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.
ON 06/06/2024 MORE THAN 2.056.610
VISITORS FROM 134 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...
26-04-2020
The Dogon, the Nommos and Sirius B
The Dogon, the Nommos and Sirius B
Museum of Unnatural Mystery
Summary: In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC.
In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. According to their traditions, the star Sirius has a companion star which is invisible to the human eye. This companion star has a 50 year elliptical orbit around the visible Sirius and is extremely heavy. It also rotates on its axis.
This legend might be of little interest to anybody but the two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen, who recorded it from four Dogon priests in the 1930's. Of little interest except that it is exactly true. How did a people who lacked any kind of astronomical devices know so much about an invisible star? The star, which scientists call Sirius B, wasn't even photographed until it was done by a large telescope in 1970.
The Dogon stories explain that also. According to their oral traditions, a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. They also appear in Babylonian, Accadian, and Sumerian myths. The Egyptian Goddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is also linked with the star Sirius.
The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an "ark" that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B.
The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon's with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun. These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope.
The story of the Dogon and their legend was first brought to popular attention by Robert K.G. Temple in a book published in 1977 called The Sirius Mystery. Science writer Ian Ridpath and astronomer Carl Sagan made a reply to Temple's book, suggesting that this modern knowledge about Sirius must have come from Westerners who discussed astronomy with the Dogon priests. The priests then included this new information into the older traditions. This, in turn, mislead the anthropologists.
This is a possibility considering Sirius B's existence was suspected as early as 1844 and seen was through a telescope in 1862. It doesn't seem to explain a 400-year old Dogon artifact that apparently depicts the Sirius configuration nor the ceremonies held by the Dogon since the 13th century to celebrate the cycle of Sirius A and B. It also doesn't explain how the Dogons knew about the super-density of Sirius B, a fact only discovered a few years before the anthropologists recorded the Dogon stories.
It is also important to remember that although many parts of the Dogon legends seem to ring true, other portions are clearly mistaken. One of the Dogon's beliefs is that Sirius B occupied the place where our Sun is now. Physics clearly prohibits this. Also, if the Dogon believe that Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 50 years, why do they hold their celebrations every 60 years?
Sirius A is the brightest star in our sky and can easily be seen in the winter months in the northern hemisphere. Look for the constellation Orion. Orion's belt are the three bright stars in a row. Follow an imaginary line through the three stars to Sirius which is just above the horizon. It is bluish in color.
Sirius is only 8.6 light years from Earth. Astronomer W.Bessel was the first to suspect that Sirius had an invisible companion when he observed that the path of the star wobbled. In the 1920's it was determined that Sirius B, the companion of Sirius, was a "white dwarf" star. The pull of its gravity caused Sirius's wavy movement.
White dwarfs are small, dense stars that burn dimly. Sirius B is, in fact, smaller than the planet Earth. One teaspoon of Sirius B is so dense that it weighs 5 tons.
So did alien fish-men pay a visit to ancient Earth and give the Dogon their knowledge? Or was the Dogon's culture contaminated by western visitors? Or could the Dogon's have had ancient technical or non-technical means to find this information out? Or is the whole thing just a matter of coincidence?
The question maybe settled as larger and more powerful telescopes take a look at the Sirius system. According to the legend there is a third star: Sirius C, and it is around Sirius C that the home planet of the Nommos orbits. Most scientists do not consider any part of the Sirius system a prime candidate for life, though.
When Temple first issued his book in the 1970's there was no solid evidence of a Sirius C. In 1995, however, two French researchers, Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent, authored an article in the prestigious journal Astronomy and Astrophysics with the title Is Sirius a Triple Star? and suggested (based on observations of motions in the Sirius system) there is a small third star there. They thought the star was probably of a type known as a "red dwarf" and only had about .05 the mass of Sirius B.
So has the home star of the Nommos been discovered? Or is this just another strange coincidence?
EXPLORERS IN ANTARCTICA FIND THE FOSSILS OF A "TOTALLY UNEXPECTED" ANIMAL
EXPLORERS IN ANTARCTICA FIND THE FOSSILS OF A "TOTALLY UNEXPECTED" ANIMAL
Researchers were shocked to find 40-million-year-old remains.
The Earth's South Pole, known for being a land of penguins, is covered in ice. But it wasn't always this way: Tens of millions of years ago, Antarctica was lush and green — and full of very different creatures.
Recently, while exploring the frigid region for ancient fossils, researchers found the shockingly out-of-place remains of a helmeted frog. It's the oldest-ever discovery of an amphibian and demonstrates that 40 million years ago Antarctica was more similar to present-day South America.
Paleontologist Thomas Mörs and his team were on a mission to find fossils of mammals who inhabited Antarctica before the big freeze. They collected and sifted through samples of sediment from Seymour Island, a process that revealed the teeth and bones of a variety of mammals — including tiny marsupials.
While sorting through their findings, Mörs found something shocking: an ilium — a large hip bone — and an ornamented skull. Both are telltale signs of a HELMETED FROG.
"I first found the hip bone, and I directly realized that I found an Antarctic frog, the first!" Mörs tells Inverse. "It was a totally unexpected discovery under the microscope."
This finding was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
This discovery also indicates that Antarctica might have actually played a large role in the evolution of vertebrates, including amphibians, before the mass extinction event that happened at the end of the Eocene.
ANTARCTICA, KEY TO ANCIENT FROG HISTORY — The frozen continent at the Earth's South Pole may have been where some animals originated or dispersed, Mörs says, tens of millions of years ago.
The two fossilized frog bones are around 40 million years old. That helps pin down what the environment was like in Antarctica during that time — six million years before Antarctica froze over permanently.
But the ice was already coming: The researchers found evidence that some glaciers were already present during the days of the helmeted frogs. This suggests that the cold-blooded amphibians, and other vertebrates on the land, were able to survive even as the area became increasingly icy.
Mörs says the research helps to connect some dots about helmeted frogs, too.
Today, helmeted frogs live Australia, New Guinea, and South America, where they are sometimes called Southern Frogs. These are places with climates that are probably similar to what Antarctica once looked like.
This discovery is a sign that helmeted frogs likely formed a single population across Pangea, before the supercontinent split.
"We have now a fossil frog from Antarctica that links the living frogs of the other two continents," Mörs says.
Antarctica, then, may have been an important link — not only between the continents but also between various groups of ancient helmeted frogs.
Abstract:
Cenozoic ectothermic continental tetrapods (amphibians and reptiles) have not been documented previously from Antarctica, in contrast to all other continents. Here we report a fossil ilium and an ornamented skull bone that can be attributed to the Recent, South American, anuran family Calyptocephalellidae or helmeted frogs, representing the first modern amphibian found in Antarctica. The two bone fragments were recovered in Eocene, approximately 40 million years old, sediments on Seymour Island, Antarctic Peninsula. The record of hyperossifed calyptocephalellid frogs outside South America supports Gondwanan cosmopolitanism of the anuran clade Australobatrachia. Our results demonstrate that Eocene freshwater ecosystems in Antarctica provided habitats favourable for ectothermic vertebrates (with mean annual precipitation ≥900mm, coldest month mean temperature ≥3.75°C, and warmest month mean temperature ≥13.79°C), at a time when there were at least ephemeral ice sheets existing on the highlands within the interior of the continent.
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today.
Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be "very early" after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever.
Of course, before physicists decide to toss out the Big Bang in favor of a bang-bounce cycle, these theoretical predictions will need to survive an onslaught of observation tests.
Bouncing cosmologies
Scientists have a really good picture of the very early universe, something we know and love as the Big Bang theory. In this model, a long time ago the universe was far smaller, far hotter and far denser than it is today. In that early inferno 13.8 billion years ago, all the elements that make us what we are were formed in the span of about a dozen minutes.
Even earlier, this thinking goes, at some point our entire universe — all the stars, all the galaxies, all the everything — was the size of a peach and had a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees.
Amazingly, this fantastical story holds up to all current observations. Astronomers have done everything from observing the leftover electromagnetic radiation from the young universe to measuring the abundance of the lightest elements and found that they all line up with what the Big Bang predicts. As far as we can tell, this is an accurate portrait of our early universe.
But as good as it is, we know that the Big Bang picture is not complete — there's a puzzle piece missing, and that piece is the earliest moments of the universe itself.
The problem is that the physics that we use to understand the early universe (a wonderfully complicated mishmash of general relativity and high-energy particle physics) can take us only so far before breaking down. As we try to push deeper and deeper into the first moments of our cosmos, the math gets harder and harder to solve, all the way to the point where it just … quits.
The main sign that we have terrain yet to be explored is the presence of a "singularity," or a point of infinite density, at the beginning of the Big Bang. Taken at face value, this tells us that at one point, the universe was crammed into an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point. This is obviously absurd, and what it really tells us is that we need new physics to solve this problem — our current toolkit just isn't good enough.
To save the day we need some new physics, something that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. And that's exactly what string theory claims to be: a model of physics that is capable of handling gravity and the other forces, combined, at ultrahigh energies. Which means that string theory claims it can explain the earliest moments of the universe.
One of the earliest string theory notions is the "ekpyrotic" universe, which comes from the Greek word for "conflagration," or fire. In this scenario, what we know as the Big Bang was sparked by something else happening before it — the Big Bang was not a beginning, but one part of a larger process.
Extending the ekpyrotic concept has led to a theory, again motivated by string theory, called cyclic cosmology. I suppose that, technically, the idea of the universe continually repeating itself is thousands of years old and predates physics, but string theory gave the idea firm mathematical grounding. The cyclic universe goes about exactly as you might imagine, continually bouncing between big bangs and big crunches, potentially for eternity back in time and for eternity into the future.
Before the beginning
As cool as this sounds, early versions of the cyclic model had difficulty matching observations — which is a major deal when you're trying to do science and not just telling stories around the campfire.
The main hurdle was agreeing with our observations of the cosmic microwave background, the fossil light leftover from when the universe was only 380,000 years old. While we can't see directly past that wall of light, if you start theoretically tinkering with the physics of the infant cosmos, you affect that afterglow light pattern.
And so, it seemed that a cyclic universe was a neat but incorrect idea.
But the ekpyrotic torch has been kept lit over the years, and a paper published in January to the arXiv database has explored the wrinkles in the mathematics and uncovered some previously missed opportunities. The physicists, Robert Brandenberger and Ziwei Wang of McGill University in Canada, found that in the moment of the "bounce," when our universe shrinks to an incredibly small point and returns to a Big Bang state, it's possible to line everything up to get the proper observationally tested result.
In other words, the complicated (and, admittedly, poorly understood) physics of this critical epoch may indeed allow for a radically revised view of our time and place in the cosmos.
But to fully test this model, we'll have to wait for a new generation of cosmology experiments, so let's wait to break out the ekpyrotic champagne.
The sun begins to rise along Nevada Highway 375, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway, just north of Groom Lake or 'Area 51.'
(Photo: Will Pedro/Shutterstock)
Behind every alleged unidentified flying object sighting, every creepy alien story and every first-contact theory, there's a person. An earthling who believes a little — or a lot — in the idea that aliens have visited Earth or are trying to.
So who are all these people? Writer Sarah Scoles was interested in finding out, and it's the people behind the science, philosophy and conspiracy theories of UFOs who she focuses on in her book, "They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers."
Belief in UFOs is currently at a high point, with a 2019 Gallup poll showing that 33% of Americans "believe that some UFO sightings over the years have in fact been alien spacecraft visiting Earth from other planets or galaxies." About 60% of Americans are skeptical and 7% aren't sure — but 16% of people who answered the poll said they have personally witnessed a UFO.
Why UFOs now?
Those numbers are on the rise again in recent years due, in part, to a bombshell of an article published in December 2017 by The New York Times. A front-page story detailed a five-year program at the Pentagon call the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). That program's findings included a number of reports of unidentified flying objects. In later interviews, key members of that program offered more detail.As MNN covered at the time, Luis Elizondo, the head of AATIP, told then-Defense Secretary James Mattis:
"In my opinion, if this was a court of law, we have reached the point of 'beyond reasonable doubt.' I hate to use the term UFO, but that’s what we’re looking at," said Elizondo. "I think it's pretty clear this is not us, and it's not anyone else, so one has to ask the question where they're from."
Contrary to what might be assumed, many in the UFO community were skeptical of this news, though author Scoles said this was interestingly divided by generation, with older people more skeptical and Millennials excited to hear confirmation, a divide that got Scoles interested in the group. She attended the UFO Congress — a huge annual meeting of the UFO-interested — held just a couple months after the Pentagon program's revelation. She talked to 22 people for her book, and what's interesting is how different they are from each other; this is no monolithic group.
She traveled to famous sites on the extraterrestrial map, including Roswell, New Mexico and Area 51, the UFO Congress, the Pentagon, Skinwalker ranch in Utah and even meetings of a local UFO group in Denver where she lives. As she dug deeper into UFO society, Scoles discovered there are different reasons and attitudes that get people thinking or obsessing about UFOs.
The moderate skeptics
Sheer curiosity — and a feeling that information is being withheld — is the drive that keeps many people engaged in the UFO conversation.
(Photo: Dean Clarke/Shutterstock)
"I was surprised to find the moderate types," says Scoles, pointing out that when you think about someone who spends a lot of time thinking about UFOs, you're unlikely to picture a science-minded person who thinks there are likely good explanations for UFO sightings. She was curious, "If you don't believe in this thing, why would you spend time or energy to figure this out?"
Scoles says this group is a "large minority" of UFO-interested people, and discovered that what drives them is probably similar to what drives a scientist: plain old curiosity. Like a good researcher, they're not out to "prove" a belief; instead they're focused on the question, and how to answer it. This group is focused on how they can use science to understand, explain, explore or disprove the idea of alien life.
Scoles says the people in this group reminded her of the SETI astronomers, who use giant telescopes to look for possible messages from beyond Earth. Many of those scientists don't think alien civilizations exist, but they're "interested in the question even if the answer isn't exciting," says Scoles.
The spiritualists and the hopefuls
A tall metal alien sculpture greets visitors to the Alien Research Center, an extraterrestrial-themed gift shop in Hiko, Nevada.
(Photo: BrianPIrwin/Shutterstock.com)
Another subset of UFO fans are those who treat the idea of extraterrestrials as a kind of secular religion. While there are some cultists (including those who see aliens as some kind of god or gods), many of those who see the possibility of advanced alien life regard it as a sign of hope. If they survived, then humanity may be able to overcome our current challenges and keep advancing to the stars. This idea is behind plenty of sci-fi franchises as well, especially "Star Trek," which directly addresses the idea that we live in perilous times and that there can be positive visions of humanity's future.
Thinking about how aliens may have overcome their own challenges can give us a hypothetical look at how aliens could be a model for us, says Scoles. "If there is [an alien civilization] it will be older, it will have survived energy and other crises. The idea that somebody else did it gives us a role model for ourselves."
But there's also a less practical spiritual take — the sweet allure of the unknown. Scoles writes of a friend who stopped in a small town south of Des Moines, Iowa, where "spook lights" had been seen. As soon as he sat down at a bar and asked about the lights, people opened up, excited to tell a stranger what they had seen. "There was some mystery and magic left here, after all. There still existed something, even in this tiny town, that felt unfamiliar," Scoles writes. "And maybe someday, when they weren't expecting it, they'd be lucky enough to experience that feeling first hand again."
The true believers and conspiracy theorists
There are some people who believe that, odds are, there is life in the universe outside Earth, and those life forms have have visited our planet. This group might overlap with the spiritualists, but not necessarily. After all, some people fear the idea of aliens: "There's people who talk about aliens and UFOs who see them as an existential threat," says Scoles.
But others look at the statistics around the number of stars and habitable planets and see the possibility of life having arisen on other planets as not just possible, but probable. They think first contact has already likely happened, or they believe enough of the conspiracy theories that their judgement says it's more likely than not that we've already had some alien contact.
Of course, there are those who believe in UFOs almost entirely due to their belief that it's been covered up for years, "whether they think the conspiracy is hiding aliens or their classified technology," says Scoles. Their belief is rooted in what they see as the "cover-up."
So with all these different groups of people interested in alien life and spacecrafts, is there anything that unites them?
"I think everybody across the whole UFO spectrum from skeptics to true believers is motivated by a sense of wonder, encountering a thing that they don’t know fully," says Scoles.
Hey everyone, I found some thought provoking things on Mars in a Curiosity Rover photo today. Two the objects are structures with doorways...both located next to one another.
The other thing is a giant sculpture head with a equally sized hand with four visible fingers (hi lighted in yellow)...near it is a dragon skull (highlighted in orange). This may be evidence of a giant species...turned into a giant fossil. But my be a statue, since the doorways were so small...one 1/3 a meter tall openings, compared to the hand of the giant...which appears to be 2 meters across.
There were also two pyramids...one still being carved from the local stone, the other finished but with a face on the top. All in all, it seems Mars was teaming with intelligent life and the evidence is all over the place. Hard to believe NASA kept the secret for so long.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
Weird spherical object floating over General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile
Weird spherical object floating over General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile
It seems the Aysén region in Chile is a UFO hotspot. According to The Journal Of Hispanic UFOlogy, Ysaac Wichmann, a mountaineer with a good knowledge of the area in the Aysén region, Chile said that the UFO phenomena have always been visible in this region, in the mountain ranges or at sea, on islands, canals or archipelagos, and particularly in unpopulated, isolated, distant and hard-to-reach locations.
A member of his family who served years ago in the Chilean navy witnessed this phenomenon while approaching a small island in the Aysén region in a Navy ship. Their mission was to work on a lighthouse to provide orientation and navigation assistance to those transiting along those waters.
What they saw before reaching the lighthouse, an oval metallic object rose vertically and slowly near the lighthouse, until it reached a certain altitude. After a while, the object rose quickly into the air and vanished from sight.
In another case two black objects can be seen floating at a distance over the surface of General Carrera Lake in Aysén, Chile.
According to witnesses, who were aboard a boat during the observation on June 23, 2019, the objects appeared to hover over the water, sometimes appearing and disappearing mysteriously.
Another small grey spherical object also appeared out of nowhere beside these dark objects, along with an orb of light that appears to fly over the lake. Some claim the objects are buoys; however, buoys do not fly, disappear and reappear.
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
A Paris, France resident reported his UFO sighting a few weeks ago, which he recorded from his balcony during this lockdown. The video shows a sphere-like object hovering and appears watching over the city.
UFO sightings became more frequent over the past weeks. Many suggest that aliens may have been trying to figure out whether humans follow the rules of wearing face masks, physical distancing, and lockdowns or not.
Conspiracy theorists further speculate that aliens observing the Earth during the pandemic may have gathered information that would provide them a predictive model of what will bound to happen soon.
The video was published on YouTube and has gotten more than 25,000 views. Some observers rule out advertising balloons as a possible explanation because there are no customers and not weather balloons either as they typically fly at higher altitudes.
A few others believe that it’s just understandable UFO sightings are becoming more frequent this past couple of weeks as aliens pride themselves on their knowledge.
Others suggest it could be chemtrail, drone, or a blimp.
One commenter on the YouTube video pin hopes that if these are aliens, they are friendly.
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
UFO-Like Sphere Recorded on Video Hovering Over Paris, France
A Paris, France resident reported his UFO sighting a few weeks ago, which he recorded from his balcony during this lockdown. The video shows a sphere-like object hovering and appears watching over the city.
UFO sightings became more frequent over the past weeks. Many suggest that aliens may have been trying to figure out whether humans follow the rules of wearing face masks, physical distancing, and lockdowns or not.
Conspiracy theorists further speculate that aliens observing the Earth during the pandemic may have gathered information that would provide them a predictive model of what will bound to happen soon.
The video was published on YouTube and has gotten more than 25,000 views. Some observers rule out advertising balloons as a possible explanation because there are no customers and not weather balloons either as they typically fly at higher altitudes.
A few others believe that it’s just understandable UFO sightings are becoming more frequent this past couple of weeks as aliens pride themselves on their knowledge.
Others suggest it could be chemtrail, drone, or a blimp.
One commenter on the YouTube video pin hopes that if these are aliens, they are friendly.
"It's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions."
A new map has provided the blueprints for the moon, revealing the true nature of Earth's rocky companion.
Scientists at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with NASA and the Lunar Planetary Institute, have created the first-ever comprehensive geologic map of the moon. In this new digital map, titled the "Unified Geologic Map of the Moon," the entire lunar surface has been thoroughly charted and all of its features uniformly classified.
You can find the map, which shows an incredible amount of detail at a 1:5,000,000 scale, online here.
This map details exactly what makes up the beautiful variety of dark and light spots on the moon's surface. It is intended not only as a scientific and educational tool, but it could also be invaluable for future crewed missions to the moon.
"People have always been fascinated by the moon and when we might return," Jim Reilly, a former NASA astronaut and current director of the USGS, said in a statement. "So, it's wonderful to see USGS create a resource that can help NASA with their planning for future missions."
This new digital map is so comprehensive, in part, because it uses data spanning the last five decades. The collaborative team behind the map used data from recent satellite missions to the moon, as well as data collected and maps created during NASA's Apollo missions to and around the moon.
Among the recent data are elevation measurements from stereo observations made by the Terrain Camera on JAXA's SELENE (Selenological and Engineering Explorer) mission and topography data from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
"This map is a culmination of a decades-long project," Corey Fortezzo, USGS geologist and lead author on this work, said in the same statement. "It provides vital information for new scientific studies by connecting the exploration of specific sites on the moon with the rest of the lunar surface."
These scientists merged the old and new datasets and updated the Apollo-era maps with the more recent data. Additionally, they developed a new, unified method for describing the moon's rock layers. Previously, moon maps have used a variety of names for the different types of rock and rock layers, and this new unified description method absolved that inconsistency.
You can read an abstract describing the work on this map here, published by the USGS.
You need a telescope to see it, but astronomers have been observing it already. Charts, tips, recent images, how to watch online here.
Radar image of asteroid 1998 OR2, acquired April 18, 2020 by astronomers at Arecibo Observatory. The radar data confirm that 1998 OR2 is at least 2 km in diameter [a little over a mile wide]. It is probably about 2 1/2 times that long. It rotates once every 4.1 hours.
Image via Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
A big – very big – asteroid will pass relatively close to Earth on April 29, 2020. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass at a safe distance, at some 4 million miles (6 million km), or about 16 times the Earth-moon distance. It’ll be the biggest asteroid to fly by Earth this year (that we know about so far); according to current estimates, it’s probably a bit over a mile wide (2 km) and maybe twice that long. Closest approach will be April 29 around 5:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:56 UTC; translate UTC to your time). Professional observatories have been pointing their telescopes at the huge space rock already. Amateur astronomers with smaller telescopes will also have an opportunity to see it as a slow-moving “star.” If that’s you, we give charts and tips for observers at the bottom of this post that should help.
The Virtual Telescope Project will present an online viewing of Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on April 28, 2020. As the time approaches, check this page for more details.
No access to a telescope? No problem. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome will host a free, online public viewing of the asteroid on April 28, 2020. See the poster above.
Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project also acquired 166 images of the asteroid – collected back to back – and assembled them to make the animated gif below. The animation shows you the asteroid’s motion in front of the stars. It was made with images from the Elena robotic unit of the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome, Italy. The asteroid is in the center of the image, visible as a sharp dot of light.
Asteroid 1998 OR2 was at about 7.5 million miles from us (about 12 million km) when astronomers acquired the images to make this animation. At its closest on April 29, the asteroid will be 4 million miles (6 million km) from us, or about 16 times the Earth-moon distance. The asteroid appears to move in front of the stars because it is so much closer to us than the stars.
Astronomers at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have been studying the asteroid since April 8, as it’s traveled through space at 19,461 miles per hour (31,320 km/h). The high-resolution radar images at the top of this post and below – from Arecibo – are some of the first glimpses of this large asteroid. In addition to confirming the asteroid’s size (about 2 km [1.25 mi] wide, and maybe twice that long), the images uniquely revealed the overall shape of the asteroid and some smaller-scale topographic features, such as hills and ridges. The team of observers working now at Acrecibo to observe this asteroids includes astronomers Anne Virkki, Flaviane Venditti, and Sean Marshall from UCF/Arecibo Planetary Group, Dr. Patrick Taylor (remotely) from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, and the Arecibo telescope operators Israel Cabrera, Elliot Gonzalez, and Daniel Padilla.
Radar image of asteroid 1998 OR2, acquired April 18, 2020.
Image via Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
Let’s make it absolutely clear that there’s no chance of a collision between this asteroid and Earth. It’s true the object is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid. The Center for Near Earth Objects defines such an object as one that comes as close to Earth as:
… 0.05 AU or less [about 19.5 lunar distances] and an absolute magnitude of 22.0 or less …
In other words, such objects are reasonably close and reasonably big. And do we need to say there are a bunch of objects like this? Wikipedia lists 22 of the largest here. Recent decades have revealed more and more asteroids orbiting the sun.
None of the 22 Potentially Hazardous Asteroids listed by Wikipedia is known to be on a collision course with Earth in the foreseeble future. In fact, none of the asteroids in the video above is known to be on a collision course. Likewise, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 isn’t on a collision course with Earth, not anytime soon. The orbit of this asteroid is well known for at least the next 200 years. Its closest approach to Earth in this century and the next will happen in 2079, when it’ll swoop to within about a million miles of Earth (still about four times farther away than the moon). That 2079 sweep past Earth will still be a big deal. Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the largest known of all large Near-Earth Objects that’ll pass less than five times the Earth-moon distance over the next two centuries!
Astronomers with reasonably sized telescopes are already capturing images of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. This March 6, 2020, image of the asteroid comes from a single 30-second exposure, remotely taken with Elena, a 17-inch (43 cm) robotic telescope. At the imaging time, (52768) 1998 OR2 was about 22 million miles (36 million km) from Earth. At its closest in late April, it’ll be about 4 million miles (6.4 million km) away.
Orbit of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. It requires 3 years and 8 months to orbit the sun once. It gets nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter (about 5 times Earth’s distance from the sun).
Image via NASA/ JPL.
How to see asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 with a small telescope
During its April 2020 pass, this asteroid will at no time be bright enough to view with the unaided eye. However, it’s estimated to reach a visual magnitude of around 10 to 11, which means observers with at least 6-inch or 8-inch (15 to 20 cm) telescopes (the number indicates the size of the primary mirror) will see the asteroid (very slowly) moving in front of the stars!
Sky enthusiasts can initially use a wide-angle (32mm or 35mm) eyepiece to point the telescope to a reference star in the asteroid’s path (charts below). After being assured that the instrument is pointing at the correct patch of the sky, a 26mm or 27mm eyepiece is recommended to detect the asteroid’s slow motion. You will want to note the star field, and watch for the object that moves over a period of about 10 to 15 minutes. Yes, that’ll be the space rock.
Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is in our sky now, but it’s not visible to the eye alone. You need a telescope to see it. This illustration shows the asteroid’s location on the night of April 24, 2020, around 11:45 p.m. Central Daylight Time (04:45 Universal Time, April 25). As seen from central U.S., facing west-southwest.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 24, 2020, at 11:45 p.m. CDT (04:45 UT April 25) observers using small computerized telescopes can point their instruments at these reference stars to observe asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2. Compare the views 10 or 15 minutes later to detect an apparent star that has changed position.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
There will be closer approaches of asteroids in the future, including Apophis, which – although smaller – will pass very close to Earth in 2029. Another, larger space rock – 2 miles (3 km) wide – designated as asteroid (415029) 2011 UL21 will pass slightly farther than (52768) 1998 OR2 in June 2024.
But the upcoming flyby in April 2020 of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is the most significant close approach of an asteroid until 2027, when another huge asteroid known as (4953) 1990 MU will safely pass by Earth at 12 lunar distances.
Astronomers first discovered asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on July 24, 1998, from Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.
Have a Go-To Telescope? Point your instrument at star HIP 48674 on April 25, 2020, at 10 p.m. CDT (03:00 UTC April 26) to find the huge asteroid, which will appear as a slow-moving star. To see its movement, compare the views over about 10 to 15 minutes.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 on the night of April 27, 2020. The space rock passes close to star HIP 50745 around 9:15 p.m. CDT April 27 (02:15 UTC April 28).
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Location of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 around the nights of closest approach (April 28-29, 2020). Facing south, as seen from the central U.S.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 29, 2020, around its closest approach to Earth, asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass close to galaxy NGC 3463 and star HIP 53416. Around 9:30 p.m. CDT April 29 (02:30 UTC April 30), point your small computerized telescope to these reference objects. Compare the views 10 to 15 minutes later to detect the apparent “star” that changed position. That’s the asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
On April 30, 2020, at 9:30 p.m. CDT (02:30 UTC May 1) asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 is located close to stars HIP 54875 and 55201. Use a GoTo telescope to locate these reference stars to locate the slow moving asteroid.
Illustration by Eddie Irizarry using Stellarium.
Bottom line: The huge asteroid known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass closest to Earth on April 29, 2020. Observers peering through telescopes will see it as a slow-moving “star.” Charts, tips, how to watch online – plus some recent images – here.
China hasn’t been getting much good press lately due to the coronavirus pandemic and is probably hoping for some good news, even if it’s from 3500 years ago. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. Archeologists digging in a major site dating back to the Shang Dynasty found an unusual ‘oracle’ bone in a very creepy tomb. It’s unusual because oracle bones – used by religious diviners to ask questions of the deities – are normally made from ox bones or turtle shells, while this one is a human bone. It’s creepy because this oracle bone was found in a grave where the skeletal remains indicated that the body was a human — a human sacrificed by beheading. Sorry, China … this is not your year.
“This well-preserved human bone is shaped like the oracle bone inscription of the character ‘Kan.'”
Proving that the Chinese media will cover bad news, China Daily interviewed Liang Fawei, head of the Chaizhuang site excavation project, about the recent find. Oracle bones were the key ingredient in the practice of pyromancy, where a diviner or oracle would etch a question on a large bone, then heat it with a hot metal rod until the bone cracked. The diviner would then interpret the cracks, determine the deity’s answer to the question and often scratch that onto the bone. This practice began in the Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE-1046 BCE) and continued into the Zhou Dynasty. Fawei notes that the question in this case was the primitive Chinese character ‘Kan’ from the ancient language Jiaguwen – one of the many hieroglyphics used to describe animal and human sacrifices.
“The bone remains found at the site suggest that the human sacrifice was beheaded, facing north and kneeling in the pit with his hands crossed in front of him.”
The Chaizhuang site covers 300,000 square meters and contains houses, wells, ash pits, roads, pottery, stones, bones, jade artifacts. other relics – and plenty of evidence of human sacrifices. Shang kings were often buried with hundreds of humans and evidence shows other sacrifices by this agrarian and warring culture were made to Di (the High God), the sun and mountains and various ancestors. While the ‘Kan’ message had been found on other oracle bones, this was the first discovered with the bones clearly indicating the human was beheading in a kneeling position rather than lying down. (Photos of the grave and oracle bone here.) The Google translation is a little confusing in that it seems to say both that the oracle bone was a human bone and that the character was on a human bone that matched those found on oracle bones.
A piece of oracle bone discovered at the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, Central China's Henan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
Bone remains suggest ancient human sacrifice at the Chaizhuang site in Jiyuan, Central China's Henan province.
[Photo/Xinhua]
Whatever the case, the clear indication of a kneeling decapitation in a culture known for its human sacrifices means this story is well-deserving of headlines indicating that it was found in a “creepy tomb” or a “terrible tomb.” It’s both.
One persistent feature of the world of the weird is the phenomenon known as “spontaneous human combustion,” which is when a human being is immolated by fire that seems to have no discernible cause or eternal source of ignition. In most cases there are strange details surrounding these cases, such as bodies that were charred by extremely high temperatures, yet left the surroundings or even clothing untouched, or of cases in which certain body parts have somehow managed to remain unscathed while everything else is ash. It is a phenomenon that had been written of in literature for centuries, and one mostly stable feature of these cases is that the victim does not survive the ordeal. Indeed, most cases are known from their violent aftermath, in which the corpse or parts of the corpse are burned beyond recognition, and survivors are scarce. Yet, although rare, there are a few people who have been the victim of apparent spontaneous human combustion who have lived to tell the tale, and here are some of them.
Many of these reports come from pretty far back in time, and the earliest we will look at here is from 1776. It all revolves around an Italian friar by the name of Don Gio Maria Bertholi, who seems to have somehow drawn fire to him to spontaneously combust, and yet live to tell the tale. In October of that year he was in the small town of Filetto, and after conducting some business in town he retired for the evening at his brother-in-law’s house. Not long after he closed himself into his room for the night, the other residents were alarmed to hear Bertholi screaming loudly as if in great pain, and when they rushed to his aid, they found the friar surrounded by an aura of blue flame. Oddly, as the relatives approached the flames are said to have actually cringed away from them as if aware of their presence, before dissipating completely, leaving Betholi moaning in agony. One report of the odd event reads:
Perceiving the cries of the priest, they repaired instantly to the apartment; and, on entering it, found him extended on the paved floor, and enveloped in a thin flame, which receded as they approached him, and at length entirely vanished. They placed him, as soon as possible, upon his bed, and administered to him every kind of aid that was at hand.
Although the friar had survived the incident, he was suffering serious burns, and when he was able to articulate what had happened, he explained that it felt as if an unseen hand had struck him, after which he had erupted in flames. Oddly, it was found that although his body was burned and his silk cap had been burned to a crisp, his shirt and trousers were undamaged, and his hair had remained unscathed too despite burns on his face. Making it stranger still was that, although there had been quite a bit of fire, the room had no smoke or odor of the fire, and nothing in the vicinity had been damaged. When Bertholi was brought to a physician for an examination, he was found to be in quite a rough state. The French physician François-Emmanuel Fodéré would describe it in excruciating detail, writing:
On the following morning, the patient was examined by M. Battaglia, who found the integuments of the right arm almost entirely detached and pendant from the flesh; from the shoulders to the thighs the integuments were equally injured; and on the right hand, the part most injured, mortification had already commenced, which notwithstanding immediate scarification rapidly extended itself. The patient complained of burning thirst, and was horribly convulsed, he passed by stool putrid and bilious matter, and was exhausted by continual vomiting accompanied by fever and delirium. On the fourth day, after two hours of comatose insensibility, he expired; during the whole period of his suffering, it was impossible to trace any symptomatic affection. A short time previous to his decease, M. Battaglia observed, with astonishment that putrefaction had made so much progress that the body already exhaled an insufferable odor, worms crawled from it on the bed, and the nails had become detached from the left hand.
In the end it has never been ascertained exactly what happened to Bertholi, and no explanation offered that really explains the entirety of the very bizarre phenomenon that he experienced. It remains a historical oddity, and a curious case of a person who survived what certainly at least appears to be spontaneous human combustion. Our next weird case comes from 1822, in the countryside of France. One summer day a local man called Renateau was out in the countryside of the village of Loignan when he allegedly felt a sudden, sharp pain in his right index finger. He casually glanced to it and his eyes widened in terror as he realized that his finger was actually on fire, and when he waved his fingers around the whole hand ignited. He wildly batted his hand at his pants, setting them on fire as well, and his left hand erupted into flames when he clapped his hands together.
Now in a panic, the man dashed as fast as he could to his house and screamed at his wife to bring him a bucket of cold water in which to douse the fire, but plunging his hands into the water failed to stop the flames. He then tried shoving his hands into wet mud and even tried milk, but this didn’t work either, and by this time he had attracted a crowd of curious onlookers milling about. One of these gawking spectators then brought him some holy water, and this seemed to do the trick. Oddly, although his clothes where he had touched them were burned, his hands were remarkably intact, suffering only minor burns considering how long them had been ablaze. This curious case appears in 1822 in the French medical journal Nouveau journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie, Volume 15 and is an odd historical account that doesn’t seem to have ever been solved.
While these cases so far have mostly been met with horror and desperate panic, there is another case from 1835 that appeared in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Volume 17, and is notable for just how calm the victim was. In January of that year, a professor at the University of Nashville by the name of James Hamilton was doing an experiment in which he was outside making atmospheric measurements. As he went about checking his barometer, thermometer, and hygrometer, he felt a sudden acute pain in the thigh of his left leg. At first, he tried to ignore it, but it got steadily more intense until the pain was nearly unbearable. When he examined his leg, he then noticed that there was a flame emanating from the point of pain, right above the cloth of his pants. Perhaps it was his scientific inquisitiveness that guided his actions then, because he calmly cupped his hands around the flame in order to cut off its oxygen supply and it went out and the pain subsided greatly. He then went about inspecting his leg.
He found upon the skin a dry spot about the size of a dime, that seemed more like a scrape than a burn. Curiously, a hole was found to have been burned through his drawers in a perfect circle where the pain had been, yet the underwear between the skin and the outer clothing remained strangely untouched. It was all very weird, but the professor could see no need for medical attention, and calmly went back to his experiment just as calmly as he had dealt with the spontaneous flame that had spewed from his leg. The strange wound would take longer to heal than would be expected, but the professor made a full recovery, and it was considered by the journal to be a reliable case of “partial spontaneous combustion.”
There have been more modern cases of this as well. In 1974 a door to door salesman by the name of Jack Angel allegedly woke up at his mobile home in Savannah, Georgia, in the United States to find his hands, arms, back, and chest covered with burns. This was very odd, as he was not a smoker, there was no source of flame, and nothing around him was burned, including his clothes, which were unscathed. He claims that doctors told him that whatever had happened did so “internally,” and had originated from his left arm. The case gets a little suspicious when in later years he changed the story to say that he had been sprayed by scalding hot water as he was fixing the mobile home’s water pressure, but then in an episode of the TV series That’s Incredible he reverted back to his original tale of spontaneous human combustion. What is going on here?
In 1985 we also have the case of decorated Vietnam War veteran Frank Baker, who says he had his strange experience while on a fishing trip with some buddies. He says that as he was just sitting there on the sofa chatting away in their cabin his body suddenly burst into flames for no reason at all. They were able to put the flames out, and Baker said, “I had no idea what was taking place on my body — none. We were getting ready for fishing and sitting on the couch. Everything was great. Pete was sitting next to me — we were having a helluva time.” Making it even stranger is that when doctors examined him he was informed that the fire seemed to have burned from the inside out. The case was featured on an episode of the Science Channel’s Unexplained Files, and is pretty strange, indeed.
As of yet there is no real consensus on what causes the human spontaneous combustion phenomenon, and it has long remained a fixture of the world of the paranormal. However, while there is usually no one left to give a first hand account of what it was like to experience it, these cases that we have looked at here are very intriguing, indeed. What can we learn from such stories? Do they provide any insight into what is going on or do they merely take the mystery deeper? Whatever the case may be, they certainly do provide a different spin on the mystery of spontaneous human combustion, and it seems to be an enigma that will be talked about for some time to come.
Satelliettrein van Musk voor derde keer gepasseerd, morgen nieuwe kans - HLN.be
Satelliettrein van Musk voor derde keer gepasseerd, morgen nieuwe kans - HLN.be
De satelliettrein van SpaceX van Elon Musk is vanavond rond 22 uur opnieuw boven ons land gepasseerd. De trein was deze keer iets moeilijker te zien.
Net als de vorige twee avonden, passeerde de satellietentrein van Musk ook vanavond rond 22 uur boven ons land. Wellicht zullen we de treintjes nog enkele avonden kunnen waarnemen, maar ze zullen wel telkens minder helder worden. Ze worden namelijk geleidelijk in een hogere baan gebracht en bovendien verspreiden ze zich steeds meer, zodat het mooie ‘treintjeseffect’ stilaan verdwijnt.
Ook morgen zal de satelliettrein te zien zijn omstreeks hetzelfde uur, als het niet bewolkt is tenminste.
Supersnel internet
Woensdag was het al de zevende keer dat er satellieten gelanceerd werden van het Starlink-project, dat supersnel internet moet aanbieden in elke uithoek van de aarde. In mei vorig jaar werden de eerste gelanceerd en in totaal moeten er 12.000 in een baan rond de aarde gebracht worden.
De satellieten zijn zichtbaar als een streep van lichtjes. Volgens astronomen is die zichtbaarheid vandaag nog geen probleem, maar kan het wel een probleem worden als er nog meer satellieten bijkomen. Ze veroorzaken immers lichtvervuiling die het werk van astronomen bemoeilijkt.
Helderheid
Elon Musk liet echter weten op Twitter dat zijn bedrijf iets gaat doen aan de helderheid van de satellieten. Die heeft deels te maken met de manier waarop de zonnepanelen op de satellieten bevestigd zijn. De komende maanden zullen de panelen richting zon worden gedraaid, waardoor ze minder zichtbaar worden. De satellieten vliegen ook dicht bij de aarde en zijn vrij groot, waardoor ze licht reflecteren. Speciale zonneschermen zouden dat probleem moeten verhelpen.
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America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilisation
America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilisation
This article was published in New Dawn 175 (Jul-Aug 2019)
Humans were in America long before we’ve been told, and the Australian Aborigines have a genetic connection to the Amazon which once had great cities. FRANK JOSEPH looks at the fresh discoveries in Graham Hancock’s latest book.
As the former editor-in-chief (1993 to 2007) and ongoing writer for Ancient American – a US magazine examining Old World impact on the New World before 1492 – recently released materials regarding pre-Columbian possibilities often come my way. I was surprised, however, to find that Graham Hancock’s latest tome, America Before, compares remarkably with Before Atlantis (2013), my own book, published six years earlier, in more than title.
Both works go into the Bering land-bridge Theory, megalithic alignments with the Cygnus constellation, Easter Island’s moai, Gobekli Tepe, the discoveries of Albert Goodyear, Brazil’s Stonehenge, the Meadowcroft Rock shelter, Neanderthals, the Clovis First Controversy, Pedra Furada, etc., etc. Other topics tackled in America Before – Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound, North American earthworks, the Piasu Bird, Cahokia, et al. – were likewise described at length in my earlier releases: Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America (2006), Atlantis and Other Lost Worlds (2008), Unearthing Ancient America (2009), Advanced Civilizations of Prehistoric America (2010), Lost Worlds of Ancient America (2012), Lost Colonies of Ancient America (2014), and Lost History of Ancient America (2016).
Independent research that arrives at common conclusions tends to validate disparate investigators at work in the same field. Of them all, Graham Hancock is certainly the best known, thanks to his early association with such prestigious periodicals as The Times, The Independent, The Economist, and The Guardian, which granted him access to major book publishers with international distribution, such as St. Martin’s Press, publisher of his latest work. His Fingerprints of the Gods was a worldwide bestseller. At the time of its release in 1995, critics – even those sympathetic to the author’s belief in ancient catastrophism – faulted him for merely reworking long-known if not well-publicised information. But they were forced to admit that Hancock acquainted millions of readers with otherwise neglected information about the deep past.
America Before is not unlike Fingerprints of the Gods in that it introduces an international audience to a version of antiquity not otherwise available in schools or mainstream publications. America Before also joins Before Atlantis in highlighting “a global cataclysm that occurred near the end of the Ice Age around twelve thousand eight hundred years ago. A disintegrating comet crossed the orbit of the Earth and bombarded our planet with a ‘swarm’ of fragments.” Familiar language to readers already familiar with The Destruction of Atlantis (2002) and its sequel. Survivors of Atlantis (2004) similarly tells how an abundance of physical proof for worldwide destruction left by comets during the Bronze Age was offered by scientists meeting at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, England.
In 1997 they presented undeniable evidence in the form of annual growth rings at Irish bogs and oak forests, ash-fall deposits from Greenland ice-cores, impact lines made by colossal waves along the shores of Morocco, abrupt lake level changes from Western Europe to South America, and small, glassy spherules that result specifically from cometary collisions subjecting rock to intense heat. Earth’s periodic brushes with celestial upheaval belong to a pattern of astronomical interface with our planet that abruptly terminated the Ice Age, as described in America Before and earlier in Before Atlantis.
Buried in the floor of Lake Cuitzeo was a thin, dark layer containing unequivocal evidence for a large, cosmic body that struck central Mexico just when the Younger Dryas period opened with such violence. Virtually identical sediment strata dated to the same period have been previously located at numerous locations throughout North America, Greenland, and Western Europe. According to Science Daily, “The data suggest that a comet or asteroid – likely a large, previously fragmented body, greater than several hundred meters in diameter – entered the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle. The heat at impact burned biomass, melted surface rocks, and caused major environmental disruption.” The resulting crater became Lake Cuitzeo, measuring twelve and one-half miles across, with an average depth of ninety feet.
Dr James Kennett, professor of earth science at the University of California (Santa Barbara), told the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: “These results are consistent with earlier reported discoveries throughout North America of abrupt ecosystem change, megafaunal extinction, and human cultural change and population reduction. These changes were large, abrupt and unprecedented, and had been recorded and identified by earlier investigators at a ‘time of crisis’. The timing of the impact coincided with the most extraordinary biotic and environmental changes over Mexico and Central America during the last approximately twenty thousand years, as recorded by others in several regional lake deposits.”
The floor of Lake Cuitzeo is rich in spherules formed when they collided with each other at high velocities during the whirling chaos of an extraterrestrial impact. They are joined by numerous specimens of lonsdaleite – an identifiable configuration nanodiamonds assume when they are pressured by large meteorite collisions – and aciniform soot, the acne-like appearance of dust residue resulting from the same cause. “These materials form only through cosmic impact,” Kennett explained, not through volcanic or other natural terrestrial processes. In the entire geologic record, the only other known continental layer with abundant peaks in lonsdaleite, impact spherules and aciniform soot is in the sixty-five-million-year-old Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer that coincided with the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Evidence for Early Human Settlement
“Recent discoveries show that North America was first peopled at least one hundred thirty thousand years ago,” according to Hancock, “many tens of thousands of years before human settlements were established in Europe and Asia.” Homo sapiens-sapiens? Yes, but the European continent was actually settled one hundred seventy thousand years earlier by Neanderthals. In fact, the oldest evidence for proto-humans in Europe goes back 1.3 million years. “At least” is a bit of an understatement for human settlement in the New World, because Before Atlantis describes how prehistorian Juan Armena Camacho discovered lithic implements at Hueyatlaco, seventy miles south-east of Mexico City. According to US geologist Dr Virginia Steen-McIntyre, “radiometric dates using methods identical to those used in Africa to date the early sites there place Hueyatlaco’s stone tools to slightly over a quarter of a million years ago.”
Some thirty years prior to Camacho’s find, a still older site came to light one mile north from the Oklahoma town of Frederick, at a ten-mile-long, half-mile-wide ridge. Ten to twenty-five feet beneath the surface of this gravel deposit occur dozens of well-crafted stone implements cemented in place in common strata with the bones of extinct animals firmly dated to seven hundred fifty thousand years ago. C.N. Gould, Director of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, reported: “There can be no doubt that the artifacts occur in the pit near the basal portion, on the same level as the fossil remains. An examination of the undisturbed face of the pit, immediately above the position of the finds, showed unbroken, nearly horizontal strata above it. As the case stands, it looks very much as though the artifacts are of the same antiquity as the fossil animals. At the same time, it would be well to reserve final judgment until we are certain that the artifacts are not secondary inclusions.”
Since Gould released his report in 1929, subsequent investigations of the Holoman Pit, as it is locally known, repeatedly confirmed that the stone tools are not later inclusions but were indeed laid down at the same time the animal bones were stratified, three quarters of a million years ago. As recently as 2005, archaeologist Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool’s John Moore’s University in England discovered a line of human footprints dating back forty thousand years ago near Puebla, in Mexico. Conventional scholars, convinced no human set foot in Middle America before twelve thousand years ago, sought to debunk the heretical period she assigned the evidence by dispatching a team of leading geologists led by Paul R. Renne, director of California’s Berkeley Geochronology Center, to the site.
Once there, they took repeated argon testing to investigate the magnetic imprint of the foot-printed, magmatic rock, together with other state-of-the-art procedures. Renne announced their results in the scientific journal Nature, stating that the rock featuring the footprints was not forty thousand years old after all. It was, instead, 1.3 million yearsold.
During the early 20th century, archaeologist Carlos Ameghino (1865 to 1936) led teams of excavators along the Argentine coast south of Buenos Aires after detecting clues to an early habitation site at Miramar. By 1914, he discovered numerous stone tools cemented within Pliocene Era strata. As Silvia Gomez experienced in the following century, Ameghino’s critics commissioned a group of professional geologists to debunk his assertion. Instead, they verified it, stating that the artefacts had been laid down between two million and three million years ago. Although their analysis was released by the prestigious Anales del Museo de Historica Natural de Buenos Aires, it has since been ignored by archaeologists in the outside world.
Australia-Amazon: An Unexpected Discovery
“Certain tribes of the Amazon jungle,” states America Before’s back cover blurb, “are closely related to Australian Aborigines. How did this extraordinary, unexpected, and extremely ancient DNA signal get to the Amazon?” This question elevates Hancock’s new book with fresh discoveries that threaten to shake the scientific establishment to its core by opening an entirely new and revolutionary archaeological theatre of operations.
The vast Amazon region has long been dismissed by mainstream scholars as anciently under-populated and barren of all but the most backward, native cultures, hermetically sealed off by nature from the outside world. Hancock writes, “in September 2015, Pontus Skoglund, his senior colleague Professor David Reich of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and other leading experts in the field, announced in the pages of Nature that they had found new evidence in South America, and specifically in the Amazon rainforest, that called for a rethink.”
Researchers mapped similarities in genes, mutations and random pieces of DNA of Central and South American tribes with groups in other parts of the world including Australia. Warmer colours indicate the strongest affinities. Researcher Skoglund said “a statistically clear signal linking Native Americans in the Amazonian region of Brazil to present-day Australo-Melanesians and Andaman Islanders” was confirmed.
(Graphic credit: Pontus Skoglund, Harvard Medical School)
He quotes Skoglund’s “genome-wide data to show that some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to present-day Eurasians or Native Americans,” and are, in Hancock’s words, “more closely related to Melanesian Papuans and Australian Aborigines than to any other Native American population.” “We spent a really long time trying to make this result go away,” Skoglund explained, “but it just got stronger.” In the end, “a statistically clear signal linking Native Americans in the Amazonian region of Brazil to present-day Australo-Melanesians and Andaman Islanders” was confirmed.
“We also know it has to be pre-Columbian,” added Professor Eske Willerslev of Denmark’s Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. Further studies by Willerslev and his colleagues “found Australian DNA already present in skeletal remains from Lagoa Santa, Brazil, dated to 10,400 years ago, and confirmed the suspicion of the researchers that the anomalous genetic signal must have reached South America in the Late Pleistocene – that is, near the end of the last Ice Age, [when] a group of people carrying Australo-Melanesian genes settled in what is now the Amazon jungle.”
This is undoubtedly one of the most striking revelations ever made in the entire history of archaeology, as inexplicable as it is astounding. It does not mean that a few Australoid castaways accidentally washed ashore on Peruvian shores, then somehow traversed the formidable Andes Mountains and descended into Brazil’s totally different, but no less forbidding jungle, where they cohabited with a few, indigenous individuals.
Rather, DNA evidence signifies a mass-migration of Australo-Melanesians to Amazonia, where they interbred with native peoples on such a broad scale some ten and a half centuries ago, the genetic imprint is still discernible. Their epic, 12,940–kilometre, trans-Pacific voyage to coastal Peru and subsequent 1,890–kilometre trek to Brazilian rain forest were successfully achieved at a time when Western European Man was struggling to survive the challenging Upper Paleolithic, or Late Stone Age. Australia’s contemporaneous material culture was itself far too underdeveloped for undertaking anything even approaching an oceanic crossing of such magnitude, not only in terms of the extreme distances concerned, but especially regarding the large number of persons participating in the expedition, or expeditions.
The maritime technological requirements necessary for conducting an operation of transpacific scope alone rule out all possibilities for Australoid responsibility. Moreover, what conceivable motivation could have possessed them to attempt such a huge enterprise? Hancock wonders if a third party was involved – a different, unrelated, unknown, though far higher culture that, for reasons even more obscure, transported Australo-Melanesians to Amazonia.
Speculation like this begins to conjure ‘legendary’ Lemuria, the pre-Polynesian civilisation that rose to ancient heights of technological greatness and imperialist domination of the Pacific realm, before succumbing to a natural catastrophe sufficiently powerful enough to shake the very foundations of the Earth itself. Hancock, however, shies away from any Lemurian connotations.
Ancient Amazonia Rises Out of the Cleared Forests
Even so, America Before’s most valuable and original contribution to our deepening grasp of antiquity is its investigation of Amazonia, an area of the world hitherto neglected by conventional and alternative researchers alike. They traditionally laboured under the assumption that Brazil’s rain forest was always far too environmentally hostile for civilisation to have taken root there. Hancock cites the academic view “that the Amazon could only have been inhabited for about 1,000 years, and then only by very small groups of hunter-gatherers, since the jungle was ‘resource poor’.”
Among the very few archaeologists who personally challenged this dominant paradigm was Percy Harrison Fawcett. His disappearance in search of the lost city of Z during 1925 seemed to confirm consensus opinion that no such place could possibly exist in the Brazilian jungle, and America Before is remiss in failing to properly credit or even mention in passing the British Colonel, whose self-sacrificial, if percipient effort foreshadowed the very discoveries Hancock describes in Chapters 11 through 17.
Together with the two previous chapters detailing Amazonia’s genetic connection with Ice Age Australia, they combine to represent the book’s highest worth. Nowhere else may readers learn more about the Amazon Basin’s otherwise unknown archaeological wealth.
He tells how the first modern Europeans travelling the Amazon River from Ecuador to its estuary on the Atlantic coast of Brazil saw “great cities” that “glistened in white” (suggesting limestone construction, like that favoured by Maya construction engineers) during their 7,000-kilometre, seventeen-month journey. Some of these urban centres were “more than twenty kilometres from end to end, roughly the length of Manhattan… enormous expanses were given over to productive agriculture, and there were signs everywhere of large and well-organised political and economic systems linked to centralised states that were capable of fielding disciplined armies thousands strong.”
Hancock quotes the mid-16th century expedition’s Spanish chronicler, Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, concerning an abandoned, native “villa, in which were a great deal of porcelain ware of various makes, both jars and pitchers, very large, with a capacity of more than twenty-five arrobas [one hundred gallons] and other small pieces such as plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best that has ever been seen in the world, for that of Malaga [Spain’s centre for pottery production] is not its equal, because this porcelain which we found is all glazed and embellished with all colours, and so bright, that these colours astonish, and, more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out that one wonders how with only natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things making them look just like Roman articles.” Native porcelain of such high quality does not appear in Brazilian archaeology.
The largest native city Carvajal and his companions saw was greater than twenty kilometres in extent, with a population of twenty thousand or more residents. Their chieftain, Machiparo, also ruled over “many settlements and very large ones, which together contribute for fighting purposes fifty thousand men…”
Two, subsequent expeditions, twenty years later and 1637-38, respectively, supported Carvajal’s report. Hancock quotes UCLA Professor David Wilkinson, “an authority on long-term and large-scale phenomena in world politics [who] has made a special study of the level of civilisation in the Amazon prior to European contact.” Based on a late 17th-century report that one of Brazil’s native cities could field 60,000 warriors, Wilkinson found “comparative-civilisational standards have implied an urban population of 300,000 to 360,000.”
He goes on to describe “more than 30 epidemics – smallpox, measles, and other outbreaks – some on a massive scale – in 16th-18th century South America.” With fatal consequences in the upper ninety percentile, the Amazonian metropolitan areas literally died out though depopulation. “Once left deserted,” Hancock explains, “the great cities and monuments and other public works of any hypothetical Amazonian civilisation would quickly have been encroached upon and soon completely hidden by the jungle…” They only began re-emerging in 1977, “when giant, geometrical earthworks were discovered in the Rio Branco area of the Brazilian state of Acre, in the southwestern Amazon.”
It was the first of many related sites that have since come to light, including a pair of perfect squares – 200 metres and 100 metres wide – connected by a 20-metre-wide, 100-metre-long causeway. Archaeologists estimate “that as many as 1,500 geoglyphs might ultimately be found.” Severino Calazans, the largest Amazonian structure of its kind so far surveyed, “defined by an enclosure ditch twelve metres wide, measures 920 metres.” This particular location and other, outsized designs “have since been revealed by mass clearing of the forest for the cattle industry, thus becoming visible, especially from the sky, over the past 30 years. Indeed, the enormous size of the geoglyphs makes it easier to distinguish their shape and configuration from an aerial perspective, than at ground level…”
Groups are composed chiefly of circles, ellipses and rectangles, suggesting possible celestial orientations. Hancock writes that “because they offer an unobstructed view of the horizon, such locations are also very often what ancient astronomers looked for when they set out monuments on the ground – aligned, say, to the June solstice sunset or to the March equinox sunrise. Without a full-scale archaeo-astronomical survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs,” however, their suspected celestial significance remains unproven.
Their resemblance to Old World Stone Age sites nevertheless inspires provocative comparisons. Hancock tells how “the square enclosure ditch at Severino Calazans shares the ground plan, base diameter and cardinality [orientation to the Four Cardinal Directions] of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. That epoch, moreover, around 2500 BC, coincides and overlaps with the megalithic epoch in Europe, so another curiosity is the way that the circular geoglyphs of Amazonia resemble henges – the circular embankments with deep, internal ditches that surround the great, stone circles of the British Isles. The scale is very similar and the resemblance is so obvious that even the most sober archaeologists, usually wary of cross-cultural comparisons, are willing to remark upon it.”
Whatever critics may make of America Before, they cannot deny that its unique discussion of the lost civilisation of the Amazon, plus revelations concerning the mind-boggling heritage of its present-day descendants from 9th millennium BCE Australia, opens new vistas of antiquity, as trailblazing, as they are intriguing.
America Before is available from all good bookstores.
The UFOS or Unidentified Flying Objects phenomena seems to continue to make headlines even though these sightings may not be that regular. However, scientists have created a new category for the UFOS in which they named them unidentified aerial phenomena or UAAQS or UFOS as it is also known. This means that the reports of this unexplained phenomenon are no longer classified under UFO sightings or misidentification.
In fact, the reasons for the sightings remain unclear and no one can really pinpoint the reason as to why the UFOS is so rare. They say that the UFOS phenomenon has an extremely strong presence among people and that it might be a very powerful means for communication. The UFOS sightings have many different levels and the one that are usually seen are that the UFOS have no shapes or planes to identify it but that it is a light or a ray that seems to come from space.
Despite the lack of any clear image of the UFOS or its location, some researchers think that the UFOS phenomenon is really something more than just an unknown object sighting. One of the main theories behind the phenomenon involves the said ray that is believed to be coming from the Milky Way. However, scientists deny this theory because there is a possible indication that many of the sightings occur near the galactic center, which is the place where the Milky Way is found.
The researchers also say that while the existence of such phenomenon is often being denied by experts, the evidence is still out there for all of us to see. It will take time and patience on our part to find the source of the UFOS. However, the data has been collected and analyzed and is ready for analysis. All you need to do is to sift through the details of this data and get your answer.
Sightings of UFOS seem to be closely related to the military. There are those who claim that these sightings were caused by other government agencies because the objects seem to be interfering with certain electromagnetic sensors of military operations. If the object had already done this before the military forces were conducting their mission, then it is said that the UFOS have a bad influence on the operation.
One of the basic basis that the UFOS are related to the military is the fact that the UFOS are powerful rays that can affect aircraft that fly in the sky. They have the ability to pass through the aircraft and after coming out, they could cause extensive damage to the equipment. This is how the UFOS came to be termed as beam weapons because the UFOS weapons are directly attacking their enemy.
They also say that while most of the sightings occur near the galactic center, they also have connections to the CERN laboratory because of the experiments that were conducted there. However, the UFOS are said to have a very strong presence near the laboratory where the experiments were conducted. These beams are also said to have a strong connection to the physicists who conduct experiments on the particles.
It is also said that the UFOS are also due to the poor weather conditions of the military areas. This is also the reason why the UFOS are said to be extremely light because the weather is quite stable. To avoid detection, these rays are likely to be very light and are said to be similar to meteors.
Giant UFO Near Apollo 13 Images Watching Crews Stressful Dilemma, NASA Source. UFO Sighting News.
Giant UFO Near Apollo 13 Images Watching Crews Stressful Dilemma, NASA Source. UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery:April 23, 2020 Location of discovery: Space Source:Apollo 13 images (URL coming tomorrow) Hey everyone, how you doing? I was looking through the NASA Apollo 13 image archives and found this very unique photo with a huge UFO in it. The UFO seems to have jumped from one side of the photo to the other, so there is a shadow location on the left side of the photo and its clearly visible on the right side. This is not some light reflection. Look at it with the earth near it. This object is solid, its huge and detailed and its moving! Apollo 13 took place back in April of 1970 and lasted only 5 days, but they did have some trouble on the mission and almost didn't make it home. I believe this UFO was observing the humans on board and how they deal with stressful situations. My biggest question is...is this a living biological entity or is this some kind of alien ship or probe? Ah...the mystery...its the icing on the cake. Scott C. Waring
Ancient 20km Pyramid Leaving 650km Trail On Ocean Floor Near Japan, UFO Sighting News.
Ancient 20km Pyramid Leaving 650km Trail On Ocean Floor Near Japan, UFO Sighting News.
Date of discovery:April 24, 2020 Location of discovery:Ocean near Japan Source: Google Map I was looking over Google map and found the four sided pyramid that is about 20km across and it has traveled across the ocean floor leaving a 18-20km wide trail behind it for over 650km. This pyramid is a UFO that had landed thousands of years ago under the ocean. During that time it moved across the ocean floor until it rested 650km from its starting point. Can you imagine the alien technology that rests inside this ancient pyramid? Its hard to say if its abandoned or still occupied. Only one way to find out and thats to go down there and explore it. The only person with the ocean submarines and money to do that would probably be UK billionaire Richard Branson who is loves deep sea diving and research. Perhaps he will explore this alien realm. Scott C. Waring - Taiwan
UFO Seen Playing Over California Zig Zagging At 6AM, April 23, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
UFO Seen Playing Over California Zig Zagging At 6AM, April 23, 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting News.
Date of sighting:April 23, 2020 Location of sighting: Tracy, California, USA Source: MUFON #108111 An eyewitness in California got off work and saw something unusual in the sky...smoky trails coming down from space. UFOs often do make smoke, both when damaged badly and when they are making cloud tunnels for other UFOs to hide within and just for play. Here we see a straight fall turn into a zig zag motion and then right before it hit the ground, it suddenly went horizontal to the ground and rode off into the horizon. At 6am in the morning...it looks like it was just having a good ol time. Scott C. Waring Eyewitness states:
Just got off work driving home And saw these strange objects in the morning sky 615ish.
UFO Caught Over North Carolina Horse Farm, April 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting World News.
UFO Caught Over North Carolina Horse Farm, April 2020, Photos, UFO Sighting World News.
Date of sighting: April 24, 2020
Location of sighting:Chapel hill, North Carolina, USA
Source: MUFON #108123
This dark triangle UFO was caught over North Carolina yesterday and shows just how fast they can be. The eyewitness didn't even notice it until they got home and looked at the photos. Often times, smaller unmanned UFOs called probes will shoot past so fast that no one even notices them. This is such a case. We can easily make out it is some kind of think triangle disk. The eyewitness caught it on one photo, but the very next photo the UFO was gone. UFOs are everywhere and interested in everyone and everything. Yes, they record and watch lots of things besides humans. UFOs have been seen over ponds, flowers, bushes, trees, even near planes. They love flying tech for some reason...probably easiest to get at in the air.
Scott C. Waring
Eyewitness states:
Took 2 photos of horses in pasture. First picture shows no spot 5 seconds later black spot appears in photo. Did not notice till I looked at photograph.
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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.