Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS ALREADY 13 YEARS AND 1 MONTH.
ON 06/07/2024 MORE THAN 2.101.500
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
01-05-2021
Three UFO Sightings Reported 18 Miles Apart
Three UFO Sightings Reported 18 Miles Apart
Three separate UFO sightings took place within 18 miles of one another in the space of a month. The latest sightings of mysterious objects have all been reported with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a database of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
In Tullibody, a triangular-shaped aircraft was observed on Friday evening, March 26. A witness was walking their dog when they spotted an orange coloured light from a south-westerly direction coming towards them.
Their first immediate thought was a Chinese lantern, but they changed their mind when they observed it moving too fast. So, they then thought of a meteorite, but it was bright orange composed of three small triangles close together.
They watched it until it vanished into a bank of clouds. They moved on to think about it further when another UFO appeared from a similar direction with the same colour, speed, and form.
The mysterious object moved smoothly with no sound, vapour trail, and blinking lights. The second one looked like it caught up the previous, putting a spurt and giving off a little exhaust of similar colour. The puff of exhaust stayed in the same place and left a tiny orange dot in the sky before it again vanished into the cloud bank.
The eagle-eyed witness believes this can be explained away logically.
The phone of the spotter was broken; therefore, they have no evidence except their description. They have been thinking more about what they saw that night. The incident took place at 8.30 pm and was reported to MUFON on March 29.
Coincidentally, another UFO sighting was reported three days later, 18 miles away in Cumbernauld.
Someone witnessed this sighting in the Lanarkshire town on Tuesday, March 23, shortly after 9pm, and reported that same day to MUFON.
On this occasion, the witness managed to take video footage. The video shows a white, flickering light that, according to the witness, remained in the skies for more than two hours, but the video only lasts for more than three minutes.
The third sighting happened on Wednesday, April 21. A witness claimed to have observed a UFO moving from north to east and then changed direction back north before vanishing. Two small objects flashed above it.
The incident was reported to MUFON that same day. Video footage shows a white light flashing in the sky and seems to be coming from a type of craft but is not clearly identifiable from the clip.
Antarctica pyramids claim: ‘Oldest pyramid on Earth' is hidden on icy continent
Antarctica pyramids claim: ‘Oldest pyramid on Earth' is hidden on icy continent
THE oldest pyramids on Earth are hidden away under the deep cold snow of Antarctica, conspiracy theorists have shockingly claimed on the History Channel.
Ancient alien theorists who are certain secret pyramids are concealed all around the globe, think some may be hidden on Antarctica. Conspiracy theorists, in particular, point to a vaguely pyramid-like structure near the Shackleton mountain range on the icy continent. The “pyramid” in question, when viewed on satellite imagery, does appear to have four steep sides much like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
This incredibly bizarre theory was presented on the History Channel’s TV series Ancient Aliens, which investigates various extraterrestrial theories.
Episode one of season 11 of Ancient Aliens, explored the remote possibility such pyramids were left behind by ancient alien visitors or human civilisations.
Conspiracy theory author David Childress told Ancient Aliens there is a distinct possibility the Shackleton pyramid is the oldest of its kind on Earth.
He said: “If this gigantic pyramid in Antarctica is an artificial structure, it would probably be the oldest pyramid on the planet and in fact, it might be the master pyramid that all the other pyramids on planet Earth were designed to look like.”
Another conspiracy theorist agreed, saying: "All the way around the world we find evidence of pyramid structures.
"We should start looking at the possibility there was habitation on Antarctica.
"Was it a lost civilisation? Could it be ancient astronauts?
"And just maybe, the earliest monuments of our own civilisation came from Antarctica.”
But the theory was challenged by Dr Michael Salla, author of Exopolitics Political Implications of the Extraterrestrial Presence.
The alien expert argued the Antarctic pyramid is just one node in a global network of power-generating pyramids strategically places around Earth.
A popular pyramid conspiracy claims the triangular structures act as power generators of sorts, built for the purpose of transiting vast amounts of energy wirelessly.
Dr Salla said: “There has been extensive research done on pyramids throughout the world, in terms of their structure an what is they really are.
“One of the theories is that pyramids are power generators and so if you have these pyramids strategically placed around the world generating a charge, it’s possible to create a general standing wave around the world that is a wireless transmission of energy.”
However, not everyone who saw the Ancient Aliens episode was convinced by the wild theories presented.
YouTube user Derrick commented: “Snow covered pyramid shape in Antarctica, I believe geologists would call that a mountain.”
Lazaros Tsakpounidis said: “I feel like I’m losing my brain cells after watching this.”
And Mohammad Ziaul Mushtafa Khan said: “No evidence, only a bunch of authors referred them as extraterrestrial theorists claimed everything on Earth is conspired by some aliens, now latest victim is Antarctica.
“Maybe geologist must take lessons from so-called experts.”
And according to geologists, there is nothing unusual about the angular shape of the mountain.
Dr Mitch Darcy, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, argued mountains like this are known as nunataks.
Nunataks are exposed and rocky mountain peaks and rides which are naturally occurring and pyramid-like in shape.
Speaking about a similar “Antarctica pyramid” near the Ellsworth Mountains, the geologist told IFLScience: “The peaks are clearly composed of rock, and it’s a coincidence that this particular peak has that shape.
“It’s not a complicated shape, so it’s not a special coincidence either.
“By definition, it is a nunatak, which is simply a peak of rock sticking out above a glacier or an ice sheet.
“This one has the shape of a pyramid, but that doesn’t make it a human construction.”
“Something or someone” is observing the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars (Video)
“Something or someone” is observing the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars (Video)
Mars is getting more interesting every day: The anomalies continue on the neighboring planet and in addition, today we have “a visitor watching” the Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed safely on the Martian surface on February 18, has been carrying the “Ingenuity” helicopter on its belly.
The Rover dropped Ingenuity to the surface of Mars, where it would have to survive temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius).
Once the airfield was selected along with the Perseverance mission team , the spacecraft began to slowly unfold from underneath the rover.
More recently, last Saturday, the helicopter finally landed after Perseverance dropped it 4 inches (10 centimeters) to the Martian surface.
But once the Rover dropped the helicopter, something seems to be watching the process, and naturally it wouldn’t be human or terrestrial or … is it possible that it is? What was on the horizon watching the event?
The Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which arrived with the Rover Perseverance, is the first powered and controlled flight in another world.
During the helicopter deployment process, an unknown anomaly can be seen suspended in the air and near a mountain.
At first glance it seems to be even a possible bird, but of course, we do not believe that it is already, that experts say that Mars is dead.
So if we discard that it is a bird, we are left with a stain that has been impregnated in the Rover’s camera, but it cannot be a stain either, since in the following shots it does not appear.
What was happening there at that time? A UFO perhaps? A biological entity that lives in the skies of Mars?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
SETI Director: “We have no reason to believe that technological advancement and altruism or morality are in any way linked.”
SETI Director: “We have no reason to believe that technological advancement and altruism or morality are in any way linked.”
SETI Director: “We have no reason to believe that technological advancement and altruism or morality are in any way linked.”
While many scientists are doing their best to make first contact, or at least find evidence of an alien civilization, others are asking a crucial question:
Are we sure we really want the aliens to find us?
“We have no reason to believe that technological advancement and altruism or morality are linked in any way,” said SETI researcher Andrew Siemion, when interviewed by Inverse.
“There are probably malevolent civilizations elsewhere in the universe, so it’s certainly something we should consider as we continue to explore it.”
Siemion, who is the director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and director of the Breakthrough Listen project , is invoking a certain tension at the heart of any project seeking extraterrestrial life.
Finding her successfully would change the world, but there is no guarantee that humanity will survive the encounter.
Tendency to make a “bad name”
Noted physicist and SETI expert Michio Kaku shared a similar warning recently, though neither he nor Siemion seem to think the potential risks are reason enough to stop looking for aliens.
“Now personally, I think the aliens would be friendly, but we can’t bet on that,” Kaku told The Guardian earlier this month.
“So I think we will get in touch, but we have to do it very carefully.”
“Too late”
The debate over whether or not humanity should reveal itself to the universe and convey messages to any alien civilizations that may exist overlooks the inconvenient fact that we have not been sneaky so far.
We have been sending radio signals into the cosmos for a century, so any alien within a hundred light years and capable of intercepting a specific “hello universe” message is already more than aware of our existence.
“The point that people miss is that it is too late to hide,” said astrobiologist and president of the METI Institute (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Douglas Vakoch.
“If they are on the way, it is to our advantage to involve them and show them that we are better conversation partners than lunch.”
In the past, many ufologists have interpreted this defensive attitude of scientists as something merely philosophical and / or psychological, which departs from any serious study that considers extraterrestrial visitation to our world.
They argue that characterizing the aliens as a threat is a subtle way to mitigate the heavy blow to the collective ego of the human species.
Since for so long it was located in the “center of the universe” and now it is faced with the possibility of not being the only intelligent one.
In addition to being many steps below those more advanced technological civilizations.
The logic is simple, if something is evil, it cannot be superior to something that is benign (although technologically and cognitively it is the other way around).
On the other hand, detractors of scientists frightened by contact also argue that any highly advanced civilization must necessarily have a certain level of morality and ethics.
For otherwise they would have long ago destroyed themselves under the weight of their own technology.
The Roc stayed aloft for 3 hours and 14 minutes today (April 29).
Stratolaunch's Roc carrier plane performed its second-ever test flight on April 29, 2021.
(Image credit: Stratolaunch)
The biggest airplane ever built now has two flights under its belt.
Stratolaunch's Roc carrier plane, which is being groomed to haul hypersonic vehicles aloft, conducted its second-ever test flight Thursday morning (April 29).
The giant aircraft, which features a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters), took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in southeastern California at 10:28 a.m. EDT (1428 GMT; 7:28 local California time) on a data-gathering shakeout cruise that lasted three hours and 14 minutes.
Roc reached a maximum altitude of 14,000 feet (4,267 m) and a top speed of 199 mph (320 kph) during Thursday's test flight, which Stratolaunch deemed a success.
"We're very pleased with how the Stratolaunch aircraft performed today, and we are equally excited about how much closer the aircraft is to launching its first hypersonic vehicle," Stratolaunch chief operating officer Zachary Krevor said during a postflight news conference today.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen established Stratolaunch in 2011 with the idea that Roc would be used to launch satellites in midair. But Allen died in October 2018 without seeing that vision become reality, or even seeing the twin-fuselage Roc get off the ground. The plane didn't make its first — and, until today, only — test flight until April 2019.
The company was sold in October 2019 to its current owners, who recast Roc's role. The plane will now serve as a mobile launch platform for hypersonic vehicles, maneuverable craft that travel at least five times faster than the speed of sound.
Stratolaunch is developing its own family of hypersonic vehicles, including a reusable 28-foot-long (8.5 m) craft called Talon-A, which will be the first to fly with Roc. But that won't happen for a while yet; Roc needs to make a number of additional solo flights first, company representatives said today.
If all goes according to plan, the first drop tests with Roc and a Talon-A test article will occur early next year. An expendable version of Talon-A will reach hypersonic speeds later in 2022, and the first flight with the reusable Talon-A variant will follow in 2023, said Stratolaunch chief technology officer Daniel Millman.
The data gathered during Talon-A flights might be of interest to the U.S. military, which has been developing its own hypersonic vehicles for years now, though none are operational yet. (Hypersonic vehicles are good weapon-delivery systems, because their maneuverability makes them tougher to counteract than traditional ballistic missiles.)
"One of the areas that we're looking at is, how can we help the Department of Defense in mitigating risks for a lot of their expensive flight testing?" Millman said. "Our testbed has the ability to carry payloads. It has the ability to test materials. It has the ability to fly a variety of profiles that are of interest to folks across the spectrum both offensively and defensively in terms of hypersonics."
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity (lower right, photographed by the Perseverance rover) didn't get off the ground as planned on April 29, 2021.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity was supposed to get a real workout this morning (April 29), but things didn't go as planned.
The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper was scheduled to lift off from the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater today around 10:12 a.m. EDT (1412 GMT), kicking off its fourth flight on the Red Planet. That didn't happen.
"Aim high, and fly, fly again. The #MarsHelicopter's ambitious fourth flight didn't get off the ground, but the team is assessing the data and will aim to try again soon. We'll keep you posted," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity's technology-demonstrating mission, said via Twitter today.
Tests here on Earth suggested that fix would be effective about 85% of the time, Ingenuity team members said. It's possible that the same issue cropped up today, and the latest attempt just fell into the unlucky 15% slot. But we'll have to wait until Ingenuity's handlers have performed the requisite analyses to find out more.
Ingenuity landed with NASA's Perseverance rover on Feb. 18 inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted a big lake and a river delta in the ancient past.
Ingenuity deployed from Perseverance's belly on April 3 and began prepping for its flight campaign, which is designed to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars.
The helicopter has performed three flights to date, one apiece on April 19, April 22 and April 25. Those sorties have gotten increasingly ambitious, with the solar-powered chopper traveling 330 feet (100 meters) at a top speed of 4.5 mph (7.2 kph) during April 25's 80-second flight.
The fourth flight was designed to push those boundaries even more. Today's plan called for Ingenuity to cover about 872 feet (266 m) of ground and reach a top speed of 8 mph (13 kph) while staying aloft for 117 seconds, NASA officials said.
Ingenuity's flight window is coming to an end. The campaign is capped at five flights over a one-month stretch from the April 3 deployment date, because Perseverance needs to start focusing on its own mission, which involves hunting for signs of long-gone Mars life and collecting samples for future return to Earth.
(Perseverance has been documenting and supporting Ingenuity's work; for example, communications to and from the helicopter must go through the rover.)
It's unclear at this point if Ingenuity will be able to squeeze five flights in before its time is up, but the helicopter team members have said they will do their best to make that happen.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Selene IV crewmembers focus on their research projects at their workstations in the HI-SEAS habitat.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Jack Bryan)
Dr. Michaela Musilova is the director of Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program, which conducts analog missions to the moon and Mars for scientific research at a habitat on the volcano Mauna Loa. Currently, she is in command of the two-week Selene IV lunar mission and contributed this report to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Commander's report for the Selene IV moon mission at HI-SEAS
Lunar day 6 (March 18, 2021)
The alien dust machine — that is what the Selene IV crew has been blaming for the bad weather that we have been having during our analog lunar mission. Today is our sixth day on mission and we have barely been able to see anything outside our window due to the massive dust storm raging outside the habitat (aka a thick fog outside the HI-SEAS habitat on the volcano Mauna Loa in Hawaii).
The crew quickly became skeptical that such storms would occur naturally on the moon, so instead they blame aliens for this activity.
Personally, I'm rather happy that the "aliens" are accused of complicating the conditions of our mission instead of me. A number of previous crews used to joke that I'm turning on a hidden fog machine to challenge them and make them deal with being stuck indoors for long periods of time.
During our analog missions, crews can't leave the habitat during bad weather. This is both for their safety to not get lost and hurt in the "dust storms," but also because our simulated spacesuits would get damaged in such conditions. This year, the weather has definitely been keeping the crews on their toes during our missions! Or is it really aliens that are torturing us?
The Selene IV crew decided to take the offensive and requested that our volunteers from the Mission Support team on Earth ask the U.S. Space Force to destroy the aliens' dust machines. Funny enough, a local military base in Hawaii, which we have nicknamed "Space Force," has actually started testing their artillery near our HI-SEAS habitat. While they have not yet "destroyed the dust machines," we appreciate their efforts to help us — at least that is what my crewmembers tell themselves to find comfort from both the dust storms and the constant bombing noise that we hear coming from "Space Force."
All jokes aside, the real comfort that we have experienced during our mission has been from one another. The crew has been keeping themselves busy with their research projects and fun group activities, such as celebrating St. Patrick's Day. The entire habitat transformed into a forest of clovers within a couple of hours and so did our food. Everything was either green or clover-shaped. Even though I teased my crewmembers for their enthusiasm to celebrate this occasion in style, I was very happy that it cheered them all up and that they worked so well together to make our time on mission even more special.
The great teamwork and "taking one for the team attitude" also manifested itself when it was time to do chores. At HI-SEAS, we have a urinal that everyone needs to use, regardless of gender. In this way, we protect the compost toilets from being "drowned" by too much liquid from the crew's urine. After a few months, the urinal filter needs to be replaced and that's definitely not the most pleasant job to do. Our Crew Engineer Jack Bryan kindly took on this unpleasant duty and I volunteered myself to empty the compost toilets halfway through the mission. It's a necessary chore and I don't mind doing it, as I know that most crewmembers struggle to deal with the views and smells that are involved with that duty.
These crew interactions have been a great source of inspiration for Science Communication Officer Monica Parks. She prepares the social media text and pictures, which Mission Support volunteers then post on the HI-SEAS social media pages. Monica has also been observing the crew for her research study. She has found that there are many similarities in the way each one of the crewmembers has reacted to rejection and obstacles in life. The spirit of perseverance is very strong with this group of analog astronauts. For the remainder of our time here, Monica will be having more in-depth conversations with the crew to confirm her various observations about our resilience and drive.
Growing different types of plants has been another source of distractions and positive energy for the crew. These include the Mission to Mars growing spinach using human hair experiment that the Selene III crew started, as well as our long-term hydroponic greenhouse Lettuce Grow experiment in the habitat. Crew Operations Officer Lori Waters has been taking care of these experiments together with Jack. Lori's personal project is also focused on food crop production methods to produce nutrient-dense clovers and microgreens. The clover seeds in the ExoLab experiment, which is paired with the Magnitude.io experiment aboard the ISS, have germinated. They have a first set of leaves showing strong development in this extreme environment at HI-SEAS.
In situ resource utilization (ISRU) Mission Specialist Cameron Crowell's research relies on gathering samples from the surrounding analog regolith during a moonwalk, which hasn't been possible yet due to the dust storms. In the meantime, he has been preparing his techniques for acquiring the geologic samples, since we may only get a very short window between dust storms to perform a moonwalk. Cameron has been documenting life in the habitat for outreach purposes as well, such as for the Space Frontier Foundation that he's on the board of directors for.
Our Crew Systems Engineer Bill O'Hara has completed much of his data gathering tasks in support of a habitat design and operations case study. This project on HI-SEAS is for the Sierra Nevada Corp., where he's a lead systems engineer. Bill has also completed preparations for evaluating lava tubes for habitability, pending the opportunity to execute moonwalks. Like Cameron, he has prepared all of his equipment to be as easy to use in the field as possible, despite the time constraints for moonwalks and the restrictions of our analog spacesuits.
Jack is yet another crewmember that has been limited by the dust storms that are raging outside. He thus focused on an initial catalog of the habitat's waste materials for combination with in situ harvested materials during moonwalks. Jack has been surprised by the results to date, which is why he is reevaluating his preliminary hybrid material composition estimates. The crew generates a considerable amount of paper waste, but significantly less plastic waste than he anticipated. For these reasons, he is looking into the possibility of adding some of the fibrous paper waste into the hybrid material to add toughness, which would be similar to how fiberglass works with resin.
Commander Musilova signing off to another night of keeping our fingers crossed that the alien dust machines will be destroyed. "Space Force" may have more luck tonight so that we'll be able to venture on our first moonwalk of the mission tomorrow. If not, I'm sure that the crew will come up with yet another fun way to keep ourselves from becoming lunatics on the moon.
Follow Michaela Musilova on Twitter @astro_Michaela. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
ALL RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011
With thanks from the Belgian UFO hotline of Frederick Delaere. For recent Belgian observations and research, you can always visit his site https://ufomeldpunt.be/.
This week, a Long March 5B rocket is expected to take off from the Wenchang spaceport. If all goes well, the rocket will insert the 22-ton Tianhe module into low-earth orbit.
Tianhe, the first of three modules forming the core of China's third space station, is designed for three "taikonauts" at a time. The first batch is scheduled to arrive in orbit in June.
Between now and the end of next year, China plans to launch 11 rockets to complete construction of the CSS, as the Chinese space station is now called. China's station will be about one-sixth of the mass of the International Space Station (ISS), which has been circling the earth since 1998.
China also plans to put its Xuntian optical module, a Hubble-size telescope with 300 times the field of Hubble's view, into orbit only a few hundred kilometers from the CSS.
Moscow is also busy in space. This month, Russian television quoted Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov as saying Russia will pull out of the ISS in 2025. The aging station, the only one now in orbit, is unsafe, Moscow claims.
Moreover, Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities, posted a video on Telegram last week, stating that "work is already underway on the first basic module for the new Russian orbital service station." The module will be launched in 2025.
The ISS has been one of the most visible cooperative ventures between Russia and the U.S. in recent years, so the withdrawal is seen as symbolic.
Symbolic or not, Moscow will now go on its own. With the fate of the ISS in doubt—it is in fact nearing the end of its useful life—there could be a "space station gap," as radio talk show host John Batchelor said this week. China's CSS has been built to last more than a decade.
A cold war in the cold domain of space is fast approaching. Chinese ambition and money and Russian technology are teaming up to take on the United States. The pair could be on the verge of dominating the high ground, especially if it can attract other nations to participate in planned joint ventures.
China, in particular, will undoubtedly try to entice international partners away from the American-led ISS. As Brandon Weichert, author of the recently released Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, told Newsweek, if Beijing is successful there will be "massive tech transfers from those countries to China." This and other developments, he says, will "make Chinese space firms more competitive against American ones, which means that the vital infrastructure supporting human space operations could very well become Chinese rather than American."
Because China's space program is run by the People's Liberation Army, Beijing's cooperation with Russia looks dangerous. For instance, Weichert, also publisher of the Weichert Report, notes that the Chinese space station will have a laser. Beijing has said the laser will be used for zapping stray meteors and space junk threatening the orbiting facility, but the weapon is "dual use" and can also be aimed at other countries' satellites.
Richard Fisher of the Virginia-based International Assessment and Strategy Center tells Newsweek that a planned module for the CSS could be used to store weapons and, perhaps, bomb the earth from orbit.
China may end up operating two space stations. Fisher, an expert on China's military, reports that a Chinese source at the 2014 International Astronautical Congress told him that Beijing is thinking of a larger "second-generation" station. He says the plans for a bigger one make sense when the Long March 9 space launch vehicle enters service next decade.
China has other programs that suggest an intent to dominate space. For instance, it plans a 12,992-satellite "mega-constellation" to compete with SpaceX's proposed Starlink constellation. If China succeeds and Elon Musk's company does not—SpaceX faces opposition from both regulators and rivals—Beijing will almost certainly end up dominating 5G and 6G communications on earth.
At the moment, U.S. law imposes severe restrictions on working with the Chinese space program, and many in the scientific community are chafing under those prohibitions—including the Biden administration's NASA. Tricia Larose of the University of Oslo askedScientific American recently, "When are we going to stop looking at our differences and start focusing on our similarities?"
China has made it clear it wants cooperation from scientists around the world. Beijing has even branded its space station with attractive names. The first module is named Tianhe, which translates as "Harmony of the Heavens." The two other main modules are Wentian ("Quest for the Heavens") and Mengtian ("Dreaming of the Heavens").
How nice.
China named its Mars rover Zhurong. The Xinhua News Agency explains Zhurong is the god of fire and tells us "Zhu" means "well wishes" and "rong" translates as "integration." China's official media outlet does not mention, however, that Zhurong is also a god of war—and the god of the South China Sea.
South China Sea? "The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island," said Ye Peijian, the head of China's lunar program, in July 2018. Huangyan is Beijing's name for Scarborough Shoal. Scarborough is in the South China Sea, and Beijing has already seized that reef from the Philippines.
"Zhurong," unfortunately, is a hint of what Beijing has in store for us in space.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on Twitter: @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
MUFON CASE : 114965 Vancouver, Washington ( April 28, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Fleet of 8-10 RED LIGHTS Long Description of Sighting Report
I was out doing my nightly walk in Wyeast Communty Park with my dogs when 8-10 RED lights came out and under the cloud layer in some sort of formationrs what caught my eye was they were all red lights, using my IPhone XMax I recorded what I was seeing but it barely showed the lights but by adjusting the filter they show up as wmy nightly walk with my dogshite lights coming out under the clouds in some sort of formation toword my stationary position from the North going South. They shortly disappeared back up into cloud layer an no longer visible.
Date Submitted : 2021-04-28 Date of Event : 2021-04-27 / 8:00PM MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : 42721UAP8pm.mov
MUFON CASE : 114966 Wildwood, Missouri ( April 28, 2021 )
Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : TWO NIGHTS - RING CAMERA CAUGHT OBJECT Long Description of Sighting Report
THIS THING CAME 2 NIGHTS SO FAR. IT HAS 6 LIGHTS AND WHAT LOOKS LIKE MATERIAL BETWEEN THE LIGHTS AND EXTENDING OUT TO THE SIDES. THE HOME IS NEAR AN AIRPORT AND DRONES ARE RESTRICTED HERE. THE LIGHTS DO TAKE TURNS BLINKING. BACKS UP BUT THE LIGHTS NEVER TURN.
Date Submitted : 2021-04-28 Date of Event : 2021-04-28 : 2021-04-25
Debris from crashed object caught by Perseverance Mars Rover
Debris from crashed object caught by Perseverance Mars Rover
On April 28, 2021, the Perseverance Mars Rover captured something what looks like distorted metallic-looking debris from a crashed object.
The object compared to the many rocks shows that it does not belong to the surrounding landscape.
The clearly visible distorted parts of the object, which may be debris from a crashed craft, indicates that it is artificially and that the Jezero crater on Mars has been visited by an intelligent race in the past.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:Ruins, strange artifacts on other planets, moons, ed ( Fr, EN, NL )
A SpaceX Rocket Nearly Collided with a UFO, NASA Says
A SpaceX Rocket Nearly Collided with a UFO, NASA Says
Can you imagine being advised that you’re about to collide with a UFO? A team of astronauts made up of Akikho Hoshide, Thomas Pesquet, Shane Kimbrough, and Megan McArthur was told that they’re about to collide with an unidentified flying object. According to reports from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a SpaceX rocket came close to colliding with an unknown object.
NASA decided to warn the crew because there would be insufficient time to execute an evasion maneuver, as the US space agency explained. As a precautionary measure, the team donned their pressurized suits.
Fortunately, the collision did not happen as the UFO was 45 kilometers from the spacecraft. The astronauts reached their destination at the International Space Station (ISS) safe and sound on April 24 to join the Crew-2 mission.
We Could Detect Alien Civilizations Through Their Interstellar Quantum Communication
We Could Detect Alien Civilizations Through Their Interstellar Quantum Communication
Since the mid-20th century, scientists have been looking for evidence of intelligent life beyond our Solar System. For much of that time, scientists who are engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have relied on radio astronomy surveys to search for signs of technological activity (aka. “technosignatures“). With 4,375 exoplanets confirmed (and counting!) even greater efforts are expected to happen in the near future.
In anticipation of these efforts, researchers have been considering other possible technosignatures that we should be on the lookout for. According to Michael Hippke, a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley SETI Research Center, the search should also be expanded to include quantum communication. In an age where quantum computing and related technologies are nearing fruition, it makes sense to look for signs of them elsewhere.
The search for technosignatures, and what constitutes the most promising ones, has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. This is due in large part to the fact that thousands of exoplanets are available for follow-up studies using the next-generation telescopes that will be operational in the coming years. With these instruments searching for needles in the “cosmic haystack,” astrobiologists need to have a clear of what to look for.
In September of 2018, NASA hosted a Technosignatures Workshop, which was followed by the release of their Technosignature Report. By August of 2020, NASA and the Blue Marble Institute sponsored another meeting – Technoclimes 2020 – to discuss concepts for future searches that would look for technosignatures beyond the usual radio signals. As someone who has dedicated his professional life to SETI, Hippke has many insights to offer.
The Search Thus Far
As he noted in his study, modern SETI efforts began in 1959 when famed SETI pioneer Giuseppe Cocconi & physicist Philip Morrison (both of Cornell University at the time) published their seminal paper, “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” In this paper, Coccini and Morrison recommended searching for signs of intelligent life by looking for narrow-band signals in the radio spectrum.
But as Hippke notes, six decades and more than one hundred dedicated search programs later, surveys that have looked for these particular technosignatures have yielded nothing concrete. This is not to say that the scientists have been looking for the wrong signatures so far, but that it could be useful to consider casting a wider net. As Hippke explained in his paper:
“We are looking (and should keep looking) for narrow-band lighthouse blasts, even though we have found none yet. At the same time, it is possible to expand our search… It is sometimes argued in the hallways of astronomy departments that we ‘just have to tune into the right band’ and – voilà – will be connected to the galactic communication channel.”
Photo of the central region of the Milky Way
Credit: UCLA SETI Group/Yuri Beletsky, Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory
A Quantum Revolution
While virtually all attempts to create quantum processors are relatively recent (occurring since the turn of the century), the concept itself dates back to the early 1970s. It was at this time that Stephen Weisner, a of professor physics at Columbia University at the time, proposed that information could be securely coded by taking advantage of the principle of superposition.
This principle states the “spin” of an electron, a fundamental property that can be oriented “up” or “down,” is indeterminate – meaning that it can be either one or both simultaneously. So while an up or down spin is similar to the zeroes and ones of binary code, the superposition principle means that quantum computers can perform an exponentially greater number of calculations at any given time.
Beyond the ability to perform more functions, Hippke identifies four possible reasons why an ETI would opt for quantum communications. These include “gate-keeping,” quantum supremacy, information security, and information efficiency. “They are preferred over classical communications with regards to security and information efficiency, and they would have escaped detection in all previous searches,” he writes.”
The use of computers has evolved considerably over the past century, from isolated machines to the worldwide web, and possibly to an interplanetary network in the future. Looking to the future, Hippke argues that is not farfetched to believe that humanity may come to rely on an interstellar quantum network that enables distributed quantum computing and the transmission of qubits over long distances.
Based on the assumption that humanity is not an outlier, but representative of the norm (aka. the Copernican Principle) it is logical to assume that an advanced ETI would have created such a network already. Based on humanity’s research into quantum communications, Hippke four possible methods. The first is “polarization encoding,” which relies on the horizontal and vertical polarization of light to represent data.
The second method involves the “Fock state” of photons, where a signal is encoded by alternating between a discreet number of particles and vacuum (similar to binary code). The two remaining options involve either time-bin encoding – where early and late arrival is used – or coherent state of light encoding, where light is amplitude-squeezed or phase-squeezed to simulate a binary code.
Security and Supremacy
Of the many benefits that quantum communications would present for a technologically advanced species, Gate-Keeping is especially interesting because of the implications it could have for SETI. After all, the disparity between what we assume is the statistical likelihood of intelligent life in our Universe and the lack of evidence for it (aka. the Fermi Paradox) cries out for explanations. As Hippke puts it:
“ETI may deliberately choose to make communications invisible for less advanced civilizations. Perhaps most or all advanced civilization feel the need to keep the “monkeys” out of the galactic channel, and let members only participate above a certain technological minimum. Mastering quantum communications may reflect this limit.”
The idea of quantum communication was first argued by Mieczyslaw Subotowicz, a professor of astrophysics at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin (Poland), in 1979. In a paper titled “Interstellar communication by neutrino beams,” Subotowicz argued that the difficulties this method presented would be a selling point to a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization (ETC).
By opting for a means of communication that has such a small cross-section, an ETC would only be able to communicate with similarly advanced species. However, Hippke noted, this also makes it virtually impossible to detect entangled pairs of neutrinos. For this reason, entangled photons would not only provide for gate-keeping, but they would also be detectable by those meant to receive them.
Similarly, quantum communication is also preferable because of the security it allows for, which is one of the main reasons the technology is being developed here on Earth. Quantum key distribution (QKD) enables two parties to produce a shared key that can be used to encrypt and decrypt secret messages. In theory, this will lead to a new era where encrypted communications and databases are immune to conventional cyber attacks.
In addition, QKD has the unique advantage of letting the two parties detect a potential third party attempting to intercept their messages. Based on quantum mechanics, any attempt to measure a quantum system will collapse the wave function of any entangled particles. This will produce detectable anomalies in the system, which would immediately send up red flags. Said Hippke:
“We do not know whether ETI values secure interstellar communication, but it is certainly a beneficial tool for expansive civilizations which consist of actions, like humanity today. Therefore, it is plausible that future humans (or ETI) have a desire to implement a secure interstellar network.”
Another major advantage to quantum computing is its ability to solve problems exponentially faster than its digital counterparts – what is known as “quantum supremacy.” The classic example is Shor’s algorithm, a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for factoring integers that a conventional computer would take years to solve, but a quantum computer could crack in mere seconds.
In traditional computing, public-key encryption (such as the RSA-2048 encryption) employs mathematical functions that are very difficult and time-consuming to compute. Given that they can accommodate an exponentially greater number of functions, it is estimated that a quantum computer could crack the same encryption in about ten seconds.
Last, but not least, there’s the greater photon information efficiency (PIE) that quantum communications offer over classical channels – measured in bits per photon. According to Hippke, quantum communications will improve the bits per photon efficiency rating by up to one-third. In this regard, the desire for more efficient data transmissions will make the adoption of a quantum network something of an inevitability.
“Turned the other way around, classical channels are energetically wasteful, because they do not use all information encoding options per photon,” he writes. “A quantum advantage of order 1/3 does not seem like much, but why waste it? It is logical to assume that ETI prefers to transmit more information rather than less, per unit energy.”
Challenges
Of course, no SETI-related pitch would be complete without mentioning the possible challenges. For starters, there’s the matter of decoherence, where energy (and hence, information) is lost to the background environment. Where transmissions through interstellar space are concerned, the main issues are distance, free electrons (solar wind), interplanetary dust, and the interstellar medium – low-density clouds of dust and gas.
“As a baseline, the largest distance over which successful optical entanglement experiments have been performed on Earth is 144 km,” notes Hippke. Since the mass density of the Earth’s atmosphere is 1.2 kg m-3, this means that a signal passing through a column 144 km (~90 mi) in length was dealing with a column density of 1.728×105 kg m-2. In contrast, the column density between Earth and the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is eight orders of magnitude lower (3×10-8 kg m-2).
Another issue is the delay imposed by a relativistic Universe, which means that messages to even the closest star systems would take years. As a result, quantum computation is something that will be performed locally for the most part, and only condensed qubits will be transmitted between communication nodes. With this in mind, there are a few indications humanity could be on the lookout for in the coming years.
What to Look For?
Depending on the method used to transmit quantum information, certain signatures would result that SETI researchers could identify. At present, SETI facilities that conduct observations in the visible light spectrum are not equipped to receive quantum communications (since the technology does not exist yet). However, they are equipped to detect photons, obtain spectra, and perform polarization experiments.
As such, argues Hippke, they would be able to tease out potential signals from the background noise of space. This is similar to what Professor Lubin suggested in a 2016 paper (“The Search for Directed Intelligence“), where he argued that optical signals (lasers) used for directed-energy propulsion or communications would result in occasional “spillover” that would be detectable.
In much the same way, “errant” photons could be collected by observatories and measured for signs of encoding using various techniques (including the ones identified in the study). One possible method Hippke recommends is long-duration interferometry, where multiple instruments monitor the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic fields in space over time and compare them to a baseline to discern the presence of encoding.
One thing bears consideration though: If by listening in on ETI quantum communications, won’t that cause information to be lost? And if so, would the ETI in question not realize we were listening in? Assuming they were not aware of us before, they sure would be after all this went down! One might conclude that it would be better to not eavesdrop on the conversations of more advanced species!
Did Nikola Tesla Unintentionally Detect Signals From Another Civilization?
Did Nikola Tesla Unintentionally Detect Signals From Another Civilization?
An eccentric genius and a man in every respect extraordinary was born on the night of 9/10 of July, 1856 in the Croatian village of Smiljan, a village near Gospic Lika, (the Krajina, a military district of Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Republic of Croatia)
“A purpose was behind these signals… They are the results of an attempt by some human beings, not of this world; to speak to us by signals.”
– Nikola Tesla
According to messagetoeagle.com, this event took place at the stroke of midnight “with lightning striking during a summer storm”. Because of the unusual moment of his birth, the midwife commented that “He’ll be a child of the storm,” to which his mother answered: “No, of light.”
The great man is gone but… he will be remembered forever!
Those who knew him say he was not a normal human, but a superman, either a reincarnated master – or even an ET with superior mental powers placed here to assist in Earth’s technological development!
Nikola Tesla could have gone down in history as the man who invented the 20th century. Instead his theories were ridiculed and he died alone in a hotel bedroom.
Mostly, he did not improve on already existing technology, but created prototypes and sometimes entire new industries.
Many of his pioneer inventions he carried with him to his grave. But he believed in the destiny of man who, in his words, “searches, discovers and invents, designs and constructs, and covers with monuments of beauty, grandeur and awe, the star of his birth.”(Velikovsky)
Tesla was the first to attempt to communicate with neighboring worlds using radio waves.
In 1899, he was at his laboratory in Colorado Springs, driving monstrous surges of power into the Earth and also beaming energy outward from the 280-foot tower he’d built. He had instruments to record electromagnetic disturbances anywhere within a radius of 1,100 miles. It was an experiment of Frankensteinian proportions.
During the tests, Tesla began picking up odd data on his instruments. He was sure that this was a signal of some sort.
The signals came periodically, and with such a clear suggestion of number and order that they were not traceable to any cause then known to man.
“I was familiar… with such electrical disturbances as are produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents, and I was as sure as I could be of any fact that these variations were due to none of these causes…”
“The nature of my experiments precluded the possibility of the changes being produced by atmospheric disturbances. . . . Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental . . . a purpose was behind these signals. . . . They are the results of an attempt by some human beings, not of this world; to speak to us by signals…”
“I am absolutely certain that they are not caused by anything terrestrial…”
“The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.”
“I am absolutely certain that they are not caused by anything terrestrial…”
(N. Tesla)
In Collier’s Weekly dated February 9, 1901, Tesla wrote in “Talking with the Planets” as follows:
“I can readily demonstrate that, with an expenditure not exceeding two thousand horse-power, signals can be transmitted to a planet such as Mars with as much exactness and certitude as we now send messages by wire from New York to Philadelphia. These means are the result of long-continued experiment and gradual improvement…”
He claimed he had detected an artificial signal from Mars, or possibly Venus, using high-voltage equipment he had set up at Colorado Springs, Colorado. He also predicted that interplanetary communication would “become the dominating idea of the century that has just begun.”
After informing the world of these signals, he would neither discuss the devices he used nor the signals any further. However, the issue was further researched, according to a report entitled “A Historic Report on Life in Space: Tesla, Marconi, Todd.” mentioned by Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist and the best-known scientific ufologist in North America and probably the world, in his book Captured!: The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience“.
The purpose of the paper was to examine the original data of Tesla, Marconi and Todd to determine whether or not current science was duplicating the effort made by these men to detect radio frequency communication from extraterrestrial life forms on some distant planet.
“I am absolutely certain that they are not caused by anything terrestrial…”
(N. Tesla)
“Communication once established, even in the simplest way, as by a mere interchange of numbers, the progress toward more intelligible communication would be rapid.
Absolute certitude as to the receipt and interchange of messages would be reached as soon as we could respond with the number “four,” say, in reply to the signal “one, two, three.”
“The Martians, or the inhabitants of whatever planet had signalled to us, would understand at once that we had caught their message across the gulf of space and had sent back a response. To convey a knowledge of form by such means is, while very difficult, not impossible, and I have already found a way of doing it.
“What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come? For that it will some time be accomplished must be clear to every thoughtful being.
“Something, at least, science has gained. But I hope that it will also be demonstrated soon that in my experiments in the West I was not merely beholding a vision, but had caught sight of a great and profound truth…”
Did Tesla’s experiments transmit radio signals to some of our nearer planets?
According to Su-Shu-Huang of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, stars nearly identical to the sun are most likely to have developed life,” Stanton Friedman writes in his book.
Had Tesla unintentionally detected signals from another civilization or did he simply make an error?
Probably, we’ll never know. Because of his financial problems, (he was not a good businessman, but a true scientist) a large part of his research notes and other papers were auctioned off after his death.
What happened to his other research papers? How much of Tesla’s work remains hidden and confiscated?
It’s unknown and thus, much of his scientific work of great value has been lost for ever.
A great mystery still surrounds him and his genius work! He will never be forgotten!
Tianhe will be the central piece of the T-shaped Chinese Space Station.
The construction of China's space station is underway.
The core element of the Chinese Space Station launched to Earth orbit tonight (April 28), lifting off at 11:23 p.m. EDT (0323 GMT on April 29) atop a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on the island of Hainan.
The 54-foot-long (16.6 meters) module, known as Tianhe ("Harmony of the Heavens"), is the first space station component to launch. It will be joined in low Earth orbit later by two slightly smaller elements, forming a T-shaped space station that China aims to complete by the end of 2022.
But Tianhe will see considerable action far before then: A Chinese cargo spacecraft is expected to visit the module next month, and three astronauts will come aboard in June, if all goes according to plan.
China began laying the foundation for today's launch a decade ago. In September 2011, the nation launched a prototype space lab called Tiangong 1, to continue building its human spaceflight skill set and test the technologies needed to assemble and maintain a large space station in Earth orbit.
The uncrewed Shenzhou 8 spacecraft docked autonomously with Tiangong 1 in November 2011. Then, in June 2012, Shenzhou 9 carried three astronauts to the space lab for a two-week stay. A year later, three more crewmembers visited Tiangong 1 for two weeks on the Shenzhou 10 mission. (The Shenzhou program had three crewed orbital human spaceflights under its belt before the Tiangong 1 visits, sending astronauts aloft in 2003, 2005 and 2008.)
No crewed craft darkened Tiangong 1's door after that. But China launched a second space lab,Tiangong 2, in September 2016. The next month, Shenzhou 11 sent three astronauts to Tiangong 2, and this time they stayed aboard for a month.
In April 2017, the uncrewed Tianzhou 1 cargo vessel docked with Tiangong 2 and refuelled the space lab. Tianzhou 1 repeated this docking-refueling dance two more times over the next five months, showcasing capabilities that come in quite handy for space station operators.
Neither Tiangong 1 nor Tiangong 2 remains aloft. The first space lab fell to Earth in an uncontrolled fashion in April 2018, burning up over the southern Pacific Ocean. But China maintained control over Tiangong 2 to the end, guiding the craft to its demise in July 2019, also over the South Pacific.
When it's up and running, the Chinese Space Station will be just 20% as massive as the International Space Station (ISS), which would tip the scales at about 460 tons here on Earth. And, whereas the ISS routinely accommodates six or seven astronauts at a time, China's version is expected to host three-person crews.
But China plans to cram a lot of research activity into this smaller package. For example, the station will feature 14 internal experiment racks and more than 50 external docking points for instruments designed to gather data in the space environment, Scientific American reported recently.
The Chinese station's managers have already selected about 100 experiments to conduct on the craft, and some of them could start gathering data as soon as next year, Scientific American reported.
Not all of these investigations will be performed by Chinese scientists. Nine international experiments have already been selected to fly on the station through a program run jointly by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the China Manned Space Agency, and more such solicitations are expected in the future.
None of those nine research projects are based in the United States, which isn't terribly surprising. U.S. law prohibits NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from cooperating with their Chinese counterparts on space-related activities, unless Congress has granted approval of such cooperation in advance. This prohibition, which has been in place since 2011, is known as the Wolf Amendment after its champion, former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Virginia).
And China is not a partner in the ISS consortium, which is led by the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
China also plans to launch a powerful space telescope in 2024. The observatory will occupy an orbit similar to that of the space station, Chinese officials have said, allowing the scope to be refuelled, upgraded and maintained relatively efficiently.
There's a precedent for such on-orbit work; NASA astronauts serviced the Hubble Space Telescope during five space shuttle missions from 1993 to 2009. But each time, they had to launch to Hubble from Earth; there was no nearby space station to serve as a staging facility. (Hubble flies about 90 miles, or 150 kilometers, higher than the ISS, which began hosting astronauts continuously in November 2000.)
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
The Library of the Great Silence will feature artifacts of transition, like this handaxe.
(Image credit: Jonathon Keats)
Intelligent aliens will soon have a space here on Earth where they can share how they made it through their technological adolescence.
We haven't yet heard from any such beings, of course. Some researchers find this "Great Silence" puzzling, given how old the universe is and how many potentially habitable worlds dot its vast expanse.
One possible explanation is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves once they become "advanced" enough to explore the cosmos in a meaningful way. Such power is inherently hard to control and can burn you to the ground more easily than it can fuel an outward push, the idea goes.
Indeed, it's unclear if humanity will make it over this developmental hurdle; we had some close calls with nuclear armageddon during the Cold War, after all, and we may be in the process of offing ourselves (and many other species) right now via anthropogenic climate change.
So we could probably use some advice from other creatures who managed to get over the hump — and a new art project aims to foster such cosmic cultural exchange. Experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats is developing a "Library of the Great Silence," which will be based at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California.
Keats wants the library to be universally accessible, and we can't assume that beings from across the universe will understand any languages spoken here on Earth. So the facility will house not books but artifacts of transition — stuff like handaxes, fossils of extinct species and shards of trinitite, the greenish glass forged by the intense heat of the first-ever atomic bomb blast, at New Mexico's Trinity Site in July 1945.
If all goes according to plan, the collection will eventually become an interstellar research center, incorporating ideas sent in by creatures across the cosmos.
"Although interstellar exchange could take time, a material archive of transformations will have immediate global value that may be sufficient to extend the lifespan of human civilization in the interim," reads a description of the project, which is a collaboration with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. (Keats is currently an artist in residence there, and Hat Creek is the site of the Allen Telescope Array, which SETI Institute researchers use to scan the skies for possible signals from ET.)
"Manipulating existentially significant objects without the use of words — and without the underlying assumptions of language or limitations on who participates in the conversation — may facilitate comprehension of human behaviors that has previously eluded us, or even directly encourage beneficial practices such as cooperation," the description adds.
Hat Creek may not be the only repository of such artifacts, either.
"We're starting to reach out to libraries that already exist about whether they would host, potentially, branches," Keats told Space.com. "And, simultaneously, we're actually looking off the planet and starting to look at what it would take to have a branch on the moon, for instance."
You can learn more about the Library of the Great Silence here. And the project is getting a formal kick-off of sorts this afternoon (April 29), via a conversation between Keats and his chief advisor on the project, SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak. The 30-minute discussion starts at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), and you can watch it live online.
Our failure to make contact with ET may actually reflect a Great Deafness rather than a Great Silence, given how brief and sketchy the search has been to date, Shostak told Space.com. But he sees real value in Keats' library project, and in such artistic efforts generally.
"It may seem strange at first that an organization like the SETI Institute, which is mostly about research, would have an artist in residence, and, in fact, a whole bunch of artists in residence. What good is that?" Shostak said.
"I think it's because it gives you a different point of view," he said. "Artists give you another way of looking at the world — they look at the world completely differently than scientists do."
That's certainly true of Keats, whose projects — many of them space-themed — tend to inspire us to reassess our views of the universe and our place in it. The new library fits this pattern, seeking out an enlightening shift of perspective.
"The Library of the Great Silence is one of these instances where so many of the questions that we seem incapable of addressing — and that we actually are not asking, I don't think, in the way that we need to be asking — can potentially be asked by imagining how they might be asked if those in the conversation were not only us," Keats said.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
Australian Pilot Followed By Large UFO & Mysteriously Disappeared 43 Years Ago, Never Found
Australian Pilot Followed By Large UFO & Mysteriously Disappeared 43 Years Ago, Never Found
There are many stories about people missing in strange and sometimes inexplicable circumstances. Most of them are rather fascinating and close to sci-fiction. But a story of the disappearance of Australian pilot Frederick Valentich is documented in detail and at the same time baffles the reasoning of everyone who comes across it.
Since his childhood, Valentich had a great passion for aviation and flying. In 1977, at the age of 18, after he sat in the cockpit of a helicopter, he decided to become a pilot. He lived in Melbourne with his parents and a younger brother named Richard who was only 12 when Frederick vanished. It is said that he had about 150 total hours’ flying time and was also certified to fly at night under special conditions. Nevertheless, he failed flying tests twice and during the performance of the test exercises, at least four times created dangerous situations on the ground and in the air.
On October 21, 1978, Valentich (20) planned a date with his fiancee Rhonda Rushton to fly in his light-engine Cessna 182L aircraft from Moorabbin to King Island. Somehow, the plan failed as Rhonda could not leave work earlier and also unable to call him. Due to the tight schedule of the flight, Valentich had to leave her behind, began his flight at 18:19 and flew at an air level of 1500 m.
The plane flew to the island, not over the shortest distance, but making a broken line to minimize the duration of the flight over the Bass Strait, a sea strait separating Tasmania from the Australian mainland. At the 41st minute of the flight, the plane reached Cape Otway and turned towards the strait.
At 19:06, Valentich informed the ground control service of Melbourne that he had seen an unidentified aircraft flying higher and faster. The controllers did not know anything about the planes flying in that area, and the radars showed that Valentich was flying all alone. Nevertheless, Frederick insisted that there was a large aircraft next to him, which appeared and disappeared from his view. Over the next 5 minutes, he continued to talk about the spaceship flying around him, however, he did not give any detailed description of it. The only significant information related to the appearance of the UFO given by him was that it had four landing lights.
During his communication with the controller, Valentich said that he began to fly in a circle. The next minute, he said that the object was approaching him from the southeast and that it was not an airplane. Over the next several seconds, signal disturbance was heard on the radio, after which they lost communication.
It has been over 43 years since Valentich’s plane disappeared. The search operation carried out in the Bass Strait and on King Island had no result, although it continued until October 25. The investigation carried out by the Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development, lasted for 3.5 years. On April 27, 1982, it ended with a laconic verdict and the reason for the disappearance of the aircraft has not been determined.
Richard Valentich said there was no family fixation on UFOs. “The concept of a UFO taking my brother is very far out there,” he said.
Did he encounter UFO that made him crash or was he abducted by aliens?
The people in authority tried to destroy all records of his flight. It was done ostensibly in order to announce that on October 21, 1978, there was no such flight at all. Moreover, the original audio recording of Valentich’s conversations with the control room has disappeared. In 2008, BBC officials formally requested the original audio recording from the Australian Ministry for Infrastructure but never received it.
At the end of 1978, dozens of reports were received about strange objects and incomprehensible optical phenomena in the sky over the western part of the Bass Strait. In 1998, it became known about the existence of three witnesses, who on October 21, 1978, watched from the shore a flight over the Bass Strait of a light-engine aircraft, which was pursued by green lights.
Interestingly, there was a witness on the ground who claimed to have seen a green light just above Valentich’s plane. The last piece of audio recording with a duration of 17 seconds, in which strange grinding sounds are heard, was examined by researcher Richard Haines. According to him, this audio fragment contained 36 sound signals (bursts) of different frequency spectrum without a clear rhythmic pattern.
UFO researchers have made great efforts to find possible witnesses of the incident with Valentich. According to them, they managed to find more than 20 people who were near the coast in the area of Cape Otway before, during, and after the sunset on October 21, 1978, and who had seen an unidentified object or incomprehensible optical phenomena in the sky.
Richard Valentich is still convinced that his brother was abducted by aliens. In all his interviews, he invariably declared that what had happened to his brother cannot be staged and has no rational explanations. Frederick Valentich is still officially listed as a missing person, and his family members still hope that one day, his disappearance mystery will be solved.
Beste bezoeker, Heb je zelf al ooit een vreemde waarneming gedaan, laat dit dan even weten via email aan Frederick Delaere opwww.ufomeldpunt.be. Deze onderzoekers behandelen jouw melding in volledige anonimiteit en met alle respect voor jouw privacy. Ze zijn kritisch, objectief maar open minded aangelegd en zullen jou steeds een verklaring geven voor jouw waarneming! DUS AARZEL NIET, ALS JE EEN ANTWOORD OP JOUW VRAGEN WENST, CONTACTEER FREDERICK. BIJ VOORBAAT DANK...
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 73 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.