Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 1 MONTH.
ON 06/07/2024 MORE THAN 2.101.500
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
19-04-2020
Cylinder UFO Uncloaks Near Space Station, NASA Cuts Transmission! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Cylinder UFO Uncloaks Near Space Station, NASA Cuts Transmission! Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting: April 2020
Location of sighting: Earths orbit at ISS
Source:NASA Live Cams
Hey guys, I was looking at the NASA live cams of the space station and noticed something in the far left side of the screen. As I watched...just as the cylinder object was just about to come into focus...NASA cut transmission and went to red screen. Red screen is the updated old blue screen. So I wasn't sure it was a UFO at first, but when NASA also noticed it and went to red sceen...it sealed the deal. NASA was put effort into hiding this object from the public, therefore this object must have been a threat to national security. Kinda cool wouldn't you say? The object looks solid, its edges look like the edges of the space station arm...the object is undeniably solid. The sunlit side of the earth coming into view caused the UFOs shields to malfunction for a short time. That is why we saw it. Just as I have said a hundred times before, if you want to see a UFO, watch a few sunsets...I promise you will see one, but bring a camera or your friends will never believe you.
The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.
A few terms contributing to the zero-point energy in quantum electrodynamics. Although we frequently... [+]
R. L. JAFFE; ARXIV:0503158
Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe with absolutely nothing in it. You could take all the various quanta of matter and energy and remove them, leaving a Universe with no particles or antiparticles of any type. You could remove any sources of gravitation or spatial curvature, reducing your Universe to nothing more than purely empty space. You could shield the Universe from any external electric, magnetic, or fields that exert a nuclear force, eliminating any possible influence they may have on the spacetime you're considering. Even if you do all that, you still wouldn't get "zero" on your balance sheet for the energy of the Universe.
That's what Niels Hermes wants to know, as he writes in to ask:
Would it be possible to shine a light on the concept of zero point energy?
It's a challenging concept, but let's take a crack at it.
A scalar field φ in a false vacuum. Note that the energy E is higher than that in the true vacuum or... [+]
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER STANNERE
For any physical system we can dream up, there's always going to be at least one configuration that we can place it in that will have the lowest total amount of energy. For a series of masses isolated from the rest of the Universe, that's a black hole. For a proton and an electron, that's a hydrogen atom in the ground (i.e., lowest-energy) state. And for the Universe itself, that's to set up empty space in the absence of any external fields or sources.
That lowest-energy state is known as the zero-point energy state. For a long time, scientists who studied the Universe assumed that the zero-point energy was zero. Not for any physical reason, mind you, but because we only had two ways to attempt to arrive at it, and both of them gave answers that pointed to problems with any value other than zero.
Countless scientific tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity have been performed,... [+]
LIGO SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION / T. PYLE / CALTECH / MIT
The first time the idea of a zero-point energy to space arose was in the context of Einstein's (then-new) theory of gravity: General Relativity. According to Einstein, the curvature of space determines the future behavior of matter and energy in the Universe, and the presence of matter and energy determines the curvature of space.
Well, almost. The presence of matter and energy determines the curvature of space almost completely, but you are free to add a constant to space itself. (Those of you who've taken calculus will recognize this constant as something that arises whenever you do an integral: you determine the answer completely, up to an additive constant, "plus c.") That constant, whatever it is, represents the zero-point energy of space. When we discovered the expanding Universe, the constant was completely unnecessary, and was thrown away as such for some 60+ years.
Today, Feynman diagrams are used in calculating every fundamental interaction spanning the strong,... [+]
DE CARVALHO, VANUILDO S. ET AL. NUCL.PHYS. B875 (2013) 738-756
The second time the idea of zero-point energy showed up was when quantum field theory rose to prominence. In addition to all of the ways that particles could interact with one another through the quantum fields permeating the Universe, there were also "vacuum" contributions, which represented how quantum fields in the vacuum of space behaved.
Individual channels contributed enormous amounts to what we called the "vacuum expectation value" of these fields, which were typically some ~120 orders of magnitude greater than the observational limits. But some were positive and some were negative, and many assumed that they'd all cancel out. Additionally, some field theories were proven to be exactly equivalent to free theories (whose vacuum expectation values were zero), and so again, we assumed that the zero-point energy was zero.
Whether the expansion of the Universe accelerates or decelerates depends not only on the energy... [+]
NASA & ESA / E. SIEGEL
And then, at the very end of the 20th century, the unthinkable happened. We had always anticipated that the Universe was expanding, that gravity was working to slow the expansion, and that either:
gravitation would win and the expansion would reverse,
the expansion would win and continue to slow forever and ever,
or they would balance exactly, and the expansion would asymptote to zero but never quite reverse.
But then we discovered that the expansion of the Universe wasn't slowing down at all, but that distant galaxies were receding from us faster and faster as time went on. The Universe didn't just have matter and radiation in it, but appeared to have a new form of energy in it: what we now call dark energy. In the 22 years since that first discovery occurred, not only has dark energy been confirmed by many lines of evidence, but it's been demonstrably shown to be indistinguishable, to great precision, from a cosmological constant.
The blue "shading" represent the possible uncertainties in how the dark energy density was/will be... [+]
QUANTUM STORIES
This is why we care about the zero-point energy of space. Observations from many lines of evidence — including the cosmic microwave background, distant sources of light (like supernovae), and the clustering of galaxies in the Universe — all point to the same tiny, non-zero value of the amount of dark energy in the Universe. It appears to be a form of energy inherent to space itself, it appears not to change with time, it appears to be of a constant density everywhere and always, and we don't know what's causing it.
That's why we have such a strong motivation to try and understand what the zero-point energy of space is: precisely because we measure the Universe's expansion, which depends on it, to be inconsistent with a value of zero for this quantity. Just as hydrogen atoms have a finite energy to their ground state, so must the ground state energy of empty space itself.
Instead of adding in a cosmological constant, modern dark energy is treated as just another... [+]
That brings us to the big question: why? Why is the zero-point energy of space the value that it is? There are many plausible answers, but each one of them is dissatisfying in some way.
It could be that the cosmological constant from General Relativity simply has the positive value that it does. It's allowed to take on any value, and everything that we observe is consistent with the zero-point energy of space having a small, constant, positive value since the start of the hot Big Bang. This is appealing because it doesn't need to invoke any new physics: we can explain what we observe by setting one free parameter equal to the correct observed value. But it's dissatisfying because there's no mechanism or reasoning to help us understand why it has the value that it does.
Visualization of a quantum field theory calculation showing virtual particles in the quantum vacuum.... [+]
DEREK LEINWEBER
Alternately, it could be that the zero-point energy of all the quantum fields permeating the Universe sum up to the observed value required for dark energy. Perhaps, if we knew how to calculate this value correctly, we'd arrive at the correct answer.
The problem with this scenario is that we don't know how to do this calculation, and all of our attempts give us an answer that's ridiculously too large. It's possible that there's an almost-perfect-but-not-quite cancellation that will occur, leading us to the correct value, but that's a tough proposition to bet on. "We don't know how to do this, and the task seems difficult but isn't proven to be impossible," isn't exactly a compelling line of thought.
Quantum gravity tries to combine Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics.... [+]
SLAC NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY
But there are always "novel physics" scenarios to consider as well. It's possible that there's no cosmological constant and no contribution to the zero-point energy from the quantum fields we know. We could instead postulate a new type of field in the Universe, which could be:
a contribution from whatever quantum theory of gravity turns out to be correct,
a leftover relic from an earlier broken symmetry in the Universe (from the grand unification scale, the Higgs scale, the neutrino sector, etc.) that simply sets the zero-point energy to its presently non-zero value,
that there's a relic amount of energy that didn't quite go to zero from our earlier inflationary epoch,
or that the highly speculative idea of the string landscape, which itself requires many unproven, evidence-free assumptions about how the Universe behaved prior to the hot Big Bang, simply "landed on the value we see today" for the value of the zero-point energy (or vacuum expectation value) of empty space.
In the absence of a solution, all possibilities — no matter how ill-motivated they appear — ought to be considered.
On a fundamental level, even purely empty space is still filled with quantum fields, which affect... [+]
NASA/CXC/M.WEISS
But no matter what the answer to the zero-point energy puzzle is, there are two facts we cannot deny. The first is that dark energy is real, corroborated by a slew of independent lines of evidence that our Universe simply cannot do without. It is consistent with having a constant value everywhere in space and throughout time: it behaves in a fashion that's indistinguishable from space having a non-zero, constant zero-point energy.
The second fact is that, whatever the solution is, we still must reckon with the presence of quantum fields — mandated by the laws of physics — permeating our Universe. Until we know how to calculate that value, any proposed solution requires that we make an unfounded assumption for whatever that value is. The zero-point energy of empty space is inconsistent with a value of zero. There are many possible origins of this non-zero value, but its ultimate cause still remains a mystery.
FBI Files: Northwestern astronomer J. Allen Hynek wrote about ‘UFO phenomenon’ for the FBI
The Chicago-born scientist, once a familiar name to those studying UFOs, was described in FBI files as a man ‘of good character’ and ‘person of good habits.’
Back when supposed UFO sightings were becoming common, two people in an Air Force control tower reported seeing an object resembling “a lighted upended automobile” that the Air Force later said it determined was an aircraft.
But J. Allen Hynek, a Chicago-born astronomer and Northwestern University professor who studied UFO reports for the Air Force, wasn’t convinced.
“So, the witnesses were solid, the radar operator competent, and the object unidentifiable as any other phenomenon, and therefore the object had to be an aircraft,” Hynek wrote.
He studied at the University of Chicago, taught at Northwestern and Ohio State University and founded the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in the Chicago area. He approached the topic of UFOs with a healthy skepticism, according to Mark Rodeghier, the center’s scientific director.
“He absolutely came into the subject as highly skeptical at the phenomenon, as almost every scientist was back then,” Rodeghier says. “He was a scientist dedicated to the data. He, over time, said, ‘Wait a minute, not only can I not explain this, this stuff can’t be explained.’ ”
Paul Hynek, one of Hynek’s five children, says his father “wanted to go to the edges of mainstream science and see what’s going on there and push things a little further” but “would give an unbiased look.”
From 1947 to 1969, more than 12,000 UFO sightings were reported, and 701 were categorized as “unidentified,” according to FBI records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, many of which are now part of the newspaper’s “The FBI Files” database.
Hynek died in 1986 at 76. The FBI often will agree, on request, to release records it maintained on people who have died.
Hynek’s FBI files show he was vetted by the FBI, which reported it got references commending him as a man “of good character” and a “person of good habits.”
Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s initiative that investigated UFOs, ended in 1969, concluding that, whatever they were, supposed UFOs didn’t pose any threat to national security.
Hynek “strongly resisted accepting the idea that a genuine UFO phenomenon might exist,” according to his text “Twenty-One Years of UFO Reports.” He wrote that he studied UFO reports based on “strangeness” and “probability,” analyzing which reports seemed unexplainable and the objectivity of the people who reported a UFO sighting.
The FBI appeared to entertain the possibility UFOs existed. Hynek’s article “The UFO Mystery” was published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin in February 1975.
“There are many misconceptions about the UFO phenomenon held generally by those who have never examined the data,” Hynek wrote. “The first of these is, of course, that UFO reports are made mainly by crackpots. The facts are quite otherwise.”
Melville Ulmer, a physics and astronomy professor at Northwestern who worked with him for about six years, says Hynek was convinced there was a UFO phenomenon, though not that it necessarily was connected to extraterrestrial life.
“He wasn’t committing himself to the conclusion that it was, but he did have the conclusion that so many people can’t be having this experience without there being some explanation,” Ulmer says.
According to Ulmer, Hynek thought the phenomenon could have been a mass psychological effect.
Creepy, scary UFO sightings reported in Texas last year
Creepy, scary UFO sightings reported in Texas last year
Ismael Perez
In the minutes leading up to 2019, someone witnessed fiery orange lights flying soundlessly at a low altitude over San Antonio.
And that was just the beginning of numerous reports of unidentified flying objects spotted in Texas skies last year.
Three months into the year, there have been at least 24 reported unidentified flying objects reported throughout the state, according to the National UFO Reporting Center. The reports range from seeing strange lights to crafts hovering above people's cars and houses.
Southern Africa may have hosted a hominid transition 2 million years ago
Southern Africa may have hosted a hominid transition 2 million years ago
Cave excavation yields braincases from both Homo erectus and Paranthropus robustus
Two hominid fossils unearthed in a South African cave, including this Homo erectus braincase, point to a major evolutionary shift that occurred around 2 million years ago.
Members of three different hominid lines clustered at the bottom of Africa around 2 million years ago, signaling an evolutionary swing propelled by the spread of a highly successful, humanlike species, new fossil discoveries suggest. It’s unclear, though, if the three ancient populations inhabited the region at precisely the same time.
Excavations at Drimolen, a set of caves in South Africa, uncovered two fossil braincases, one from Homo erectus and the other from Paranthropus robustus, say paleoanthropologist Andy Herries of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues. Both finds date to between 2.04 million and 1.95 million years ago, the scientists report in the April 3 Science.
The H. erectus fossil comes from a child who displayed a long, low braincase typical of adults from that species. The P. robustus braincase is that of an adult.
Researchers previously determined that two Australopithecus species, A. africanus and A. sediba (SN: 7/25/13), inhabited nearby parts of South Africa approximately 2 million years ago.
Taken together, these discoveries indicate that a major transition in hominid evolution occurred in southern Africa between around 2.1 million and 1.9 million years ago, Herries’ team says. During that stretch, climate and habitat fluctuations drove Australopithecus species to extinction. H. erectus and P. robustus weathered those ecological challenges, possibly outcompeting Australopithecus for limited resources, the researchers speculate.
It’s unclear whether members of the three hominid lines ever encountered each other during that transition period.
“These spectacular discoveries confirm what some of us have expected for some time, that three genera of [hominids] coexisted in southern Africa,” says paleoanthropologist Darryl de Ruiter of Texas A&M University in College Station, who was not involved in the research.
Earlier work at several other South African cave sites had suggested that H. erectus, P. robustus and A. sediba all dated to nearly 2 million years ago. But many fossils from the first two species are fragmentary, and precise dating of cave sediments that held those finds has proven difficult.
Herries’ team dated the fossil braincases at Drimolen using two techniques for calculating the time since sediments formed just below and above where the specimens were found. Evidence of previously dated reversals of Earth’s magnetic field in Drimolen sediment helped to confirm age estimates for the fossils.
The South African H. erectus fossils may be slightly older than those of A. sediba, but a controversial proposal that A. sediba was an ancestor of the Homo genus remains in play, de Ruiter says. Researchers don’t know how much earlier than 2 million years ago A. sediba originated or how far it ranged beyond its one known fossil site in South Africa. Even so, some other researchers consider A. sediba a dead-end species and regard East Africa as the best bet for where Homo originated.
Unearthing an H. erectus fossil dating to around 2 million years ago in South Africa considerably expands that species’ range at an early stage of its evolution, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. H. erectus fossils in western Asia date to about 1.8 million years ago (SN: 10/17/13). And H. erectus may have made 2.1-million-year-old stone tools in China (SN: 7/11/18).
“It’s possible that this child from Drimolen is the earliest-known representative of the first global [hominid] species,” says Hawks, who did not participate in the new study.
H. erectus’ last known appearance was as late as 108,000 years ago on an Indonesian island, meaning it survived about 2 million years (SN: 12/18/19).
The H. erectus fossil found at Drimolen “marks the beginning of the most successful species of Homo ever known — present company included,” writes paleoanthropologist Susan Antón of New York University in a commentary published with the new Science report.
When giant stars eat giant planets, their starlight may shine a bit less brightly. That dimming could affect how astronomers measure distances across the universe — and possibly even put past measurements in doubt.
“You would think the planet would be a small perturbation to the star,” says astrophysicist Licia Verde. “It turns out that it’s not.” Those perturbations may even help explain why estimates for how fast the universe is expanding disagree, Verde and her colleagues argue in a paper posted March 25 at arXiv.org.
When stars similar in mass to the sun burn through most of the hydrogen in their cores, their outer layers puff up until the stars are hundreds of times their original sizes, becoming red giants. At a certain core density, red giants were all thought to reach the same peak brightness.
That uniform brightness has helped astronomers estimate cosmic distances. It’s hard to know how far away a star is without knowing its intrinsic brightness — a star may appear dim because it’s very far away, or just because it’s dim, or both. Because red giants always peak at a certain brightness, they can act as distance markers across the universe, giving astronomers cosmic landmarks to measure the space between Earth and far-off galaxies.
Astronomers have seen signs that red giants engulf nearby planets while expanding (SN: 12/21/11). Verde and astrophysicist Raul Jimenez, both of the University of Barcelona, along with Uffe Gråe Jørgensen, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen, wondered if those planetary meals could change how the star shines. If so, that would mean a red giant’s peak brightness is a little less reliable as a uniform constant than previously thought.
There are a few different ways a planet could change the star’s brightness, the team reasoned: If the planet gave the star’s core more matter to burn, that could turn up the lights, making the star seem nearer than it is. Or eating a planet could stir up the star’s outer gas layers in a way that made light particles, or photons, bounce around more within the star’s atmosphere. Then fewer photons would escape, and the star would appear dimmer.
Computer simulations to test these scenarios would be slow and expensive. So the team did some rough calculations to see if simulations would even be worth it. And in fact, those calculations showed that the extra mass from ingesting a planet doesn’t matter very much on its own. But if a large enough planet plunges into the star at high speed, it could stir up the star’s outer layers “like a spoon in a teacup,” Jimenez says. In that scenario, the star’s brightness drops by up to 5 percent, the team estimates.
That slight shift could make a big difference to cosmology, and particularly to estimates of the universe’s expansion rate — a number known as the Hubble constant. To measure the Hubble constant, astronomers need to know precisely how fast cosmic objects appear to be receding thanks to cosmic expansion, as well as how far those objects actually are from Earth.
So astronomers use objects with known luminosities as so-called “standard candles” to help determine cosmic distances. Red giants are one example; supernovas and stars called Cepheids are others.
But measurements using different candles have resulted in different estimates for the Hubble constant. Another method using details of how matter was distributed in the very early universe gave yet another Hubble constant value. The discrepancies have led to a crisis in cosmology: Either some of the measurements are wrong, or the universe behaved differently in its early epochs than it does today. That would mean long-held ideas about how the universe formed and evolved may need revision (SN: 7/30/19).
“People believe [the mismatch] could be a signature of new physics,” Jimenez says. “That’s the excitement.”
Cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who measured the Hubble constant using red giant stars, thinks more detailed studies are needed to figure out if planetary meals are a problem for the Hubble constant estimate. Even if some stars shine less brightly because they’ve ingested a planet, that won’t make a difference if the same thing is happening in every galaxy, she notes.
Astronomers also have used both Cepheids and red giants in a single galaxy to measure that galaxy’s distance from Earth, and the two methods give the same answer. That suggests cosmologists might not need to worry about red stars’ dimming after devouring planets.
“Theoretical components and constraints you can get from existing observations suggest that, at the moment, this is not a serious issue,” Freedman says.
Messages sent by aliens from space could destroy life as we know it on Earth if we're not careful about how we read them, scientists have warned.
A new paper explores how we might read and understand a message that came to us from space. And it finds that it would be impossible to know that a message was dangerous before we opened it.
In fact, the messages are so dangerous that it would be safest to simply discard them without ever reading them, scientists have warned.
It's unlikely that any alien civilisation we came into contact with would be harmful, researchers Michael Hippke and John G. Learned write in a new study posted on arXiv.org. But since it's impossible to know what the message would say before we read it, the safest scenario would be to avoid doing so entirely.
"After all, it is cheaper for ETI to send a malicious message to eradicate humans compared to sending battleships," the researchers write.
Some have suggested that such a message would have to be "decontaminated" before we actually read it, to ensure that the danger was understood and removed before people came to read it. But the paper – titled "Interstellar communication. IX. Message decontamination is impossible" – suggests that it would be practically impossible to remove that danger.
The theory of “panspermia”, which suggests life originated somewhere other than Earth, has existed in one form or another for decades, with scientists proposing different mechanisms for the interstellar dispersal of life over the years.
Upon the arrival of Oumuamua, astronomers Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb saw an opportunity to examine this theory in more detail.
“In principle life can be transferred between planets through rocks; we know that rocks from Mars for example reach the Earth and vice versa,” Professor Loeb told The Independent.
He noted that some creatures on Earth, such as microscopic tardigrades, are capable of surviving the kind of extreme environments found in space. Alternatively, chemical “seeds” for life could be delivered inside rocks from distant solar systems.
“The solar system acts as a fishing net – it capture objects from interstellar space that belong to other planetary systems, and Oumuamua is the first object discovered to originate from outside the solar system.”
While astronomers know there are objects in our solar system that originated elsewhere, calculating their abundance has historically been tricky because – prior to our recent visitor – they had never been observed before.
“Now with Oumuamua we have a data point, a calibration of that abundance,” said Professor Loeb.
Asteroids and other space debris can enter our solar system, as Oumuamua did, and become trapped there due to the gravity of the Sun and Jupiter.
“At any given time you should have thousands of objects trapped from interstellar space, and the objects – if they came from another planet that had life – could in principle transfer the life into the solar system, for example by colliding with a planet like the Earth,” said Professor Loeb.
Using computer models, the scientists calculated the number of objects that would have been pulled into our vicinity prior to the emergence of life on Earth.
They found that around 400 interstellar objects 100 metres in size, and 10 objects about a kilometre in size, could have struck the planet prior to the emergence of life 3.8 billion years ago.
The study is currently awaiting publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and is available as a pre-print.
Besides understanding our own origins, the Harvard researchers suggested their work could also have a role in the search for alien life.
If astronomers can determine which of the objects in our solar system originated elsewhere, by analysing their chemical composition for example, it might be possible to find aliens in our own backyard.
“It’s not just primitive life; we could also look for artefacts associated with intelligence life,” said Professor Loeb. “There is a possibility that advanced civilisations could produce robotic spacecraft that roam through interstellar space and every now and again one of these could be trapped in the solar system.”
This work could make the search for alien life considerably easier.
“Instead of travelling in interstellar space, going to another planetary system we can actually just wait and see what our ‘fishing net’ captures in our own neighbourhood, and examine the fish that are in that net,” said Professor Loeb.
On tonight’s Black Files Declassified, the fans of anything alien and UFO will love the coverage that the series gives the unexplained sightings by the US military that have been kept under wraps from the media and the general public.
Weekly Black Files Declassified aims to reveal the most clandestine of all government programs told from the vantage of a former CIA operative who worked on some of these secretive initiatives.
From the creepy and inexplicable to the jaw-dropping technological advances, this series will open your eyes to what our government is up to with monies earmarked for this hidden research and secretive departments.
The episode tonight examines strange unexplained UFO sightings by our military during regular air flight exercises.
The exclusive clip opens in November 2004, described by Baker as a clear sunny day off the coast of San Diego, California.
Until something odd occurs.
Commander David Fravor pilots an F18 off the USS Nimitz at near Mach 1 speed. The Navy striker has logged thousands of hours flying hundreds of combat missions.
But suddenly, his training exercise is canceled, and he receives orders to investigate an air threat.
Baker notes that he’s confronted dozens of them, but nothing like this.
This incredible video shown on the episode tonight is one of three released by the Department of Defense.
The New York Times broke the story, describing a US government-funded program investigating UFOs run by military intelligence deep within the Pentagon.
About Black Files Declassified
Each week, Mike will sort the truth behind some of the world’s most puzzling and unimaginable mysteries.
In the first episode, Mike revealed a top-secret aviation program funded by a well-hidden money trail that will change the game for flight transportation by attaining Mach 5 speeds, at 4,000 mph.
That episode explored the ramifications of that hypersonic speed technology falling into the wrong hands.
Also, in that episode, Mike researched the black files and revealed how a few nations are already working on hypersonic missiles, capable of reaching their target in minutes, and not to frighten you, but are described as “completely unstoppable.”
Other future episodes cover a space-based military program to an unbeatable army with otherworldly strength and the ability to kill with their minds, and Mike will open the kimonos up of these crazy sounding programs that sound more like science fiction than truth.
And another episode will see Mike dive into a clandestine program that fans of Ancient Aliens will love.
He investigates the program tasked to investigate alien sightings and a program dedicated to researching, tracking, and identifying UFOs. We find out that most government officials do not even know this exists.
Is there truth that the government has already captured hostile spycraft?
Science Channel said in a press release:
“A series of recently released videos filmed by the Department of Defense show a technology that scientists and aviation experts agree is beyond our capability and very possibly, something from beyond our world.
Mike Baker looks into one of the most fascinating subjects of our time.
The series comes from Espiritus Productions and Spark TV. For Espiritus Productions, the executive producers are Michelle and Bill Katz. For Spark TV, the executive producer is Paul Wooding.
For Science Channel, Wyatt Channell is the executive producer, and Andrew Lessner is the producer.
Black Files Declassified airs Thursday at 10/9c on Science Channel.
Pentagon UFO Program Interested in Psychic Child’s Abilities says DeLonge
Pentagon UFO Program Interested in Psychic Child’s Abilities says DeLonge
Recently, Tom DeLonge took part in a video interview with 91X, a mexican owned english language radio station that broadcasts in San Diego. His band, Angels and Airwaves, released a new song and Tom was promoting it. During the interview DeLonge was explaining how the song came about and why it was released. He went on to say this:
Tom DeLonge: I was struck, kind of, by public consciousness because there’s a lot of studies that have been done, and a lot within the US government as well that I’m aware of, but that your mind… your mind over matter… that saying is very true… where they found, and I actually have a really amazing sensitive document that… and I’d always tell people about this, where they actually were…it was part of the UFO program at the Pentagon. They were following this kid in China that can move objects with his mind and he was like 10 years old.
Danielle: What?
Tom DeLonge:Yeah, so they repeated the experiment in the Department of Defense. And they put a piece of paper in a glass mason jar and they screwed the lid on it. With their mind they moved the paper through the lid of the jar six feet across the floor. And it says right there in the document with the letterhead and everything, on our defense (letterhead). You know it’s… they found that it’s… a hundred percent of people can do it, but only 10% of the people can really like master it. And my point being is that, you know, your mindset that you’re in, it affects all matter around you. And I can give you another couple laboratory experiments, but we won’t go down that rabbit hole, but they prove that consciousness affects all matter around you. In terms of healing they’ve even healed like 30 mice with like crazy terminal cancers. They healed all the mice with just energy healing in a lab. It was a wonderful lecture I listened to, but I was thinking when everyone was really scared with the virus you have mass consciousness but for something that’s negative, fear, and that’s a really bad place to be because it’s going to perpetuate things, you know, in a negative way. So I was like, well maybe my little part ,you know, put out something more hopeful or more optimistic…”
Which program was DeLonge referencing? AAWSAP, AATIP or a different unnamed program? We know AAWSAP researched a wider spectrum of so called paranormal topics. Allegedly AATIP did not. Any UFO program Tom references as taking part in psychic studies is interesting, but AATIP especially would be a surprise. View the interview below.
Thanks to Twitter user and graphics guru Mark for the lead.
A fresco from Visoki Dečani which confused the scientists around the world
A fresco from Visoki Dečani which confused the scientists around the world
The foothill of a high mountain massive Prokletije, has been keeping safe the Serbian sanctity whose existence is connected to the inexplicable miracle, and whose walls own the frescoes of a priceless value. The beauty and uniqueness of fresco art in Visoki Dečani have made people talk about Serbia as a country which keeps strong evidences about the existence of aliens, and made this monastery the world known place.
Southwestern from Peć, in Kosovo and Metohija, in the long gone 1327, a construction of the endowment of the King Stefan Dečanski and Dušan the Mighty had begun. Frescoes from the monastery which is among the five Serbian monuments on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List, have always represented the masterfully works, and today, the best kept icons in Serbia. Still, one of them has singled out and became a subject of numerous science researches and discussions.
The most famous domestic and foreign media has dedicated their articles to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Enormous interest and curiosity have woken up the second when the unusual objects were spotted on it. A large number of scientists around the world have attributed the extramundane features to the a bit unusual look of these objects, claiming that they represent an indisputable proof of the once aliens’ visit to the Earth.
Visoki Dečani Monastery is famous for the bones which are kept inside it. Here is the rot-proof body of Stefan Dečanski, a rot-proof hand of St. Nikita Gotski from the 4th century, as well as the jaw which belonged to the St. Gregory Niski.
While some scientists compare the strange objects left and right from Jesus’s head with the spaceships in which aliens used to travel, a majority of domestic experts agree that it is about the heavenly bodies.
Serbian historians explain the art as a wish of a former artists to show the Sun and the Moon suffer because of the crucifixion of Jesus, in an unusual way, indeed.
Exactly that extraordinary way of presenting the heavenly bodies has spawned numerous conspiracy theories which have brought the Serbian monastery into connection with the creatures from outer space.
From the one that Visoki Dečani are known as a place where proofs of aliens’ existence were found, to the spaceships drawn on the frescoes, and lastly, putting it into the wonders of the world.
Still, there is no solid evidence to the claims of Serbian and global experts. The only one who had ever known the truth is the unknown author who had completed the Crucifixion of Jesus in bygone 1350, leaving the mystery on the walls of Visoki Dečani.
What do you think is on the Crucifixion of Jesus? Heavenly bodies or aliens?
Russian Scientists Warn the Return of the Fallen Angels
Russian Scientists Warn the Return of the Fallen Angels
The Military and Scientific Committee reports reveal that Russia’s allies, which are India, China, and Brazil, need to defend the Earth because some extraterrestrial entities disguising as Fallen Angels are coming back to the planet.
During World War 2, sources suggest that Soviet Intelligence Services confirmed the strange relationship of Nazis with the so-called “fallen angels or demons.” However, in our oldest records, these entities are known as “gods.”
Fallen Angels have been defeated during the great revolution that wiped out the city-state called Atlantis some 500 years ago. The devastating event has been recorded in religion and myths as “the great flood.”
Any news related to a series of mysterious craters in Siberia has been classified as a national threat by Vladimir Putin. Also, don’t forget the Chelyabinsk meteorite from 2013.
It appears that the US, with the support of Europe, is making its best effort to demonize Putin and entrap Russia into a battle to invade Siberia and control the old defense system that has been designed to protect Earth from the invasion of these “fallen angels”, that could also be alien beings.
Please watch the video for more detailed information and share your opinions with us.
Earth-Size, Habitable-Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data
Earth-Size, Habitable-Zone Planet Found Hidden in Early NASA Kepler Data
While the star it orbits is much smaller than our Sun, it gets about 75% of the sunlight Earth does. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed Kepler mission development.
A team of transatlantic scientists, using reanalyzed data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, has discovered an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting in its star’s habitable zone, the area around a star where a rocky planet could support liquid water.
Scientists discovered this planet, called Kepler-1649c, when looking through old observations from Kepler, which the agency retired in 2018. While previous searches with a computer algorithm misidentified it, researchers reviewing Kepler data took a second look at the signature and recognized it as a planet. Out of all the exoplanets found by Kepler, this distant world – located 300 light-years from Earth – is most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature.
This artist’s concept shows what exoplanet Kepler-1649c could look like on its surface. The planet is the closest to Earth in size and temperature found yet in data from the Kepler space telescope.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter
This newly revealed world is only 1.06 times larger than our own planet. Also, the amount of starlight it receives from its host star is 75% of the amount of light Earth receives from our Sun – meaning the exoplanet’s temperature may be similar to our planet’s as well. But unlike Earth, it orbits a red dwarf. Though none have been observed in this system, this type of star is known for stellar flare-ups that may make a planet’s environment challenging for any potential life.
“This intriguing, distant world gives us even greater hope that a second Earth lies among the stars, waiting to be found,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The data gathered by missions like Kepler and our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite [TESS] will continue to yield amazing discoveries as the science community refines its abilities to look for promising planets year after year.”
There is still much that is unknown about Kepler-1649c, including its atmosphere, which could affect the planet’s temperature. Current calculations of the planet’s size have significant margins of error, as do all values in astronomy when studying objects so far away. But based on what is known, Kepler-1649c is especially intriguing for scientists looking for worlds with potentially habitable conditions.
This artist’s concept shows exoplanet Kepler-1649c orbiting around its host red dwarf star. This exoplanet is in its star’s habitable zone (the distance where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface) and is the closest to Earth in size and temperature found yet in Kepler’s data.
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter
There are other exoplanets estimated to be closer to Earth in size, such as TRAPPIST-1f and, by some calculations, Teegarden c. Others may be closer to Earth in temperature, such as TRAPPIST-1d and TOI 700d. But there is no other exoplanet that is considered to be closer to Earth in both of these values that also lies in the habitable zone of its system.
“Out of all the mislabeled planets we’ve recovered, this one’s particularly exciting – not just because it’s in the habitable zone and Earth-size, but because of how it might interact with this neighboring planet,” said Andrew Vanderburg, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and first author on the paper released today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “If we hadn’t looked over the algorithm’s work by hand, we would have missed it.”
Kepler-1649c orbits its small red dwarf star so closely that a year on Kepler-1649c is equivalent to only 19.5 Earth days. The system has another rocky planet of about the same size, but it orbits the star at about half the distance of Kepler-1649c, similar to how Venus orbits our Sun at about half the distance that Earth does. Red dwarf stars are among the most common in the galaxy, meaning planets like this one could be more common than we previously thought.
Looking for False Positives
Previously, scientists on the Kepler mission developed an algorithm called Robovetter to help sort through the massive amounts of data produced by the Kepler spacecraft, managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Kepler searched for planets using the transit method, staring at stars, looking for dips in brightness as planets passed in front of their host stars.
This graphic compares the size of Earth and Kepler-1649c, an exoplanet only 1.06 times larger than Earth by radius.
This graphic compares the size of Earth and Kepler-1649c, an exoplanet only 1.06 times larger than Earth by radius. › Larger view
Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter
Most of the time, those dips come from phenomena other than planets – ranging from natural changes in a star’s brightness to other cosmic objects passing by – making it look like a planet is there when it’s not. Robovetter’s job was to distinguish the 12% of dips that were real planets from the rest. Those signatures Robovetter determined to be from other sources were labeled “false positives,” the term for a test result mistakenly classified as positive.
With an enormous number of tricky signals, astronomers knew the algorithm would make mistakes and would need to be double-checked – a perfect job for the Kepler False Positive Working Group. That team reviews Robovetter’s work, going through each false positive to ensure they are truly errors and not exoplanets, ensuring fewer potential discoveries are overlooked. As it turns out, Robovetter had mislabeled Kepler-1649c.
Even as scientists work to further automate analysis processes to get the most science as possible out of any given dataset, this discovery shows the value of double-checking automated work. Even six years after Kepler stopped collecting data from the original Kepler field – a patch of sky it stared at from 2009 to 2013, before going on to study many more regions – this rigorous analysis uncovered one of the most unique Earth analogs discovered yet.
A Possible Third Planet
Kepler-1649c not only is one of the best matches to Earth in terms of size and energy received from its star, but it provides an entirely new look at its home system. For every nine times the outer planet in the system orbits the host star, the inner planet orbits almost exactly four times. The fact that their orbits match up in such a stable ratio indicates the system itself is extremely stable and likely to survive for a long time.
Nearly perfect period ratios are often caused by a phenomenon called orbital resonance, but a nine-to-four ratio is relatively unique among planetary systems. Usually resonances take the form of ratios such as two-to-one or three-to-two. Though unconfirmed, the rarity of this ratio could hint to the presence of a middle planet with which both the inner and outer planets revolve in synchronicity, creating a pair of three-to-two resonances.
The team looked for evidence of such a mystery third planet, with no results. However, that could be because the planet is too small to see or at an orbital tilt that makes it impossible to find using Kepler’s transit method.
Either way, this system provides yet another example of an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. These small and dim stars require planets to orbit extremely close to be within that zone – not too warm and not too cold – for life as we know it to potentially exist. Though this single example is only oneamongmany, there is increasingevidence that such planets are common around red dwarfs.
“The more data we get, the more signs we see pointing to the notion that potentially habitable and Earth-size exoplanets are common around these kinds of stars,” said Vanderburg. “With red dwarfs almost everywhere around our galaxy, and these small, potentially habitable and rocky planets around them, the chance one of them isn’t too different than our Earth looks a bit brighter.”
For more information about Kepler and its discoveries, go to:
NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Snaps Its Highest-Resolution Panorama Yet
NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Snaps Its Highest-Resolution Panorama Yet
To go along with the stunning 1.8-billion-pixel image, a new video offers a sweeping view of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
Along with an almost 1.8-billion-pixel panorama that doesn’t feature the rover, NASA’s Curiosity captured a 650-million-pixel panorama that features the rover itself
Both panoramas showcase “Glen Torridon,” a region on the side of Mount Sharp that Curiosity is exploring. They were taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, when the mission team was out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Sitting still with few tasks to do while awaiting the team to return and provide its next commands, the rover had a rare chance to image its surroundings from the same vantage point several days in a row. (Look closer: A special tool allows viewers to zoom into this panorama.)
It required more than 6 1/2 hours over the four days for Curiosity to capture the individual shots. Mastcam operators programmed the complex task list, which included pointing the rover’s mast and making sure the images were in focus. To ensure consistent lighting, they confined imaging to between noon and 2 p.m. local Mars time each day.
NASA Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada guides this tour of the rover’s view of the Martian surface.
“While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the Curiosity rover mission. “This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama.”
In 2013, Curiosity produced a 1.3-billion-pixel panorama using both Mastcam cameras; its black-and-white Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, provided images of the rover itself. Imaging specialists carefully assemble Mars panoramas by creating mosaics composed of individual pictures and blending their edges to create a seamless look.
Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Curiosity’s Mastcam. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington and built the Navigation Cameras and the rover.
Mystery as ‘very big flaming object’ spotted spiraling through sky above Cambridgeshire for 20 minutes
Mystery as ‘very big flaming object’ spotted spiraling through sky above Cambridgeshire for 20 minutes
A “VERY big flaming object” was spotted spiraling through the sky in Cambridgeshire this week – leaving onlookers dumbfounded. Gerry Underwood, 55, spotted the mysterious flaming object at around 8 pm on Wednesday from outside his canal boat in Stretham, Cambs. He said: “It looked like a very thick chemtrail to start with. It looked like a short, skinny cloud. “It wasn’t moving quickly at all. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a meteorite, because they are gone in seconds. We have seen hundreds of shooting stars, but this definitely wasn’t that either. “This was coming down very slowly and spiraling. It started to glow orange, as you can see in the pictures.
“There were flames coming out of the back of it as well. It was really unusual.” Gerry, who shares his canal boat with partner Melanie, photographed the burning spectacle as it dropped through the sky – leaving a huge trail behind it as it descended into the distance. He watched the mysterious object slowly falling for “between 10 and 20 minutes,” before it disappeared behind the trees in the distance.
The large flaming object was spotted spiralling through the sky near Stretham, Cambs
Credit: BPM Media
According to one witness, the object was moving slowly for 20 minutes
Credit: BPM Media
Gerry said he was looking towards Huntingdon as he watched it descend, but stressed the object might have landed “well beyond that.” He said: “The sheer size of it is what’s got me. When you look at the pictures, they show the trees in the foreground and its way beyond that, it was very big. “It landed beyond the horizon, that’s how big it was – we couldn’t see it land.” –The Sun
UFO Follows Dog Walker In New York City During Lock Down, Video, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Follows Dog Walker In New York City During Lock Down, Video, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:April 8, 2020 Location of sighting: New York City, New York, USA Source: MUFON This is some great raw footage of a UFO that looks like a cube that is following a woman as she walks a dog. As she moves down the street, the UFO also moves to keep her in view. John Lennon himself has said he and his wife saw a UFO back in 1974 in New York City...so you know its possible its still happening today. Awesome raw footage taken during lock down of coronavirus. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan Eyewitness states:
Good morning, My name is [name removed] i'm 34 years old and i live in New York City. Last night, Wednesday April 8 2020, I went out my apartment (Upper west side) at 8pm to bring out my dog for a quick walk. As soon I went out i notice this bright light in the sky, I didn't pay attention that much thinking was an airplane even if was to low because was close to the building but still was up to the sky. I did half block with my dog (82 street and Columbus avenue) i stopped (dog has to smell) and again notice this light that move position, but was not going in a clear direction as airplane will do) so i start to pay more attention to this light . When I walk i notice this light also moving and when i stop even this light seems stopping parallel to me! That was funny and I take my phone and start to recording this wired light! I had my phone pointing this light and my dog leash in the other hand but my dog start to get nervous and he start running in our home direction so I stop the video and bring him inside to come out right after. At 8.10pm i was out in the street to be able to see this funny light that catch my attention and recording. I end up stay out till almost 9pm going up and down the same blocks (82nd street till 84street) back and forth and this light clearly did the same!!! I have almost 30 minutes of video were you can see the street (the pizzeria in 82nd, the school in 83, the supermarket in 84 and this light always above moving also up and down! i make a joke that i end up "walking the light" instead my dog!! :)
Scientists took a second look at a strange object and spotted the most powerful winds ever detected gusting off of a special flavor of black hole called a quasar.
A quasar forms when a supermassive black hole accelerates certain particles it cannot absorb so dramatically that they reach nearly the speed of light as they shoot away from the black hole in bright, jetlike structures. Quasars often also produce winds that can gust through the surrounding galaxy, reducing star formation. But, until now, scientists haven't ever seen such powerful quasar winds.
"While high-velocity winds have previously been observed in quasars, these have been thin and wispy, carrying only a relatively small amount of mass," Sarah Gallagher, an astronomer at Western University in Canada and lead author on the new research, said in a university statement. "The outflow from this quasar, in comparison, sweeps along a tremendous amount of mass at incredible speeds. This wind is crazy powerful, and we don't know how the quasar can launch something so substantial."
The newly studied quasar, which scientists refer to as SDSS J135246.37+423923.5, is produced by a supermassive black hole containing more than 8 billion times the mass of our sun, or perhaps 2,000 times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, according to the team's calculations.
This quasar was first discovered by a project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which produces massive maps of the universe, and was revisited by the Gemini North telescope located atop Maunakea in Hawaii. The team behind the new research also needed to apply a recently developed technique for analyzing this sort of quasar, which scientists call a broad absorption line quasar after a characteristic in the data such objects produce.
"We were shocked — this isn't a new quasar, but no one knew how amazing it was until the team got the Gemini spectra," Karen Leighly, a co-author on the new research and an astronomer at the University of Oklahoma, said in the same statement. "These objects were too hard to study before our team developed our methodology and had the data we needed, and now it looks like they might be the most interesting kind of windy quasars to study.
The calculations based on this analysis suggest that this particular object is producing the most powerful quasar winds scientists have ever detected. The phenomenon is particularly intriguing because scientists believe such winds play a key role in sculpting the galaxies that surround the structure.
The researchers hope that this quasar isn't the only one of its kind. "We don't know how many more of these extraordinary objects are in our quasar catalogs that we just don't know about yet," Hyunseop Choi, first author on the new research and a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, said in the same statement. "There could be more of these quasars with tremendously powerful outflows hidden away in our surveys."
The research is described in a paper published March 1 in the Astrophysical Journal.
Big gods came after the rise of civilisations, not before, finds study using huge historical database
Big gods came after the rise of civilisations, not before, finds study using huge historical database
When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have long known that small-scale traditional societies – the kind missionaries used to dismiss as “pagan” – envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behaviour. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.
What came first – all-seeing Gods or complex societies? God the Father and Angel, Guercino Giovan Francesco Barbieri via Wikimedia Commons
Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism – such as karma – for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralising religions came into being.
Now, thanks to our massive new database of world history, known as Seshat (named after the Egyptian goddess of record keeping), we’re starting to get some answers.
Eye in the sky
One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.
What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions. Maybe it would also increase trust among traders. If you believe that I believe in an omniscient moralising deity, you might be more likely to do business with me, than somebody whose religiosity is unknown to you. Simply wearing insignia such as body markings or jewellery alluding to belief in such a god might have helped ambitious people prosper and garner popularity as society grew larger and more complex.
Nevertheless, early efforts to investigate the link between religion and morality provided mixed results. And while supernatural punishment appears to have preceded the rise of chiefdoms among Pacific Island peoples, in Eurasia studies suggested that social complexity emerged first and moralising gods followed. These regional studies, however, were limited in scope and used quite crude measures of both moralising religion and of social complexity.
Sifting through history
Seshat is changing all that. Efforts to build the database began nearly a decade ago, attracting contributions from more than 100 scholars at a cost of millions of pounds. The database uses a sample of the world’s historical societies, going back in a continuous time series up to 10,000 years before the present, to analyse hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space. Now that the database is finally ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about global history.
One of the earliest questions we’re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies. We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralising gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later.
As part of our research we created a map of where big gods appeared around the world. In the map below, the size of the circle represents the size of the society: bigger circles represent larger and more complex societies. The numbers in the circle represent the number of thousand years ago we find the first evidence of belief in moralising gods. For example, Emperor Ashoka adopted Buddhism 2,300 years ago after he had already established a large and complex South Asian empire known as the Mauryan Empire.
Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceed about a million individuals.
We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilisation. For example, Seshat data suggests that daily or weekly collective rituals – the equivalent of today’s Sunday services or Friday prayers – appear early in the rise of social complexity and we’re looking further at their impact.
If the original function of moralising gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, what might declining belief in such deities mean for the future of societies today? Could modern secularisation, for example, contribute to the unravelling of efforts to cooperate regionally – such as the European Union? If beliefs in big gods decline, what will that mean for cooperation across ethnic groups in the face of migration, warfare, or the spread of xenophobia? Can the functions of moralising gods simply be replaced by other forms of surveillance?
Even if Seshat cannot provide easy answers to all these questions, it could provide a more reliable way of estimating the probabilities of different futures.
Strange tale: Ojibwa tale of a ‘Skyman’ visitor may have been Extraterrestrial
Strange tale: Ojibwa tale of a ‘Skyman’ visitor may have been Extraterrestrial
The modern Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) craze began in the late 1940s, when a wave of people reported seeing strange objects in the skies above America.
Indeed, it was in 947 the term flying saucer entered the popular consciousness after pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed several brightly-lit saucer-like objects weaving in and out of distant mountain peaks while he was flying in Washington State.
This wasn’t the first wave of UFO sightings, however. An earlier wave occurred in Britain in 1909, when hundreds of people described flying objects shaped like dirigibles and emitting beams of light carrying out extremely advanced manoeuvres overhead. A decade earlier, throughout 1896 and ’97, there was a rash on similar sightings in the United States.
But these weren’t the first accounts of alien spacecraft on record. Legends of god-like beings coming from the heavens exist in many cultures. Throughout North America, there are numerous caves that date back thousands of years. These paintings figures and objects much like the modern imagery of aliens and flying saucers.
One intriguing legend comes from the First Nations people of central Ontario. Their ‘Skyman’ tale may in fact be one of the earliest alien encounters on record.
According to the story recorded in 1917 by ethnologist Colonel G.E. Laidlaw, 500 years ago there was a large Ojibwa village about 550 native people living somewhere in our region. One day, a pair of them stumbled upon a stranger sitting on the grass in a field. This figure, a male, was notably “clean and shining bright.”
The natives approached the stranger and asked who he was and how he came to be in the field. “I am not one of you. I do not belong to this land. I dropped down from above,” the stranger explained.
Showing unusual hospitality, the Ojibwa invited him back to their village. The stranger agreed, but on one condition: “Go home and clean the place where I will stay, and when you come back for me, I will go with you for a few days.”
Agreeing, the Ojibwa men went back to their community, told their fellow villagers about their experience, and cleaned the hut where they would house the ‘Skyman.’
The stranger did in fact accompany them to their village, but he was clearly restless. He watched the skies often and told people that in two days something would come and get him to take him back up to the sky.
One afternoon, Skyman looked up and said, “It is coming.” The villagers craned their necks and turned their eyes above and saw something that looked like a bright shining star streak down from the heavens and hover near the ground.
This was the most beautiful thing any of them had ever seen. Skyman entered the shining star and disappeared from view. The shining star then shot back into the sky and faded away.
This tale seems to be a description of an encounter with an ‘ancient astronaut,’ as seen in many cultures and popularized by Swiss theorist Erich von Daniken of Chariots of the Gods fame.
Many modern UFO theorists believe Skyman was a marooned extraterrestrial astronaut whose own craft was somehow damaged or destroyed. They point to the fact Skyman clearly entered the glowing star as proof the object was a spacecraft of some sort. Was he ‘clean and shining bright’ because he wore a silvery pressure suit? Did he request his hosts clean his quarters out of fearof contracting human viruses against which he had no immunity?
Many researchers believe Skyman was no mythological tale, but rather an actual encounter of the first kind between an ancient alien and an entire Ojibwa community. And it was said to have occurred somewhere nearby. Maybe we too should be craning our necks and scanning the skies.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.