UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

It seems that no matter where one travels on Earth (Remember traveling? It will be back soon, just keep wearing masks), you can’t escape mice – the rodent kind, of course. That list now includes on frozen glaciers in Alaska, where researchers looking for microbes – long assumed to be the only things that can survive in the harsh environment – have been finding the ice mysteriously covered with small, green mice moving around in formation on the surface … so many of them that the scientists received funding to study them.

Did he say green mice moving in formation? Is this Earth or Mars? Are they planning an invasion?

“What the heck is this!”

That was the initial scientific assessment of University of Idaho glaciologist Tim Bartholomaus, co-author of the new study published recently in Polar Biology. He was referring to the day in 2006 when he arrived at the Root Glacier near the former mining town of Kennicott-McCarthy, Alaska. What Bartholomaus encountered were hundreds of mouse-sized furry green egg shapes covering the ice. (Photos here.) He bravely touched one and found it was a soft, moss-covered ball of dirt. (Sorry — not like the feature photo.) Upon finding a lack of information on what these might be, Bartholomaus called them “glacier mice” and decided to study them. The first thing he discovered is that the glacier mice are covered with different types of moss. However, the second thing is what prompted the six-year study.

Glacier mice in Iceland.

Ruth Mottram

Glacier mice can be composed of different moss species.

Timothy Bartholomaus

The research team tagged each moss ball with an identifying color sequence of beads to track them over months and years.

Sophie Gilbert

It’s not easy being not green either.

“They really do look like little mammals, little mice or chipmunks or rats or something running around on the glacier, although they run in obviously very slow motion.”

Study co-author and wildlife biologist Sophie Gilbert told NPR that they noticed the balls were in slightly different spots every day. Assuming the cause to be something like the wind that pushes tumbleweeds, they got down and dirty with the fuzzy dirt balls – attaching a thin loop of wire strung with identifying beads around 30 of them. That was in 2009. They measured the movements for 54 days, then left and returned in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and measured them again. The researchers found that the glacier mice were pretty indestructible. And they were surprisingly well-organized.

“We show that glacier moss balls move an average of 2.5 cm per day in herd-like fashion, initially to the south and later towards the southwest, and their movements are positively correlated with glacier ablation. Surprisingly, the dominant moss ball movement direction does not align with the prevailing wind or downslope directions, nor with the dominant direction of solar radiation. After attaining a mature size, glacier moss balls persist for many years, likely in excess of 6 years.”

Bartholomaus told NPR the movement was similar to a school of fish or a flock of birds and defied conventional explanation. They even changed directions and speeds over time. (Video here – not from this study.) The one thing for certain was that the glacier mice needed to move an inch a day so that the moss on their bellies would get sunlight.

Perhaps the movement and moss growth is required to feed their gut microbes. Yes, cutting open a glacier moss exposed water bears (tardigrades) and tiny worms. This fits in with prevailing theories that the microbial ecosystem on the glaciers depends on moss – something that could suffer with climate change.

Tardigrades are also sometimes called moss piglets.

I’m inside a moss ball? No way!

The team completed the study without going back since 2012 to see the original flock of glacier mice at Root Glacier. Batholomaus is hoping to return soon and see how many of the original group are still ‘alive’ and rolling.

They’re slow and they’re boring, but at least glacier mice don’t leave green mouse droppings everywhere.

In the spring of 1959, a U.S. Air Force C-118, now called a Douglas DC-6, was doing training runs at McChord Air Force Base, also called McChord Field, in Pierce County, Washington. On April 1, the large cargo aircraft was doing take offs and landing training, particularly what are called “touch and go” landings, after which the plane would circle back around and do another run. On this day the plane had a very experienced crew, with seasoned pilot 1st Lieutenant Robert Roy Dimick, his co-pilot 1st Lieutenant Thomas E. Lasater, and flight engineers Technical Sergeant Guy J. Cunningham and Staff Sergeant Arthur T. Foote. Everything was going to plan and it was all considered to be pretty routine stuff, but then something very odd would happen that would launch this plane into an obscure but fascinating oddity of UFO history.

During one of the landing runs, the plane was told to hold off and let some approaching fighter jets land, so Dimick brought the aircraft into a holding pattern over nearby Bonney Lake while they waited. At some point during this holding pattern, which was a mundane maneuver the pilot had done many times before, the pilot allegedly suddenly made a panicked radio call, saying “We’ve hit something or something has hit us.” The plane then quickly lost altitude as the pilots struggled to maintain control, finally clipping some treetops in the surrounding wilderness, which heavily damaged the wing. The plane would then continue limping on, spewing flames the whole way, and finally come down just outside the town of Orting, killing everyone on board.

C-118

For the Air Force, there was nothing mysterious about it. They officially explained the crash as due to pilot error and a misunderstanding between the plane and ground control over who was tracking its altitude, all compounded by the fact that it was very dark and there were no ground lights in the wilderness they were over. For the Air Force is was just a tragic accident, move along, nothing to see here. However, some odd details would begin to emerge that seemed to point to something far stranger. In the days after the crash, some locals claimed that they had heard what sounded like sonic booms at around the time of the accident, and there were also some reports of seeing strange lights in the sky in the weeks before and even on the evening in question. When combined with the claim that the pilot had said they had hit something, this started to spawn rumors that the plane might have actually collided with a UFO. According to some researchers, the plane also did not seem to hit the ground at an angle, as one would expect, but rather it has been claimed that it seemed to have almost come down vertically, as if pushed down from above. Also, according to some witnesses there were sinister efforts by the military to quiet local officials in Orting from talking about it.

Pushing it all further into the realm of conspiracies is the fact that the original report on the incident seems to have had two whole pages redacted from it, and numerous requests for the information have allegedly been denied time and time again. Why should that be if this was a simple training accident involving pilot and ground tower error? Also, the doomed plane was flying in calm conditions on a routine run, and suddenly radioed a collision, before going down to take the lives of all aboard. With all of the reports of the lights and sonic booms and other strangeness surrounding this case, is it all as the Air Force says it was, or is there something else more mysterious going on here?

The case of the Bonney Lake incident is fairly obscure, but has all the makings of an intriguing case. What really caused that plane to go down back in 1959? What did those men potentially witness out there while soaring over that swath of wilderness? What did that call mean that they had hit something? What could that have been and how does that tie into the official explanation? Why the redacted pages? Although the military claims it was all an accident, these oddities and discrepancies have made sure that the case has still generated discussion in some circles, and considering we will probably never really know the full story it seems destined to do so for some time to come.