Months after my Roswell-themed-book, Body Snatchers in the Desert, was published in June 2005, I received an out-of-the-blue email from a well-respected Australian UFO researcher, Keith Basterfield. As Keith notes of himself: “I have been interested in the subject of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) since the 1960’s. Over the years I have held a variety of roles in numerous Australian state, national, and international organizations, studying the phenomena. My work has appeared in various state, national and international newsletters, magazine and journals. Between 2003 and 2008 I was involved in a search for Australian government documents relating to UAP with the Adelaide based AURA network.” Keith had a fascinating account to relate that dovetailed very closely with the data given to me by Al Barker, Bill Salter, the Black Widow, and the Colonel – four people who I interviewed for my 2005 book, Body Snatchers in the Desert. Notably, the information was provided to Keith well before Body Snatchers in the Desert was published and when the existence of the book – and the story it told – was still firmly under wraps in the offices of Simon & Schuster in New York. It was specifically after my book was published that Keith realized the data given to him some time earlier was eerily similar to that which I had uncovered. He wasted no time in getting in touch with me. I listened carefully to what Keith had to say.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005, Keith told me, was the date on which he received a story just about as shocking and controversial as the ones I had uncovered between 2001 and 2003. On the day in question, Keith was interviewed on Australia’s ABC 891AM radio station. The subject was the work of the Adelaide-based Australian UFO Research Association, specifically in relation to the issue of so-called “UFO disclosure.” Although Keith did not know it at the time, while he was taking part in the show, a caller phoned in, left his name and number, and asked for Keith to get in touch. He did precisely that. It was later in the day that Keith made the call, in which his source somewhat hesitantly revealed snippets of a dark and dirty secret concerning certain things that went down – as in quite literally down – in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947. We’re talking about Roswell. Such was the potential dangerous nature of the information, Keith felt it was much wiser for the pair to meet up in-person, rather than discuss such matters over the phone. Keith was wise to follow his instincts; after all, one never knows who might be listening in.

When Keith related the account to me, he preferred not to use the informant’s name and gave him an alias instead: Martin. Echoing this, Martin said to me that if I ever told his story, his name should never be revealed. It should be noted, however, that both Keith and I know Martin’s real name. As Keith told me, he met Martin at the latter’s home in Adelaide on January 15, 2005 – roughly six months before Body Snatchers in the Desert hit the bookshelves. The story went as follows: Martin’s father – a Brit – had worked for a certain arm of British intelligence decades before Keith got the story. I would later learn that the agency was specifically MI5, which is the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ FBI. Martin’s father was sitting upon a secret of epic and grim proportions – one which he had already been silently keeping under wraps for years. Such were Martin’s concerns and worries about sharing the story with Keith, he insisted that the information not be revealed to anyone – at all – without his, Martin’s, specific permission. Or, until after Martin’s death; whichever came first. Keith agreed to the terms and sat back and listened as the dark and shocking tale came tumbling out.

Keith revealed that at the time Martin chose to share the secrets of his father, Martin’s health was far from good. He was seriously ill – with a heart condition. It was possible that Martin was not long for this world, although he was not quite on his deathbed, yet. The upshot was that Martin wanted to reveal to someone the story that his father had told him, while there was still time. Keith agreed to listen and also agreed not to place Martin’s real, full name into the public domain. According to Martin, he was told by his father of the truth of Roswell way back in 1959 – when Martin was only twelve years old. Such were his father’s concerns about imparting what he knew, he asked young Martin never to reveal the story until he was either very old or on his deathbed. Given his serious heart problems that were in evidence in 2005, Martin thought it was a case of possibly now or never – hence his decision to share what he knew with Keith.

Martin’s father had gotten all of the information on Roswell from a source working in the U.S. Intelligence community – who, exactly, we still don’t know. Martin’s father explained that the events which occurred out on the wilds of the Foster Ranch, Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947 were born out of early, and highly secret, experiments that had a bearing on the formative years of what would ultimately become the U.S. space program. Keith, in a July 2011 online article, revealed what else Martin chose to share with him: “The Americans were working on getting into space. Their biggest concern was getting back to Earth and landing without killing the people inside the space vehicle. Landing in water was not considered, but a ground landing was the order of the day. The Americans were experimenting with craft they dropped from ‘aircraft’ flying in the stratosphere. Also, gigantic balloons were being flown in the stratosphere to drop craft fitted with retrorockets and a drogue chute. The retrorocket was fitted with an altimeter to fire them close to the ground. Lots of UFO sightings were of these craft. The U.S. released bogus flying saucer sightings and later discredited them.”

Martin recalled – to both Keith and I – how his father had informed him of a series of high-altitude experiments in the United States, in 1947, involving monkeys and pigs, specifically in connection with the prototype aircraft / balloon flights. On this particular occasion, however – the one that spawned the ever-enduring legend of Roswell’s crashed UFO – it was decided that a human crew was finally needed. Keith was told that “Prisoners could volunteer for dangerous missions in return for early release but were not used in these experiments.” This issue of prisoners used in experiments, specifically in relation to radical aircraft-based technology, is not a matter of doubt or a tale born out of folklore or conspiracy-theorizing. In 1948, staff of the Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) program practically salivated at the idea of using prisoners in its aircraft-related trials. Official, now-declassified, records on this issue state: “The Committee is not in a position to make recommendations as to where these tests can be conducted other than that they should be carried out at some federal, state, or Armed Services prison, where life prisoners are incarcerated and where arrangements can be made with the prison authorities to cooperate in the experiment.  The selection of the prison is a matter for top military consideration. Continued cooperation of the prison staff and prisoners for a matter of many years will be required [italics mine].”

That somewhat mirrored the words of my own informants in my 2005 book – namely, that prisoners were secretly offered reduced sentences if they were willing to engage in dicey and potentially missions for the military. On this occasion, however, it was not prisoners who were on-board the ultimately ill-fated craft, but physically and mentally handicapped people. As Keith recalled: “Two to three live people were needed. The government got people with hydrocephalus – water on the brain – from a facility.” From the interview with Martin, both Keith and I recalled much more too on the matter of the human guinea-pigs. Keith said that the people roped in had “big heads, tiny bodies, jaundiced color – one even had no eyes. They put these people in the craft – either the balloon ruptured early or blew off course and came down. Retrorockets went off and set fire to it. It landed and a farmer / rancher saw it and reported it.” That “farmer / rancher,” of course, was Mack Brazel; the man who let the Roswell cat out of the bag. Thus was born the legend of the “Roswell ‘UFO’ Crash” of 1947.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

14-04-2021 om 23:18 geschreven door peter  

100-meter Asteroid Created a Strange Impact Event in Antarctica 430,000 Years Ago

The effects of ancient asteroid impacts on Earth are still evident from the variety of impact craters across our planet. And from the Chelyabinsk event back in 2013, where an asteroid exploded in the air above a Russian town, we know how devastating an “airburst” event can be.

Now, researchers in Antarctica have discovered evidence of a strange intermediate-type event – a combination of an impact and an airburst. The event was so devastating, its effects are still apparent even though it took place 430,000 years ago.

Researchers found small black spherules in the Sør Rondane Mountains of East Antarctica, which indicate an unusual “touchdown” event, where a jet of melted and vaporized meteoritic material impacted the ground at high velocity. This impact came as a result of an atmospheric entry and airburst of an asteroid measuring between 100 to 150 meters (330 to 490 feet) wide.  

The research, led by planetary scientist Matthias van Ginneken from University of Kent in the UK, described the event as larger than an airburst, but smaller than an impact cratering event. While the density of the vaporized material was too low to form an impact crater, the tiny spherules made from igneous rock signal a high-energy event.

The team’s paper, published in Science Advances, indicates the vaporization of the asteroid during atmospheric entry would have created a cloud of superheated gas from which the extra-terrestrial spherules would have pelted the ground at high speeds, perhaps several kilometers per second.

The Chelyabinsk event, the largest witnessed airburst (except perhaps the Tunguska event in 1908, which flattened trees for miles), exploded with 20-30 times the force of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima at an altitude of just 14.5 miles (23 km). Before it detonated into thousands of mostly gravel-sized meteorites and dust, researchers estimate the incoming meteoroid was about 20-meters (66 feet) wide, about the size of five-story building. The shock wave from the explosion shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring nearly 1,500 people.

The new findings in Antarctica indicate an impact much more hazardous than both the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk events. The researchers said this highlights the importance of reassessing the threat of medium-sized asteroids, as it is likely that similar touchdown events would produce similar particles and be destructive over a wide area. Between the hot gas and the hot jet of materials pummeling the ground, such an event could create a hellscape.

“While touchdown events may not threaten human activity if occurring over Antarctica,” van Ginneken said, “if it was to take place above a densely populated area, it would result in millions of casualties and severe damages over distances of up to hundreds of kilometers.”

Van Ginneken said their team recommends that future studies should focus on the identification of similar events on different targets across the planet – such as shallow ocean beds – because it would indicate how often events like this may have happened in the past.

Sources: 

• Science Advances, University of Kent

Lead image caption: 

• Mocked up illustration of touchdown impact on Antarctica by Mark A. Garlick

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

14-04-2021 om 22:45 geschreven door peter  

UFOs Over Las Vegas, Nevada On March 5, 2021, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: March 5, 2021

Location of sighting: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Source: MUFON

 

In this video we get to see two unidentified flying objects over Las Vegas, Nevada. This area is very close to Nellis Air Force Base. These UFOs could be new military technology being developed over at the military base in order to keep up with Chinas constant aggressive moves to its neighbors. They could also be alien craft watching the military base and scanning the latest human technology in order to assess where America is in the big scope of things in case the US and China have to fight each other. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan 

Eyewitness states: 

Two objects were noticed and appeared to be over the Las Vegas airport ( could have been further ) two separate objects slowly changing shapes and lighting up in daylight with no cloud cover. one started much higher and to the west and eventually disappeared how ever the lower second one was a much better video if you zoom in like I saw in person (not on iPhone) you can see it seems to change shape and will intermittently reflect or light up . I believe this was over airport airspace and drones, airplanes or any other object should not have been in the area, I view this area from work 5 days a week and several times a day (while smoking at work outside).

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

14-04-2021 om 22:01 geschreven door peter  

UFOs hovering above Aurora, Colorado 20-Jan-2021

UFO activity filmed over Aurora, Colorado on 20th January 2021.

Witness report: 

Saw 3 lights that looked like stars but brighter and bigger. I was starring at what I thought were 3 stars. I realized they weren’t stars once 1 of them moved. I also realized I had been starring for awhile almost in a trance. The bright objects did not look like any of the planes ascending and descending nearby and they had no sound. The first bright object that moved, I didn’t actually see it move it just appeared at a different spot in like seconds. Imagine 3 dots lined horizontally and the furthest to the right all of a sudden fades away and reappears diagonally. Then the furthest left disappears. The middle remains hovering. Then the one diagonal appears to be dimming and fading in and out and eventually all disappeared. I didn’t see them move or zip away just poof gone. Later I looked up at the stars and constellations noticing how small the real stars actually looked. The lights I saw has to be 20x bigger looking than the stars.

RELATED VIDEO, selected and posted by peter2011

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

14-04-2021 om 21:16 geschreven door peter  

Marcahuasi: Vestiges of a Forgotten Global Civilization, or Just Weird Rocks in Peru?

The world is full of difficult-to-explain wonders. In the last century, archaeologists have discovered many civilizations, such as the Hittites, which were previously not thought to exist. As a result, the discovery of a new civilization has become relatively commonplace today. One supposed example of this is the Marcahuasi rock forest .

Within the unusual rock formations, many visitors have claimed to have found what amounts to hundreds of carvings. But others say that these are just the result of natural erosion; meaning one possible explanation of this phenomenon is pareidolia.

One of the first modern explorers to visit Marcahuasi in Peru was the self-styled archaeologist and mystic Daniel Ruzo, who visited the site in 1952. He spent nine years exploring the region and claimed to have found hundreds of human sculptures, as well as figurines of animals such as camels, lions, seals, and frogs. He also claimed that some sculptures were made in such a way that they appeared to change their shape at different times of the day and year depending on how they were illuminated.

The ‘Monument to Humanity’ rock sculpture at Marcahuasi.

( willmontano /Adobe Stock)

The Masma Civilization

Ruzo also claimed that Marcahuasi had vortices of healing power, making it a deeply spiritual place. He believed that it was built by a civilization called the Masma, who, according to Ruzo, once maintained a globe-spanning civilization before they were destroyed in a cataclysm. He used this to explain why some of the figures appeared to imply an origin on different continents - such as animals not native to South America.

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Ruzo’s tale of the Masma civilization has its origins in the beliefs of a Peruvian esotericist by the name of Pedro Astete, who had heard the name in a dream. Ruzo came to believe that the cataclysm that allegedly wiped out the Masma would one day happen again and that it was a part of a cycle spanning thousands of years.

Stones at Marcahuasi.

( Adwo /Adobe Stock)

Strange Occurrences at Marcahuasi

Since Daniel Ruzo first made these observations in the 1950s, many people have gone to the Marcahuasi rock forest and have claimed to feel a spiritual presence there. Many have also said they experienced out-of-body experiences, visions of ghosts, and even encounters with UFOs. There are many stories of supernatural events involving these mysterious formations. One such tale is of a man who was paralyzed in a car accident being miraculously healed after meeting a mysterious man among the rock formations.

People camping at Marcahuasi.

( josemanuel246 /Adobe Stock)

Although most archaeologists believe them to be natural formations, many fringe theorists and mystics have insisted that the rock formations are artificially modified. Among the more well-known sculptures are the ‘Monument to Humanity,’ two statues of queens (one of which is said to be African), and a feature that some believe resembles an Egyptian deity in the form of an anthropomorphic hippopotamus. There is also at least one statue that is said to resemble the face on Mars .

In addition to statues, explorers of the area say that they have found the remains of office buildings and residences, indicating that it was once a city. There is also a claim of a mummy having been found in the area.

Although this would be definitive proof of a sustained human presence in the area, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the rock formations are indeed statues or that a city ever existed in the area. No serious archaeological surveys appear to have been done in the area, so it is hard to verify that a mummy was actually found at the site.

Chullpas (tombs) in Marcahuasi.

( Peruphotoart/Adobe Stock)

Questioning the Claims

The man who is most often sourced in relation to Marcahuasi is Daniel Ruzo. His methods don’t appear to have been very rigorous. He was more of a mystic than scientific investigator. Most of the other studies of Marcahuasi suggest that there isn’t any evidence of a large human settlement having ever existed in the area.

If the location had been the site of a city, it is likely the tools, human remains, ornaments, figurines, middens, and other archaeological items would be found. From what can be gathered though, none of the hallmarks of a human settlement have been discovered, with the possible exception of a mummified body. If the rocks really are sculptures, then they are the only evidence of a complex society at Marcahuasi. In fact, this is probably why there hasn’t been much archaeological investigation at the site by mainstream archaeologists; they believe there isn’t much to be found.

Ruined structure at Marcahuasi. 

(Rickahontas/ CC BY SA 3.0 )

Another problem with the alleged statues is that upon examination it is difficult to tell them apart from natural rock formations that have been eroded. Some people have claimed that the sculptures change their form in different light at different times of the year. At one time of the year a formation might appear to be a frog and at another part of the year it might be a bird.

Art is distinguished from nature by how clearly it represents something and is deliberately manufactured. If the form of a sculpture is so open to interpretation, it leaves one to wonder if there is anything there at all or if these statues are not simply the result of imagination.

• Giant Face-like Rock Formations and a Rock Shrine Found in Bulgaria
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• The Badlands Guardian and Other Uncanny Products of Pareidolia

Marcahuasi.

( Bayamin /Adobe Stock)

This leads to another possible explanation for the apparent figures: pareidolia. Pareidolia is a tendency for humans to see patterns that are not really there. This is the reason why people have claimed to have seen things like a face on Mars or the face of Jesus Christ on toast. Our mind tries to make sense of all the sensory stimuli and puts together a pattern that is familiar to us, but it does not actually exist.

The reason that our brains are wired to see patterns even if they aren’t there is probably because there was no selective advantage against false positives. If a prehistoric human thought he saw a tiger in the grass and didn’t, he would run and still survive even though he was mistaken; whereas someone who wasn’t able to detect a pattern that actually was there, tiger stripes in this case, would be more likely to get eaten.

Because of pareidolia, we must be more careful to make sure that what we see is actually there. If we look long enough, our brain will discern a pattern whether or not one actually exists, especially if we want it to be there. As a result, it is important to be skeptical and discerning when it comes to encountering things in nature that look manmade. Is there a good reason to think it is? Is it likely? If not, it might just be pareidolia.

• Top Image: Marcahuasi Stone Forest in Peru. Source: Adwo /Adobe Stock

By Caleb Strom

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

14-04-2021 om 01:36 geschreven door peter  

Man Is Not The King – New Evidence Of More Advanced Earthly Civilizations

From time to time, scientists find strange artifacts that are attributed to the property of other civilizations. A lot of things tell us that even before us, developed people lived on Earth who were able to come up with what we have reached quite recently. But why such confidence that the finds are the property of other civilizations that lived before humans?

Whose artifacts?

During the period that people needed to achieve “civilization”, other civilizations could well develop and improve. Archaeologists have repeatedly found strange artifacts that cannot belong to people in any way, the finds were well ahead of their time – how did they even appear?

In finds that are considered “not ours” there are many differences that do not fit into the usual history. They are called ‘out of place’ artifacts.

Take, for example, the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, which is approximately 2000 years old. It was used to calculate the position of celestial bodies: the sun, moon and planets. How was it known that there were other planets? This means that the civilizations that lived in those days were very smart, since they were able to find out and come up with such a complex mechanism.

In the middle of the 20th century, archaeologists found a hammer in Texas. After analysis, it turned out that this object is in no way less than 100 million years old. It was made of a very ancient stone, once its handle was made of wood, but over time it turned into coal. No less strange was the 500,000-year-old spark plug.

Something from the realm of fantasy

Not all scientists and archaeologists are sure that there were no civilizations on Earth before humans. In the scientific world, everything is divided into two camps and the controversy does not subside. Even more fuel is added to the fire by new finds, for which no one has ever found an explanation.

One of the most mysterious, is the Ayud artifact discovered in Romania and although they found it back in 1974, there is still no clear explanation for the find. This piece of metal lay at a depth of 10 m among the bones of long-extinct mastodons. The artifact is very similar to an axe without a handle and weighs over 2 kg. It turned out to be a complex aluminium alloy.

The find is strange and does not fit with people in any way, because its age is more than respectable. Aluminum was first obtained only in the middle of the 19th century. Therefore, the only version categorizes it to a different, technically advanced civilization.

There is of course the assumption that the shifts of the earth’s crust were sudden and abrupt and as a result of such shifts, and ordinary hammer could be found at a kilometer depth or any other depth! Ordinary analysis would give the ‘millions of years’ result.

A sudden sagging of the earth’s crust (more than a kilometer) would give an extremely sharp minus temperature that could instantly freeze not only mammoths, but even the air! (which otherwise explain permafrost at depths below 800 meters!). This explains the presence of the mining and geological disturbances themselves, there are many ensuing consequences.

There are although many such finds, the vast majority of them, perhaps, are the keys to unraveling the existence of civilizations before man.

If we accept that man is the most perfect being in the world and the king of creation is a pseudo-fact, then everything will become clear. Modern man could well be a degenerated and degraded being, the end of the stage of evolution.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://mysteriousthing.com/ }

14-04-2021 om 01:23 geschreven door peter  

SpaceX moon mission to take eight people 'further than any human has ever gone' from Earth

Bankrolled by a Japanese millionaire, the DearMoon mission plans to transport eight people around the moon and back in 2023

Jackson Ryan

In 2023, will civilians fly around the moon for the first time? According to Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, the answer is yes. He is bankrolling the DearMoon mission, which is intended to take a group of eight people to the moon on SpaceX's still-in-development Starship and loop around Earth's natural satellite on a six-day mission. 

The project, announced by Maezawa and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in 2018, originally planned to invite artists from around the world to experience. The criteria for "artists" was never clearly defined, but on Tuesday, in a new promotional video for the mission, Maezawa announced that DearMoon would be opened up to practically everyone across the globe. 

"I began to think that maybe every single person who is doing something creative could be called an artist," he says in the video, which you can view below.

Maezawa outlines "two key criteria" for the civilian passengers. These seem fairly flexible, too. 

• "Whatever activity you are into, by going to space, I hope that you can push its envelope, to help other people and greater society in some way."
• "You have to be willing and able to support other crew members who share similar aspirations."

In total, Maezawa says 10 to 12 people will be on board for the first flight around the moon. The billionaire entrepreneur had also begun to develop a "matchmaking" TV show around finding a girlfriend he could take to the moon on the mission, but Maezawa canceled the project shortly after its announcement.

Musk makes an appearance in the video to explain the mission expects to take people "further than any human has ever gone from planet Earth" because it will fly past the moon and loop around it to head back home. 

Musk says he's "highly confident" that the Starship will have reached orbit "many, many times" before 2023 and that it will be "safe enough for human transport" by the time the mission is scheduled to launch. Musk has been prone to making these kinds of claims before and missing a deadline or too, and the Starship prototypes are yet to make a successful landing. The next prototype is scheduled to fly and land this week -- but that's a long way from getting to the moon and back. 

The selection process is yet to be clearly defined for DearMoon, but the website's schedule appears to have crew selection by July 2021. You can pre-register now and should hear more about the selection process sometime "after March 15, 2021."

We've reached out to the DearMoon team to clarify the details.  

Another SpaceX mission aims to send civilians to space very soon. Known as Inspiration4, it plans to send humans to orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, lifting off on top of a Falcon 9. It too is being bankrolled by a billionaire, Jared Isaacman, and it could fly before the end of the year. 

• Follow CNET's 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.    

Though the explosion itself was obscured by dense fog, a weather radar detected a plume of gas that signalled an explosion in mid-air

Credit: Twitter/NWS Brownsville

As in past tests, the SN11 showcased clean firing of three Raptor engines and autonomous control of the flaps that steer the craft back to land

Credit: AFP

The landing attempt followed a clean liftoff and a demonstration of the rocket’s autonomous in-flight maneuvers

Credit: AFP

A spectator holds a piece of debris which was blown 5 miles from the site where SpaceX test rocket SN11 exploded upon landing

Credit: Reuters

The finished Starship product will stand 165ft tall and boast six of SpaceX's powerful Raptor engines

Credit: Rex Features

{ https://www.cnet.com/ }

14-04-2021 om 01:01 geschreven door peter  

Today, and for the last week, as you will have seen, I’ve been digging further into the angle of Roswell having nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with shocking tests on people. And here’s a bit more of the story. The late Leonard Stringfield, who passed away in 1994, was a UFO researcher who firmly believed that, since the 1940s, the U.S.  Government had secretly recovered a number of crashed UFOs and dead aliens, and which were stored and preserved a variety of military bases across the country – many at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Stringfield, too, however, was given a number of accounts relative to the issue of secret and shocking human experimentation on handicapped people; experimentation that was tied in with the Roswell affair.  One of those stories came to Stringfield from a highly controversial figure in Ufology. His name: Timothy Cooper, a resident of Big Bear Lake, California and someone who, it has often been said, exited the field of UFO research years ago. Not quite so. Far more than a few people in Ufology have very little time for Cooper, suspecting that many of the documents he supplied to the UFO community in the mid-1990s were bogus, rather than the highly classified papers that they were purported to be. They were bogus; there is no doubt about that. But, Cooper himself was not the forger. It’s the “pre-documents” era we have to take a look at. It paints a very different picture of Cooper to that which many ufologists have accepted.

Tim Cooper said to Stringfield in 1990 that he had numerous sources of the old-timer kind – some of who assured Cooper that, yes, aliens really did crash outside of Roswell in the summer of 1947. Others, however, quietly hinted to Cooper that the truth was far more controversial: a scenario involving human guinea-pigs – Japanese and handicapped individuals – and the creation of UFO-themed disinformation programs and faked, pro-UFO documents to hide the down-to-earth truth of the Roswell enigma. Also in 1990, Cooper supplied Stringfield one specific story which Stringfield decided to firmly keep under wraps until the following year, 1991, when he published it in a lengthy report on tales of crashed and secretly retrieved alien spacecraft. The story concerned a woman who Cooper first crossed paths with in 1989. He described her only as a nurse, and gave her the pseudonym of “Mary.” Decades ago, Cooper’s informant allegedly worked at what is, today, the New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In Cooper’s own words of 1990, and which Stringfield published: “She casually mentioned to me over coffee that ‘bodies’ were being flown to Los Alamos periodically from late 1945 to sometime in 1947. I asked her if she had seen these ‘bodies’ and she said no, but others had. I asked her where these ‘bodies’ were coming from. She said she did not know but it was rumored that they were human experiments for biological and nuclear medicine research. She thought they may have come from Japan after the war [italics mine]. I asked her why she thought that. She said that they were small bodies with deformed heads and limbs. The eyes were abnormally big, she was told. She did have some view of them in the morgue very briefly for a few minutes at some distance. I asked her why she was allowed to be present at the autopsies. She told me that she was asked to assist in the preparation and cleanup. I asked her again about the bodies. She said they were being flown in on special transport planes equipped with refrigerator units to keep the bodies from decomposing. The flesh was badly burned and charred. There was no hair on the heads and had a grayish-yellow color. That’s all she knew.”

It has to be said this is the part of Ufology that so many people in the UFO scene prefer to ignore. The reason: because it threatens their belief systems when it comes to the issue of what did or did not happen outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Some may dismiss all of this (or choose to forget about it), but the fact is there are so many threads of this type that push things down a “secret experiments” angle. Don’t close your eyes and ignore it all. Instead, follow the story and dig into it even more – as I have done – and you may well find something that might shock you, but that deserves to be shared with us all. Before, that is, the whole thing is hidden from us to such a degree that we will never know the truth.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-04-2021 om 23:21 geschreven door peter  

Both inside and outside of the U.K., the death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at the age of 99 has provoked numerous news stories all around the world. That brings me to a UFO connection to Prince Philip, in a roundabout way. May 22 1955 was the date when an American journalist named Dorothy Kilgallen (who, some say, died under questionable circumstances) prepared an amazing story for the U.S. media, and specifically for International News Service (INS): “I can report today on a story which is positively spooky, not to mention chilling. British scientists and airmen, after examining the wreckage of one mysterious flying ship, are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet. The source of my information is a British official of cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified.”

Kilgallen’s informant – evidently, someone powerful in the U.K. government – agreed to talk to her and reveal what he knew. The man didn’t say much, but it was still enough to turn heads and open eyes. His words went as follows: “We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there’s no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.” Kilgallen wasn’t done: “This official quoted scientists as saying a flying ship of this type could not have possibly been constructed on Earth. The British Government, I learned, is withholding an official report on the ‘flying saucer’ examination at this time, possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public. When my husband and I arrived here from a brief vacation, I had no premonition that I would be catapulting myself into the controversy over whether flying saucers are real or imaginary.”

England’s Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, disembark from a British Airways Concorde supersonic transport aircraft upon their arrival for a royal visit.

So, who was Kilgallen’s anonymous informant? To answer that question we have to turn our attentions to Timothy Good, a longtime, and well-respected, UFO investigator and author; and to a man named Gordon Creighton who, for years, was the editor of Flying Saucer Review magazine. Good, who followed the Kilgallen story, said that the conversation “was alleged to have taken place during a cocktail party given by Lord Mountbatten, but I have been unable to substantiate this with Mollie Travis, Mountbatten’s private secretary at the time.” The theory is that Mountbatten was not only the host of the party; but, that he was also the man who had something sensational to say, to Kilgallen, about Flying Saucers. So, who, exactly, was Mountbatten? Town & Country provide a background on the lord: “A great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was a distant cousin of the Queen’s as well as Prince Philip’s uncle. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was Louis’s sister…In August of 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed at age 79 in a terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Army.” There’s another piece of the story to address.

Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen

Decades ago, Prince Philip just happened to develop a deep interest in the UFO subject, as UFO writer-researcher David Clarke says. That the prince spent time living with the Mountbattens makes it very possible – maybe, even, extremely likely – that Lord Mountbatten confided in Prince Philip what he, Mountbatten, knew about UFOs and alien life. If Mountbatten was comfortable speaking with a journalist about all of this – Dorothy Kilgallen – then there’s a strong likelihood he would have told the prince of what he knew, too. As for Gordon Creighton, he, also, was a person who moved in high circles. When he passed away in 2003, the U.K.’s Times newspaper ran an obituary on the man himself. An extract from that same obituary reveals:

“Government service occupied most of the working life of Gordon Creighton, but he perhaps made his greatest mark as an authority on unidentified flying objects. His conviction that extraterrestrials were visiting Earth seemed oddly at variance with the more orthodox worlds of diplomacy and Whitehall. His expertise took him into government research on maps in oriental and other languages with the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, and he spent eight years as an intelligence officer on Russian and Chinese affairs at the Ministry of Defense. It is said that in the intelligence post he worked directly below the secret Whitehall department where the Air Ministry and the RAF were studying information on UFOs.”

And there will be much more to all of this coming soon.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

13-04-2021 om 23:16 geschreven door peter  

NASA delays Ingenuity's maiden flight AGAIN: Mars helicopter is 'healthy' but will now not launch until at least next week due to a software update

• Ingenuity's trip will be the first-ever powered controlled flight on another planet

• A high-speed test of the helicopter rotors on Friday ended earlier than expected  

• NASA says it has found a software solution that needs to be sent to Ingenuity  

• It could take up to a week to deliver, test and deploy the new solution on Mars 

• NASA calls the unprecedented helicopter operation highly risky, but says it could reap invaluable data about the conditions on Mars 

By RYAN MORRISON FOR MAILONLINE 

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is 'healthy' but its maiden flight has been delayed and it will now not launch until at least next week due to a software update.

Ingenuity's trip, which is to be the first-ever powered, controlled flight on another planet, was set for April 11, was delayed until April 14 and is now delayed again.

A high-speed test of the four-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter's rotors on Friday ended earlier than expected due to an alert of a potential issue. 

The US space agency has now determined the craft is physically healthy, but requires a software update, which takes time to upload, before it can safely fly.  

As the upload has to travel 147 million miles to the Red Planet, its expected the whole process will take up to a week, with a new flight date due to be set next week. 

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is 'healthy' but its maiden flight has been delayed and will now not launch until at least next week due to a software update

Ingenuity's trip, which is to be the first-ever powered, controlled flight on another planet, was set for Sunday 11, was delayed until April 14 and is now delayed again.

Throughout the issues Ingenuity has continued to send information back to Earth, reporting in that it is 'healthy'. 

When it does eventually fly, the plan is to have Ingenuity fly for 30 seconds to take a picture of the Perseverance rover, which touched down on Mars on February 18 with the helicopter attached to its underside.

A command sequence issue was identified on April 9 by the NASA JPL team during a planned high-speed spin-up test of the helicopter’s rotors. 

The craft has gone through a number of tests before it can fly on Mars, to ensure each stage is operating as expected. 

Over the weekend, the team considered and tested multiple potential solutions to this issue in simulations on Earth.

They discovered that minor modification and reinstallation of Ingenuity’s flight control software was 'the most robust path forward.'

This software update will modify the process by which the two flight controllers boot up, allowing the hardware and software to safely transition to the flight state.

Modifications to the flight software are being independently reviewed and validated by NASA engineers, and will be rolled out to Earth-based testbeds before eventually being sent the millions of miles to Mars to be uploaded to the small 4lb helicopter.

A high-speed test of the four-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter's rotors on Friday ended earlier than expected due to an alert of a potential issue 

Ingenuity is expected to soar at some point in the next few weeks from a 33-by-33-foot piece of Martian real estate that is the first airfield on a another planet 

While the development of the new software change is straightforward, the process of validating it and completing its uplink to Ingenuity will take some time. 

A detailed timeline for rescheduling the high-speed spin-up test and first flight is still in process, with NASA saying the plan is to keep a new flight date 'fluid'.

The process of updating Ingenuity’s flight control software will follow established processes for validation with careful and deliberate steps to move the new software through the rover to the base station and then to the helicopter.  

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

13-04-2021 om 22:59 geschreven door peter  

Marshelikopter Ingenuity moet software-update krijgen, datum van eerste vlucht nog onbekend

De eerste buitenaardse helikopter vliegt voorlopig nog niet rond op Mars. Bij een laatste test voordat het onbemande toestel zou opstijgen, kwam vorige week een computerprobleem aan het licht. Daarom moet de vluchtleiding van 280 miljoen kilometer afstand nieuwe software aan boord installeren. Die moet eerst op aarde worden getest.

Bron: ANP

Het kost tijd om de nieuwe code te maken, te controleren en dan naar Mars te sturen. Veel is nog onzeker, maar hopelijk kan volgende week een nieuwe datum voor de vlucht worden vastgesteld, laat de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA weten. De helikopter is in goede staat en alle onderdelen aan boord werken goed, benadrukt de organisatie.

Lees ook

• 

  NASA deelt eerste 360°-panoramafoto in hoge kwaliteit vanop Mars

• 

  Marshelikopter overleeft eerste nacht alleen: “Belangrijke etappe”

Problemen bij generale repetitie

De Marshelikopter heeft de naam ‘Ingenuity’ (Vindingrijkheid) gekregen. Ingenuity zou in de nacht van zondag op maandag (Belgische tijd) zijn eerste korte vlucht maken. Het was de bedoeling dat hij in drie seconden naar een hoogte van enkele meters zou gaan. Daar zou hij 30 seconden blijven hangen, om vervolgens gecontroleerd op dezelfde plek te landen.

Als voorbereiding op de eerste vlucht liet de vluchtleiding vrijdag de rotoren van de helikopter draaien. Tijdens die generale repetitie ging iets mis. Toen de software aan boord moest omschakelen van de fase voor het vliegen naar de zogenaamde vliegfase, en dus deed alsof de helikopter daadwerkelijk ging opstijgen, sloeg de computer aan boord alarm en werd de repetitie gestaakt.

Rondvliegen

Als de eerste vlucht slaagt, kan Ingenuity daarna een keer of vijf rondvliegen op Mars, telkens enkele honderden meters verder. De helikopter houdt het waarschijnlijk ongeveer een maand vol op de rode planeet. Gelijkaardige helikopters kunnen ooit misschien helpen om een buitenaardse bestemming veel sneller te verkennen.

Ingenuity werd in juli gelanceerd, als bagage in het laadruim van het Marskarretje Perseverance (Volharding). Samen landden ze half februari op Mars. Ruim een week geleden werd Ingenuity neergezet op het oppervlak. De helikopter is bijna een meter hoog en weegt ongeveer 2 kilo.

Meer info over de Marshelikopter:

Lees ook:

• Als we ooit naar Mars reizen, is het dankzij deze jeep van 2,4 miljard (+)

• Parachute geweven met Picanol-machine helpt Mars-rover veilig landen: “We zijn nu ook gekend in de ruimte” (+)

{ https://www.hln.be/ }

13-04-2021 om 22:42 geschreven door peter  

In the next video, Linda Moulton Howe talks about recent and upcoming events and continues with the infamous case of a huge non-human craft that attempted to land at Iraqi base in 2009. 

2:27​ - Saturday, March 13 - “Macron rehearses Star Wars”, “France runs satellite war games” 

•  France carried out first ever military exercise in space 
•  US, France, Germany take part in codename “Asterix” 
•  wargame exercise practicing orbital defence 

5:01​ 

• Mystery boom, shaking reported around San Diego, March 10, 2021
• noise and shaking felt around Southern California - no information about the cause, even from USGS - eyewitness in South Park… “I knew it wasn’t an earthquake”.. “sudden impact” 

Strange metal sounds coming from the sky in PA on March 13 

• Phoenixville, PA witness: “we heard a metallic sound ..”this was not the sound of a sonic boom” 

15:48​ Interview with retired U.S. Any Chief Warrant Office 4 

• October, 2009 incident at USA forward operating base Sykes, outside Tal Afar, Iraq 
• saw huge craft above the runway
• no fuselage, boomerang-shaped, floating above the runway 
• “this thing is like 1/8 mile wide”…”covered the whole runway”
• “pale white, eggshell color” 
• “hovering at the end of the airstrip” 
• “it was so big”…”it came straight down the runway…made a very gentle turn to the right and started rising…and then it was gone” - “they covered it up”

  

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

13-04-2021 om 22:21 geschreven door peter  

UFO Captured on Camera in Puerto Rico

UFO experts confirm the origins of strange objects captured on camera by NASA during a 1996 mission in Puerto Rico, in this clip from Season 16, “The Space Travelers.”

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

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

13-04-2021 om 22:06 geschreven door peter  

13-04-2021 om 18:50 geschreven door peter  

Study finds Greenland ice-sheet has already melted before – and it could again

Researchers find million-year-old plants in frozen ice core.

 by Fermin Koop

It seems like a Hollywood blockbuster but it’s actually a real and concerning story: catastrophic sea level rise could be on the way. Researchers analyzed ice core samples taken in the 1960s from a secret Arctic military base and found that the Greenland ice sheet – which has enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet worldwide – could melt much faster than previously thought.

More than 60 years ago, US Army scientists dug up the ice core in northwestern Greenland as part of the Iceworm project – a mission to build a subsurface base to hide hundreds of nuclear warheads. The army created a research base called Camp Century as a cover story, but the base was eventually abandoned and the ice core lay forgotten in a freezer.

Researchers rediscovered the ice samples in 2017 and started investigating them in 2019. They found fragments of fossilized plants that could have bloomed a million years ago, which implies there was once vegetation in a spot now buried with ice. Greenland’s current ice cover was thought to be three million years old, but these fragments say otherwise.

Most of Greenland is now covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet, which spans 656,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers) – three times the size of Texas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). If the new research is right and most of Greenland’s ice vanished relatively recently, this isn’t good news for the stability of the current ice sheet.

If all of Greenland’s ice were to melt, the seas would rise by about 24 feet (seven meters), according to a 2019 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This would be enough to flood most coastal cities around the world. While this won’t happen tomorrow, Greenland’s ice sheet is already melting now six times faster than it was in the 1980s and if things don’t change soon, we could face a worst-case scenario.

“Before humans added hundreds of parts per million of fossil fuels to the atmosphere, our climate was able to melt away the ice sheet. In the future as we continue to warm the planet at an uncontrollable rate, we could force the Greenland ice sheet past some threshold and melt it and raise sea levels,” Drew Christ, the study’s lead author, told Gizmodo.

The US Army started building Camp Century in 1959, followed by the extraction of an ice core measuring 11 feet (3.4 meters) from a depth of 4,488 feet (1,368 m) below the ice. The core went to storage after the army finished the project, first in New York and then in Copenhagen. Following an inventory of materials in 2017, researchers were called on to examine the core.

Christ and the group of researchers noticed “little black things” floating in the water. They placed them under a microscope and discovered fossil twigs and leaves in the frozen sediment. Such plants, probably from a boreal forest, could have only grown if Greenland’s ice sheet was mostly gone. So now the next step will be to figure out how recently that happened.

To date the plants, the researchers looked at isotopes of aluminum and beryllium, which accumulate in minerals when exposed to radiation that filters through the atmosphere. They determined that the soil and the plants last saw sunlight between a few hundred thousand and about a million years ago. The traces of leaf waxes resembled those now found on tundra ecosystems.

The researchers estimated that the present ice sheet persisted at more or less the same size for about 2.6 million years, using geological records and ocean geochemistry. However, the findings showed that ice vanished almost entirely from Greenland during at least one period in the island’s most recent deep freeze – a previously unknown threshold for ice sheet stability.

“This is important as we move forward into a warmer future,” Christ told Gizmodo. “Our climate system has a delicate balance to it. If it changes enough, you can melt away large portions of these ice sheets and raise sea levels — and that would inundate and flood large portions of the most densely populated areas on Earth.”

• The study was published in the journal PNAS.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

13-04-2021 om 18:41 geschreven door peter  

Mars: Vast amount of water may be locked up on planet

By Paul Rincon - Science editor, BBC News website

{ https://www.bbc.com/ }

13-04-2021 om 18:28 geschreven door peter  

Brilliant SpaceX rocket launch sparks fireball reports along the US East Coast

By Chelsea Gohd  

Some early-bird skywatchers got a surprise before dawn Sunday (March 14).

"Is it a fireball?" "Is it a space jellyfish?" Nope, it's a SpaceX rocket. 

Some observers along the U.S. East Coast saw a strange sight in the dark, early morning sky on Sunday (March 14): a bright object streaking across the sky, leaving a ballooning, illuminated trail behind it. The pre-dawn sky made this spectacle even more striking and the American Meteor Society (AMS) received about 120 reports about "an observed object in the sky," the AMS tweeted. However, the sighting was actually of a SpaceX rocket, not a fireball, the AMS confirmed.

At 6:01 a.m. EDT (1101 GMT) Sunday morning, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying a fresh batch of 60 Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. People all along the East Coast, from Florida up to Maine, saw the rocket's brilliant streak across the sky. 

Related: SpaceX's Starlink satellite launches in photos 

This photo by Warren L. shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch on March 14, 2021, as seen from Front Royal, Virginia. 

(Image credit: Warren L. )

This photo by Cory B. shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch on March 14, 2021 as seen from Lebanon, PA. 

(Image credit: Cory B. )

This image was taken by Monita S. of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch on March 14, 2021, as seen from Pleasantville, NJ. 

(Image credit: Monita S. )

This photo by Jonathan W. shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch on March 14, 2021 as seen from Holly Springs, NC. 

(Image credit: Jonathan W. )

This photo by Paul H. shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch on March 14, 2021 as seen from Frederick County, MD. 

(Image credit: Paul H. )

Skywatchers sent the AMS photos of the "fireball," showing the striking image of the rocket midflight. Florida launches like this one are often visible along the East Coast. But this time, because the launch happened in the predawn hours, the sun illuminated the rocket's plume and created a unique atmospheric effect that only happens at dawn and dusk, where the light looks like a "space jellyfish" in the sky. 

This sighting isn't the first time that skywatchers have mistaken a rocket launch for something stranger in the sky. SpaceX launches have sparked claims of UFOs, as they sometimes create strange, squiggly "clouds" in the sky. 

As during SpaceX's other Falcon 9 launches, the reusable rocket's first stage fell back to Earth shortly after launch; it landed on SpaceX's drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was posted in the Atlantic Ocean, the ninth time for this booster. 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 14, 2021 in a brilliant pre-dawn liftoff. 

(Image credit: SpaceX)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 14, 2021 in a brilliant pre-dawn liftoff. 

(Image credit: SpaceX)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 60 Starlink satellites into orbit in from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 14, 2021 in a brilliant pre-dawn liftoff. 

(Image credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is working to launch the massive constellation of Starlink internet satellites to create global internet coverage and provide internet connectivity for those in rural or remote areas that otherwise don't have access. 

• Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

{ https://www.space.com/ }

13-04-2021 om 18:02 geschreven door peter  

Perseverance's Selfie with Ingenuity

{ http://www.nasa.gov/ }

13-04-2021 om 17:38 geschreven door peter  

11 Strange Stories From the National UFO Reporting Center

BY ELLEN GUTOSKEY

Get in, loser, we're going planet-hopping.

SIMONBRADFIELD/ISTOCK VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since its founding in 1974, the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) has served as a non-judgmental hub where you can share—via hotline or written report—any potentially otherworldly experience you’ve had. The online archive contains thousands of these stories, which range from UFO and alien sightings to other unexplained phenomena. The NUFORC doesn’t question the veracity of the reports, and it doesn’t always speculate about possible causes, either. In fact, the organization encourages a healthy skepticism about what you read on its site.

Decide for yourself whether each eerie tale below is the result of extraterrestrial intervention, military experimentation, a scientific anomaly, or just a misunderstanding—that is, if you believe them at all.

1. TOO MUCH HAIR, TOO LITTLE TIME // 1969

On a weekend trip to Boulder, Colorado, in 1969, a young member of the Air Force was in bed when his motel room suddenly darkened, “followed by a bright flash of light.” The next day, he realized his half-inch-long hair was now almost two inches long, a mystery that his roommate “totally freaked out” about when he returned to the base in Aurora, Colorado. “He wasn’t sure what to think of my story, but did realize there was glaring physical evidence,” the airman recalled. Though he didn’t remember anything else from that night, he speculated in his report that he had been abducted (and presumably taken to a place where time passes more quickly than it does on Earth). “I still have trouble remembering many things, as it has always been very ‘foggy’ since that time,” he said.

2. THE LONG-ARMED COLLECTOR // 1971

At about 10 p.m. one summer night in 1971, two teenage girls crept from their houses in Sunnyvale, California, and met up for a neighborhood stroll. All was still and silent for an hour or so, until they came upon a 20- to 30-foot flying ship hovering as low as the streetlights “probably a full five-minute walk ahead” of them. The friends watched it drift toward some nearby apartment buildings and appear to survey them, bobbing slightly up and down. “It had these great enormous arms on the sides that slowly swiveled around and they had lines on the ends, like ropes, but they weren’t ropes,” one of the friends explained in her report.

It didn’t make noise or light up, and it looked more like wood than metal. She got the impression it was “collecting things,” though she couldn’t see what was inside. The girls fled in terror when the aircraft abruptly turned its attention on them, and they tried in vain to convince the one friend’s father that they had seen something truly extraordinary. “He dismissed it and said it was probably just a weather balloon,” the witness wrote. “If I am sure of anything, it is that that thing was no weather balloon.”

3. COWS GONE WILD // 1975

Two friends were driving along the quiet country roads of La Fontaine, Indiana, after a fishing trip one evening in 1975. About a quarter mile away, a flying disc “with white lights revolving around it” appeared and lowered itself gradually until it was completely obscured by a nearby house. They followed it behind the house, but found only “cows running all over the road, frightened and mooing.” The cows had apparently torn right through the electric fence, and a neighbor soon showed up to see what all the fuss was about. “He asked if we knew what had happened because cows just don't break down an electric fence for nothing,” the witness said. “We didn’t say anything about what we had just seen.”

4. THE VANISHING SILVER SHIP // 1979

From his front step in Wenatchee, Washington, a man watched a silver triangular aircraft with “no discernible fuselage, no wings or other protruding control devices” coast slowly over the tops of 150-foot-tall poplar trees. “A jet liner could not have stayed airborne at such a sedate rate of speed,” he recalled, and this was significantly larger than a Boeing 747. There wasn’t much time to wonder about the physics that kept the craft in flight, because it was drifting straight toward Burch Mountain. “My immediate thought was that a monstrous crash was imminent,” the witness explained, but it never came to pass. Instead, the UFO just disappeared.

The NUFORC actually vouched for this particular onlooker. “One of two excellent reports from [the] same witness,” they wrote in a note below his report. “We know this witness, and have spoken with him on several occasions. He formerly served in the U.S. military, and held a high security clearance.”

5. THE GLOWING GRAY NIGHTTIME VISITOR // 1982

A man in Leicester, England, awoke one night in 1982 to find a soft light illuminating his room. It was coming from the face of a 4-foot-tall gray creature that resembled the classic aliens from 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The witness, “overwhelmed with a feeling of calm and peace,” pinched himself several times to make sure he wasn’t simply dreaming and scanned the room in vain for some other explanation. Knowing he’d have a tough time convincing anyone he was telling the truth, he nudged his wife awake so she could bear witness, too. But as soon as she stirred, the room went completely black and the visitor vanished. “Did I imagine or dream the whole thing?” he wrote in his report. “Absolutely one million percent no.”

6. THE DISEMBODIED SEARCH BEAM // 1988

Three friends were on their way home from an INXS concert in Pittsburgh when they encountered a ball of light sweeping a “very bright beam of light” over the dark road and its surroundings. They promptly pulled over, and two of them exited the car so they could get a better look. (The third friend “remained in the car, screaming.”) Though the light resembled a helicopter’s search beam, “there was no hint of any craft or body emitting the beam, even when it faced away from us.” Furthermore, the whole scene was completely silent. They quickly returned to the car when the beam drew closer, and it suddenly darted away and disappeared into the night. When they resumed their journey, the radio played static before cutting out completely. “We heard a commentator say ‘…further evidence that there is life on Mars…’ and then it went back to static,” the witness reported.

7. A FIERY HOBERMAN SPHERE // 1991

Late one evening in 1991, a young man and his girlfriend parked the car in a peaceful spot overlooking the port of Olympia, Washington, and passed about half an hour “talking about life and random things.” Suddenly, what they thought was one abnormally bright star split into a sphere comprising roughly 20 points of light—much like a Hoberman sphere expands ("I found out many years later what a Hoberman Sphere is, and just about crapped myself the first time I saw one in motion its movement looked so similar," the witness noted)—and rotated rapidly before contracting back into a single bright light. That light then glowed red and spit out five identical red lights, one by one, which pulsated in a synchronized manner as they flew through the sky in a straight line and eventually vanished. The witness actually managed to capture video footage of the event, but the camera only showed “a blank screen with a few strange flickering whitish dots on it that seem to come and go.”

“I am (after seeing it) hard pressed to believe it to be anything of ‘known’ terrestrial technology,” he wrote. “I have resigned to the likelihood that I will never know what it was at all.”

8. THE IDES OF MARCH SIGHTINGS // 1995

On March 15, 1995, the NUFORC received an influx of calls across several states from witnesses who saw a bright object flying through the night sky. The first of these so-called “Ides of March sightings” was reported by two men in Florida, who described it as “luminous,” “white,” and “disc-shaped,” though subsequent descriptions from others varied. A Tennessee caller thought it was more of a “blue-green 'cloud of light'” that emitted sparks before vanishing, and a Missouri State Highway Patrol sergeant said it was a green light that turned yellow and suddenly snuffed out “like a light being switched off.” He also explained that many people called the patrol’s 911 dispatch line to report their own sightings, and one person claimed his cell phone and car radio both died when the UFO got close. Other reports came from Virginia, West Virginia, and Missouri.

“In summary, it appears that one or more egg-shaped objects, radiating intensely bright green, blue-green, and yellow light, and periodically spewing out a cloud of sparks, streaked over at least seven states, stopping from time to time, and the whole event occurred in a matter of minutes,” the NUFORC summarized in a case brief.

9. THE PHOENIX LIGHTS // 1997

In March 1997, Arizona played host to what the NUFORC dubbed “perhaps the most dramatic UFO sighting” reported in a few years. Dozens of people from all over the state phoned the hotline to report having seen a group of white or red lights in a V formation flying across the sky. One man with flight experience estimated that the lights were about 1000 feet from the ground, and multiple people claimed the display was totally silent—making it unlikely that airplanes were responsible. When that same observer phoned Luke Air Force Base about the event, the operator told him they had received calls from many other witnesses, too. But according to the NUFORC, the base later claimed that nobody had called them about it.

After these “Phoenix Lights” received national media attention several months later, the military finally offered an explanation: The lights were just leftover flares that the Maryland Air National Guard had dropped at the end of an operation in Arizona. But some people remain unconvinced.

10. ELK, ABDUCTED // 1999

Three foresters were planting seedlings in Washington’s mountains when a gently wobbly disc-shaped aircraft appeared and drifted toward a herd of elk. Nearly all the animals fled together, but one set off in a different direction. The UFO positioned itself over the lone elk and beamed it right off the ground, though the observers couldn’t discern any “visible means of support,” attached to it. The UFO wobbled more, seemingly struggling with the weight of its prey, and eventually rose so high that the witnesses couldn’t see it anymore. They assumed the elk had somehow ended up inside the aircraft.

When NUFORC director Peter Davenport traveled to Washington to conduct an investigation, he was shown the carcass of a pregnant elk that had been found dead just a few miles from the UFO sighting. As for whether that was the same sorry creature that the UFO had supposedly targeted, we’ll almost definitely never know.

11. HIGH-FLYING REAL ESTATE // 2000

Shortly after 4 a.m. one morning in January 2000, Ed Barton, a police officer in Lebanon, Illinois, heard a dispatch about a strange UFO sighting at a neighboring police station. He looked up and saw the object for himself: two extraordinarily bright lights that seemed to merge into one even brighter light. He sped off in the object’s direction until it was almost overhead, and ballparked its altitude somewhere between 1000 and 1500 feet. It was triangular, with a light on each corner and many more along one end. The object abruptly shot through the sky so fast that Barton concluded it couldn’t possibly have been created by humans.

Other Illinois residents witnessed it, too. A Millstadt police officer named Craig Stevens thought it was between one and two stories tall, and “perhaps three stories long.” Highland resident Melvern Noll also likened it to a house. “There were big windows, about two and a half feet wide and five or six feet high, two stories, one on top of each other,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2010. “I still believe it was something from another planet.”

Though a spokesman for the nearby Scott Air Force Base is said to have claimed that the base’s radar had been shut off at the time and nobody had seen the UFO, other reports allege that the government was involved. The NUFORC received one report from “a highly reliable source” who said the Air National Guard jets "may have been 'scrambled" to take a look at the object,'" and several other people even told the NUFORC that federal government employees visited police departments and citizen witnesses to ask that they “curtail all their statements to the press."

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{ https://www.mentalfloss.com/ }

13-04-2021 om 17:17 geschreven door peter  

Yuri Gagarin: How the first man in space sparked a conspiracy theory

By David Crookes 

Space Mysteries: Before the cosmonaut orbited the Earth, rumors abounded that someone else already had.

Yuri Gagarin trains in the Vostok spacecraft in November 1960, five months before his historic flight. 

(Image credit: Getty)

Everybody knows that Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. Most are also aware that he wasn't the first to go into space. After all, Alan Shepard paved the way for American astronauts on May 5, 1961, while Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stole a march by rocketing into Earth orbit a few weeks earlier on April 12. Or did he? 

Today Gagarin's name is cemented in the record books, and he instantly became a national hero across the Soviet Union. Presented as a triumph of the fiercely fought Space Race against the U.S., the 27 year old, who had been chosen just three days before the mission, spent 108 minutes in space, orbited the Earth and returned fit and well following a drama-filled flight.

• In Photos: Yuri Gagarin, First Man in Space
• Related: 25 Space Conspiracies That Just Won't Die

And yet, before he even embarked on his journey skywards, doubt was seeded in many a person's mind. For rumors had surfaced that the Soviets had successfully launched a man into space before Gagarin set foot in Vostok 1, and the talk was that one cosmonaut had done so on April 7, just five days earlier.

Dennis Ogden, the Moscow-based correspondent for the British Communist Party newspaper, Daily Worker, reported as such, his story splashed across the publication's front page with the headline: "The First Man In Space". It informed readers that the spaceman — "the test-pilot son of a top-ranking aircraft designer" — was "back alive, but suffering from [the] effects of his flight". 

A lost cosmonaut conspiracy theory begins 

Gagarin's feet hadn't even left the ground when the paper hit the newsstands, and it caused something of a stir, sparking the first whispers of a conspiracy theory which has continued to this day. The Soviet Union denied the reports and instead alerted the press to Gagarin's subsequent feat. Ogden also reported this, his article again making the splash as he wrote of a "hero's welcome" and a Soviet Union "wild with joy at [the] first trip outside this world". 

Ogden's article could have been seen as something akin to a correction; confirmation that he was initially wrong about the flight on April 7. But then French journalist Eduard Bobrovsky followed up on Ogden's claims and pointed to the man in question as being an accomplished test pilot called Vladimir Ilyushin, while also stating the flight actually took place on March 25. 

Trouble is, this mission had — according to the press sources — not gone quite as well as planned. That is why, it has long since been claimed, Ilyushin's feat was cast aside in favor of Gagarin's successful launch and landing.

Ilyushin was a Soviet general and a test pilot of high standing. He had broken many speed and altitude records and his father was influential, having designed and built Second World War fighters and bombers. Ilyushin senior had also earned himself a place in government. To that end, his son would have been seen as the perfect person to send into space, his penchant for risk-taking such that the then-34-year-old pilot would have surely relished the task. 

And so the story went that his journey outwards on board his spaceship was fine but, after three supposed orbits, Ilyushin's return went awry. Apparently, his landing was off-course, causing him physical harm and mental anguish. There was even a suggestion that the accident had put him into a coma.

• Related: From Yuri Gagarin's launch to today, human spaceflight has always been political

"The space vessel reportedly was recovered where expected, but Ilyushin was mentally unbalanced and is unconscious in a Moscow hospital," said a report in The Spokesman Review about the journalist's claims on April 12, 1961. The article adds that Bobrovsky said his information came from reliable sources that he could not name and that Russian officers denied the report. 

The Soviet Union claimed Ilyushin was in hospital being treated for injuries he had received in a car accident. The Soviets were not the only ones blinking with disbelief at this. Even the Americans did not believe the journalists' claims. Indeed, Pierre Salinger, the press secretary to the White House at the time, told reporters that there was no evidence of a flight on April 7 and, we have to assume, nothing to have raised suspicion in March either. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) space tracking stations, it transpired, had not picked up on anything, and the U.S. was not about to leap in and heap embarrassment on the Soviet Union without proof. 

And yet, even this wasn't enough to completely quell suspicion. Some journalists believed the claims of a car crash were a mere cover story, and it certainly wasn't beyond the wildest of imaginations to believe the Soviets would seek to bury a mistake since it had been done so many times in the past. 

What's more, in the framework of the Space Race, conspiracists could surmise there was a valid reason for trying to bury such a failure: the Soviets would constantly pull out all the stops to present communism as the superior ideology.

• Related: Are we really in a new space race with China and Russia?

But is that, together with unknown journalistic sources, reason enough to believe that Gagarin's place in history was not quite what it was? Ogden would later claim that he saw a photograph of Ilyushin wearing space gear at the time of the supposed flight, but it has never subsequently surfaced. Meanwhile, Ilyushin himself — who died in 2010, aged 82 — never confessed to having flown into space. He lived to tell the claimed tale, but notably did not.

What has been seen, however, are rumours continuing to swirl long after the event, and they've even been fleshed out. One of the most notable was a 52-minute documentary in 1999 called "The Cosmonaut Cover-Up", released by Global Science Productions and directed by Elliott Haimoff who, in the following year, also helmed "Vladimir Ilyushin: The Real First Man in Space".

Widely broadcast, it claimed Ilyushin had failed to eject from his capsule, crashed in China and, after being captured, was eventually handed back to the U.S.S.R. in 1962. The documentary makers said Ilyushin wouldn't talk about the alleged incidents on camera, according to an article published on Sun Community News, and preferred to maintain his secrecy. 

But was Ilyushin so fearful that, in verifying such claims, he would open himself up to a world in which he did not wish to boldly go? Given that the documentary was being made a number of years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when secrets were finally being divulged and historical events were being flung open, many would suspect not.

All About Space magazine takes you on an awe-inspiring journey through our solar system and beyond, from the amazing technology and spacecraft that enables humanity to venture into orbit, to the complexities of space science.

In fact, the Soviets began to open up well before the U.S.S.R. ceased to be. In 1980 the West finally learned of the death of Valentin Bondarenko, who according to The New York Times, died ten days into a 15-day low-pressure endurance experiment in Moscow in 1961 when fire broke out — even though they had removed his image from an official subsequent training photograph.

It took longer to tell the world of a major launchpad accident that took place on Oct. 24, 1960, and officially killed 78, as eventually revealed to the rest of the world in 1989. There's talk of Gagarin being used for propaganda, but of all the confessions and documents seen since the Soviet Union collapsed, Ilyushin has never featured.

And yet there have been some peculiar pieces of "evidence". Two Italian former amateur radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, claimed to have recorded audio from an orbiting capsule in the days before Gagarin made his flight, and it was actually the fourth slice of startling audio released by the pair. 

The first was from May 1960 of a manned spacecraft reportedly going off-course; the second in November that year of an SOS Morse code from a troubled spacecraft leaving Earth's orbit and, most chillingly, a third in 1961 of a cosmonaut apparently suffocating to death. Should these be hard-and-fast evidence of spaceflights, then we would have to say that not only was Gagarin not the first person into space, Ilyushin was perhaps not first either. But given the supposition was that everyone involved in those three recordings had died, discovering the truth has been even more difficult. And yet theories still mount up.

Who was the first man in space?

What could be made of claims by Mikhail Rudenko, a former Soviet senior engineer and experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456, formed in 1999 by members of the editorial staff of the oldest Soviet paper Pravda, that cosmonauts had been sent into space in 1957, 1958 and 1959?

"All three pilots died during the flights and their names were never officially published," he is quoted as saying in an article published on pravda.ru on April 12, 2001, having explained that the pilots involved were called Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov and took part in sub-orbital flights. "The cosmonauts were to reach space heights in the highest point of such an orbit and then return to the Earth," he added. But considering Pravda has also run with headlines such as "Aliens forced Americans out from the Moon'' and "Alien and human skulls found on Mars", it's a tough call.

Harder still to determine is Ilyushin's location in March and April 1961. The Soviets didn't help themselves in this regard either since they couldn't give a straight answer about the reason why he was seen to be injured — pinned down to that car crash — or when it actually took place. Neither could they offer up a suitable explanation for why he might have been in China. They also went as far as to say he was never actually a cosmonaut and, indeed, it would appear that he wasn't in the original cosmonaut team. No memoirs or declassified information put him there.

Yet it's also difficult to corroborate the Judica-Cordiglia recordings with any data from official sources. Listening stations did not pick up on what they claimed to have committed to tape, and radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, who established the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, dismissed claims of earlier Russian manned space attempts in 1963. 

Even that, however, isn't as clear cut as it sounds. Lovell paid visits to Russia around this time, and there have even been allegations that he was brainwashed. He fell ill that year following such a trip, and the U.K. Ministry of Defence said it might have been due to an attempt to remove his memory of a Soviet offer to build a telescope facility in the U.S.S.R. His son says he was merely ill from exhaustion, according to an article published in February’s edition of Physics World magazine. And that sounds more plausible.

• Related: Russia's next space station-bound Soyuz spacecraft named for first cosmonaut

Besides, supposing Russia had suffered such terrible space attempts which resulted in deaths and crashes, would it really have announced Gagarin's flight in the way it did? 

As James E. Oberg points out in a 1975 article he wrote in Space World magazine, the Russian news agency TASS — frequently used as a front organisation by the Soviet intelligence agency — released its first bulletin while Gagarin was still in-flight. If it was worried about the potential for bad news, wouldn't it have been better to wait until the mission was over and Gagarin's feet were firmly back on the ground, rather than risk Gagarin's spacecraft hitting the same problems as the one claimed to have taken place just days before?

Maybe we will never know. The two men who would have been directly involved are no longer alive — Gagarin was killed when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed on March 27, 1968, when he was 34. Given the evidence that has been made available, the smart money remains on Gagarin having been the first person on a manned spaceflight Russian space history can be murky and difficult to pick apart, but in truth there is no real reason to lie in instances such as this.

Additional resources: 

• Read more about the Vostok Program
• Learn about the Jodrell Bank Observatory
• The most extreme records in human spaceflight 

{ https://www.space.com/ }

13-04-2021 om 16:46 geschreven door peter