What astronomers thought was a planet beyond our solar system has now seemingly vanished from sight, suggesting that what was heralded as one of the first exoplanets to ever be discovered with direct imaging likely never existed.

According to Physorg. two University of Arizona astronomers conclude that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was instead looking at an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies that smashed into each other. Hubble came along too late to witness the suspected collision but may have captured its aftermath. The missing-in-action planet was last seen orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light years away.

The suspected exoplanet, named Fomalhaut b, was first announced in 2008, based on data from 2004 and 2006.

The object was bright in visible light—highly unusual for an exoplanet, which is simply too small to reflect enough light from its host star to be seen from Earth. At the same time, it did not have any detectable infrared heat signature again, highly unusual, as a planet should be warm enough to shine in the infrared.

Astronomers conjectured that the added brightness came from a huge shell or ring of dust encircling the planet that may have been collision-related.

Data analysis of Hubble images taken in 2014 showed the object had vanished, to their disbelief. Adding to the mystery, earlier images showed the object to continuously fade over time, they say.

The astronomers said that Fomalhaut b was doing things a bona fide planet should not be doing.

Indeed, very mysterious, maybe it was not an expanding cloud of very fine dust particles from two icy bodies at all but a huge mothership or something like the infamous red planet Nibiru?

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

27-04-2020 om 18:57 geschreven door peter  

Triangle UFO filmed over Statue of Liberty, NY 5-Mar-2020

This amazing video was just submitted through our Facebook page. It show some kind of a triangular-shaped craft maneuvering in the sky above the Statue of Liberty in New York. This happened on 5th March 2020.

What do you think this is? Please leave your comments below!

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

27-04-2020 om 18:12 geschreven door peter  

Founder of the Center for UFO Physical Trace Research, Ted Phillips Has Died

A young Ted Phillips

Ted Phillips, the founder and director of the Center for Physical Trace Research died, on March 10, 2020. Phillips was born in 1942 and spent his life in Missouri. He began investigating UFOs in 1964 and met Dr.J. Allen Hynek during the investigation of the Socorro UFO landing. Phillips was trained as an engineer and was a professional photographer. He was involved in the Vanguard Satellite Program and was a field engineer on the Minuteman Missile Project. He was also employed as an inspector for the Missouri State Highway Department, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, and made presentations at the MUFON Symposiums.

By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 3-11-20

It was Hynek who suggested that Phillips concentrate on UFO physical trace cases. Phillips and his team investigated more than 4000 physical trace cases in more than 90 countries. Phillips once said that if you told him the physical markings left be the UFO, he would be able to describe the craft that left them.

Ted Phillips at the Illinois conference

With Hynek, Dr. Jacques Vallee and Dr. David Saunders, Phillips participated in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Sciences meetings. He was also participated as a member of a small group who met with the United Nations Secretary-General. Phillips made presentations to a wide variety of groups and was a participant in several television programs and documentaries dedicated to UFOs.

In recent years he was involved in the investigation of strange lights seen in the Marley Woods in far southern Missouri. I met him in Illinois when he made a presentation about those lights at a UFO conference there. I had hoped to talk to Phillips about this while at the conference but there never seemed to be a couple of moments when the two of us crossed paths, with one exception. I told him it was my impression, from his presentation, that he wasn’t looking toward the extraterrestrial on this. He confirmed that he had thought it was some sort of terrestrial manifestation but he didn’t know what it might be. For those interested, there is more about Phillips’ presentation here.

In the 1970s, he provided a “position statement” for Ron Story’s Encyclopedia of UFOs that said:

The available facts are mostly statistical, but by taking a large number of reports, we can begin to develop a fairly clear picture of the objects observed and the traces left behind. Obviously, a report involving a landed object is of much greater value than a nocturnal light case. The landed object immediately eliminates a number of possibilities. One would not expect a balloon to land, leave unusual traces, and then ascend vertically at high speed. Stars and planets do not appear at ground level between witnesses and a line of trees. When several witnesses observe a disk-shaped object with a metallic surface, no wings and no sound, landing, ascending vertically, they have, with their descriptions, eliminated most of the natural or conventional explanations. When these objects then leave traces at the landing site, we have something tangible to examine I believe, after thirteen years of investigation, the data indicates a nonterrestrial origin.

Ted Philips, truly one of the pioneers in scientific UFO research and a dedicated investigator is dead at 78.

{ https://www.theufochronicles.com/ }

27-04-2020 om 01:41 geschreven door peter  

By Carolyn Gramling

Modern plate tectonics may have gotten under way as early as 3.2 billion years ago, about 400 million years earlier than scientists thought. That, in turn, suggests that the movement of large pieces of Earth’s crust could have played a role in making the planet more hospitable to life.

Geologist Alec Brenner of Harvard University and his colleagues measured the magnetic orientations of iron-bearing minerals in the Honeyeater Basalt, a layer of rock that formed between 3.19 billion and 3.18 billion years ago. The basalt is part of the East Pilbara Craton, an ancient bit of continent in Western Australia that includes rocks as old as 3.5 billion years.

This craton, the researchers found, was on the move between 3.35 billion and 3.18 billion years ago, drifting around the planet at a rate of at least 2.5 centimeters per year. That’s a speed comparable to modern plate motions, the team reports April 22 in Science Advances.

The basalt layer, which burbled up as lava and hardened during the journey, contains iron-bearing minerals that can act as tiny signposts pointing the way toward Earth’s magnetic poles. While the lava was still molten, the minerals rotated, orienting themselves to align with either the north or south magnetic pole. By tracking the changes in orientation within the lava as more basalt formed during the journey, the researchers were able to determine how quickly the craton was moving.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

27-04-2020 om 01:23 geschreven door peter  

Is life a gamble? Scientist models universe to find out

(Image: © Shutterstock)

 RNA is made up of a chain of nitrogen-based molecules called nucleotides. Researchers think that in order for RNA to perform its essential function of copying itself, it needs to be composed of a chain of nucleotides longer than 40 to 60 nucleotides. 

So, how would these RNA molecules made up of at least 40 to 60 nucleotides have popped up on their own? Nucleotides have been shown experimentally to randomly organize into RNA given enough time and under the right conditions. But these experiments show that the abundance of RNA rapidly decreases with the length of their chains and none of the experiments could consistently produce strands longer than 10 monomers.

"It has been experimentally confirmed that RNA polymerization can occur by a basic random process," Totani said. "Some experiments claimed that more than 50 (monomer long) RNA were produced, but these are not reproducible. One problem is that aggregates are easily mistaken for a long RNA polymer."

Totani's model uses the most conservative method of RNA polymerization, where each monomer is attached randomly one-by-one until a chain of monomers is formed. Scientists have suggested that polymers (each made up of multiple monomers) could attach to each other to speed up the process, but Totani said such a process is "highly speculative and hypothetical."

Life as we know it

Scientists think life emerged on Earth around 500 million years after the planet formed. Given that there are an estimated 10 sextillion (10^22) stars in the observable universe, it may seem that the odds of life popping up in the universe should be good. But researchers have found that the random formation of RNA with a length greater than 40 is incredibly unlikely given the number of stars — with habitable planets — in our cosmic neighborhood. There are too few stars with habitable planets in the observable universe for abiogenesis to occur within the timeframe of life emerging on Earth.

"However, there is more to the universe than the observable," Totani said in a statement. "In contemporary cosmology, it is agreed the universe underwent a period of rapid inflation, producing a vast region of expansion beyond the horizon of what we can directly observe. Factoring this greater volume [of stars with habitable planets] into models of abiogenesis hugely increases the chances of life occurring."

After our universe flashed into existence some 13.8 billion years ago during the Big Bang, it underwent a period of rapid expansion that continues today. If we think of the universe as a loaf of bread baking in the oven, our observable universe is like a bubble of air trapped in the dough, where the walls of the bubble are the farthest distance light can travel since the Big Bang. As the loaf rises (inflation), our bubble grows while other pockets of air within the bread get farther away. Our observable bubble of air is all that we can see, even though the rest of the loaf is out there.

• Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time

It is estimated that the whole universe could contain more than 1 googol (10^100) stars. When Totani factored in this new abundance of stars, he found that the emergence of life was no longer improbable, but very likely. 

This may be good news for the RNA world hypothesis, though it could also mean that the search for life in the universe is a hopeless pursuit.

If life first got its start in RNA, "life on Earth was created by a very rare chance of producing a long RNA polymer," said Totani. "Most likely, Earth is the only planet harboring life in the observable universe. I predict that future observations or explorations of extraterrestrial life will yield no positive results. 

If by chance, life is discovered elsewhere in our cosmic neighborhood, Totani believes it would likely be of the same origin as life on Earth. Life may have hitched a ride from comets and asteroids across interplanetary or interstellar space, seeding the local universe with life from a single origin event.

Totani's work is far from an answer to one of science's most existential questions but it may guide further research on the origins of life. Whether we are alone in the universe still remains unanswered, but if Totani's numbers tell us anything, you shouldn't bet on it.

• The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics
• The 11 Biggest Unanswered Questions About Dark Matter.
• The 15 Weirdest Galaxies in Our Universe

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

27-04-2020 om 01:00 geschreven door peter  

Tiny, levitating 'nanocardboard' aircraft could explore Mars one day

By Chelsea Gohd

A visualization of the "nanocardboard" flyers.

(Image: © Bargatin Group, Penn Engineering)

Tiny, levitating "nanocardboard" flyers could one day explore the dusty red surface of Mars. 

This summer, NASA will launch its newest Mars rover, Perseverance, and a helicopter that will fly over the planet's surface as part of a "high-risk, high-reward" experiment. But even before its launch, researchers are designing much more ambitious aircraft for Mars as well.

Of particular interest are flying aircraft that could, with less risk, more effectively observe and study Mars' surface. In a new study, researchers have demonstrated the abilities of a unique fleet of aircraft that could thrive on Mars: tiny "nanocardboard" flying vehicles. These aircraft each weigh about a third of a milligram, or less than a fruit fly, and have no moving parts. Instead of flying with wings or rotating blades, they actually levitate. 

• Video: Watch NASA unveil the Perseverance Mars rover's name!
• More: NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance in pictures

"The Mars Helicopter is very exciting, but it's still a single, complicated machine," lead author Igor Bargatin of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, who is not involved in the Mars Helicopter, said in a statement. "If anything goes wrong, your experiment is over, since there's no way of fixing it. We're proposing an entirely different approach that doesn't put all of your eggs in one basket."

Each tiny flyer is a plate of "nanocardboard," which is inspired by paper cardboard's corrugations, or ridges. Plates of "nanocardboard" are hollow aluminum oxide a few nanometers thick with ridges made by a pattern of micro-channels on the plates that keep them stiff and unbroken. 

The micro-channels in the "nanocardboard" plates are actually the secret behind their unique method of flight, according to the statement: The channels create a temperature gradient that pushes air through the hollow plates and allows them to float. 

This strange method of flight would be particularly advantageous on Mars because the planet's thin atmosphere and weaker gravity would allow the plates to lift more weight and travel over much longer distances than here on Earth. 

In this study, the researchers tested "nanocardboard" vehicles in a Mars-like environment in a lab environment. They tested the vehicles in a low-pressure test chamber and experimented with mock payloads by having the little floating plates carry silicone rings. 

Additionally, Bargatin is working with other researchers to develop new, tinier chemical sensors that could collect important data and detect substances like methane and water on other planets, according to the statement. 

"In addition to carrying sensors," Bargatin said, "our flyers could simply land and have grains of dust or sand passively stick to them, then transport them back to the rover so it doesn't need to travel as far."

Bargatin also suggested in the statement that fleets of these tiny flyers could be used to study our own planet's atmosphere — specifically, the mesosphere.

"The Earth's mesosphere is pretty similar to the Martian atmosphere in terms of density, and we currently don't have anything that flies there, since it is too low for space satellites but too high for airplanes and balloons," Bargatin said. "Ideally, you'd like to have some sensors up there as well. The more knowledge you have about the movement of the atmosphere at that level, the better predictions you can make about Earth's climate and even weather."

The research was published Tuesday (April 21) in the journal Advanced Materials. 

• Mars 2020: The Red Planet's next rover
• Life on Mars: Exploration & evidence
• Photos: Ancient Mars lake could have supported life

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

27-04-2020 om 00:31 geschreven door peter  

As far as odd couples go, this is one for the record books.

The ripples in spacetime stirred up by two distant, merging black holes suggest that one of the pair was much bigger than the other. It’s the first definitively mismatched black hole pair spotted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, which search for the gravitational waves emitted in the cosmic encounters of black holes. The collision, detected on April 12, 2019, occurred about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth.

For all previous such black hole mergers, the two partners have been of similar size. But in this case, the bigger black hole had a mass about 30 times that of the sun, while the smaller was about eight times the mass of the sun, researchers with the LIGO and Virgo collaborations reported April 18 at a meeting of the American Physical Society, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to this result, scientists did not know if such lopsided partnerships existed, or how rare they might be. “This one event represents a big step forward in our understanding,” astrophysicist Maya Fishbach of the University of Chicago said in a talk at the meeting.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

26-04-2020 om 23:24 geschreven door peter  

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.

{ http://ufoevidence.org/ }

26-04-2020 om 22:51 geschreven door peter  

EXPLORERS IN ANTARCTICA FIND THE FOSSILS OF A "TOTALLY UNEXPECTED" ANIMAL

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.

{ https://www.inverse.com/ )

26-04-2020 om 21:50 geschreven door peter  

What happened before the Big Bang?

An artist's interpretation of the Big Bang

(Image: © © Scott Wiessinger (USRA): Lead Producer Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET): Technical Support Krystofer Kim (USRA): Lead Animator)

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.

That's a pretty big piece.

• Related: From Big Bang to present: Snapshots of our universe through time

The conflagration

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.

• Related: 8 ways you can see Einstein's theory of relativity in real life

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.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe.

• The biggest unsolved mysteries in physics
• The 12 strangest objects in the universe
• Big Bang to civilization: 10 amazing origin events

Originally published on Live Science.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

26-04-2020 om 21:15 geschreven door peter  

 STARRE VARTAN

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.

{ https://www.mnn.com/ }

26-04-2020 om 20:47 geschreven door peter  

Doorways Into Structures On Mars And Pyramids With Faces! NASA Photo, UFO Sighting News.

• http://www.gigapan.com/galleries/13476/gigapans/217257

{ https://www.etdatabase.com/ }

26-04-2020 om 18:28 geschreven door peter  

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.

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

26-04-2020 om 17:48 geschreven door peter  

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.

Please watch the video and decide for yourself.

Other vidoes, peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

26-04-2020 om 12:18 geschreven door peter  

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.

Please watch the video and decide for yourself.

Other vidoes, peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

26-04-2020 om 12:18 geschreven door peter  

The Hessdalen Phenomenon - UAPs over Norway

The Hessdalen lights are UAPs observed in a 7.5 mile-long Hessdalen valley in rural central Norway.

Full Documentary:

{ https://twitter.com/UAP1949 }

26-04-2020 om 01:11 geschreven door peter  

Scientists use Apollo data to create the best geologic moon map ever

26-04-2020 om 01:01 geschreven door peter  

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.

Image via Gianluca Masi/ Virtual Telescope Project.

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.

Animation via Gianluca Masi/ Virtual Telescope Project.

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.

Image via Gianluca Masi/ Virtual Telescope Project.

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.

{ https://earthsky.org/ }

26-04-2020 om 00:46 geschreven door peter  

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.

Sorry, China.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-04-2020 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

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.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

25-04-2020 om 23:36 geschreven door peter