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.
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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 Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
15-04-2020
‘Holy Grail’ Dating Technique Sheds New Light on Prehistoric Past
‘Holy Grail’ Dating Technique Sheds New Light on Prehistoric Past
A new archaeological dating technique has been successfully applied to shards of pottery uncovered from a dig in East London’s Shoreditch.
The “groundbreaking” new dating technique analyzes fatty acids rather than organic materials, and the University of Bristol scientists who developed the method proved its effectivity by dating ancient pottery samples from sites of known ages. Among them was a collection of pottery fragments discovered beneath Shoreditch in East London, containing traces of meat and dairy products, made and consumed by descendants of Europe's first farmers around 3,600 BC.
Enter: Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Analysis
A new study published in the journal Nature by a team of scientists, from the University of Bristol in England, explains that pottery is one of the most commonly recovered artifacts from archaeological sites. However, pottery is among the most difficult artifacts to date accurately using the traditional radiocarbon dating method, but the new method is based on “accelerator mass spectrometry analysis” of food residues including fatty acids.
Experts at the University of Bristol have developed a groundbreaking new dating technique for pottery (like the fragment of the one pictured, which here is being prepared for dating).
According to the paper, this new dating technique for pottery vessels has several advantages over the traditional method, as it can directly determine the period it was made. It also identifies the origins of the organic residues found on the pottery, which helps scientists map when specific foodstuffs were exploited. What’s more, when testing their new method, they successfully dated dairy and carcass products in Neolithic vessels from Europe and Saharan Africa .
Behold, a Holy Grail of Archaeology
The team’s new method dates pottery with an accuracy to within around “one human lifespan” by analyzing the porous surfaces of pottery, which absorb fatty acids left over from foodstuffs. And speaking of this groundbreaking new method of directly dating archaeological pots, chemist Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol said it’s one of the “holy grails of archaeology.”
Emmanuelle Casanova one of the Bristol scientists who worked on the project loading the Bristol accelerator mass spectrometer with samples for the new dating technique.
Having conceptualized this technique more than twenty years ago, the scientist says it wasn't until the team established their own radiocarbon facility in Bristol that they “cracked it,” according to The Daily Mail .
Before this new method was approved, the researchers had to demonstrate that it could determine dates as accurately as samples of bones, seeds and wood and this was achieved by extracting fatty acids from ancient pottery at a range of key sites across Britain, Europe and Africa, known to be up to 8,000 years old. The British sample is described in The Daily Mail as Neolithic “dirty dishes" dug up in Shoreditch at the Principal Place dig site, which is the foundations of Amazon’s new headquarters.
The Shoreditch excavation site, Principal Place, London.
Shoreditch is a hipster heaven for artists and clubbers and people who like to dress up as 19th century cobblers through the day, and this hub of glassy office blocks interspersed with vintage clothes markets, indie coffee shops and cool co-working spaces is but a modern venire over a deeply ancient landscape.
Comprising 436 fragments from at least 24 separate vessels and weighing a total of nearly 6.5 kilos, the pottery included traces of goat, beef, lamb and dairy products, which the team were able to date to within a window of just 138 years, to around 3,600 BC. This means the poetry was made and used around 5,600 years ago by ‘early East Enders’, descendants of Europe's first farmers who arrived in Britain just four centuries earlier, who we now know ate a diet of dairy products from cows, sheep and goats.
Residues found within the round-bottomed vessel suggest it was used to process meat stew. These fragments were used as part of the new dating technique.
Revealing the Sedentary Secrets of Neolithic Hipsters
This “remarkable collection” from Shoreditch helps to fill a “critical gap in London's prehistory,” according to consultant prehistorian Jon Cotton of the Museum of London Archaeology, and he added that this is the “strongest evidence yet” that the people in the area later occupied by London lived “a less mobile, farming-based lifestyle during the Early Neolithic period.”
This evidence challenges the traditional archaeological view that hunting and gathering was the preferred survival method in the mid fourth century BC by demonstrating the people in what would become Britain’s capital were more sedentary than thought.
Historic England's head of scientific dating, who complied the statistical analysis in the new study, Alex Bayliss, said it is very difficult to overstate the importance of this advance to the archaeological community and that the opportunity to date different kinds of pottery much more securely will be “of great practical significance in the field of archaeology.”
Top image: 6,000-year-old prehistoric pottery from the Sahara Desert, which was subjected to the new dating technique. Source: Emmanuelle Casanova et al. / University of Bristol / Nature
New Crucifixion Evidence Sheds Light on the Death of Jesus Christ
New Crucifixion Evidence Sheds Light on the Death of Jesus Christ
An investigation into crucifixions reveals evidence using the latest medical technology on how the horrific form of execution was slow and excruciating, providing new insights into the death of Jesus Christ.
An Excruciating Death
A new TV documentary on the Smithsonian Channel called Crucifixion Mystery discusses the latest theories by medical experts. Dr. Per Lav Madsen, a Danish cardiologist believes the whole process was to cause immense suffering before death. “ Crucifixion was a horrible way of killing people because it took so long. It was a slow way of dying and that’s the reason they used crucifixion in the first place.”
The length of time and suffering varied, according to Dr. Kristina Killgrove. “Someone might have survived on the cross for as long as four or five days until they died of dehydration.”
Rare Skeletons Provide Insights Into Death of Jesus
The documentary also investigates two rare examples of skeletons believed to have been crucified.
The most recent archaeological discovery was in 2007, when a construction team in northern Italy’s Gavello municipality accidentally uncovered an isolated skeleton from a Roman-era burial. Scientists believed the man who was in his thirties was crucified. Using the latest technological advances to study the skeleton, this could offer up new insights into the death of Jesus Christ .
Grave of the man from Gavello during excavation by the provincial archaeological superintendency.
The research team included Emanuela Gualdi-Russo, Ursula Thun Hohenstein, and Nicoletta Onisto from the University of Ferrara and Elena Pilli and David Caramelli from the University of Florence. They extracted DNA from the remains and were able to rule out an accidental origin for a hole in the calcaneus – the heel bone.
The hole was circular, passing from the inside of the foot to the outside, with evidence showing it was caused at the time of death. “In our interpretation,” the archaeologists wrote in A multidisciplinary study of calcaneal trauma in Roman Italy: a possible case of crucifixion? : “We found a particular lesion on the foot of a skeleton from an isolated Roman burial discovered by excavation in 2007 in northern Italy. Here we suggest crucifixion as a possible cause of the lesion.”
Right calcaneus from 1st c AD Gavello, Italy, showing possible evidence of crucifixion. This archaeological evidence has provided new clues to the death of Jesus.
The researchers believed that “the type of lesion found on the right calcaneus from Gavello is compatible with a position of the body [...] contorted to the right with legs and feet in contact to allow a single nail to pierce both heels, [or with] knees in an open position and feet with heels overlapping and fixed on the medial side by a single nail.”
The skeleton was dated to the Roman era as archaeologists discovered fragments of typical Roman bricks and tiles nearby, which places this crucifixion on or near the time of Christ’s death.
Why did the Romans Use Crucifixion as a Form of Punishment?
This form of execution was reserved for the lowest of the low - slaves, disgraced soldiers, Christians, foreigners and political activists.
During the 1st century AD, large numbers of rebels against Rome were crucified in Palestine. It’s believed that Christ was crucified on the pretext that he instigated rebellion against Rome, who were ruthless in suppressing political dissent.
The first example of possible crucifixion came from an excavation in 1968 of a cemetery in Giv’at ha-Mivtar just outside of Jerusalem. It revealed a heel bone with a nail still skewered through it. Yehohanon ben Hagkol is the name on the tomb – and he may also have been a political activist like Jesus Christ.
The calcaneus of Yehohanon ben Hagkol, with transfixed nail, which provided insights into the death of Jesus.
Even the Romans themselves thought crucifixion was barbaric. The Roman orator Cicero noted that “of all punishments, it is the most cruel and most terrifying.” He added that it was the most “extreme and ultimate punishment for slaves.”
Seneca, the Roman philosopher, described the various ways in which crucifixion took place. “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in different ways: some have their victims with their head down to the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms,” he wrote in 40AD.
The victim could have also had their eyes pulled out or their tongue excised. One of the worst cases of sadism was recorded by Josephus during the reign of Antiochus IV, where the condemned man’s strangled child was placed around his neck.
The Lex Puteolana tablet reveals the ritual and economics of crucifixion in the Roman world. The 2,000-year-old tablet, now housed in a medieval castle on the Bay of Naples, was found in the town of Puteoli. It’s the only inscription which details the precise practice of crucifixion. The inscription tells us how much the workers who flogged the slaves to be crucified were paid – as well as the executioner. The standard fee for an execution team was four sesterces each – the price of a glass of wine.
In an ironic twist, during later rebellions, the Romans were themselves crucified. According to historians, in AD 9 local Germanic tribes crucified many of the Roman general Varus’ defeated soldiers. In AD 28, the detested Roman tax collectors also met the same fate at the hands of Germanic tribesmen.
How did Jesus Christ die?
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is believed to have taken place in Jerusalem under Roman rule between AD 30-36. No confirmed archaeological evidence of that event has been found, although Christ is mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians.
Tacitus mentions that Christ was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect in charge of Judaea (AD26-36), during the reign of Tiberius. According to biblical accounts, Jesus died after six hours, nailed to the cross. The two thieves who died with Christ were Gestas who was on the left and Dismas on the right.
In Roman law, a person condemned to crucifixion was scourged first, usually with a wooden stave. Short whips with studded leather thongs were also used to flay the skin. The person was stripped naked, tied to an upright wooden post and then flogged across the back, buttocks and legs by Roman legionnaires.
Death may have been due to cardiac arrest after the scourging or dehydration. Many scientists have come to the conclusion that it was progressive asphyxia caused by impairment of respiratory movement. The Roman guards were only allowed to leave once the victim had expired. Due to impatience, the soldiers may have sped up matters by breaking their legs or stabbing the chest.
Shockingly, this horrific form of execution is still used today. Amnesty International recorded a case of crucifixion in Yemen in 2012, when an Islamist group found a 28-year-old guilty of planting electronic devices in vehicles. He was executed first and then hung on a cross.
In Iraq during 2016, a man revealed that his brother-in-law was crucified after being tortured for five hours. “My wife’s brother was crucified by Daesh (Isis),” he told the charity ADF International. “He was crucified and tortured in front of his wife and children, who were forced to watch. They told him that “if he loved Jesus that much, he would die like Jesus.” Isis then cut his stomach open and shot him before leaving him to die on a cross.
Every Good Friday in the Philippines (which is 80% Catholic), a man playing the role of Jesus Christ is nailed to the cross. Since the 1980s, Ruben Enaje has had four-inch nails hammered into both his hands and feet and then hoisted on a wooden cross for around five minute
In 2016, Enaje decided that would be his last crucifixion. The significance was that this was the Filipino’s 33rd time. According to religious tradition, Jesus was 33 years old at the time of his crucifixion.
Top image: Main: depiction of the crucifixion/death of Jesus Christ and the thieves, Gestas and Dismas. (Andrea Mantegna / Public domain ).
Inset: The calcaneus of Yehohanon ben Hagkol, with transfixed nail. ( Israel Museum / Ilan Shtulman)
60,000-Year-Old Underwater Forest May Hold Next Medical Breakthrough!
60,000-Year-Old Underwater Forest May Hold Next Medical Breakthrough!
About 60,000 years ago, pre-historic humans began emerging out of Africa and shared hunting places and cave residences with Neanderthal populationsin what is today Europe. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a vast cypress tree forest carpeted riverbanks off the coast of Alabama in Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. The ancient underwater forest of withering trees and the shipworms they contain were entombed beneath encroaching sediments and sea waters until Hurricane Ivan tore up the Gulf Coast in 2004 and exposed the ancient forest, which was discovered 60 feet below the surface water of Mobile Bay.
The Ancient Secrets of Modern Medicine
A new documentary film by Ben Raines produced by This is Alabama, reveals how dive shop owner Chas Broughton first discovered evidence of the ancient forest and invited an environmental journalist and scientists from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA) to assess his find. The results were published on the NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research website, saying this ancient submerged forest has remained undisturbed for thousands of years and that it holds “the secret to the creation of new medicines .”
300 Ancient Animals Found Entombed in Submerged Forest
A sample of tree sap was recovered from within the bark of one tree, that when cut released resin strong enough to “permeate the air” and the tree’s fibers and growth rings were still visible. Dr. Harley said the tree’s growth rings were narrower and were more uniform in size than those of modern cypress trees, indicating the environment was much colder than our current climate , and Dr. DeLong radiocarbon dated the sample at 40,000-45,000 years old.
Collected from an ancient cypress forest submerged in Mobile Bay, this log contains hundreds of marine organisms that either burrow into the wood or live in burrows made by other organisms.
Last December, NOAA-funded an expedition of scientists from the University of Utah and Northeastern University , and marine and environmental sciences professor Brian Helmuth, who determined that the ancient trees were very well preserved under sediment layers that had prevented oxygenation and decomposition. It was Francis Choi, a senior lab manager at Northeastern University Marine Science Center , who looked at organisms buried within the wood and discovered 300 ancient animals.
This dried specimen of Teredo navalis was extracted from the wood and the calcareous tunnel that originally surrounded it and curled into a circle during preservation. The two valves of the shell are the white structures at the anterior end; they are used to dig the tunnel in the wood.
Sometimes called “termites of the sea,” shipworms are tiny marine bivalve mollusks(saltwater clams) with long, soft, naked bodies, and they are notorious for boring into wood immersed in sea water. As these worms bore their way into organic matter, what comes out the other end is converted into animal tissue.
In this study, one hundred bacterial strains from shipworms, many of which were novel, were dated to being at least 60,000 years old. The team of scientists DNA-sequenced 12 of the strains, determining that they could be applied in the creation of new antibiotics for treatment against “parasites, pain and anti-cancer drugs, antimicrobial activity, and possibly anti-viral drugs”, according to University of Utah medicinal chemistry research professor Margo Haygood.
Ocean Genome Legacy Center Director Dan Distel removes a shipworm. The bacteria that shipworms create may lead to new life-saving medicines.
This is not the first time scientists have studied shipworms in a medical context, in 2017 a paper by Northeastern University scientists titled “'Unicorn' shipworm could reveal clues about human medicine, bacterial infections” was published by Science Daily . Researchers discovered a “dark slithering creature four feet long” dwelling in foul mud in a remote Philippines lagoon and this “giant shipworm”, with pinkish siphons at one end and an eyeless head at the other, was said to have added to the scientific understanding of how “bacteria cause infections and, in turn, how we might adapt to tolerate, and even benefit from them.”
According to East Idaho News , the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stop to diving at the ancient forest site in the Gulf of Mexico, but Dr. Choi and his team plan to launch unmanned underwater robots to provide 3D visualizations of the forest and Dr. Haygood and her team plan to study more tree samples next year, which NOAA said might have applications in “textile, paper, food, renewable fuel, animal feed, and fine chemical production.”
Top Image: Wood from an ancient bald cypress forest buried off the coast of Alabama was uncovered by storms. Newly exposed wood offers a unique habitat for marine organisms and creates a novel ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico.
UFO sighting: Mysterious 'man-made' crafts in Siberia stun top scientists - watch footage
UFO sighting: Mysterious 'man-made' crafts in Siberia stun top scientists - watch footage
A BIZARRE UFO sighting in northern Siberia has stunned Russian scientists, who have failed to come up with a logical explanation for the footage - amid odd claims of alien involvement.
A mysterious trio of UFOs circling in the daylight sky over northern Siberia has sent the Internet into meltdown. The bizarre sighting was caught on video in a car park close to a shopping centre in Tomsk, Russia. Scientists, who typically dismiss such sightings, have been left baffled by the footage of the UFOs, amid growing speculation over its origins.
In the 15-second video, three mysterious bright spots lined up in a triangle above Siberia appear to move closer together.
The person behind the footage told Russian media they spotted the UFO formation on the 6th April.
The clip, which went viral across Russia, immediately prompted online viewers to start speculating if the sighting was a genuine UFO.
Tatyana Galushina, an astronomy professor at Tomsk State University, explained that she and her colleagues could not agree on what exactly the video shows.
A mysterious trio of UFOs circling in the daylight sky has sent the Internet into meltdown
(Image: IG)
The scientist did suggest that the objects filmed were "man-made" but refused to speculate on their origins
(Image: IG)
Professor Galushina said: "The main theory is that it is something illuminated by the sun.
"It could be balloons, paper lanterns, or even quadrocopters."
Galushina also suggested that the UFO footage was a hoax or potentially camera glare.
This comes amid claims video is a result of "bored" Russians during the coronavirus lockdown measures.
The unusual lights follow a similar sighting of mystery lights across the border of the US and Mexico over a week ago
(Image: IG)
Professor Galushina told RIA Novosti: "This is certainly not a natural phenomenon, because if a person really filmed an incomprehensible phenomenon and wanted to find out what it was, they would give more information, film for longer, and so on.
"The problem is that it’s hard to make any reliable conclusions from this video."
She did suggest that the objects filmed were "man-made" but refused to speculate on their origins.
2020 has been an exciting year so far for SETI – the search for extraterrestrial life – in terms of new technological developments and strategies.
Artist’s concept of a nearby civilization signaling Earth after observing an Earth transit in front of our sun. Scientists have looked for radio signals from at least 20 nearby stars, those situated so that they might see Earth transits. So far, no signal has been found. And so the search continues.
2020 has been an interesting year so far with respect to the search for extraterrestrial entelligence, aka SETI. No, there’s been no alien signal yet, but scientists have been working with new technologies and strategies that should greatly improve the search. Earlier this year, they also announced that they have a ton of new survey data to go through, collected in previous years by radio telescopes.
An outline for new approaches to the question of alien intelligence, and how best to look for it, was announced by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in mid-February 2020. The old SETI paradigm of only searching for radio signals is now changing as new technology is used and new ideas are considered.
Also in mid-February, the Breakthrough Listen initiative announced via UC Berkeley that a whopping 2 petabytes (2 million gigabytes) of data was released from the latest SETI survey of our galaxy. It is the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the galaxy and the region around the central black hole. The associated peer-reviewed paper can be found on arXiv.
When SETI first started in the 1960s with Project Ozma, its only focus was to look for radio signals from an advanced alien civilization among the stars. SETI still does that, but a lot has also changed since then. Now, as well as searching for radio signals, scientists are looking for technosignatures, a wide variety of possible signs of alien intelligence including chemical changes in a planet’s atmosphere, laser pulses and even megastructures orbiting a planet or star.
As part of the new technological advancements, the SETI Institute will add a new signal-processing system to the Very Large Array.
This year, some radio telescopes that are already looking for radio signals are having new SETI capabilities added to them with a new signal-processing system. This is the result of an agreement between NRAO and the SETI Institute. The National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is the first to use this technology, with the addition of a state-of-the-art technosignature search system. NRAO director Tony Beasley said in February, in a statement:
Determining whether we are alone in the universe as technologically capable life is among the most compelling questions in science, and NRAO telescopes can play a major role in answering it.
Andrew Siemion is director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, and he’s principal investigator for the Breakthrough Listen initiative. He explained:
The SETI Institute [is developing and installing] an interface on the VLA permitting unprecedented access to the rich data stream continuously produced by the telescope as it scans the sky. This interface will allow us to conduct a powerful, wide-area SETI survey that will be vastly more complete than any previous such search.
Such an endeavor is welcome news for those who have advocated that SETI needs to expand its search away from looking only for radio signals, given that a civilization older and more advanced than ours might have abandoned the use of radio signals long ago.
With the new technologies, scientists say they’ll be able to look for other signs of intelligent activity, such as lasers, megastructures like Dyson spheres that could be built around a star to harness its energy, chemicals in the atmosphere of a planet caused by industrial pollution, or rings of artificial satellites orbiting a planet. All this can be done while the telescope is also doing other kinds of observations, they say. Siemion explained:
Such indicators are becoming detectable as our technology advances, and this has renewed interest in SETI searches at both government agencies and private foundations.
The data from the VLA’s new observations is being provided to a new signal-processing system built by the SETI Institute. This will allow VLA to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence while doing other kinds of observations at the same time.
SETI traditionally involved the search for alien civilizations. But there’s more to discover here. For example, simple life forms might also alter a planet’s atmosphere in ways that could be detected; for example, they might produce oxygen and methane. According to Victoria Meadows, principal investigator for NASA’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL):
Upcoming telescopes in space and on the ground will have the capability to observe the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby cool stars, so it’s important to understand how best to recognize signs of habitability and life on these planets. These computer models will help us determine whether an observed planet is more or less likely to support life.
Of course, it would be exciting to find any kind of extraterrestrial life on an exoplanet orbiting a distant star. And now scientists have new and better tools to find it. But if alien life were found sometime relatively soon, then what? Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute has said:
How strong does the evidence need to be to justify claiming a discovery? Can we expect to find smoking guns? If the evidence requires many caveats, how do we responsibly inform the public?
Tarter also emphasized the need for media to accurately relay the discovery to the public:
A real detection of extraterrestrial intelligence would be such an important milestone in our understanding of the universe that journalists need to avoid uncritical reporting of obviously fake claims.
Beasley spoke to a new era for SETI as well when he said:
As continuing discoveries show us that planets are very common components of the universe, and we are able to study the characteristics of those planets, it’s exciting that at the same time, technological advances are giving us the tools to greatly expand our search for signs of life. We look forward to this new realm of discovery.
We also look forward to the coming decade, when we hope to build a next-generation Very Large Array, which will be able to search a volume of the universe a thousand times larger than that accessible to current telescopes, making it the most powerful radio technosignature search machine humanity has ever constructed.
Artist’s concept of a Dyson sphere, a theoretical megastructure built by an advanced alien civilization to harness energy from its star. This is one type of possible technosignature – evidence of a past or present technology, built by an alien civilization – included in SETI 2.0.
In the meantime, as we wait for that big discovery – as we’ve waited hopefully for a lifetime – Breakthrough Listen also said in February that nearly 2 petabytes of data had been released from the most comprehensive survey to date of radio emissions from the plane of our galaxy and the region surrounding the central black hole.
It was the second data dump from the project’s four-year search. The first data release was in June 2019. The survey covered the radio spectrum between 1 and 12 gigahertz. Half the data is from the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, and the other half is from the Green Bank Telescope, part of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, and an optical telescope called the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California.
Matt Lebofsky, Breakthrough Listen’s lead system administrator, said in February in a statement:
Since Breakthrough Listen’s initial data release last year, we have doubled what is available to the public. It is our hope that these data sets will reveal something new and interesting, be it other intelligent life in the universe or an as-yet-undiscovered natural astronomical phenomenon.
Yuri Milner, the founder of Breakthrough Listen, also emphasized the importance of having much more data to work with:
For the whole of human history, we had a limited amount of data to search for life beyond Earth. So, all we could do was speculate. Now, as we are getting a lot of data, we can do real science and, with making this data available to the general public, so can anyone who wants to know the answer to this deep question.
Breakthrough Listen is using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes telescope in Australia for the most comprehensive search for alien radio signals yet conducted.
The center of our Milky Way galaxy – and our galaxy’s flat disk – are considered good places to search for evidence of advanced alien life, since they are so dense with stars. It makes sense that we’d find a powerful transmitter or beacon in the galactic center or disk. According to Siemion:
The galactic center is the subject of a very specific and concerted campaign with all of our facilities because we are in unanimous agreement that that region is the most interesting part of the Milky Way galaxy. If an advanced civilization anywhere in the Milky Way wanted to put a beacon somewhere, getting back to the Schelling point idea, the galactic center would be a good place to do it. It is extraordinarily energetic, so one could imagine that if an advanced civilization wanted to harness a lot of energy, they might somehow use the supermassive black hole that is at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Now that’s a mind-blowing idea!
These scientists said earlier this year that a small subset of the new data had already been analyzed, from 20 nearby stars in the Earth-transit zone, that is, the zone in our sky aligned with the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Distant planets in this part of our sky would see Earth transiting the sun, if they had powerful-enough technologies, and if they happened to be looking our way.
The search of 20 stars in the Earth-transit zone was conducted in the C-band – 4 to 8 gigahertz – by the Green Bank Telescope.Sofia Sheikh, a UC Berkeley undergraduate, conducted the analysis and submitted her findings to The Astrophysical Journal (here’s a draft on arXiv):
This is a unique geometry. It is how we discovered other exoplanets, so it kind of makes sense to extrapolate and say that that might be how other intelligent species find planets, as well. This region has been talked about before, but there has never been a targeted search of that region of the sky.
The Green Bank Telescope, part of the Green Bank Observatory, in West Virginia.
So what did Sheikh find? Nothing yet, but this new comprehensive search is still in the very early stages. Siemion said:
We didn’t find any aliens, but we are setting very rigorous limits on the presence of a technologically capable species, with data for the first time in the part of the radio spectrum between 4 and 8 gigahertz. These results put another rung on the ladder for the next person who comes along and wants to improve on the experiment.
Sheikh added:
My search was sensitive enough to see a transmitter basically the same as the strongest transmitters we have on Earth, because I looked at nearby targets on purpose. So, we know that there isn’t anything as strong as our Arecibo telescope beaming something at us. Even though this is a very small project, we are starting to get at new frequencies and new areas of the sky.
As noted in the paper:
We conclude that at least 8% of the systems in the restricted earth transit zone within 150 pc [parsecs] do not possess the type of transmitters searched in this survey.
The Green Bank Telescope was aimed toward each star for five minutes, then was turned away from each star for five minutes. That process was repeated two more times. If a detected signal disappears when the telescope is turned away, that makes it more likely that it really is originating from the star and isn’t just terrestrial interference. An initial 1 million radio spikes were narrowed down to a couple of hundred good candidates, which were then eliminated as Earth-based interference. The last four signals turned out to be from passing satellites. Disappointing, but there is still a long way to go.
While searches like this cover a lot of cosmic territory, it should be kept in mind that we have still really only looked at a very tiny portion of even just our own galaxy. As Jason Wright at Penn State put it, if our oceans were an analogy to all the places and radio wavelengths that could be searched, then to date we have only explored the equivalent to a hot tub. That leaves a lot of cosmic real estate still to cover. According to Siemion:
Of all the observations we have done, probably 20% or 30% have been included in a data analysis paper. Our goal is not just to analyze it 100%, but 1000% or 2000%. We want to analyze it iteratively.
Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen.
It’s not just distant stars that Breakthrough Listen can monitor. The project recently listened to interstellar comet 2I/Borisov as well as the previous interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua in our solar system, just in case. Nothing was heard, which isn’t too surprising, but since we don’t really know when or how a distant civilization might send a probe our way, it doesn’t hurt to check them out. As Steve Croft, a research astronomer with the Berkeley SETI Research Center and Breakthrough Listen, explained:
If interstellar travel is possible, which we don’t know, and if other civilizations are out there, which we don’t know, and if they are motivated to build an interstellar probe, then some fraction greater than zero of the objects that are out there are artificial interstellar devices. Just as we do with our measurements of transmitters on extrasolar planets, we want to put a limit on what that number is.
With new technology, strategies and mountains of data to analyze, these are good days for SETI. Broadening the search for alien intelligence, or other life, is a smart move, and one of these days it might just pay off in spades.
Bottom line: 2020 has been an exciting year so far in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aka SETI, with some technological developments and new strategies.
A NEW, VIOLENT ORIGIN STORY FOR 'OUMUAMUA EXPLAINS THE INTERSTELLAR OBJECT’S WEIRD SHAPE
A NEW, VIOLENT ORIGIN STORY FOR 'OUMUAMUA EXPLAINS THE INTERSTELLAR OBJECT’S WEIRD SHAPE
The more we learn about this interstellar visitor, the weirder it gets.
ON OCTOBER 19, 2017 OUR SOLAR SYSTEM RECEIVED AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.
The rocky, elongated object came to us from beyond the realms of the Sun — the first ever recorded interstellar object to cruise through our neck of the galaxy. We dubbed it 'Oumuamua, which means "A messenger from afar arriving first" in Hawaiian.
Since then, scientists have puzzled over this cigar-shaped alien body. Where did it come from? Is it a misshapen comet? An alien probe from a distant world?
It turns out 'Oumuamua's origins are even more unusual than we could have supposed.
A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy is the first to propose a comprehensive origin story for the mysterious interstellar object.
It suggests 'Oumuamua was once part of a planet that got too close to its host star. Like Icarus flying too near to the Sun, the planet was destroyed in its close encounter, violently shredded by the star's gravity into long, thin, rocky pieces.
Oumuamua is likely a fragment that was broken off from a dead planet.ZHANG Yun
VIOLENT ORIGINS— Yun Zhang, a researcher at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France and lead author of the new study, began the quest to uncover 'Oumuamua's origins because there were just no good theories out there to explain the object's weird features.
'Oumuamua resembles a cosmic cigar. And while many assumed 'Oumuamua is a comet, it lacks the telltale coma, or envelope surrounding a comet’s core, and tail of gas and dust. It also has a dry surface more akin to that of rocky asteroids.
Another strange characteristic of 'Oumuamua is how fast it travels through the Solar System. It slingshotted past the Sun at a speed of 196,000 miles per hour — too fast to be explained by the force of gravity alone.
"It really is a mysterious object," Zhang tells Inverse. "We did not know any scenario that can produce that shape before."
To unravel 'Oumuamua's mysteries, Zhang and her team created a series of computer simulations to model what would happen when three types of objects — half-mile-wide planetesimals, frozen objects similar to comets, and larger planets such as super-Earths — came too close to their host star.
The study found that if any of these objects came as close as 220,000 miles to their host star, they would be torn apart by the star's tidal forces. They would essentially shredded into elongated fragments, and then ejected out into interstellar space. The smaller the object, the closer it would have to get for this process to take place.
In 'Oumuamua's case, that means it could be the shrapnel left after one of these destructive events — the remains of a planet that came too close for comfort to its star, somewhere out in our galaxy.
"Our scenario is still hypothetical, but it’s the only scenario that can explain all the puzzling characteristics of 'Oumuamua," Zhang says. The theory is just that, however — the researchers can't prove this is the true origin tale of 'Oumuamua.
"Although we cannot verify the actual thing that happened, but we have high confidence about this scenario."
The tidal forces of the star acts on the particles that make up the object, causing it to be elongated. Yun Zhang
'OUMUAMUA POPULATION— If the findings hold up, they suggest there may be many more 'Oumuamua-type objects out there.
The process described in the study would take place in planetary systems around low-mass stars or white dwarfs which would have strong enough tidal forces to rip the planets that come too close to shreds. Reassuringly, our Sun isn't dense enough to exert such strong forces. It does exert some tidal forces on the Earth, but the effect is smaller than that of the Moon.
On average, each of the qualifying planetary systems could eject about a hundred trillion objects like 'Oumuamua over the course of their lifespan, according to the researchers. To know whether that is the case, they need a bigger sample size than a single strange space rock, Zhang explains.
"If we can observe many more interstellar objects and we can compare their properties with 'Oumuamua, we can compare the formation and ejection we propose, and compare the occurrence rate, and then we will see how many interstellar objects can be actually produced from our scenario," Zhang says.
There's hope we will find more objects like 'Oumuamua to help unravel these mysteries. Just two years after the discovery of 'Oumuamua, a second interstellar object was spotted by an amateur astronomer. The object, dubbed 2I/Borisov after its spotter, Gennady Borisov, is more similar to comets that formed inside the Solar System.
“We have two interstellar visitors, and each of them is completely different,” Michal Drahus, a postdoctoral scholar at Jagiellonian University in Poland, who co-authored a study on 21/Borisov in 2019, told Inverse at the time.
“One is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the Solar System, and the other one is completely similar to the Solar System’s comets.”
If scientists are able to observe more of these interstellar objects, they may offer a unique opportunity to study the composition of planetary bodies that form outside of our Solar System. They could also offer clues as to whether or not these interstellar objects are capable of carrying life with them. This is the foundation of a theory known as "panspermia."
The theory of panspermia suggests that life didn’t originate on Earth at all. Instead, so the theory goes, it originated elsewhere in the Universe, and was transported to our planet via interstellar objects like 'Oumuamua, which travel between planetary systems, seeding them with the ingredients for life as they go.
Abstract:
The first discovered interstellar object (ISO), ‘Oumuamua (1I/2017 U1) shows a dry and rocky surface, an unusually elongated shape, with short-to-long axis ratio c∕a≲ 1∕6, a low velocity relative to the local standard of rest (~10 km s−1), non-gravitational accelerations and tumbles on a timescale of a few hours1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. The inferred number density (~3.5 × 1013−2 × 1015 pc−3) for a population of asteroidal ISOs10,11 outnumbers cometary ISOs12 by ≥103, in contrast to the much lower ratio (≲10−2) of rocky/icy Kuiper belt objects13. Although some scenarios can cause the ejection of asteroidal ISOs14,15, a unified formation theory has yet to comprehensively link all ‘Oumuamua’s puzzling characteristics and to account for the population. Here we show by numerical simulations that ‘Oumuamua-like ISOs can be prolifically produced through extensive tidal fragmentation and ejected during close encounters of their volatile-rich parent bodies with their host stars. Material strength enhanced by the intensive heating during periastron passages enables the emergence of extremely elongated triaxial ISOs with shape c∕a≲ 1∕10, sizes a ≈ 100 m and rocky surfaces. Although volatiles with low sublimation temperature (such as CO) are concurrently depleted, H2O buried under surfaces is preserved in these ISOs, providing an outgassing source without measurable cometary activities for ‘Oumuamua’s non-gravitational accelerations during its passage through the inner Solar System. We infer that the progenitors of ‘Oumuamua-like ISOs may be kilometre-sized long-period comets from Oort clouds, kilometre-sized residual planetesimals from debris disks or planet-sized bodies at a few astronomical units, orbiting around low-mass main-sequence stars or white dwarfs. These provide abundant reservoirs to account for ‘Oumuamua’s occurrence rate.
In 2004, when I visited Puerto Rico for the first time – in search of the Chupacabras – I was told of the account of a former civil-defense employee. He had seen a gigantic, unknown craft rise silently out of the coastal waters of the island, while he was on an early-morning jog in the spring of 1999. In this case, the vast device, which was viewed at a distance of around half-a-mile off the coast, or perhaps slightly more, wobbled slightly – rather like a falling-leaf – as it took to the skies, and then streaked vertically at a fantastic speed, before finally vanishing from view as it grew ever smaller, and was finally lost due to the effects of the bright, rising sun. It’s a fact that there are more than a few cases on record of these “falling leaf”-type UFO encounters.
In September 1952, a notable UFO encounter occurred at Royal Air Force Topcliffe, a military base in Yorkshire, England. One of the witnesses, Flight Lieutenant John Kilburn, said of the incident: “Sir, I have the honor to report the following incident which I witnessed on Friday, 19th September, 1952. I was standing with four other aircrew personnel of No. 269 Squadron watching a Meteor fighter gradually descending. The Meteor was at approximately 5000 feet and approaching from the east. [Flight Officer R.N.] Paris suddenly noticed a white object in the sky at a height between ten and twenty thousand feet some five miles astern of the Meteor.”
Kilburn continued: “The object was silver in color and circular in shape, it appeared to be traveling at a much slower speed than the Meteor but was on a similar course. It maintained the slow forward speed for a few seconds before commencing to descend, swinging in a pendular motion during descent similar to a falling sycamore leaf…After a few seconds, the object stopped its pendulous motion and its descent and began to rotate about its own axis. Suddenly it accelerated at an incredible speed towards the west turning onto a south-easterly heading before disappearing.”
From the 1953 files of NICAP (the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) comes the following, which occurred over Barter Island, Alaska: ” 4:50 a.m. local time. Captain R. E. Barnes was thawing and heating a C-47 at Barter Island air strip when he heard a noise that seemed to be out of synchronization with the Herman Nelson heaters running nearby. He ducked out of the wheel well and walked over to the heaters located in front of the left main gear. He immediately realized that the noise was emanating from a large, round, bright object which was descending over the building area about 3/4 of a mile away. This object appeared to be at approximately 5,000 feet in altitude and descending in a sort of falling leaf pattern. Captain Barnes estimated the distance covered by the side to side movements at about 200 feet. Approximately 45 seconds later the object had reached an estimated 2000 feet directly over the building area.
“The object was described as round in shape and brilliant white in color and approximately 30-40 feet in diameter. Small ray-like appendages appeared on either lower side. After hovering for approximately 45 seconds, the object began an ascent using the same pattern as it did for the descent. During the climb out, 1st Lt. Lewis E. Griffin arrived at the aircraft and Capt. Barnes pointed out the object for Lt. Griffin. a rated pilot. At this time the object was directly overhead at an estimated altitude of 10,000 to 15,000 feet. The two witnesses continued to watch the object for two more minutes as it traveled to the east blinking as it went. Capt. Barnes is an F-94 jet pilot with 1470 hours of flying time.”
The cases that I have shared with you above are just a few of many. Are those falling leaf movements signs of malfunctions in the craft? Problems soaring through our atmosphere? I have to admit that I have no idea. All I can say for sure is that the falling leaf aspect of UFO encounters is one that dates back to the very early years of Ufology – and that still continues.
In October 2017, an odd-shaped space object was discovered with characteristics unlike any ever seen. It immediately lived up to its unusual name by defying definition, deceiving some into thinking it might be a spaceship and stumping all as to where it came from, let alone how it got here or how it got its cigar shape. Two astronomers have been pondering this space cigar since it lit up our telescopes and think they have the answers to what ‘Oumuamua is, how it formed and why they think there may be trillions … yes, trillions … more objects like it.
“It is really a mystery, but some signs, like its colors and the absence of radio emission, point to ‘Oumuamua being a natural object.”
Yun Zhang, postdoctoral researcher at the Université Côte d’Azur, co-authored the study – published this week in Nature Astronomy — of all of the available data on ‘Oumuamua. The origin in another star system, elongated shape and slight rate of acceleration not caused by gravitational forces caused him and co-author Douglas Lin, professor emeritus in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to speculate that ‘Oumuamua was once a planet or planetoid that was broken apart with a force that shattered it into odd-shaped pieces and flung them out of their solar system. A model gave them an idea of how this happened.
“Zhang and Lin ran high-resolution computer simulations to model the dynamics of an object closely flying by a star. They found that the star can dramatically split the object, if it comes enough close to the star, into extremely elongated fragments, and then eject them into the interstellar space.”
In a press release announcing the study results, Zhang and Lin explain that the model generated some elongated pieces with a greater than a 10-to-1 length-to-width ratio. The fragments may have melted but managed to stay together long enough to cool down again, giving them the same kind of surface as ‘Oumuamua, while trapping moisture inside, allowing them to release a very small vapor trail that could cause a spin like ‘Oumuamua’s. This Icarus-like event caused by space objects as large as planets or as small as disk debris getting too close to a star can explain a lot of space and interstellar objects.
“The discovery of ‘Oumuamua implies that the population of rocky interstellar objects is much larger than we previously thought. On average, each planetary system should eject in total about a hundred trillion objects like ‘Oumuamua.”
Carl Sagan
If Carl Sagan were alive today, he’d be saying “trillions and trillions” instead of “billions and billions” as he described what astronomers now expect to see when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory astronomical observatory opens later this year in Chile. The more that look like ‘Oumuamua, the closer this new model will come to fact.
Let’s just hope nothing in our own solar system gets too close to the Sun. Are you listening, Planet X?
Have you ever wondered what multidimensional beings look like? David Nemes did once, but he developed a tool for viewing them and now has thousands of images of multidimensional beings on his Facebook page. Have you ever wondered what a multidimensional being is? He’s a good person to answer that. Most believers in a multiverse or multiple universes don’t often talk about any beings living in them, other than parallel universes with some alternate form of us. Neme’s photos of multidimensional beings or entities look nothing like humans. He posts them quite frequently, so viewing them can be a welcome, albeit just as scary, alternative to watching pandemic news. (A video containing many of the images can be viewed here.)
“It is an electronic Ouija board, with image and sound, the project is quite advanced.”
According to an interview with MysteriousTimes.com, Nemes was a science and astronomy buff growing up in Madrid, Spain, and is now a scientist and inventor in Colombia. Using “mathematical calculations and optical experiments,” he developed a device that uses “special lenses, ultrasensitive screens of his invention and above all sunlight. The process – which he calls “Energivision” – allegedly generates images of … things. Some look like faces, others like bodies, sometimes with wings. With his Facebook comment about the device being an “electronic Ouija board,” he obviously thinks these could be beings that are evil and he’s convinced they exist in other dimensions or planes.
It would be nice if the images were this clear.
“The only way I have to publicize my invention and the captures are by Facebook, since 2015 I have posted 1000 photos on my facebook.”
Nemes claims he’s tried to show Energivision to the scientific community, although he doesn’t say how, and was rejected – not a surprise. He also claims the mainstream media has ignored the photos and his theories. That’s not surprising when you consider some of the comments of those who agree with him – often referring to astral planes, which is more religious of occult than science. In addition, most of the photos appear to be split mirror images – like a Rorschach inkblot. As anyone who has looked at those for any length of time can attest, the imagination, anthropomorphism and pareidolia kick in quickly and it’s easy to see faces, winged creatures, horned beings and other scary things. Finally, the faces all appear to be looking straight into the Energivision device – like multidimensional mugshots.
Rorschach inkblot – see anything?
This is not to discredit Nemes’ photos – just to point out that to make a scientific analysis, it would be helpful to know more about his Energivision device, the process he uses, the locations where he finds these beings, etc. To his credit, Nemes’ comments on Facebook have a definite philosophical and psychological angle – he promotes positive thinking and vibrations and warns viewers to avoid negative thoughts … which would probably attract these things out of their dimension and into ours – if they’re real.
Nothing wrong with using scary pictures and stories of evil beings to get people to think positive amidst the stream of round-the-clock negativity we’re getting exposed to these days. For that, and to expose your mind to the possibility that he really has invented a way to photograph multidimensional beings, it’s worth a trip to the Facebook page of David Nemes.
My curiosity got the best of me today and I was looking over some sun photos from NASA Helioviewer.org when I found something...something seen before, but yet, mysterious in and of itself. The object is huge, looks planet size, but I believe to be about 1.5km across and very close to the satellite and moves in jumps from place to place, often at or around the speed of light, sometimes leaving trails seen on camera, but here...one stopped, rested a bit, move a bit closer to the sun resting again, then jumped away into the directing it came from...space. The object jumping like that and seeing trails of others similar shaped objects zooming around the sun makes me wonder are these living beings made of energy? Energy travels at the speed of light too...and this would explain the speed of the objects. I believe these are incredibly large energy beings...intelligent beings. But the way some move around is like they are children at play, chasing each other across a grassy playground. Odd I know, but true observation of their behavior.
So...are these energy beings ships not beings? Not likely, why would an energy being need a ship? Are they gods? Maybe in our terms of what a god is...they are. But god the creator...I don't thinks so. Just god like beings...still beings, still a species, not our god, but have incredible powers...speed being one of them. Where are the species arms and legs you ask? Why would an omnipotent being need arms, legs or a head? We as humans view things as if everything must happen according to our rules...however the universe has its own rules...and doesn't care about ours. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
NASA satellite captured mile long UFO near the sun before it jumped away into space
NASA satellite captured mile long UFO near the sun before it jumped away into space
Scott C. Waring, owner of the website ETdatabase, was looking over some sun photos from NASA Helioviewer.org when he found something...something seen before, but yet, mysterious in and of itself.
According to Scott: The object is huge, looks planet size, but he believes to be about 1.5 km across and very close to the satellite and moves in jumps from place to place, often at or around the speed of light, sometimes leaving trails seen on camera before it jumped away into the directing it came from...space.
Similar large planet sized objects flying by the sun has been captured by BruceSeesAll during a time in 2017 and 2018 that a lot of activity was being seen on the moon too. (Watch Video).
Jump to 2:45 to see actual video of the mile long UFO moving.
Huge Cigar-shaped UFO emerges from the ocean off coast Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa
Huge Cigar-shaped UFO emerges from the ocean off coast Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa
Several days ago a resident from Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa captured an incredible image of a huge cigar-shaped UFO/USO at the moment it emerged from the ocean off coast Umtuntweni beach nearthe city of Kwa Zulu Natal.
USOs are defined as unknown craft that are sighted in the water, sighted rising up out of the water, or diving into the water. There's a long history of this kind of sightings but till now we don't know whether these UFOs/USOs are secret government craft or of extraterrestrial origin.
If we look at this huge flying object, we see that it is comparable to several UFOs / USOs that were caught by an American submarine years ago.
UFO off coast Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.
Two UFOs captured by by an American submarine.
Sanderson, a renowned zoologist with a keen interest in the paranormal, puts forward the curious theory that OINTS" - 'Other Intelligence's' living in the Earth's oceans.
This underwater, parallel, civilization may be twice as old as Homo sapiens, he proposes, and may have developed what we call space flight.
What better place to have an impenetrable base than deep within the oceans of the planet.
This UFO footage was filmed somewhere over United States in April 2020. Similar sightings were recorded over different places in the USA recently. What are those unknown lights?
The bizarre newfound world resides in the mostly barren 'hot Neptunian desert.'
An artist's depiction of the exoplanet NGTS-4b, one of the few known Neptune-sized worlds that orbit very close to their stars. The odd newfound planet TOI-849b also resides in this “hot Neptunian desert.”
A distant world about 40 times more massive than Earth may be the remnant core of a giant planet, or a giant planet in the making whose growth stalled, a new study reports.
These findings may help shed light on what the mysterious cores of giant planets look like, researchers said.
Scientists investigated the exoplanet TOI-849b, which NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) first detected in 2018 and whose existence the La Silla Observatory in Chile later helped confirm. This alien world orbits the sunlike star TOI-849 about 730 light-years from Earth.
With a mass about 40 times that of Earth, TOI-849b is nearly half as massive as Saturn. At the same time, data from the Paranal Observatory in Chile and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope helped reveal that the exoplanet has a diameter about 3.45 times that of Earth, comparable to Neptune's. Altogether, this information suggests the exoplanet has a density similar to Earth's, making it the densest Neptune-size planet discovered to date.
TOI-849b circles its star in a fast, tight orbit just 18.4 hours long. This brings it scorchingly close to its star at a distance of just 1.5% of an astronomical unit (AU), the average distance between Earth and the sun (which is about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers).
The newfound exoplanet therefore lies in the middle of the so-called "hot Neptunian desert," an apparent (and mysterious) dearth of Neptune-size worlds that orbit very close to their stars.
"There are not a lot of planets in this in-between place, so to see a planet this size this close to a star is pretty cool," Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the Observatory of Bordeaux in France, who did not take part in this research, told Space.com.
Previous models suggested that nascent planets more than 10 to 20 times Earth's mass should have strong enough gravitational fields to gobble up huge amounts of material from the protoplanetary disks of gas and dust that surround their newborn stars. Such worlds should therefore swell to become gas giants similar to Jupiter or Saturn. As such, one might think that TOI-849b is the remnant of a gas giant that lost most of its weight somehow, perhaps due to the heat it experiences orbiting so close to its star.
However, as much as the light from TOI-849b's star would sear the exoplanet, the scientists noted such heating alone might still not strip a gas giant's atmosphere down to nearly the planet's core. They estimated the star is about 6.7 billion years old. Given that amount of time, as well as TOI-849b's distance from its star, they calculated a Jupiter-like gas giant would have lost only a few percent of its mass due to stellar radiation to date.
This is the first clear image of a planet forming from the disk of gas and debris surrounding its host star. The planet, PDS 70b, is visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the star's blinding light.
ESO / A. Muller et al.
As such, the researchers suggest that TOI-849b may be the remnant core of a gas giant that lost mass through a different mechanism. Perhaps it collided with other giant planets, for example, or the gravity of its star peeled off much of its gas envelope. Alternatively, if TOI-849b were slung to its current position due to gravitational clashes with other planets, the energy the exoplanet would have experienced as its star's gravity pulled TOI-849b into its current circular orbit would have greatly heated that world, potentially leading to significant mass loss.
Another possible explanation for TOI-849b's current state has to do with arrested development. Perhaps TOI-849b formed late, when much of its system's protoplanetary disk was gone, the researchers said. Alternatively, perhaps as TOI-849b developed in orbit around its star, it carved off all the material available to it for its growth within the protoplanetary disk.
All in all, TOI-849b may give scientists a glimpse at what the core of a gas giant looks like. Future research may directly observe that core's composition by analyzing evaporated material in the exoplanet's remaining atmosphere.
Further work may also investigate whether this exoplanet actually was a gas giant whose atmosphere was stripped away by the light from its star.
"They claim that it's unlikely, but these calculations are hard to do," Raymond said.
The new study, which was led by David Armstrong of the University of Warwick in England, has been accepted by the journal Nature. You can read a preprint of the paper for free at arXiv.org.
The little chopper will attempt to pioneer a new type of off-Earth exploration.
The Mars Helicopter, visible in lower center of the image, was attached to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed onto the Martian surface about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands.
The newest Mars rover's pioneering passenger has come aboard.
Technicians attached the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter to the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover on Monday (April 6) at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the robot is being prepped for its upcoming launch. That liftoff will take place during a three-week window that opens on July 17.
Prep work on the rover is officially in high gear. For example, over a four-day span in late March, mission team members finished installing Perseverance's parachute system and also put on the robot's six wheels.
The Mars Helicopter and its Mars Helicopter Delivery System were attached to the Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The helicopter will be deployed about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance lands. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Perseverance's descent stage was also fueled up last weekend, just before the helicopter integration, NASA officials said.
The descent stage is the rocket-powered sky crane that will lower Perseverance onto the Martian dirt via cables in February 2021. Gassing up the crane was no trivial task; the craft's four tanks hold a total of 884 lbs. (401 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant, agency officials said.
"The last hundred days before any Mars launch is chock-full of significant milestones," David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. (JPL built Perseverance and is the lead center for the rover's mission, which is called Mars 2020.)
"Fueling the descent stage is a big step," Gruel added. "While we will continue to test and evaluate its performance as we move forward with launch preparations, it is now ready to fulfill its mission of placing Perseverance on the surface on Mars."
That placement will occur inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) hole in the ground that hosted a lake and a river delta in the Red Planet's ancient past. Perseverance will hunt for signs of long-dead Martian life, characterize the region's geology and perform a number of other tasks, chief among them collecting and caching samples for a future return to Earth.
The Mars 2020 mission will also demonstrate several new technologies, including an instrument that will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere and the 4-lb. (1.8 kg) Mars Helicopter, which will be the first rotorcraft ever to ply the skies of a world beyond Earth.
If all goes according to plan, the helicopter will be deployed in May 2021, 2.5 months after Perseverance's touchdown. The little solar-powered chopper will then conduct a series of short flights during a test campaign that will last up to 30 days.
The Mars Helicopter won't gather any scientific data during these excursions; it carries no instruments. But a successful test campaign could pave the way for extensive aerial exploration of the Red Planet in the not-too-distant future, mission team members have said.
Scientists have detected what may be the largest hole in theozone layer ever recorded over the North Pole.
The ozone hole covers an area roughly three times the size of Greenland, scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement, and could expose people living at far northern latitudes to high levels of ultraviolet radiation if it grows much larger. Fortunately, the hole looks likely to close on its own in the next few weeks, the ESA researchers said.
Holes form in the ozone layer — which is a sheet of gas in Earth's atmosphere that absorbs much of the harmful ultraviolet light emitted by the sun — every year over Antarctica due to seasonal changes in cloud cover. Ozone holes over the Arctic, however, are rarer. The last time an Arctic ozone hole opened was in 2011, and it was significantly smaller than the hole seen now, the researchers said.
"From my point of view, this is the first time you can speak about a real ozone hole in the Arctic," Martin Dameris, an atmospheric scientist at the German Aerospace Center, told Nature.
The Antarctic ozone hole opens every year due to the combination of frigid temperatures and man-made pollution. When temperatures plummet at the start of Antarctica's winter, high-altitude clouds form over the South Pole. Industrial chemical pollutants, includingchlorine andbromine, trigger reactions in these clouds that eat away at the surrounding ozone gas.
The Arctic, which has more variable temperatures, doesn't usually see the same ozone-depleting conditions, the researchers said. But this year, powerful winds trapped cold air in a "polar vortex" above the Arctic. That led to colder temperatures and more high-altitude clouds than normal. Hence, North Pole ozone-depletion began.
Fortunately, with the sun slowly getting higher over the Arctic, atmospheric temperatures are already beginning to increase, which means the conditions causing the ozone hole should soon change, the researchers said. However, if the hole continues to expand south, Arctic residents — like those living in southern Greenland — may need to apply sunscreen to prevent UV damage.
The much larger Antarctic ozone hole will remain a seasonal feature, as it has for roughly four decades, though that hole has begun shrinking in size. A 2018 assessment by theWorld Meteorological Organization found that the southern ozone hole has been shrinking by about 1% to 3% per decade since the year 2000, with the 2019 hole measuringsmaller than it ever has since 1982. The shrinking of the southern ozone hole is thanks largely to a global ban on ozone-depleting chemicals initiated in 1987, though some key nations still do not appear to be participating. According to a2018 investigation, factories in China still appeared to be pumping large quantities of ozone-depleting chemicals into the atmosphere.
During the 1970s, thousands of ranchers and farmers across America woke up to discover a bizarre and horrible thing in their fields and pastures. They found that not only had one of their cows or bulls died, but that it had been bizarrely mutilated. The lifeless body would be lying on its side completely drained of blood, the desiccated corpse staring up at them with empty eye sockets, the flesh cut away from the nose and jawbone creating a macabre grin. The anal cavity was bored out, and the sex organs completely removed. There were no signs of footprints, or any other kind of forensic evidence to point to any kind of perpetrator, human or animal. The ranchers filed reports with local brand inspectors, the sheriff’s office, and in some cases even federal investigators, but investigations resulted in no suspects, leads or explanations.
This exact scenario played out this summer in eastern Oregon. Five previously healthy bulls from the Silvies Valley Ranch were suddenly found dead, drained of blood, and with organs and pieces of their soft tissue precisely removed. There were no footprints or signs of predation, and authorities currently have no explanation. The story was covered by national news outlets like NPR and USA Today.
“The common denominator for every one of these is the lack of blood,” says Chuck Zukowski, a Colorado Springs resident and the deputy director of Animal Mutilation Investigations for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) International, which has more than 4,000 members and has been investigating UFO phenomena since 1969. Zukowski has 35 years of experience researching paranormal phenomena, including cattle mutilations. He is also the subject of the Travel Channel’s TV show Alien Highway. “Not only that, but the lack of evidence of blood. How much blood is in a cow?” asks Zukowski. “There’s a lot of blood in a cow, and for that blood not to be there when a carcass is found is unusual.”
These kinds of cattle mutilation cases rose to national prominence in the 1970s, when thousands of carcasses across 21 states were discovered to be mutilated. By 1975, the response to the problem had reached a fever pitch amongst ranchers across the Midwest. Many were carrying guns and patrolling their fields at night. The Bureau of Land Management ran ads in eastern Colorado newspapers urging ranchers not to shoot at survey helicopters. The prevailing theory at the time was that these killings were the work of a nefarious cult. The horrific Manson family murders were recently seared into social memory in the U.S., so it seemed like a plausible explanation. When satanists were hiding in the lyrics of rock ‘n’ roll songs, in the pages of fantasy novels, and in American basements in the form of the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons, certainly it had to be their work when it came to the cattle as well.
In August 1975, the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph (now the Gazette) reported on a study conducted by eastern Colorado law enforcement officials who were dealing with the approximately 60 mutilation cases reported so far that year. The Gazette said the study provided “a glimpse into a satanic organization with national political overtones which has grandiose plans of bringing about a 1,000-year reign of terror and darkness.”
As law enforcement officials desperately searched for proof of cult involvement, the mutilations increased in number and frequency, popping up in Crowley, El Paso, Elbert, Douglas, Las Animas, Washington and Morgan counties here in Colorado — and in 20 other states across the country.
Courtesy ufonut.com
Local Chuck Zukowski is a nationally recognized UFO investigator.
The most comprehensive media coverage of the phenomena at the time came from an unlikely publication out of a small farming community just east of Fort Morgan. It was there that Dane Edwards, a recent Colorado transplant who had allegedly spent time in “Europe, the Middle East and Far East filing wire service reports,” acted as editor and publisher of the now-defunct Brush Banner, Brush's weekly newspaper. Information about Edwards' life prior to Colorado is limited, but a “Meet Your Editor, Publisher” column from a July, 1975 issue of the Banner boasts “17 years newspaper experience, Former member of the President’s Council on Youth Opportunities, and in August, 1972, Invited to the White House by the President.”
Edwards' first mutilation story ran on July 30, 1975. Grisly black-and-white photographs of mutilated cattle adorn the front page of the Banner with the headline, “Cattle Mutilations Hit Near County.” He documented an incident from Woodrow, where a 1,000- pound cow “had its nose, one eye, an ear and its tongue cut away.” Edwards noted that “while massive mutilations often occur, little blood is found in the area of the carcasses. In some instances, officials report that scavenger animals and birds refuse to touch the body.”
The owner of the mutilated cow, John Kalous, told Edwards, “There wasn’t a sign of a footprint in the area either.” In spite of the lack of human-generated evidence, though, the Washington County Sheriff’s Department noted that the cow’s tracks were clearly visible, thanks to a recent rain. Moreover, law enforcement officials were unable to photograph the evidence. “After several attempts, both the Morgan County and Washington County officers were unable to take a photo of the carcasses with a Polaroid camera. … The photos were consistently dark and even when the camera settings were changed to compensate for the conditions, the pictures were without contrast,” Edwards wrote.
“I can’t explain it,” Washington County Undersheriff Bob Jones was quoted as saying, “I’m not going to try.”
The following week the Banner ran another story about the first mutilation reported in Morgan County, and Edwards was one of the few journalists at the time to critically analyze the cult hypothesis. He interviewed Lorin Paull, an Episcopal priest who claimed, “in considering what is cut from the animal, the mutilations do not suggest cultism of a satanic nature. None of the items removed from the cattle are used in satanic rites.”
Edwards also interviewed a coven of Denver witches, who provided him with a symbol, a stylized variation of the evil eye, which was supposed to “ward off the activities of satanic followers.” Displaying the symbol would supposedly stop the satanists from “further acts until the symbols have been removed.” The Banner ran the symbol with the story. “By printing the symbols in each of our 6,500 papers,” Edwards wrote, “they obviously cannot be removed.” Edwards also was able to track down the origins of the cult story, which came from federal prisoner Kenneth Bankston. Bankston had read an article about the wave of mutilations that took place in Minnesota in 1975 and wrote to the author of the article, who forwarded Bankston’s letter to an agent within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That agent took Bankston’s claims seriously and launched an investigation. According to Edwards, Bankston claimed that the mutilations were “the work of a cultist operations, and that the group had also drawn up a list of future human victims that included notable political figures such as Hubert Humphrey.”
The Gazette reported on the “bizarre Satanical group somewhat reminiscent of the Charles Manson ‘family’” in August 1975, quoting a “field investigator.”
“There’s a right wing, white supremacist faction to the cult which has planned the assassination of a number of prominent liberal-type political figures.”
In return for his cooperation with the investigation, Bankston was transferred to a lowersecurity facility, from which he escaped on May 31, 1975. No member of the “Sons of Satan,” the alleged name of the cult, was ever arrested. The cult theory quickly became a dead end for both law enforcement and journalists.
With satanists out of the picture, ranchers and law enforcement began looking for other explanations. The scope of the mutilations led many to believe it was the work of a vast government conspiracy, and others to look to the stars for an extraterrestrial explanation.
By the end of August and into September, Edwards was reporting on new twists in the cattle mutilation incidents: menacing aircraft and strange lights at the mutilation sites. Edwards collected reports from Elbert County, Elizabeth, Franktown and Simla of unmarked helicopters “buzzing” farmers and “chasing” people. “Several people reported having seen a flashing ‘strobe’ light,” wrote Edwards, “travelling from east to west at an extremely fast rate of speed and changing directions with a staccato effect in the sky.”
Edwards allegedly began working with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, providing them with evidence gathered during the course of his investigations, after reporting that “agencies such as the FBI stated there is no evidence of federal crimes.” Edwards was frustrated with the response, noting that “it would mean that 21 groups of mutilators have operated in 21 states. Since it is a federal offense to commit interstate crimes that would open the door for their participation in the investigation.”
It wasn’t until Edwards began receiving threats at the Banner to “lay off the investigations of the cattle mutilations,” that Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell finally sought the FBI’s assistance within the mutilation investigations.
In October of 1975, the Gazette reported that the Banner, with reporting by Edwards, was “the only newspaper in Colorado known to have conducted a full scale investigation into the matter of mysterious deaths and mutilations of livestock in Colorado.” Edwards was interviewed in the Gazette to announce that this phenomenon was actually “an outcropping of a program” that began in 1961, and that he would be writing a book that “will tell how the project was conceived, how it progressed and why.” Edwards admitted in the interview that “anger made me interested in the cattle mutilations. It disturbed me that the public would take the word of officials, that no one was willing to look into it himself.”
But in that same interview, he alleged that not everyone appreciated his investigations, saying, “my office had been broken into twice and things gone through. Blood was thrown on my glass storm door at my home.”
Edwards also criticized law enforcement officials, who were beginning to ditch the cult theory for claims that the mutilations were actually the natural result of predation, scavengers and the decomposition process. This would be the conclusion of both a CBI investigation and an FBI investigation into the matter. Edwards called the investigations “an unimaginative job” and noted that “the most popular but weakest theory is that the mutilations are caused by predators. This is a good one for law men who can’t solve cases, since they don’t have to pursue the case any further.”
Shortly after Edwards’ interview with the Gazette, he was terminated at the Brush Banner. The new publisher, Drusilla Georgsson, said it was for “poor business practices.”
Then, on Dec. 10, 1975, the Banner’s headline read: “Ex Banner Publisher Presumed Missing.” The paper reported that Edwards’ wife filed a missing person’s report five days earlier, after he failed to contact her “as was his policy while he was away.” The Banner also noted that, “While in the Banner’s employ Mr. Edwards expressed concern for his well being on various occasions.”
Edwards’ car was found abandoned at a truck stop, and no one in Brush ever heard from him again.
“There’s two ways of looking at what happened with this guy,” says MUFON’s Zukowski. “He got caught into something and he got threatened bigtime and he went underground. I can think of one other person who that happened to. They went off the grid.” Zukowski also mentions the case of Max Spiers, a UK conspiracy theorist and UFO investigator who died in Warsaw, Poland under mysterious circumstances, allegedly vomiting black goo. “There are issues with doing different types of UFO investigations that could cause you to step over the proverbial line, so to speak,” warns Zukowski. “You have to be careful what you do. When you do UFO investigations and you go too far, you will get silenced.
Courtesy ufonut.com
The team of Travel Channel's show, Alien Highway
“Then you have the case where he just started a new life,” adds Zukowski. “There’s always the possibility he left his wife and used the conspiracy theory to cover his tracks.”
Zukowski works full-time as a microchip engineer and has served as a reserve deputy for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. He says he applies scientific and forensic methodology to his mutilation investigations, and has also reported strange findings with mutilated remains, some similar to Edwards’ findings from decades ago, and some uniquely weird. “I’ve had a few cases where the animal is lying in a round ground depression — not a crop circle — but a ground depression, where something pressed the vegetation down, 16 to 22 feet in diameter,” he explains. “I’ve taken soil samples from inside the ground depression and compared it to a test sample outside the ground depression, and the nutrients, the soil itself, in the ground depression is less water-soluble. The cations and CECs are different.” Zukowski implies that something, presumably whatever the deceased bovine had come in contact with, was able to change some fundamental atomic aspects of the soil. Cation exchange capacity (CEC) is a measure of a soil’s ability to hold positively charged ions — it's an inherent soil characteristic and is difficult to alter significantly. “That tells me that whatever made the round ground depression that the animal is laying in the middle of might have been a high energy source," he says. "I’ve also picked up EMF, electromagnetic field, from these ground depressions.”
As for what Edwards observed in the ’70s, many of those anomalies still occur.
“Unmarked helicopters will show up after the fact,” explains Zukowski. “August 2014 in Walsenburg, I investigated eight cows that were mutilated within a couple of miles of each other. The majority of the cows were found lying in the same direction. All the animals had the same type of cuts. The dewclaws were cored out. I interviewed two ranchers who reported helicopters in the area with spotlights where the animals were mutilated. There were also reports of lasers that diverted commercial air traffic. A week after the last mutilation, the rancher’s daughter saw a UFO.”
Zukowski has collected findings that cause him to doubt the predator theory, which Edwards also thought was bogus. “One thing we’ve learned is that the animal is picked up from location A — wherever it was grazing — it’s taken to a location B and it is mutilated and drained of blood, and then it’s taken to a location C, which is in the vicinity of Location A, not exactly, but close by. There was a case in Trinidad where we actually found the tracks of the cow where it ended, and then a good 60 yards away was the cow laying on the ground. Did it jump?”
The alleged predators’ choice in prey has also caused suspicion in some of Zukowski’s cases. “There was another case in the Walsenburg area,” recounts Zukowski, “where a cow had calved. The next day the cow was found mutilated. It was void of blood and the milk sack was cut out. A good 50 or 60 feet away was the newborn calf and the half-eaten placenta. Predators don’t go after a 1,000-pound animal and leave a 100-pound calf.”
Chuck Zukowski
Zukowski still documents cattle mutilation cases.
Others have also questioned the predation theory. The Gazette covered a mutilation in October 1976, a year after the Banner’s initial investigations: Logan County Sheriff Harry Graves found signs that a coyote had approached the mutilated animal, but “he never got closer than 22 ½ feet from the animal. Other cattle and horses in the same pasture were spooked and wouldn’t approach the dead steer either.”
Additionally, during the few field autopsies that were able to be performed, in cases where the time of death could be estimated, veterinarians discovered various anomalies. In January, 1976, the Gazette reported that Dr. Susan Colter of the Trinidad Animal Clinic was able to examine “various parts of the animal including the heart, lungs, kidneys and liver and she sent specimens to the extension laboratory in La Junta. She was especially interested in the way the animal’s organs turned to mush in a short time.”
Cattle mutilations have lessened in frequency since 1975, but continued. Many cattle mutilation cases allegedly go unreported. In 1975, Edwards noted that “one hundred and eleven mutilation cases held in the files of the Nebraska Brand Inspector’s office had never been turned over to law enforcement agencies.”
Zukowski attributes the under-reporting to what he calls the “giggle factor.” He notes that “ranchers don’t want to speak out and report something just to be made fun of.” Zukowski’s most recent mutilation investigation took place in Westcliffe in 2018. Since 1975, no arrests have been made in any of the over 10,000 cases involving cattle mutilations.
Forty-four years after mutilations originally terrified American ranchers, explanations of this phenomena remain controversial. The mutilators, whatever or whoever they are, have been able to keep their secrets this whole time, while conducting operations around the nation, without any defectors, leakers or whistle-blowers. UFO investigators, like Zukowski, are seen as conspiracy theorists at best. With unsatisfying official findings, and recent publicized cases, old explanations are resurfacing.
Colby Marshall, Vice President of the Silvies Valley Ranch in Oregon, which recently saw five bulls mutilated under mysterious circumstances, said in USA Today, “We think that this crime is being perpetuated by some sort of a cult.”
A new study of unusual ripples on Pluto’s far side add to the evidence for a subsurface ocean on this distant and cold dwarf planet.
New Horizons’ view of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto, which makes up half of Pluto’s “heart” feature. A new study of odd ripples on the opposite side of the dwarf planet supports previous evidence that Pluto has a subsurface ocean.
Not all that long ago, scientists thought that Earth was the only place in the solar system with an ocean. But then we learned – surprise! – that several icy moons in the outer solar system are also water worlds. They’re true water worlds, too, in the sense that most, if not all, of their oceans are global. These alien oceans are different from Earth’s oceans: they’re not on the surfaces of the moons, but below the moons’ surface crusts of ice. Now, evidence is building for yet another such ocean, this time not on a moon but on the dwarf planetPluto. The evidence is based on what the scientists called “ripples” on Pluto’s surface.
Scientists presented the latest findings about ripples in Pluto’s surface – and a possible ocean below Pluto’s crust – at the virtual 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The evidence suggests that Pluto has a deep ocean between its crust and core. The conference had been scheduled to be held from March 16-20 in The Woodlands near Houston, Texas, but was changed to a virtual-only format this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This latest update on a possible Plutonian ocean was also the subject of a new article by Theresa Machemer in Smithsonian Magazine on April 1, 2020. The results are based on a new paper that was first pre-published on ArXiv in October 2019, and is still waiting for peer review. Lead author is a name you may recognize. It’s Alan Stern, who spearheaded the New Horizons mission to Pluto for decades, from concept to reality.
The main focus of the new paper was to study the far side terrains of Pluto, and how they formed. From the paper:
The New Horizons spacecraft provided near global observations of Pluto that far exceed the resolution of Earth-based data sets. Most Pluto New Horizons analysis hitherto has focused on the encounter hemisphere of Pluto (i.e., the anti-Charon hemisphere containingSputnik Planitia). In this work, we summarize and interpret data on the far side (i.e., the non-encounter hemisphere), providing the first integrated New Horizons overview of the far side terrains.
The unusual dark “ripples” on the far side of Pluto (circled). Pluto’s far side was only able to be seen in lower resolution during the New Horizons flyby, but the images still provide valuable clues as to the possibility of a subsurface ocean.
The evidence for a Pluto ocean comes from dark ripple-like features on the far side of Pluto. How did these ripples form? Scientists think they were produced by the same large impact that created Sputnik Planitia, which is a huge smooth plain of primarily nitrogen ice on the other side of the dwarf planet. This shallow basin composes one half of the distinctive huge “heart” feature on Pluto. As Purdue University planetary scientist Adeene Denton told Lisa Grossman in a statement to Science News:
If the impact is large enough, the planet itself can act like a lens, and focus the wave energy at the exact opposite point on the planet from the impact.
Denton and her colleagues had run computer simulations to see how the shock waves from the impact might have affected Pluto’s interior. The simulations suggested that an ocean was necessary to explain the ripples. As Denton said:
We got the fun answer.
Diagram of what the interior of Pluto might look like below Sputnik Planitia (the cellular terrain on the right side, on top). The ice crust above the water is thinner in this region.
The ocean would need to be at least 90 miles (150 km) deep, and Pluto’s core must contain minerals, such as serpentine, that form through interactions between rock and water. Denton said:
It’s certainly not exactly a smoking gun. But it’s exciting.
This new modeling of Pluto’s interior is the latest of a growing number of studies suggesting that Pluto could still have liquid water beneath its surface. Previously, in 2016, scientists also showed that fissures on the surface, and the spherical shape of Pluto itself, were evidence for a subsurface ocean. Pluto’s orientation may also be a clue. Another study from last year contends that the rocky body that collided with Pluto and created Sputnik Planitia actually broke through the dwarf planet’s icy crust. This allowed the ocean to briefly flow on the surface before freezing, which affected Pluto’s axis orientation.
The new research is compelling, although not conclusive yet. It’s still possible that there is another explanation for the rippled terrain on the far side. As James Tuttle Keane, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Scientific American in a statement:
There’s a lot of weird stuff on that far side of Pluto. And there are a lot of different ways that you can imagine creating some of those odd patterns that we see.
Close-up view of the unusual cellular terrain in Sputnik Planitia, composed of nitrogen ice. Water ice mountains are on the edge of this region.
Whether the newest research really does indicate an ocean on Pluto remains to be seen. But if it does, that would greatly help scientists understand how such subsurface oceans can exist on worlds that are otherwise too cold and too far from the sun, including possibly other small objects in the Kuiper Belt – a ring of small rocky and icy bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune – where Pluto resides. As Denton toldScientific American:
We might need to think a little differently about the Kuiper Belt itself and all of these distant worlds in it and maybe look at them a little bit closer. They could all host such incredible, rich geologic histories.
If there really is an ocean on Pluto, then how and when did it form? As planetary scientist Carver Bierson of the University of California, Santa Cruz, toldScience News:
If there’s an ocean today, it raises the question of, when did that ocean get there?
According to Bierson, if Pluto had a “cold start,” then the water would have been frozen from the beginning, before melting later on due to decaying radioactive elements in the dwarf planet’s core. It would then partially re-freeze again. But if Pluto had a “warm start,” then the ocean would have always been liquid, and probably still is today, with perhaps only partial re-freezing. Cracks would form from the water partially re-freezing, and this is what the New Horizons images seemed to show. Bierson said:
That means maybe Pluto did start off warm. Maybe it started with a liquid ocean really early on.
Pluto backlit by the sun, as seen by New Horizons. The thin atmosphere glows an ethereal soft blue color.
So if Pluto has had an ocean for the past few billion years, could it be habitable? Could Pluto’s ocean actually support life? If Pluto’s core does contain minerals as hypothesized, then water-rock interactions at the ocean bottom could conceivably provide the necessary energy and nutrients, as in oceans on Earth and possibly ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus. And if Pluto could be habitable, what about other bodies in the Kuiper Belt? As Keane surmised in Science News:
This lays out one of the coolest hypotheses that a future Pluto mission could test. If Pluto can have an ocean and potentially be habitable, it’s very likely that other bodies in the Kuiper Belt also are ocean worlds and also are potentially habitable.
Although New Horizons’ mission at Pluto is long over, the data sent back will keep researchers busy for decades to come. As noted in Scientific American by Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University:
It’s amazing how we squeeze every little bit out of it.
Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and lead author of the new study.
New Horizons found that Pluto is a complex little world, with vast, smooth icy plains of frozen nitrogen, the surface of which is divided into large “cells” (known as cellular terrain) and mountains composed of water ice with methane “snow” on top. Pluto also has a very thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide, and when New Horizons viewed Pluto backlit by the Sun, the atmosphere glowed softly as a blue ring around the dwarf planet. And even though Pluto is much smaller than Earth, it has no less than five moons! If there is an ocean below as well, that would make this already bizarre world even stranger.
Bottom line:Odd ripples on Pluto’s far side add to the evidence for a subsurface ocean.
THE DISCOVERY OF MICROBIAL LIFE ON EARTH OFFERS A NEW HOPE FOR LIFE ON MARS
THE DISCOVERY OF MICROBIAL LIFE ON EARTH OFFERS A NEW HOPE FOR LIFE ON MARS
“I am now almost over-expecting that I can find life on Mars.”
WHEN WE THINK OF WHAT LIFE MIGHT LOOK LIKE ON OTHER PLANETS, we might picture the Hollywood-induced image of green, slender aliens, or the more scientific approach -- tiny forms of bacterial life hidden beneath a planet’s surface.
But a recent discovery of a microbial form of life here on Earth gives scientists hope of findinglife on Mars, and narrows down what they should be looking for in the ongoing search forlife outside of our planet.
The discovery is detailed in a study, published this month in the journal Communications Biology, which follows a 10-year quest to find life hidden in the cracks of volcanic rock beneath the seafloor, and how that discovery can lead to the discovery of life in Martian samples collected from the Red Planet.
A colony of tiny microbial life was found wedged in tunnels on these volcanic rock samples.Suzuki et al. 2020,
The team of researchers found a community of bacteria on ancient volcanic rock, which they believe hold similar qualities to rocks on Mars. As a result, their discovery has initiated a collaboration with NASA to design a plan to find life on Martian rocks.
MICROBIAL COLONY— The team of researchers behind the new study have been probing at these volcanic rocks for 10 years.
The rock samples were collected during the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program in 2010, which carried a group of researchers onboard a ship that traveled across the Pacific Ocean. The researchers drilled 125 meters below the seafloor, extracting rock samples that were between 13.5 million to 104 million years old.
Yohey Suzuki, associate professor at the University of Tokyo and lead author of the new study, had been trying to take a crack at the samples since, quite literally.
“I was making loud noises with my hammer and chisel, breaking open rocks while everyone else was working quietly with their mud," Suzuki said in a statement.
Suzuki and his team were attempting to find bacteria in the rocks by chipping away their outer layer, and grinding the center of the rocks into a powder. However, the team’s initial method was not successful.
Over the years, Suzuki developed a new method by coating the rocks in a special epoxy to support their natural shape, and then slicing off thin layers. He then washed the super thin layers with dye that stains DNA, and placed the samples under a microscope.
A thin slice of the volcanic rock, where microbial life was discovered.Caitlin Devor, University of Tokyo, CC BY 4.0
And then bacteria appeared under the microscope in a colorful, glowing display of life hidden in the cracks of these volcanic rock samples. The bacteria was in the form of glowing green spheres, packed into orange tunnels, which are clay mineral deposits, and surrounded by black rock.
Microbial life appeared as glowing green streams under the microscope.Suzuki
"I thought it was a dream, seeing such rich microbial life in rocks," Suzuki said. "Honestly, it was a very unexpected discovery. I was very lucky, because I almost gave up."
So, how did life get there in the first place?
It seems like an unlikely place to find any form of life, but the study suggests that the bacteria were attracted to mineral-filled cracks in the rocks which they use for nutrients to build their tiny colony.
Volcanoes erupting underwater produce lava at a scorching temperature of approximately 1,200 degrees Celsius. The lava eventually cools, and then cracks to become rocks. These cracks, which are around 1 millimeter wide, fill up with clay minerals over millions of years.
Bacteria are attracted to this clay, the same kind used to make pots, and therefore settle in those cracks to multiply.
"These cracks are a very friendly place for life,” Suzuki said. “Clay minerals are like a magic material on Earth; if you can find clay minerals, you can almost always find microbes living in them."
The new study estimates that the cracks are home to a community of bacteria as dense as that of the human gut, forming about 10 billion bacterial cells per cubic centimeter. Meanwhile, bacteria forming in mud sediments on the seafloor are around 100 cells per cubic centimeter.
In mud sediments, seawater dilutes the nutrients that the bacterial live off of, which is why the concentration of bacteria found on the volcanic rocks is eight times as much as those found in mud sediments.
NOW, BACK TO MARS — By now, you might be wondering what a tiny colony of microbes found beneath the seafloor of the Pacific Ocean has to do with a planet 135.81 million miles away.
NASA rovers are roaming the Red Planet, collecting samples for a future return to Earth.NASA
The researchers behind the new study believe that the cracks filled with clay minerals found in deep ocean rocks are likely similar to the minerals that may be in rocks on the surface of Mars. This hypothesis is based on the idea that the deep ocean and the Red Planet share the same conditions of low temperature, moderate salinity, iron-rich environment, and basalt rock.
"I am now almost over-expecting that I can find life on Mars,” Suzuki said. "This discovery of life where no one expected it in solid rock below the seafloor may be changing the game for the search for life in space."
Suzuki’s team will begin a collaboration with NASA to put together a plan of examining the rock samples brought back from Mars by the space agency’s rovers.
NASA is launching the recently named Perseverance rover to the Red Planet this summer. The car-sized robot will spend at least one Martian year on the planet, the equivalent of 687 days on Earth, collecting samples of rocks and soil and setting them aside for a future mission to return them back to Earth.
A new document acquired by Motherboard shows that the Air Force launched an investigation into the release of classified UFO videos by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge’s UFO outfit To the Stars Academy.
At the end of last year, we revealed the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations had looked into several videos, which The Pentagon claims show "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" or UFOs. This news was particularly curious considering the videos were initially filmed by the Navy (not the Air Force) in 2004 and 2015. Since the videos were published in a New York Times article in December 2017, the Air Force has refused to discuss anything related to UFOs.
The new document, obtained from the Air Force Office of Investigations (embedded below), shows that after that New York Times article, AFOSI looked into the classification of the released videos, called “GoFast,” “Gimble,” and “FLIR.” Originally, it found “all three videos were classified” and that, though a declassification request had been made for these videos, it was never granted. As we reported in December, AFOSI has become known as "The Real Men in Black" in the UFO community.
The AFOSI investigation also contradicts the Pentagon's claims that Luis Elizondo, the man who says he ran the Pentagon's UFO program, called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, never worked on UFOs at all.
Though his name is redacted, the investigation is clearly focused on Elizondo, who left the Pentagon, spoke to the New York Times, and has since joined DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy. Before leaving his position as an intelligence specialist in the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence’s Office, it was Elizondo who applied for the release of the three UFO videos.
In the years since the videos’ release, the Pentagon has contentiously denied the existence of a current Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and has denied that Elizondo investigated UFOs for the DoD. This appears to be disputed by this investigation. The AFOSI report states, “[Elizondo] disclosed his involvement (to several news outlets) with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which focused research issues on Unidentified Flying Objects.”
Similar to what’s implied in the OSI report, since Fall of 2019 when the Pentagon made it known the videos weren’t cleared for public release, the court of public opinion has widely assumed Elizondo was responsible for side-stepping regulations and releasing the videos before leaving the DoD.
However, during a previous investigation, I was able to locate a former colleague of Elizondo who was involved in the process. According to them, any errors in the process were the fault of the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review (DOPSR) agency, and not Elizondo. When asked who was responsible for the videos not being cleared, Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough acknowledged to me, “DOPSR in this specific case.”
“I did everything I was supposed to do to request the release, and even went above and beyond by also engaging Foreign Disclosure personnel; which I did not have to do by regulation,” Elizondo told Motherboard.
According to the report, three months into OSI’s investigation, an unnamed official with the Unauthorized Disclosure Office said the videos were finally determined to be “Unclassified and For official use only.” The official also told OSI agents the videos were submitted to multiple offices within the Navy for review, and it was determined they contained “No sensitive symbology or other items of concern.”
In one final interview detailed in the report, another unnamed official said “100% of all F-18 videos go through his office for declassification and public release,” however, the videos in question, “never went through his office.” The official says there’s no indication the videos were ever classified and it’s uncertain where exactly they came from since “individual units kept track of their own footage.”Intriguingly, the official told OSI, “Some videos were kept for training purposes and some for situations such as SUBJECT’s public release of unauthorized videos.” What isn’t clear, is if the “situations” being referenced relates to video taped encounters with UFOs, or if this was a reference to unauthorized releases generally.
"There are still elements within the Pentagon who are very sensitive about this topic and are unhappy with this information being brought forward for public discussion"
Almost four months after launching their investigation, the report says on April 13, 2018 OSI closed the case after it was determined the three UFO videos were “unclassified,” and the Unauthorized Disclosure Program Management Office equally considered the matter “closed.”
What’s still unclear is why the Air Force was investigating Navy videos.
“I find it strange the Pentagon would assign an Air Force unit to investigate alleged data spills involving Navy information, technology, and data,” Elizondo said. “Especially, when there are NCIS [Naval Criminal Investigative Service] representatives in the same building.”
When OSI’s involvement became known in December of 2019, Motherboard asked DoD spokesperson Susan Gough if she could clarify why the Air Force’s investigative service would have been involved with the Navy’s UFO videos. Gough initially agreed to provide a response, however, she subsequently failed to respond, and ignored numerous follow-up requests.
Other journalists have expressed similar frustrations when it comes to the DoD’s sudden silence to anything UFO related. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone recently published an entire feature detailing the DoD’s refusal to answer his inquiries related to the 2004 Nimitz UFO event.
After being provided with a copy of the report, Motherboard asked Elizondo if he had any significant takeaways from it or the DoD’s current silence. Elizondo said, “Even though there was no wrongdoing on the part of my office, there are still elements within the Pentagon who are very sensitive about this topic and are unhappy with this information being brought forward for public discussion.”
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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.
