been singled out and victimized by some supernatural thing. That's why they're very reluctant to come forward.
'It's only when they see the hundreds and hundreds of helicopters being reported around these sites – mostly military helicopters – it's only when they see that that they feel like they've been targeted or victimized by their government and that pisses them off.'
Though the occurrences in the United States have considerably slowed down since they were at their height in the early 1970s, they certainly haven't stopped. O'Brien notes that they have seen a consistently high number of cases in South America, especially Brazil and Argentina.
O'Brien says that throughout his decades of studying mutilations, he's noticed that there's been a shift to South America, where he believes they've had more than 4,000 cases since 2002. A news report included in an FBI briefing stated that more than 1500 cattle in 22 states were killed and mutilated from 1973 to 1976 in the United States
He claims that since 2002, there have been more than 4,000 cases of cattle mutilation in South America - and are still reporting anywhere from three to a dozen cases a week.
Back in the United States, just before the New Year in 2016, and again a few days afterwards, two cows were mutilated in nearby rural towns in Kansas.
In McPherson County, Carla and John Shearer discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised.
'We lose animals, but not like this,' Shearer told the Kansas Agland. The couple believes whoever killed their $4,000 cow used a tranquilizer or stun gun to immobilize it before killing it.
'She died in motion – she was walking and she just went straight down,' Shearer added.
Carla and John Shearer on McPherson County, Kansas discovered one of their pregnant cows dead with one eye removed and both her top and bottom eyelids and eyelashes excised in January 2017
The bull found in nearby Harvey County was found dead with its genitals removed – also cut with surgical precision.
It is O'Brien's opinion that the mass mutilations – of which there were thousands reported in the 1970s alone – are a part of a secretive government effort to research animal plagues such as mad cow or prion disease.
'We've seen this many, many times throughout history – where one case will happen and then within a week there will be a dozen. I think they're looking for something – that's the best explanation I can give. And I think they're looking for something within the food chain.
'Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is the most horrendous affliction that you could possibly imagine. It's 100% fatal – it produces large holes in the brain tissue and creates holes like Swiss cheese in the neuron system and the brain synapses start to misfire. You forget to breathe and your autonomic system starts to break down.
'That I think is the basic underpinnings of it – we're dealing with a group that is interested in keeping an eye on the food chain. The beef industry is the largest, most powerful industry that you never hear about. I think we're dealing with something that's being protected by some quasi-governmental group,' he said.
Though tempting to indulge in the possibility of space creatures invading the planet to study our animals, O'Brien finds this explanation a bit too impractical.
'It sounds like bad science fiction,' he said. 'Who would fly hundreds of light years to come and gather cow butts?'
Now and again I’m asked about the issue of “cattle mutilations”/”animal mutilations” in the U.K. Well, yes there are such things in the U.K. I should stress, though, that when I’m asked about these grisly and undeniably disturbing phenomena, people are usually talking about the theory that aliens are the culprits. The truth, though, is that most mutilations in the U.K. are undertaken by sick people who should be behind bars. That said, there are some genuinely weird cases. On April 11, 1977, no less than fifteen wild ponies were found dead at Cherry Brook Valley, Dartmoor, Devonshire, England, by a Tavistock storekeeper named Alan Hicks, who had been crossing the wild and desolate moors with his children. It was not until mid-July, however, that the media began reporting on the incident in-depth. Newspaper articles in my possession demonstrate that the story traveled as far as South Africa; however, consider the following story, extracted from the U.K.’s Western Morning News of July 13, 1977:
“Fears that the mystery deaths of fifteen ponies near a Dartmoor beauty spot were caused by visitors from space were being probed by a Torbay team yesterday. Armed with a Geiger counter, metal detectors and face masks, four men are investigating what leading animal authorities admit seems a ‘totally abnormal happening,’ and are hoping their equipment will throw a new light on the three month old mystery. While other investigators have looked for signs of malnutrition, disease or poisoning – or even gunshot wounds – the four men are seeking proof that extra-terrestrials were responsible for the deaths.”
The trail went icy cold until pretty much 1991 when a great mate of mine, Jonathan Downes, a prolific author, journalist, investigator, and the director of the Center for Fortean Zoology, began to probe the case. Jon – who was living in Devonshire at the time, and who still resides there to this very day – succeeded in tracking down a number of those people that had been quoted by the newspapers some fourteen years previously. Curiously, Jon detected a very distinct reluctance to talk, even after almost a decade and a half. Even more bizarre, one of those same individuals, who strictly adhered to a non-paranormal explanation for the pony deaths, complained to a research colleague of Jon’s acquaintance for constantly pestering her day and night by phone, when, in actuality, the only contact had been one, solitary telephone call. It was a mystery never solved.
On the afternoon of a spring day in 1992, Jon Downes was deep in conversation with a police officer from Middlemoor Police Station in the English city of Exeter. The subject of the conversation was the so-called “big cat” sightings (such as the notorious Beast of Bodmin, Beast of Dartmoor, and Beast of Exmoor) that have been reported throughout the British counties of Devon and Cornwall for decades. Was Jon aware, the officer inquired, that there had occurred at nearby Newquay Zoo in the late 1970s a series of grisly mutilations of animals under extremely strange circumstances? Jon replied that, no, he was not.
Fortunately, however, the officer was able to put Jon in touch with the one man in a position to discuss the facts: the head keeper at the zoo at the time in question. And here’s where things began to get distinctly odd. Jon wasted no time in tracking the man down. Elderly and in failing health, he confirmed to Jon the basics of the story: very strange deaths had occurred at the zoo, and wallabies, swans and geese had been beheaded. But more significantly, their corpses had been totally drained of blood. Another strange saga remained unsolved.
While I don’t personally adhere to the theory/belief-system that the U.K. mutes are the work of ETs, some do. One of those is Mike Freebury. I met Freebury for the first time a few years ago, when I was back in the U.K. for two weeks. He is the author of a 2011 book titled Killers on the Moor. It’s a 252-pages-long book that looks deeply in the matter of mutes in the U.K. If the animal mutilation issue interests you, then you really should get a copy of Killers on the Moor. Regardless of whether you are of the opinion that aliens, wild animals, government conspiracies, or cults are the culprits, Freebury’s book is important, as it’s the only one ever written on the subject of U.K.-based animal mutilations.
Arnu arrives at the A’Le’Inn in a big SUV, pulling up and saying hi to the hungover twentysomethings rocking in rocking chairs out front before he greets us.
“You ready?” he asks, and we pack into his Tahoe and head right back out on the Extraterrestrial Highway.
Arnu has owned property in Rachel since the early 2000s. Back in its boom, when the tungsten mine near Tempiute Mountain was still digging wealth out of the planet, around 500 people lived here. Today, it’s a small town—just around fifty residents, who meet up at the collective mailbox when the Postal Service arrives. Young people, Arnu says, tend to leave. There’s no TV reception. There’s just a squeak of cell phone service. Few places exist to build a career, none to go to college. Some people work at what they simply call “the test site,” an umbrella term that could refer to any of the secret-squirrel operations nearby—the Nevada National Security Site, the Tonopah Test Range, or Area 51.
Around ten people also work at the A’Le’Inn, by far Rachel’s biggest employer. They’re always hiring, because people are always leaving. But people are always showing up, too. “Sometimes they come up here because they are interested in Area 51,” says Arnu, “and they just get stuck.”
That’s what happened to Arnu, decades ago now. It all started with online research into Area 51, reading a website run by a former programmer and airline worker named Glenn Campbell. In the 1990s, Campbell ran the Area 51 Research Center and two UFO newsletters—The Groom Lake Desert Rat and the just plain Desert Rat. The newsletter logo featured a sentient rodent with safari shirt, walkie-talkie, and binoculars, underneath the tagline “The Naked Truth from Open Sources.”
Recalling this, Arnu speeds along the straight road. “He was one of the first that brought the attention of the general public,” he says. But Campbell was mysterious, evasive. “I wanted to know what’s really going on here. Are there UFOs are there no UFOs?”
So Arnu took a day trip, traveling from his home in San Francisco. And when he arrived, he found a place that was fascinating as much for its terrestrial qualities as its celestial hypotheticals. “I had never really experienced the desert in this way,” he says. “And it was just like, ‘Oh my God, this is a whole different world.’ ”
He thought of it, thinks of it now, in terms of motorcycle trips—a hobby of his that he just calls “riding.” “It’s always my thing: I want to see what’s behind the next turn, the next hill,” he says. And despite how this highway feels—unchanging, flat, forever—if you veer from it, turns and hills and the secrets behind them abound.
Release date: March 3Courtesy of Pegasus Books
Arnu went back home knowing he would return. The presence of the place loomed over him, shook him. Soon enough, the labor market gave him a chance: His company downsized, so he took a severance package and car-camped around Rachel.
Soon after that, Arnu started his own website, mostly a blog detailing his daily exploits: As he summarizes it, Today I went out to this gate, this is what I found, check out my pictures. More important than anything he wrote, though, were the comments sections.
“It’s like people were only waiting for a place to congregate,” he says. He soon started a forum—still going strong today—dedicated to such interaction. “We’re geeks,” he says. “We’re loners. But at the same time we also want to discuss what we do with like-minded people.”
He moved to Vegas in 2002 and then bought the property in Rachel, working remotely a lot so he could spend a week at a time in the remote desert.
“And here I am,” he says. “Years later. Still unraveling the mystery of Area 51.”
Arnu looks through the Tahoe’s windshield and points at a prominent peak ahead of us. If you can get to the top, you can see inside Area 51, which would then be 26 miles away. This high spot is the only one left with that view, the military having gobbled up all closer vantage points in a series of land grabs. Here’s what the base looks like from up there: Dark, if you’re doing it right, because the interesting stuff happens at night. But all of a sudden, way across the valley, a runway illuminates itself, a long line of lights dotting the landscape. “You know something is about to happen,” Arnu says. Aircraft bulbs streak along the runway, as a Whatever speeds to takeoff. And as soon as the Whatever is airborne, its lights blink out of existence, and so do the runway’s. The Earth becomes as optically opaque as it was before.
It’s not that they appear. It’s that they disappear.
Nevertheless, the base continues to give away information invisibly: Pilots talk on radios, and if the chatter is not so secret, you may be able to catch a monologue.
Arnu has a radio scanner, which he now turns on, mounted to the dash of his Tahoe. It runs through many Hertz in search of such communication. As the display rolls across frequencies, I prepare to tell Arnu about what we saw last night, feeling silly and like every other overexcitable person who’s ever visited the region.
I know from our prior emails that Arnu doesn’t ride the alien train. Sure, creepy stuff happens here. Sure, there are strange lights, technologies we can barely fathom. But they don’t require invocation of the extraterrestrial: They’re just the government, doing things the world isn’t privy to—the growing up of projects perhaps born classified, just like it always has here.
That started with the U-2, which flew twice as high as a commercial jet, and much higher than anything else at the time. Workers commuted daily on passenger jets—a secret service people call, in its modern incarnation, “Janet airlines”—partly so that permanent residences would not reveal the scale of efforts here. U-2 pilots, though they worked for the CIA, wore civilian clothes and pretended to do weather-related research, according to the book Area 51 by investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen.
Later, Area 51 hosted the Oxcart spy plane project, the U-2 successor that also flew close to the sun but showed up dimmer on radar. Jacobsen writes that FAA and NORAD employees were instructed “not to ask questions about anything flying over 40,000 feet.” And when commercial flights crossed paths with an Oxcart, and a pilot did report it, the FBI would meet the plane at the gate, asking passengers to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Rachel is the closest town to Area 51, a top-security Air Force testing ground in the southeastern Nevada desert.Alexey Stiop/Deposit Photos
Around the country, people nonetheless spotted spy planes and reported them as UFOs. Says a CIA report from 1997, “Over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.” Many, including UFO skeptics, dispute this take, but it doesn’t seem absurd that the government would use UFO reports to understand how conspicuous its technology would look in less friendly skies. And it doesn’t actually want people to see skylights and think “spy planes.” So it is sometimes in the feds’ best interest to let people attribute the phenomenon to something mysterious, unearthly, not them. And—bonus—because many people thought UFOs were woo-woo and not “real,” whoever heard about these UFO sightings would likely dismiss the very real U-2 or A-12 their kid had just seen. The government’s secrets could stay secret. If you wanted to create a theory about why the military hasn’t come out swinging against some of its pilots’ more modern sightings, you might consider this part of the past.
“ ‘Oh, well, these people just saw another UFO,’ ” mimics Arnu. “In actuality they may have seen something super-secret ... If you make people look like fools when they say they saw something, if they say they saw something super secret, what better way to discredit them?” Given the government’s history of passive deception, and active secret-keeping, here, is it any surprise that people suspect it could be hiding something more inside Area 51?
But I want to know what Arnu, who sees this stuff every day, thinks of my sighting. So I describe the on-off lights, their hovering, and my theory that this was some kind of hide-and-seek exercise.
Arnu frowns in concentration. “Were the lights kind of orange?” he asks. “A bright orange color?”
“Yes!” says Carolyn from the backseat. Arnu nods and then goes on to describe exactly what we saw, detail for detail, as if he were there.
“That was flares you were seeing,” he says. A plane chases another plane, and the chaser sends off a (fake) heat-seeking missile. The chased plane drops flares, which burn so hot that they distract the missile, which then chases them instead of the jet’s exhaust. These planes drop flares in patterns—disc shapes, sometimes—to send the missiles clear off course.
Hearing this incident repeated back, with more meaning, makes me feel the way people do when they discover their seemingly singular experience is, in fact, universal: equal parts relieved and disappointed.
Arnu’s first UFO sighting, turns out, was also flares. He had been camping right where we did, in the gravel parking area. “I looked over Tikaboo,” he says, referring to one of the peaks, “and all of a sudden, I see this disc-shaped object of orange orbs hanging in the sky.”
It’s all true, he recalls thinking. They’re coming to get me.
But they weren’t and they didn’t. He was just primed: He thought he had witnessed a UFO because that’s what he expected to witness. “Your eyes see what you want them to see,” he says.
He then begins to talk about YouTube videos of cars disappearing on the Extraterrestrial Highway. They’re not disappearing, he says: They’re coming down from summits, hitting dips.
“We saw that!” I say, and describe how I scared ourselves into thinking that the guards had set a trap.
“That’s why I’m such a skeptic,” says Arnu. “Because I’ve seen it. And I know for a fact what they’re describing is very explainable.” Talking to Arnu feels like seeing a therapist who understands, even when you don’t, that your problems are all because of your mom.
They came from outer Finland: the town where everyone saw UFOs – in pictures
They came from outer Finland: the town where everyone saw UFOs – in pictures
The photographer Maria Lax comes from a northern Finnish town where UFO sightings were common – so she set about looking for answers. Her book Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is published by Setanta Books
‘I’m from a small town in northern Finland surrounded by a vast, sparsely populated wilderness. Most pass through the town without ever knowing it was a hotspot for UFO sightings in the 1960s,’ writes Maria Lax
‘It wasn’t until I read my grandfather’s book about the UFO sightings in the area that I learned of the incredible stories of supernatural events, bravery and struggle against hardship in what is largely a barren land. Already suffering from dementia, he was unable to answer any of the questions I had so I went looking for the answers. I turned to the people who had seen the mysterious lights, to newspaper archives and my family’s photo albums from the era’
‘All of the locations in the book are places I have been going to since my childhood. By doing the project, talking to people, reading my grandfather’s book, searching through family albums and walking around the familiar landscapes I got to know my past and my family history much better. This image was taken near my grandparents’ house on a New Year’s Day when there was a long power cut and an eerie fog came out of nowhere - the perfect weather for the type of photographs I wanted to shoot’
‘Over the few years I worked on this project I interviewed several people in the town, and all their accounts are remarkably similar. Colourful lights would follow cars, or people walking home alone. The lights would be silent, pulsating in different colours before disappearing into the sky. Sometimes bright lights would wake people up in their homes in the middle of the night - and would again vanish without a trace’
‘With the lack of sunlight northern Finland experiences for a considerable part of the year, it’s impossible to escape the darkness. I decided to embrace it and felt like the absence of natural light allowed me to experiment with my images. I wanted to fill the darkness with colours and use long exposures to draw out the unexpected from the locations I knew so well’
‘The first known UFO sightings in the area were made as early as the 1920s. But because of fears that they would be labelled as crazy by others, people kept what they saw a secret and would only come forward with their experiences decades later - and more than likely most never spoke of what they saw’
‘There is a larger story running alongside the UFO sightings. Rapid industrialisation in the 60s and early 70s meant that people couldn’t support their families by farming and were forced to move to cities in search of jobs. Some towns lost nearly half their populations. A whole lifestyle disappeared in a matter of a few years, and those who lived through it remember it as a painful, uncertain time. It’s little wonder the UFO sightings embodied a fear of the future and the unknown. I wanted to bring all of this in by photographing the abandoned houses and showing the isolation’
‘One of the people I interviewed told me: “I remember waking up one night and the room being awash with the most beautiful colours. I knew it was the aliens but I wasn’t afraid. I knew they didn’t wish me any harm.” Although some locals I spoke to were still visibly scared and cautious of sharing what they had experienced decades ago, others said the strange lights were a thing that gave them hope; a sign they hadn’t been forgotten’
‘The title Some Kind of Heavenly Fire comes from a quote in my grandfather’s book about the alien sightings. When an older woman saw what looked like the forest on fire on a cold winter’s night, she described the strange lights by saying it wasn’t anything from this world - but what she saw was “some kind of heavenly fire”. The town where I come from was, and still is, deeply religious in parts, and I thought that quote was the perfect summary for the different elements for the photo book’
‘This project is an artistic expression of something that is part of my hometown and my family history. I have kept the narrative ambiguous and hope that anyone who sees these images can form their own truth about this little town with a big secret’
Even skeptics acknowledge eyewitness accounts of strange aircraft in the skies are worth investigating. With everyone from pilots to other credible sources describing unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, in the air as far back as 1947, it’s impossible to completely discount the real possibility extraterrestrials may be paying us visits.
But which states are most prone to these sightings? Telecommunications company SatelliteInternet.com compiled data from the National UFO Reporting Center to find out.
The results:
Washington
Montana
Vermont
Alaska
Maine
Washington has the highest number of sightings (according to population) by far—an estimated 5894 through June 2019, which amounts to 78.22 sightings per 100,000 people. Montana had 823; Vermont had 482. Oregon, which came in at number 6, had 2844 sightings, but a larger population put the average at 67.86 sightings per 100,000. If aliens are indeed operating the sighted crafts, they appear to be fond of sprawling landscapes with wide-open spaces, like Montana and Vermont.
The states with the least number of sightings:
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
Mississippi
Alabama
Texas has logged many accounts—4969—but their state population means an average of just 17.31 sightings per 100,000 people. Alabama had 10,882 sightings for an average 22.26. It appears as though aliens aren’t visiting southern states.
You can file a UFO sighting at the National UFO Reporting Center. Be prepared to summarize details like light, trails, whether the object landed or made a sound, if anything was chasing the object, or if entities were seen.
Where did the Moon come from and how was it formed? It’s a question that scientists have been scratching their heads over for decades.
According to the widely-accepted “giant-impact hypothesis,” the Moon was formed billions of years ago when a Mars-sized planet called Theia collided with the Earth, breaking off a large chunk in the process.
Now, researchers from the University of New Mexico say in a new paper published in Nature Geoscience that they believe they’ve found the remains of Theia buried beneath the lunar surface.
The big drawback to the impact hypothesis — as discussed at length by numerous scientists over many years — is the fact that even though oxygen isotopes in lunar rocks collected during NASA’s Apollo missions closely resemble those found on Earth, they’re strikingly different from those found on other objects in our Solar System, as explained by Science Alert.
So how could the Moon be largely made up of the remains of Theia, as many models have predicted?
Despite very small odds, Earth and Theia may have originally had similar compositions, but then been mixed up beyond recognition.
In their research, the New Mexico scientists examined oxygen isotopes in a range of different lunar rock types, collected from a variety of altitudes. They found that the deeper the origin of the rock, the heavier the oxygen isotopes, when compared to the ones found on Earth.
“Clearly, Theia’s distinct oxygen isotope composition was not completely lost through homogenisation during the giant impact,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
That means the oxygen isotopes didn’t fully mix during the Theia-Earth impact, leading to their conclusion that Theia could’ve still originated from outside of the Solar System before impacting with Earth.
“This data suggests that the deep lunar mantle may have experienced the least mixing and is most representative of the impactor Theia,” said research scientist and co-author Zach Sharp in a statement.
Key point:Eyewitnesses, even fighter pilots, are prone to human error.
By now you’ve probably read the New York Times article detailing a UFO research program run by the Pentagon which received $22 million — a tiny amount by Defense Department standards — from 2007 to at least 2012. The disclosure of the program is the biggest such reveal since Project Blue Book of the 1950s and 1960s and the French government’s 1999 COMETA Report.
If that wasn’t strange enough, the article included declassified footage from a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter’s AN/ASQ-228 sensor display as it trailed a still-unidentified flying object over the Pacific near San Diego on Nov. 14, 2004.
In the footage, the Super Hornet pilot, while traveling at 252 knots at nearly 20,000 feet, switched between his display’s infrared and visual modes as the sensor tried to lock onto the blurry, oblong or pill-shaped object. The flying object appeared white in IR mode, and black in TV mode — indicating that whatever it was, the sensor had picked up on the object’s emission, temperature or reflection.
The video comes from the same incident when Cmdr. David Fravor, a veteran Navy pilot assigned to the USS Nimitz carrier fighter squadron VFA-41 Black Aces, was on a training mission off San Diego. “It was a real object, it exists and I saw it,” Fravor told the Washington Post. Telling the paper that he believes it was “not from the Earth.”
During an exercise, commanders ordered Fravor to intercept an object that was appearing at 80,000 feet — above the range of Ticonderoga-class cruiser USS Princeton’s SPY-1 air-search radar — before dropping suddenly to 20,000 feet. “Officials told they had been tracking a couple dozen of these objects for a few weeks,” the paper reported.
The story that followed has circulated in the military aviation world and fighter community for several years, including this write-up by former Navy F-14A Tomcat pilot Paco Chierici at Fighter Sweep. With orders to intercept the object, Fravor in his jet — callsign FASTEAGLE 01 — headed toward with aid from an E-2 Hawkeye early warning and control plane.
The Hawkeye’s sensors, however, couldn’t detect the object and vector him toward it, so Princeton directed FASTEAGLE 01 and Fravor’s wingman, FASETEAGLE 02 to the location, and even asked Fravor whether he was carrying weapons — he wasn’t. He just had two training missiles. Below the jets, Fravor saw whitewater sloshing in the blue ocean.
All four aircrew were eyes out from this point forward. The first unusual indication Dave picked up was the area of whitewater on the surface that Cheeks was looking at over his shoulder as he flew away. He remembers thinking it was about the size of a 737 and maybe the contact they had been vectored on had been an airliner that had just crashed. He maneuvered his F-18 lower to get a better look. As he was descending through about 20K he was startled by the sight of a white object that was moving about just over the frothing water. It was all white, featureless, oblong and making minor lateral movements while staying at a consistent low altitude over the disk of turbulent water.
[…]
In his debrief comments, Dave, his WSO and the two other crews stated the object had initially been hovering like a Harrier. They described it as uniformly white, about 46 feet long (roughly fighter-sized), having a discernible midline horizontal axis (like a fuselage) but having no visible windows, nacelles, wings or propulsion systems.
There was no apparent exhaust or rotor wash, either. The pill-shaped object then “oriented one of its skinny ends towards him,” and rose in a “right 2-circle flow” — fighter speak for when each aircraft have their noses pointed at each other’s tails. The object then accelerated away at “multi-Mach” speed.
The video of the AN/ASQ-228 sensor display occurred later in the day with a different set of fighters. The object at this point appeared stationary before taking off.
This is consistent with a U.S. Navy report obtained by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a UFO research company which published the footage. The Navy pilots, apparently, first believed the object could have been a classified missile test from a submarine. The Navy report cited a source who indicated the object maneuvered in a manner “that seemed to defy the laws of physics” and “‘tumbled’ into nonsensical angles that made any engagement by the F-18 impossible.”
So what was it? A secret U.S. test project? A classified drone or hypersonic weapon? A maneuverable reentry vehicle or something like DARPA’s Falcon Project? Naval Air Systems Command, which tests airborne weapons, has 36,000 square miles of controlled sea and airspace off the Southern Californian coast. And the Falcon Project’s Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 has reached Mach 22 — albeit six years after the 2004 object sighting in the Pacific.
Or perhaps it was an elaborate hoax, or a software or sensor error. Maybe an atmospheric disturbance? Or let’s say it was an alien spacecraft powered by technology impossible for our tiny primate brains to understand. I hope it’s the last one, but I’m not counting on it. Your guess is as good as mine.
Eyewitnesses, even fighter pilots, are prone to human error. Pilots also know how aircraft operate, and the belief that there is something unusual in the skies is more common in that community than you might assume. Fravor certainly believes what he saw, and many fighter pilots believe him.
The Pentagon UFO-hunting mission, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is still partially classified. In any case, even if the explanation is as mundane as a weapons test, the eyewitness accounts and FLIR footage make this an interesting mystery worth further study. Whether Fravor saw an object of extraterrestrial origin is beside the point.
It’s also worth reading the comments section at Fighter Sweep:
I was on board the USS Princeton (2001-2005) when this all went down. We actually went to GQ (General Quarters) for about 4 hours as all if this was going down. I’ve been telling everyone about this even, but have gotten the usual “yeah right” look when I tell them about it. I saw the video after it happened, but didn’t think that it would somehow make it’s way to the public, considering all of the “security” that surrounded the issue.
Crazy how the world turns, isn’t it?!
Thank you for giving this event life! I no longer look like a tin foil hat wearing idiot!
Are aliens real? Learn about sightings, abductions, and crashes around the world. Hear about unbelievable stories, dating back to ancient Egypt, including the famous crash in Roswell, New Mexico that eventually led to the government cover-up in Area 51. UFO’s in the universe confirmed!
Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:00 Ancient Egypt, Roswell, New Mexico, and David Grohl. Here are some of the biggest 00:05 UFO sightings in history. Stay tuned to number one to see how the famous rock 00:10 band the Foo Fighters are involved. 00:22 Number 10: The Tulli Papyrus. 00:25 in approximately 1440 BC scribes of the 00:29 Pharaoh Thutmose III claimed to have seen fiery discs in the sky. 00:33 What’s amazing about this story is that it’s the first written account of humans 00:38 seeing UFOs in history the translation of the ancient tule papyrus asserts that 00:42 strange fiery objects were seen in the sky 00:45 for at least four days, and continued to grow in number. Here’s what current 00:49 historians believe the papyrus to have read, “Now, after some days had passed over 00:55 these things lo, they were more numerous than anything they were shining in the 00:59 sky. More than the Sun to the limits of the four supports of heaven powerful was 01:04 the position of the fire circles the army of the King looked on and His 01:08 Majesty was in the midst of it it was after supper thereupon they went up 01:13 higher directed to south fishes and volatile fell down from the sky he was a 01:18 marvel never occurred since the foundation of this land. Caused his 01:22 Majesty to be brought incense to pacify the earth. What happened in the book of 01:27 the house of life to be remembered for the eternity.” Some claim the ancient 01:32 Egyptians merely saw strange astrological or weather phenomena. But 01:37 opposing arguments remind us that the Egyptians were one of the most advanced 01:41 astrologers of any ancient culture. For them to mistake a weather phenomenon for 01:46 an unnatural object is highly unlikely. 01:50 Number 9: Roswell, New Mexico. 01:52 Probably the most famous of all UFO sightings occurred in Roswell, New Mexico 01:57 in 1947. The deep conspiracies and cover-ups that have spawned from these 02:02 events have influenced art, movies, and music, as that event is thought to be the 02:07 catalyst of all area 51 secrets. We’ll have to talk more about area 51 at a 02:11 later time, but for now, more about this famous UFO . William Brazil, better known 02:16 as Mac, was a ranch foreman on the Foster homestead about 30 miles north of 02:21 Roswell. On June 14, 1947, while out on the ranch, Mac noticed some metallic debris 02:28 in the desert and went to investigate. What he found, though, was indescribable. Tough, 02:33 pliable metal that would Bend, but would bounce back to its original 02:37 shape without even a crease. Mac mentioned what he’d found to the local 02:41 sheriff on July 7th and the rest, as they say, is history. 02:46 Immediately after being reported, the US government agencies swooped in to recover 02:50 the strange craft and its occupants. Initially they were moved to Wright 02:54 Field, in Ohio, where they were kept until 1951. But secrecy and security demanded 03:01 that the strange findings were moved to a remote location in the Nevada desert… 03:04 Area 51. Nobody knows for certain what was discovered in Roswell, or what 03:10 secrets the government is hiding from us in Area 51, but whether alien or 03:14 domestic, the truth is that something was discovered in Roswell in 1947. The 03:19 government collected it, and has managed to keep the truth a secret for over 70 03:24 years. That’s not suspicious! 03:27 Number 8: The second…first(?) Recorded Sighting? 03:32 June 19th, 1801, The streets of Hull, England were quiet…nothing out of the ordinary. 03:37 That is, until a strange blue glow began to light up the city. The people of the 03:43 town later said that a huge moon like orb was seen floating over the city, 03:47 casting a strange light upon the town. The moon was aid to form itself into 03:53 seven small distinct moons, or globes of fire, which disappeared for the space of 03:58 a few seconds. Its reappearance was equally brilliant. At first showing 04:02 itself like the face of the Moon, afterwards in five circular balls, and 04:07 lastly like several small stars which gradually faded away, leaving the whole 04:11 atmosphere brilliantly illuminated. Sounds amazing, right? After this sighting, 04:16 which was the first recorded sighting of modern times, more newspaper reports of 04:21 UFO sightings appeared all over Scotland. 04:24 Number 7: Tierport, South Africa. 04:26 South Africa has been a hotbed of UFO sightings, including a 1965 UFO landing 04:33 that was confirmed in a press release by Lieutenant Colonel JB Brits, the district 04:38 commandant of Pretoria North. Some folks in South Africa have even told stories 04:43 of abductions occurring as early as 1956. One such occasion, on July 24th, 1956, a 04:51 photographer capturing photos of an inexplicable object in the sky claimed 04:56 she was abducted by the craft and impregnated by one of the crew members… 05:00 Akon! Now, I don’t think this is the hip-hop artist Akon, 05:03 but it’s definitely a possibility. Sightings have continued through the 05:07 years, but in June of 2011 20 of these crafts were spotted as they crossed the 05:12 skies of Teirport. Some witnesses were even able to capture photos of seven of 05:17 the craft. These objects were described as silent orange lights traveling across 05:21 the sky. Witnesses stated that the orange lights moved much faster than the speed 05:26 of a commercial aircraft. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below! 05:31 05:31 Number 6: The Ghost Rockets. 05:33 It’s not very often than multiple countries 05:37 report seeing the same unidentified objects in the sky, but that’s exactly 05:41 what occurred with the ghost rocket incident. 1946 was an active year for UFO 05:46 sightings over the skies of Europe. Over 2,000 reported sightings were logged by 05:51 the Swedish government, alone, however these same unexplained objects were also 05:56 reported in Greece, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy. And more than 200 sightings were 06:02 corroborated by government radar systems. Most of these reports described 06:06 fast-flying ,missile shaped objects. While they typically flew horizontally across 06:11 the sky, the concerning item for those who saw the phenomenon is the fact that 06:16 the objects maintained maneuverability in the sky – a feat that was unheard of 06:21 for rockets at the time. In a declassified US Air Force document, it is 06:25 clear that Swedish and US governments both believe that the objects had 06:29 extraterrestrial origins. “For some time, we’ve been concerned by the recurring 06:33 reports on flying saucers. They periodically continue to pop up. 06:37 During the last week one was observed hovering over Neubiberg Air Base for 06:42 about 30 minutes. They’ve been reported by so many sources, 06:45 and from such a variety of places, that we are convinced that they cannot be 06:50 disregarded and must be explained on some basis which is perhaps slightly 06:54 beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking. When officers of 06:58 this Directorate recently visited the Swedish air intelligence service this 07:02 question was put to the Swedes. Their answer was at some reliable and fully 07:06 technically qualified people have reached the conclusion that these 07:10 phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be 07:15 credited to any presently known culture on Earth. They are therefore assuming 07:22 that these objects originated from some previously unknown or unidentified 07:26 technology, possibly outside the earth.” The Ghost Rocket sightings ended as 07:30 quickly as they began in 1946, however, in both 2012 and 2014 recent sightings have 07:37 prompted both government and civilian investigations into potential landings 07:41 and crashes that seem to be occurring in a Swedish Lake. Maybe ET is just after the 07:47 Swedish Fish! 07:48 Number 5: Ängelholm Memorial. 07:50 During the same 07:52 period as the ghost rocket sightings, Swedish entrepreneur Gösta Carlsson 07:56 supposedly stumbled across a landed UFO and even got to meet a passenger of the 08:01 spacecraft, who had exited the saucer. Carlsson must have made quick friends 08:06 with the alien race, as it is told that they exchanged recipes for natural, 08:10 holistic medicines that Carlsson later shared with the world through his 08:13 pharmaceutical company. Alien pharmaceuticals, huh? Not sure if I trust 08:18 the source! Anyway, to memorialize the meeting, a concrete statue of the UFO was 08:23 constructed in 1972 and remains a tourist attraction to this day… 08:27 especially by UFO enthusiasts around the world. 08:30 Number 4: Abduction! 08:31 Speaking of memorials, if you were to travel the back 08:36 roads of New Hampshire on US Route 3, you might stumble across a strange 08:39 plaque near the town of Lincoln. It’s dedicated to Betty and Barney Hill and 08:44 the fateful events of September 19th, 1961. Betty and Barney were traveling home in 08:49 their car following a vacation in Montreal. At some point during their 08:53 drive, the Hills noticed a strange light up in the night sky. Betty had thought 08:57 that it was a falling star, other than the fact that was falling up, and 09:02 continued to be visible for a long period of time. Betty found a pair of 09:06 binoculars in the car and was able to track the movements of the object as it 09:10 passed in front of the moon. She described it as an odd shaped craft that 09:14 was surrounded by flashing, multicolored lights. Concerned, the Hills climbed back 09:19 into their 1957 Chevy Belair and continued to drive home. Out of nowhere, 09:24 the craft descended upon them and Barney came to a screeching halt as the UFO 09:27 hovered above the road right in their path. 09:30 Fearing they were going to be captured, Barney began to speed away. Their car was 09:34 no match for the extra-terrestrial horsepower, though, and the saucer was 09:37 quickly hovering above their car. According to the Hills, the car began to 09:41 vibrate and their bodies begin to tingle. 09:44 And that’s it! 09:45 The couple of woke some 35 miles away. They had no idea how they got there. 09:50 They did remember seeing the UFO moments before, but they had no recollection of the 09:55 time in between. In the weeks following this incident, Betty Hill began to have 09:58 vivid dreams that seemed more like a recollection of actual events. She was in 10:03 the medical ward of the UFO while being examined by an alien figure. During her 10:08 conversations with the leader of the aliens, he showed her a star map of where 10:12 they hailed from. From Betty’s memory of the dream, she was able to recreate the 10:16 star map, which astronomers have identified as the system of Zeta Reticuli. 10:21 Many books and movies have been written concerning the first documented alien 10:25 abduction, and it’s most certain that Betty and Barney Hills lives were never 10:29 the same after this event. But what really happened that night? Honestly, 10:33 we’ll probably never know. 10:35 Number 3: Cape Girardeau Crash. 10:38 10:39 Cape Girardeau is a small Missouri town, a mere 118 miles south of St. Louis. One 10:45 fateful night in 1941, though, led to a government cover-up and members of the 10:49 town being sworn to secrecy. More than 75 years ago, on the night of April 12th, 10:54 1941 a reverend was asked to leave the comforts of his home in the middle of 10:58 the night so that he could administer last rites 11:01 to victims of what was thought to be a plane crash, just outside of town. As a 11:05 town sheriff and the Reverend arrived at the scene 11:07 they found firefighters working hard to put out a fire that resulted from the 11:10 crash. Through the smoke and fire, it was obvious that this was no plane. As later 11:15 transcribed by UFO researcher Michael Huntington, “The Reverend arrived and saw 11:20 a classic flying disc with part of the side ripped open and two alien bodies 11:24 that were, at least dead, and one that may have been dying, may have been alive, 11:29 couldn’t breathe. The Reverend looked inside of the flying 11:33 saucer and saw wires and components of some sort of alien design. There were 11:37 strange hieroglyphics and bizarre knobs and dials. The Reverend knew that he 11:41 couldn’t really give last rites. About that time the Army Air Corps arrived 11:45 from Sikeston Field and cordoned off the area and swore everybody to secrecy 11:50 and confiscated any pictures. There were pictures allegedly taken that night of 11:55 men holding one of the alien bodies and somewhere out there are those pictures.” 11:58 The story was kept quiet until the 1970s when the witnesses were aging. On his 12:03 death bed, the Reverend finally broke down and told his granddaughter, 12:06 Charlotte Mann what he had seen. Unsure how to take his news, Charlotte was able 12:11 to get corroborating stories from the other aging witnesses, who all claim to 12:14 have seen the craft firsthand. Since the 1970s, Cape Girardeau has become a hotbed 12:19 for UFO research 12:21 Number 2: The Battle of Los Angeles. 12:24 Okay number two sounds 12:27 like something directly out of a Hollywood action movie, the Battle of Los 12:31 Angeles. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the recent decision to enter 12:35 World War II, Americans were on high alert for anything suspicious that might 12:39 indicate an enemy attack. On February 25th, 1942 one such incident occurred and 12:45 has subsequently become known as the Battle of Los Angeles. In the early hours 12:49 of the morning, just after 2:00 a.m. military radar units sent word of what 12:54 appeared to be enemy aircraft approaching the mainland United States. 12:57 As not to give the enemy an easy target, a citywide blackout was ordered and the 13:01 air-raid siren sounded. Reports of an unidentified object in the 13:05 sky began circulating just after 3:00 a.m. and eventually the troops begin 13:09 firing anti-aircraft guns at whatever objects were in the night sky. As 13:13 reported by the Los Angeles Times, “Powerful searchlights from countless 13:17 stations stabbed the sky with brilliant probing fingers while anti-aircraft 13:22 batteries dotted the heavens with beautiful, 13:24 if sinister, orange bursts of shrapnel.” But what was strange was the objects 13:29 never fired back. In fact, after one full hour of firing 1,433 rounds of 13:37 anti-aircraft artillery into the sky…not a single enemy plane was taken down. Not 13:42 a single bomb was dropped from an enemy plane. And no evidence of an enemy 13:46 attack was ever found. There was plenty of damage due to friendly fire, though. 13:50 Beyond the scattered shrapnel of anti-aircraft ammo that had exploded all 13:55 over the town, windows were shattered in homes and businesses all over LA. Several 14:00 homes were completely destroyed by the friendly artillery shells falling from 14:03 the night sky. At least five people died from the events surrounding this attack, 14:07 from incidents ranging from car accidents to stress induced heart 14:10 attacks. While no one knows for certain what was seen over the night sky in Los 14:14 Angeles, many UFO theorists have gone on record to state that the glowing, moving 14:18 targets that the air raid troops were firing at with our rudimentary 14:21 earthbound weapon systems were actually groups of UFOs flying over the Los 14:26 Angeles night sky. Before we get to number one take a moment to subscribe! 14:30 Also don’t forget to leave a comment and let us know what you think about UFOs 14:35 and extraterrestrial beings. 14:39 Number 1: David Grohl and the Foo Fighters. 14:42 Any music lover that’s listened 14:45 to rock in the 90s or the 2000s should be familiar with rock legend David Grohl. 14:50 Beginning his rock stardom as the drummer for the legendary grunge band 14:53 Nirvana, David Grohl went on to found the also well-known fighters of foo or… 14:59 something like that. Anyway, what does this have to do with UFOs you ask? 15:04 Well, Mr. Grohl himself has gone on record to state that he was reading a 15:08 lot of UFO books at the time of the band’s inception. The term Foo Fighters 15:12 dates back to World War II where it was actually used to refer to the 15:16 unidentified objects that were regularly spotted by Air Force pilots as they flew 15:20 missions critical to war efforts. These reports talk in depth about bright 15:25 lights following Allied airplanes. Traveling in speeds of over 200 miles 15:29 per hour, these lights would complete amazing maneuvers and formations all 15:33 around the Allied Force planes, while others would simply follow the pilots 15:37 through the European and Pacific skies. Reports originating as early as 1941 15:42 have described these objects with many different characteristics ranging from 15:46 fiery and glowing red, to orange white, or even green. Some were reported as disk 15:52 shaped, while others were reported as cylindrical objects or even wedge-shaped. 15:56 One of the fiery objects was actually hit with gunfire which caused the larger 16:01 ball of fire to break up into several small pieces and fall to the ground. 16:05 While the buildings below caught on fire, nothing was found from this fireball 16:09 that would have identified its origin or makeup. To this day no known cause for 16:14 these strange appearances exist. Some say it was a secret Nazi unmanned weapon. So 16:19 secretive, in fact, that the Nazis still aren’t even talking about it today! 16:23 Others feel it is related to electrostatic discharge from the planes.
Merciless Ancient Flood Carried 300,000 Lives Away
Merciless Ancient Flood Carried 300,000 Lives Away
A new paper provides evidence that a historic Yellow River flood in China killed an estimated 300,000 people, suggesting the city of Kaifeng was to killer floods, what Pompeii was to mega-volcanoes.
The Chinese city of Kaifeng was a former imperial capital and a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides geological and archaeological evidence supporting old literary accounts found in historical documents, that a catastrophic flood in 1642 AD destroyed the inner city and “entombed its inhabitants” within several meters of silt and clay.
Dr. Michael Storozum is a Doctor of Philosophy at Shanghai’s Fudan University Institute of Archaeological Science and, as lead author of the new research paper, he said this flood was particularly “catastrophic” because the city’s defensive walls had partially collapsed during a military siege which caused the floodwaters to become trapped inside.
China Vs Nature’s Wrath: The Flood of 1642 AD
Kaifeng is located on the southern bank of China’s Yellow River’s in the modern central Henan province and in antiquity it was one of the world’s largest cities serving as an imperial capital for several Chinese dynasties . The Yellow River is known to have flooded more than a thousand times in the past 2,000 years causing some of the deadliest flood disasters in recorded history, having claimed an estimated million lives. And over the past 3,000 years, while the Yellow River has flooded Kaifeng city around 40 times, according to the new paper, the 1642 AD event was “perhaps the most devastating of them all”.
Kaifeng and the Yellow River. (a) Topography of the North China Plain. (b) Area around Kaifeng, showing the elevation of the Yellow River compared to Kaifeng. (c) City walls of Kaifeng (solid line - Song dynasty wall, dashed line - Ming/Qing dynasty) (d) The super elevated channel of the Yellow River hanging above Kaifeng, with the tallest building in medieval Kaifeng, the Iron Pagoda, for scale.
In a Newsweek article about the new study, Xin Xu and Rivka Gonen, authors of the book The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion , said that for six months Kaifeng had been resisting a rebel siege on its outer defensive walls and the governor fatefully ordered that the waters of the Yellow River be “unleashed in hopes of destroying the rebel army”. The walls were subsequently broken apart but rather than washing away the rebels the raging dirty waters penetrated the low-lying city taking the number of inhabitants from 378,000, to only “a few score thousand” (60,000) survivors.
The Flood Was Like A Washing Machine Loaded With Razor Blades
Storozum and colleagues explain in their paper that the constant influx of floodwater entering the city created a “deadly mix of mud and urban debris” that they say significantly amplified the destructive power of the flooding Yellow River, causing it to cut through and tear apart everything caught up in its wrath. What this 17th century flood event at Kaifeng tells the scientists is that “urban resilience is not static” but varies in accordance with the magnitude and type of natural hazard, the built landscape, as well as the city's social institutions, said the authors.
Victims of the 1642 AD flood were discovered along with a deadly mix of mud and urban debris.
It’s not only historic floods that the researcher’s new investigations shine light on, for similar events are predicted to occur in our modern world in which “ climate change is expected to cause an increase in extreme weather around the globe,” wrote the scientists. And they also pointed out that as global temperatures continue to rise, which increases the frequency of extremities of floods, studying this one historic event provided an important reminder that unexpected events have happened in the past “and will likely happen again”.
The Facts As They Stand, Are Soaked To The Bone
According to a recent report on the science platform First Street , flooding is a natural process that greatly benefits the environment by, “abating erosion, protecting habitat, cultivating biological productivity” which leads to groundwater recharge. However, high frequency and excessive flooding conversely damage ecosystems, natural habitats, and entire communities, as was experienced over the last month in the UK and other places around the globe. According to a BBC report published today, Copernicus, the EU's climate change service, last winter was “the warmest winter on record for Europe, by a long margin,” being 3.4C above the 1981-2010 average and 1.4C higher than the previous warmest winter of 2015-16.
In North America, according to First Street , between 2000 and 2017 tidal flooding increased “an average of 233% nationally” and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that in 2019, “200 million people in 25 North American states were at risk from flooding”. Trying to explain this sharp increase in heavy downpours and flooding across most of the United States over the last 20 years, it is believed to be largely caused due to changes in “sea levels, surface temperature, and sea surface temperature,” and these fluctuating environmental factors bring about inconsistent, unpredictable, and increasing flood patterns.
And so far as costs are concerned, according to NOAA, flood damage in America alone has cost the American tax payers, “$1 trillion in inflation adjusted dollars since 1980” representing over 63% of the costs of all disasters totaling a billion dollars or more.
Top image: The Yellow River Breaches its Course by Ma Yuan Source: Beijing Palace Museum / Public Domain
Andrew Collins exclusively reveals the true face of a Siberian Denisovan.
What the Denisovans might have looked like has been one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology since the discovery of this extinct human lineage back in 2010. Were they big or small? Did they look like their cousins, the Neanderthals, or were they more like anatomically modern humans in appearance? Lastly, were they the giants of legend as some are now speculating?
Resolving these issues is difficult as just a handful of Denisovan fossil remains have been found. They include two enormous molars, two fragments of a parietal bone from a Denisovan skull, and a finger bone from a young female who lived 75,000 years ago - all found during excavations at the famous Denisova Cave in Siberia. There is also a 160,000-year-old mandible that was found in a cave on the edge of the Tibetan plateau in northwestern China and recently identified as being that of a Denisovan.
Despite this frustrating situation, in September 2019, it was announced that Professor Liran Carmel and Dr. David Gokhman of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, had used epigenetics to analyze gene regulation and cytosine degradation in order to determine the suspected physical make up of the Denisovan face. Their finished reconstruction shows the head and neck of a young female with a rounded head, wide mouth and jaw, minimal chin, brown skin, and striking brown eyes. So well received was their reconstruction that in December 2019 the team won the 2019 Science magazine’s People’s Choice for Breakthrough of the Year .
The Hebrew University team’s award-winning reconstruction of the Denisovan face.
Crucial in Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction of the Denisovan face was data gained from the lineage’s genome first sequenced in 2010 by the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. This showed that a significant number of Denisovan genes have been inherited by modern human groups through interbreeding in the distant past. It is perhaps for this reason that Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan bears similarities to Papua New Guineans and also to certain Australian Originals, both of whom display anything up to 5 percent Denisovan DNA ancestry, the highest rate in any human groups. (See, for comparison, figure below which shows Koori Originals photographed around 1847 in Victoria, Australia. Their features, particularly the man in the middle, can easily be compared with Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan reconstruction).
Koori Originals photographed by Douglas T. Kilburn around 1847 in Victoria, Australia. Their features are comparable with those of Carmel and Gokhman’s Denisovan reconstruction.
So did all Denisovans look like Australian Originals, or indigenous Melanesians? The answer is almost certainly no. For example, studies of Denisovan genes inherited by modern populations in East Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and Papua New Guinea have revealed new information about the evolution of the Denisovan genome. This shows that soon after the Denisovans split from a common ancestor they shared with their cousins the Neanderthals (as much as 475,000-450,000 years ago) the population diverged into two separate types.
One Denisovan population came to inhabit a vast territory possibly extending from Central Asia, Siberia, and northern China in the north to Mongolia and Tibet in the south. Their descendants most likely moved through the Russian Far East before finally crossing the Beringia land bridge into North America; this occurring perhaps as early as 20,000 years ago. From the many discoveries being made in the Denisovan layer at the Denisova Cave it would seem that these Siberian Denisovans as they are known displayed a high level of advanced human behavior.
The other population of Denisovans lived in southern and southeastern Eurasia, as well as in Island Southeast Asia, Melanesia and possibly even Australia. They displayed a more basic genome, suggesting that they were a more archaic lineage than their northern neighbors.
This second branch of Denisovans are known as Sunda Denisovans (occasionally Australo-Denisovans) after the former Sunda landmass that once linked the Malaysian Peninsula with Indonesia. They themselves would appear to have split into two distinct groups, the youngest of them, according to genetic evidence, perhaps lingering on in places like the Philippines and Papua New Guinea until around 15,000 years ago.
So far there is no hard evidence that the Sunda Denisovans developed the same advanced human behavior achieved by their northerly neighbors. Stone tools as much as 50,000 years old found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi may have been made by Denisovans. If they were created by Denisovans then it would imply that their ancestors had not only crossed the Wallace Line, the deep water channel dividing most of the Indonesian archipelago from Sulawesi, but also that they had sea-going capabilities.
If the portrait of the young female created by Carmel and Gokhman’s Hebrew University team is truly representative of a Denisovan, then it is the likeness of a Sunda Denisovan, not a Siberian Denisovan, whose evolutionary development was quite different to that of its southerly counterparts.
So the question remains: what did the Siberian Denisovans look like? How different would they have been to Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction? To answer this question the present writer asked independent researcher and writer Debbie Cartwright to help in the collation of everything available on the physical appearance of a Siberian Denisovan.
This included all obvious information obtained from the Denisovan genome, such as the fact that Denisovans had brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin, along with any further information to be gleaned from the few fossil remains found to date. We also looked at the suspected effects on the lineage’s evolutionary development derived from knowledge that the Siberian Denisovans would appear to have thrived at very high altitudes and also in extremely cold conditions. This probably included the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Mongolia and the Tibetan plateau, one of the highest places on earth.
Such extreme environments might well have necessitated the development of specialized respiratory systems including highly adapted noses that were able both to absorb all available oxygen at altitudes where the air was particularly thin, while at the same time warming up the air sufficiently before it passed into the lungs. For instance, a study by Mark Shriver, a geneticist and anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, found that the effects of climate upon the evolution of nose size and shape suggested that larger, narrower noses are more suited to higher and colder climates, while wider flatter noses are more suited to hot tropical climates.
The Neanderthal Connection
It is important also not to forget that Denisovans were related genetically to Neanderthals, meaning that they would have borne at least some physical characteristics in common with them. This probably included a heavy brow bridge, thickset features, and a receding chin - a fact confirmed with the discovery of the 160,000-year-old Denisovan mandible found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau in northwestern China. This is extremely wide and robust and lacks a well-defined chin.
The Xiahe mandible, only represented by its right half, was found in 1980 in Baishiya Karst Cave.
Also, like the Neanderthals, the Denisovans probably had receding foreheads and extended occipital buns, meaning they perhaps had long heads, as opposed to the more rounded craniums displayed by some early modern human populations such as Australian Originals.
Modern Human Introgression
Having made the connection between Denisovans and Neanderthal physiology it is also likely that Denisovans had at least some traits in common with anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). When a previously misplaced fragment of the finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in 2008 was reunited with the second, more famous, fragment used by the Max Planck Institute to sequence the Denisovan genome, it was realized that the finger did not resemble that of a Neanderthal as had been widely expected. Although the finger bones of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus are extremely thick and quite stubby, the Denisovan finger bone is a lot slimmer, like that of an anatomically modern human.
This connection between anatomically modern humans and Denisovans is perhaps far deeper than anyone has so far suspected for, as the current writer has speculated elsewhere, there is a strong likelihood that the ancestors of the Siberian Denisovans, after leaving Africa, encountered pre-dispersal modern humans already occupying the Levant. Evidence for the existence of these early modern humans has come from the discovery at the Qesem Cave in Israel of eight teeth belonging to members of the Acheulo-Yabrudian Cultural Complex (AYCC), which thrived in the Levant corridor circa 420,000-250,000 years ago. These were found to be almost identical to those of anatomically modern humans.
Having interbred with these early modern humans, the Siberian Denisovans would then have continued their migration eastwards, entering Central Asia, Siberia, and finally, Mongolia and China. If correct, they would have been carrying physiological traits picked up from early modern humans living in the Levant. This is something that the Sunda Denisovans would seem to have missed out on since they most likely took a different route out of Africa, crossing the Arabian peninsula before entering southern Asia, southeastern Asia, and, finally, Island Southeast Asia.
The possibility that the Siberian Denisovans were carrying at least some early modern human genes might also help explain why the Siberian Denisovan genome is slightly different to that of the Sunda Denisovans, and why they would appear to have displayed advanced human behavior before their final disappearance around 45,000 years ago.
And so this brings us to an impression of the Siberian Densovan that appears as follows…
The face of a Siberian Denisovan by artist George Hernandez working in concert with writer-researcher Debbie Cartwright and the present author. Genetic information, Denisovan and Neanderthal fossils, and unique traits in anatomically modern humans were used to reconstruct this likeness.
For our reconstruction of the Siberian Denisovan we have included some physical traits seen in modern human populations that perhaps benefitted from introgression with this archaic human population. They include modern populations in North Asia, East Asia, and even North America - where First Peoples of the Great Lakes-St Lawrence River region such as the Ojibwa and Cree have been found to possess some Denisovan DNA. They, more than any other population, might well have retained Siberian Denisovan traits through the isolation of their ancestors prior to first contact with Europeans at the start of the historical period.
Debbie Cartwright and I then worked with talented Californian artist George Hernandez to achieve the best likeness of an archaic Siberian Denisovan, here revealed for the first time. It is shown also for comparison alongside Carmel and Gokhman’s own reconstruction.
The reconstructed face of a Siberian Denisovan (left) alongside the Hebrew University’s own representation of a Sunda Denisovan (right).
Many similarities can be noted between the two versions, including wide mouths, receding chins, heavy brow ridges, brown eyes, skin and hair, and also large noses, but there are also some differences as well. The face of the Siberian Denisovan is much longer, the brow ridge more prominent (like that of a Neanderthal), the forehead recedes more, while the cheekbone is much higher.
Aquiline Noses
We have also chosen to give the Denisovan a narrow, aquiline nose with a prominent bridge, as opposed to the large, but much flatter nose, of the Carmel and Gokhman reconstruction. As we have seen, such distinctive noses helped in the absorption of oxygen in elevated environments where the air is particularly thin. Yet curiously, an aquiline nose (also known as the Roman or hooked nose) combined with a prominent bridge has often been compared with the head shape of a large bird, most obviously that of an eagle (the Latin word aquiline means “eagle-like).”
Bird shamanism would appear to have played a significant role in human development for as much as 400,000 years. If, as we suspect, the Siberians Denisovans did possess aquiline noses, then with their prominent bridges and heavy brow ridges there is every reason to suspect that their facial details could be said to resemble those of a bird, something noted in individuals with aquiline noses in more modern times.
Illustration comparing an individual with an aquiline nose, heavy brow and prominent nose arch with the head of an eagle by Charles Le Brun
If correct, then this might have encouraged Siberian Denisovan groups to adopt the guise of birds to engage in early forms of animism and even shamanism, similar to that noted in connection with the AYCC inhabitants of the Qesem Cave in Israel as much as 400,000-250,000 years ago. In other words, Siberian Denisovans came to resemble birds both in physical appearance and in mannerisms, a connection emphasized and even celebrated through ritual practices.
Dreadlocks
Lastly, we chose to give our Denisovan thick, dreadlocked hair as opposed to the frizzy hair seen in Carmel and Gokhman’s reconstruction. Why did we do this? The answer is two-fold. First, it comes from the adoption of dreaded hair for socio-cultural and socio-religious purposes by various modern human populations such as the Himba people of Namibia, the Hindu Sadhus or holy men of India, and the Rastafarians of Jamaica.
Secondly, the deliberate management of long thick hair by dreading and the subsequent use of mud (as well as goat hair in the case of Himba women) to help coat it aids in the prevention of lice and other insect infestations. In addition to this, dreadlocks bunched up on the head would have accentuated the Denisovans’ suspected elongated heads, emphasizing their individual identity in a world that towards the end of their time circa 45,000-50,000 years ago, would have included Neanderthals, anatomically modern humans and, most likely, hybrids stemming from an admixture of all these various lineages of the homo genus.
Clearly, such a unique feature is based on speculation of how the Siberian Denisovans managed long hair without cutting it and how it might have come to signify their ritual culture. This is an important point, for no matter what evidence is used to reconstruct the face of an archaic human, it will always involve some personal bias. This can be seen, for example, from the many different representations of Neanderthals. They range from virtual ape-men covered in thick body hair, to others where the individual becomes almost indistinguishable from any red-haired, freckled person you might encounter on the street today.
Thus, it has to be accepted that the Denisovan face imagined by artist George Hernandez under the directions of Cartwright and the author must by definition have its own personal bias. This said, we feel it is the closest representation to date of a Siberian Denisovan, as opposed to the face of the Sunda Denisovan developed by Carmel and Gokhman.
Further assessments on the shape of the Denisovan skull and the proportions of the face can only be achieved following the discovery of additional fossils; most urgently a complete cranium. Beyond this will be the eventual discovery of a Denisovan femur, which will help settle the debate over whether or not the Denisovans were of exceptional size and height.
This was first implied by the enormous size of the two Denisovan molars found in the Denisova Cave. Although the two fragments of the Denisovan skull found at the site in 2016 are also suggestive of a large body frame, not enough fossil remains have come to light to answer the question of height and girth with any degree of certainty. So, until such times we must be content with the two faces of a Denisovan presented to the public so far – that of Carmel and Gokhman’s team from the Hebrew University and that of our own. At least these provide some idea of what this extinct branch of the Homo genus might have looked like.
Top image: The reconstructed face of a Siberian Denisovan (right) alongside the Hebrew University’s own representation of a Sunda Denisovan (left).
Rare Masterpiece Uncovered on Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus
Rare Masterpiece Uncovered on Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus
An Italian-Egyptian team have reconstructed a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian art. They have been able to virtually recreate the face of a leopard that was found on a sarcophagus lid in a necropolis. They recreated the face of the big cat using the latest digital technology.
A team led by Italian archaeologist Patrizia Piacentini, from the Milan State University, found the necropolis under the sands of the desert not far from Aswan. The burial site was unearthed some 15 feet (5m) underground. According to Ansamed, the necropolis “extends for more than 25,000 square meters on the western bank of the Nile River , near the Mausoleum of Aga Khan III.”
Apart from the network of tombs found underground, some burials were also discovered dug into a nearby hill. It is believed that the burial site was in use for a millennium from the 7 th century BC until the 3 rd century AD when Egypt was a Roman province.
Entrance of the newly discovered tomb, where the leopard painting on the sarcophagus was found.
Ansamed reports that “one of the tombs, number AGH026, already made news last year when a large room was found with about 30 bodies buried during the 2nd century BC.” This had a treasure trove of grave goods, including funerary art and a very rare stretcher for transporting mummified cadavers.
In this location, the team found a leopard that was painted onto the stucco of a shattered lid of a sarcophagus. In ancient Egyptian culture, this animal was the symbol of power and determination. Live Science reports that the representation of the predator was “likely intended to strengthen the spirit of the recently deceased for the journey to the land of the dead.”
The painted image of the leopard was found in a poor condition and much of it was missing. It was painted onto the fragment of a lid of the sarcophagus, which was very fragile and full of sand. The experts decided to remove the stucco, with the image, from the lid in order to save the artwork. It was a very delicate task and it could easily have gone wrong. Archaeology.org quotes Piacentini as saying “it was a very delicate operation that had us holding our breath, we had tears in our eyes.”
The fragmentary sarcophagus lid with the painted leopard face on it.
At one time, the face of the leopard would have been aligned with the face of the mummy inside the coffin. Live Science quotes the lead researcher Piacentini, that the symbol of the leopard “was common in ancient Egypt, but it is very rare to find it painted.” The team took the fragment with the image of the leopard from the site, in order to preserve it.
Then they decided to use some breakthrough technology in an effort to digitally reconstruct the c.2200-year-old painting. The researchers were able to recreate the leopard, which was originally very realistically painted, with vibrant colors and wide eyes. Piacentini told Fox News “we made the discovery at the end of January 2019, but just finished the 'virtual' restoration of the fragment.” The digital reconstruction demonstrates the great skills of Egyptian artists and their ability to create realistic and naturalistic works of art.
Also found in the same tomb as the leopard painting was a dish with some pine seeds. Based on Roman era cookbooks it seems that these were very popular and used in a variety of foods. It is likely that the seeds were placed beside the burial of a person by his family. The Egyptians believed that the deceased would enjoy them in the afterlife.
The leopard found at Aswan is now being conserved. Ilaria Perticucci and Rita Reale, both professional conservators, are planning to restore the image in the controlled environments of laboratories in Aswan. It is not known if the restored painting will be put on display in the future. The necropolis, where the remarkable image was found, continues to be excavated by archaeologists.
Top image: Virtual rendition of the painting of the leopard face found on the ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
After the US Navy confirmed a spate of unusual sightings by its pilots last year, candidates in the 2020 election have been asked what they think of the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.
Some candidates have dodged the question, others have openly shared their views.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has suggested that he would declassify information about UFOs if he wins.
President Donald Trump has expressed skepticism about UFOs but told a reporter last year the US was monitoring the situation.
See what other leading candidates – including those who ran and then dropped out – think.
As the 2020 presidential race heated up, the candidates came ever-closer scrutiny for their policies on the key issues facing the US.
But some reporters have made it their mission to find out where they stand on a subject usually relegated to fringes of the internet – the existence of UFOs.
The question is getting increasing attention after the Navy confirmed last September that a spate of videos showing military planes being buzzed by mysterious, fast objects.
In response to an freedom of information request in January, the Navy also said it had top-secret information about UFOs that it could not make public as it could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States” if released.
Here are some of the candidates who’ve shared their thoughts on UFOs, and what they said.
Bernie Sanders suggested he would release classified information if elected
Foto: Democratic 2020 U.S. presidential candidate Sanders rallies in North Charleston, South Carolina
Source: Reuters
Sanders made the suggestion to podcast host Joe Rogan in an interview last August.
Here’s the full exchange:
Rogan: If you found out something about aliens. If you found out something about UFOs, would you let us know?
Sanders: Well, I’ll tell you, my wife would demand that I tell you.
Rogan: Is your wife a UFO nut?
Sanders: No, she’s not a UFO nut. She goes: “Bernie, what is going on do you know? Do you have any access to records?”
Rogan: You don’t have any access? You’ll let us know though?
Sanders: Alright, we’ll announce it on the show. How’s that?
President Donald Trump doesn’t seem to believe in UFOs, but did say his administration was looking into them
Foto: FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump visits India
Source: Reuters
President Donald Trump was quizzed about the rising number of Navy UFO sightings in an interview with ABC News last June.
And though he was sceptical about the reports, he did confirm that the US government was monitoring the situation.
“They do say, and I’ve seen, and I’ve read, and I’ve heard. And I did have one very brief meeting on it. But people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”
Asked if he would be told if extraterrestrial life was found, Trump said: “We’re watching, and you’ll be the first to know.”
Amy Klobuchar said she would declassify information so “earnest journalists” can dig into it
Foto: U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) speaks to guests during a campaign stop at the Marion County Democrats soup luncheon at the Peace Tree Brewing Company on February 17, 2019 in Knoxville, Iowa
Source: Scott Olson/Getty Images
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who dropped out of the race after the South Carolina primary, made her remarks to Daymond Steer, a reporter on local New Hampshire newspaper Conway Daily Sun.
The state’s primary in February was the first of the election season.
In his interviews, he typically saves one big question for the last: Do they believe in UFOs and if elected president would they declassify information about them?
“I think we don’t know enough … I don’t know what’s happened, not just with that sighting, but with others,” Klobuchar told Steer in January. “And I think one of the things a president could do is to look into what’s there in terms of what does the science say, what does our military say.”
“Here’s the interesting part of that answer is that some of this stuff is really old,” she said. “So, why can’t you see if you can let some of that out for the public so earnest journalists like you who are trying to get the bottom of the truth would be able to see it?”
Pete Buttigieg said humans ‘should always be looking at what’s going on around us’
Foto: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate and Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg campaigns during a SEIU California Democratic Delegate Breakfast in San Francisco, California, U.S. June 1, 2019.
Source: REUTERS/Stephen Lam
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, struck a philosophical tone when Steer asked him the same question in January. He dropped out at a similar time to Klobuchar.
The former military intelligence officer remarked that “strange things happen out there” and that though life outside Earth probably existed, he had not seen any evidence that alien life forms had visited this planet.
“As a curious species, [we] should always be looking at what’s going on around us,” Buttigieg told Steer.
“Unimaginably strange things often happened in the grand sweep of American and world history and we should never fail to be on the lookout for what’s happening around us.”
What in the blazes is a ‘blazar’ and should we be worried that the oldest and biggest one in the universe is pointed directly at Earth?
“We present the discovery of PSO J030947.49+271757.31, the radio brightest (23.7 mJy at 1.4 GHz) active galactic nucleus (AGN) at z > 6.0.”
Well, that opening line from a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics tells us absolutely nothing about blazars that a non-astronomer can understand. Fortunately, we have Silvia Belladitta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Insubria in Italy and leader of the study, to explain it to us in somewhat simpler terms in a statement to Phys.org.
“The spectrum that appeared before our eyes confirmed first that PSO J0309+27 is actually an AGN, or a galaxy whose central nucleus is extremely bright due to the presence in its center of a supermassive black hole fed by the gas and the stars it engulfs.”
Hey, watch where you’re pointing that thing!
PSO J0309+27 was first discovered when Belladita and her colleagues looked at bright radio sources captured by the NRAO’s Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawaii (Pan-STARRS), and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. A bright object was isolated and named PSO J030947.49+271757.31 (PSO J0309+27 for short). Knowing its exact location, they then took measurements from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) in Arizona and NASA’s Sift space telescope to determine that it was an active galactic nucleus (AGN) – a black hole at the center of a galaxy that was consuming the stars around it. All exciting stuff, but one piece of data from the LBT made this a unique and mind-blowing discovery.
“In addition, the data obtained by LBT also confirmed that PSO J0309+27 is really far away from us, according to the shift of the color of its light toward red or redshift with a record value of 6.1, never measured before for a similar object.”
OK, mind-blowing for astronomers. PSO J0309+27 is a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy and is a billion times more massive than our Sun. For an apples-to-apples (or AGN-to-AGN) comparison, the supermassive black hole at Milky Way’s center is only four million times more massive than the Sun. While PSO J0309+27’s mass is impressive, its light is even more extraordinary. It means that the radar jets blasting out of PSO J0309+27 are pointed directly at Earth – THAT’S why it’s called a ‘blazar’. Any slight deviation would make it a barely detectable non-blazar AGN. At the distance of 13 billion light years, the third remarkable thing about PSO J0309+27 is that it’s barely a billion years older than the entire universe.
“Thanks to our discovery, we are able to say that in the first billion years of life of the universe, there existed a large number of very massive black holes emitting powerful relativistic jets. This result places tight constraints on the theoretical models that try to explain the origin of these huge black holes in our universe.”
Other supermassive black holes pale in comparison.
Yes that’s a big deal to Belladitta and her fellow astronomers, who are now anxiously awaiting the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online this year. The first objects they’ll most likely study are the 100 other known AGNs.
And finally … is Earth in any danger with the biggest and oldest blazar in the universe blazing its jets directly at us? Not a chance.
It was while the Northwest Airlines Airbus A319 was in the airspace of Minnesota, at around 8 pm on the evening of 25th March 2004, when the air traffic control in Minneapolis received communication from the crew that they could see two unidentified objects approximately 15 miles in front of their position and seemingly traveling in the same direction (and so maintaining this steady cushion).
The plane was traveling at an approximate altitude of 35,000 feet and it appeared the two strange objects were possibly only slightly higher than that. The crew requested any information from the control tower of other air traffic in the area.
However, the response returned that there were no signs of any other aircraft in the plane’s vicinity. They would ask the crew, though, if they were “still seeing the targets” to which they would respond they very much were.
Upon focusing on the scene in front of them further, one of the pilots felt he could see two sets of two objects, which, if correct, would mean that four individual, solid crafts were making their way, from the north, in a west, southwest direction to a destination unknown.
The two spherical objects would remain in their sight for approximately a quarter of an hour before eventually vanishing into the distance. While the plane continued its flight with no further incidents, eventually landing as planned in Los Angeles, the air traffic controller would make a report of the incident to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC).
The incident would catch the attention of Peter Davenport the NUFORC’s director. So much so, that Davenport would initially arrange to speak with the witness on an upcoming talk radio broadcast. However, before the show could take place, the controller’s supervisor somehow became aware of the impending appearance and would order that the witness not appear on the show and was not to speak of the incident publicly.
While this might be nothing more than a desire to keep such “sensationalist” stories away from a commercial airline so as to avoid any potential negative effects, it also smacks ever so slightly of the way other witnesses, particularly those connected to airlines, have been silenced from telling their stories. NOTE: The above image is CGI.
The most recent UFO footage on the Internet is completely free to download, yet you still can’t find a single video on the Internet that has more images and color than the latest UFO video to come from the Mediterranean. If you need any more proof of how important this newest UFO video is, then just read on.
Most people are familiar with UFO sightings in the United States such as those which have been reported in the Midwest region or the Mississippi Valley Delta. However, there are many videos of UFOs in the Mediterranean which are as varied as the countries they come from. There are many UFO videos from France, Italy, and Spain, and another from Switzerland, to name a few.
Although most UFO videos in Europe and North America take the viewer on a ride through the sky and onto the ground, some of these videos feature scenes that are taken from within the atmosphere of earth. These images are especially impressive because they include blue and green flashes and streaks that appear to be video film. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they’re actually from an extraterrestrial craft, but it does show that UFO videos from the Mediterranean can be as captivating and mesmerizing as those from other parts of the world.
What does this mean for someone who wants to see a UFO up close and personal? It means that if they want to be truly amazed by the amazing technology we humans have at our disposal, then they need to watch a video from the Mediterranean. You can’t compare these videos to the ones from Florida, Texas, or California, because the European videos feature some amazing imagery and not all of them are filmed on black and white.
Because the many images in these videos are taken from the atmosphere of earth, they don’t make much sense unless you understand what’s going on. You need to remember that NASA scientists didn’t believe in the existence of UFOs until they started taking pictures of them from the surface of the moon. When you take a video from the atmosphere of earth, you are viewing what is known as an enhanced digital video.
But not all videos from the atmosphere of earth show the same footage, so you need to watch one from each country in order to compare. In fact, some European UFO videos do not include footage at all, as they come from both above and below the atmosphere of earth. If you want to see some of the most spectacular images of the new generation of UFO footage from the Mediterranean, then you need to get on the Internet and see for yourself.
The videos that feature imagery from the atmosphere of earth are typically far superior to the ones that don’t, and they all have the power to awe anyone who views them. The human race has been fascinated by the UFO phenomenon since the very first time a person took a picture of an object in the sky. Nowadays, the technology used to capture the most exciting UFO videos from the earth has reached new heights.
There are even several of these videos on the Internet that you can download without having to pay a cent, but you can only do that if you want to see these videos for yourself. People who want to see the latest UFO footage on the Internet can find numerous websites that offer it, and if you want to experience what it is like to be on the ground when a UFO zooms across the sky, then you need to see one of these videos from the Mediterranean. There is no arguing the fact that these videos are the latest and greatest form of entertainment available, so why would you be interested in anything else?
Huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By NASA's Stereo Ahead Camera
Huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By NASA's Stereo Ahead Camera
The camera from NASA's satellite Stereo Ahead HI2 which orbits around the Sun has has picked up somethings that shouldn't be there.
The unknown object which looks like a huge "Ezekiel's Wheel" made its appearance on February 19, 2020 and it is still out there and NASA has not yet issued a response to the strange apparition.
It is not the first time that this UFO, which also looks like the spacecraft in the 2001 movie "A space Odyssey", appears in front of the Stereo Ahead HI2, the same satellite also caught this object in 2011.
It was said at the time that it was a camera artifact, but when it comes to a camera artifact then why does it only come back after nine years and not more often as you would expect.
Stereo is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched in 2006 into orbits around the Sun that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth. This enables stereoscopic imaging of the Sun and solar phenomena, such as coronal mass ejections.
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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 74 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.
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