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

Extensional faults (arrows) on the surface of Pluto may have been created by the freezing of a subsurface ocean.

Credit: NASA/Alex Parker.

Pluto is so far away from the sun that it lies inside the Kuiper Belt, a group of rocks and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. It’s really no wonder that today the planet looks like a barren ball of ice and rock.

However, detailed images of Pluto’s surface taken during flybys by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed intriguing geological features that can tell us many things about the dwarf planet’s past.

According to Francis Nimmo, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, Pluto’s surface shows evidence of both ancient and modern extensions of its surface. This suggests that Pluto may have been ‘hot’ during its early days.

To understand why this matters, we have to make a brief tangent to talk about how water freezes. Most liquids shrink when they are cooled because molecules are moving slower, making them less able to overcome the attractive intermolecular forces that draw them closer together. When the freezing point is reached, the substance solidifies in a tightly packed crystalline matrix.

Water is an exception to this chemical behavior. Liquid water also contracts when cooled, but only until it is chilled to approximately 4 degrees Celsius. If you cool water past this threshold, it will actually expand slightly. Cool it further to its freezing point and the water will expand by about 9%.

So, water expands when it freezes and contracts when it melts — and this has important implications for Pluto’s history.

“If Pluto had a subsurface ocean shortly after it formed, that ocean would have been continuously freezing over solar system history. That would cause Pluto to be expanding and that would result in specific geologic features we can look for. In contrast, if Pluto started with a cold ice shell, that ice would have warmed and melted slowly from the heat of radioactive decay forming an ocean. That ocean would have been refreezing in more recent times as the heat from radioactive decay waned. This would lead to early compressional tectonics followed by later extension,” Carver Bierson, UCSC graduate student and co-author of the new study, told ZME Science.

If Pluto had a ‘cold start’, compression on its surface would have occurred early on, followed by more recent extensions. However, if it had a hot start, then extension would have occurred throughout Pluto’s history — and this seems to be the case, current observations suggest.

“When we look at the surface of Pluto we don’t see any clearly compressional features even on the oldest terrains. We do see many extensional features, most of which are recent. The oldest tectonic features we see look to be extensional, but are hard to interpret because they are so eroded. Taken together we think this favors Pluto’s ocean already being present very early in Pluto’s history,” Bierson added.

Pluto’s hot past

Where could all this energy have come from? Pluto is too far from the sun to be of consequential difference, which leaves us with only two main possible sources of energy.

One is the heat released through the decay of radioactive elements in the rock, the other is gravitational energy released during impact with asteroids and other cosmic bodies. Early in the solar system’s history, it was quite common for planets to be bombarded by asteroids and meteorites.

Calculations performed by the researchers suggest that if all of that gravitational energy was retained as heat, Pluto could have supported an initial liquid ocean.

In reality, however, we know that is simply not possible — some of that energy will escape into space.

“How Pluto was put together in the first place matters a lot for its thermal evolution,” Nimmo said in a press release. “If it builds up too slowly, the hot material at the surface radiates energy into space, but if it builds up fast enough the heat gets trapped inside.”

The researchers found that if Pluto formed over a period of less than 30,000 years, then it would have most certainly been hot. If it took a couple million years for accretion of proto-Pluto to take place, then a hot start would only be possible if a large impactor buried its energy deep beneath the surface.

“If Pluto’s ocean was there early on it raises another question, “What was the heat source to form that ocean?” Today Pluto sits in an extremely cold part of the solar system. Its surface temperature is about 45 Kelvin (-480 Fahrenheit). When Pluto was forming new material would have been coming in and impacting its surface. Each impact is like an explosion that will warm the nearby area. If Pluto formed slowly, the surface would cool between each impact and generally stay very cold. If however Pluto formed quickly you have impact on top of impact and the surface doesn’t have time to cool. We calculate that if Pluto formed in less than 30000 years the heat from these impacts could have been sufficient to lead to an early ocean,” Bierson said.

There are a lot of assumptions and ‘ifs’ in this study, but if the findings are confirmed, other large objects in the Kuiper belt likely started out hot, possibly harboring oceans billions of years ago.

What’s intriguing is that these oceans could persist to this day in the largest objects in the belt, such as the dwarf planets Eris and Makemake, shielded under a blanket of thick ice.

“Pluto is the first Kuiper Belt object we visited and what we found was amazing. There is no reason to think that Pluto’s neighbors (Eris, Makemake, Haumea) are any less interesting. From this work, we suggest that they also should have formed with oceans, but we don’t know if they would have completely refrozen over solar system history. Up to now, we haven’t been able to see those worlds as more than points of light in the night sky. This is hard because the Kuiper belt is very very far away. It took New Horizons 9 years from launch to Pluto and it was one of the fastest spacecraft ever launched. Still, I am optimistic that with new telescopes and maybe a future mission we can keep unlocking their secrets,” Bierson concluded.

The findings were reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The September 1961 “alien abduction” incident of Betty and Barney Hill – chronicled in John Fuller’s 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey – still provokes interest and intrigue to this very day. It is to alien abductions what Roswell is to tales of crashed UFOs: a key case in the history of Ufology. What if, however, aliens did not abduct Betty and Barney? What if the pair were led to believe they had undergone something that had extraterrestrial origins, when things were actually much different? One of those who came to believe that the Hills had been subjected to an MK-ULTRA-type event was the late Philip Coppens. He said: “It is clear that the Hills were being monitored by USAF [U.S. Air Force] Intelligence before the encounter took place, through Major James MacDonald, who had befriended them some time earlier. Betty Hill wrote to [UFO researcher / author] Donald Keyhoe who, despite the fact that he received over a hundred letters a day, homed in on this initially unremarkable case. Within twenty-four hours, Keyhoe had arranged for the Hills to be visited by top-level scientists, including C.D. Jackson, who had previously (definitely not coincidentally) worked on psychological warfare techniques for President Eisenhower [italics mine]. Stretching coincidence far beyond breaking point, Jackson already knew Major MacDonald…”

Betty and Barney Hill.

Philip continued on: “It seems that Betty and Barney Hill were at the center of a web that involved USAF Intelligence and top military experts in psychological warfare. The evidence suggests that the Hills were the subjects – victims – of a psychological experiment.” Those who believe that the Betty and Barney Hill experience was a genuine alien abduction case might very well dismiss the words of Coppens. That’s not a wise approach to take, though. Sadly, Coppens was unable to continue his work on the case for long on this topic. In 2012, he was quickly taken by a very rare form of cancer at the age of just forty-one: Angiosarcoma. Philip Coppens is gone, but the threads of his research have allowed us to take his investigations further into the associations between UFOs and mind-manipulation.

As for Fuller, he was an intriguing character. When he died in 1990, at the age of seventy-six, the New York Times ran an obituary on him. It was written by a Times journalist, Edwin McDowell, who stated: “Mr. Fuller was sometimes criticized by reviewers for not using footnotes in his books and for what they judged was the implausibility of his topics. But as Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times Book Review in reviewing ‘The Poison That Fell From the Sky,’ Mr. Fuller ‘keeps raising the most unsettling of questions.’ Moreover, even before passage of the Freedom of Information Act, he had a facility for somehow obtaining Government documents [italics mine], which he incorporated in some of his books.””

The fact that Fuller had a strange knack for getting his hands on official papers prior to FOIA legislation was passed, suggests strongly that he moved in intriguing places and with equally intriguing people. Powerful people, too, no doubt. Indeed, back in 1957, Fuller had a decidedly clandestine meeting with a Dr. Karlis Osis, as Marie Jones and Larry Flaxman note in their 2015 book, Mind Wars. As now-declassified CIA files on Osis reveal, he was deep into a wide range of fringe sciences and technologies, including out-of-body experiences, how to alter brain wave frequencies, the means to affect “various biophysical changes,” and mind manipulation. It’s no wonder that Osis was also secretly consulted by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA teams.

After getting to know Fuller, Dr. Osis guardedly informed him on what was going down with the MK-ULTRA people – of the successes that had been achieved, but also of the disastrous accidents that had occurred with certain hallucinogens. Osis also made Fuller an unforeseen, amazing offer: how would he, Fuller, like to be the very first investigative journalist to break at least a part of the MK-ULTRA story to the Unites States’ media? Clearly, Osis was recklessly playing both sides at the same time – the government and the media – for reasons that, today, are lost and not clear. As a writer, though, Fuller immediately recognized the dollar value of the story that, potentially, just might be tossed into his lap. At the time, the mid-to-late 1950s, Fuller chose not to publish anything that might have compromised the mind-control programs that both the CIA and the U.S. Army were heavily into at that time. Clearly, however, Fuller never lost the undeniable allure of all this.

From the mid-1950s, and up to at least the latter part of the 1960s, John Fuller was inextricably, and clandestinely, tied to some of the most significant players in MK-ULTRA. And, Philip Coppens’ work put psychological warfare expert C.D. Jackson right in the heart of the Hill’s encounter on that dark and dangerous night home in September 1961. Does this prove that the Hill affair was some kind of MK-ULTRA-type experiment? No, it does not. At the very least, though, we should dig further into the matter of these thought-provoking threads and characters referred to above.